Digiday Publishing Summit:

Connect with execs from The New York Times, TIME, Dotdash Meredith and many more

SECURE YOUR SEAT

How Taco Bell made that terrifying giant taco Snapchat lens

Taco Bell is letting everyone live out their secret Cinco de Mayo wishes by becoming a taco.

To celebrate the holiday, Taco Bell purchased its first selfie lens that transforms people’s heads into giant crunchy tacos with a dollop of the chain’s Diablo spicy sauce dribbled on top.

The filter — all crunchy head-shell and bulging eyes — is terrifying sane people, and is hit among its younger followers.

Here’s a sampling of reactions, mostly positive:

While getting a taco at Taco Bell takes minutes, Ryan Rimsnider, senior manager of social media for the Yum!-owned brand, told Digiday creating this took six weeks and was created in-house.

“We’re the world’s biggest taco fan and what better day to celebrate that,” he told Digiday. “We wanted to delight taco fans everywhere with an experience that we’ve been thinking about for quite some time.”

This is Taco Bell’s first selfie lens, although it’s no stranger to Snapchat. It previously used the app to promote its new menu item during this year’s Super Bowl and regularly creates stories on its own account that has more than 225,000 followers.

The filter, Rimsnider said, was just another way to appeal to a social-savvy audience: “It was a fun surprise to start their day; and these celebratory, highly engaging and interactive moments worth capturing are what they live for.”

https://digiday.com/?p=176279

More in Marketing

Illustration of a social media post with hearts, showing a chat bubble with a dollar sign, purse, and shoe, representing how creators use automated marketing tools to monetize content.

In Graphic Detail: Inside the state of the creator economy industrial complex

The creator economy might have started out as an alternative to traditional media, but is becoming more and more like it as it professionalizes.

Shopify has quietly set boundaries for ‘buy-for-me’ AI bots on merchant sites

The change comes at a time when major retailers like Amazon and Walmart are leaning into agentic AI.

WTF is ‘Google Zero’?

The era of “Google Zero” — industry shorthand for a world where Google keeps users inside its own walls — is here.