Greatest Common Factory & SafeAuto Bring Fârnhäan to Huluween

This year, to spice up Hulu’s month-long Huluween festival of horror movies, Greatest Common Factory and SafeAuto let Fârnhäan, the brand’s confidently wrong spokes-device, give their take on the occasion with pithy one-liners. 


While Hulu sold a dozen sponsorships for Huluween, SafeAuto was the only brand to create its own short-form ads on the theme. Others settled for “brought to you by” tags produced by the network. 


“When you create a character like Fârnhäan, you’re inspired to take advantage of every opportunity to comment on a social convention,” said John Trahar, co-founder and creative lead at Greatest Common Factory.  “We designed Fârnhäan for the quantity-quality approach to content creation required to keep a brand connecting in our age of distraction.” 


Read more from John on what went into creating the spots below.

 

 

Tell us about your role in the creation of this work. 

As agency of record for SafeAuto our role is to lead strategy, creative and production of all of SafeAuto’s content. In this case, we created the “makes sense” positioning, the idea of Fârnhäan as a fake news “that doesn’t sound right” spokesdevice and directed, filmed and edited all spots and promos in the campaign.

 

Give us an overview of the campaign, what is it about? 

Fârnhäan was created to bring to life an easy to do business with and common sense car insurance product by contrasting that value proposition with the ever-increasing, 24-hour news cycle “that doesn’t sound right” information we are subjected to daily.

We needed a cost effective vehicle that could cross channels easily and be flexible enough to say what needed to be said in specific trend, market or media opportunities as they arise. Fârnhäan makes that easy and this Huluween sub-campaign is a perfect example of its nimbleness.

 

Tell us about the details creative brief, what did it ask? 

The brief called for relevant content within the specific media opportunity of Huluween that could extend and complement a larger campaign in mix of other channels.

 

Which insight led to the creation of this piece of work? 

The overall insight was that SafeAuto’s customer is time and cashed strapped and values ease of doing business and cost most when buying a required by law product.

The larger campaign plays into that by positioning SafeAuto as the car insurance provider that makes sense.

  

Can you share with us any alternative ideas (if any) for this campaign? Why was this idea chosen? 

No other campaigns were considered as this one was designed to be the modular vehicle for quick turn media opportunities and partnerships.

 

What was the greatest challenge that you and your team faced during development?  

The biggest challenge was getting Hulu to start talking about serving specific SafeAuto content that worked in creative alignment with the programming they were serving their viewers. Once it was understood that we were attempting to deliver a better “advertising viewing experience” for their viewers we were quickly able to move forward together.

 

What did you enjoy most about seeing this campaign through? Did you learn anything new from the experience?  

Most enjoyable for us is being able to make content that makes sense for our client and then be able to serve it to an audience that makes sense within the context of what they have chosen to watch. We happily learned that it is possible to have a more meaningful connection between channel and advertising message through a shared context of programming. 

 

View all six videos here.