SharkNinja · 2019 / 2026
Ninja Foodi Redux
Seven years later, four new winners.
In June 2019 my team at UM Worldwide pitched a Hulu spot with holes in it. “When it's snowing outside, [insert weather context] we could all use a hearty, warm meal to pair with our hot chocolate.” The brackets were the point. An ad server would fill them based on the weather wherever you happened to be watching.
Seven years later, that's a prompt. So I took the same brief, the same product and the same audience and ran it again, this time letting the blanks fill themselves. Then I judged everything that came back, our original included, against the only question advertising has ever had to answer. Does it sell?
The brief
Ninja launched the Foodi Grill in the fall of 2019 into a category most people didn't know they were missing. The brief asked for awareness, education and demand for indoor grilling, a higher price point that felt earned, and a product that read as a Foodi. It also asked us to teach people the difference between good smoke and bad smoke, a sentence I have not seen in a brief before or since.
The audience was the person our planners called the Solution Seeker. Overscheduled, plans everything so nothing throws off the routine, buys what trusted people recommend. Watches a lot of TV, and more sports than most.
The triggers were weather. Hot, cold, snow.
The constraint
In 2019 the words could change and the pictures couldn't. Ninja's in-house team shot the footage. We wrote the overlays, the voiceover and the end frames, and the ad server swapped them by audience, by program genre and by whatever was happening outside.
Our shot list for the Grill had one line I still think about. Item five asked for a wide shot of the Grill next to a window, so weather and time of day could be placed in post. The weather was a plate behind glass. It could snow in the window all day long. It could not change what the spot was about.
What shipped
Three base videos, one per product, each cut for Hulu viewers of comedy, drama and reality, or food and cooking. Nine versions. The voiceover changed by genre, and the weather moved out of the script and into the overlays. Dynamic overlays keyed to weather, time of day and holidays took the count to 63 unique pieces, from a company that had built itself on infomercials.
It worked. Aided brand awareness rose 7.4%. On connected TV, people kept our 30-second interactive units open for 114 extra seconds, against Innovid's benchmark of 71. That's the 61%. Neither number is a sale.
Run 1: fill the blanks
I handed the 2019 template, slots intact, to my AI workflow. It doesn't get tired, doesn't bill hours and has never once asked to go to Cannes. I asked it for 30 fills each for snow, cold and heat. Ninety in all.
Fifty used weather as wallpaper. Sleds, sweaters, snowball fights, pool days, the Fourth of July. Seven named a feature, like going from frozen to char-grilled, without a reason it mattered in that weather. Thirty-three did what the brief needed and noticed that weather is why people stop grilling. The deck is a skating rink. The outdoor grill is a lawn ornament until April. The HOA said no grills on the balcony.
Six died for lying. One said the propane tank froze. One gave the Grill the Oven's speed claim. One promised you could grill with the windows sealed, which quietly turns “virtually smoke free” into “smoke free” and hands the spot to legal.
The heat fills found a crack in our original. The fixed line in the middle of the template says “even when the weather outside is frightful.” In August that line has nowhere to go.
Run 2: break the template
Then I threw the template out. The machine got the objective, the audience and the trigger, and one rule: the weather has to change the idea, and a new first line doesn't count. Nine concepts came back, three per weather state.
Each of the four I kept needs different footage. In 2019 that meant three shoots and a conversation about budget. Here it meant boards.
The Window
The outdoor grill sits under two feet of snow, framed in the same kitchen window from our 2019 shot list. A steak sears on the counter in front of it.
Twelve Months
A calendar. The backyard grill gets its cover in October. This one never does.
The Gauge
A frosted gauge on the patio grill against a 500-degree readout inside. Outdoor grill power, indoors. It makes the Foodi a grill instead of a gadget.
Apartment 4C
A fourth-floor walk-up with a “No grills” sign on the balcony door. For renters the alternative isn't a cheaper grill. It's no grill.
The kill log
Everything got the same three questions. Does it make indoor grilling feel like something you've been missing? Does it earn the price? Is it true to the product and the mandatories? Fail one and it's dead.
| Work | Missing category? | Earns the price? | True? | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 workshop concept, snow | No | No | Yes | Killed | Snow becomes a reason to want something warm. A hot meal was never the Grill's job. |
| 2019 shipped, 3 Grill scripts | Partly | Partly | No | Killed | “Without the smoke,” over a shot with no smoke in sight. The mandatory said virtually. Same kill as Smoke Alarm. |
| Run 1, 90 template fills | 33 of 90 | 0 of 90 | 84 of 90 | Killed | The fixed middle of the template carries no price case, so no fill can pass. |
| Snow: The Window | Yes | Yes | Yes | Kept | The outdoor grill buried in the window; the one on the counter works. Season length is the value. |
| Snow: Smoke Alarm | Yes | No | No | Killed | The joke promises the alarm never goes off. “Virtually” is the disclaimer, and the joke deletes it. |
| Snow: Snow Game | Yes | No | Yes | Killed | They're playing in it, you don't have to grill in it. Funny, and silent on price. |
| Cold: Twelve Months | Yes | Yes | Yes | Kept | A calendar where the backyard grill gets covered in October and this one never does. |
| Cold: No Volunteers | Yes | No | Yes | Killed | Nobody wants to go out in the cold to man the grill. Good scene, no case for the money. |
| Cold: The Gauge | Yes | Yes | Yes | Kept | Outdoor grill power, indoors, with the BTU disclaimer. Makes it a grill, not a gadget. |
| Heat: Heat Advisory | Yes | No | Yes | Killed | The weather crawl says stay inside. A joke about obeying, nothing about value. |
| Heat: Apartment 4C | Yes | Yes | Yes | Kept | For renters the alternative isn't a cheaper grill. It's no grill. |
| Heat: Rain Delay | Yes | No | Yes | Killed | Best line in the set. Fixing it means borrowing Twelve Months' argument, and one spot already makes it. |
Price killed more work than anything else. Five of the nine Run 2 concepts failed it, every one of them a decent joke. Our 2019 workshop script died on it too, along with the category question. It's true, it's competent, and it sells hot chocolate.
The scripts we actually shipped died on the third question. All three promised char-grilled flavor without the smoke, and the boards put the Grill on a kitchen island with no smoke in sight. The mandatory said virtually smoke free. It aired anyway. I killed the machine's Smoke Alarm for dropping that same word, so ours goes too.
What changed
The blanks were never the problem. Run 1 filled 90 of them and the best 30 still couldn't pass, because the sentence wrapped around the blanks had no case for the price. In 2019 we spent our judgment on what went inside the brackets. It belonged one level up, on what the brackets were attached to.
The tools made volume free. They did nothing for the ratio. One hundred and three pieces of work went through the same three questions, and four came out the other side.
The window is still the best shot on the list. This time the snow in it does the selling.