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🧡 NBA’s Best Player Hated This Brand for Years
How Taco Bell turned a decade-old Jokic story into a full-circle marketing win
Jeff Chen
January 28, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Baseline!
If you’re newly subscribed, I’m a brand marketer, creator, and entrepreneur with extensive experience in the sports industry, having worked with iconic brands like Jordan Brand, SLAM and the NBA.
Every Wednesday and Friday, I share business, marketing, and creator insights related to basketball culture.
Let’s get right into it…
MARKETING BLUEPRINT
The NBA’s best player has disliked this fast food company for over a decade, but this brand just turned it into a full-circle sports marketing win.
Most brands today chase immediate relevance while forgetting their past, but Taco Bell realized their biggest miss was actually their biggest brand insight.
Nikola Jokic was drafted in the second round during a Taco Bell Quesarito commercial, which led to a unique opportunity for Taco Bell to make amends to the three-time MVP.
Taco Bell didn’t invent a new story but resurfaced an ironically funny moment in sports history.
By apologizing publicly on social media, they acknowledged this infamous incident.
Then they added multiple layers of strategic marketing channels to connect the Quesarito to this insight.
Out-of-home placements throughout Denver made the apology impossible to ignore, while their Nuggets partnership turned the arena and team socials into key narrative drivers.
Arena t-shirt takeovers created a live stunt for 19,000 Nuggets fans and the team’s tunnel content became a recurring escalation to get Jokic’s attention.
Then the future Hall of Famer finally gave in by trying the Quesarito as trusted voices like Shams, LeagueFits, and NBA Central amplified that historic first bite.
Just like Jokic’s game, this campaign wasn’t built on speed but patience, because great sports marketing ideas aren’t always about inventing new moments, but about recognizing the stories that fans never forget.
And while Taco Bell originally interrupted Jokic’s game, they won by finally owning and finishing the story years later.
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FREE THROWS
Sharing the tools and resources that I’m using this week:
🧪 AI Video Test - Can you tell the difference between a real video and an AI-generated one? This test presents you with two videos from the same frame, one real and one AI-generated. (I scored 17/20; I guess my experience building NBA athlete AI personas gave me a good eye for generative content.)
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POST-GAME
Thanks for reading—I’ll see you back here later this week!
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- Jeff Chen | 🏀💡👨🏻‍💻
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