Chipotle Blurs Lines With a Satirical Series About Industrial Farming A scene from Chipotle's four-part show, "Farmed and Dangerous." Piro/Chipotle During the Super Bowl on Sunday, advertisers will deploy talking animals and A-list endorsers, anything to reach the 100 million Americans expected to be watching. But Chipotle Mexican Grill, the fast-growing restaurant chain, is playing a different advertising game. Building on its unconventional marketing tactics, Chipotle next month will release "Farmed and Dangerous," a four-part comedy series on the TV-streaming service Hulu that takes a satirical look at industrial-scale farming. You'll have to look hard to find Chipotle's connection to the series. There are no scenes at Chipotle restaurants or impromptu testimonials to its tacos or quesadillas. It is no accident, though, that the show's young hero is named Chip. Rather, "Farmed and Dangerous," billed as a "Chipotle original series," hopes to promote the company's concerns about sustainable agriculture and the humane treatment of animals used for meat. This stealth marketing strategy, Chipotle executives say, is not about "product integration," but "values integration." A scene from "The Scarecrow," one of its animated shorts. Chipotle Starring the actor Ray Wise, the series is a full-throated attack on "industrial agriculture," complete with a Dr. Strangelove-like scientist inventing eight-winged chickens and cash bribes being delivered in gift boxes. " "Farmed and Dangerous" is meant to strike large emotional chords - it's not about selling burritos," said Daniel Rosenberg, a former Hollywood executive whose New York-based company, Piro, produced the series with Chipotle. A restaurant chain's production of a comedy series appearing on a streaming-video service highlights several recent media industry trends, particularly the blurring between advertising and entertainment or news. Like "native advertising," which involves news outlets running articles paid for by corporations to appear alongside traditional reporting, "Farmed and Dangerous" will live on Hulu next to conventional TV comedies. The series - four scripted 30-minute episodes including breaks for commercials, some of them Chipotle's - which Hulu calls brand-authored content, "sits in between content for entertainment and advertising," said Bryan Thoensen, a Hulu executive. Still, he said, Hulu felt comfortable situating "Farmed and Dangerous" among its roster of comedies because the show primarily intends to entertain and has high production value along with recognized talent. Mr. Thoensen described "Farmed and Dangerous" as an example of the longed-for convergence of the advertising industry and Hollywood, with "brands as studios." He said that Hulu, with its tools that recommend shows to viewers based on age, geography or past viewing habits, is well positioned to deliver Chipotle's series. "Basically, there was no difference in this process from creating a TV show," said Mr. Rosenberg, who has developed TV pilots and was an executive producer on the film "Inside Man." He said that his agent at William Morris Endeavor brought the series to Hulu and that he recruited the screenwriter Jeremy Pikser, who wrote the film "Bulworth," to work on the scripts. Chipotle's partnership with Hulu continues its outside-the-box marketing campaign. Over the past few years, the chain has released two short animated films on YouTube that highlighted the ills of factory farming. Together, they have had 20 million views on YouTube, aided by a distinctive animation style and catchy songs performed by Willie Nelson and Fiona Apple. The company hopes that preaching the gospel of sustainable agriculture will translate into consumers buying their fast food at Chipotle, whose slogan is "Food With Integrity." It promises, wherever possible, to use produce grown organically, dairy products from cows that were not treated with synthetic hormones and meats from animals raised humanely and free of antibiotics. Chipotle's values branding is a proven advertising method, said Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University. He drew a comparison to piano makers decades ago who encouraged families to build music rooms. "The best way to sell something would be to create a kind of buzz that would naturally lead to people to buy your product," Mr. Miller said. From its start in Denver in 1993, Chipotle has styled itself as a different kind of fast-food restaurant, one that cares about the supply chain. Today, the company has about 1,500 restaurants and a stock market value of more than $15 billion. Chipotle's efforts to promote its anti-industrial-farming message and change the debate on agricultural production are vital to its growth, given its pledges to its customers and its sometimes-public struggle to obtain, for example, enough antibiotic-free beef. Ensuring steady supplies of its key ingredients is a must for the company. In part, Chipotle's advertising is a continued effort to dissociate itself from McDonald's, which owned a controlling stake in the company for roughly eight years before divesting it in 2006. "Farmed and Dangerous" mentions Chipotle only once - when Mr. Wise's character, the villainous Buck Marshall of the Industrial Food Image Bureau, or IFIB, boasts of spreading the false rumor that McDonald's and Chipotle are still linked. Much of Chipotle's growth has been fueled by word of mouth among people who agree with the company's view of farming, said Bob Martin of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. As lawmakers debate industrial farming regulation, consumers are having an influence by changing their spending habits in a process that Mr. Martin calls "regulation by retail." With "Farmed and Dangerous," which cost about $250,000 an episode, Chipotle hopes to promote regulation through comedy. Mark Crumpacker, its chief marketing officer and an executive producer of the series, said he saw the appeal in using satire for a topic that in documentaries can be grim. "As you do with all comedy, you take a real issue and then amp it up," he said. The show tells the story of an idealistic boy who falls for a girl whose father, Mr. Marshall, works for farmers planning to raise cows on petroleum pellets, a move meant to increase the food supply by lowering costs. At the start of the series, a cow feeding on the pellets explodes. Later episodes begin with snippets of text on issues like the use of antibiotics in meat and food libel laws that make it easier for companies to sue their critics. Tim Piper, a principal at Piro who has spent his career writing and directing television commercials, praised the advantages of marketing through longer-form entertainment. "A lot of advertising characters are one-dimensional," he said. What we are trying to do is create characters. There is hope for more seasons of "Farmed and Dangerous" and distribution overseas, according to Mr. Rosenberg, of Piro. "Our goal was always to make more of these," he said. There is plenty of fodder, pardon the pun.