Year

Role

Discipline

Credits

2016

Design Director / Art Director

Art Direction · Social · Film

Bharat Kumar
Adam Rozanski
Adam Lowe
Gio Serrano
Monica Sagowitz
Helen Torney

Background

Before the age of Instagram Stories and Tik Tok, there lived a social media platform called Snapchat. Chipotle, feeling disconnected from it's youthful audience, wanted to find a way reconnect on this new platform. 

The Challenge

Help Chipotle connect with a younger audiences on the new (at the time) social media platform, Snapchat.

The Execution

To break the monotony of the platform, and try something new, we looked to the behavior of TV before DVR, and launched a weekly show.

School of Guac, led by our host--Hallie Peño, was our take on an after-school special meets variety program meets satirical news program. Our audience: HS and college kids craving some mid-afternoon Chipotle. 

The series and each episode (approximately a 1 minute long Story comprised of multiple Snaps) were supported by a promotional campaign that included weekly tune-in messaging. The result was an 11 episode pilot season complete with holiday specials, nonsensical burrito wisdom, coupons, and even live election coverage.

Unlike Instagram at the time, Snapchat wasn't built for polish. For the first few years after launch, it was as raw as it gets - lo-fi, compressed images and video that could only be shot through the app itself. And Snapchat aimed to keep it that way in their Terms of Service. Third Party Uploaders could get you permanently banned from Snapchat.

So we had to get creative. We custom-built a rig that allowed us to shoot our previously edited, 4k footage using their in-app camera. The rig worked so well that we had to provide video proof of our process to avoid getting Chipotle banned from Snapchat.