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Bordering on insanity: the Taco Bell story

It started with a question, posed by Stan Richards to everyone in the creative department in late December 1994: “How many of you will be staying in town over the holidays?”

The assignment that followed had a familiar ring to it. Over the previous months, Taco Bell, a client we shared with Bozell/Salvati Montgomery Sakoda, had crushed our spirits by choosing Bozell’s idea, not ours, for two upcoming network TV Super Bowl commercials.

And yet.

“I just got off the phone with our client at Taco Bell,” Stan continued.

“He’s willing to accelerate the launch of their lighter-calorie menu, Border Lights, if we can show him a concept that he loves enough to replace the Bozell spots on the Super Bowl.”

Flash forward 12 days to January 4, 1995, in Irvine, California: I had just finished presenting a two-spot story arc that conceptualized Taco Bell’s Border Lights as mysterious lights flying in from the border. Everyone in the room waited for the CEO to speak. After a long pause, he said, “Try not to spend more than a million dollars,” then stood and left the room.

Before it was over:

• We would award the job on January 9. The Super Bowl was on January 29.

• I would kiss my wife Marie goodbye, asking her not to have our first child while I was in the California desert. (She was eight months pregnant.)

• Our agency and production teams embarked on a five-night shoot at Vasquez Rocks outside of LA, which stood in for otherworldly planets in the original Star Trek.

• On night two, a driver failed to secure a huge Musco light, and the entire truck tipped over on its side.

• A car accident on the way back to the motel one morning required a bleary-eyed afternoon visit to the California Highway Patrol office.

• We faked the Taco Bell location you see in the spot. The production company built it from the ground up over the course of the last night, getting the shot just before dawn.

• Also on the last night, two members of the cast and crew sought to consummate their week-long on-set flirtation. I know this because I was asleep in the motorhome when the two of them tried to get into the same bed I was occupying.

While we were shooting, Adweek broke the news that we were vying to replace Bozell’s spots on the Super Bowl. (See article to right.) The Taco Bell client wavered until the last minute, unsure if our spots would finish in time. They did.

Taco Bell introduced Border Lights with a full-page teaser ad in USA Today, followed by commercials in the first and third quarters of Super Bowl XXIX. The first spot narrowly missed the top 10 in USA Today’s day-after ad rankings, coming in 11th out of 42 spots total.

Our son, Paxton, stayed put through it all. He was born on February 9.

Bonkers schedule

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Full-page teaser ad

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Launch hyped

in USA Today.

Adweek on

how it happened

Paxton: Thankfully,

born after the game.

Secret effort

 becomes public

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