Pulp & Press
Two years of performance creative for a DTC juice brand, running two markets on separate offers.
Role
Production Designer
Agency
Northern Commerce
Years
2022 to 2024
Disciplines
Performance Creative, Production Design, Motion
01 The account
Pulp & Press is a cold-pressed juice and plant-based meal brand selling direct to consumer in Canada and the United States. The business runs on promotions. Cleanses go on sale for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, New Year, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, spring break, Canada Day, July 4th, back to school, and every long weekend in between.
Every one of those moments needs creative. Not one ad, a set: a square for feed, a portrait for the newer placements, a vertical for stories, a carousel to carry the detail, and a static version of every animated one in case the video underdelivers. Then the same set again for the other market, because the discount depth and the product lineup are not the same in Canada as they are in the States.
That is the work. Not one campaign with a big idea, but a creative engine that had to keep producing at the pace the promotional calendar set, without the brand drifting.
02 The unit of work is the set, not the ad
The mistake with volume work is treating each ad as a fresh design problem. Do that and you get forty ads that each look fine and nothing that looks like a brand.
Canada Day 2023 is the whole method in one campaign. Two concepts, each resolved as a static and as a fifteen-second cut, each of those built for both 4x5 and 9x16. Eight deliverables, one idea, no piece of it phoned in because it was the seventh export.
Re-set, not scaled: a 9x16 story gives you vertical room that a 4x5 does not, so the type stack gets rebuilt for the space rather than shrunk into it. The product sits in the same part of the frame every time so the bottle label, which is the actual brand asset, stays readable at feed size.
The offer is a separate layer from the design. The number, the promo code and the legal line are the only things that move between a 15% run and a 30% run. Build it that way and the next promo takes an afternoon instead of a week.
The account ran with campaigns assigned whole. A designer took a promotion from concept through every export, so a set like Canada Day is one person's decisions from the first layout to the last file name. That is why the sets hold together, and it is also why there was nowhere to hide.
03 Two markets, one system
The Canadian and American back-to-school ads share a layout, a promo code and a headline structure. They share nothing else.
Canada, 15% off smoothies
United States, 30% off wellness shots
Canada ran 15% off on the smoothie lineup. The US ran 30% off on wellness shots. Different discount, different SKUs, different product photography, different supporting claims: nourish your body and support digestion on one, strengthen immunity and boost energy on the other.
The pair holds in motion too. Both markets got a sixteen-second square cut on the same beat sheet: a question on a green circle mask, a torn-paper wipe onto notebook paper, the offer card, then handwritten benefit lines writing themselves on one at a time beside a rotating pair of bottles. Same timing, same transitions, different products and a different number.
The promo codes carry the same logic. WEEKEND and SCHOOL are occasion-coded and run in both markets. USA40 is market-coded, because a 40% sitewide run that only exists south of the border needs a code that cannot leak into the wrong cart.
Two ads that are obviously the same brand and obviously not the same ad. That only works if the system is doing the holding. Localizing by swapping a flag into a template is what most brands do, and it reads as exactly that.
04 The system turned over in the autumn of 2022
Two years of files in one folder makes something visible you cannot see in a single campaign.
In May 2022 the work is loud. STOP CRAVING JUNK AND START CRAVING A HEALTHIER YOU in heavy grotesk caps, on a white card dropped onto a full-bleed photograph of burgers and fries. High contrast, high volume, no subtlety anywhere in it, and it was right for the moment.
By September it is a different brand. The Blue Lemonade ad sets Double the plastic removal with Blue Lemonade in a serif, over a soft cream ground, against a torn watercolour shape. Nothing shouts. The product carries the frame.
May 2022
September 2022
September 2023
Everything after that is the second system. St. Patrick's Day in deep green with a serif and one restrained line of caps underneath. Canada Day as a white card floating over a picnic. The fall cleanse on terracotta with the offer in a hairline box. Same brand, entirely different register, selling to a customer who has seen a lot of juice ads by then.
Neither is wrong. The point is that a long account is not a template you fill in for two years. It is a system you keep pushing while keeping it recognizable, and the discipline is knowing which parts are allowed to move and when it is time to move them.
05 Motion
Roughly half the archive is video, and almost every animated ad has a static twin.
That is not redundancy, it is how paid social actually works. Video wins the placements where it wins and loses the ones where it does not, and the static has to carry the same message on its own. Designing them as a pair rather than exporting a still from the video is the difference.
These are ten to sixteen second spots, most of them landing on fifteen. That length is a structure, not a duration. Fifteen seconds is long enough that you cannot just show a bottle and a discount, and short enough that every second has to be doing something. So each one is built as a sequence with a job per beat: a hook that works with the sound off, a product or lifestyle moment, the offer, an end card.
What that looks like varies more than the format suggests. A benefit build, where feature lines stack onto a card one at a time. A colour-blocked triptych, three saturated frames rotating through energy, vitality and gut health behind the same offer seal. A gift-card spot where the recipient field types and retypes itself. A Black Friday cut that is one held pour shot under a scrolling sale ticker, because on the busiest advertising day of the year the restraint is the idea.
Frame rate was a production decision, not a default. The square back-to-school cuts run at 15fps. At 1200 by 1200 for sixteen seconds, that is the difference between shipping the file you designed and letting the platform compress it into something worse than what you would have chosen yourself.
Motion
Static twin
06 Past the ad unit
The account was not only promotional creative.
Lead generation sets for list building. A subscription explainer that walks through commitment levels and how to pause, because the objection to a subscription box is never the product. Product launch creative for the meals line, resolving into the Wellness Club mark. Giveaway mechanics with entry conditions that have to read at a glance and hold up legally.
Same brand, four different sets of constraints. A giveaway ad has to carry terms without the terms eating the frame. An explainer has to teach something in fifteen seconds to someone who did not ask to be taught. Knowing where each format breaks is most of the job.
07 What it actually takes
Volume work has a reputation as the unglamorous end of design. It is where I got good.
An account like this teaches you things a launch does not. You learn what survives repetition and what wears out by the fourth run. You learn that the version-numbered file name is a real deliverable, because someone will need v1.2 in eight months and they will need to find it. You learn to design the system so that the twelfth execution is as good as the first, because by then nobody is watching, and that is exactly when brands slip.
Consistency at pace is not a lesser skill than the idea. It is the thing that decides whether the idea survives contact with a calendar.