We found exactly who would reach for the jar, and the launch sold through 200% above plan.

Carbone is a Greenwich Village phenomenon in NYC. A red-sauce temple loved by celebrities and regulars alike. Carbone Fine Foods took that magic to the grocery shelf, in the form of a jar of sauce. The challenge was bridging a restaurant's cultural cachet to a product people use at home, and doing it against the category king, Rao's.

We took the full assignment, strategy through production. The positioning didn't fight Rao's on premium, it claimed the tier above: super-premium pasta sauce, built on the restaurant truth that when you make the best Italian food on earth, something amazing is bound to happen. The tone was mid-century elegance meets pop culture, aimed at people with main-character energy who think they already know premium. Then we made it real, shooting inside Carbone's NYC dining room, no food stylist, just the chefs, cut into a :30, a :15, and integrated social.

We used our AI data tools to dimensionalize the Carbone buyer, creating the audiences in the platform from real data, then interviewing them directly, pulling the motivations, tastes, and tensions behind a badge purchase you'd hard pressed to get from a focus group. The platform built and voiced the personas. We decided what the patterns meant for the brand. That gave Carbone a sharp, shared picture of who they’re really for, ready to steer brand positioning and the creative idea. And it worked: the launch sold through at 200% above plan.