- Talking Head
While: talking head ad for a mobile app
A man laughs at a clip about customer service hold times, says “Yeah, this used to be me,” and tells the story of the morning he spent an hour on hold with a cab waiting downstairs.
01
Brief
While is an app that waits on hold for its user. The presenter describes it in one sentence: “While calls for me, gets through the phone menu, waits on hold, and calls me when a real person answers.” The end card reads “We wait. You live.” over a button that says “First 2 waits free.”
The ad speaks to anyone who has lost a morning to a customer service line. It has to make that memory sting for 30 seconds and present the app as the way out, closing on his line “I don't listen to hold music anymore.”
02
Format and style
A talking head that starts as a reaction video. For the first ten seconds a comment sticker reads “What I imagine Customer Service is doing while I'm on hold” over a clip of a man dancing beside a pool with a phone handset, and the presenter laughs at his own phone in a small inset. He fills the frame from there: glasses, a mustache, an orange patterned shirt, a gray sofa.
He opens on a joke and uses the attention it buys for a confession. Heavy white captions with one word in blue track each phrase, and a cutaway shows him in a white tee packing a suitcase with a phone pinned to his ear. I use that mix in AI app install ads: a face for the story, a flashback for the pain, and the app on screen for the fix.
03
How it was made
I open on the pool clip and hold it until he fills the frame, laughing, with “Yeah, this used to be me.” He tells it in one breath: “trying to throw clothes into a suitcase with one hand while holding my phone to my ear with the other, nearly an hour deep into a brutal hold loop.” The bedroom cutaway plays under the suitcase line, and he stacks up the stakes from the sofa: “My cab was already waiting downstairs. My flight was leaving in an hour.”
He lifts the phone to his ear for “glued to a speakerphone, listening to elevator music,” and lowers it on “Then I found While.” A hand holds the app over his knee: a list of airlines to pick from, and a live session that ticks through dialing, the phone menu and “On hold for an agent.” He turns a “Calling you now” screen to the camera, says “So yeah, I don't listen to hold music anymore,” and answers the phone with “Hello” as the ad cuts to the end card.
04
Deliverables
One talking head ad, vertical 9:16
Runtime 0:54
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