Chipotle is a brand known for their ambition to constantly be the best in class. Creative and marketing standards across the board are set to push innovation, risk and industry recognized work.
Our objective was to drive affinity with the next generation of Chipotle customers and to do so in a way that met the standards of quality and finesse.
The restaurant's core customer and avid loyalists were 25-34 year olds - an age bracket above the next generation of Chipotle eaters. More than 60% of US 13 - 24 year olds smartphone users are Snapchatters. And Chipotle needed to be a "Snapchatter" too. In order to drive affinity with this next generation of customers, Chipotle needed to go where their eyeballs were: Snapchat.
The conversation in the social sphere about Chipotle and their menu was larger than life - fans had an incredibly strong connection to the brand. They loved the food, the humor, the dialogue. They loved Chipotle. So, we set out to encourage fans to be talking about what we did for them on Snapchat that day just like they raved about Chipotle's food; to translate that love to a new, untapped platform for the brand by creating content that is favorable to the platform and its unique user experience.
Snapchat is a unique platform where users are surfing the Stories page constantly; content is entirely vertical; Stories are one-way conversations; users are highly engaged and there's a shelf life of 24 hours.
Our insight was clear: Snapchat was the new TV, before it met the DVR.
Drawing inspiration from traditional television, we elected to go with a weekly, episodic series called School of Guac where every Story is an episode; viewers could anticipate a schedule and media was all about driving tune-in.
We conducted research through focus groups of the core audience, looking for ways they chose to engage with Snapchat content. We worked closely with our partners at Snapchat to better understand key performance days of week and times of day.
From there, we reimagined what was usual social content and reimagined the type of show that would best fit the platform. The variety show format stood out as ideal, we could program something for everyone and create short bursts of content.
This all came to life to create a show that aired on ChipotleSnaps for 24 hours, starting at 3PM (our audience's primetime) on Tuesdays. Each episode, ("Story") was approximately one minute long and comprised of stylistically and thematically different segments ("Snaps") including "Burrito Whisperer", a Jack-Handy style haiku performance to really make you think.. about salsas and other aspects of life."Mental Bites", the science behind the flavor with snackable factoids about food. And meanwhile "The Noms Rooms" kept our viewers up to date to all burrito news and taco gossip with a recurring news anchor. The show was designed to mirror TV as much as possible. We planted special brand offers, educational tidbits, commercials and other observational, philosophical and occasionally, aspirational humor in a range of creative executions.
Surrounding the show itself, we created a tune-in campaign across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram featuring trailers, teasers, posters and reruns. It was just like real TV but on its newest version: Snapchat.
The premiere season ran from September 27 - November 29, totaling 11 episodes. Its run included a Halloween special, on-the-ground Election Day coverage, and other cultural milestones, such as Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
The season garnered 1.3Million total views.
Each episode (Story) averaged a 77% completion rate; 18% above platform benchmark.
That's a cumulative of 141,400 number of minutes spent on the content.
High schoolers and teenagers showed their interest in Chipotle by engaging with the content with over 2,000 screenshots and more than 700 direct messages.
Press coverage asserted Chipotle's entry onto the platform as clever and creative. Further solidifying our strategy is the industry recognition of Snapchat continually evolving to be more and more similar to traditional TV through measurement and the ad products. Chipotle was able to be first to market in playing to this insight and did so with an organic approach - no media was placed within the Snapchat platform.
