Taco Bell has decided to enter the fast food breakfast market where McDonald's is the entrenched and dominant player in the category. Obviously Taco Bell needs to up its budget to effectively compete against this Goliath. The big question is: how to spend the money.
Until now, the launch of Taco Bell breakfast has focused on its product advantages (taste and portability). The launch ads use competing products as a foil, but the real story was about what Taco Bell has to offer.
Now, Taco Bell has switched gears, producing a long format , three minute film (which I presume will spawn thirty second commercials) focused on making McDonald's a demon ... titled "Routine Republic." Most of the message is about how awful McDonald's is ... leaving the Taco Bell message as an afterthought. I will be anxious to see how this campaign plays out because these kinds of ads are usually more of a hit in the boardroom (where executives celebrate with fist pumps as they watch film that trashes the evil empire) than with consumers, who may be perfectly happy with McDonald's. Click here to see the film. If I were a Taco Bell executive, I would be especially concerned about the cost of this little film. I'm sure it wasn't cheap. Competing with McDonald's is going to cost a lot. Producing a three minute film whose primary audience is the executive boardroom takes a big chunk out of the budget.
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