SAVOR.WAVS Ingredients By Chipotle. Produced By RZA - a campaign of infinite musical possibility featuring 51 sounds inspired by Chipotle’s 51 real ingredients. Recorded using only real instruments.

To tell the story of its real ingredients Chipotle enlisted RZA, a food advocate and the musical genius behind Wu-Tang Clan, to create the ingredients to our campaign. Each sound powered a 360-mobile experience, where anyone could compose the sound of her or his Chipotle order. The process mimicked the line at Chipotle and uniquely generated an immersive, WebGL, animated music video based on the ingredients found in the order.

RZA invited the Wu-Tang Clan, The Head and The Heart, AWOLNATION, GRiZ, and PANG! to create original tracks using the ingredient stems in their favorite Chipotle order.

A fully-integrated campaign brought SAVOR.WAVS to life including a music video, commercials, audio, paid social, and digital takeovers on Spotify, SoundCloud, and Complex.

Over the course of six months, the SAVOR.WAVS site was designed specifically with mobile devices in mind. To begin, users selected the menu items that make up their favorite Chipotle order. Once the site generated the WebGL-animated music video based on the order, users could interact with it by exploring the 360 environments or adding sound effects and visuals inspired by the additions you could make to a Chipotle meal. All of the animations were designed to react to the movement of a mobile device, following the field of view at times, and leading the viewer toward more action at others. Upon completion, users were then encouraged to share their unique audio/visual experience via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail throughout the six-week campaign. SAVORWAVS.com also featured a soundboard with all 51 musical stems, links to the RZA music video, and links to Spotify artist pages for the remix tracks.

Over the course of the program, almost 9 million users visited savorwavs.com, and despite lower sentiment for the brand as a whole due to the negative news cycle, brand sentiment for SAVOR.WAVs was high (76% positive for the experience vs. 22% for the brand). As part of the marketing initiative, for the first two weeks, users were rewarded for taking part in a BOGO for a free meal at Chipotle. We issued just over 3.5 million offers through the experience, and of the customers who redeemed their BOGO, nearly 40% were new/lapsed customers versus existing. Additionally, thanks to an intense PR event with RZA explaining the project, along with overall PR efforts, we generated 46 unique stories for more than 350 million impressions. Press coverage spanned everything from food and tech outlets to music publications and more thanks to the diversity that existed within the platform.

The power of both food and music to unite people around the world is undeniable. Based on this insight, we used it to create a musical re-imagination of Chipotle’s 51 ingredients as an example of how music and food can bring people closer together. Our target audience was “eaters” everywhere, but by adding a musical element, we could more acutely target passionate fans by leveraging partnerships with remix artists from across the music landscape.

Almost a year after Chipotle’s most significant setback, as well as the dramatically changing food-business landscape, it was clear that Chipotle needed to reinvigorate its brand and take a position that is unique and defensible in the fast-casual industry. Our task: Deliver on Chipotle’s better ingredients strategy, by associating Chipotle with the whole, unprocessed, delicious ingredients that make up its menu. Our goal was to drive fandom for the Chipotle brand while engaging people through the lens of their unique ingredient story. But as the fast food industry has become ripe with claims of better, fresher and more wholesome ingredients, how could Chipotle stand out?