Explosive Ben & Jerry's social campaign over-performs on all platforms.

Ben & Jerry’s was launching in South Korea as a premium ice-cream product in a price-sensitive market with established lower-cost local brands. The challenge was to launch the products in a way that would ‘scoop’ a bigger share of the market without impacting margin or brand image – and this campaign was key to achieving this goal.

Create a suite of thumb-stopping, appetizing and flavourful social videos, highlighting the core flavours in a fun, colourful and quirky way while staying true to the brand’s identity.

Bring to life visually the provenance of the product, beyond the brand values – highlighting the fact that Ben & Jerry’s has more chunks and swirls than any competitor, hence the higher price point.

Genero creators Rascal were commissioned for this brief. Their creative idea was inspired by the action of a shaken champagne bottle exploding, using Ben & Jerry’s ice cream pints instead. The idea was to showcase the appetising appeal and taste cues of each of the different ingredient-packed ice cream flavours.

This concept originally involved a combination of production techniques. Firstly, a live action shoot to capture the individual ingredients at a macro level, showing them shooting up into the sky. And secondly, a papercraft stop motion shoot to create a ‘Ben & Jerry’s world’.

However, this shoot was scheduled to take place during the initial stages of the pandemic and the team had to pivot the idea to a safer production approach.

COVID-19 fundamentally altered the way we approached this production.

The ice cream ingredients:

• The live action shoot which would have involved a crew of 6x people, had to be cancelled completely
• Instead Rascal used existing brand assets and food photography to create a 2.5D animation of the ingredients, giving the impression of the macro detail

The stop motion world: 

• Bafta-award winning papercraft engineer Amy Dodd sent the paper craft items via courier for testing in advance
• The shoot took place with 1 x self shooting DOP only, with the Director and Producer dialling into the set remotely via live stream to give direction
• The ice cream tops were added digitally in post to remove the need for a food stylist on set.

Using these techniques we were able to deliver on the original concept, without impacting the quality of the assets or timings. Rascal delivered individual assets for the five flavours, as well as a series of edits showing the full range – see examples below.

Facebook & Instagram:

This campaign over-performed on key KPIs across Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. From Ben & Jerry’s universe of 10 million South Korean people aged 18-35, the Facebook campaign reached 3.8M with 198% more impressions than estimated, and the Instagram story ad also over-performed with 247% more impressions than estimated.

YouTube: