The World’s Catchiest Ad: my BONAWI entry

The World’s Catchiest Ad is ElevenLabs’ contest for an original jingle and a spot between 15 and 45 seconds. The announced grand prize is 50,000 USD. I entered BONAWI, a hazelnut spread that does not exist.

A jar is an easy ad. You show the spread, you show a bite, you say it tastes like nuts. I didn’t want that film. Inside the fiction, BONAWI has one promise: no palm oil, no added sugar, a lot of hazelnut. The spot starts where the palm oil in other spreads comes from. A forest. The machines that take it down.

The jingle is the hook, and you hear it before the picture explains itself. Each time a tree goes, one syllable of that hook goes with it. The lid is the way back. When it pops shut, the hook is whole again. Then one spoken line: “Your turn.”

The cut is 31 seconds. The entry is in.

What I actually made it with

The jingle was made in the ElevenCreative app, on Music v2.5, with custom lyrics and too many generations. The take I kept is Bo-NAH-Wee. On its own:

https://elevenlabs.io/music/songs/3eEj5ecWjdq4wfa09Vvt

The closing line is ElevenLabs text to speech. The toaster click, the lid pop and the room tones are ElevenLabs sound effects, placed on the beat grid. The picture is image-to-video, then cut by hand to that same grid. The shots in the cut come from LTX-2.5 and MiniMax H3 Max. TV and phone screens were composited afterwards. The label and the end card are vector artwork. I got tired of asking a model to draw the same jar twice and have it stay the same jar.

No existing songs, no covers, no real people, no real brands. BONAWI is not for sale. If a frame reminds you of a spread you know, that is a mistake, not a claim about that company.

What took the longest

The jingle. Early drafts sang the stage directions. I had left brackets in the lyric, and the model sang the brackets. The final lyric has none.

The frame. The contest watermark sits at the bottom right. Crop the 16:9 picture and the mark falls off, so the wide version stays wide. The vertical post is its own 9:16 master, not a center crop.

Watch it

The same spot is on Instagram and on X, posted as Trapdoor Vector.

Same list as the caption, so nobody has to guess: ElevenCreative for the music, the voice and the sound effects. LTX-2.5 and MiniMax H3 Max for the shots. Gemini for the review passes. Claude Code for the scripts. The cut is mine.