We had to sell one of the strangest food products in American culture: the can of jellied cranberry sauce. Our target audience was millennials, who are naturally cynical about CPG advertising, so we needed to find an unexpected way to sell the product.

The work defies all traditional strategies of holiday advertising (wholesome joy) and food advertising (making it look delicious). Our work made the product’s taste, nutritional value, or use cases irrelevant. Instead, we let the jelly’s strangest properties transform the holiday. And we created a jelly dance that anyone could do to experience the joy of the jiggle.

As part of our foundational brand work with Ocean Spray, we had repositioned them from a juice company to a cranberry company, showing cranberries as an essential source of disruptive power and flavor.

Thanksgiving is a big moment for the brand culturally, and the most crucial time of year for the company’s sales.

And the brand was losing ground with millennials, right as millennials were taking over holiday hosting duties in their extended families. We needed to make the brand relevant with this audience and lift sales during this critical time of year.

We chose to do it with the product that made Ocean Spray famous 90+ years ago: the canned cranberry jelly, which many people viewed as a vestige of a different time and an antiquated way of eating.

Millennials were taking over the duties of Thanksgiving hosting, but weren't including cranberry jelly on their tables. In fact, 55% of millennials hadn’t grown up with cranberry jelly on the Thanksgiving table, and 40% of them didn't consider it an important part of Thanksgiving. We needed to bring the brand and its flagship 90+ year old product to the forefront of the holidays.

The simplest business challenge was driving sales in the highest-volume part of the year, as a recession loomed. But the more complex problem was compelling a new generation to see Ocean Spray as an essential part of the holidays.

If millennials could fall in love with the brand, they would then bring it into their emerging holiday traditions. And this would give Ocean Spray traction with a new generation and secure the brand’s place on the Thanksgiving table for years to come.

Knowing we had to capture the attention of millennials, we probed two areas: their relationship with advertising and their relationship with Thanksgiving. Both areas presented a challenge.

We knew millennials were immune to traditional CPG advertising. The CPG playbook—i.e. making food look delicious—was not going to work. Especially since our product was not delicious-looking – it’s gelatinous, strange, and unnaturally-shaped.

And after several years of canceled holiday gatherings, disrupted traditions, and significant collective grief, an ad that showed saccharine holiday magic would feel dishonest and out-of-touch.

Our key strategic choice was to take the collective anxiety around this first post-COVID Thanksgiving and create a moment of joyful catharsis.

Our audience was ready for a wild, even messy, party. So using our strange, jiggling cranberry jelly, we delivered exactly that.

The creative idea was simple: cranberry jelly is weird.

It wobbles. It quivers. It’s an unnatural shape and a bright red color.

Its strangeness makes it an interesting party guest – a standout on a table of beige, bland Thanksgiving foods.

And it's often the last thing to hit the table, like a jiggling punctuation mark to the holiday spread. When the jelly lands, the party has begun.

We pushed this product’s strange qualities to the extreme, with a film where the power of the jelly’s wobble compels an entire family to wobble along with it. Turning their boring holiday dinner into something wild and absurd.

The takeaway: when you bring the cranberry jelly, you bring the fun.

To make this moment impactful and culturally contagious, we gave the jelly its own original dance track and turned the wobble into a dance that anyone could do, via a TikTok challenge.

The campaign received over 4.5 billion PR impressions, making cranberry jelly the most talked-about product in pop culture for the holidays.

From TikTok to Twitter, Ocean Spray saw over 236k engagements. Brand mentions were up 77% YoY, with positive mentions up +399%, and all mentions staying 94% positive/neutral. The spot also had one of the highest completion rates on YouTube (+40% above benchmark).

Sales for cranberry jelly increased 27% YoY. Sales increased cross-portfolio too: Juice was up +6% vs YA and Dried Fruit +11%.

Ocean Spray experienced unprecedented lifts across nearly all aspects of the brand, and the industry and public reacted intensely to the work. From ranking on top ad lists to reactions from the public, there was a consistent theme. As one critic said, “If this is the future of advertising in a world of too many things fighting for your attention, I’m all for it.”

Cranberry jelly has been an American Thanksgiving staple for over 90 years. It’s a jellied fruit product that comes in a can. When you remove it from the can, the cranberry jelly retains the ridged shape of its container. It’s both a beloved tradition and a commonly-mocked food at the American Thanksgiving table.

It’s strange and unnatural-looking. It’s also delightfully bright red, sweet and tart. It goes great as a side to the traditional meal of roasted turkey and mashed potatoes.

Millennial consumers, who we needed to recruit, have been raised on more natural foods than previous generations and are suspicious of anything in a can. That makes canned cranberry jelly a difficult sell for them.

This generation is also in the process of creating their own meaningful holiday traditions, so selling the jelly as something traditionally important would not be effective with this audience.