A mouthguard brand, a New York Jets tight end, and one shoot cut into a football season of social.
Vettex · Freelance, hands-on creative director
Campaign strategy · Talent-led creative · Analytics and measurement · Video and motion · Product photography · Email design and build
THE CHALLENGE
Vettex makes a mouthguard with a patented shape, and its advantage is that you can breathe through it. That is a hard thing to sell in a photograph. The product is small, it is worn inside the mouth, and the moment it is doing its job it is invisible.
Football season is also a fixed window. The campaign had to run for the length of a season without going stale, on a budget that allowed one production.
WHAT I DID
Built the campaign around an athlete, because the product cannot demonstrate itself.
A working professional in front of the product does the job a close-up cannot. It says the people who need this most already use it, which is the only argument available when the thing itself is invisible in use.
Planned one production to cover a whole season.
Football season is a fixed window and the budget allowed one shoot. So the film was planned to be cut apart: one production, a run of shorter edits, and distribution on Tyler Conklin’s own channels alongside the brand’s. One spend, a season of runway.
Gave them a way to keep it going without me.
The Conklin partnership worked, so I handed over the method rather than just the campaign: partner with up and coming players instead of established names and grow them into influencers alongside the brand, and use contests and giveaways to convert the attention into followers.
Set them up to see who was actually buying.
I showed them how to use UTMs and Google Analytics, so the campaign returned demographics and behaviour instead of follower counts. Without that, the next decision is guesswork dressed up as instinct.
Edited the film and cut it for the feed.
I cut the film and the shorter edits in After Effects, sized for how people actually watch on a phone.
Photographed the products, and split the static work two ways.
The product posts are my photography. Athlete-led posts carry the endorsement; product-led posts carry the patented shape and the reason it exists. Different jobs, so they were designed as two sets rather than one look applied twice.
Designed the emails and built them into NetSuite.
I designed and sliced the campaign emails in Photoshop and built them in Oracle NetSuite, the ERP the business already ran on, so the sends sat with the customer records instead of in a separate tool.
RESULTS
A season-long campaign from one production, running across the brand’s channels and the athlete’s
A social growth method the brand could run itself: emerging athletes as partners, contests and giveaways
UTM and Google Analytics tracking, so the brand could see who its customers were and how they arrived
The film edit and the cutdowns, made in After Effects
Product photography, and two sets of static posts, athlete-led and product-led
Campaign emails, designed and sliced in Photoshop and built in Oracle NetSuite
Vettex passed $1M in sales for the first time that year, announced by the owner at a staff meeting
A product that disappears when it works has to borrow its proof from someone the audience already trusts. Knowing that is strategy. Knowing it could be shot once, cut for a season, and tracked well enough to prove it is what made the strategy worth having.
Another sports product, and the two ends of how one gets sold: a trade show stand and an Amazon listing.
View Varo Trade Show Assets and Amazon A+ Content