Most brand spotlights on this blog track advertisers that spend consistently, test dozens of creative variations, and iterate on landing pages every few weeks. Old El Paso’s summer 2026 flight is the opposite of that story, and that’s exactly why it’s worth studying.
In the 90 days between May 20 and August 17, 2026, Old El Paso put an estimated $36.2 million in US ad spend behind a campaign that ran almost entirely on YouTube — and almost entirely on two video creatives. It’s one of the most concentrated big-budget flights in Adbeat’s index, and it’s a clean, real-world illustration of a media-buying philosophy that looks nothing like the performance-marketing playbook most digital advertisers follow.
Company Background
Old El Paso is General Mills’ Tex-Mex food brand — taco shells, seasoning packets, salsas, and dinner kits that have sat in American pantries since the 1930s. It’s a category leader in a grocery aisle that doesn’t get much attention in competitive-intelligence writing, because most packaged-food brands don’t buy much measurable digital media relative to their retail footprint. When they do spend, though, they tend to spend in a very particular way, and Old El Paso’s recent flight is a textbook example.
The brand has spent the last year building out “Elroy,” a singing-cowboy mascot cast through a social media talent-show format judged by Keith Urban, and has used him as the throughline across a string of campaign moments — a “Taco Gods” spot in summer 2025, a “Taco Totality” push tied to Cinco de Mayo landing on Taco Tuesday in May 2026, and now a flight built around a track called “Pass o’ the Old El Paso,” created with The Martin Agency. That mascot-and-jingle continuity matters for understanding why the creative economics look the way they do below — this isn’t a brand testing its way toward a message. It already has one, and it’s using paid media to put it in front of as many people as possible.
Industry Context
Old El Paso doesn’t compete for attention with other food brands the way a DTC challenger competes with rivals in the same feed. Its nearest neighbors in Adbeat’s advertiser-similarity data are other center-of-store grocery brands and QSR chains — Taco Bell, Kraft Heinz, McCormick, Campbell’s, Chick-fil-A, Chicory — most of which show up in the same food-content publisher network rather than head-to-head on the same creative real estate.
The more useful comparison is internal. Old El Paso sits inside General Mills alongside Pillsbury and Annie’s, and looking at the same 90-day window across all three shows just how differently a single portfolio can allocate budget and creative:
Pillsbury spent an estimated $11.4 million behind 15 unique creatives in the same window — a normal-looking, moderately diversified flight. Annie’s spent $6.9 million behind just 4 creatives, already a tight rotation by most standards. Old El Paso outspent both combined and did it with a creative set that, once you strip out a handful of stray test impressions, comes down to essentially the same handful of assets carrying nearly the entire budget. Three sibling brands, three completely different points on the concentration spectrum, all funded from the same corporate parent.
Spend & Networks: A Standing Start
The scale of this flight only makes sense next to what came before it. In the same calendar window one year earlier — May 20 to August 17, 2025 — Old El Paso spent an estimated $1,103 in the US, with a single tracked creative. In the 90 days immediately preceding this flight (February 19 to May 19, 2026), spend was $379,000. Across the full trailing 12 months before the flight began, cumulative spend was $861,000. Then, starting May 20, 2026, spend jumped to $36.2 million in 90 days.
That trendline isn’t a gradual ramp — it’s a step change. Daily spend sat in the low thousands through the winter and spring, then jumped past $100,000 a day in late May and generally ran in the hundreds of thousands to low millions a day through the summer — including a stretch in mid-June that topped $1.7 million a day. Spend briefly dipped back below $100,000 a day on a handful of days in early-to-mid July (as low as roughly $32,500 on July 9) before climbing to the flight’s actual peak of $1.82 million a day on July 19. This is the signature of a planned flight going live on a set date, not an always-on program scaling organically.
Where did it run? Virtually one place:
An estimated $36,175,118 of the $36,175,200 total — effectively all of it — ran through YouTube’s video network. A trivial $82 ran through Google’s DV360 stack. There’s no display retargeting, no native content marketing, no programmatic banner presence worth mentioning. For this flight, “advertising” meant one channel: in-stream video on YouTube.
Publishers: Broad Reach, Not a Sponsorship Deal
It would be easy to assume a campaign this YouTube-heavy is a handful of influencer sponsorship deals. It isn’t. Breaking the youtube.com placement down by channel shows spend landing on some recognizable names — MrBeast, the Stokes Twins, Fuerza Regida, 7clouds, KarolG, Sony Pictures Animation, Jordan Matter, Alan Chikin Chow — each pulling in somewhere between $500,000 and $1.75 million.
But those ten channels combined only account for roughly $10 million of the $36.2 million total. The other $26 million-plus is spread across thousands of smaller channels and videos that never accumulate enough individual spend to rank on their own. That pattern — a handful of big, recognizable names at the top, and a long, thin tail underneath — is what a genuine reach-and-frequency buy looks like in YouTube’s ad auction: the brand isn’t hand-picking specific creators to sponsor, it’s buying broad audience reach across YouTube’s entire content graph, and the recognizable channels simply happen to have enough viewership to absorb a proportional share of impressions.
