Video creative for brand-building: four FMCG case studies

With short video taking over social media and consumers enjoying more entertainment through streaming and video platforms, there are more opportunities than ever for brands to use video in the right way.

For brands in sectors like FMCG, video can be a prime venue to build brand and create positive associations that will put their products higher up the consideration list next time consumers come to buy. But with a range of different platforms in play, how can brands make the most of this format and deliver a truly impactful message?

Here are four excellent examples of FMCG video creative that successfully built brand, along with takeaways for marketers looking to do the same.

Tide: Viral UGC and creating a meme

In 2023, detergent brand Tide launched a larger version of its Tide Pods known as Tide Power Pods, designed to match the growing size of washing machines and laundry loads and to tackle heavily-soiled loads of laundry.

However, social listening and customer insight indicated that consumers were confused by the bigger pods and didn’t understand the need for them. To address this, Procter & Gamble partnered with Saatchi & Saatchi New York to create a social video and broadcast TV ad with accompanying gifs, memes, and AR lenses.

The video’s creative makes use of infamous viral videos that involve a subject getting extremely messy – such as a man who is abruptly covered in plaster from his ceiling or a teenager exploding a watermelon with a rubber band. For the ad, the team stitched in clips of actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani to answer the question posed in the opening of the ad: “Who needs that much more Tide?”

(Answer: the people in the video do).

YouTube recommends an ‘ABCD’ (Attention, Branding, Connection, Direction) approach to advertising on their platform, and it’s easy to identify how Tide’s ad ticks off each one of these points:

• Attention: The video grabs the viewer’s attention in the opening seconds with the humorous ceiling-falling clip, along with the introduction of the brand message (“Who needs that much more Tide?” “–He does.”)
• Branding: The Tide logo and Power Pod product image are presented at the very beginning via an ‘in-universe’ product ad, as well as in the closing seconds. Meanwhile, the Tide brand is reinforced through the “Gonna need more Tide” messaging.
• Connection: The viral video clips are funny and relatable, depicting human moments of mess and chaos. These are accompanied by a simplistic message: “more Tide” will solve the mess.
• Direction: While the ad lacks an explicit call-to-action, it reinforces the notion that viewers should purchase bigger Tide pods to tackle their daily messes.

As a short video itself, ‘Gonna need more Tide’ is almost a meta-commentary on the role of social video in our lives: the clips are the star of the show, while actor Kumail Nanjiani is only a commentator – although he briefly stars in his own ‘clip’ at the end.

One of the biggest markers of the campaign’s success was the fact that “Gonna need more Tide” developed into a meme, with internet users posting it to comment on similar videos, or riff on other meanings of the word ‘dirty’.

This demonstrates that the video successfully developed a link between Tide’s brand and dramatic messes in consumer’s minds – and the memes only served to spread its message further.

Ohhh yeah “Wildman!!”

That slider was dirty, “We’re gonna need more Tide!!!!” https://t.co/hw02CX93D2

— TJ Pitzer (@TJ_Pitzer) October 10, 2023

Kellogg’s: A nostalgic master brand refresh

Kellogg’s kicked off a major revamp of its master brand at the end of 2024 that aims to “reignite demand” for the business, as Jenn Carkner, Europe vice-president at Kellogg’s Cereal, told Marketing Week.

The first phase of this revamp came in the form of ‘See You in the Morning’, an ad that ran across TV and digital, and brought the distinctive Kellogg’s green rooster to life in gigantic form using computer animation.

The video ad walks the line between nostalgic and new, drawing on decades of visual identification that associates Kellogg’s with its green rooster Cornelius, whom Carkner calls “one of the [brand’s] strongest assets”. However, the character is historically “underutilised … a bit of a diamond that was just waiting for some love”, as Carkner put it.

This nostalgic asset is combined with a brand new tagline: ‘See you in the morning’, which is snappy, memorable, and encapsulates Kellogg’s role in the morning ritual as consumers begin their day.

Kellogg’s ad successfully grabs the viewer’s attention in the first few seconds with its iconic rooster silhouette superimposed on a high-rise building, hinting at the brand while creating curiosity as to what will come next.

Another creative coup is the choice of music for the video: a 1990s hip-hop track, ‘Jayou’ by Jurassic 5, which layers in additional nostalgia while also covertly referencing Kellogg’s with its “Snap, crackle, pop pop” line (associated with Rice Krispies cereal).

It’s often recommended that video creative should work well without audio, as videos tend to autoplay on mute, particularly in social media feeds. This ad succeeds in standing alone visually, however, ‘See You in the Morning’s placement on video platforms and TV makes it more likely to be heard, with the music adding an extra element to the experience.

System1 analysis reveals that the ad scores well on ‘fluency’ (88 out of a possible 100, although slightly below the 92 average in the cereal category) and succeeds in evoking emotions of happiness and surprise, overall achieving a ‘Good’ 3.8 star rating (which exceeds the 3.2 category average).

