merit
Hatch is a sleep wellness brand known for its smart devices that help babies and toddlers sleep. When Hatch came to us in late 2023, they were facing a conundrum: Their brand messaging advertising had been failing to drive the results they aspired to, while their performance marketing was not cutting through culturally, and as such was beginning to blend into the countless sleep health and wellness products constantly served up on Instagram and TikTok. We worked closely with their in-house creative team to develop and execute a Cultural Performance Marketing strategy-- an approach that blends cultural insights with performance marketing techniques.
Our goal was to develop a template for simultaneously driving results while claiming cultural leadership of one's category.
In our research, we identified an emerging cultural culprit: late night screen culture. Our target's noctural media binges were creating a modern sleep crisis. But what if we could turn the moments of our wakefulness into gateways to better sleep? This pointed to an innovative media strategy that leant itself to problem-solution advertising: Reach the sleep-deprived right in the heart of their night-time rituals.
We used a combination of qualitative and quantitative techniques to map out culturally relevant tension points. The idea was to intervene in each with a targeted message. We gave these names: autoplay all-nighters; over-texting boss bombardments, reality TV rampages, house hunting hypnoses, "parent brain" safety searches. Hatch could speak to the universal experience of the sleep crisis by highlighting all of the specific ways life prevents good sleep.
Keying in on this cultural tension also helped us overcome production limitations, as we leaned into precise cultural storytelling rather than flashy visuals. Alongside Hatch’s creative team, we produced 29 videos over the course of two weeks, with a wide range of options for optimization. Our media buy focused on channels that served as ground zero for the modern sleep crisis: Instagram, TikTok and streamers. As a result, stories about doom scrolling, gut health creators and reality TV binges would reach consumers where it mattered most: while they were engaged in the thing itself.
The campaign performed at over 6x the rate of the youtube average, achieving a clickthrough rate of 4% versus the youtube ads average of 0.65%. It helped Hatch expand from the baby market to the larger adult market, and become the leading brand in its category. And it established a model at Hatch for growing via performance marketing while simultaneously positioning its brand as culture-leading.
N/A
N/A
