From Script to Screen
How do you beat a Control ad that has already crushed 11 challengers?
When Hungryroot came to Quirk Creative, they had a high-performing UGC ad from that seemed untouchable. They had already A/B tested it against 11 different high-quality challengers, and nothing could knock it off its pedestal.
Until now.
Our Director and Editor, Ariel Utin, shares the secret sauce behind the strategy that finally moved the needle:
> The Strategy: From Mental Load to Mental Unload
To win over viewers, the team leaned entirely into emotion. Specifically the target demo: parents of young children who feel constantly overwhelmed. Establishing this very relatable feeling in the first 5 seconds was absolutely key.
> Turn the Logo into a visual insight
We turned the Hungryroot logo into a creative asset, using its semi-circle shape as a "loading" icon representing the endless mental tasks parents carry.
> The Director-Editor Edge
Ariel is both Director and Editor…which is a total superpower! Her creative process involves editing the spots in advance to test if a concept works before ever hitting set.
> Smelly Socks. Seriously.
Authenticity is found in the (sometimes smelly!) details. It’s those real, human moments that build the trust needed to beat even the toughest performance benchmarks. For this spot, the team landed on a fun sock-based easter egg in the first 5 seconds. Check out the full interview below! 👇
Transcript below:
Ariel: I was refreshing the window. Refreshing the window. And I was slacking you, how is it doing? And you can kind of see the results coming in and seeing if it's going to beat the control?
Gaelan: I don’t think I paid attention to any meetings that day. I was just slacking you as every single respondent came back and I was like, "We have a good one." It's going! The score is slowly increasing.
Ariel: Exactly. And it worked. It did. It beat the control and then the actual ad beat the control as well.
Gaelan: I love these spots. They're so awesome. There's a great strategy behind them and they performed super well. Ariel, talk us through it.
Ariel: Hungryroot came to us with this pretty big ask. They wanted to beat this control UGC ad that they had made, I think during COVID.
Gaelan: It was crushing it. It was like it was their best ad, right?
Ariel: They had done A/B testing against eleven different challengers. They had put a lot of dollars into all these very crisp, nice looking ads and nothing was beating this UGC vertical video that they had put on TV.
Gaelan: The first five seconds of this ad is such a great hook. It's so relatable. How did you come up with that strategy? What was the secret sauce that went into that?
Ariel: And the secret sauce was emotion. To get people to emotionally relate to the problem we needed a problem solution in five seconds, and their target demo was kind of me. It was like a parent of young children who was overwhelmed. So we really ran with this overwhelmed idea and this mental load idea, and we called our spot "mental unload," and this really tied into their logo as well, which is half a circle. And the logo came in because it was like a loading sign and it's loading all the mental tasks that a parent has to think about throughout the day.
Gaelan: That's so fun. Did you try a bunch of different variations of how you could play around with it?
Ariel: We tried so many things. I was working with our art director at the time, Isabella. You should see our Pinterest board. What we really were pushing for is a first five seconds that even though it's all her speaking to camera, you could understand what's going on without volume because a lot of people watch this.
Gaelan: I saw this commercial a couple weeks ago in a bar, no volume. I saw this commercial a couple weeks ago in a bar, no volume. Let’s go! Talk to me a little bit about the fact that you are both an amazing director but also an editor. How does that work? How does that play into your process of putting spots together?
Ariel: I tell everyone when we're concepting that I think in edit and a lot of the time while we're even coming up with ideas, I have to edit them. So like either record myself and my kids or I'll pull like random footage and edit it together to see if an idea works. So and also on set, being an editor gives me a lot of confidence in a way, because I can keep the pace, I can keep moving because I know when I have the take, I know how things will cut together and I don't have to, you know, keep rolling if I know that I have it.
Gaelan: This is a really difficult question. Do you have any favorite parts of this?
Ariel: In the first five seconds, the mom is talking and that's what you're supposed to pay attention to. But the dad in the background is picking up laundry. And there's a part where he, like, sniffs a smelly sock and puts it in the laundry basket. And I think that is so good. It's just like an Easter egg.
Gaelan: Yeah, that's so good. Okay. That's all I'm going to see now, whenever I watch the spot.