Sometimes you can’t pinch yourself out of a nightmare. The bird poop dripping down your favorite cashmere is real, and yes, you have a job interview in ten minutes. You are wide awake.
While your day might be a living nightmare, Casper Sleep can provide a night guaranteed to end well. So declares the original mattress-in-a-box disruptor as it returns to advertising for the first time in four years, hoping to reclaim its former glory.
Marking Orchard‘s first work for the brand, “Daymares” is led by three dark-humor films that zero in on uncomfortably relatable ordeals, shot with a horror-film flourish through the absurd lens of director Jeff Low.
“Birthday Boy” depicts the awkward experience of sitting through a round of “Happy Birthday to You” as wax drips from the candles, made all the more uncomfortable by a restaurant mascot’s unblinking stare.
From bad to worse, “Crowded” sees a claustrophobic woman wedged to the back of a packed elevator beside a sneezing man, before a blaring red alarm kicks off.
And in “Poor Connection,” a businessman struggles through a frozen video call, repeatedly asking a crowded conference room if they can hear him.
In each scenario, the tension dissolves when the scene cuts to nighttime, as each tormented soul sleeps off their daymare on a Casper mattress, accompanied by the tagline “Goodnight, Day.”
“It’s been a while since we’ve been in front of consumers with major brand work, and we wanted a partner who could create something that felt memorable and relatable,” Torrie Belknap, vice president of marketing at Casper, said in a statement. “Orchard deeply understood the message we wanted to bring to life and translated it into something that not only reinforces what’s special about Casper, but does so in our own, unique way.”
“Sleep is such an integral and restorative part of our lives, and yet our value of sleep is rarely ever matched by our concern for what we sleep on,” Orchard chief creative officer David Kolbusz added. “We brought this campaign to life by juxtaposing the horrors of the day — all the microaggressions to the major transgressions — with the womblike comfort of a Casper-furnished bedroom.”
