WASA CRISPBREAD:
SOCIAL CONTENT ENGINE
FIVE YEARS IN. THEN THEY NEEDED SOMETHING NEW.
WASA had already worked with Zeno for five years on PR and influencer work by the time this came along. When their social vendor shifted focus elsewhere, WASA gave Zeno a three-month trial to prove the agency could handle content too — a premium European crispbread brand with real brand recognition and a social presence that hadn't caught up to it.
THE PLAYBOOK DIDN'T EXIST YET. SO I WROTE ONE.
This built on the vertical-video instincts I’d sharpened on Toyota location work and, more recently, on Meritage’s vertical home tours and ASMR content at Campbell Ewald: native to Instagram, leaning on UGC. I also ran my own competitive analysis without a digital team behind me, which made it harder and more necessary. And I stay close to the social and digital strategists who live in this work full-time, to see what they’re seeing.
What I kept landing on: the best-performing content never felt like an ad. It reflected the platform and the people scrolling through it — native, not a TV spot cut down to fit a vertical frame. The claims took a back seat. Visual appeal and attention did the work instead, measured against real engagement metrics that fed the next round and opened the process up to the whole team.
Take a scroll with WASA
The carousel became the real unifier. One let the topping build itself, swipe by swipe. Another moved through a full day without ever cutting away — each cracker bleeding seamlessly into the next scene. A third borrowed the chalkboard-specials look of a good restaurant to ask the only real question: how will you top your WASA? Different format each time, same idea underneath it — a scroll isn't just navigation. Built right, it's a story.
If a shot gets clipped by Instagram's own profile icon or caption box, the work never had a chance, no matter how good the idea underneath it was. Before we shot anything, I mapped every frame around exactly where those interface elements land on-screen — the parts of the shot the app was always going to cover no matter what we did — and built the product and type to live entirely outside them.
REELS DON'T REWARD HERITAGE. THEY REWARD THE FIRST HALF-SECOND.
NOT JUST A FRAME WITH A CLAIM ON IT.
The harder cultural read isn't the calendar — it's inside UGC itself. One idea rode the jump-cut trend moving through social: the WASA cracker bounced, ingredients changing with each jump. Carousels built to connect frame to frame instead of stacking claims — swipe, and the story kept building. Even pacing got reverse-engineered from real cooking content: a knife taps an onion and it's already diced, no chopping shown. I used the same trick — stop-motion standing in for prep time — because that's how the best food content on the platform already moved.
SAME DISCIPLINE AS TOYOTA. SMALLER FOOTPRINT, MORE PLATES SPINNING.
The shoot ran in-house, organized the same way I'd run location work for Toyota — just onsite this time. I delegated as much as I could to the ACDs and designers on the team, since this wasn't the only account demanding real attention that quarter.
20.19% Reels view-rate.
68% past target.
WASA existed partly to prove Zeno could handle more digital and social work. The trial was three months. The view rate was the answer.