Ocean Spray’s 2022 holiday commercial was one of the creative highlights of the season, with its crew of listless dinner guests who spring convulsively to life at the sight of wiggly, jiggly Ocean Spray cranberry jelly.

Now, the brand is following up that Cannes Silver Lion-winning effort with more anatomically unlikely fun, courtesy of agency Orchard and director Jeff Low—the same team that made the original.

This time we’re at a party, where the guests are similarly glum. But soon a woman appears, tiptoes over to the punch bowl and delivers the branded solution—a dose of Ocean Spray cranberry juice cocktail.

Soon, everyone is most definitely feeling the effects.

Monisha Dabek, chief commercial officer, USA, at Ocean Spray Cranberries, told Ad Age that the impetus for a sequel came from how last year’s “Power Your Holidays” spot boosted the whole product portfolio. Sales of its jellied cranberry sauce rose by 27% and juice sales also spiked.

“The spot performed very well last year, much more than I expected,” she said. “Our social media sentiment showed it resonated positively with younger consumers—millennials and younger. It also reinforced how the power of cranberry can transform boring into fun, which continues to be our guiding creative approach today.”

Making cranberry juice cocktail—CJC, as the company calls it—the focus of the sequel made sense, as it’s the flagship product and one that many consumers already associate with party environments.

“Nearly 40% of consumers are mixing cranberry juice with either vodka, seltzer or other juices,” said Dabek. “Since consumers already know adding cranberry to your drink or punch turns the party from boring to fun, showcasing the product through this creative lens not only makes sense from our brand perspective but will also be instantly recognizable to the end consumer.”

For the agency and director, the challenge became largely a practical one—how to make juice as viscerally interesting as jelly.

“There was definitely that fear of, we don’t want to repeat ourselves, just change one element and have it be a juice version,” said David Kolbusz, chief creative officer of Orchard. “We had to think about what to do differently. But jelly has a natural jiggle—that’s a property you can emulate. Juice in a glass just sort of sits there, doesn’t it?”

The agency considered various ways of making liquid visually compelling, such as having people move through it in slow motion (à la Amy Adams in “Arrival”). Soon, they began to explore the swirling motion liquid can have when poured into a bowl.

“When you’re spiking a punch bowl, there can be a bit of centrifugal force,” said Kolbusz. “One thing led to another, and we were like, ‘Oh yeah, like the Tilt-A-Whirl at the fairground.’”

The agency brought in Low, from Biscuit Filmworks, early on to figure out the science of how to get the talent spinning in circles while rooted to the spot.

The director researched the famous 45-degree lean Michael Jackson performed in the “Smooth Criminal” video, achieved with a special shoe and a peg in the floor. But eventually they chose another method—attaching the cast to rigs and having the crew physically spin them around, then painting out the rigs in post.

In terms of the casting, the roguish lead character wasn’t as big a presence in the script, but when she got on set, they realized she had to be central to the story.

“She had a great face,” said Kolbusz. “The whole idea of her being a puppet master was something that was born on set. When you saw her down the lens, there was just something about her. We grabbed those close-ups. I’m not even sure they were boarded, necessarily.”

While last year’s spot was more like a music video, Kolbusz said, this one has more storytelling—more of a narrative arc. “It’s a little more complicated than last year,” he said. “But hopefully it feels just as simple.”

The final piece of the puzzle was the soundtrack which, like last year, is an original piece from Mack Goudy Jr. of the electronic dance group the Detroit Grand Pubahs.

“Every track we put on the film sort of worked, but very few tracks made it special or particularly interesting. There were a lot of songs where you sort of tuned it out a bit,” said Kolbusz. “In the end, it was Mack again who came in with the winning track that gave it the hooky melody and propulsion we needed.”

The spot—which will run on linear and streaming TV, online video and display banners—is just the beginning of Ocean Spray’s holiday shenanigans. The brand is also planning a “team canned versus team homemade” cranberry jelly effort (involving “granfluencers”), a social campaign to get consumers to make their own “punch in a bottle” with 64-ounce CJC bottles and a creator campaign on Pinterest featuring holiday mocktails, Dabek said.

It’s a playful mix of work that reflects a confidence and willingness to experiment that Dabek said was originally inspired by the famous Ocean Spray/Fleetwood Mac TikTok video from 2020—where Nathan Apodaca (aka “Doggface”) was seen drinking CJC while longboarding to work.

“Many people knew us as ‘the guys in the bog’—which we love, but we lacked consumer engagement from the younger generation around our products,” said Dabek. “Following the viral success of Doggface, we became comfortable taking more risks. Now, we aim to show up in the world and our consumers’ lives in ways that feel unexpected for Ocean Spray but highly relevant for our consumers.” 

Among the key architects of year’s “Power Your Holidays” spot was Dan Hamilton, VP of USA Marketing Center of Excellence at Ocean Spray. Hamilton passed away last December.