Marketing Campaign Evaluation

2022's Come and Say G'day campaign from Tourism Australia was a big success. Testing from System1 rated the work in the top 1% of all campaigns tested. Consumers that recalled the ads had a 15pt increase in awareness and consideration. And in the target countries were the campaign ran consideration gains and share of search increased significantly versus the other markets. International tourism spend in Australia now significantly exceeds pre-Covid levels and will land about $7 billion ahead of target this year. No wonder the work won five Effies. But that's a problem for Susan Coghill the CMO. She is a scholar of advertising effectiveness. You can see it in her work. Emotion. Codification. And maintaining the same campaign for years to ensure it has time to work. Most marketers pull campaigns and replace them long before they can have their maximal impact. Susan knows better. Again the data confirms she is right. After two years the same creative tested just as well (in the UK) and actually improved over time in the US. So why change it? Winning ads stay winning ads for a very long time. They usually improve. Why not save creative costs and keep running the same work? Why take the risk? It's here that Coghill makes some interesting points. First, she does not disagree with 'baking your cakes for longer'. Three years of the same creative is an eternity in the tourism and travel category and contrasts with Tourism Australia's former approach of a new campaign each and every year. It's also not a new campaign. Again, unlike less well trained marketers, Coghill is not throwing the consistency bathwater out with the new baby creative. She bills this work as 'Chapter 2'. Same codes, same theme, same fluent device. Fresh but familiar. New campaigns, especially extensions, eventually make sense. The whole media caravan that surrounds new work and launching can positively impact the market. This new work also keeps internal customers, retail partners and employees happy and invested. And finally, as effectiveness scholars there is the tempting ability to apply all the learnings from the first campaign to its second chapter. In the case of Come and Say G'Day II - the realisation that the creative will work better if local stars from China, Japan, America, UK, India and US are featured in each country's messaging - see the amalgam of the new work above. I guess the point is that most brands should maintain their campaigns for much longer than they do. Two or more years makes effectiveness sense and contrasts with the creative myopia of 95% of the industry. But after 3 years there is a case to be made for new work, providing it follows in the footsteps of what preceded it and builds from the lessons and limitations of the earlier work. So new cakes do eventually make sense. But only after the old ones have been baked for long enough. And provided today's gateau looks a lot like 2022's pavlova.  #advertising  #branding  #3yearoldpavlova

FIFA received 500 million ticket requests for the 2026 World Cup. Thousands of seats are currently unsold. Those two facts are not contradictory - they are the inevitable outcome of dynamic pricing that mistook demand signals for willingness to pay. The gap between expressing interest in a ticket and paying $33,000 for one is not a demand gap. It is a pricing gap. FIFA confused the volume of interest at any price with the volume of buyers at its chosen price points. The India and China media rights crisis is the same dynamic at a different scale. JioStar offered $20M against a $100M ask. CCTV offered the equivalent of $80M against a $250M demand. In both cases, FIFA priced against a demand signal that did not account for the commercial reality of the specific market. Aggressive dynamic pricing works when the product is genuinely scarce relative to the price-inelastic portion of demand. For a World Cup with 48 teams, 104 matches, and 3 host countries, the scarcity thesis was weaker than FIFA's pricing model assumed. The ticketing situation and the broadcast rights crisis are the same story. FIFA is the last major sports property that still believes its own demand narrative more than the market does. #sportsbusiness #sportsinvesting #sportscapital #sportsinfrastructure

