MARKETING
How Taco Bell Turned A Trademark Battle Into A Marketing Campaign

Welcome to HubSpot Marketing News! Tap in for campaign deep dives, the latest marketing industry news, and tried-and-true insights from HubSpot’s media team.
In most cases, the pursuit of good vibes isn’t enough to overturn a trademark — but Taco Bell is certainly trying.
The popular fast-food chain set its sights on the term “Taco Tuesday” which it wants to use freely to promote sales happiness among taco lovers. There’s just one problem.
Though the phrase is frequently used in conversation, it’s actually a registered trademark owned by the Wyoming-based chain Taco John’s and has been since 1989.
On May 16, Taco Bell filed a petition with the USPTO requesting the reversal of the trademark, claiming the term is too common and widely used for Taco John’s to maintain the rights to it. Taco Bell claims the goal in this filing is to “liberate” the term for any and all restaurants to use freely.
It’s not the first time “Taco Tuesday” has been involved in trademark controversy.
In 2019 Lebron James attempted to trademark the term but was turned down by the PTO because it was too widely used. Naturally, James released a statement supporting Taco Bell’s efforts to overturn the trademark and is now starring in the company’s latest ad.
Through the company’s statement, the public petition on change.org, and the partnership with James, the liberation of “Taco Tuesday” feels more like a marketing campaign than a legal pursuit.
However, Taco John’s isn’t taking the challenge lying down. The company released a (hilariously petty) statement in response to Taco Bell announcing a new Tuesday special offering two tacos for $2.
In the statement, Taco John’s CEO Jim Creel says, “I’d like to thank our worthy competitors at Taco Bell for reminding everyone that Taco Tuesday® is best celebrated at Taco John’s®.”
We’re anxiously awaiting the USPTO’s response to this taco saga…
Elsewhere in Marketing
The latest marketing news and strategy insights.
Twitter fingers: pew research released new insights into how Twitter user behavior has changed since Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform.
Meta just rolled out a performance-based ad revenue share model to replace its Reels Play bonus program that sunset earlier this year.
…Also in Meta news: the company was just hit with a record $1.3 billion fine for violating E.U. data privacy rules.
Google announced plans to remove inactive Gmail accounts beginning in December 2023.
Telly introduces free TVs that feature a constant stream of ads and track user data.
The latest on AI: the HubSpot Marketing Blog just released the State of Generative AI, featuring new data from over 1300 marketers.
MARKETING
6 Ways to Use Time Tracker and WordPress Quiz Plugin for Effective eLearning

Time tracking and WordPress Quiz Plugins are an effective way to improve eLearning outcomes. With time tracking, you can measure how much time a student spends on their coursework, allowing you to identify problem areas or gaps in understanding. WordPress Quiz Plugin allows instructors to create quizzes within the platform, which helps students test their knowledge and assess what they have learned. By combining these two tools, educators have a powerful toolkit for optimizing learning experiences and ensuring better performance from their students. As technology continues to change the way we learn, educators are increasingly turning to innovative tools to improve eLearning outcomes.
One such tool is a combination of time trackers and WordPress Quiz Plugins. By using these two tools together, educators can gain useful insight into how their students are engaging with content, as well as assess what they have learned from the coursework. This combination of tracking and assessment allows for greater optimization of learning experiences and improved performance from students.
Six ways time trackers and WordPress Quiz plugins can be used in eLearning
Combining these two tools allows instructors to access essential data that can help identify areas in which students might struggle and pinpoint what they have learned from coursework. Here are six ways educators can use time trackers and WordPress Quiz Plugins to create effective eLearning experiences:
1. Measure Student Engagement
Time trackers help educators measure their students’ engagement with the course material, allowing them to assess where lessons may need more focus or attention. Instructors may also be able to identify gaps in understanding by determining how much time a student spends on particular topics or tasks. This data is invaluable for optimizing the learning experience and helping ensure better performance from students.
