Taco Bell’s Dystopian-Themed #BreakfastDefector Campaign Rewards Those Who Solve Challenges
The fast food brand paints a bleak picture -- that can be remedied by its breakfast offerings -- in its newest effort with Deutsch LA.
If you’ve seen the movie 1984 (or, hey, actually read the dystopian George Orwell book), then you’ll have a pretty good grasp on the Taco Bell Breakfast Defectors campaign launching this week. The brand worked with Deutsch LA on the campaign, which includes multiple online and offline elements driving to a campaign microsite.
A year ago, Taco Bell entered the fast food breakfast space with a campaign that enlisted real people named Ronald McDonald. Now, the brand is taking things further with a campaign that paints the all-too-familiar dystopian future depicted in every recent sci-fi movie and YA book.
The general theme of the campaign centers on a society where breakfast has become mundane and full of sameness. The campaign includes a 3-minute film, Routine Republic, that deftly crafts a stereotypically communistic world in which choice has been removed and blandness is celebrated.
The film is directed by Michael Spiccia and will air as a :60 on MTV’s The Challenge finale, ABC’s Pretty Little Liars finale and AMC’s Walking Dead finale.
Other elements of the campaign include wild postings in New York and Los Angeles:
Also part of the campaign is a propaganda film, made in the style of those Lost Dharma Initiative videos, that were created in-house by Deutsch LA. The propaganda film is also featured in the above mentioned Routine Republic film. Incidentally, the film is not embeddable and is only viewable on the RoutineRepublic site.
In addition, there will be four TV spots launching the week of March 26.
All of this activity points to the campaign site BreakfastDefectors.com on which visitors can accept challenges, one each week, which unlock rewards that can be redeemed for prizes (action figures).
The first week’s challenge, Defect, asks people to get creative with the defector symbol used in the campaign and post their creations to Instagram or Twitter using the hashtags #breakfastdefector and #promo. These challenges go live March 24.
People can also share pre-created gifs (with individualized hashtags applied) to Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr:
Taco Bell is promoting the campaign on Facebook and Twitter:
Welcome to the breakfast revolution. #BreakfastDefector http://t.co/ub8JzA0qgL https://t.co/dQchqUDyXJ
— Taco Bell (@tacobell) March 24, 2015
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