Taco Bell is already planning next year’s Live Más LIVE – and it promises to be bigger and better

Taco Bell’s Brand Narrative team is already planning next year’s Live Más LIVE, and it won’t be a repeat of the celebrity-led variety show that aired on a popular streaming service this spring. While the ingredients of Taco Bell food, celebrities and a mass distribution element (i.e., streaming) will remain mainstays, brand leaders say, how they intersect will shift as the event is designed to change shape each year as Taco Bell pushes to be seen as a broader cultural and entertainment brand.

Live Más LIVE began in 2024 in Las Vegas as a Taco Bell first – a stage show to preview upcoming menu items. In 2025, the program moved to New York City and was hosted by an “Emily in Paris” actor. This spring, it returned to the West Coast, opening in Los Angeles with a well-known rapper as host and appearances by pro athletes, actors and music artists.

“We want Taco Bell to be more of a cultural and entertainment brand than a quick-service restaurant (QSR) brand,” said James Burton, marketing manager. “If we repeated it year after year, it becomes the expected behavior. We could fall pretty quickly back into the QSR playbook.”

A constant across editions is the scale of the menu reveal: Taco Bell announces a full year of limited time offerings (LTOs) at the event, a move executives frame as a competitive advantage.

“This year’s variety show format reflected how we’re moving with culture and meeting consumers where they are," said Taco Bell Global Chief Brand Officer Taylor Montgomery. "If we want to make Taco Bell the most culturally connected brand, we need to continue raising the bar, and this year we did exactly that."

For the 2026 edition, the Brand Narrative team initially sketched an on-stage comedy that evolved into a celebrity-studded variety show. Marketing Director Sara Singh said the team pushed for a distributor that matched the scale of the production.

Singh said the pitch landed on a popular streaming service after internal leaders made the calls needed to secure a Hollywood-caliber platform.

“The ambition was: let’s match the energy of what we’re building to where we’re airing it,” Singh said.

The team shifted from an internet livestream to a live-to-tape production, filming March 3 and releasing the hourlong show March 10 (with access through April 9). The format required entertaining the in-room audience while also holding attention online for a week-long rollout.

Taco Bell partnered with a production company, whose credits include live award shows. Singh said the team tightened segments and pared back traditional “reasons to believe” product messaging to keep the show “short, punchy and watchable,” while still landing key menu details.

In editing, the team used a simple test: each segment had to include “fan truth,” “food truth” and “brand truth.” Anything that didn’t hit all three was cut.

One example was “Made or Made Up,” in which participants had to guess if a menu item was concocted from the Taco Bell test kitchen or a fictious invention by AI. The game playfully emphasized the inventiveness of the brand’s food (brand and food truths) that often blurs the line of real versus imaginary and reflects how Taco Bell fans love to talk about the brand’s innovation pipeline (fan truth).

The final cut removed about 30 minutes of material and generated more than 2,000 pieces of traditional and online media coverage, which Burton credits in part to a Taco Bell social-first: a rollout built around “clipping,” 15- to 30-second highlights designed to travel quickly across platforms rather than requiring audiences to commit to the full hour.

Singh said the approach reflects how younger viewers often consume longer content in serialized bursts, with the team packaging key moments to sustain a week of conversation prior to the streaming release.

@clipsallday18 Taco Bell reads fans tweets with a choir at their recent live event 😭🙏 #choir #ingredients #pie #nachofries #tacobellpartner ♬ original sound - clipsallday

At the same time, Taco Bell said the full episode drew viewers on the streaming platform, where Live Más LIVE ranked among the top five most-watched shows in the Talk Category during its premiere week. The in-room talent and guest list also helped pull the campaign into entertainment coverage from outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, People and Us Weekly.

“Every single person here is a real fan,” Singh said, pointing to the event’s live audience as part of the show’s selling point. “The fact that we have the power to bring them together is our brand’s superpower — and you’re going to continue to see that from our team.”

With the 2026 drop in the rearview, Singh said planning for the next Live Más LIVE started immediately. “We’ve got to start thinking about Live Más LIVE 2027,” she recalled being told, adding. “It will be unique from years before.”