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Super Bowl Taco Bell Brand Chief Mixes In Search

How does search play a role for Taco Bell? One thing is certain -- it's mixed in with a bunch of other ingredients to make it work.

The fast-food restaurant chain recently recreated its site into an ecommerce platform at Ta.co that -- along with its mobile app --- allows customers to order food online and pick up the goods from their local Taco Bell eatery. You can find the local restaurant by typing in your ZIP code on the site.

While the fast-food industry isn't driven around ecommerce, Taco Bell has never been one to follow "the rules." It took the innovation one step further and began running a Super Bowl campaign that offers a secret menu. It's giving consumers a chance to pre-buy the goods before knowing what's in the bag and then taste it on Saturday, two days before the rest of the world.

Consumers still need to pick up the order at the Taco Bell restaurant of choice.

The site and app have a pretty good search engine that allows consumers to build combos with keywords like "spicy," "taco," "loco," and more.

You can use search for discovery, but you need to think about how to make it responsible for generating a return on investment, Taco Bell Chief Brand Engagement Officer Marisa Thalberg told SearchBlog during the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting earlier this month in Palm Desert.

Thalberg views search marketing as the opportunity to lead people to try the brand's new site and a variety of products it offers. "You connect interest with intent and then provide an answer," she says.

The mystery food is part of Taco Bell's teaser Super Bowl ad featuring NBA player James Harden; TV personality "alien expert" Giorgio A. Tsoukalos; and Texas attorney Bryan Wilson, famous for his viral YouTube ads.

It's not unusual for Taco Bell to behave this way. Late last year, Taco Bell physically moved its original location in Downey that opened in 1962 to its headquarters in Irvine, California. It had housed various eateries for decades, but closed for good in 2014.

Affectionately known as Numero Uno, it rolled through Los Angeles Country into Orange County where it sits today waiting for another promotion to decide its fate, according to Thalberg.

And let's not forget the taco emoji that now lets the brand says its full name in emoji with a taco and bell. "How many brands can say they can express their name in emoji?" Thalberg says.

In November, Taco Bell celebrated with Deutsch L.A. the taco emoji engine with 600 pieces of content that ended up on Ta.co. The restaurant had been trying for about a year to persuade Apple to make it part of the built-in keyboard in smartphones.

Setting up a Change.org petition and presenting more than 33,000 signatures before the Unicode Consortium made it happen.

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