Pearmill won two Silver Davey Awards for our work with Vori, in the Social Media and B2B campaign categories. The winners of the 22nd Annual Davey Awards were announced on October 21, 2026.

‍

The Davey Awards are run by the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts (AIVA), a group of more than 1,100 industry leaders from brands and agencies including Burberry, Mastercard, Lyft, Comcast, Dentsu and Work & Co. The program is built for small teams: boutique agencies, in-house teams and independent creators doing big work on smaller budgets. Each entry is scored by multiple jurors on a 10-point scale, and an average of 7 to 8.9 earns Silver. This year drew thousands of entries.

‍

‍

Independent grocers still run much of the store by hand

Vori builds the point-of-sale and operating system for independent grocers. Those stores are being squeezed by chains that can out-price and out-market them, and much of the work of running one still happens by hand in the back office.

‍

Before we made a single ad, the team joined Vori's sales calls, studied how independent grocers run their stores, and worked closely with the Vori team, who are multi-generation grocers themselves. Every concept in the campaign traces back to something we learned there.

‍

We made ads that look like they came from the store

Meta is a video-first platform, and the feed is crowded with people talking to camera. We built static images dressed as the things grocers see every day: hand-printed signs, vendor invoices, shelf tags, produce.

‍

An ad built this way reads like something the store made. It stops the scroll because it looks familiar, and it earns trust because it shows grocers a scene from their own day. In our testing, these environmental statics drove leads about 38% cheaper than video.

‍

Each ad is built around one pain point.

‍

Margins. Outdated systems still send owners into the back office to check vendor invoices line by line. We built the ad from a real owner's desk, with a UNFI invoice, a distributor logo grocers know on sight. It became the campaign's top pipeline ad, with 15 deals created in six months.

‍

‍

Waste. Grocers are always fighting product that spoils before it sells. We ran the ad with avocados, strawberries and a banana visibly on the turn. The banana version won and cut cost per lead by about 22%.

‍

‍

Selling at a loss. Vori flags cost changes before they quietly eat into margin. The visual comes from the one-off signs grocers print by hand for last-minute price changes. In an A/B test, this handmade version beat a polished, more branded execution.

‍

‍

Repeat tasks. The shelf tag is one of the most tedious, repeatable jobs in the store. We made the tag the hook, then told owners that work can run itself.

‍

‍

The statics carried the campaign, and the same idea works in select video formats too. A short receipt-math video uses a little motion to deliver more information while keeping the grocer's world as the setting.

‍

‍

Why the handmade version wins on a cold feed

Brand creative and performance creative do different jobs. Brand work builds recognition over years, and it belongs on the website, in the sales deck and in the follow-up. On a cold feed, a stranger decides in about a second and a half whether to stop, and an ad that looks like an ad loses most of them.

‍

The handmade price sign beating its branded twin is the clearest example. Once an ad looks like Vori made it, it stops looking like something the grocer made, and the stop goes with it.

‍

We find winners by running small variations of the same concept against each other on equal spend, then putting budget behind whichever one the audience picks. The banana is a product of that process: one concept, three fruits, and a clear winner on cost per lead.

‍

The team

• Creative Director: Donovan McKnight
• Creative Strategist: Haley Rogers
• Growth Manager: Moojan Hakim
• Paid Social Lead: Mariate Rodriguez
• Designers: Lilya Kasatkina, Polina Korshunava and Ekaterina Addams

Thank you to Vori for trusting us to make ads that look homemade, and to the AIVA jurors for their time.

‍

What's next

Our work with Vori continues, and the question we keep asking on the account stays the same: what is the next moment in a grocer's day that doesn't have to be this hard? You can see the full campaign at pearmill.com/vori-davey-awards, and our entry in the Davey Awards winners gallery.

‍