Pine-Sol isn’t a product that’s on people’s minds. And even when it is, it’s usually just thought of as a floor cleaner. Even our biggest fans would tell you: “Pine-Sol can clean floors, but surely not clothes!”

We needed to show people that Pine-Sol is a lot more than what they’ve always thought it is. So, to show people the versatility of Pine-Sol, we decided to leverage the affordability of stock video to create 19 short social videos that were inherently tied to every YouTube video category. Each video took on the voice of Pine-Sol, as if the bottle itself could talk, and commented on what it could and couldn’t do: Pine-Sol can clean just about anything, but it can’t provide insight on the intricacies of human life. We placed each video as contextual pre-roll, ensuring that when our target searched for a specific genre, they saw our related ad.

We created a pre-roll ad for every YouTube category, and then carefully targeted them against our consumer’s top searches. With limited budget, we were determined to find a way to create disruptive, entertaining and persuasive videos and have enough left over to ensure our media performed.

Using stock video, voiceover and bold design, we created ads that met our consumer where they were and shared an interest. Our spots explored what we did and didn’t know to ultimately prove the versatility of our product. If a user searched for cat videos, they were served an ad where we admitted we had no idea if that indecisive cat, Mr. Boddington, would jump on the counter or the table, but that we definitely did know how to clean both surfaces. To keep the humour all the way to the end, every video concluded with a unique, tongue-in-cheek tagline about what we aren’t.

Through a combination of paid media and organic interest, our videos saw millions of views. More importantly, they all achieved a 98% completion rate, even with a skip button available after just 33%. This proved that people genuinely liked, and were intrigued, by our content, with a 25% increase in web traffic to our site only proving the point more.

It wasn’t just our target consumers that loved the work, either. The campaign received favourable coverage in the press from AdWeek, Campaign, Creativity, PR Week UK, Little Black Book and more!