Hint Lemurs
The lemurs 2022 debut Fruit Experts is the best performing TV campaign in Hint company history.
Early Development
The original idea for the lemurs was hatched in a brainstorming session run by the amazing folks at Funworks, agency partners on our highly successful TV spots in 2020. A discussion about who qualifies as an expert in fruit flavor began with talking fruit flies but quickly moved up the evolutionary (and adorability) chart to lemurs. An initial script was produced but was not selected for further development. Until…
A Hit Radio Ad?
In late December of 2020 — and I mean very late, like the week after Christmas — a rush request for a new creative radio spot was delivered from the tippy top of the company. Fortunately, I had no big plans for the holiday, thanks to a certain global pandemic whose name I won’t mention here. (You know who you are.)
Our CMO and I selected a couple of ideas from the Funworks brainstorming session to develop. I rewrote them as audio-only spots and recorded scratch versions. The lemurs were the obvious champions, thanks in no small part to the decision to have our highly opinionated primates from Madagascar speak with Brooklyn accents.
The final version of the “Hint Lemurs” radio spot started running on Sirius XM in early January, and it wasn’t long before our customer service team tipped us off to something strange: people were messaging through our website requesting copies of the ad so they could listen to it again.
Development & Design
Fast forward to late 2021. It was time for a new TV campaign, and there was no question that the Lemurs were the right primates for the job. There was only one problem: 3D character design and animation — at least the kind of top-quality, Pixar-esque kind we wanted — was not realistically going to be achieved within our budget.
I stripped the script down to only the most critical visual elements to engineer the animation budget down, and we reached out to the a dozen of the best animators of creatures and fur we could find. Throughout the search there was truly only one apple of our eye, House Special of Portland, Oregon. Aaron and Karly were enthusiastic from the jump and were incredible partners in every way: ultra creative, super diligent, amazingly flexible and just damn good people.
Lemurs Puppet Kit
In addition to the animation work on the TV spot, House Special built us an amazing 2D animation kit for both Larry and Lenny. This allowed the internal team to create lightly animated social content featuring the lemurs relatively quickly using our standard workflow in Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects.