Creative Analysis: Two Assets, 98% of the Budget
This is the part of the flight that makes it genuinely unusual. Old El Paso’s entire measurable creative output for this campaign comes down to 17 tracked creative hashes, and of those, two videos carry almost the whole budget:
This creative alone carried an estimated $17.98 million in spend and 736.6 million impressions — 49.7% of the entire flight’s budget by itself.
The second video carried $17.44 million and 714.2 million impressions — another 48.2%. Together, these two assets account for roughly 98% of total spend and impressions. A third and fourth video — at $397,000 and $353,000 respectively — cover almost all of the remaining budget. The other 13 creative hashes Adbeat tracked for this advertiser in the window are effectively verification impressions worth a few dollars each, not meaningfully distinct media buys.
Do the math on cost-per-thousand and something else jumps out: both hero videos ran at almost exactly the same effective CPM, around $24.40. That consistency is a tell. It means Old El Paso wasn’t running these as two competing creative concepts being tested against each other for performance — it was buying the same reach-focused YouTube inventory with two edits of what is fundamentally one campaign asset (almost certainly two cuts or versions of the “Pass o’ the Old El Paso” spot), split for frequency management or slight targeting variation rather than head-to-head testing.
Landing Page Analysis
An estimated $35.0 million of the $36.2 million total — 97% — lands on oldelpaso.com/products/pass-o-the-old-el-paso, a campaign hub page tied directly to the flight’s name. A handful of secondary URLs with different Google Ads tracking parameters (gad_campaignid, gbraid) pick up the remainder — the kind of parameter fragmentation you’d expect from a single campaign trafficked through several ad groups inside one Google Ads account, not evidence of multiple distinct landing experiences. There’s no A/B test of different page concepts here, no funnel variation by audience segment. One creative message, one destination, delivered at massive scale.
Device split tells a similar story of a broad, undifferentiated buy: spend landed almost evenly between mobile (51%) and desktop (49%), and 99.9%+ of it stayed within the US. This wasn’t a campaign carved up by device or geography — it was one message, pushed as widely as the media plan allowed.
Marketing Lessons
Creative concentration and media reach trade off against each other by design, not by accident. A performance advertiser rotating dozens of creatives is managing ad fatigue and hunting for a winning angle inside a smaller audience they can retarget repeatedly. A CPG brand running a national awareness flight is optimizing for something different: frequency and reach against as broad an audience as possible, with a message that’s already been decided and produced at high cost (a licensed jingle, an established mascot, agency production values). When the message itself is the asset, rotating it dilutes the very repetition that makes it memorable. Old El Paso didn’t need 40 creative variants — it needed enough reach behind one strong asset that a large share of its target audience saw it multiple times.
A single mascot or campaign property lets you scale spend without scaling creative production. Elroy the singing cowboy has now anchored at least three distinct campaign moments across more than a year — “Taco Gods,” “Taco Totality,” and now “Pass o’ the Old El Paso” — each with its own hook but a consistent character and tone. That continuity is what allows a brand to justify pouring tens of millions into one or two hero assets rather than spreading budget across a wide creative testing program: the audience-recognition work was already done by the character, not the individual ad.
Watch for the “step change,” not just the trend. Old El Paso went from $861,000 across a full trailing year to $36.2 million in a single quarter. Advertisers monitoring competitive spend in the food and CPG space should treat sudden, order-of-magnitude jumps like this as signals of a planned seasonal or promotional flight rather than a gradual strategic shift — the buying pattern (one network, two creatives, one landing page) confirms it’s a scheduled campaign burst, not a change in always-on strategy.
Sibling brands inside the same portfolio don’t have to buy the same way. Pillsbury’s 15-creative rotation and Annie’s 4-creative flight sitting next to Old El Paso’s near-single-asset buy, all funded by General Mills in the same quarter, is a reminder that “how a company advertises” isn’t one strategy — it’s a portfolio of strategies matched to each brand’s specific campaign objective, whether that’s testing messaging (more creatives, smaller budgets) or maximizing reach for an already-proven concept (fewer creatives, bigger budgets).
Conclusion
Old El Paso’s summer flight won’t show up in many “creative testing best practices” guides, and it isn’t supposed to. It’s a reminder that the rules governing performance marketing — rotate creative, test landing pages, diversify channels — aren’t universal laws of advertising. They’re tactics suited to a specific goal: finding what works when you don’t yet know. Old El Paso already knew. It had a mascot, a jingle, and a message, and the only variable left to optimize was reach. Buying $36 million of YouTube video against two assets is what that optimization looks like at CPG scale.
Want to see how other advertisers in your category are splitting spend between creative testing and reach buying? Explore Adbeat’s live demo to look up the pattern yourself.