Aspen Dental is one of the largest dental care brands in the United States that's been operating for more than 25 years. They’ve changed over 10 million smiles and are committed to removing financial barriers and improving people’s confidence, no matter the state of their smile or bank account.
Yet despite their scale, warmth, and real impact, Aspen Dental’s advertising didn’t reflect who they truly were. While the brand delivers modern and compassionate state-of-the-art dental care, their video creative felt disconnected from the humanity of the work happening inside their offices every day.
Our objective was to modernize Aspen Dental’s video advertising across Meta, Google, TikTok, YouTube, and OLV — not by simply polishing existing assets, but by fundamentally rethinking how the brand showed up in digital and social environments.
We set out to uncover the emotional core of Aspen Dental: the trust they build, the confidence they restore, and the life-changing outcomes they deliver. The goal was to create video ads that felt punchy, contemporary, and performance-driven — while also being heartfelt, empowering, and deeply human.
We wanted Aspen Dental’s advertising to finally reflect the modern, compassionate care they provide — and to connect with the people who need their services most in ways that stand out, resonate, and perform on digital and social platforms.
How do you modernize a 25 year old dental brand in a way that’s punchy, compelling, heartfelt, and empowering? By anchoring it in what they do best: creating real, confident, life-changing smiles.
Strategy
While Aspen’s competitors lean into fear, click bait, and gimmicks like “teeth in a day,” we saw an opportunity to show people what Aspen Dental stands for: trust, expertise, dependability, and compassion. We focused on the real emotional barriers people face when seeking dental care — fear, embarrassment, financial anxiety, and outdated stereotypes — and spoke to them empathetically, confidently, and without judgment.
Execution
To capture authenticity at its source, we filmed inside real Aspen Dental practices in Las Vegas, NV; Panama City, FL; and Hialeah, FL — documenting real patients, real dentists, and real transformations.
We intentionally moved away from traditional healthcare advertising aesthetics. Instead of muted palettes, scripted soundbites, or stock-looking imagery, we built a bold new brand world: saturated colors, confident typography, expressive motion graphics, and joyful, unfiltered human moments.
We wrote more than 40 dentist scripts and conducted over 30 one-on-one patient interviews filmed directly in the dental chair. Patients were encouraged to share their stories in their own words, in a safe and celebratory environment. Once treatment was complete, we brought them onto a bright blue seamless backdrop to capture something often missing from dental advertising: pride, laughter, confidence, and personality.
To help patients relax and be themselves, we played their favorite music and stocked the set with crunchy foods they were most excited to eat with their new teeth.
We needed to challenge the fears of dental work, the stereotypes of dentures, and inspire people to see who they could become, and how they would feel, if they had the smile of their dreams. We wanted this to feel aspirational and 100% attainable aesthetically, medically, and financially.
The Challenge:
We had only 2 weeks to plan the first shoot, including writing all the scripts, interview questions, crafting a shot list, creative and art direction, food styling, wardrobe direction etc. Instead of actors, we were shooting real patients in a real dentist office during working hours, so we had to prepare for every scenario. Like having wardrobe options sourced in multiple sizes and colors for each person, questions based on how talkative, comfortable, or well spoken they were. We had to anticipate everything (like no shows) and make a plan that was not just attainable, but successful. We also had very tight timelines for post, often creating 3-5 net new video concepts in 3-4 days.
Despite the challenges, the result was a robust, beautiful, human-centered library that allowed us to create video ad creative at scale that captured the heart and soul of Aspen Dental patients, inspiring millions of people to get a smile they're proud of.
In 2025, we created over 120 video ad assets and built a deep photo and video library designed for long-term iteration, testing, and performance filled with glowing, confident smiles.
This work succeeded both emotionally and commercially.
From a performance standpoint, the new video ads dramatically outperformed Aspen Dental’s previous benchmarks.
Our creative reached milliosn of people while maintaining exceptional efficiency across both awareness and consideration objectives. Our top-performing campaign (Aspen Dental's Mission) generated nearly 4 million video views at an average cost of just $0.04 per view, even at national scale.
One standout traffic creative, “Sky High Prices Are Everywhere,” achieved a 14.28% CTR, driving 78,667 clicks in a single week. Across upper-funnel video campaigns, view-through rates remained consistently high at 97–99%, signaling strong engagement and message resonance.
The longevity of the work further underscored its success. Despite Aspen Dental significant digital media spend, several of our video ads ran continuously for 6–10 months, an unusually long lifespan for performance creative. By refreshing offers while maintaining the core emotional framework, the assets avoided fatigue and continued to perform.
Beyond metrics, the impact was deeply human. Patients openly shared emotional stories — including a U.S. Army veteran proudly bringing his service medal to set — reinforcing the confidence, dignity, and pride restored through Aspen Dental’s care.
Perhaps the clearest signal of success: the footage captured during these shoots is still being used nearly a year later, with new ads continuing to be built from the original library.
We didn’t just create video ads — we built a scalable, human-centered library that changed how Aspen Dental shows up, empowering millions more people to get the smile they deserve, undoubtedly the most important metric of all.
