The Client: California Grown
The Projects: Love, California & Farm2Fan Integrated Advertising Campaigns
The Agency: MeringCarson
My Role: Creative lead—concepting + copywriting + media strategy + production + content strategy
The Backstory: During my first year on the California Grown account, I took it upon myself to transition a very traditional client to a modern performance-first approach. Historically, they would spend their limited annual content budget on one or two lengthy, expensive farmer-focused videos that did not perform well in the social space and did not resonate with our foodie-focused target consumers. It was time to change our approach, our audience, and give California’s family farmers a campaign that drove real results.

We sparked this process in years 1 and 2 with the Farm2Fan campaign by tapping into the popularity of the farm2fork movement and shifting the creative emphasis onto the inspiring intersection of California’s family farmers and their food-loving fans.

In years 3 and 4, we dove into the deep end of the social-first space with the incredibly successful Love, California campaign and made the commodity the hero of the story. Our challenge was to find a way to feature more crops with an even smaller budget, so we pulled together a wide variety of new and existing footage and packaged them with graphics and on-screen text to create a cohesive, compelling campaign that was specifically designed for digital platforms. This award-winning digital campaign also featured MeringCarson’s first :06 ad units, as well as a series of :15s and a multi-commodity :60 that told the story from the farm all the way to point-of-sale.