How a 30-second habit became a New Year content campaign for AG1

How we turned a simple product behavior into an editorial idea that could work across articles, email, social, and the customer journey.

Ahead of the New Year in the fall of 2021, Athletic Greens — now AG1 — came to TORIAL looking for an editorial campaign for its audience.

New Year content is crowded territory. Resolutions, goal-setting, habit change, training plans — everyone is talking about some version of starting over.

We wanted to find an idea that felt relevant to the moment but also connected naturally to the product.

The answer was already hiding in the way people used it.

Mixing AG1 into water takes about 30 seconds. It’s a small daily action designed to become part of a larger routine.

That got us thinking about what other small behaviors could have an outsized effect over time.

The idea became The Micro-Habit Challenge.

The opportunity to create an AG1 New Year content campaign

The challenge wasn’t simply to create four New Year articles.

We wanted to give Athletic Greens an ownable editorial concept that could unfold over several weeks, provide real value to readers, and work across multiple channels.

Instead of asking people to make sweeping New Year resolutions, we went in the opposite direction.

Think smaller.

A micro-habit could take 30 seconds but still move someone toward a larger goal. That made the idea useful on its own while creating a natural connection back to the product.

Building the Micro-Habit Challenge

We developed the campaign as a four-week progression designed to move people from understanding habits to actually building them.

Each week had its own editorial focus:

Week 1: New Year, New Habits
 Introduce micro-habits and help readers identify small behaviors they could realistically adopt.

Week 2: Take Action
 Explore how behaviors become habits and how to turn intentions into repeatable actions.

Week 3: Understand the Psychology
 Dig into the science of habit formation, motivation, and behavioral change.

Week 4: Build Your Success
 Help readers stack, sustain, and build on the habits they had started.

To give the series real authority, we brought in two experts from our network: performance coach and psychologist Sarah Sarkis, Psy.D., and Art Markman, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Texas and author who studies habits and behavior change.

Their expertise gave us a foundation for turning the campaign into something more useful than generic New Year motivation.

Turning one idea into a content system

The Micro-Habit Challenge wasn’t designed as a collection of disconnected articles.

We built one concept that could travel across the entire campaign.

The four editorial pieces lived together on a central landing page, giving readers a single destination for the program while allowing them to move directly to the topics that interested them.

We then translated the core ideas into email.

Rather than treating the newsletters as traffic drivers alone, each email was designed to deliver value in the inbox — with practical takeaways, expert insights, and enough substance to be useful even if someone never clicked through.

We also created different copy and modules for three distinct audiences: current subscribers, prospects, and former subscribers.

Social followed the same philosophy.

Instead of simply promoting the articles, gallery-style posts pulled useful ideas out of the campaign — from identifying a micro-habit to understanding the psychology of behavior change — and packaged them as content worth liking, saving, or sharing on its own.

What we developed

• The Micro-Habit Challenge campaign concept

• Four sequential editorial themes and articles

• A central campaign landing page

• Two expert partnerships to support the editorial

• Four email newsletters

• Audience-specific email variations for subscribers, prospects, and former subscribers

• Six social media assets built around standalone insights and takeaways

• A creative system that carried the idea consistently across web, email, and social

What shipped

The result was a four-week New Year campaign built around one simple idea rather than a collection of unrelated content.

Editorial created depth. Email brought the ideas directly into the customer journey. Social turned the strongest insights into standalone pieces people could consume and share.

And throughout it all, the connection to AG1 remained simple: meaningful change doesn’t always start with a massive overhaul.

Sometimes it starts with 30 seconds.

The larger lesson

Good brand content doesn’t have to start with a product claim.

Sometimes the better question is: What behavior already surrounds the product, and what larger human idea does that behavior point to?

For AG1, a 30-second daily routine led us to micro-habits.