Nature Valley’s Playful Puppet Helps Its Ads Level Up

Kids’ snack favorite Nature Valley has a strong tradition of commercials that emphasise the crunchy goodness of its signature granola bar and the brand’s associations with nature itself. Beautiful forests, inspiring views and adventurous trails abound in Nature Valley ads.

These ads are broadly effective – when we look at Nature Valley on the Test Your Ad database we see plenty of 3-Star results. But what Test Your Ad gives you goes beyond a snapshot of your own ads, it puts your whole category in a competitive context. And the baked goods category is a strong one. Bakery brand ads land on average at 3.5-Stars. Nature Valley ads were good – but in a tough sector, we know they needed to be even better.

Enter new agency The Martin Agency and a new campaign, “We Make Nature Delicious”, which takes Nature Valley to new levels of effectiveness. We’re looking at the highest scoring spot from the campaign, which launched this month with a range of short TV and online video ads. The concept is simple: humans love Nature Valley bars, but the animals we share nature with have got wise to the delicious snacks too.

So in this ad some hikers pause on the trail for a break, and they’re joined by an adorable raccoon, who wants some of their snacks. Given a gentle “no”, the creature takes things up a level and does a cute dance instead. On the Test Your Ad platform this scores a 4.7-Star Rating, which predicts a strong potential for long-term share gain and growth with the right investment. It also lands a strong short-term Spike Rating, which predicts sales boosts.

What makes this ad work so much better than the previous Nature Valley work? The key is the raccoon. Animals are a proven-effective element of advertising. Including one gives the ad a focus and allows it to save its best emotional moment – the dance – to last, so it obeys the “peak end” rule and finishes strongly.

It also makes a difference what kind of raccoon it is. Nature Valley aren’t mixing real people with CGI here – all the ads in this campaign use actual puppets, which give them a texture and craft that help bring the scene to life and chime with Nature Valley’s consistent natural branding.

Test Your Ad is built to give brands a competitive snapshot so they can measure themselves against the real effectiveness norms in their sector. With this campaign, Nature Valley moved from a good, but average performer in the baked goods category to making one of the Top 10 bakery ads of 2025 so far. Putting a playful face on nature has proved a delicious decision.