For more than 30 years, Organic Valley has been doing some pretty crazy stuff. Stuff that no food business in their right mind would do. Like raising their cows on pasture instead of in industrial feedlots. Like insisting that the farmers own and run the company themselves, instead of the company running the farmers. Like actually holding themselves to even higher standards than those required for organic certification, instead of trying to skirt the regulations. But in spite of these totally uncorporate practices, Organic Valley had grown to become one of the biggest organic brands in the world.

We created video campaign that tells the crazy story of how OV went from 6 organic hippie farmers with $2,000 in the bank to a billion dollar food brand, while staying true to their crazy high standards for creating food that’s better for everyone.

Our mini documentary opens with “This is the crazy story of what happens when a bunch of idealistic farmers decide to start a company.” Instead a typical, polished founding story, we show you how the founding farmers of Organic Valley had no idea what they were doing. We meet the cooperative’s original long haired, Gandalf-like CFO, and a head of marketing who admits the name she came up with for the company is “ really not that creative.” We see archival footage of a long-haired, shoeless hippie farmer, George, who would one day become the long-haired, shoeless hippie CEO of Organic Valley. Today, Organic Valley is the biggest organic-only food company—but that’s about the only thing that’s changed. They’re still a democratically-run cooperative owned by a bunch of organic family farmers. Call us crazy, but it’s working.

Reach: We reached 96-97% of our target audience at over 30+ Frequency.

Engagement: 60% of our audience who viewed our video ads watched to 100% completion.

Sales/Achievement against business targets: 3x more effective at driving sales via Marketing Mix Modeling than Nielsen’s CPG average.

Social and Engagements:

YouTube: Paid media drove over 2.4MM 100% completions of the Hero video – this represents 57% of total 4.2MM views of the video. Average watch time is 2 mins!

Facebook: Over 20K engagements (reactions, comments, shares). Engagement rate was around 1-2%.

The use of :06s was an efficient and effective way to get the brand back in front of our audience who had already seen other pieces of video copy.