Picture this perfect promotion. You are working with a major fast food chain to move drinks and a new product, you get to use the most hyped movie of the summer, and you come up with a cool, innovative instant-win game piece that knocks the old peel-and-reveal system in the dirt. But there is one big problem. You can’t show the main star of the movie until after the film opens (insert Godzilla yell here).
That was the story with our Find Godzilla and Win promo for Taco Bell. Our goal was to drive beverage sales and encourage trial of the new Gorditas menu item. We came up with the idea of letting consumers search for and find the monster. It played off the central theme of the movie where hoards of people scurry around the Big Apple looking for a 220-foot, surprisingly hard-to-locate lizard.
On every medium and large drink cup and on Gorditas wrappers, we attached a piece with original decoder screen game technology. Consumers could win in two ways. They could peel off the two-part game piece and use the decoder half to hunt for a hidden image of Godzilla for an instant win. Big ticket prizes included Giant Iguana Bikes and Sony Big-Screen TVs. Or they could collect individual letters to spell Godzilla and win a million bucks. Simple, but cool.
For a little more fun and play value we added extra hidden messages and images on the packaging.Patrons using their decoders could find a picture of the wacky little chihuahua from Taco Bell’s ad campaigns nestled nicely in one of Godzilla’s footprints.
In-store elements, saturated in Godzilla signature atomic green, contained blanks where the monster’s likeness was added in after the film’s premier in the promo’s second phase. Kids’ toys and self-liquidating cup-holders hit 5,000 outlets just in time for the film’s May 20 release.
All the results are not in, but so far Taco Bell has increased sales, bumped up per visit spending, and increased transactions overall – proving, as the movie’s ad says, that size does matter.
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