Thnks
Ghosting Support Group
A support group for salespeople who’ve been ghosted.
Watch the full campaign · 2:15
The Strategy
Thnks makes it easy for a business to send a small thank-you, like a coffee or a lunch, to a client or a prospect. Its founders started from a simple question: if a client got in line behind you at a coffee shop, what would you do? You'd buy their coffee. The people who bring Thnks into a company run sales, marketing and customer success teams. What their salespeople fight every day is silence: the prospect who goes quiet after a great meeting.
Our first round of ideas poked fun at the wrong ways to say thanks, like a coworker who turns up at your bedside with hot chocolate. Thnks' CEO didn't want ads that made fun of the people sending thanks, since those people are his customers. The idea he liked was about ghosting, because his sales customers run into it all the time. So we came back with three new ways into ghosting, and Thnks picked the support group.
The spot is set in a community-center classroom, under posters of sales funnels and charts heading the wrong way. A facilitator sits in a circle with six sales pros, and each one is someone every sales team knows. The Multitasker wears a stack of watches. The Blitzer has a wrist brace and a hand gripper from one email blitz too many. The Emotional One can barely hold it together. Around them sit the Suit with his business cards, the Traditionalist with her headset and Rolodex, and the Maverick with his AirPods and a giant water bottle. One by one, they share how they got ghosted. Then the facilitator asks everyone to take out their phones.
The Process
Thnks' team helped shape the room. They pointed us to the Corporate Bros YouTube channel, and its office characters fed our six sales pros. The posters of sales funnels and sinking charts were their idea too. The first script ended with everyone on video calls with their prospects. Thnks didn't want anyone thinking it did video calls, so we kept the ending on their phones.
We shot it in one day, in a community center in Denver, the same week as our Cardata and GoodUnited shoots. The Suit needed to be a man in his sixties. We cast extras differently from our lead actors, and Brian Bruzzi's dad happened to have a trip to Denver planned that week, so he got the part. He had a blast. He also kept looking straight into the lens, which cost us a lot of takes, but we got a great shot in the end.
We delivered an 80-second hero, a 50 and a 40, three 30s that each follow one sales pro, two 15s and a 13-second montage, plus short closing lines where the facilitator and three of the sales pros speak straight to camera. Most came in wide, square and vertical versions.
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