Story365 Case Study: Dictador Art Masters – WhereNext Digital Marketing/Storytelling Agency
How We Do It
As a digital marketing/storytelling agency and production company rolled into one, Story365 by WhereNext responds to A/B test results and optimizes our video creative process in real time—an unprecedented approach that more than doubles the efficiency of our client’s media spend.
Story365 Results
Our storytelling campaign resulted in a massive ROI for our client.
10,000 new, certified-real Instagram followers per month
80 video ads optimized through A/B audience-interest testing and real-time data analysis
US$0.15–US$0.20 cost per follower
10 million+ video views
50% cost reduction over the brand’s previous media buys
10x cost efficiency vs. influencer campaigns
The Client
Dictador Art Masters
When it comes to digital marketing, each client brings a new universe to explore and understand. A one-size solution does not fit all. For our legendary spirits client, we knew we had to go big in a smart, efficient way, so we created Dictator Art Masters, a project full of color, art, and nature that brought the enormous challenge of creating and marketing the planet's most unique graffiti museum—set in the heart of the Colombian jungle.
Founded in 1913, Dictador is a storied Colombian rum distiller turned lifestyle brand that came to our digital marketing agency with a passion project, the digital aspect of which was to build an Instagram community of people who love street art. Dictator Art Masters is a not-for-profit organization that brings together the best street artists in the world, transporting them to an old distillery in the heart of the Colombian jungle, between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and La Serrania del Perijá mountain ranges, with the sole purpose of promoting art and showing how it can bring new life into the world.
The Marketing Challenge
10,000 New Instagram Followers Per Month
Every social network has its particularities, and people behave in different ways depending on the network. In the case of Dictator Art Masters, we focused on Instagram, where people expect to see fun, inspirational, beautiful content. Instagram also hosts a vast audience of users passionate about street art, and most graffiti artists have an Instagram account with which they showcase their new work and projects.
Dictador Art Masters challenged our digital marketing agency team with the goal of adding 10,000 new followers to their Instagram account every month. When we took over the account in November 2018, our client believed that it had 2,000 followers, but to our great disappointment, our research showed that 90 percent of them were dummy bots purchased by the client’s former digital marketing agency, leaving WhereNext with a foundation of just 200 followers to build upon.
Our Media Strategy
Our first step to rebuilding the account’s audience was to identify the most significant graffiti and street-art Instagram accounts in the world. Next, we contacted the top-tier accounts to introduce ourselves and tell them about our #ArtDistilled campaign. After deploying our first cross-posting campaign, we immediately gained 500 legitimate followers: a small but encouraging start on our way to 10,000 per month.
Afterwards, we earmarked our budget for advertising campaigns on Instagram and Facebook, proposing a global strategy that sought to explore the principle interests of our target countries based on their respective Instagram searches. Initially, our target market was just Latin America. With that in mind, we identified countries with a significant street-art interest per capita: Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.
Our first tests utilized a video explaining the project (location, artists, dates, etc.) with overlaid narrative text. For each country, we made a selection of interests related to the project, such as street art, graffiti, art, modern art, and urban art, among others. In the first week, we achieved a cost per new follower of US$0.30–US$0.40 and realized that we needed to optimize our creative to reach our goal of 10,000 new, highly engaged followers per month.
To optimize our cost per follower, we used heavy A/B testing and produced 80 video ads, each focused on a single interest, and separated them one by one for each country. By the end of the test, we had more than 30 ads running in different countries, targeting niche interest groups.
Epic street art murals covering the abandoned distillery that is home to Dictador Art Masters’ graffiti museum
Responsive Marketing is Story365’s Superpower
Next, we quantified which interest gave us the most bang for our buck in each country. For example, in Colombia, the most effective interest was "Urban Art," but in Brazil, the most economical was "Graffiti." With these insights, we quickly bolstered our follower count to 4,000. Then we realized that our videos with fewer than 25 percent text overlays were far more effective in terms of cost per follower. After optimizing our video creative, we began to gain new followers at US$0.15 per follower. Within two weeks, we reached our initial goal of 10,000 engaged followers.
Our Dictador A/B testing process led us to question the accepted industry standard for video format and prove that it could be bested. Our initial posts were horizontal (16x9 format). This was the typical Instagram format. But for people scrolling through their feeds on mobile devices, 16x9 videos have a much smaller screen footprint, thus reducing engagement and impact. Realizing this, we decided to experiment with different vertical formats mixed with different audio and text-overlay percentages. The results were staggeringly effective: followers were 30 percent less expensive when targeted with vertical videos. The numbers speak to the effectiveness of our constantly experimental approach: US$0.40 per follower in horizontal format vs. US$0.15 per follower in vertical. This is the kind of agile and attentive service that can only be offered by a digital marketing department fully integrated with a creative video production team.
Find out more about our journey with Dictador Art Masters here.
How We Scaled and Managed the Budget
Our new challenge was to hit 10,000 genuine new followers for five consecutive months, but we soon discovered significant cost creep when we let the same video ads run for more than two weeks in a row. We decided to change the creative of every country-specific video ad every two weeks, then we built a table with every interest, country, and creative concept to chart how each ad performed on a daily basis. This nimble creative and tracking methodology allowed us to anticipate and respond quickly to price fluctuations. If the cost of one interest group jumped up, we paused the ad and redistributed our budget. Because we tracked and responded to the results every day, we were able to find the most cost-effective audience attention.
The final result: WhereNext’s storytelling agency team reached its goal of growing the Dictador Art Masters campaign by at least 10,000 followers every single month at US$0.15–US$0.20 cost per follower, achieving more than 10 million video views in the process. How did we do it?
We legitimized our project and follower base by reaching out to the most significant relevant communities and influencers, securing them as fans.
We launched our campaign with a single video to understand costs for our target markets.
We employed simple A/B testing to define the most economic categories and markets.
We experimented, refining our A/B tests further in terms of formats, sizes, colors, text overlays, audio, and video creative.
We evaluated and adjusted our ad spend and changed our creative approach on a daily basis for optimal balance.
Producing an Integrated Campaign
Although this was primarily a digital campaign, our team seamlessly translated our creative work to print. That’s where our co-branded campaign with the art-and-culture magazine Juxtapoz entered the picture. Juxtapoz is the world’s leading media outlet focused on the modern art world. Their Instagram account has 1.1 million followers, and their print magazine has the largest circulation of any art publication in the United States. Our campaign also included a full-page ad in the print edition of Juxtapoz. We leapt the barrier from digital to print and reached out to a whole new audience of subscribers and consumers, further growing our high-value follower count.
Summarizing Story365’s Advantages
Social networks are subject to constant day-to-day changes. Opportunities can exist for a moment and disappear just as quickly. Agility and savvy experimentation is crucial for success. Because WhereNext is a global creative agency and production company with a full suite of digital marketing capabilities, we can immediately respond to test results and tailor our creative-to-cost data for maximum efficiency for our brand clients. If we want to experiment with a different soundtrack, title, or animation sequence, we can do it all in-house, reacting to media-buy trends in real-time. By starting with a simple plan and a good dose of creativity and vigilance, our digital marketing agency rapidly scaled Dictador Art Masters’ campaign to silverback gorilla proportions on a marmoset-size budget.