Ocean Spray
When Ocean Spray went viral thanks to the Fleetwood Mac “Dreams” skateboarding guy in October 2020, I happened to be on their creative as a freelance ACD.
My labor before and after that watershed social moment consisted of planning the monthly content calendar and creating that content with help from two direct reports. But when the video went viral we creatively pivoted to more “meme-y” social, playing into social media trends, and reaching out to third party influencers for creative partnerships. It been a zero budget affair meant we had to be creative, and I would often shoot videos myself, and sometimes even star in them.
One of the best ways to think of ideas is to… well, think about it. Turn it around in your head, let it simmer, plus or minus things, see what turns it. It’s like twisting a Rubix Cube until you find the design. That’s how I got this concept, I was thinking about the cranberry bogs floating about and it reminded me of a bath bomb so I made this concept of an Ocean Spray bath bomb. Indeed as this was at the height of Ocean Sprays meme popularity I sincerely advised that they should actually make cranberry bath bombs but alas this is as far as things got.
116,000 views - 26,000 likes - 680 comments
After seeing him in a promotional video, I observed that Ocean Spray’s CEO Tom Hayes had a kindly “cool dad” energy to him and I’d noticed that our TikTok got absolutely wild comments so I thought it’d be really funny if we had him read/respond to them. Of course, the direct inspiration here was mean tweets.
I felt that this would be cool in several ways: puts the CEO on level with the folks and it shows we’re paying attention to what people say and might use it thus incentivizing more interaction. Unfortunately, due to avails, this wasn’t produced for almost a year after the initial burst of Ocean Spray fame by when attention had long since petered out and around 10 months after I’d initially proposed it.
When I learned that cranberries bounces, I knew there was a tok idea there and after some noodling came up doing a “What Fruits Bounce Test”. And yes, this one stars me.
One of the most effective ways to tickle TikTok’s algorithm is to play into a trend. As long as you are humble and get the vibe right the community is open and amused to brands playing ball (which can’t always be said for other spaces).
Views: 290,000/Likes: 73,000/Comments: 472
Another example of taking on the trend and bringing the brand into it. Guest starring my living room!
164,000 views/36k likes 512 comments/
For months I pushed the brand to make swag that people could buy, specifically pool floaties, and also send it to influencers. This was in early 2020 before a lot of the now more notable brand swag efforts were done. It took a very long time for the idea to actually get through and I wish it had sooner when the meme-iron was hot.
I find one of the simplest tricks is asking questions. For instance this one was inspired by my witnessing just so many people ask in comments when such and such favorite flavor of theirs will be back. Sometimes I’ve used this information to make more content, for instance one time asking “What would you think a company named ‘Ocean Spray’ sold if you didn’t know what we sold?” And took the responses and had the designers design Ocean Spray brand colored versions of those things.
I mean, the pun just appeared in my head and that was that. I did suggest as a push the idea to client (again this was at the height of their viral popularity) to actually make a website of it that was really just a swag shop/drink shop.
