Chipotle uses only 53 real ingredients that you can recognize, pronounce...and spell. But how do you get people talking, sharing, and caring about it? We did it by hosting a live competition at Scripps National Spelling Bee where we asked young champions to spell typical fast food ingredients (like hydroxypropyl methylcellulose) and then spell Chipotle ingredients (like green peppers or garlic). The resulting video was a visceral and memorable reminder that not all food is created equal.
“Real Art has created some of our most compelling digital brand activations that bring a different perspective versus the rest of our agency partner set.”
Four of the best Cowboys receivers ever to play—Drew Pearson, Michael Irvin, Dez Bryant, and CeeDee Lamb—had never been in the same room until Chipotle and Real Art brought them together. In this national campaign, we filmed the 88 Club legends discussing what it means to wear the number 88 while they enjoyed eating Real Food for Real Athletes.
Real Art helped launch Chipotle’s NIL Ohio State partnership with this beautifully shot video. Heisman winner Archie Griffin narrates as OSU star TreVeyon Henderson enters the tunnel to Ohio Stadium, reflecting on what matters most, in this powerful video connecting Chipotle to OSU fans.
We concepted, wrote, designed, and built Chipotle IQ, a trivia microsite that tests fans’ knowledge of Chipotle’s 53 real ingredients, food prep, sustainability, and farming—with winners receiving one of 500,000 BOGOs. The campaign was such a success, Chipotle keeps bringing it back, year after year.
Ads for Black Friday tool sales don’t generally trend online. So how do you make one that stands out, gets audiences paying attention, and actually drives sales?
Real Art did it by creating an escape room (actually, an escape building) with individual puzzles that could be solved using Lowe’s tools. Then we teamed DIY influencers up with professional contractors and filmed them working together to literally build solutions to the problem, reality TV style. It was the world’s first escape room you had to construct your way out of.
The result was over 9M views (4M+ on week 1) and Lowe’s most successful YouTube video of all time. Black Friday sales blew the roof off Lowe’s expectations.
Lowe's tapped Real Art to create a video series featuring quarterback Drew Brees coming out of retirement to recruit fellow NFL stars to join his “Home Team” and help fix up their local communities. Real Art produced, directed, and filmed these videos, which were part of an integrated campaign and announced during the NFL Draft by host Rich Eisen. The series also featured Bears QB Justin Fields and Steelers running back Najee Harris.
When Activision Blizzard wanted to attract top talent to their Call of Duty development team, Real Art drew inspiration from the war that inspired the series. In the 40s, Alan Turing found codebreakers to crack the German Enigma at Bletchley Park through a crossword puzzle in The Daily Telegraph. Real Art created their own crossword puzzles, combining clues about Activision, coding, and game design, then attached them to a larger-than-life Loadout Box, a popular element of the game. Then we dropped them where they’d reach the perfect audience: in the middle of San Francisco’s annual Game Developers Conference. They stole the show, and fans lined up to try their hand at the puzzles and a chance to win prizes—and maybe a dream job at Activision. Winners received their prize-filled crate at home, creating more buzz for Activision recruiting when the gigantic delivery was posted on LinkedIn.
When the Cincinnati Reds renovated their Hall of Fame—located next to Great American Ballpark—the team looked to our team to create interactive experiences that explore the past and present of Reds baseball, intriguing fans of all ages.
We created seven original, fully immersive exhibits, letting fans call a game from a sports desk like the pros do, create their own baseball cards, and enter a 360° theater to hear stories from Reds Hall of Famers. The result combined high-tech fun with an emotional intensity that brought Reds’ legend Johnny Bench to tears (in a good way).
When Verizon signed up to be a title sponsor of the Super Bowl XLVII Boulevard Festival, they needed something massive to wow the crowds. They turned to Real Art, who brought out The Claw—the world’s largest Claw Game, conceived, designed, and constructed by Real Art (and confirmed by Guinness World Records). Fans swamped to try their hand at the claw, and win big (literally enormous) prizes. Using a Verizon-powered mobile tablet, of course.
Can you hear me now? Visitors to Verizon’s Chicago flagship store could—as they mixed custom audio (and video) tracks in an experimental DIY DJ booth created by Real Art in partnership with AKQA. From fabricating the booth to programming the microcontroller, we designed, built, and tested every element in-house. The result was a delight for the senses that guests lined up to experience and share—and such a win for Verizon, the company expanded the activation to additional flagship stores across the nation.
