Bonjour Turns One Script Into Every Ad Style with Runway

Specializing in mushroom- and plant-based adaptogenic beverages, France-based Bonjour has built its growth on paid social. Keeping ads fresh enough to compete with the organic feed is the responsibility of a 15-person creative pod. They build every new concept out in several animated styles and test each one against real ad spend before deciding what actually works. With Runway handling that animation, the loop from script to verdict runs in four to five days, work that once meant hiring a freelancer for something the team had neither the time nor the skill in-house to build.

The formats winning on Meta were out of reach

Before Bonjour's creative pod started generating its own animation, trying a new visual style for an ad meant leaving the building. The team could write the script and picture the concept, but building it required animation skills nobody on staff had, so a new look meant briefing a freelancer, waiting on their schedule and paying whatever they charged, often without knowing if the finished ad would even work.

Clément Schuffenecker, Head of Creative at Bonjour, runs the 15-person pod responsible for everything that goes out on Meta: scripts, storyboards and finished content. For a team that learns by testing constantly, the old route priced out experimentation.

“It was impossible before AI. We didn't have that skill on the team, so we would have needed a freelancer, which would've cost way more and taken way longer. That's why AI helps us. We can test, learn and retry.”

—Clément Schuffenecker, Head of Creative, Bonjour

Every script now ships in multiple styles with Runway

The pod's process now starts the way most performance-marketing ideas do: with something already working. An idea from the organic feed, or another ad the team has seen performing well, becomes a brief and a script. Florent Assa, a creative strategist on the team, turns that script into a storyboard and animates every scene in Runway.

Bonjour has settled on three styles that consistently work: claymation; a Pixar-inspired format built around small illustrated characters that stand in for a body part or a concept; and a cartoon format that uses human characters to deliver testimonial-style scripts. Every video follows the same underlying structure regardless of style: name a problem the viewer's body has and might not know about, explain why it happens and show how Bonjour helps. Florent has built an internal workflow that lets the team run one script across all of the styles at once rather than rebuilding each from scratch, and Schuffenecker estimates a finished, animated batch comes together in 24 to 48 hours.

Asked what made Runway the right fit, Schuffenecker listed three things: support, stability and how quickly the team picked it up. “At first, it was the customer success team. They have the most responsive team out of every tool we tried,” he said. And when it came to handing video content in French, he explained other tools they tested couldn’t provide the the output they needed.

We make most of our videos in French, and unlike other models that struggled with the accent, Runway's was very reliable.”

— Clément Schuffenecker, Head of Creative, Bonjour

From first script to winning ad in under a week

Once a batch of style variants is ready, every version goes straight into Meta Ads Manager and the market makes the call. The signal is whether Meta itself is willing to spend on a given variant, an early proxy for whether it will convert. Schuffenecker estimates the full loop, from script to a verdict on which style worked, lands somewhere between four and five days.

That speed used to run into a hard ceiling. As the pod's output grew, the team started hitting credit limits, but once they moved onto Runway's enterprise plan, they were unblocked to keep testing.

“We were hitting a wall on credits with how much we were producing. Since moving to the enterprise plan, we're not afraid to spend more on testing. We can test more, learn more and get better at it.”

— Clément Schuffenecker, Head of Creative, Bonjour

Schuffenecker estimates the shift to generating creative in-house has reallocated more than €50,000 that would otherwise have gone to outside production, and that the team has produced upward of 500 video and image variations with Runway since adopting it. The bigger change, he said, is in how the pod spends its time: editors aren't racing against the clock anymore, which leaves room to think through a concept. “We can be a bit bolder, and produce more than we ever could without Runway,” he said.

Ad variations Bonjour has generated with Runway it’s now testing

The clearest sign of that came the first time the pod saw one of its own animated concepts finished and running as a live ad. “That first one looked slick, and we realized, ‘wait, that actually worked,’” Schuffenecker said. “That aha moment happened when we saw how much creative range we actually have now.”