How Adam Levine’s Tatted Torso Led to Chipotle’s Best Sales Day in Years

Three years ago, a self-described “satire fangirl” in Los Angeles posted two photos side by side on Twitter. The first was a shot of Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine in concert, showing off his sinewy torso covered in tattoos. The other photo was a brown paper takeout bag from Chipotle. “Adam Levine looks like a Chipotle bag and I can’t stop thinking about it,” she wrote. It was a typical social-media joke: clever, reasonably accurate, and funny. For about three seconds. That might have been the end of it, too, except that the post caught the attention of Chipotle’s social-media team. And it wasn’t the first time. In 2019, after Maroon 5 wrapped up its set in the Super Bowl halftime show, others had made the same comparison between the rock vocalist’s monochromatic tats and the casual Mexican chain’s well-known bags, crammed with line drawings and various ruminations scrawled in undulating text. Though it would take several years to turn the meme into a tangible piece of marketing, this week, Chipotle execs are feeling good about having done it. Today, some two weeks after the June 13 “Tatted Like a Chipotle Bag" campaign, the chain’s Director of Social & Influencers Kirby Ann Connell said that the promotion notched its highest single-day, non-peak-hour sales volume in years. This, in addition to generating 102 million social impressions and, by the company’s count, 9.2 billion “PR impressions” overall. (Chipotle did not disclose specific dollar figures.) Ever since those first tweets about Levine’s inked abs and pecs in 2019, “we’ve consistently seen fans on social media reference being ‘tatted up like a Chipotle bag,’” Connell told ADWEEK. “While we’ve leaned into the joke, we’ve been waiting for the right idea to spotlight [it.]” That opportunity arrived when Connell’s team noted the approach of June’s Friday the 13th, a holy day for tattoo aficionados since 2008. That’s when Dallas’ Elm Street Tattoo inked people with the number 13 for free (415 people took advantage of the offer), and parlors around the country followed suit. But while Connell’s team struck on a good day for the promo, it still faced a logistical problem. While nearly a third of Americans have at least one tattoo, according to Pew research data, it seemed like a bit of a stretch to ask ordinary consumers—even hard-core beef barbacoa fans—to get a needle under their skin for the greater glorification of a brand. (Though it has been known to happen.) So the company decided on a softer approach. Anyone with any existing tattoo they were willing to show—and who lined up at one of 13 designated locations between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. local time—would qualify for a buy-one-get-one offer on an entree of their choosing. For those with virgin skin, Chipotle offered temporary tattoos whose unabashedly swellheaded designs included “Chipotle is my life.” A key task for Connell's team during the two months it took to put the promotion together was picking out the 13 locations—there are 3,726 in total—that would distribute the "flash sheet" of temporary tattoos. “We selected restaurants in cities that are considered to be the most tatted in America, along with priority markets for Chipotle,” Connell said. Among the cities on that list were Austin, San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, and Miami—which, with 24 tattoo parlors for every 100,000 residents—is America’s leading tat town. And it worked. “Chipotle achieved its highest-ever sales during a non-peak hour, with lines out the doors,” Connell said. But the reason it worked seems to have less to do with literal tattooing than with using tattoos as a kind of Gen-Z FOMO engine. Not only had the idea for the promo come from young fans to start with, but the giveaway also "rewarded" them for their "unique self-expression," Connell said, by creating a participatory event that was more about diners than what they were dining on. Unit managers were willing to stretch the definition of tatted to include one young man who taped a Chipotle bag to his arm and the woman who scrawled CHIPOTLE on hers using a ballpoint pen. There was, however, at least one documented case of someone getting a real tattoo just for the sake of a lunch giveaway. “Free Chipotle was all I heard,” he explained.

Branding

How Adam Levine’s Tatted Torso Led to Chipotle’s Best Sales Day in Years

At least one Chipotle fan got a real tattoo for the sake of a lunch giveaway

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Robert Klara

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