Anker: Use Anker Instead

Our lives revolve around the life cycle of our phone batteries more than we care to admit. How much juice do I have left? Do I really want to be stranded with no way of contacting people? Maybe I should delay leaving the house for 15 minutes to let my battery top off?

As America’s leading USB charging brand, Anker has a deep understanding of how these phone battery issues ripple into our daily lives. They’ve made a name for themselves by providing smart and technologically advanced solutions that are meant to replace the stock charger that comes with your phone, helping us charge our devices more quickly.

As their Miami commercial production house, we teamed up with Anker to help them create pre-roll ads that illustrate some of these everyday scenarios. The goal was for these to be instantly relatable and convey the problem in 6 seconds or less, which is the gold standard for a successful pre-roll campaign.

Anker knows that their products have mass appeal; almost everyone is potentially in the market for a cheap charging solution that also happens to offer increased performance. The challenge that they shared with us is one of education: it turns out that a lot of people don’t know that you can use a third-party charger for you phone without causing any technical issues.

We knew that the average reaction to a pre-roll ad is typically eye-rolls, impatient clicks, antipathy. How can we amuse people enough to prevent them from clicking away AND educate them about something we know they want, in as little time as possible?

“Use Anker Instead” was our answer. The first few seconds start with a hook, something to engage the viewer, and we landed on a literal first-person approach to immerse the audience personally in the problem. Each spot begins with someone losing battery and then searching around for a place to plug in their stock charger.
In the next few seconds, we wanted to amuse the viewer, but also use common pain points as the source of this humor. In the actor’s point of view, the audience witnesses as they do something stupid in lieu of a better alternative, whether that’s trying to plug their phone into a car cigarette lighter or look under the seats on the subway for an outlet.

We are then suddenly snapped out of first-person perspective by some wise Good Samaritan, such as a friendly police officer or a kindly old lady on the train, who uses some type of physical action to wake our character- and in turn, the viewer- out of their daze and see the obvious: they should have used Anker instead.

Our four spots for Anker have combined to create over 70 million views on YouTube globally, and outperform industry benchmarks for average viewing time and user interaction.

Artex was responsible for conceptualization, scripting, treatment, production, and post-production for this project. We shot this Miami video production in two days, all over the city.