Serving Stories: How Biite Turns Brand Experiences into Cultural Moments

Jordan P. Kelley, Content Director, Brand Storytelling

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Biite’s innovative approach to brand storytelling highlights how experiences can serve as powerful narratives that convey brand identity, values, and foster ongoing audience engagement. By blending food culture, live events, and digital content, Biite creates immersive experiences that extend well beyond the moment itself. This philosophy came to life in the production of Taco Bell’s Live Más LIVE, where the company helped transform a product announcement into a cultural phenomenon.

BrandStorytelling caught up with Guto Araki (Biite Founder and CEO) and Alex Jacobs (Biite Co-founder and COO) to discuss the origins of Live Más LIVE, the balance of humor and vulnerability in shaping the event’s tone, and how live experiences can spark conversations that ripple across social platforms:

Biite has carved out a unique space in food culture and experiences. How do you see what you do as brand storytelling, and how did that perspective shape your approach to Live Más LIVE?

Though we both have long careers in brand advertising, we originally started Biite as a platform to shine a light on culinary talent around Los Angeles and allow dining enthusiasts to experience their pure, unfiltered creativity.

The culinary rebels we work with every day at Biite are artists who express themselves via their craft and connect with their customers in a visceral, tangible way. That creativity and storytelling is what connects with guests and keeps them coming back.

Hospitality in general is a welcoming act of love and nourishing people. Guests come in depleted and leave restored. That’s what restaurants do. That’s where the word ‘restaurant’ comes from in the first place.

Whether on a plate or in a print ad, creativity and storytelling truly break through and connect with an audience. These same principles, which we see so brilliantly within the culinary community, are what we can bring to our clients to help them break through in culture.

Where did the vision for Live Más LIVE originate, and how did Biite facilitate bringing it to life?

We're officially in the age of innovation. If tech and innovation are our new religion, our high holiday is the tech keynote, a massive reveal that brings together fans and skeptics alike to celebrate what's to come and fight about it in the comments. This is where some of our most memorable and buzz-generating moments in culture are born. Think Ballmer, Windows, 1999. Jobs, iPhone reveal, 2006. Or Musk, Cybertruck, 2019.

But here's the thing: innovation isn't just happening in tech. The entire fast food category is a constant race to out innovate and out iterate the competition. And Taco Bell is hands down the most innovative fast food company in the world.

Not only that, Taco Bell has the most passionate fans in fast food, rivaling iPhone fanatics. So much so that super fans of the brand on Reddit and other online communities would often scoop and leak new menu items before Taco Bell could announce them.

So we thought, what if we started the race from the finish line, and just announced the whole year’s worth of new products and innovations right from the get go?

We knew the die hard fans would go crazy, and had a hunch that the whole concept of a fast food company revealing tacos like iPhones would be social media gold, making the whole event into a cluster bomb of social content clips designed to ripple across social platforms and make an imprint in culture.

It all started with a concept, a name, and the “key ingredients” for success that would ultimately make up the show. We knew it had to be funny. We knew it had to be honest, transparent, and vulnerable. We knew it needed to have a wink. Live performances and awards were a spoonful of sugar for entertainment value interspersed with the product updates. Vulnerability was a critical through-line to bring the audience’s guard down and not take ourselves too seriously, giving everyone permission to have some fun with us.

Once the concept was in place, what were the biggest creative and logistical challenges in bringing it to life?

From a logistical standpoint… one word: time. We shared the first concept in November of 2023, and the first Live Más LIVE happened on Friday, February 9th. This wasn’t just a live event held in a massive new structure built off the Las Vegas strip on Super Bowl weekend. This was a rich interactive live streamed experience that allowed fans everywhere to tune in and participate from all over. As it revealed new products and programs, this wasn’t just a “brand” or “marketing” effort but touched every single part of the organization from the Test Kitchen to their Food Innovation Team and all of their executives who were the voices on stage that day. It took a lot of hustle and a lot of trust. It was amazing to see how the Taco Bell team and hundreds of individuals across dozens of agency and production partners came together to pull this off.

From a creative standpoint, sure, having less time is always a challenge. But, sometimes, having less time means you don’t have the luxury of overthinking things. This was definitely one of those moments: we all just ran.

What did those early meetings with Taco Bell look like? How did you balance their brand goals with your own creative approach?

