The Brief: eBay wanted to test how to drive consideration with inactive buyers, by showing the human face of real eBay sellers. The challenge was to develop a production approach that would allow us to test and optimise content based on its Facebook performance, whilst maintaining a consistent creative treatment throughout the series.
The Solution: The Smalls assembled a team of six filmmakers for a six week period, and a social/ paid media strategist for the duration of the campaign. We researched eBay’s audience and sellers, developed a creative treatment, cast top sellers with compelling stories and then shot 60 sec mini-documentaries.
We then used facial coding and retinal tracking to test the emotional impact of each video. Any changes were then made to the videos based on the results before releasing them on Facebook. The results on Facebook were monitored closely for further social and paid media optimisation that then fed into the next batch of videos.
- The content gained over 580k views with 35% of those converting into 10sec (or valuable) views
- Drove over 60K clicks through to shop for products, thats over 10% of views converting to click-through
- Drove over 640k engagements*
- All films drove positive consideration of eBay amongst inactive users (average + 27% - based on facial coding and retinal tracking data)
- Each piece of content out-performed the last, proving our testing and optimisation media spend and creative approach framework a success
- Lastly, eBay's global social team claimed they had "never seen a click-through rate over 1% on any Facebook ad", we started at 1.5% and lifted it to 3.2% during our final round of content.
This project was an exercise in flexible content creation and media spend strategy, truly analysing and optimising at every step of the campign.
*As defined by Facebook
