On a gray spring morning on the outskirts of Warsaw, a residential street is being dressed as suburban Dallas. A giant light on a crane stands in for the sun. A camera glides past on a miniature rig an inch off the ground. Some of the actors are American, the voiceover will be recorded in London, and most of the crew speaks Polish.
That may sound like an “Avengers” or “Project Hail Mary” level production. It isn’t (even though I wish it were). This is a Quo commercial, or Quomercial. It’s a long way from the commercial shoot I wrote about a few weeks ago. That one was four spots in two days in Boston, deliberately modest — a first attempt we wanted to learn from. This is the next round we promised at the end of that piece: more visual ambition, a bigger scope, and more money.
If you’ve shot a small ad and you’re thinking about scaling up, this is what four times the cost looks like up close.
Why we went bigger
I framed it simply when we started planning: if we’re going to make money, raise money, and grow, then we have to act like a company that’s doing all three things (and we are). We’re competing with larger brands — though we’re catching up — whose products feel dated and whose messaging sounds like it was written 10 years ago. We can win a lot of those head-to-head comparisons, but not while looking smaller than them, or like the smaller company we actually are.
In Boston, we were deliberately doing the opposite. We kept it small so we could learn before going any bigger. What we wanted was a clearer read on our customers, our tone, and our editing process. By the time we sat down to plan this round, we were ready.
If you’re considering a bigger ad spend, the case is yours to make. But the easiest version of that argument is the one where the business has already grown into the size of the ad you want to produce. Catch the company up first. Then pitch it.
The math of a bigger swing
The headline number is roughly four times what we spent in Boston.
That number is worth unpacking, because the multiplier is misleading if you stop at the top line. Boston produced four commercials in a single location, with multiple casts, multiple concepts, and a lot of moving parts. This shoot, with four times the spend, bought one hero spot cut into 60-, 30-, 15-, and 6-second versions. Per finished cut, the ratio is much steeper than the headline suggests.
And 4xing the cost only covers the shoot itself. The total campaign cost, once you add the placements that actually put the spot in front of people, is significantly higher. A version of this same shoot filmed in the US would likely have run roughly double what our Polish production cost us. Warsaw has a deep commercial film industry, skilled crews who handle international jobs constantly, and a rate structure that worked in our favor. We treated the location as a creative decision and a business one at the same time. Warsaw delivered on both counts.
Pick a director by their own visual language
In Boston, we learned that tonal fit was the thing we should have screened harder for. Our director this time around, Richard Hunter, happens to share a first name with me and almost shares the same last name. I wear a straw cowboy hat almost everywhere, so I assumed that my British doppelganger would wear one of those Peaky Blinders hats. I don’t know what they’re called, but you can probably visualize it. I am sad to report that he doesn’t.
However, he did direct the most visually striking Lysol ad I’ve ever seen in my life.
And you wouldn’t believe how many I’ve seen.. It has a signature you wouldn’t mistake for somebody else’s work. The spot wasn’t even close to what we were making for Quo. But it told us he had a point of view, and I knew we’d recognize that both on set and in the cut.
There’s a tendency when you’re spending serious money to hire from the biggest brand names in a director’s portfolio. Reels are full of work for the same handful of companies, and it’s easy to be impressed by the logos. The risk is that you’re hiring the brand’s aesthetic instead of the director’s.
If you’re hiring a creative for any job, look hardest at the piece of work that’s most clearly theirs, rather than the one with the biggest logo at the bottom.
Planting seeds beyond this commercial
Our other big bet on this shoot: the octopi. They’re animated characters featured across this commercial and, if they land, the ones we haven’t made yet.
The octopus showed up a couple of rounds in and stuck almost immediately. Why? Many tentacles, many things being handled at once, a clean map of what Quo actually does. We also noticed, late in the process, that the Q in Quo looks a little like an octopus itself.
The octopi were also where the work got the most ambitious. My colleague Grayson, Quo’s Senior Video Production Manager, was on set with me in Warsaw. As he put it about ad-making in general: “People play it a lot more safely than they actually should.” The octopi were our way of taking a creative risk.
