After 6 successful years in market, Ancestry’s growth had plateaued. At that point, they approached us to develop a new TV advertising campaign that would build an emotional connection with the audience while still driving immediate action. With a focus on the fun and often surprising insights uncovered by the Ancestry service across all products, the ensuing 2015, 2016 and 2017 campaign proved to be the most successful in the company’s history, besting prior subscriber growth by 35%.
As we know, shooting real people can be tricky. It’s about finding characters that are believable, memorable and engaging. It's also a numbers game. You have to shoot some duds to find the gems. In the end, we landed on some great, break-through personalities.
They say the true mark of a successful campaign is when it gets parodied and becomes a pop-culture phenomenon. This campaign achieved such a feat when it was spoofed by Comedy Central, Saturday Night Live… and even Brietbart News.