A short-form performance ad test for Mars Men, cut from their raw creator footage and B-roll library, with a generated foundry sequence carrying the turn.
Mars Men sells a testosterone support supplement. The brief handed over raw creator footage, a B-roll library, and a script called Stop Chasing Hacks: a pitch that opens by rejecting the usual wellness shortcuts and lands on doing the real work instead.
The ask was one to two variations, built to perform rather than just to look good. The evaluation criteria were stated outright, which made the job unusually clear.
Both hooks were on the table, so I built both and made them structurally different rather than just swapping the opening line. One leads with a person. One leads with the thing being mocked. Same script, same ending, two different bets on what stops a thumb.
Opens cold on an LED therapy mask, a cold plunge, mushroom coffee. The viewer recognizes the trend before anyone tells them it's useless, so the line lands on something they already have in their head. The creator arrives four seconds in, once there's something to argue against.
Opens on the creator mid-sentence, no setup. It's the shorter cut by seven seconds because the hook does its work instantly and the body has to keep that pace or lose it. Built for the feed where personality outruns setup.
Heads up: this cut opens with explicit language, carried over from the hook the brand wrote.
Two documents came with the test and they appeared to contradict each other. The editing brief called for captions and music. The creator brief said no captions and no music. I flagged it and asked which one governed, along with whether the actor in the raw footage was the creator and whether I could shoot my own.
They turn out to address different stages: one is filming direction for the person on camera, the other is instruction for the editor. Worth thirty seconds to confirm rather than guessing and rebuilding later.
The ad needed an AI or 3D element, and the easy version of that is a floating logo nobody watches. Instead I put it where the argument turns. The script says when you fix your foundation, and that's a hammer striking hot steel and molten metal pouring into a mold. Generated footage, because no stock clip was going to hit that beat with the right heat and timing.
It's also the only place in the ad where the visuals stop illustrating and start arguing. Everything around it is a person or a situation. This is the one metaphor.
The brand's rule was no product until the last ten to fifteen seconds, and that rule is correct for this format. Both cuts hold the bottle until after the payoff line, so the ad has already made its case before it asks for anything.
Four files went out: both cuts at 9:16 and 4:5. Framing was checked per ratio rather than letting an auto-crop decide what got cut off, because a caption that works vertically can fall apart in the squarer placement.
After submitting, I went back through my own files and found that my captions were sitting in the bottom third of the frame. That's exactly where the Meta Reels interface overlays the video, and the brief had specified safe zones explicitly. I'd followed the caption style and missed the placement.
It's a small thing that costs real money. A caption the platform covers is a caption nobody reads, on an ad built entirely around a spoken argument.
Captions in the lower third, sentence case, box at low opacity.
Captions centered in the safe band, all caps, box opacity raised to read over the forge sparks and gym lighting.
The cuts above are the corrected versions. I sent them to the brand too, after the fact and without being asked. Catching your own miss late is worse than catching it early, and better than never catching it.
Training video, explainer animation, motion graphics, and interactive learning.