If you were watching the Grammy’s the other night, you may have noticed a very engaging spot for Chipotle featuring a song sung by Willie Nelson. The key message in the commercial was that Chipotle has a new focus on providing free range pork to its customers.

The commercial was also uploaded to YouTube and has generated more than 5 million views so far.

What would it cost to run a 2-minute prime time TV commercial that generated 5 million impressions? It depends, but Zach LaVoy at BKV Digital and Direct Response tells me it could run anywhere from $400,000 to $600,000 depending on a few variables.

The cost to run it on YouTube? $0.

(Side note: Please don’t take the $0 figure mentioned above to mean that social media is free. There are production costs and labor costs that are not included in that figure, so Chipotle didn’t get 5 million impressions for $0, they got 5 million impressions for $0 in media plus (I’m guessing) close to $1 million in labor and production costs.)

The Chipotle commercial is yet another example of the changing nature of marketing. The days of simply running a TV commercial on prime time are over. Today, a well-executed campaign runs the spot on TV as well as on various social and mobile media channels.

You can watch the video below, or check it out on YouTube.

Thursday, February 16th, 2012, 6:06 am   |   General Marketing  |  RSS feed |  Respond  |  Trackback