- Talking Head
Sherlock+ talking head ad: Friend spots red flags
Two friends in two rooms: one is dressing for a trip with a man she met last week, the other asks “Please tell me you checked him first.”
01
Brief
Sherlock+ appears on the end card as a People Intelligence Platform, and in this 63-second Meta ad one friend explains it to the other: “you just have to upload his name and his profile to Sherlock+,” and it tells you “if the profile is real or if he's been using the same profile to catfish people across the internet.”
The ad speaks to women who date men they meet online, through a friend who is about to travel with one after a week and to enter “all my information” through a link he sent. It has to make the search look like the first step with any internet match, ending on “everyone should start their search on Sherlock+ as soon as they meet anyone from the internet.”
02
Format and style
A two-character skit shot vertical in two rooms, opening on the text “POV: You found out you've been talking to a CREEP.” The friend with the date wears a floral sundress and does her makeup at a round brass mirror against a terracotta tile wall; the skeptic wears glasses, a long oatmeal cardigan and a white tank top in a white kitchen with a woven pendant lamp and a marble island.
Each woman gets her own caption color, yellow serif for the one getting ready and white serif for the friend in the kitchen, so the viewer follows the back-and-forth with the sound off. The humor runs on the gap between one friend's excitement and the other's doubt, and a skit that turns on a phone search suits AI app install ads: the app arrives as the punchline of the story.
03
How it was made
I open on her at the mirror, mascara in hand, as her friend asks “Where are you going all dressed up like that?” She turns to camera beaming, “Oh my god, you're not gonna believe it!”, and lays out the plan: a guy she met online last week, a trip tomorrow, a link to enter all her information. I cut from room to room on every line, and the friend in the kitchen listens with a hand on her hip until “Please tell me you checked him first.”
“Check him? What do you mean check him?” sets up the explanation, which the friend starts with a facepalm on “I didn't know you are that naive” and continues with a raised arm as she walks through the upload. Back at the mirror, the friend in the sundress reads her phone, gasps with a hand over her mouth and reports “His photo is connected to three different profiles and he lied about his job,” with DIFFERENT PROFILES in bold capitals, then says the search “may have just saved me from dating a creep.” The last lines run under the top text SEARCH BEFORE YOU TRUST SHERLOCK+, and the ad ends on the purple Sherlock+ end card with its fingerprint logo and sherlock.plus.
04
Deliverables
One talking head ad, vertical 9:16
Runtime 1:03
Built for Meta
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