The Better Fish: Strategy, Media and Creative

Problem: Barramundi is a fish that is relatively new to the US market, in fact most people don’t even know what Barramundi is when they hear the name. The Better Fish produces 90% of the Barramundi consumed in the US market, however the pie is small in the US compared to salmon, so they wanted to grow Barramundi’s share of finfish consumption. However, this needed to be done without upsetting “Big Salmon” as an industry (yes, this is a thing!).

Our Strategic Insight: Healthy eating is no longer about what nutrition a food provides, now healthy eating is all about how it makes you feel, and how you feel about eating it.

Creative Solution: Advertising in the finfish category is all about calories, Omega 3 and fat content - it is very heavy on “nutritional values.” For Barramundi to get noticed in the market, we realized we needed to break category conventions, and do it in an extreme way given the media budget restrictions when compared to the salmon industry.

So not only did Bray & Co reduce mention of health benefits, we removed them altogether and focused on creating a campaign that activated people’s hunger responses - by making ads that didn’t look like ads. We created a series of long form 60 and 30 second ads, with social media versions as well, that simply showed Barramundi cooking in a dish. Nothing more. And no logo until the very end.

This is brave work, and a brave client. Our goal was to create a high arousal state to ensure greater ad recall, and we utlised a number of subtle visual cues to aid this goal.

Media Solution: The Storybuilding commenced with longform, then once a person has been exposed a certain number of times, we presented them with shorter form versions and targeted them across social. Bray & Co also only ran ads between 3pm and 8pm (localized times), as well as targeted consumers who were known customers of retail outlets in which The Better Fish Barramundi was sold. The sequenced messaging was dayparted through Google Paid, Bing, Facebook, YouTube, Broadcast TV, Programmatic Media, Connected TV, and Instagram, with females between 25 - 55 targeted as they are the most likely to be high salmon consumers, with Barramundi positioned as a switch.

Results: The unique ads worked, with an incredible viewthrough rate (as measured on YouTube) of over 60%, far higher than the usual standard of 35%. In addition, organic interaction went through the roof as people would actively search for the ads in order to relax as well as feel ASMR effects. The campaign was also extensively mentioned in the media.