July 22, 2015

Warehouse

Chalk Social describe their work with Warehouse on ‘Style Me If You Can’, a campaign to promote the retailer’s autumn-winter 2013 collection

Background

Warehouse has been building smart, connected fashion experiences since 1976. Their autumn-winter 2013 collection was especially innovative and came with a new 90-minute delivery service.

Chalk Social were given just three weeks to devise, build and execute a display advertising strategy. Our USP was the ability to create audience clusters that were unique to Warehouse, whilst driving efficiencies through high impact ad formats programmatically. It was important to Warehouse that they target a new audience as they’d only been buying retargeting ads for the previous two years and new site visitors were at an all-time low.

Working with creative agency Brooklyn Brothers, Warehouse identified their core audience as the ‘ambitious stylist’. Female and aged 18-35, the ‘ambitious stylist’ is described as someone who has things to do, people to see, meetings to rule and hearts to capture. Fashion fits their life, not the other way around.

Objectives

1. Target ‘ambitious stylists’. Understand size of cluster and devise a media plan that reaches them through multiple digital touch points

2. Showcase the collection and the 90-minute delivery service

3. Deliver the campaign at an ROI of 200 per cent or above

Strategy

Chalk Social built ad units across Facebook, YouTube and programmatic video. Luckily there was a wealth of assets to work with. Brooklyn Brothers had already shot a series of nine promotional videos to showcase how the life of the typical ambitious stylist changed every 90 minutes.

Choosing the right digital mix was crucial in order to cost effectively reach the ‘ambitious stylist’. Programmatic video, YouTube and Facebook channels were selected for a mix of high impact engagement and targeted campaign awareness (based on targeting capabilities at the time the campaign ran).

Across display it was important that brand association was spot on. Rather than targeting just the right audience whilst they were browsing the web, the fashion white list amplified the campaign messaging. The specific decision to steer clear from semantic targeting was put in place as Warehouse had to be to be surrounded not only by the right content, but also best in breed fashion photography. Roll over rich media video units were served where available.

We used Facebook and YouTube’s indexing tools to identify the total audience size. Based on monthly uniques across the fashion white list a number of 3 million uniques was identified. Assuming 50 per cent were on Facebook the total audience size was decided to be 4.9 million.

We targeted UK females aged 18-35 with link ads, ‘Like’ ads and sponsored stories. Ad copy included a mix of brand and SMIYC campaign messaging, overlayed with a list of 317 bespoke keywords to target the ‘ambitious stylist’.

We also used TrueView to showcase the ‘Style Me If You Can’ trailer across in-stream, in-display and in-search ad formats.

We utilised log level data on YouTube and Facebook to hit the audience that had first interacted via mobile devices on desktop. Although the budget was limited to 20 per cent on mobile, it was important the audience engaged across devices considering the ‘ambitious stylist’ is always on the move.

The ads were optimised not only by format, but by geo and keyword. Certain cities weren’t targeted which kept the cost per view much lower and improved the quality of the traffic. Our programmatic buying is overlayed with ad viewability, ensuring that the ad unit was above the fold and only pre-bidding on ads that were ‘in view’.

Alongside current creative assets there was a legacy of Grazia and Elle homepage takeovers to fulfil. Again, Chalk Social produced the creative banners to ensure campaign synchronicity.

Results

  • 23.4 million impressions to 4.9 million unique ‘ambitious stylists’ (100 per cent of the total indexed audience)
  • 10 per cent viewed the video, and 3 per cent engaged through clicks to site, shares and posts
  • 1 per cent became social connections through Facebook and Twitter. Facebook tracked 35,300 new Warehouse fans directly from the ‘Like’ ads
  • The campaign was optimised to a positive ROI of 523 per cent