The hook. A prince scoops rainbow soft serve from a pooping unicorn and eats it. You cannot look away, which is the entire point, because what comes next is a three minute anatomy lecture about your colon.
Why it works. Harmon Brothers launched this for Squatty Potty in October 2015 and it became the template for every DTC video ad since. The unicorn is a Trojan horse. It buys attention for a genuinely awkward product and gives you a safe visual metaphor, ice cream instead of the real thing, so the ad can explain toilet posture in graphic detail without making you close the tab. Under the whimsy is hard mechanism selling: the kinked colon diagram, the squat position demo, the before and after. You come for the unicorn, you stay for the science, you convert on the mechanism. The video sits at over 42 million views on YouTube plus a nine figure count on Facebook, and the brand credited it with lifting online sales around 600 percent.
Steal this. If your product is embarrassing, do not whisper. Build a metaphor cute enough to make the taboo watchable, then spend most of the runtime on the mechanism that makes your product obviously necessary. Charm opens the door, mechanism closes the sale.
Ad by Squatty Potty, created with Harmon Brothers. Watch it on YouTube.