• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 23, 2014

Playing hard to get, Taco Bell made people hunt for its new Spicy Chicken Cool Ranch Doritos Locos.
 
Working with Deutsch LA, the QSR brand developed a digital scavenger hunt, which has been encouraging young consumers to scour Twitter and Reddit for clues and prizes.
 
To win some shirts, people had to find a specific Taco Bell “ghost” Twitter follower, @CoolKylieofCali and follow hints to the PacSun Web site. There, they had to search through merchandise to find a small hidden blue taco image, which eventually led them to a free shirt.
 
Making things a bit trickier, to find 10 pairs of Janoski Nike shoes, hunters had to find hidden letter clues through @CoolKylieofCali and her other Ghost Profile friends.
 
Once all the letters were found, users had to figure out the URL for the shoes, based on a phone number clue, and unscrambled into the password “bespoke.”
 
“We respected the fans’ intelligence, and we didn't make it easy for them," said Donny Brunner, an art director at Deutsch LA who helped create the hunt. “This showed that we understood our fans … people who are in tune with the Internet.”
 
Taking home the Janoski Nike shoes was a group of Redditors who teamed up to break the code.
 
According to Brunner, part of the fun was not only watching them puzzle out clues, but form conspiracies about what everything meant.
 
Taco Bell had about 4,000 mentions of the scavenger hunt, while thousands of people scoured through the sites to find clues, by Deutsch LA’s estimates.
 
While most of the prizes have now been found, the grand prize -- a year’s worth of tacos -- has yet to be claimed.