There were definitely some spirited discussions about what we should be saying and how we should be saying it. We (Biite) thought it was critical that the brand be a little vulnerable and have some fun with itself to preemptively neutralize the haters in the comments. We all have access to the internet and we all hear and see what people say about Taco Bell. They love the brand, and love to have some fun with the brand, too.

Taco Bell is the most memed about QSR in the industry. If you just get up on stage and talk about how awesome you are, it’s natural: haters gonna hate. We really believed the wink was crucial, even talking about things that didn’t go so well, was going to be key to bringing the audience’s guard down to let them in on the fun to bring them over to our side.

Trust me, I get it. If I’m an executive at Taco Bell being told by an agency partner that I should go up on stage and talk about all the products that bombed before getting into all the hits we have in store for the year, I’d be a little uncomfortable, too. All in all, it was an amazing partnership with a lot of trust that ended up landing the show, script, and tone in a great place. The internet agreed.

What were your engagement and consumer response projections going into the event, and did Live Más LIVE meet or exceed those expectations?

Going into the event, we all really believed that this was going to be catnip for “the cult” of Taco Bell, the subset of die-hard superfans who truly live and breathe the brand. As for breaking through on a mass scale, we all knew this was a first-of-a-kind idea that had a lot of potential to make a dent in culture and drive a lot of conversation around one of the biggest brand moments of the year (The Super Ad Bowl) in a way that was totally fresh.

By taking an alternative approach to The Big Game, we believed we could stand out in a noisy moment in culture where all the biggest brands are competing for attention with more traditional formats. But the results? They exceeded all of our expectations. It was one of the biggest conversational moments for Taco Bell in years. Every moment of the show was clipped and sent hurtling through social channels far and wide.

What surprised you the most about how people engaged with the event, both in-person and online?

We weren’t necessarily surprised, but we all were thrilled. The show had something for everyone, so one hypothesis we had going in that was confirmed was that people at home really weren’t going to experience the full event linearly from start to finish. Rather, each segment of the show was a clippable, meme-able moment.

We stacked the audience, both in the venue and at home, with super fans as well as social creators, celebrities, and food and culture media, each with significant social footprints of their own, so they could clip and share moments of the show with their audiences to kickstart viral sharing of each these sub-storylines. Some TikTokers cut down highlight reels and reaction videos that did hundreds of millions of views themselves.

What do you think live events bring to brand storytelling that other mediums can’t?

For most live events, the amount of people who can experience it live is only a small fraction of the total potential audience you can reach through word of mouth.

For those who get to experience something live, these kinds of high-touch events can make a visceral impact on a person that they might not ever forget. For super fans of a brand like Taco Bell, when you can actually give them a taste of never-before-tasted products, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

But the potential for live events to generate conversation that feels timely, exciting, and almost like news or a phenomenon in culture that you need to know about, is immense.

When brands get the IRL experience and social content storytelling right, it’s like nitro and glycerine, and the impact from a brand and conversation standpoint can be massive.

Looking ahead, how do you see Biite continuing to evolve in the world of brand storytelling and experiential marketing?

Whether it’s behind the stove or in front of the camera’s lens, creativity, self-expression, and storytelling are always the recipe for success. We don’t view ourselves as an agency with unique expertise in experiential. We’re a creative agency that connects brands to culture through food; something that’s truly universal.

When we’re helping our brand partners tell their stories in new and interesting ways, whether it’s something you experience with your eyes, ears, mouth, belly, or heart, we’re always going to be pushing the boundaries of how we can break through, make people feel something, and connect with our clients’ audiences in a way they won’t soon forget.

About Guto Araki:

Guto is an award-winning advertising executive with 20+ years of experience. Throughout his career, he's been responsible for leading brands like Gatorade, Adidas, Apple, and many others. In recent years, he's been the creative director behind the new Hulu branding, which has shown unprecedented growth, surpassing Netflix and elevating the number of subscribers from 21 million to 29 million at the end of 2019. He recently launched Taco Bell globally in 32 countries, beating all the forecasted KPIs.

About Alex Jacobs:

Alex Jacobs is a co-founder and COO at Biite. Previously, Alex worked as a brand consultant for various companies including Quibi, Flipboard, and Google, where Alex held leadership roles in marketing and brand strategies. Alex was also involved in founding Glassbooth, an organization focused on empowering voters. With a background in marketing and extensive experience working with notable brands, Alex has made significant contributions to the industry.