Out Of It
At the tail end of the pandemic I wanted to create something that showed the general detachment from life that I was seeing in the people around me. It was a strange transitionary time when life was becoming “normal” in an unfamiliar and disappointing way. This observation was supported by the clinical team who reported an increase in the number of clients describing these feelings. Dissociating is a difficult feeling to pinpoint, but I knew that if we showed viewers that they weren’t alone, they would consider going to therapy to try and break the cycle.
Faithfully representing an ambiguous feeling such as dissociation was a challenge, but early on we decided that strong visuals would have to be at the heart of this concept. As a product of the late 90’s & early 2000’s the reference for this piece came from none other than Spongebob. I’ve spent enough time online to know that this clip hits home for a lot of people.
Keeping with the theme of unlikely inspiration, this music video served as a visual reference for how we might be able to immerse viewers in the feelings of our hero. This kind of POV shot makes use of something called a Snorricam. In the music video it’s used to communicate an ostensibly druggy passage of time as well as some intense in-the-action shots. For our use case, I thought it would be perfect to communicate the feeling of being, well, out of it.
The Test Variant
With this concept, we wanted to create a version that was strictly from the POV of the main character. It was both a test of an unproven format for our cinematic commercials and another way to portray this very complicated and personal feeling. Working closely with the director, we figured out that we would only have to add a few shots to the shotlist to make a second version since we were capturing traditional POV footage anyway.
The Results
We launched these spots in testing campaigns alongside some cutdowns to get a pulse on which version resonated the most. We quickly saw that viewers on social channels preferred the first version that mixes traditional and Snorricam POV. The conflicting result was that the “winner” on YouTube was the traditional POV version.
Regardless of the muddy results, we folded the corresponding “winning” versions into our campaigns across our digital channels. After a couple of months of consistent positive engagement, efficient CPAs, and multiple six-figures in media spend we decided to license the spot for broadcast and streaming.
My strategy with commercials is to build for digital while laying the groundwork for TV later on. The shelf life for a spot on TV is much longer than on digital mediums so there was less need to consistently launch new TV spots. Our approach was to square away the paperwork as if we were shooting a TV commercial, launch the spots on digital, and then use the highest performers on TV.
That was the case with Out Of It. We launched both versions on broadcast and streaming in August of 2022. The spots ran for just under a year and were able to spend multiple seven figures on the media side while maintaining efficient CPAs.
