THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!
From the 9th Annual Shorty Awards

Prickly

Winner in Video Pre-Roll

Audience Honor in Video Pre-Roll

Objectives

Scotts wanted to show that the faster you treat weeds with Scotts Weed B Gon, the less annoying the weeds will get, and the better off your lawn will be.

Strategy and Execution

So we partnered with Google, to re-imagine something else annoying — pre-roll ads — and turned them into an interactive product demo, by tweaking the functionality of the 'skip ad' button.

The pre-roll starred an annoying weed character named Prickly, who was so annoying, you'd want to kill him.

At the 5 second point of the video, the 'Skip Ad' button popped up, giving viewers a chance to skip our pre-roll. But, we also gave viewers a second option. A button that would let them 'Kill Prickly'.

If viewers clicked 'Kill Prickly' instead of skip, they got to jump ahead in the pre-roll, to the point where Weed B Gon is used to kill the annoying weed.

Results

Giving viewers a choice worked. While most pre-roll ads are skipped in the first few seconds, only 2% of all Prickly viewers chose to skip the ad. Instead, 98% of all viewers made it through the full ad, making it one of the most successful pre-roll ads ever.

Using pre-roll in a unique and innovative way helped us to land Scotts' message, while giving viewers a fresh way to interact with our brand, and learn exactly how it works.

Media

Video for Prickly

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Rethink, Scotts Canada

Entry Credits