Building a mascot isn’t a first-ad decision. It’s barely a second-ad decision. We chose to do it now because we’re at a point where we want characters that can carry weight across a campaign for years, not a single 30-second spot. A mascot, if it works, is one of the few advertising assets that compounds.
We’ve also chosen, for now, not to give our octopi a name. The instinct, when you build a character, is to lock the whole thing in at once: a name, a backstory, the look, the lore. The risk is that you commit before you know what the character will be useful for. By holding back the rest, we leave ourselves room to develop them. If a name we love shows up later, we’ll give them one.
For a small business reader, the takeaway here is that a mascot is a long-horizon bet, and a relatively expensive one to pull off well. However, it can make your brand more memorable. It’s the kind of investment most small businesses shouldn’t go near in their first commercial, or maybe even their second. But if you do decide to create one, leave room for the character to grow.
What we’re really buying
Awareness advertising plays a longer game than performance marketing. Nobody is going to see this spot, feel a sudden urge to switch business phone providers, and sign up before lunch. The job is to take up a little room in somebody’s memory and stay there until the day their current setup finally lets them down.
Every dollar is buying a half-second of recognition that might not get cashed in for a year, sometimes longer. You can’t watch it tick over in a dashboard the way you can with performance marketing. What it buys is our name surfacing in a conversation a year from now, without quite remembering where they first heard it.
What we’ll be watching for
The commercial is now live. Our first external benchmark will be whether this spot outperforms the four commercials we shot in Boston last fall, across trials, conversions, and mentions. That’d be an encouraging signal. It wouldn’t be the whole answer, because awareness ads don’t fully pay back in week one. But it’d tell us the extra investment is doing work.
The mascot is harder to measure. The signal there is whether the octopi are shared online, asked for again, or our customers ask for octopi swag. If people start talking about them as characters rather than just a production choice, that’s useful information.
The very first benchmark was internal: showing the cut to the company. That was the moment I was most nervous about. It’s easier, somehow, defending your work to investors than to the people who know the product well enough to catch every false note. You can rationalize a director choice, justify a location, and talk yourself through every line item on a budget. You can’t really rationalize what your colleagues feel when the lights come up.
When your team’s first reaction is the one you wanted, you’ve already cleared the most important bar. The dashboard will tell us the rest in the weeks to come.
For a small business owner, the equivalent is whether the people closest to what you do react the way you hoped — your team, your most loyal customers, the contractors you’ve worked with for years. That’s the feedback you trust before the metrics catch up.
What we’d tell a small business taking their own bigger swing
If you’ve skipped to the end, you’re in luck. Here’s what we’d tell any small business sitting where we were a year ago:
- The case for a bigger ad is easier to make once the business has grown into it.
- Hire creatives for the work that feels most distinctly theirs, not the biggest brand name in their portfolio.
- Treat geography as both a creative and financial decision. The right location can buy you a better crew at a better rate and shape the look of the spot at the same time.
- Know what each dollar is buying on screen. Making the ad is not the whole bill, and the marginal dollar may show up later than you’d think.
- Build recurring characters only when you’re ready to invest over years, not weeks.
- Track the short-term signals, but they’re only part of the picture. Awareness pays back on a delay, sometimes a long one, when a customer finally goes looking for what you sell.
The next ad, and the one after that
This is the second of what I expect to be many more swings of this size and ambition. Each one earns the right to make the next. We started small in Boston, went bigger in Warsaw, and have plenty left to do.
The commercial and our out-of-home campaign are two parts of the same first chapter: Quo taking brand storytelling seriously and showing our work as we go.
What I wanted out of this commercial was a chance to find our voice on screen and to create something we can build on. Two days in Warsaw and four months of editing later, I think we have both.
So what else may be coming soon? We’re looking at one big game. At a previous company, when I was an early employee, we had the money and the growth trajectory to make a Super Bowl ad. We were too scared, so we didn’t. A competitor of ours did, and over the next few years, they became worth about 50 times what we were.
I’m not claiming a perfect cause-and-effect story. But I watched one brand take the swing and another brand hesitate, and I don’t want Quo to miss the same window.
Quo isn’t going to run a Super Bowl ad this year, and probably not the next either. But Super Bowl 2028 is the kind of planning horizon I want us to take seriously, and we’ve already started thinking about what could earn us a place there.
