Friday, September 20, 2013

Food for Thought: Chipotle's New Ad for The Scarecrow

So a lot of folks have been raving about Chipotle's new ad for its iOS app-based game "The Scarecrow".  The ad features a dystopia of unsustainably produced and chemically saturated corporate fast food products, complete with high-budget emotionally loaded 3-D animation and a hauntingly seductive soundtrack featuring Fiona Apple singing "Pure Imagination", a song off of the 1971 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film soundtrack.   The protagonist of the ad, The Scarecrow, leads the viewer into and out of this morbid and darkly bleak world and into what appears to be the initial stirrings of the groundbreaking emergence of a utopian promised land that is of course made possible by Chipotle's comparably uplifting style of (presumably) ethical and sustainable corporate food worlding.  Chipotle parted ways with McDonald's back in 2006 and ever since has been trying to brand itself as a corporation committed to "Food With Integrity".  As part of this branding effort, in July 2013 Chipotle became the first corporate fast food chain in the U.S. to attempt to completely rid their menu of GMO products.

                              

Chipotle's new ad has received a lot of positive feedback from viewers.  Indeed, there is no denying that this is a very innovative ad that is, to a certain extent, far more truthful and ethically ambitious than most global corporate food chain ads.  No other global fast food chain in history has ever publicly presented this kind of unapologetically critical portrayal of the cruel, unhealthy, unethical and completely unsustainable global food system that the mainstream fast food industry actively maintains, and for this I applaud Chipotle.  However, while I am impressed by some of the critical content featured in the ad, I nonetheless have very mixed feelings about it.  For all of its captivatingly emotional hooks, bells, and whistles, this creative ad is at bottom a corporate branding strategy designed to increase consumption of multiple commodities controlled by large global corporations like Apple and Chipotle.  Part of the genius of this ad is its ability to market the Chipotle brand in ways that initially appear potentially subversive to corporate branding as such. The Chipotle logo itself actually has a very subtle and limited visual presence in this 3-D animated ad.  Indeed, it is only towards the very end of the ad that we see any explicit reference to Chipotle.   However, the effect is arguably an even more profound branding dynamic that simultaneously replaces and reinforces a corporate brand with an entire way of life, in a way that seems to both echo and exceed the prototypical 'life style marketing' strategy of global corporations that investigative journalist Naomi Klein brilliantly showcased in her powerful 1999 documentary 'No Logo'.  In addition, I couldn't help but notice the conspicuous absence of any coherent reference to farm workers in the ad.  How does/will Chipotle ensure sustainable and socially just labor and living practices for farm worker families in its corporatized vision of "food with integrity"?  Another question that concerns me is how does/will Chipotle, a giant global corporate food chain, impact local and regional sustainable food restaurants and eateries that are not global fast food chains? These are just a few of the concerns that struck me as I watched the now viral ad.

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