Want some free tacos? Just go to a Los Angeles Lakers game and hope they win and the opposing team scores less than 100 points.
Over the past decade, the Jack in the Box-sponsored promotion for LA Lakers ticketholders has become a fan favorite. During close games, fans chant “We want tacos!”
This season, the fast-food chain introduced Snapchat to the menu, broadcasting a unique Snapcode during the third quarter. When fans scan the QR Snapcode, they get a custom geofilter – one of Snapchat’s beta ad products.
“We are looking for ways to tie the physical world to the digital world,” said Jack in the Box social media manager Rah Mahtani. “As a brand, we saw such great fandom around the taco promotion, and we wanted to increase that with people engaging with our content on Snapchat.”
During the first game, 56% of people who unlocked the geofilter snapped themselves with it. Those snaps generated 132,871 views. The Lakers’ arena holds fewer than 20,000 people, so the geofilter expanded the impact of the promotion beyond the building’s walls.
The unique usage rate of 56% particularly impressed Mahtani. “We have branded filters at all our locations, and that rate destroys our usage for a typical filter,” he said.
For now, analysis of how the Snapchat geofilter performs is limited to views and number of unique users. As the platform expands, Jack in the Box will push for more ways to analyze success.
The real goal is tying digital back to sales or store traffic – but Mahtani called this “a moonshot.” That said, Jack in the Box has noticed trends in the promotion’s popularity over the past decade. “The bigger the win, the greater amount of tacos get redeemed,” he said.
Jack in the Box would not disclose how it worked out the media price for the geofilters with Snapchat, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Measuring the value of its Snapchat initiatives will come down to the company’s end-of-the-year analysis.
Jack in the Box normally tests out new marketing ideas in a small area before expanding, and plans to do the same for “Snap to Unlock.”
“The next place you can look for this to happen is in restaurant. There are lots of logical customer touch points where we can get in front of the customer, from the register receipt to signage on the wall to digital executions,” Mahtani said.
Mahtani would also like to Snapchat to enable rewards beyond geofilters.
“In my opinion, this is the first the first platform that’s been able to successfully integrate a QR code into their marketing, and people are using these Snapcodes so much,” he said. “That makes me wonder what we could do next.”