Over the last 6 months at Triangle, we’ve reviewed the performance of dozens of our Executive and Founder LinkedIn posts across all sectors. We pulled together reach, engagement, and story-type metrics, and three consistent patterns emerged. (1) Cultural hooks drive visibility. Posts that lead with a recognisable figure or big event attract high impressions. By tying in to these topics, you get broad distribution and big numbers. Then insert your idea, offer, company within this. Example: A tech leader building in the AI space opened with “Mark Zuckerberg wanted to buy Google.” The post reached 3.2M impressions. (2) Use proof points to build credibility. Executive posts that point to a real outcome (a campaign delivered, a deal closed, a client story) bump engagement rates significantly. Fewer eyeballs, but more meaningful interaction. That’s the kind of peer-recognition that moves you from “someone who talks” to “someone you want to buy from.” Example: A founder of a UK-based speaker bureau shared that they booked an Olympic gold medalist for a client. The post generated 26k impressions with 15 qualified MQLs. (3) Personal narrative and spotlighting others deepen the connection to your readers. When executives share a lived experience, like hardship, change, lessons learnt or they deliberately make someone else the hero, engagement spikes. You build trust at scale and deepen the connection with your audience. Example: A founder reflecting on 8 years of building their company reached 3.7k impressions with 1.57% engagement. Another spotlighting a client’s book launch hit 2.5k impressions and achieved 5.86% engagement. Actions you can take • Use a mix of formats rather than a single style. • Use a cultural hook when you need to amplify reach. • Use proof posts when you want to underpin your capability. • Use personal stories when you want to humanise your brand and deepen trust. • Track not just impressions but meaningful engagement: comments from peers, ICP engagement, follow-ups, profile views, DMs initiated. The difference between executives who get seen or not – is down to having a system in place. At Triangle, we build that system. Turning your ideas, proof points, and stories into a consistent flow of credibility, reach, and opportunity.

There’s a specific moment in any product launch when you can tell if a team is truly confident. It’s not the first ad. The first ad is courage. Anyone can do that once. It’s when they do it again. A week ago, REDMI published a comparative print ad. Performance benchmarks. Four phones. Numbers laid bare. REDMI at the top. Bold move. The kind of move that makes people stop scrolling and actually pay attention. The response from the market was loud. Consumers loved seeing a brand back its product with actual proof instead of lifestyle storytelling and vague promises. Today, June 9, REDMI did it again. Same format. Same confidence. Same willingness to let the numbers speak. This time, battery and charging speed. And here’s what that tells me: They’re not worried. You don’t run two comparative ads in two weeks if you’re hedging your bets. You do it when you know exactly what you’ve built and you’re not afraid of the comparison. This isn’t a launch strategy. This is a belief system. I see this same pattern in the companies I work with through my training programs. The ones who genuinely transform their teams aren’t the ones who talk the most about transformation. They’re the ones willing to put their results next to anyone else’s. They benchmark. They compare. They prove. Because when you have something real, comparison becomes your strongest selling tool. What REDMI is doing with the Turbo 5 feels different from the typical smartphone launch playbook. No celebrity endorsements. No “lifestyle” cinematography. No aspirational narrative about what your phone will help you become. Just: Here’s what we built. Here’s how it compares. Here’s the data. You decide. And the market is responding to that differently. I can see it in the comments. People are genuinely excited, not because of marketing, but because a brand finally trusted them enough to show them the truth. Two bold comparative ads in two weeks isn’t a coincidence. It’s a statement about momentum. REDMI is going all in. And from where I’m sitting, watching people light up about a phone for the right reasons, because it actually works, that kind of energy is rare. This is how you build something that lasts. Not with the loudest voice. With the most honest one. #brandcollab

When user acquisition teams optimize for average acquisition costs, they often engage in volatility washing—smoothing out high-variance acquisition metrics to achieve a static target without accounting for the fact that some proportion of their spend has been wasted. While this can't necessarily be controlled with automated tools like PMax and Advantage+ -- which I've written about extensively -- it's often completely ignored on other channels when only the average CPA over a period of time is considered with respect to performance. However, marginal CPA is more relevant than average CPA, especially over an extended timeline (e.g., monthly), and teams neglect it at their peril. An interesting thought experiment: if you knew that every dollar spent on user acquisition for the remainder of the month would be unprofitable given that marginal CPA exceeds product LTV, but the month would nonetheless appear profitable on an average basis, would you continue to invest in user acquisition?

