How Publisher Collaborations Fueled Chipotle's Latest Campaign
This month, almost 3 million viewers watched a branded content video for Chipotle’s “Behind the Foil” across social media. The short-form documentary is the product of a collaboration between 60 Second Docs, Chipotle, and Velocity, Viacom’s branded content studio. Although the finished piece is only 1-minute long, it’s been nearly three years in the making.
The campaign was an example of a different way of working—marked by strategic business development—both for traditional media companies and digital native content startups at-large and for Velocity. Working together as “partners for innovation,” a term coined by transformation consultant Dave Knox in his book, Predicting the Turn: The High Stakes Game of Business Between Startups and Blue Chips, our organizations were able to leverage the scale, resources, and enterprise relationships of a traditional media company with the digital reach, nimbleness and innovative spirit of a new media first-mover like 60 Second Docs.
Collaborations in the business and creative worlds aren’t new. Aerosmith’s collaboration with Run-DMC on “Walk this Way” helped to revitalize the band’s career in the 80’s and put a rap video on MTV for the first time. J.Crew has an "In Good Company" section devoted to its collabs with cult brands like Catbird, Comme des Garcons, and Alden. Casey Neistat has helped lift up a new generation of YouTubers like Peter McKinnon, while increasing his own reach, through collab videos.
However, there were still headwinds to navigate in establishing this type of partnership. I’ve experienced firsthand the challenges of bridging the boundary between traditional and new media players. New media outfits can be perceived as too small to transact large-scale deals, as being disdainful of establishment companies, and as a growing threat in the competition for media dollars that are constantly shifting from linear to digital.
But the rewards of building strong digital collaborations where “both sides had skin in the game and were committed to real results”, as defined by Knox, surpassed the hurdles. Building an ecosystem of startup relationships provides numerous advantages to big companies, from gaining learnings and opportunities to developing muscle memory, mindset, and capabilities around a fast-growing area. I’ve experienced the power of collaborations in the digital content space first-hand. In a former role at Velocity, when I launched the talent partnerships and influencer strategy team, I saw how smart collabs could grow an influencers’ audience or stimulate the performance of a brand campaign virtually overnight.
Partnering with new media creators enables bigger media companies to become part of the emerging market of social branded content creation. It gives us the opportunity to get out in the world and see where the puck is heading in real-time. It makes it possible for us to be what we call “content entrepreneurs” at Viacom, reinventing the way we reach our audiences and creating effective product offerings for our partners while also extending our reach across emerging platforms and opening new sources of revenue. And, it gives us the chance to create a framework for collaboration that makes the whole process scalable.
Replicating the process is important because as advertisers’ hunger for premium digital video content grows and the digital landscape continues to evolve, partnerships like the one we forged with 60 Second Docs for the Chipotle campaign will only get more important. So, for anyone curious, here’s our approach for selecting partners and how it led to the successful campaign with Chipotle:
How to Select Partners in Innovation
To avoid falling into the trap of “startup tourism”—or investing time, money, and effort into vanity projects that seemed cool but were unlikely to produce revenue—we started with these steps:
Identify areas of opportunity within the company where a partnership could either fill a space in existing programming or satisfy advertiser demand for content types we aren't currently offering.
Create a target list of premium digital creators who we think could help us solve those needs.
Work with stakeholders across the company, from salespeople to channel programmers, to test our assumptions and to add their own input, so that together we can build strong, cross-channel solutions.
Design a strategic framework for communicating the benefit of these potential partnerships. Much like a business plan, the framework included a value proposition, description of how the partnerships would work, potential clients, audiences, finances, and a cost structure.
I’ll spare the details from the original framework, but needless to say, it was complex:
We’ve since borrowed a more elegant framework, called “The 3 Rs” from Viacom’s Chief Transformation Officer Jose Tolosa, based on the pillars of reach, relevance, and revenue. In keeping with the 60 Second Docs example, here’s how we validated partnership according to this framework:
Reach: What is the Serviceable Addressable Market for the Partnership?
We were attracted to the format of 60 Second Docs—a winning formula for creating highly sharable stories about real people—because we thought it could be relevant to audiences and align with themes of certain Viacom brands. But first, we needed to evaluate the potential market it could reach online through its social media footprint:
Viewership
3.5B+ Total Video Views
7.0M+ Followers
7.9M+ Average Views/Episode
Audience
Mobile-first
76% watch at least 1 hour of television per day
Primarily based Located in the US
32% 18-24 / 30% 25-34; 39% Male / 61% Female
The combination of a high average views/episode count and a large base of followers who demographically mirror our brands’ audiences and target consumers that are desirable to many of our advertisers, meant that 60 Second Docs offered an opportunity to extend our reach into a lucrative market.
