Oh snap. Growing Triangle phone grip company markets the (beep) out of its products
It’s an age-old story. Guy sees girl. Girl sees guy.
Guy crashes car and smacks his face into a bag of Doritos. Girl runs to see if he’s OK and trips, sending her own bag of Doritos into the air.
This 30-second meet cute was Dale Backus and Wes Phillips’s entry into the 2007 Crash the Superbowl contest, a Frito-Lays competition that invited fans to submit homemade commercials. The winner would have their video aired during the year’s biggest television event.
Backus’ advertisement came in first. A Triangle native, he shot it at the Waverly Place development in Cary while on roller blades. His wife played the smitten girl; his friend the lovestruck guy. He said their budget was zero.
Time magazine named it the ninth-best commercial of 2007.
Two years later, Backus and Phillips won Crash the Superbowl again with a commercial shot at Bond Park. It featured a man, a dog and a shock collar. This time, the top spot came with a $600,000 prize.
With the money, the two partners started a monitor hardware company, SmallHD, which they sold in 2014. Backus used the proceeds from that sale to launch a new business in 2019, a phone accessory company called Ohsnap that it’s founder says now has more than 1 million customers.
OhSnap’s $40 phone grips entered most Best Buy locations this spring, and will begin selling in AT&T stores Friday. Verizon stores and Target are scheduled to have the back-of-phone accessories by the end of this year.
Born indirectly from a Super Bowl ad, Ohsnap carries on a distinct style of branding.
With its tagline — the phone grip that doesn’t suck — the company has a direct and irreverent approach. Its latest online commercial opens with the line “Hey dummy,” referring to anyone using its rival PopSockets. The ad also includes sexual innuendo, a phone being tossed into a pool, and a literal mic drop. The three-and-a-half-minute video has 722,000 views on YouTube and has received strong reviews.
“Whatever ad company made this ... You didn’t pay enough,” a top comment says. “I can’t remember the last time I watched an entire ad.”
Ohsnap didn’t hire an outside advertising firm; the startup with 17 full-time employees had its own marketing division write the script, scout the spokesperson (a UNC-Greensboro student named Amanda), and film at area locations.
The marketing tone extends beyond the big commercial. Packaging notes that its magnetic grip made from “spacecraft grade aluminum” is not just thin, but “stupid thin.” And this grip is not just durable, but “crazy durable.”
Though it’s more expensive than PopSockets, the Ohsnap grip is thinner — at around 2.5 millimeters when shut.
“I haven’t seen that sort of (branding) treatment successfully implemented in the phone accessory space before,” Backus, 38, said last month from his company’s Apex offices. “So that’s why we lead with the marketing. We invest heavily in marketing. We think the marketing is ultimately the thing that will build enterprise value for this business over a long period of time.”
Maturing its tone
To sell its main product — a nickel-thin grip that attaches to the back of phones and can double as a mount — Ohsnap leans into what its founder described as bottom-of-funnel advertising. Whereas the likes of Coca-Cola and Apple can afford to make broader, general awareness ads (top-of-funnel), startups with products to sell want to convince people to purchase the moment they come across an ad on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook or Instagram.
The trick is not to be subtle, said JD Haggard, the company’s marketing director.
“What we’ve learned is that people actually like knowing they’re being advertised to,” he said. “They like knowing it’s an ad, they just want to be interested at the same time.”
Being clear upfront has a financial advantage, too. Haggard said YouTube doesn’t charge them when viewers click “skip,” so the company wants people to either pass on watching or be invested. He understands not everyone will take to his company’s style, but believes those who do will feel “a lot closer” to the brand.
Ohsnap isn’t alone in its edgier strategy. In recent years, successful startups like Dollar Shave Club and Liquid Death have made funny and meta marketing defining features.
“You’re seeing this revolution right now in really brandy brands emerging,” Backus said.
Opinions differ on how effectively the company’s marketing tone connects with younger consumers.
“They’re talking in a way that your audience is talking,” said Fei Long, a marketing professor at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, after viewing OhSnap’s commercial. “This is useful information.”
Yet after watching the commercial, NC State marketing professor Heather Johnson Dretsch cautioned Gen Z and millennial consumers might bristle at an ad — even a tongue-in-cheek one, opening with “Hey dummy.”
“They are very confident in their own skills, optimistic in their outlook, and they value both respect and kindness,” she said.
As the company grows, its marketing minds say they are open to a strategy shift.
“Now as we mature as a company, we want to become more than just not sucking,” Haggard said. “So, we’re in search of a new tagline.”
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