Using Generational Stereotypes about Avocados to Sell Mortgages for NatWest

We created a stand up avocado comedian to challenge the lie that millennials spend all their money on avocado toast.

NatWest asked us to increase interest in their banking products with millennials by educating them about finance. A standard brief. What we found in research was that actually this audience saves more than earlier generations and are just being bullied in the media.

View through rates were nearly 50% and most importantly we saw a significant lift in consumers googling “NatWest Mortgage” even though there is no explicit instruction to do so. Our theory is that the time spent making an emotional connection was more important than a CTA.

We produced the video with a flat background color that made it easier to reformat from 16:9 to 9:16 for Youtube and Instagram/Facebook cutdowns.

Agency \\ VaynerMedia London
VP, Group Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Associate Creative Director \\ Jules Dixon
Associate Creative Director \\ Chris Rush
Art Director \\ Matthew Markham
Senior Copywriter \\ Dan Camano
Production House \\ Aardman Animations

Calling out the Chore Gap at Super Bowl LV for P&G

Thousands of women have been pushed out of work by additional chores at home during the pandemic. We launched a 360 campaign for P&G to raise awareness of this important issue during the Super Bowl pre-kickoff show.

With a small budget we produced a TVC raising the issue for the middle American audiences that need to hear it most. We also stretched over PR, celebrity and influencer to bring this message to families in authentic language relatable to different audiences.

Agency \\ M Booth
CCO \\ Adriana Bevilaqua
VP, GM, Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Agency Producer \\ Brian Wheeler
Director \\ Victoria Rivera
Production House \\ SLMBR PRTY

CELEBRITY TALENT + PR + CONTENT

We hired Ken Jeong to serve as Cottonelle’s first a**vertiser, normalizing a taboo conversation around bathroom care.

Cottonelle asked us to find a way to make bathroom care conversations more normal. We all talk about it—or at least think about it—and we decided Ken Jeong was the right person to start that conversation. He’s a doctor and a comedian, which makes him doubly qualified to have awkward conversations. Plus he gave our campaign credibility in case consumers had serious questions.

Ken drove huge press coverage for Cottonelle, and even more important a huge wave of positivity across social channels.

This partnership even landed on Jeapardy with Ken Jeong's spokesperson status as an answer. Proving the right idea not only uses culture but can create it.

Agency \\ M Booth Health
VP, GM Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Associate Creative Director \\ Liz Kim
Associate Creative Director \\ Melissa McCarthy
Producer \\ Brian Wheeler
Director \\ Bonnie Dennison and Alison Barton
Production House \\ Art Class Content

ADVERTISING & CONTENT

Bedwetting and neurodiversity are stigmatized enough, so we made possibly the first brand ad campaign to feature autistic actors playing…just the normal kids they are.

Goodnites asked us to make ads marketing to parents of neurodiverse kids who they’d noticed buy a good deal of their bedwetting underwear. Our approach was to do as much research as possible to avoid making ads that hurt more than they helped. We partnered with the American Autism Society to get their recommendation and in the end landed with autistic child actors and their real parents.

Instead of focusing on the problem of bedwetting, we depicted real moments of good days parents share with their kids - taken straight from research verbatims. We used a reverse slowmo effect to tell this story from beautiful loving moments back to the product helping make them happen.

Agency \\ M Booth Health
VP, GM Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Associate Creative Director \\ Liz Kim
Associate Creative Director \\ Melissa McCarthy
Producer \\ Brian Wheeler
Director \\ Maya Albanese
Production House \\ Greencard

PR, EXPERIENTIAL & CONTENT

Winner: 2024 Innovation SABRE Award

We hired Lisa Ann Walter to be the bouncer of a Bic Back to School Speakeasy where teachers could load up with all the supplies they need for fall.

There’s never been a tougher time to be a teacher, with funding a perennial challenge and inflation driving up the cost of, well everything. Bic is in a unique position to be able to foster connection with both teachers and students and their parents by creativing a give back program.

We started with an in person Back to School supply closet speakeasy where NYC teachers could come and stock up for free. Lisa Ann Walter was so excited to join as the host and boucer, both because of her connection to her character on Abbot Elementary and because she comes from a family of teachers.

Agency \\ M Booth
VP, GM Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Associate Creative Director \\ Liz Kim
Associate Creative Director \\ Melissa McCarthy

BRAND CAMPAIGN + ADVERTISING + CONTENT

All Party Not Sorry: Sazerac approached us to reposition 99 Brand to reach fickle Gen Z consumers who are becoming more choosey about alcohol.

Our insight was that these emerging consumers crave a pre smartphone party where they were free to party without regrets—or photographic evidence. We introduced our campaign line with a series of social-first ads that misdirected from pretentious party to fun in just a few seconds.

Agency \\ M Booth
VP, GM Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Associate Creative Director \\ Liz Kim

PR & CONTENT

Launching Bud Light was a very personal brief to me as an American who had just moved to the UK. The creatives and I took inspiration from our personal culture clash - the constant conversation about British and American pronunciation.

Brits are obsessed with accents. Youtube has dozens of videos with millions of views of Brits doing different accents. It is a sport, and we knew it would be a strong way to talk about the arrival of such a huge American brand.

