SmartStop
Your Stuff’s Happy Place
An old bicycle finds out storage is the best place to be.
Watch the full campaign
The Strategy
SmartStop rents storage units across the U.S. and Canada. Storage is hard to make memorable. Most storage ads show a clean hallway, a price and a phone number. SmartStop wanted ads that were funny and a little bold, so people would think of them first the day they need space.
So we asked a different question: how does your stuff feel about storage? In these ads, the things inside a SmartStop unit have real human faces. A leather recliner, a green shag rug, a purple box of baby teeth, a pair of skis and the seat of an old road bike all live together. And they all think they've landed somewhere great.
Brian, our director, wrote the ads, and he picked the items from his own family. His parents kept a whole living room set in storage for over ten years. His dad bought a full set of ski gear and used it once. His wife's mom saved her kids' baby teeth. SmartStop's customer data shaped the rest. Most of their renters own homes in the suburbs, so the unit is packed with what suburban homes hold on to: pink lawn flamingos, a Christmas tree, a grandfather clock.
SmartStop liked the idea and asked us to say more about why their storage is better. So each ad sells one thing. In the main ad, the stuff trades stories about the homes they escaped, and then an old bike gets rolled in. In the night ad, the bike seat wakes up from a bad dream, and the recliner talks it down with cameras, gates and lights. In the 15-second ad, the skis say something in French about the temperature, and nobody else understands them.
The skis are a nod to Canada. SmartStop has dozens of locations there, and French-Canadian customers matter to them. We cast an actor who speaks French, and that one actor plays both skis.
The Process
We shot over two days in October 2024. Day one was in a real SmartStop storage unit. We filled it with boxes and stored things, then filmed every item with no face at all, the way you'd see it if you rolled up the door yourself.
Day two was in a studio, and it was all faces. Each actor was painted to match their item, like green for the rug and purple for the baby teeth box. Our crew built a frame for each item's material, like a panel of the same green shag, with a hole cut out for a face. Each actor pushed their face through the hole in front of a green screen, so every face sits inside real texture, not a drawing of it.
Then the faces went into the items in editing. The hard part was matching each face to the item we'd shot the day before: the same angle, the same light, the same size. The bike seat was the toughest. Every voice you hear is the actor's own, and a real kid plays the baby teeth box.
SmartStop got two 30-second ads and a 15-second ad, each cut wide, square and vertical, with and without subtitles. We also made a portrait of each character. Later came a Canadian version with its own ending, and a version of the 15-second ad played at the New York Stock Exchange the day SmartStop went public in April 2025.
The Results
SmartStop came back for a second campaign with us. On the call where we pitched it, in October 2025, Michael Schwartz, SmartStop's chairman and CEO, told us what the first one meant to him.
“This is what I've always wanted, this voice, this fun voice in storage. And you guys are helping amplify what we're trying to do.”
More like this: the best B2B video ads · how we make them