Outbrain, a leading recommendation platform, launched Brand Studio earlier this year with the mission to transform the way open web marketing can look and perform. We deliver genuine moments of engagement, with incredible results for brands, by using data-led creatives to re-imagine and better mobile experiences.
We partner with leading brands to transform their online presence into unforgettable moments – thus, challenging the status quo of what digital marketing can achieve on the open web.
Elvie, a bold women's lifestyle brand turning ‘taboo’ topics into top-notch products for women, has had a successful history with Outbrain’s core service, scaling its brand and products across different markets, and winning a Digiday award for Best Use of Video back in 2020.
Looking to treat Outbrain as a more dynamic platform, the brand tested Outbrain’s new Brand Studio service to drive deeper customer engagement among Elvie’s open-web audiences. Elvie’s passion to create world-class products that improve women’s lives, and its innovative mindset and willingness to break barriers both as a company and in their digital strategies, perfectly aligned with Brand Studio’s vision.
Elvie challenged the Outbrain Brand Studio team to deliver a custom digital experience that would be purpose-built for engagement, showcase its transformative product line-up to new audiences, while exceeding the benchmarks from the existing channel mix.
Pioneering a new paradigm is never easy. We noticed how brands got accustomed to relying on separate entities for the complete picture – one company for data analysis, another for creative direction, and yet another for ad placements.
Outbrain Brand Studio gets rid of these silos, meeting brands in the early data-gathering stage to understand the best ways to unlock user value – from creative success factors to behavioral insights and first-party data capture.
The Elvie and Outbrain teams gathered for a single-day workshop to exchange client-centric information that would help spark an original campaign that would engage Elvie audiences. The teams compared differences and similarities between open-web audience behavior and Elvie’s customer habits to align a strategic direction.
Based on those insights, it was determined that Elvie audiences find customer reviews a key factor in their decision-making. This led to the design of an interactive experience, giving users the ability to engage with Elvie’s product in action, swipe through cards to see reviews, and watch its product-featured video.
After refining elements to maximize impact, the campaign was launched the same day across Outbrain’s platform. The creative experiences engaged consumers through a variety of creative formats, including video and earned media, allowing them to explain their products in an effective and entertaining manner.
The Brand Studio and Elvie teams then continued to refine the creative design in real-time. This hands-on approach led to a changing of logo, background color, CTA, and other tweaks that furthered engagement.
Advertising through Outbrain ensured that Elvie reached consumers who were interested in learning about new products. Elvie was able to leverage Outbrain’s retargeting capabilities to drive conversions among their pre-informed audiences. The optimization towards users who were more likely to engage with Elvie content enabled an optimized CPC and stronger CTR.
This holistic cooperation enabled Outbrain Brand Studio to help Elvie learn more about its real audience on the open web, through attention and actions:
Attention = Engagement: Open-web users listen to what others say, as 22% of Elvie audiences clicked to go straight to its website after viewing the ‘customer review’ card, while 78% continued to swipe for more. It was very clear that the more that audiences interact with the creative experience, the more likely they are to convert.
Video: User-initiated video isn’t just preferred; it performs. Half of all video views achieved 100% completion, showing that Elvie audiences see video as a valuable educational tool.
In just one month of the campaign running live, Outbrain Brand Studio delivered exactly as promised and surpassed the benchmarks from Elvie’s existing channel mix.
Those are indeed note-worthy achievements, but what we find incredibly important is the reciprocal connection between brand and consumer. Not only were we able to have new and previously untapped audiences discover Elvie, but we were also able to have Elvie discover tangible insights about their new won audiences.
Lucia Cisneros, the Global Digital Marketing Lead at Elvie, had this to say: “We’re continually impressed with how Outbrain pushes boundaries and embraces the digital canvas in innovative ways to garner high attention and rich engagement for our open-web audiences. While we’ve worked with Outbrain for a few years on a variety of efforts, this unique collaboration with Brand Studio demonstrated its capability to move beyond a traditional working-model to drive intuitive mobile brand experiences, surpassing all other paid channels.”
