Grammarly
Words that work (at work) for DR and brand
If you (or your kid) use Youtube, you’ve probably seen a Grammarly ad. Video advertising has always been a major component of Grammarly’s customer acquisitions and growth strategy. And in a world where marketers and creatives constantly hear “make it shorter”, Grammarly goes long: 30s, 60s, and believe it or not, 90 second ads. The 90s are actually their best performers.
As part of a larger repositioning and rebranding initiative with the Grammarly Executive team, Squero worked with Grammarly’s Growth team to mix up the creative and production approach. We needed to hit the sweet spot: hard working direct response content to get downloads and upleveled creative quality to build the brand.
The ask
Direct response ads (90s, 60s, and 30s) for YouTube, OTT, and some TV. The ads needed to get professionals at work to download Grammarly for free. As part of the brand's larger shift, we also needed to shift perception of Grammarly from a spellchecker to an essential AI writing partner for work.
The requirements
MANY. But what it really boiled down to: Hook the audience with compelling creative… but remember that the product demo must take up the majority of the spot, and these ads need to drive conversions.
Over 1.5 years, we made 21+ sets of 90, 60, and 30 second acquisition videos for Grammarly across 3 different campaign pushes. The overall campaign and coordinated brand refresh successfully captured seasonal demand and contributed to brand lift.
On YouTube, the Sportcaster videos outperformed evergreen creative with a higher CTR, higher viewthrough, more efficient installs, and increased brand awareness.
The analysts for the Underwater spots are, well, underwater. But what we know for sure is that the Grammarly for Work campaign works because it’s funny and true and memorable, not because it was written by committee to hit a number on a dashboard (although it did hit that number).
Our approach
Go wide
When you’ve been running ads on YouTube for as long as Grammarly has, you’ve gone through a lot of creative concepts and tropes. So for any brief, we’d bring back 7‑10 divergent concepts, thin down, and refine until we had our one winner. We pushed the spots further by requesting three director treatments, opening it up to their unique creative interpretation before picking one we felt was the strongest.
Comedy and visual hook
Even in a 90 second ad, the first 5 seconds are crucial. Grammarly wanted something both funny and visually striking, so that’s what we did. In our Sportcaster spots, we played with the idea of work being a sport, complete with a giant desk and commentators. In the Underwater spots we took a step even further into the absurd, literally sinking our set and actors to immediately grab and hold people’s attention.
Product and process
We treated our production process like a product. And we treated the product demo in the video as the hero character. With each round, we retro’d internally and with the Grammarly team to incorporate learnings. With each cycle, we obsessed more and more about the product moments - for example, doing animated UI/UX motion comps alongside storyboards to make sure we were nailing timing and staying aligned with our directing partners.
Squero turned a performance-driven brief into brand-building creative, hitting our goals while making the work feel elevated and on-brand.
Shannon Everley, Sr. Director of Growth Marketing at Grammarly
Collaborators
Director of “Underwater”
Production
Hungry Man and B2Y
Post and VFX
Music
SFX and Mix
