Homebase: Polished Irreverence

Client

HomebaseScheduling, time clock and payroll for small teams

The brief

Make the adsFor Meta, aimed at small business owners

When

Feb–Apr 2025Three months, one round a month

Rhythm

Six ideas a monthFour made, every one in every size

Output

24 finished adsPlus the tests along the way

Formats

Three sizesFeed, portrait, Stories and Reels

Homebase runs the back office for more than 100,000 small businesses. Its ads had to talk like those owners do: fast, funny and short on time. So instead of a campaign, we built an ad engine.

Homebase is the app behind the schedule at the café, the payroll at the gym and the time clock by the back door. Its customers open up, lock up and do the books somewhere in between. When they scroll, they give an ad about two seconds, and every one of ours had to earn them, then hand over a reason to try the app.

So we set up a rhythm rather than a one-off. The first week of each month was for writing. In the second we pitched six ideas. Homebase picked four, and we made them, each one cut for the feed, the portrait post and Stories. Then we looked at what was working, kept it, and started again.

Each month built on the last, and the plan pointed on to video next: motion storytelling, product demos and real customers, all built on what the first rounds had proven.

February was about the voice. We called it polished irreverence: confident enough to sell payroll, cheeky enough to stop a thumb. Homebase purple against an acid yellow-green, heavy condensed type for the hook, a handwritten script for the punchline and the app itself somewhere in every frame.

March was text-led on purpose: no faces and no footage to lean on, just words that move. Each spot runs eleven to fifteen seconds, with a hook in type, the problem, a tap on the app and then the phone. The taps became a kit of their own. “Clock in”, “Payroll submitted” and “Publish schedule” were built once as motion pieces and turn up across the whole set, so the product is always the hero of the ad.

One idea, every size

Every idea that got made shipped three ways. It isn’t a crop: each one is laid out again for its frame, so the hook lands wherever Meta happens to put it.

What March taught us

A month of ads is also a month of evidence. Before we wrote a word of April, we wrote down what March had told us.

01

Personality performsPerformance demands a voice you can own

02

Show the productThe app needs to appear more than once in every ad

03

Talk to ownersThe business owner is the hero, not the staff

04

Keep it simpleSimple, modular formats win on Meta

The ones that got away

Pitch six and make four, and two ideas get left behind every month. Some of ours were the best things we wrote. Before March was locked we animated tests for the lines we loved, and a few of them still make us smile.

ServicesCreative Direction·Motion Design·Social Videos·Social Content Creation·Editing