Next, we needed to determine if they were a good fit creatively and enlist stakeholder support:
Relevance: How Does it Tie Back to Culture, Our Brands, and Our Fans?
When we first learned about 60 Second Docs, which is produced by parent company Indigenous Media, the franchise was still new but early performance numbers were strong. We were drawn to the energetic, short-form documentary format which told stories about interesting people. It seemed that 60 Second Docs’ expertise in creating highly sharable profiles of big, bold characters and careers could align with the unscripted lineups of Paramount Network and VH1. With Ink Master on Paramount and Black Ink Crew on VH1, these networks are adept in telling authentic stories about real people working to achieve their dreams on their terms.
There was a clear synergy between 60 Second Docs and our brands, as both appealed to audiences that are inspired by real-life hustles. We believed that pairing these networks with 60 Second Docs to jointly create branded content packages would reach large audiences and benefit all parties—especially the advertiser.
Before packaging the 60 Second Docs partnership for sale to clients, we wanted to test how well it would resonate with our audiences. Velocity’s creative team, led by Beth Trentecoste, and Paramount Network’s (formerly Spike) digital team, led by Red Fabbri, worked with 60 Second Docs to create a pilot collaboration to promote Time: The Kalief Browder Story. The test generated over 4 million views and was the second-highest post in terms of views and engagement on the network’s social handles. In addition to strong performance numbers, it won 3 Shorty Awards and generated buzz in the press.
Our team of content entrepreneurs was growing and we validated our assumptions about reach and relevance. Next, we had to sell it to our sales team and their clients:
Revenue: How Can It Be Packaged and Customized to Solve Our Advertisers Needs?
The trick with packaging this partnership—and the ones my team has built with Bustle Digital Group, Above Average and other publishers—was to find the right balance between positioning it as a highly customizable, premium original content product and a low-cost, turnkey sponsorship opportunity.
We boiled the sales story down to a 1-sheet with the help of Velocity’s integrated marketing as well as members of Viacom’s Ad Solutions teams. It outlines straightforward package pricing options, including guaranteed thresholds for views or impressions informed by the learnings from the pilot and distribution plans that clearly and concisely highlight what type of content will be produced (formats, context, estimated lengths) and where it will live across both Viacom’s and our partner’s digital footprints.
Finally, we brainstormed several category-specific creative thought-starters, many of which were tied to Viacom IP, with the team at 60 Second Docs to show how the partnership can be adapted to solve the needs of a variety of clients. We also worked with the brand partnerships team to devise a list of high-potential target advertisers and categories to make a highly intentional go-to-market strategy.
Turning Culture Into Content for Chipotle
Now that you have the back story, you can start to understand the planning, coordination and teamwork required to navigate a cross-content creator partnership designed to pay off in 1 minute of screen time.
But, that work delivered results when, earlier this year, Chipotle approached Velocity looking for ways to promote its new brand campaign, “Behind the Foil”, a series of documentary-style pieces shot by famed documentarian Errol Morris. The series includes behind-the-scenes footage of Chipotle’s kitchens, prep routines and features Chipotle’s employees and farming partners. It’s an unfiltered glimpse into the daily food preparation routine and ingredient harvesting, of one of the most valuable QSR brands in America.
Chipotle wanted to highlight its commitment to transparency and real food as themes. This corresponds with a trend that Velocity’s culture and insights team has been tracking about how members of our target audience are choosing to support brands with sustainable business practices, like Chipotle, as part of their personal effort to take care of the planet. 60 Second Docs, which has produced over 30 high-performing videos featuring entertaining profiles of people taking unique approaches to sustainability, was the right partner to create engaging content that would appeal to our audiences and deliver the message at scale.
Ultimately, the partnership between Viacom Velocity and 60 Second Docs offered a unique platform for Chipotle to tell the story of its daily commitment to sustainability and freshness to a large, engaged audience across social media. It shows how collaboration between new and traditional media can create exponential growth opportunities to satisfy audiences and advertisers hunger for premium video content.
And most importantly, it demonstrates our commitment to our audiences, on all screens, by telling stories that move them.
