On the self-care app Finch, users care for a personalized digital bird by completing small acts of self-care like drinking water, tidying up and performing breathing exercises. But one of the most popular pre-set goals on the app is something much more basic: literally survive the day.
It was that insight that inspired the creative for the five-year-old app’s first brand campaign, an animated film called “Whatever It Takes to Get Through the Day.” The full 90-second spot depicts comical coping examples like eating a fistful of cake from the fridge, rage-cleaning the floor, and destroying pillows with a sword, all set to a poppy, upbeat original song.
“That was the seed of this idea, like, whatever it takes to get through the day, we want to be there to celebrate,” said Katie Shill, Finch’s VP of Marketing. “You don’t have to do these monumental acts of self-care. Brushing your teeth and getting out of bed and surviving the day counts.”
The decision to highlight nontraditional acts of self-care was a conscious one to stand out in the crowded health and wellness category, where advertising tends to prioritize aesthetics and perfectionism, which can feel alienating to some audiences. Since launching in 2021, Finch has grown its primarily Gen Z and millennial user base to 2 million daily users mostly through word of mouth (it has active Reddit, Discord and Facebook communities) and lower-funnel tactics. The brand campaign was a chance to cast a wider net.
“We had gotten to the point where paid acquisition alone — just getting people to install the app — wasn’t really enough to grow the whole category. We are a really mission-driven company, we want to normalize self-care, and we want everyone to feel like this is something that they can be a part of,” Shill said. “The brand campaign felt like it was time to elevate not just Finch but the full category, too, and hopefully reach people who might not think that self-care or health and wellness in general is for them.”
To bring the campaign to life, Shill passed on working with larger agencies in favor of partnering with a small creative team led by Kevin Weir and Mark Bielik of Weirwork and animation director Kirsten Lepore (“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”). The tight creative group allowed for not just faster decision-making, but a dynamic where Weir and his team “could really challenge us to make the work better,” according to Shill.
“[Finch] really encouraged us to get weird and dark, which we were quite happy to do. We need more weird work in the world,” Weir said. “It takes a brave client to introduce their (adorably sincere) self-care bird app to the world with a film that talks about how we’re all hanging on by a thread over a pit of despair. We wanted to push the bounds of where this bird could go, while also making sure that our world felt like something that the current Finch users would love and see themselves in.”
While the original creative brief was centered around emotional storytelling, Weir pushed for emphasizing humor in order to grab attention among a distracted online audience. The team chose animation over live-action to mimic the playful feel of the app as well as allow for the heightened self-care examples. And notably, the film used no AI-generated visuals or music; the animation is the work of Paris-based studio Mathematic while Human composed the song.
“It was a creative choice, mostly because going this route felt like the best representation of the idea,” Shill said of the decision to forego AI. “There’s a larger message about humanity and people feeling represented in this work, and a message of authenticity, too. It felt disingenuous to communicate that and use AI at the same time.”
The 30-, 60-, and 90-second versions of the film will be distributed across connected TV (Roku, YouTube TV) and paid social (Meta, TikTok), plus static assets are being transformed into memes and GIFs to fuel organic social efforts. The campaign will run for 12 weeks initially, with the potential to extend if it performs well. To judge its success, Finch will look at the results of brand lift studies done at 4 weeks, 8 weeks and 12 weeks that will measure recall of the brand and core messaging, as well as whether there’s an effect on business metrics like performance media cost. The goal is not immediate conversion, but rather building brand trust, which Shill calls the biggest marketing challenge in the wellness space.
“Our hope is that we’re planting the seed,” she said, “so that when people are ready to eventually download an app like Finch, they’re already familiar with Finch and we are hopefully someone that they feel like they can trust.”