Time trackers allow educators to monitor overall course time as well as time spent on particular sections of the curriculum to gain a better understanding of how effectively their students are engaging. WordPress quiz plugin is also useful for measuring student activity, giving educators the ability to see when and how often students are completing quizzes or assignments related to the course. By taking advantage of time trackers and WordPress Quiz plugins, teachers can closely evaluate student engagement with their eLearning program.
2. Create Assessments
WordPress Quiz Plugin allows instructors to easily create quizzes within the platform, giving them an effective way to test their students’ knowledge and gauge what they have learned from the coursework. By combining these results with time tracking, instructors can get a full picture of their students’ progress throughout the duration of the course.
Creating assessments for an online learning platform can be time consuming and tricky. Luckily, time trackers and WordPress Quiz plugins can help simplify the process and make it easier to create accurate assessments. Time tracking allows you to accurately record time spent on projects, while WordPress Quiz plugins provide customized quiz-building capabilities. With these together, it’s now possible to quickly and efficiently create powerful assessments in no time! These advancements have helped revolutionize the eLearning industry by making creation time less time consuming so that more value can be placed on continued learning instead of assessment creation.
3. Track Learning Progress
By keeping track of how much time each student spends on specific tasks or topics, educators can observe changes in learning progress over time. This insight helps them create tailored approaches to teaching that better support each individual student’s needs, allowing for greater optimization of learning experiences for everyone involved.
Time trackers allow you to measure the time spent on specific tasks, which makes it easy to assess progress over time. With WordPress Quiz plugins, you can make sure your students are staying on track by creating quizzes that evaluate their learning progress and understanding of material. Both time trackers and WordPress Quiz plugins can be useful tools in tracking the progress of your eLearning course and ensuring that your students are flourishing.
4. Customize Instructional Materials
With the combination of time tracking and WordPress Quiz Plugins, instructors can easily customize instructional materials based on individual student performance and progress rates. This ensures no one gets left behind in the learning process, as well as providing more tailored instruction based on each person’s unique goals and objectives.
With time trackers, you can analyze student engagement in activities as well as create future plans for better outcomes. Furthermore, WordPress Quiz plugins help you create online quizzes directly within your own course material that easily engage students while they learn. By taking advantage of time trackers and quiz plugins, teachers can more effectively customize instructional materials in order to maximize student learning experiences.
5. Identify Areas of Improvement
Having access to data regarding student engagement and quiz results provides important information about areas needing improvement as well as where additional instruction might be necessary for certain individuals or groups within a class setting. This allows instructors to adjust course materials accordingly and ensure all students have an equal opportunity when it comes to achieving their desired outcomes from the educational program being offered.
If you are in the eLearning sector and are always looking for areas to improve, time trackers and WordPress quiz plugins can be invaluable tools. Time tracker with screenshots in a simple software allow users to determine how much time a given activity or task is taking up, which can lead to opportunities to better use time and resources. WordPress quiz plugins meanwhile are indispensable for gauging learner performance in an objective way, which helps identify slow progress or successes that could impact future efforts. Together, time tracking and WordPress quiz plugins provide concrete ways to measure progress and uncover potential improvements in any learning environment.
6. Monitor Participation Rates
Time trackers also provide valuable insight into participation rates amongst your students during classroom discussions or other activities related to the course program you offer; this allows instructors to adjust instruction accordingly if needed, helping keep learners engaged at all times throughout their educational journey with you.
With time trackers, educators can see how long each session lasted and when students logged on in relation to the time given for the assignment. WordPress Quiz plugins allow time tracking features as well, as well as providing instructors with feedback on areas where students may need further instruction. You can provide feedback in different ways, using feedback emails ot a separate tool. Using both time tracking and WordPress Quiz plugins can make it easier for educators to monitor participation rates in their eLearning courses so they can more effectively evaluate each student’s progress.
