Culture Hustle
Stuart Semple is a renowned British artist who has been making art for the past 20 years. Stuart makes his own materials to use in his work, looking to craft for the most vibrant colour palette.
Stuart’s materials all had special qualities and he is known for creating the world’s pinkest pink, glitteriest glitter, and blackest black. Stuart set up Culture Hustle as a project to bring his materials to aspiring artists, adopting Shopify Plus as their eCommerce platform of choice.
The Brand
Culture Hustle was created to create and share ‘the artyist art materials’. Artist Stuart Semple made powders like the world’s pinkest pink & glitteriest glitter. With the help of other artists around the globe he made potions like Black 2.0, Black 3.0 – the world’s blackest black.
Rather than hoard these amazing creations to use all for himself, so that he and he alone could wield the power of the colouriest colours, Stuart made Culture Hustle to share these potent concoctions of his with all artists.
Don’t call Culture Hustle a ‘brand’ – it’s a movement, a way of thinking. Artists are encouraged to think out-of-the-box, in order to make their mark and express themselves via art. The twin passions of making great paint and making great art mean that all paints are crafted by hand and only the best ingredients will do, using only the finest pigments, binders and polymers that money can buy.
And with such a strong belief in their wares, Culture Hustle approached blimpp to help take their offering to new audiences, both in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The Challenge
Get ‘the artyist art materials’ in the world into new hands. Drive discovery. Find new affinity groups outside of core art lovers.
Having worked with blimpp to drive exponential growth across search and shopping, the next frontier to scale was video.
Q4 was a record-breaking quarter, across all metrics, including revenue. Following that up in Q1 would mean going deeper into the world of YouTube ads, finding new audiences to engage, and push the narrative around art materials that are for the many, not just the privileged few.
The Solution
Having run search and shopping campaigns in 2020 with great success, relying on the same approach would mean standing still. But instead, we decided to up the ante with video, building on some promising tests in Q4 around sequenced video ads.
In this type of ad campaign, YouTube users are exposed to a sequence of video creative within a relatively short period of time, meaning that we could break down the overall narrative in a number of videos, rather than one. This meant that ads could be joined up in new ways, with a four-step sequence created for both ad ‘viewers’ and ad ‘skippers’.
Targeting placements around competing products, in addition to influencer channels, meant that new eyeballs were plentiful, and most important than all, relevant. Targeting people based off broad interests or affinity segments was one thing, but targeting them based on what specific videos they had watched was something else. Using data from purchasing audiences, we also built up a picture of which influencers were relevant to them during the ideation and inspiration phases of the journey, in addition to what specific videos were most likely to be viewed during the consideration and validation phases.
All in all, there were close to eleven campaigns built and tested for both prospecting and retargeting. Although targeting varied, the one common entity was that they adopted a sequenced approach to build a narrative across each phase of the purchase journey.
A focus on blended revenue was always going to be important in order to justify investing in YouTube as a platform, and blimpp was one of the first agencies involved with the YouTube cross-network beta. This reporting tool provided greater insight into blended revenue performance based on both click and view interactions, and was key to understanding which videos assets were driving meaningful actions, going beyond just views and watch rate.
“The goal here wasn’t just to serve the right ad at the right time, it was to serve a meaningful sequence of three-to-four ads which provoked people to respond emotionally to the whole debate around art materials for the masses, not just for a few well-known artists who owned their patents.” said Harpal Singh, Managing Partner at blimpp.
“Once we broke through emotionally, via our hero videos which were broken down into 6s, 15s, and 30s ad variants, we needed to draw people in to specific paints that would be right for them based on the content they were viewing on YouTube. From there, it was less about selling, and more about inspiring with how-to videos.”
Once it became apparent that the strategy was working, the focus also turned to how to retarget YouTube ad viewers across search, shopping, and display. Gaps were identified in keyword coverage, and shopping ads were reinforced with precise data feed optimisation targeting competitor terms.
A truly holistic experience, across several digital touchpoints, was a reality.
“Once we broke through emotionally, via our hero videos, we needed to draw people in to specific paints that would be right for them based on content they were viewing.”
The Results
In just three months, YouTube has become a leading digital touchpoint, driving both awareness and re-engagement. Competing with established brands with larger marketing budgets meant ads needed to be coherent and fit with a specific narrative, aligned to each phase. The results spoke for themselves:
- 36% Quarter-on-Quarter revenue uplift for Q4
- 291% increase in brand traffic
- A blended YouTube ROAS of 9.3, meaning that for every $1 spent, $9.30 was generated
- A 487% increase in YouTube blended revenue
- An average View Rate of 33.1%, across both prospecting and retargeting workstreams
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