Truth Be Told.
WE BUILD BRANDS PEOPLE CARE ABOUT, AND MAKE CONTENT WORTH PAYING ATTENTION TO.
Modern marketers don’t want ads, they want growth. So we create shareable content and highly-engaging campaigns that turn audiences into advocates. And because we combine strategy, creative and full production capabilities in a single team, we do it faster and more effectively than you thought possible from an agency. Because we’re not an agency.
We’re Fact & Fiction, a wonderful combination of strategy, creative and production wrapped in an all-inclusive, collaborative package in Boulder, Colorado.
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Portfolio
Fact & Fiction /// 2019 Reel
In every ask, project, or deliverable – we find the most meaningful element of human truth, define actionable insight and pay it off with contextually relevant storytelling and experiences.
We are Fact & Fiction, and this is our sizzle reel.
Voodoo Ranger /// Stuck In The 80s
Voodoo Ranger had had enough of 2020 so he traveled back to the future to bring us the bitchin’ taste of the good old days with his new rotator, 1985 IPA.
Chock full of mango notes and years away from Zoom calls and stay-at-home orders, 1985 IPA is brewed with 1.21 gigahops (not a real thing) to bring summer in a glass and help you reminisce of better days.
And not only did Voodoo Ranger bring us a tasty beer, he brought back all things 80s. To celebrate 1985’s arrival we created a full campaign of assets from a live COVID stunt to a classic sitcom credit scene to purchase-able lunchboxes and VIP jackets.
I and love and you: Manifesto
With Millennials putting off marriage but not pet ownership, they’re building deeper emotional bonds with their pets than older generations ever had. This is why we chose to target them for the first-ever “I and love and you” integrated campaign. We dug into the target market to uncover a new way to communicate with today’s pet owner
Situation
In a crowded category with big players dominating messaging, “I and love and you” were struggling to find their voice. With everyone talking about better ingredients and better nutrition, how does a company that does the same thing stand out? Digging into the target research we uncovered an insight that everyone else was missing. While anyone can tell an ingredient story, not everyone understands why this target chooses those ingredients and consumers are willing to pay much more for a better for you brand.
Idea
We realized that the reason Millennials are choosing healthy eating for their pet wasn’t to follow diet trends or to look cool, but because of their desire to take better care of their fur babies. Because they love them. Their love manifesting itself in the way love often does between two people; with crazy, silly, embarrassing actions and proclamations. We developed an integrated digital campaign around the idea that people do crazy things for love. And it’s just as true for their pets, as it is for people.
Results
“I and love and you” sales are up 40% since our relationship began. Our Amazon videos have outpaced the competition by more than double, driving click-throughs and purchases from an otherwise untapped media outlet. We’ve helped push their social followings over 160k and are poised to make big strides moving forward. Above all, our clients feel like we’ve captured their brand in a way that’s authentic to who they are, and what they stand for.
Pets are People, Too.
These days, more than ever, we think of our pets as more than just pets. But when it's time to eat, we treat them like dogs. In this campaign for "I and love and you" we set out to change that fact. Because they're more than pets. Pets Are People, Too.
Chili’s /// St Jude
Our work helping Chili's support St. Jude.
AAA - Candy
Understanding finances, insurance, and loans can be confusing. Let alone all the jargon that goes along with those things. And oftentimes, searching for definitions online just confuses things more.
The people at AAA, who deal with insurance and finance every day, wanted to help. So, we created a way for people to understand these terms (on their terms) by allowing the user to choose what type of explanation of a complicated subject is best suited for them. Into sports? Choose the baseball analogy. Not a jock? Maybe the gamer analogy would make more sense to you.
We de-jargoned jargon. By re-jargoning it into an entertaining choose-your-own-adventure style explainer series.
Reviews
the project
Creative Content Production for a Food Product Company
"Fact & Fiction did a lot of things in a thousand different ways."
the reviewer
the review
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I worked at a chocolate snacking business out of Hershey, Pennsylvania. I was the senior director in charge of all the digital which represented $470 million in spend and created over 22 different brands within the portfolio.
What challenge were you trying to address with Fact & Fiction?
It was real-time relevance and resonance in terms of creative expression for each of our brands. We couldn’t move at the speed of the digital world, but Fact & Fiction could.
What was the scope of their involvement?
I was trying to understand how to leverage data and storytelling for our digital audience. We wanted to know how we would be able to do that while offering relevant topics to our external stakeholders. Kyle (Founding Partner) and I ideated for 1–2 weeks on what we should do, what would be meaningful, and what would be helpful.
We talked about different models for partnering together, and we talked about using internal people and leveraging them holistically in one capacity or partial capacities. We called it the “Hothouse Project” which was essentially an agile content curation system or practice for our business. Moreover, we identified challenges and how those activation models would look before we would consider rolling content out. In total, we developed two strategies for agile content curation, and created a system for content development that was nuanced, and leveraged what was a new model for both forward-looking, and real-time content ideation.
We created an agile workgroup for each of our brands that essentially had daily scrum models. The system creates content in virtual real-time at a cost that was exponentially lower compared to other agencies. These agencies wanted to create content at a 3–6 month cycle, but what Kyle and I were able to create was something that was incredibly agile. It leverages data that allows us to use a framework for agile approvals. We looked at the channel executions to determine the value and opportunistic approaches.
What is the team composition?
We worked with four people from Fact & Fiction, including Kyle.
How did you come to work with Fact & Fiction?
I worked with their sister agency in my days when I was creating digital content from scratch for a sporting goods company out of the West Coast. As a result, I called Fact & Fiction to initially ideate on what I was trying to achieve. I also worked with them before, and we did an RFP when we needed an organization most fundamentally from a decision-making perspective.
How much have you invested with them?
We spent roughly around the range of $500,000–$1,000,000. We were leveraging them for a certain amount of resource capacity, as well as production capacity. We did various levels of strategic support with an ongoing agility and production team always on the ready.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started talking in August 2017, and we continued to use them until I left in June 2018.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
One of the key things that we wanted to increase specifically, was our engagement across certain channels. We were actively looking at opportunities to get more intimate with our customers, and get more knowledge about their likes and dislikes.
Essentially, we were able to increase our engagement from this program by 30%. Our most successful channel in this particular instance was social, but that lent itself out into curation of actual TV commercials as a function.
How did Fact & Fiction perform from a project management standpoint?
They used whatever they wanted, and they had their own specific tools for project management. The biggest challenge that ever came up was more on our side, because we had too many cooks in the kitchen, and managing the project got more complicated.
However, in terms of the clarity of the work, we had to figure out what those benchmarks were, so we really worked together to create some of those communication models. In addition, they were always on time when it came to the deliverables. It wasn’t about perfection, it was about being in the moment that was resonant and relevant at the time. We didn’t consider something lost as a miss, we considered something lost as maybe it wasn’t the right time for it, and we picked up on something else.
The project management was very deliberate, intention, quick, and not designed to find errors, but opportunities.
What did you find most impressive about them?
They were phenomenal partners, and they were incredibly smart. Fact & Fiction did a lot of things in a thousand different ways, but they understand fundamentally that each engagement was unique. Every time we started something new or thought about something new, they had a trove of information around things that worked and didn’t.
We could easily collaborate together to get to an answer, and even though none of it was perfect, they had the same goals that we did.
Are there any areas they could improve?
The only thing that was the most complex was time since we were in different time zones.