Creative content with a 185% ROI

In a crowded fashion retail market, how could Very, one of the UK's biggest multi-category retailers achieve standout and drive sales amidst a content-fatigued audience?

To achieve cut-through and engagement, curate Very's extensive product offering and convert this key audience to purchase before attention lapsed, our challenge was multi-faceted.

The Insight

Millennials are a generation that are disrupting the status quo. Unafraid to break away from the norm, they are eager to explore new trends that reflect their individual style.

The Big Idea

We identified a pivotal segment of millennial shoppers - fashion 'rule-breakers' who are admired by their own peer group and seen as fashion inspiration by their friends.

Combining the force of two of our flagship brands: Cosmopolitan with it's young, highly engaged millennial audience and ELLE, with its fashion credibility, we brought to life a unique 'rule-breakers' campaign.

By inspiring and challenging our audience to step out of their fashion comfort zone and celebrate their individuality, we aligned Very with uplifting and empowering content. From editors trialling catwalk trends IRL to profile pieces of our favourite rule-breaking influencers, all our content showcased the transformational power of fashion.

Yet we needed to ensure the inspiration we sparked could be actioned before our audience's attention moved to something else and the window for purchase was lost. Therefore we created this campaign with e-commerce in mind and made it shoppable throughout.

We were the first UK test partners for Facebook's custom conversion sharing test between an advertiser and a publisher. This meant we accurately tracked user purchases specifically driven by the campaign over a two-week period.

The outcome was overwhelmingly positive, driving a  185% return on social advertising spend. 

This fully shoppable campaign included articles with embedded product galleries, fashion challenge videos, interactive canvases, shoppable carousels, collection and snap ads.

The strongest performing content was our, ‘4 Women Wear The One Thing They’ve Been Told They Can’t’ article which drove an Engaged View Rate (EVR) of 78%, making it the most engaged with commercial article on ELLE in 2018.