Agency:
Method1
Client
Heaven Hill
Team Members
CD: David Muldoon
AD: Romik Mita
PM: Mara Whitten
Mellow Corn’s official social accounts were out of step with its cult following. The brand’s real voice, irreverent, quirky, and deliberately not serious, lived exclusively on r/MellowCorn.
Our brief was simple. Bring every channel in line with the subreddit’s low fidelity chaos.
We ran a two track content stream. First, intentionally rough Photoshop posts that matched the community’s pace. Second, larger full composite concepts built to drive reach and engagement. Working with the copywriter, social lead, and Method1’s Head of Content, we turned a niche inside joke into a cohesive, high performing social strategy.
The biggest hurdle was a lack of assets. We needed to post at high volume, yet we had only four images to work with: one hero bottle on white and three incidental warehouse shots. The job shifted from creating content to engineering assets.
That raised a simple question. How do you build a visually rich, engaging feed with only four source images? The constraint pushed us to get inventive with a low fidelity look and feel, and it turned into a feature, not a flaw.
These Photoshop composites were a blast to make. They let us spend a little more production time, usually a couple of hours per piece. For this run, we pulled from iconic films and TV along with a few modern classics. The twist: we anthropomorphised the Mellow Corn bottle and cast it as the lead. That freedom kept the work genuinely fun and let us lean into the visual language of each reference.
Reminatation of the classic poster of Jurrasic Park with the corn instead of the T-Rex
Reminatation of the classic poster of Jaws with the bottle in place of the shark
composite inspired by the Yellowstone television show, where the bottle was visually positioned as the character John Dutton
We developed a tongue-in-cheek fan-casting announcement for Mellow Corn whiskey, presenting it as the next James Bond in the style of a traditional newspaper announcement
Building on the success of integrating TV themes, we created a visual homage to The Mandalorian (Season 2). This composite featured a creative character swap, positioning the product bottle as "The Mandalorian" and incorporating Mellow Corn to replace the character Grogu
Each April Fools’ Day, we set out to make something the audience would love. Wild enough to feel almost real, still rooted in the brand’s playfulness. The tricky part was translating our label into believable new product formats, from cans and aftershave to hot sauce and potato chips.
We launched our first-ever April Fools' campaign, executing a unique concept that generated significant brand buzz. This involved a detailed visual asset where we reimagined the product bottle as a spritzer can and promoted it as a new item going on sale.
For the following year's April Fools' initiative, we elevated the concept by introducing a completely new, humorous product extension: Corn Mist, an imagined corn-flavored aftershave.
Continuing our successful run of humorous concepts, the next idea focused on a unique product extension: digitally creating a branded hot sauce.
For the final year of the April Fools' series, we returned to the core ingredient by launching Mellow Corn-flavored corn chips
We integrated our brand into the content calendar year-round, identifying timely opportunities to create fun and engaging content. This allowed us to put our own unique spin on major dates, including Halloween, the Super Bowl, and Coachella.
We developed a quirky, low-effort style for our carousels, combining in-your-face, direct copy with low-fidelity, scrapbook-esque imagery. The aim was to establish a distinctive aesthetic that we could easily deploy whenever we needed a change of pace.
