Wiggle Room! Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce Shakes Up the Holidays

Ocean Spray cranberry sauce wiggles on the plate. Dinner guests jiggle in their seats. What more does the brand need for a holiday campaign? A freaky dance track, that’s what.

Agency Orchard Creative delivers seasonal silliness for the venerable condiment in the spot below. Once the cranberry sauce hits the table, a staid gathering shifts into high gear. Guests start gyrating as weird electronic beats rocks the house.

Well, those folks certainly look … thankful? At least they’re working up an appetite.

Director Jeff Low knows how to frame funny, and the ad is memorably frenetic while showing admirable restraint. Googley-eyed, singin’ sauce would’ve been too much. Maybe next year.

“Cranberry sauce is intense. It has a wildly tart taste, it looks brighter than any other beige food on a holiday table, and it can move,” agency art director Dohyun Lee and senior copywriter Christine Taffe tell Muse. “We wanted to make that power the star of a holiday dinner.”

Hence the tagline, “Power Your Holidays,” driven by original music from Mack Goudy Jr. of the Detroit Grand Pubahs. The full-length version—more than 5 minutes of throbby, blobby pulsations and audio effects—will drop soon across streaming platforms.

Here’s a YouTube lyric video, though the trippy tune just repeats the words “wiggle” and “jiggle” until your brain bounces like cranberry sauce:

“We wanted a song that felt like it was emanating from the cranberry jellies themselves,” say Lee and Taffe. “The track is bizarre and fun and makes you want to move. The fact that it doesn’t fit neatly into one category of music makes its audience limitless. It’s for anyone who wants to wiggle.”

That last line could describe the commercial casting sessions, too.

“We kept it very wide open,” Lee and Taffe recall. “We sent a link to our track and asked people to move their bodies to the music, as if they were almost possessed by the wiggle of the cranberry jelly. It was incredible to see, and it became clear quickly who we were looking for: those who could really let loose.”

Ocean Spray let the campaign loose across digital and TV yesterday, synced to the most cran-tastic stretch of the year, as 20 percent of all such saucy consumption takes place during Thanksgiving week.

CREDITS

Agency
Orchard Creative
Chief Strategy Officer: Laura Janness
Chief Executive Officer: Barney Robinson
Chief Creative Officer: David Kolbusz
Executive Creative Director: Jimm Lasser
Creative Director: Heather Larimer
Head of Strategy: Sarah Garman
Head of Production: Jenn Pennington
Senior Copywriter: Christine Taffe
Art Director: Dohyun Lee
Account Director: Hayley Howell
Creative Strategist: Raman Mama

Production
Director: Jeff Low
Production Company: OPC
Executive Producer: Donovan Boden
Executive Producer: Harland Weiss
Line Producer: Max Brook
DP: Angel Navarro
Production Designer: Francois Jordan
Editorial/Post production: Arcade Edit
EP/Partner: Sila Soyer
Post Producer: Ellen Lavery
Editor: Jeff Ferruzzo
Assistant Editor: Samuel Barden
Flame Artist: Tristan Wake
Color: Simone Grattarola /Time Based Artists
Music: Mack Goudy Jr.
Sound Design/mix: Mikayla Peterson/ Barking Owl