Alliance Franchise Brands Project of the Year First Place Award Winner: ‘Free the Taco’ Campaign Draws Students

When the Allegra Marketing Print Mail franchise — with locations in Palatine, Illinois, and Kenosha, Wisconsin — was tasked with putting a free taco voucher in every local college student’s hand, the full-service marketing and print communications company got to work. In an effort to boost business for a local Mexican restaurant chain, Allegra Palatine created a free taco marketing campaign to draw in the hungry crowd. The effort also garnered the company the Alliance Francise Brands Marketing and Print brands “Project of the Year” first place award.

The restaurant, El Jefe’s Taqueria, which has eight locations on college campuses, was looking to run a “Free the Taco” promotion. This tagline needed to run in conjunction with the restaurant’s previous marketing efforts featuring an animated avocado character with a moustache using the tagline “Free the Guac.” The campaign promoted that there was no extra charge for adding guacamole —something college students feel strongly about.

For the new campaign, Allegra Palatine decided to create a companion character for the Avocado. To achieve this, Allegra utilized Midjourney, an AI image generator to construct a matching cartoon taco character complete with a sombrero and moustache, as well as an Old-Western jailbreak scene. Once the artwork was perfected, seven accompanying designs in varying aspects ratios and sizes were created for digital use.

This storyline was carried throughout postcards, digital ads, a landing page, and a 10-second video ad — all promoting the offer. One of the most critical aspects of the campaign was ensuring that customers could redeem the offer electronically without slowing down food lines, given the high volume of patrons.

The digital character creation sparked the Allegra franchise’s first experience with using an AI generator. “It’s amazing. I don’t see a need to ever buy a stock photo again because you can create exactly what you need,” says Brian Walsh, president of Allegra Palatine. And while he cautions that it still requires human interaction to pull it together, printing and marketing professionals should not be afraid of AI and should in fact “embrace it and use it because it’s only getting better and easier, and allows early adapters to create amazing content that saves hours of time in the design process.”

Despite the success with utilizing an AI generator to create 13 different digital ads, the most surprising outcome from the campaign was the popularity of the postcards among students. “The print is the driver of the campaign. Without that mail piece, nothing else fires correctly,” Walsh explains.

Using a Xerox 280 digital press, the postcards were UV coated and distributed to students via direct mail carrier routes that were also linked to college dorms, social media cookies, and geotargeting. Over the course of 30 days, more than 1,100 coupons were redeemed — half of which were printed postcards.

When asked about the most challenging aspect of this marketing campaign, Walsh notes that finding the college students was not an easy feat due to their transiency. He says, “The biggest success of any campaign is your list — who you’re sending it to.” Because many students live in dormitories and are protected by privacy restrictions, Allegra Palatine worked with a program that utilizes carrier routes that deliver to university housing. The addition of geo-targeting — which builds a digital fence around an address and enables anyone within the targeted area to receive ads — was a major boost to the program as well. With this technology, friends who visited the college dorms also started receiving digital ads. The success of this strategy was evident in the resulting number of coupons that rolled through the restaurants’ doors.

All in all, Allegra Palatine’s campaign to “Free the Taco” was a hit among the owners of the restaurant business, the general managers, and even the cooks and busboys. Perhaps most importantly, the advertisements drew students to the restaurant where they could easily redeem their free taco using the printed promotion or electronically, without slowing down the lines — a win-win for both the students, the restaurant, and the Allegra Palatine franchise.