This original music achieved something remarkable: it encapsulates the odd fun of a wobbling cranberry jelly.

The music works with the actors’ movement to show how the product transforms the boring holiday into something wild.

Our music-driven campaign highlighted the strangeness of one of the strangest food products in American culture.

Our original dance track was the theme of the wiggling jellies and the provocation for everyone else to join in the jiggle on social. The song was an earworm that made people dance, from TV to TikTok.

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. Our job with this work was to refresh the power story for the holidays.

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.

Our track grabbed the attention of our audience and lived beyond the spot as an entertaining, exciting piece of music in social and online.

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 very simple: take the weirdest truth about cranberry jelly and amplify it.

And that’s the fact that it wobbles, wiggles and jiggles. We needed a song that could be the jelly’s mouthpiece, imbue it with a supernatural power.

Our brief to the composer was this: The jelly’s arrival to the party should feel like a powerfully fun, supernatural force. Like an alien commanding people to dance. Something that makes anyone move, even a reluctant grandmother.

We honed in on references from decades-old trance Europop tracks that were alien-like and hypnotizing.

His first pass was delivered in ten days, and is essentially what was used in the final spot. His use of (his own) eerie voices saying “wiggle” and “jiggle” on top of an electronic dance track was highly catchy and original and was used from TV to TikTok.

The composer of the track was Mack Goudy Jr. He’s best known for his band, Detroit Grand Pubahs (“Sandwiches”). He’s also created custom music for Southern Comfort, Light+Fit and many others.

Mack’s first pass was delivered in ten days, and is essentially what was used in the final spot. His use of (his own) eerie voices saying “wiggle” and “jiggle” on top of an electronic dance track was highly catchy and hypnotic and was used from TV to TikTok.

The original “Wiggle Jiggle” track appeared in our hero film (:60, :30, :15), three :06s for TV, OLV and social. It appeared on Spotify and on YouTube in an animated lyric video. It was also used for our TikTok dance challenge, which invited people to dance with a jiggling jelly, and the alien voices were extracted and used in our ten-hour long cranberry yule log video.

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.