Everyone in beauty tells you not to launch a new product during Black Friday. Apparently, it’s “bad for business.” That’s not quite how things played out for us. The traditional playbook is simple: Launch at full price, collect the early adopters, discount months later. But indē wild has always been about reinventing tradition. So we launched one of our biggest products to date, the Champi Slick Stick, on Day 1 of our Wild Friday Sale. Any guesses on how that went? It became our biggest single product launch of the year. We sold out and had to reorder stock in the same week, and the product wasn’t even discounted. Which brings me back to this week. Launching a new product inside our biggest sale of the year isn’t usually the most finance-friendly decision, simply because this is when most brands push their existing catalogue, not debut new ones. But this was the product our community asked for in almost every support-group call. For a brand that’s built on listening, ignoring real demand, especially when it’s this loud, could end up being worse for the business. Black Friday is our annual stress test as a small team. Marketing, operations, supply chain, CX, everything gets pushed to its limit. And the team somehow still delivers, with good humour, which I’m told is crucial. In beauty, margins matter, but so does meeting people where they actually are. This week is our attempt to do both. Up to 35% off everything on the website, plus a few extra surprises that will appear straight in your cart. So if you’ve been waiting to try indē wild, or to restock, this is the moment where the economics work entirely in your favour rather than ours, and that’s intentional.

LinkedIn is now breaking down where your content views actually come from. 📊 The platform has rolled out new metrics that show how many impressions come from within your network (followers and connections) versus outside of it (people discovering your content through the Feed, recommendations, reshares, and Search). You can find this breakdown in the Discovery section under Impressions. Why this matters: Impressions alone have always been a blunt metric. Two posts can generate the same reach, but one might be reinforcing existing relationships while the other is reaching entirely new audiences. These new insights help clarify where your visibility is actually coming from, which is especially important because success on LinkedIn isn’t one-size-fits-all. 🤝 For relationship-driven users: In-network reach may matter more, since you’re strengthening existing connections and credibility. 🎯 For creators and thought leaders: Out-of-network reach is a key signal that your content is breaking into new audiences and expanding your influence. By understanding which topics and formats perform within your network versus beyond it, you can make more intentional decisions about your content strategy. This is part of LinkedIn’s broader push to expand post-level analytics, following updates like visibility into saves, shares via message, and post-driven profile visits and follower growth. And with more brand-creator partnerships happening on the platform, these signals also give marketers a clearer view into how creators perform beyond just surface-level impressions. Anyone noticing any early patterns in their in-network vs out-of-network reach yet?

Are You Spending Too Much to Acquire a Customer, Or Not Enough? E-commerce brands often focus on lowering their customer acquisition costs (CAC). But what if cutting CAC is actually hurting growth? The real question isn’t just how much does it cost to acquire a customer? It’s how much should you be spending? If you knew with certainty that a customer would generate $500 in long-term profit, would you hesitate to spend $100 to acquire them? Probably not. But many brands take a one-size-fits-all approach, capping CAC at an arbitrary percentage of their first purchase revenue. This can lead to underinvestment in acquiring high-value customers and overinvestment in customers who won’t stick around. A better approach is to align CAC with long-term customer equity, not just at a blended level, but dynamically across customer segments. Some customers have significantly greater revenue potential than others. The challenge is identifying which customers will create sustainable profitability over time. The chart illustrates that customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV) are not linear, spending more on acquisition can lead to higher-value customers, but only up to a certain point. Key Insights: There is an optimal CAC range. - Spending too little on CAC (left side of the chart) may result in acquiring lower-value customers, limiting long-term profitability. - Spending too much (right side of the chart) can lead to diminishing returns, where LTV does not justify the extra spend.   The breakeven threshold matters. - The red dashed line represents where CAC = LTV, meaning any spend above this line is unprofitable unless justified by strategic goals (e.g., market share growth). Smarter spending, not just lower spending, drives profitability. - Many brands mistakenly focus only on reducing CAC, but the real goal is to align CAC with future LTV dynamically across customer segments. What This Means for Retailers Instead of asking, “How much does it cost to acquire a customer?”, the real question is: - How much should we spend to acquire the right customers? - How long will it take to break even on acquisition costs? - Which acquisition channels and products lead to the highest-value customers? Retailers who leverage AI-driven insights to align CAC with future Customer Equity, not just at a blended level but dynamically across customer segments, can spend smarter, scale faster, and drive long-term profitability. If you want to go deeper on this topic, Professor Peter Fader has done extensive research on customer-centric growth strategies. Check out this fascinating podcast with Nick Hague on how businesses can take a more data-driven approach to optimizing CAC. https://lnkd.in/eGu5EM5g #CustomerAcquisition #EcommerceGrowth #MarketingStrategy #CustomerEquity #GrowthMarketing #CACvsLTV #RetailStrategy #Profitability #WGBTpodcast

