marketing
The entire
music industry is
slowly becoming a simple extension of
corporate marketing programs—but at least most companies are forced to pay a lot of money for their new pets.
Taco Bell, though, has learned that it doesn't take that much to have an "
indie" (Ha! Ho!) group cosign your company. The souls of musicians used to cost at
least a bag of heroin; now, an entire band can be purchased for as little as a Chalupa value meal!
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advertising
Taco Bell's Value Menu slogan is "Why Pay More?" But if a rapper were to say it, they would say, "Why Pay Mo'?" Because black people can't talk right, ha! Cannily tapping into urban culture, the fast food chain is running a "Why Pay Mo'?"
online promotion, complete with a Rap Name Generator (mine is Super Fly H. Nach!). Taco Bell's beef tastes like dog food, and their
ad agency is making them look like a bunch of tone-deaf racists. But I can almost forgive them for all that, because their site's "Why Pay Mo' Rhyme Generator" allowed me to create a hip hop supergroup featuring evil columnist
Andrea Peyser, Spitzer hooker
Ashley Alexandra Dupre, drunk
Post editor
Col Allan, and author of the year
Keith Gessen, all kicking rhymes about the fat value menu. Action photos below!:
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public relations
You like to play with the pretty horses? Step away, until you
pony up some cash, ha. High profile horse racing has become an entirely corporate marketing-driven spectacle, where horses are sponsored by UPS and
owned by hedge funds. The
big sponsor of the
Kentucky Derby is YUM Brands, owner of
Taco Bell and KFC. Who could embody the noble spirit of galloping stallions better than the nation's leading purveyor of Mexican Pizzas? Anyhow, YUM's CEO, David Novak, found out the perils of sponsoring an event with live animals when a horse up and died on the track at the Derby last weekend. With no idea what was happening, Novak stepped up moments later and gave his little speech plugging his company, which has proven to the world that he hates dead ponies:
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writers strike
I've been on many a picket line, and what tends to happen is the whole community comes out in support of a strike: local bakeries offer free coffee and donuts, and area restaurants often stop by in the afternoon with foodstuffs. It's just the right thing to do.
Taco Bell, that purveyor of food for harried workingmen everywhere, will do no such thing, according to
Trading Markets. Instead, they are offering striking screenwriters the "chance to win free Taco Bell food by injecting fun and fresh bits of wisdom into the restaurant chain's iconic Border Sauce packets." They want them to work for free, basically, for the chance to win about $260 worth of food.
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rats in peace
The rat-infested Greenwich Village
Taco Bell that spawned citywide panic and a plague of restaurant closures will never again open to haunt New York's rat-phobic populace. Yum! Brands, the perhaps ironically named parent company of Taco Bell and KFC, recently announced that the store—and 9 others in the city—will be or remain permanently closed. The Taco Bell, perhaps more than any other restaurant in Manhattan, was a gathering place for rodents who, hungry and abandoned, sought shelter, camaraderie and delicious Nacho Bell Grandes. Though Taco Bell has been seriously damaged here by its popularity among the greater rat community, Yum! posted
record Q1 earnings due to their rapid expansion into China, where the majority of the vast population of rats has yet to discover their fine products.
—Josh
taco bell
Good news for those of you with unrefined palates and propensity to ingest garbage:
Taco Bell is over that nasty bout of
E. coli that has made nearly fifty area residents ill.
Yum Brands Inc. on Tuesday said a strain of E. coli that is suspected to have sickened a number of people in the Northeast is no longer in any of its Taco Bell restaurants.
"The E. coli strain appears to have passed through our system," Tim Jerzyk, Yum's vice president of investor relations, said at a meeting with Wall Street analysts on Tuesday.
Nice one, Tim! Jerzyk went on to add that Yum had suffered some discomfort, but everything came out the other end, and attributed the speedy dispersal to the corporation's focus on spraying out the affected food products. "I shit you not," said Jerzyk, "we are ready to return to serving the wonderful meals Taco Bell consumers have come to know and love, which feature only trace amounts of feces."
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Gawker