Verizon needed a simple, clear way to illuminate complex information about the benefits of their 5G network for an installation in their DC Technology & Policy Center. In collaboration with Hyperquake, Real Art created a series of digital experiences that demonstrated how fast 5G can be, and encouraged visitors to rethink what’s possible on a mobile network. The center is powered by a custom CMS which distributes content to twenty-seven monitors configured in a series of eight vignettes throughout the space.
In March 2020 as the COVID-19 crisis was enveloping the globe, the Ohio Department of Health turned to Real Art to deliver the message that social distancing works. We needed to create an emotional gut-punch of an ad that would actually change behavior. Lives were literally at stake.
While others were piecing together content with recorded zoom calls and stock footage, we knew we wanted to take a different approach. We also knew we had to create something safely—with no on-screen talent and a socially-distant skeleton crew.
Our solution was to take a subject that virologists could write whole books on, and sum it up into a simple, easily understood, visual metaphor. Combining two everyday objects—ping pong balls and mouse traps—we demonstrated how distancing can stop a contagion in a video that was built and filmed entirely by our team, using no trick photography or digital effects.
The resulting Mousetrap video has been seen over a billion times, received a National Gold Addy and an Emmy, was written about everywhere from The Washington Post to the British Mirror, and was licensed across the globe (and stolen and rebranded by a few nations as well).
When we suspect child abuse, our impulse is often to look away. Which makes delivering a message about the topic especially challenging. Real Art answered that challenge by creating a visual metaphor: a child taking a trust fall into the arms of waiting community members who, one-by-one, begin to walk away. To pull off this seemingly simple concept, our video team integrated a range of slow motion timelines, practical effects, and stunt work. The resulting spot created a tension viewers couldn’t stop watching until the end.
By late 2022, Covid fatigue had set in, and fewer people were getting booster shots, even among those who’d gotten the original vaccine. So when the Ohio Department of Health wanted to launch a new campaign promoting boosters, we opted for a light-hearted, fresh approach: comparing not getting boosted to getting caught in the rain with half an umbrella, or eating a messy meal with half a bib.
At CES virtually everything is flashy, larger-than-life, digital, and interactive—how do you stand out from the very large crowd? We did it by being more clever, more conversation-worthy, and more creative than the rest.
For Krush’s CES debut, we didn’t just put their existing technology on display, we invented an entirely new way of experiencing it. With our in-house team of fabricators, game designers, coders, and engineers, we built a physical moving cabin which integrated seamlessly with a VR headset. Of course, since the technology was totally new, there weren’t any existing games that could utilize it, so we built that too. The experience was unbelievably immersive. Word quickly spread, and it was named Best of CES by Exhibitor Magazine.
After our VR experience crushed it at CES, Krush knew they wanted to bring it to the crowds at SXSW. However, we knew we didn’t want to transplant an exhibit built for CES directly into SXSW—we wanted to tailor the experience to the different crowds, different setting, and wholly different vibe of the Austin event. So we overhauled the experience, bringing it outdoors, and making our VR simulator the centerpiece of a very cool party—and attracting over 6k visitors in the process.
As a startup, Krush’s expertise lay in combining existing technologies and using them in never-before-seen ways. We worked with them from day one to build out an entire brand identity that would embody their ethos and excite investors and customers. Referencing maker-hacker culture, we started with the basics: their name and logo, then built out from there, working with them on an aspirational manifesto—a North Star that would guide and inspire employees.
Real Art partnered with Royal Enfield for the global launch of their 650 Twin motorcycles—the Continental GT and the Interceptor. Over 250 journalists were invited to Santa Cruz, CA to participate in technical sessions, plus two days of organized rides on the Pacific Coast Highway and through Red Wood Basin State Park. Real Art managed, coordinated, and designed the event, including transforming the Dream Inn into an exclusive showroom, created custom swag and maps, and hosted a live motorcycle reveal on the beach broadcast to a global audience.
When tapped to convey the incredible story of Max Schubert at winemaker Penfolds’ annual showcase, we let guests dive into the past. Taking inspiration from the story of Max’s covert winemaking, we recreated his workspace, covering the entire right side of the room in a projection of wine barrels. Guests could grab an infrared flashlight and train it on the wall to reveal images, facts, and quotes from the secret period “hidden” behind each barrel.
When L.A.’s Grammy Museum saw the groundbreaking Donor Wall we created for the Dayton Art Institute, they wanted their own. So we challenged ourselves to create something just as original and interactive, but with an auditory experience tailor-made for the Recording Academy.
The result was equal parts jukebox, high-tech interactive display, and stunning work of art. Not only could museum guests navigate through music history by viewing past donors, they could associate themselves with a favorite song as a “Donor for a Day.” The resulting jump in donations was music to the Museum’s ears.