Gushers have been a beloved snack for young adults for decades - but in the candy game, these days it takes more than delicious taste to break through. So General Mills came to us with a very straightforward brief: make Gushers the most talkable brand in candy with young adults and sell a lot of fruit (flavored) candy.
On a certain level, Gushers is a truly straightforward product that requires no explanation: you bite into one, and you immediately understand why they’re called Gushers. What we realized, however, is that this simplicity also came with a whitespace for us to create lore around the product and present it in a format that felt radically different from everything everyone knew about Gushers. Because the easiest way to start a conversation online is to show everyone a brand new way to look at something everyone already knows.
If there’s one aspect of the Gushers story that everyone already knows - even if you’ve never bitten into a Gusher in your life - it’s the brand’s surreal 90s mascot FruitHead. So we set out to build out a true origin story for FruitHead to give additional context to the character. And we knew this story had to make FruitHead feel different from every other time anyone had seen it. So we decided to make more than a spot - we made an horror short film unpacking the character’s origins, tapping into the constant refrain we saw in conversations about how Gushers’ mascot gave people nightmares when they were kids. More specifically, we made an arthouse body-horror short film to appeal to younger audiences’ love for the A24 aesthetic, but also one with a good serving of Adult Swim-esque absurdity. We remained inspired through development and execution handling the full production through vfx and post. We were delighted to collaborate with Legendary actor Bradley Whitford to play the lead role. Because we knew our audience would devour this, we gave them lots of bite-sized content that was distributed online across all digital platforms.
Our short film killed it. Within weeks, we’d racked up over 6 million views on YouTube alone, with millions more views & impressions coming in on social media. Outlets like AdWeek and MuseByClio rushed to praise the spot’s humor as well as its innovative approach. Most importantly, we started the conversations General Mills was looking for: Gushers Earned Branding and messaging increased +44 points. This helped drive an +8 point lift in purchase intent which translated to a 3% lift in quarterly sales for the brand.
