How a $2,000 Commercial Accidentally Got 176 Million Views

We sat down with Adam Franklin of Creative Chops to talk Hollywood, motion graphics, a viral accident, and what filmmaking looks like in the age of AI.

For the first episode of the Benco podcast, Ben Allison and co-host Brett Junvik of Anthem Films sat down with Adam Franklin — owner of Creative Chops, a Charlotte-based post-production and motion graphics studio with two decades of Hollywood experience behind it. What followed was an honest, funny, and insightful conversation about building a creative career, the gap between the Hollywood dream and the Hollywood reality, and where all of this is heading now that AI can do in five seconds what used to take days. Here are the talking points worth pressing play for.

Breaking into Hollywood the hard way

Adam's start is the kind of story that sounds impossible today. No YouTube, no LinkedIn — just a Hollywood directory and a stack of DVDs he hand-stamped one by one. He mailed his reel to more than 150 companies he knew almost nothing about, got two replies, and took the one that was essentially a glorified secretary job. Two weeks after getting married, he and his wife moved to Los Angeles on nothing more than the hope of an interview. He nailed it, landed at a trailer house called Verve, and his career was off. It's a reminder that the way in is rarely glamorous, and that boldness early on often matters more than a perfect plan.

Motion graphics, and the myth of the big screen

Adam clears up something a lot of people get wrong: the difference between motion graphics and visual effects. VFX is the 3D characters, the green-screen compositing, the matte replacements. Motion graphics is the text on screen — the title cards, the animated logos, the lower thirds that pop up during your favorite shows. It's a craft most viewers never notice, and Adam spent years becoming one of the best at it.

But the bigger the project, the smaller the creative freedom. On blockbusters like Iron Man 2, he describes feeling less like an artist and more like "a technical mouse on a wheel" — anything that strayed from the established formula simply got thrown away. The glamour everyone pictures rarely matches the reality of burnout, 80-hour weeks, and very narrow creative lanes. That tension eventually led to a fork in the road. Offered a creative director role with what he calls "life-changing money," Adam turned it down to bet on himself and start Creative Chops. His real passion was directing, and the collaboration that comes with it. As Ben puts it, quoting his own website: filmmaking is the miracle of collaboration.

A $2,000 ad and 176 million views

The headline moment of the episode is Adam's accidental viral hit. For Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" contest in 2011, his team made two spec commercials for around $2,000 total. One of them — a dad who discovers his crying baby only calms down to the crunch of a chip — was uploaded without final color correction and promptly ignored. About a hundred views over three years.

Then it exploded. Passed around on WhatsApp in India, Iraq, and Vietnam, it racked up 17 million views seemingly overnight and eventually crossed 176 million, more than 70% of them from outside the U.S. Adam's takeaway is a lesson any marketer can use: less is more. The ad worked precisely because it had almost no dialogue. It told a universal, visual story anyone could follow regardless of language — which matters more than ever now that so many people watch with the sound off.

Charlotte, and the question of AI

Why leave Los Angeles for Charlotte? Adam points to Blue Ocean Strategy — the idea that you grow faster by going where the competition isn't. Atlanta was already crowded with motion graphics houses; Charlotte, in his words, was ripe for the taking.

Then there's the elephant in every creative's room: AI. Adam is refreshingly honest about it. Watching an AI image generator do in five seconds what once took him days to model, light, and render was, he admits, "depressing" at first — it felt like it pulled the ground out from under twenty years of craft. But he's come around to seeing it as a tool, not a replacement. The technology changes; the storytelling doesn't. Creatives are still "the link," he says — the people who shine a light and tell a clear, compelling story for a brand. That part isn't going anywhere.

Watch the full episode

This is just the surface. The full conversation digs into flow state, working across print, digital, and AV teams, and the lesson Adam learned when he thought no one was watching. Press play above — and if you're a brand wondering how to stay visible online without it eating all your time, this is exactly the kind of content engine we love to build.