The evaluation also shows that the ad has a strong ‘Spike Rating’ of 1.22, which is derived from strength of branding and intensity of emotional response, and indicates short-term sales potential.

Driving Effectiveness with Creativity

Glow Recipe: “Scroll stopping” brand storytelling

Glow Recipe is a ‘fruit-forward’ skincare brand with strong social followings – almost 2 million followers on both Instagram and TikTok. The brand’s Instagram is a site of high engagement with Glow Recipe’s loyal fans, who flood each post with enthusiastic comments and suggestions.

In May 2024, the brand launched a new product: a hydrating facial balm and sunscreen derived from watermelon, Glow Recipe’s signature ingredient.

To introduce the product, Glow Recipe created an Instagram Reel that explained why watermelon is omnipresent in the brand’s products, drawing a direct line from the two founders’ childhoods and their experiences of natural skincare remedies while growing up in Korea to the creation of Glow Recipe products.

The video successfully humanises the brand and tells a unique story that viewers can connect and relate to, as evidenced by the comments from fans sharing emotional responses and even recalling similar stories.

It also tells a product creation story, replete with shots of watermelon that serve to drive home the natural source of Glow Recipe’s products, along with close-ups of the skin balm in its distinctive pink packaging, and shots of the product being applied to illustrate how easy it is to use. Speaking to Inc. in 2022, co-founders Sarah Lee and Christine Chang explained how social media plays a large role in product development, in order to create appealing textures for “scroll stopping” content on Instagram on TikTok.

This understanding of how social media and brand complement each other explains how Glow Recipe has been so successful at using visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok to build its brand and engage consumers.

Oddlygood’s brand preference success

Plant-based food brand Oddlygood successfully cut through on TikTok in 2023 with a video that poked fun at Swedish and Finnish midsummer traditions.

The 35-second video focuses on overhead shots of a person preparing midsummer snacks using Oddlygood’s products, showing how these vegan alternatives can be used in place of regular condiments to create appetising-looking spreads.

All the while, a comedic voiceover jokes about why Swedes and Finns love midsummer, speculating that the appeal is in being able to “live our ABBA summer fantasy” through wearing “flower crowns and pretty dresses”.

The video has a polished aesthetic with professional-looking food shots, but also features stickers and overlaid images that give it a meme-like, TikTok-native feel. It uses humour to connect with its Nordic audience by joking about shared cultural traditions that are ‘strange’ but endearing, something that consumers throughout Sweden and Finland can relate to. All the while, the video positions Oddlygood’s products at the centre of Midsummer celebrations at home.

The ‘Midsummer’ video is an excellent example of TikTok content that feels native to the platform: per TikTok’s own creative best practices, it’s shot vertically and feels made for TikTok, evokes emotions like suspense (there’s a shot with an anthropomorphised onion that is swiftly followed by the onion being chopped up), surprise and humour, and utilises stickers and graphics. The text overlay enables the video to be enjoyed without audio while aiding comprehension.

Oddlygood’s ad picked up an award in the TikTok Ad Awards Nordics and took Oddlygood from the 5^th-preferred brand in the plant-based beverages category to the top preferred brand. As a result of the campaign, Oddlygood enjoyed a 40% uptick in in-store sales, demonstrating the video’s success at enhancing Oddlygood’s brand.

How can marketers gauge the effectiveness of their creative?

As we’ve seen, the right creative can do wonders to promote brand and create positive associations around new products or those in need of a lift. However, it can be difficult to know whether creative will hit the mark in the right way until it doesn’t – or to be sure whether the creative is the element of a video that’s resonating.

Creative can feel subjective and hard to pin down – one person’s favourite ad can fall flat with another – but there are data-driven ways to determine whether an ad’s creative is succeeding at its goals. Mark Ritson wrote persuasively for Marketing Week in favour of pre-testing ad creative, which he called a “no-brainer”. In Ritson’s words:

“Why would you not test probably the biggest single marketing investment of the year? If you believe pricing or product development is bolstered by consumer research, why would you not think the same about advertising?”

A variety of tools exist to facilitate creative testing, which can be carried out in different ways:

• Split or A/B testing, which gauges the performance of two (or more) variants against each other, in this case versions of the ad creative
• Multivariate testing, which seems similar to A/B testing but adjusts a range of different variables at once to gauge how they affect performance
• Lift or incrementality testing, in which the impact of an ad is tested by comparing two groups: one that was exposed to the ad and a control group that wasn’t. This is most useful for gauging overall impact of an ad on consumer behaviour.

Measurement Approaches: Controlled Experiments and Incrementality Tests

In an interview with Econsultancy, Zappi’s Chief Marketing Officer Nataly Kelly also put forward the argument that brands should not just test ad hoc in an isolated manner, but consolidate their testing data to give them a holistic view of ad impact.

“Brands cannot properly leverage technology and automation unless they first systematise their insights function, and this is a major area of opportunity that many brands today are still overlooking,” she argued.

“… Brands that connect their data and insights across projects, business units, markets and teams can unlock meta-learning, which benefits the brand as a whole.”