“We need people to send us their poop, in order to make custom probiotics for them.”

This was, by far, the most interesting commercial prompt I’ve ever had.

Thryve is a custom probiotics company. Their customers suffer from a range of health issues: painful bloating, constipation, emergency bathroom breaks after every meal - all serious problems that are incredibly frustrating, but potentially embarrassing to talk about. Thryve creates custom probiotics that truly worked…but they struggled to make a compelling commercial.

The challenge: How do you talk about poop problems, without sounding too clinical or like an immature kindergartener?

The solution: By crafting an ad that’s so entertaining, quirky, and artistic - you forget it’s even an ad.

My responsibilities as Creative Director:

Research: I sat down with the founder to understand how exactly custom probiotics works, and what problems they were facing with their customers. According to the CEO, the product genuinely worked, but people were not particularly receptive towards their ads, which were rather clinical at the time. 

Next, I interviewed two dozen random customers to dig into their experience because the better you can understand the current customers, the better you can write for future customers. Honestly, bless their hearts for being so open about talking about their bathroom problems with a complete stranger. It turned out, these probiotics were pretty life changing for people who suffered with some pretty painful and frustrating bathroom problems.

Writing: After talking to so many customers and reading thousands of survey data entries, we had the raw information necessary to hit all of the important talking points. The real challenge here wasn’t the information, but how to convey that information. To be frank, how do you talk about diarrhea, or bloating, or constipation in an entertaining yet trustworthy way? We opted to illustrate the users’ bathroom problems with aesthetically pleasing food. We believed the juxtaposition between hearing something clinical (or uncomfortable) while showing something aesthetically pleasing, would keep things interesting. We also kept the pacing fast and added in as many tasteful jokes as possible.

Visuals: This ad was so much fun to implement visually - I’m really happy to say I’ve never seen an ad for a health product with such fun visuals. I curated every single prop, went to every paint store in town to find hues that filmed nicely, and dyed wardrobe to match!

Post-production feedback: I gave detailed feedback to our editors to help ensure the cut reflected what was intended in the script. For this ad in particular, we included a LOT of education about digestive health before posing Thryve as the solution. During post-production, we really had to be strict with what information was ultimately necessary, and what information made the ad too long.