We Love the Weed: 30-second animated advertisement | HoneyStash

Project: The HoneyStash Fish
Organisation: HoneyStash / HoneyProjects
Role: Director of Marketing — concept, animation and production
Media: 30-second animated video advertisement
Methods: Character development, rewritten lyrics, AI-assisted vocals, animation and editing
Platforms: Google and Meta paid advertising
Outcome: Ran for almost a year and delivered almost 12× return on ad spend

Inspired by Quiznos’s famously strange Spongmonkeys ad, I turned the fish in HoneyStash’s aquarium into singing characters for a 30-second spot. I produced the ad myself; it became one of our strongest video creatives on Google and Meta.

Cannabis advertising comes with creative restrictions, so I wanted a way to make HoneyStash memorable through character, music and humour. My starting point was Quiznos’s 2004 “We Love the Subs” campaign, created by The Martin Agency using animator Joel Veitch’s strange, singing Spongmonkeys. Its oddness had stayed with me for years.

I reimagined that idea around the fish in HoneyStash’s aquarium. I gave the spot a hip-hop feel, rewrote the lyrics and created new vocals with AI tools. I conceived, animated, edited and assembled the entire 30-second ad myself.

We made it for programmatic television, but the placement was rejected: the fish were considered too appealing to children. The spot went on to run as a paid ad across Google and Meta for almost a year. It became one of our most successful video creatives, delivering almost 12× return on ad spend.

I love this project for its sense of humour and for the range of work it brought together. It let me take a reference from advertising history, give it a distinctly HoneyStash setting and carry the idea through storytelling, animation, sound and final production.