A woman blinks awake, disoriented, as she takes in the sterile, gleaming white room she's in. An old-timey jingle wafts through the room, as a stocky, straight-from-the-'80s robot wheels up to her. "Good morning," it intones. "It is time for ice cream." It presses a spoonful to her lips and starts to force-feed her.
And it only gets creepier from there.
Halo Top's low-calorie, high-protein ice cream — packing less than 400 calories per entire pint — disrupted freezer aisles everywhere, bypassing Ben & Jerry's and Häagen-Dazs to become the bestselling pint in America. Now, the brand's disrupting traditional advertising, with an ad that's exactly the opposite of what you'd expect from an ice cream company.
Halo Top CEO Justin Woolverton wouldn't have it any other way.
"We could do the typical, 'hey, here's a jingly ad where everybody likes ice cream' ad, but isn't that boring?" he said. "We wanted to do something that's a reflection of our company — we're a collection of personalities here, not a big, corporate structure — and give our fans something they could enjoy."
The video, which will run in movie theaters nationwide, is like a sci-fi movie in and of itself, and seems to poke fun at the marketing of ice cream in general: a robotic voice and a charming tune, all urging you to eat more ice cream, no matter what's happening or what's going on in your life. Even if you're strapped to a chair, lost, confused, and "all your loved ones are gone," as is this character's case, keep buying ice cream.
"People keep comparing it to Black Mirror, which I love," Woolverton said. "I love dystopian, I love sci-fi. I like how it makes you wonder, 'what's going on?' 'what's happening next?'"
Halo Top tapped filmmaker Mike Diva to create the film. They didn't have a concept in mind; Woolverton was just a fan of his work, so he asked Diva to go wild, pitching whatever he wanted. A few weeks later, Diva stopped by Woolverton's California home and pitched him this idea, featuring the sinister robot.
"At first, I was like, 'wait, what?' About 5 to 10 minutes later, I was like, 'I love it. Let's do it,'" Woolverton said.
They wanted different; Diva delivered, and then some. There's almost no branding to the video, save for a graphic at the very end. Woolverton admitted the video almost portrays ice cream a little negatively, but for him, the ice cream was really tangential. It was really about getting people's attention, and giving them something they hadn't seen a thousand times before.
"I'm getting a kick out of what everybody says," he said. "It's pretty fun to read the comments. I've seen everything from, 'This is my favorite thing' to 'I'm never eating ice cream again.'"
We'll let you decide on which end of the spectrum you fall.
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