Archer Roose, the sustainable luxury canned wine brand, worked with Dragon360 to launch their direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce website for libation-lovers looking for a more convenient and planet-friendly alternative to conventional glass bottles and snobby wine elites. But, a new site meant they needed to rapidly grow traffic and kickstart digital sales.
The canned wine industry has grown by nearly 70% in the last year alone with new brands launching all the time. However, the category as a whole has an awareness problem: only 4 in 10 wine consumers are even aware that wine can come in a can, and less than 10% say they’ve bought canned wine in the past six months.
In an increasingly crowded, yet relatively unknown category, how could Archer Roose increase brand awareness and make a splash just in time for summer — their peak sales season?
Archer Roose was made to fit the lifestyle of the modern wine drinker, because high-quality wine ought to be planet-friendly, at an accessible price point, and in a format that you can take (almost) anywhere.
We knew that to best reach our target audience — affluent millennials — we’d need to pair Archer Roose wines with their digital lifestyles, meeting them on the phone and TV screens they turn to every day. We also knew that while women drink more wine than men, male wine drinkers are on the rise. So, we developed a digital brand awareness campaign with wide appeal to both cork-sniffing, glass-swirling wine lovers and the newly-canned-wine-curious, starring none other than actor, director, and writer, Elizabeth Banks.
While brand awareness was the primary goal, we also needed to educate consumers that high-quality, sommelier-selected, luxury wine can come in a 100% recyclable and portable can — straight to your door.
Dragon360 had to get creative with campaign development, as we were on a tight budget. But luckily, we had some serious star power to jumpstart buzz: Archer Roose Founder + CEO Marian Leitner-Waldman co-starred in the hilarious spot (made by creative agency Colossus) with Elizabeth Banks, who had just become a major investor in the brand.
Campaign channels spanned Archer Roose’s first foray into Connected TV (CTV), as well as YouTube and a paid social push. We timed the launch to coincide with the official kickoff of summer: Memorial Day weekend. And, to make ad spend go further, we narrowed our target markets to urban areas where Archer Roose also had strong retail and on-premise sales, like: NYC, Boston, Miami, and Los Angeles.
The funny spot showcased Elizabeth’s overenthusiastic new affiliation with the brand.
CTV was crucial to our strategy, not only for its massive reach (now reaching nearly four-fifths of US homes), but to help test and confirm the best target audiences, as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube reporting specificity would be adversely affected by iOS 14 updates.
We initially ran both the :15 second and the :60 versions of the spot; on CTV, shorter was sweeter. As the campaign progressed, the data showed that Foodie and Technophile segments were particularly responsive, even more than Wine Lovers, which we anticipated being the highest-performing audience. And, most surprisingly, male audiences outpaced female audiences for most of the campaign. Key placements included: HGTV, Lifetime, NBC, Roku, PlutoTV, tubi, MTV, and This Old House.
As we continued to hone audiences and optimize the campaign, we were able to deliver steadily increasing impressions for an eCPM that was, on average, 36% lower than expected median CTV eCPMs.
We launched on Instagram — focusing on Stories and the Video Feed — and then expanded to other placements across the Facebook and Instagram ad ecosystem to get the best results possible for the most efficient spend. The clear winner was the Facebook Video Feed, as viewers would already have their sound on and were ready to watch a video, as opposed to someone scrolling aimlessly.
Unlike CTV and YouTube, female audiences significantly outperformed male audiences 2:1 on Facebook and Instagram with lower CPCs and a higher estimated ad recall lift rate. As the campaign progressed, we also added lookalike and remarketing audiences (landing page visitors, video viewers, Archer Roose customers, etc.) to our interest-based targeting, which increased the percentage of the video watched and lowered the cost per purchase. In a nutshell, affluent female foodies and wine lovers wanted to watch the whole story (:60 version of the spot), and were most likely to make a purchase, and become a repeat customer.
The YouTube campaign showed fantastic results that out-performed national adult beverage industry averages by more than 15%. We ran both skippable and non-skippable ads that targeted In-Market and Affinity audiences like Foodies, Luxury, Travel, Wine Lovers, and Elizabeth Banks fans, as well as lookalike remarketing audiences. Surprisingly, the most responsive audiences were millennial men — nearly three times more than millennial women — who were watching the ads from their phone or mobile device. Overall, we were able to optimize for high views and impressions for an extremely low cost-per-view, and nearly half of all viewers were watching the ad all the way through (100% view-through-rate (VTR)).
As most people clicking-through or navigating to the campaign landing page wouldn’t be brand-aware, we had to quickly immerse visitors the brand’s story, who Marian is, Elizabeth Banks’s connection, and the core values that set Archer Roose apart from its competitors — all while driving them to purchase cans of wine. We approached the user experience and design of the page with a mobile-first lens, so they could dive as deeply as they wanted to, while being able to quickly peruse varietals and skim content.
The landing page went through several iterations as we ran conversion rate optimization (CRO) tests on its content and layout, and monitored heat maps to better understand users’ behavior while on-page. Optimizations included things like reducing page length to increase scroll depth, moving CTA buttons, and letting visitors choose to watch the full video or to get directly to the wine. Careful experience refinements like these increased purchase call-to-action button clicks by 85%.
The “Uninvited Guest” campaign launched Archer Roose into the spotlight, drove brand awareness and was the most successful advertising campaign the brand had run to date.