Conclusion
Overall, using a combination of time tracking and WordPress Quiz Plugins is an effective way for educators to optimize eLearning experiences for everyone involved – whether it be through measuring student engagement or creating customized instructional materials that better suit individual goals and objectives. By having access to essential data regarding both performance levels and learning progress over time, instructors are empowered with powerful tools that help them create better educational opportunities for all involved.
MARKETING
Is Marketing Climate Change Coming? Or Is It Already Here?

Is marketing climate change a thing? New results from Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey hint at the evolution.
CMI’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose shares his thoughts in this week’s CMI News video. Watch it below, or keep reading for the highlights:
Marketers reduce reliance on search advertising
Gartner’s survey announcement reveals some intriguing data on advertising priorities and budget expectations. (The full report is only available to Gartner clients.)
Chief marketing officers increased their investment in social advertising, digital video advertising, and influencers. Most survey respondents also decreased their investment in search-based advertising.
Those investment choices mirror what’s happening in the consumer world. Internet searches have become less and less useful with the growth of vertical search and generative AI.
More CMOs dropped their search ad budgets and increased their investment in social ads, digital video ads, and influencers via @Gartner_inc #research via @Robert_Rose @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
The rise of push content (a la TikTok) also means relevant, targeted, and personalized content now finds the user rather than the user finding the content (a la search). Robert wonders if those results hint at marketing climate change, where marketers find more success reaching audiences through influencers and social content than through search.
CMOs lament budgets don’t allow strategy success
But that shift in consumer behavior wasn’t the headline of the Gartner CMO survey results. Instead, it focused on the 71% of CMOs who believe they lack sufficient budget to fully execute their 2023 strategy even though marketing budgets are in line with last year – experiencing a slight drop to just over 9% of revenue.
71% of CMOs say they lack sufficient budget to execute their 2023 strategy fully, according to @Gartner_inc #research via @Robert_Rose @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
“Budgets do not seem to be returning to pre-pandemic levels,” Robert says. So he created a chart using Gartner’s annual survey budget numbers. It reveals the trend line for CMO budgets steadily dropping since 2016, aside from the pandemic course correction in 2022.
Do seven years make a genuine trend in marketing budgets? Could budgets as a percentage of revenue decline even more? Does that even matter?
Instead, Robert says, marketers should ask if measuring marketing’s impact as a percentage of the company’s total revenue really assesses its effectiveness.
Does measuring #marketing’s impact as a percentage of total revenue really assess its effectiveness, asks @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet
Does a reduction in the marketing budget lead to a drop in its revenue share? Or is marketing more efficient and driving more revenue per dollar spent? Or has the democratization of media driven down costs, so the same amount of marketing is less expensive today? Or is it something else?
Gartner seems to believe marketing costs are increasing while productivity is decreasing – that those two things are “squeezing CMOs’ spending power.” The research notes 75% of CMOs said they face increased pressure to do more with less to deliver profitable growth in 2023. Eighty-six percent of marketers said they must change how marketing functions to achieve sustainable results.
Of course, no marketer has ever said, “My marketing team has too much time and money.” So those Gartner results don’t surprise us.
Ironically, marketers also spend more time acquiring and implementing new tech to boost productivity and reduce costs than creating things of value. (Not surprisingly, tech received the biggest budget line item increase this year.) These attempts often slow the process.
All that budget data led Robert to rethink his five Cs of strategic marketing – coordination, collaboration, content before containers, and channels. “Make sure your siloed teams coordinate with one source of the truth when it comes to content and how it’s managed,” he says. “Ensure they collaborate, plan consistent ideas, and develop content that can be reused across multiple containers. Use only the channels where you can demonstrate value.”
Even Gartner agrees. It recommends CMOs should double down on scenario planning and balance near-term execution with the investments that enable them to build future capabilities.
What do you think? How are your marketing teams balancing the need for more technology and increased productivity with the challenge of marketing budgets? Let us know in the comments.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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