On August 15, a sweltering summer Saturday, thousands of hungry people made the brave journey outdoors to St. James Park in Downtown San José for the inaugural Chacho’s Taco Festival. With temperatures reaching 96 degrees, one of the most popular attractions at the festival was wherever you could find shade. The day was not without enjoyment, of course. What we didn’t have in perfect festival weather, we made up for in amazing entertainment, enthusiastic vendors, endless cool drinks, and the personal highlight of my day: tacos. With a giant cup of agua fresca and a plate of mouth-watering hot tacos, it was easy to forget about the heat. Oh, and some random guy scarfed down 103 tacos in 8 minutes too.
Creating advertising and marketing strategies for an outdoor festival is no easy task, as I learned this summer. Each and every morning, the team and I put all of our creative effort into figuring out what would draw the most attention and attract the existing and a new fan base to our client, Chacho’s Restaurant. Along with many discussions with our client, a decision was made that the major elements that we would highlight and would get the most people excited were the live entertainment, the multitude of vendors, and of course, the MLE-sanctioned taco eating contest. With that in mind, we created graphics and incorporated images, kept our captions simple, and hoped to reach as many people on social media as possible, boosting posts where we thought we could capitalize the most. We put our creative minds together and delivered #taconatic, a definition that was accepted into Urban Dictionary; we included posts with graphics promoting vendors, MLE athletes, and live entertainment, and even an illustration series that I personally was charged with working on. With all the social media output, it was important to brand each and every post with the famous pink and black Chacho’s logo.
At Milagro Marketing, we take our branding seriously, especially when it’s for our clients. Because Chacho’s was the brand that had to drive the festival to be an extremely successful event, it was essential that the Chacho’s brand and the festival brand be consistent. In order to maintain the relationship between the Chacho’s restaurant brand and their annual event, we incorporated their famous black and pink color scheme into the Chacho’s Taco Festival logo. The signature black and pink was seen throughout the day and successfully stood out on social media in the weeks leading up the festival. The branding made the logo memorable, promoted the event, and drew the attention of thousands of potential festival-goers. Within 24 hrs, the Facebook event page had over 1,500 attendees indicating they were coming; several weeks before the event, close to 6,000 attendees indicated they were coming to the festival, and on the night before the event, our web page crashed due to an overload in traffic and not enough bandwidth.
Since the beginning of my internship at Milagro, I’ve been chin-deep in anything and everything related to Chacho’s. Even the first graphic I created for Milagro was advertising Chacho’s Taco Tuesday. Now, I do consider myself a taco aficionado, and I’m all for dedicating my Tuesdays to enjoying tacos, so it’s safe to say I have enjoyed putting together each and every Chacho’s graphic thus far. Throughout my time here, with the help of David, Sergio, and Google, my knowledge and understanding of digital design has improved immensely, making me increasingly confident in my skills as a graphic designer. Seeing my improvement, David and Sergio trusted me to create an illustrated series to advertise the taco festival. It all started with a historic fact about tacos and an unrealistic expectation that there would be a picture of a taco bomb on the internet for me to use at my disposal. Stressing out about not being able to make that image of a taco bomb appear out of thin air, David suggested that I create it myself. I drew a simple line drawing in my sketchbook and, from there, turned it into a vector on Illustrator. Knowing that my own creative work was drawing the attention of many potential festival guests online kept me excited to continue the series and more trusting of my own ideas.
On the day of Chacho’s Taco Festival, I showed up to St. James Park ready to take photos and capture footage. When the festival opened its doors and people started filing into the park, I noticed the diversity of festival-goers; from families to couples to groups of best friends. As I was snapping photos, I felt proud to have contributed to such a successful event that brought together so many people, even if all I contributed was just a JPEG or two.
Here I am, determined to score a spot in the shade to enjoy my pupusas and my giant cup of fruta fresca.