Game, Set and Match to Jellycat

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It’s another sporting Ad Of The Week – but this time it’s not the World Cup. While most brands’ eyes have been on the US, toy brand Jellycat went to Wimbledon this week to create a very different kind of viral social video moment.

Jellycat are one of the toy world’s biggest recent success stories – a British brand that’s caught both the premium soft toy market and built a fanbase of collectors. Alongside their teddies, bunnies and stuffed animals sit their Amuseables range of plush toys modelled on household objects and pieces of food. It makes Jellycat toys unpredictable as well as charming, keeping fans surprised and delighted with each new product line.

For Wimbledon the ad stars one such Amuseable – Tennis Ball, who we probably don’t need to explain is a plush tennis ball. There’s also more familiar Jellycat faces like Ricky Rain Frog and Budgeby Parrot in the stand watching a bunny and a seagull play their match.

It’s less than 20 seconds of social video but with it Jellycat scored more than 4 million views in their first week, and the total keeps on rising. The brand have hit on a mix of relevance, wit, silliness and charm that means audiences can’t stop watching.

We ran the commercial through Test Your Ad Social and it confirmed what audience figures already showed – this ad is a huge hit. In a channel where only 1% of ads hit the 5-Star mark this one scores a near maximum 5.7-Star Rating, and gets an Exceptional short-term Spike Rating too. Social Video is often seen as a performance marketing channel but what Jellycat have shown here is that with the right video a social ad can get top ratings on both long-term brand building and short-term performance. Whether they’re social media users or a general audience, viewers love the ad.

Jellycat’s ad is well-branded from the start, with clear but unobtrusive branding giving it a stronger than average Fast Fluency score (recognition in the first two seconds). The ad is also a great showcase for Jellycat products and the brand name comes out as the top association people have for the ad.

So why does the ad work so well? It’s a simple idea – soft toys watching a tennis match – executed with real wit, with the angry seagull and fist-pumping bunny helping the ad a huge score on “Amusing” in our Types Of Happiness diagnostic. It’s perfectly timed, and is short and sweet enough to be extremely shareable.

The great branding advantage Jellycat has is its characters. Alongside the Amuseables its range of toys has some very recognisable stars and this ad shows they work just as well in animated form. We know that vivid characters are one of the most powerful elements in advertising, and a familiar character (what we call a Fluent Device) is particularly powerful on a channel like Social Video where you only have seconds to grab attention and avoid a scroll or skip. Jellycat has dozens of potential star characters, but it’s never too late for other brands to start investing in their own.