In Bid to Be Heard, Angi Makes Oddly Satisfying Bet on Ryan Reynolds and ‘ASMR’

At a time when brands are struggling to capture shrinking consumer attention spans within a torrent of competing images and content, sometimes the best way to be heard is to whisper rather than shout.

Such is the thinking behind a new big-budget ad campaign launched Monday (March 28) by home improvement platform Angi, in the form of three, 30-second spots that look and sound more like the opening of a “Breaking Bad” episode than a sales pitch to repaint your kitchen.

“Obviously, you need products and marketing that cut through that noise,” Angi Chief Marketing Officer Dhanusha Sivajee told PYMNTS ahead of the national rollout of the most elaborate advertising campaign in its 27-year history.

“We wanted to have our creative [content] not just tell the message but actually demonstrate that message,” Sivajee added, “so that’s where we moved to this ‘oddly satisfying’ ASMR idea that makes you feel really calm and really happy and satisfied.”

‘Oddly Satisfying’

For those unfamiliar with autonomous sensory meridian response or ASMR, it is a media production technique that relies on whispering and other highly mic’d sounds and tightly shot, mesmerizing images to deliver what Google Trends referred to as a sedative “brain massage.”

In Angi’s case, with the help of Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort creative agency, the home improvement platform turns steam cleaning, caulking and painting from mundane chores into some sort of hypnotic moment of household Zen under the tag line, “That oddly satisfying feeling when you don’t do it yourself.”

“We just thought, why not really partner and lean into that [ASMR] movement in terms of creating content that makes people feel really calm and positive and release those chemicals in the brain,” the CMO, who joined Angi six months ago, said. “I think in this day and age, with so much going on in the world, giving consumers a sense of calm was something that was really important to us.”

Satisfying, but Will It Sell?

To be sure, the unusual ad campaign comes at a time when Angi’s stock has slumped nearly 60% in the past year and marks the company’s second big branding initiative since it shortened its name from the original Angie’s List.

Whether the spots resonate with consumers enough to garner their own viral lift via social media remains to be seen, but in the meantime, Angi will be moving ahead with a national ad-buy aimed at reaching the wide demographic diversity of its target homeowner customers.

“Another reason why we really love this concept is that it works across all mediums, both on the large screen [TV] as well as on the smallest screens on mobile,” Sivajee said.

The new ads also come at a time when everything from large legacy retailers and brands to small direct-to-consumer (D2C) digital startups are not only contending with shortened consumer attention spans, but also with rising customer acquisition costs (CAC) where cost-per-click rates have risen as much as 40% without providing a commensurate increase in conversions.

While that is a consideration, in Angi’s case, nurturing referrals is also a significant driver of business, something Sivajee said was made easier by the fact that the brand has been around for nearly 30 years.

“Angie’s List was the original ‘OG’ of the internet, so we’re very lucky that we are able to drive a lot of our acquisition organically and through word of mouth,” she said.