Golden Ideas (burrito by burrito)

Today's post from Twisted Brother and contributor Brian Lauvray:

Rewind to this point last week and recall the hubbub surrounding the Super Bowl, and more importantly, the ads shown during the Super Bowl. Not a ton of “Wow” moments, but people were impressed by Coke’s polar bears and their real-time interest in the Giants-Pats score.

People were seemingly miffed at the latest Volkswagen Star Wars ad (none of the kitsch of “The Force”); but none of the ads had that joie de vivre or, heck, even “punch” we’ve all come to expect from the most-watched TV event of the year. Instead of “1984” or Cindy Crawford alluringly sipping Pepsi, we had GoDaddy’s exhaustingly stupid body painting ad and Dorito’s cat-killing pooch.

Now consider where we’re at today, a week past the Super Bowl, a day removed from the Grammy’s with all of us still milling about the water cooler, chatting over the success of Chipotle’s offering. What’s the difference? What has separated Chipotle’s cute-as-a-button 2-minute spot from the million dollar offerings from a week ago? Well, a few things. For starters, Chipotle’s ad is long enough that to have broadcast it on during the Super Bowl, Chipotle would have had to have sold 1,642,465 barbacoa burritos to pay for the media.

No problem for the seemingly always-adaptable Chipotle. During the Grammy’s, much-loved troubadour/fighter for the little guy, Willie Nelson, covers a Coldplay song? Toss in the inspired animation of rebuilding farmlands and a pastoral idyll with humans and pigs being friends? This is advertising gold, folks.

And so as it was written, so shall it be told, that a burrito ad would erupt and capture the Social Web’s imagination during the Internet-wide conversation/”zing fest” that Twitter becomes during an award show.

Wow. Chipotle commercial for the win.

— Andy Masur (@drmasurjr) February 13, 2012

At 8:15 p.m. I noticed that tweet from my friend Andy; curious to learn more I searched “Chipotle” on Twitter. A nation of agog tweeps were clamoring for more and expressing true emotion to, of all things, an ad; Chipotle had struck a nerve and hit a home run with such ease.

Planning, timing, a moving, animated narrative, the gentle crooning of a country legend. That’s all it took. Not a Super Bowl-sized budget, but the savvy and know-how to realize that with the power of social, delivering and touching an audience is so easy. It might be giving them too much credit to say that Chipotle had this planned out. But, well: “Country legend + music-focused audience + our quaint animated message = Seamless marketing and viral matrimony.”

More so, the success of Chipotle suggests something more nuanced than ratings, tweets or the buzzy notion of a “viral hit.” Most surprising was the emotion people expressed in tweets. Culling this positive, emotive sentiment? This is Chipotle’s moment to harness that into community-building in the digital realm and the “IRL” realm.

Additionally, other brands should take heed: the world of social marketing is way less about numbers, and way more about connecting with your audience and enmeshing them within a community of shared belief and faith in a product.