We just built a Claude skill that scans 227 demographic segments across a LinkedIn Ad account and tells you exactly where your budget is working and where it's being wasted. Takes about 90 seconds. Used to take our team at least 1 hour per client for each run. Here's what it actually does: It pulls every demographic facet LinkedIn tracks (geo, function, seniority, industry, company size, company name) and cross-references impressions, CTR, and conversions across all of them. Then it sorts every segment into three buckets: 1. Top Performers. High conversion rate segments you should be scaling into. These are your PRIORITIZE moves. The segments where real pipeline is coming from, not just clicks. In this example... CXO seniority is converting at 2.37%. CEOs at 2.74%. Canada as a geo is outperforming at 2.80% conversion rate. Business Development function is driving the most raw conversions at 66. Each one gets a specific recommendation. Not "looks good keep going." Actual next steps like "dedicated campaign candidate" or "best converting geo, scale." 2. Hidden Gems. High CTR segments with low volume that deserve dedicated creative testing. These are segments the algorithm is burying because they're small, but the engagement signal is screaming. GrowthMentor community: 0.976% CTR. RevGenius community: 0.927% CTR. Both with tiny impression volume because they're niche. Both worth testing with dedicated creative and budget. You'd NEVER catch these manually scrolling through Campaign Manager. 3. Budget Wasters. High impression share, zero conversions. These are your EXCLUDE moves. San Francisco County: 118K impressions. 0.196% CTR. Zero conversions. That's 3.17% of total impressions going to a geo that produces nothing. France, Spain, Alameda County... same story. Impressions burning, nothing converting. Immediate exclusion candidates. This is one of about 40 skills we've built for our account teams. Every skill answers one specific question. Not a dashboard. Not a generic "how's my account doing" report. One question, one answer, one set of actions. LinkedIn and tools like DemandSense give you the raw data. AI is helping speed up the process of turning it into decisions because it's then also based on our years of knowledge, frameworks, and playbooks. The agencies and teams that build these systems first will operate at a speed and precision that manual account management can't touch.

The One Metric I Trust Most on LinkedIn Over three years on LinkedIn, I’ve tracked every community metric I could: week to week, month to month, year over year. I’ve analyzed trends, looked for forward vs. lagging indicators, and tried to understand what truly drives growth. At first, I focused on top-line metrics - like impressions. Then engagements. But the best predictor of long-term success - the one metric I now trust most - is something few people even check: Members Reached (formerly Unique Impressions). If you go into your post analytics, LinkedIn shows you not just impressions but how many unique people saw your content. And I’ve found that growth in this number is the strongest signal that I’m on the right path. Why? Engagements fluctuate. A viral post, a trending topic, or a high-emotion moment can skew the numbers. Many people who value my content don’t engage. Senior professionals, in particular, often prefer to observe rather than publicly interact. Some folks just, increasingly, value anonymity and will discuss seeing my posts but never engage. Members Reached can’t be hidden. Unlike engagements, which depend on visible likes or comments, this metric quietly tracks how many real people are seeing what you share. Metrics should never drive your content - you should create what matters to you. But if you’re looking for a true measure of reach and impact, start paying attention to Members Reached. For me, it’s been the clearest predictor of whether the community will grow - or not - down the road.