Aerva Fires Up Locos Tacos Campaign In Times Square

March 8, 2013 by Dave Haynes

Boston-based software company Aerva has a big social-mobile-Digital OOH campaign up and running with Taco Bell on a ClearChannel spectacular board in NYC’s Times Square.

The campaign is a product launch this week for Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos. Through the five week campaign, users can send their picture to the digital billboard. Taco Bell’s digital team uses Aerva’s moderation engine to filter, approve or reject photos. Acceptable pictures of users’ expressions when they taste the new product, Cool Ranch Doritos Taco, with Twitter hashtag #wow and #coolranchdlt or #duh #coolranchdlt are viewed and approved for display on the billboard.

Once approved, says Aerva, an automatic Twitter response from Aerva’s system is sent to the user to ask for permission for use on the billboard. Aerva’s Keepsake Platform is used to capture images of the tweeted photos as displayed on the billboard and used in a searchable and shareable Keepsake image gallery—an ideation that Aerva popularized since it unveiled the Keepsake Platform in 2010. Aerva executed this campaign with creative input from Digitas, the digital agency of record for Taco Bell.

Aerva drove a similar campaign a year ago for Doritos Locos Tacos. The most appropriate tweets were shown on two digital billboards, in Times Square and on LA’s Sunset Blvd, after receiving user’s permission.

The Doritos Locos Taco launch had a massive impact on sales at the 5,600 unit chain, raising same-store sales 8% for the year and prompting the chain to add an aggregate of 15,000 new restaurant jobs in 2012.