WhatNot

Whatnot's Magic: The Gathering campaign pulled a 38% higher click-through rate than their last one. It also got four influencers speaking fluent jargon on camera, and turned Whatnot's own office into a living room for a week.

Magic: The Gathering

Whatnot

The BRIEF

NOBODY UNDERSTANDS
YOU LIKE WE DO

Whatnot lets you buy sealed Magic: The Gathering boosters and watch someone else's hands shake while they open them live. Great product, tiny niche. We pitched four ways in, Whatnot picked the one built entirely out of real player jargon, if "I tap six and summon Ruric Thar" means something to you, you've already found your people. Two cuts came out of the same shoot, same day, same players, edited two different ways.

COMMUNITY FIRST

Same shoot, same day, a different two players. Here the jargon carries the whole thing, captioned so it reads as a message to exactly one audience. If it means nothing to you, that's the point, you weren't who this was for.

PRODUCT FIRST

Same jargon running through it as everywhere else in this campaign, but here it's proof, not the pitch. Overhead, cards in close-up, the game doing the convincing before anything asks you to believe in a community around it.

COMMUNITY FIRST

The shoot

We had five days and nothing shot yet. So a crew flew into Whatnot's Los Angeles office, pulled the desks out, and built a living room set from scratch, dice, card boxes, a fiddle leaf fig that hadn't been there the day before. Four influencers, four cameras, one long game night, way more footage than one cut could use.

What I Led

I led creative direction and the client relationship on this one, the concept that won the pitch, the visual direction of the shoot and the edit, and every conversation with Whatnot along the way. Three months in, they upgraded their contract. They wanted more of what we were making. The project also got called out at a Superside town hall as one of the year's standouts.