From a production point of view, our challenge was to make content that was relevant to people around the UK who didn’t see the activation in London. We didn’t want to just recap the event, but use it as a backdrop for authentic action between real people.

Agency \\ VaynerMedia London
VP, Group Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Senior Art Director \\ Chris Rush
Copywriter \\ Lucy Everett
Producer \\ Xav Boivin

NAMING + B2B BRANDING + CONTENT

Avery Dennison asked us to rebrand and rename their “Exterior Embellishments” business unit so it could reclaim its global leadership and land new accounts.

They credit the new brand with a 26% bump in inboard sales leads and with landing their first NFL account.

*Winner of a Provoke Media Sabre and PRweek awards

Agency \\ M Booth
VP, GM Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Associate Creative Director \\ Liz Kim
Associate Creative Director \\ Melissa McCarthy
Producer \\ Brian Wheeler
Director \\ Kimb Luis & Dan Young
Production House \\ Sawhorse

ADVERTISING & CONTENT

We fought back against the craft beer trend by upending a classic taste test challenge—having consumers try the 100+ year-old recipe, blind.

Recently the newness of craft beers is taking cultural space form classic brands like Budweiser. In order to drive trial among younger generations that hadn’t ever tried Bud, we went across the country recording just how much more they like the beer than they thought they did.

Beer has such a regional culture surrounding it that we shot in 5 key markets across the country to be sure we drove deep relevance with local audiences. We wanted them to recognize bars and hear their own accents. One of the most gratifying responses were all the comments saying we faked it (we didn’t).

Agency \\ VaynerMedia New York
Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Associate Creative Director \\ Todd Bradley
Art Director \\ Clark Rogers
Art Director \\ Meg Rometty
Producer \\ Lani Neumann

ADVERTISING & CONTENT

We told the story of the love expressed across generations through classic Johnson’s baby wash to remind consumers that it is the brand their parents’ trusted.

Johnson’s Baby is a classic brand up against unfair (honestly) and unfortunate negative press. It’s also facing competition from a newer generation of natural baby products and store brands. Our task was to build trust and we did that through emotional storytelling.

Previous testing of a number of pieces of social content had shown that consumers responded most strongly to images of dads with their kids. This contradicted the canon of work J&J published showing mothers with children. We proved out that I]it’s more effective to give consumers an image they want to see rather than a reflection of themselves.

For production we focused on action that could tell the story without dialog so we could give the best experience both to users on social media with their sound turned off and to ease transcreation for markets across EMEA

Agency \\ VaynerMedia London
VP, Group Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Associate Creative Director \\ Jules Dixon
Art Director \\ Matthew Markham
Director \\ Thomas Hefferon

ADVERTISING & CONTENT

We brought performance marketing thinking to content marketing for Amazon’s global launch of American Gods. We made hundreds of videos for 200+ markets, and each had a strong test and learn agenda.

First, we optimized the limited assets we had for social video. The trailer on the top is the version the studio cut, and the one below our recut. We led with the strongest images. No fade from black, no spare titles, no meaningful glances. We chose the most impactful footage and created a quick “trailer-within-a-trailer” to get viewers on board.

In addition to that front-loading craft, we did a 4 cell audience test using Facebook’s MindSights product—very much traditional psychographics but tied to real people and their real interests. We had highbrow and lowbrow, male and female. Highbrow men saw genre-first fantasy imagery, which we meant more violence and sexuality for the lowbrow men. The same for women, but we focused on characters and relationships for the high brow audience. You’ll be happy to know highbrow women performed the best—and that content also performed well with a general audience. Faith in humanity restored.

Agency \\ VaynerMedia London
VP, Group Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Editor \\ Leon Kesko
Copywriter \\ Lucy Everett
Art Director \\ Fatima Nota

ADVERTISING & CONTENT

Bringing the Budweiser Clydesdales to the internet was our holiday gift to superfans in 2015.

The are an icon of holiday advertising and very few brands had put out internet yule log videos at the time. And the internet always loves animals - that is a rule you can bank on. Bringing this branding into a more modern cultural moment delivered on our constant goal of making Budweiser relevant to a younger audience.

Working with animals is always a challenge, but the clydesdales are incredibly well trained and looked after - the challenge was building a set to accommodate such a massive animal.

Agency \\ VaynerMedia New York
Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Producer \\ Stoney Duckett
Group Account Director \\ Pinsuda Sagooleim
Art Director \\ Jes Vallee
Copywriter \\ Tory Dickerson

ADVERTISING & CONTENT

We used a dance video format to show how Listerine can freshen breath when used properly over 30 days.

Selling Listerine in the UK is tough. Only a tiny fraction of the population uses mouthwash, so this was a category job in addition to a brand job. Additionally there was a legal mandate to tell consumers that using the product regularly for 30 days was most effective. We had the idea of showing the repetition of a morning routine through dance, where repetition is fun to watch. We pitted one twin against another to show how easy it was to add Listerine to your morning.

Agency \\ VaynerMedia London
VP, Group Creative Director \\ Ryan Murphy
Art Director \\ Fatima Nota
Copywriter \\ Lucy Everett