Content-driven Marketing Success Stories: How brands used celebrities in social media PSAs and advertising

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And get inspiration from this article’s case studies, focusing on the use of celebrities and impactful content in social media marketing.

First, we detail how a nonprofit organization achieved over 1 million views on Instagram by collaborating with a high-profile celebrity influencer and using emotionally resonant content. Then, we share a comedy club's strategy – leveraging preference-based targeting and content-based ads to increase its return on ad spend significantly.

Quick Case Study #1: How nonprofit got more than 1 million views on Instagram for its PSAs

The National Association for Children of Addiction (Nacoa) is a nonprofit in the UK.

APPROACH: Nonprofit collaborates with celebrity and industry professionals

As a nonprofit with a limited budget, collaboration – both with a TV personality and a production company – was key to Nacoa’s ability to get its message out.

The collaboration with Nacoa’s production company started after the production company’s team heard that government funding was cut for Nacoa’s services. “We started our relationship with Piers through LinkedIn, simply connecting, as I valued Nacoa’s mission and got to finding out more about Nacoa,” said Billy Southard-Woolf, Marketing Executive, Co-Producer & Editor, Synima (Nacoa’s video production company).

The company donated its time, expertise, and resources. “After meeting a handful of other companies, Quint [Boa] and Billy from Synima stood out by a mile as the strongest candidates to provide the space, technical skills, and understanding of the topic, to see the project through with aplomb,” said Piers Henriques, Director of Communications, Nacoa UK.

The charity has several high-profile patrons and ambassadors who can spread campaign awareness, and one of those patrons approached it with an idea to create a series of professionally produced videos in a documentary style reflecting on his journey since finding the charity.  “The series was centered around Calum Best (son of George Best) a Nacoa ambassador and a child of an alcoholic (COA),” Southard-Woolf said.

The team interspersed footage of Calum speaking with archival footage from his almost two decades involvement with the nonprofit. This allowed the viewer to compare the past with the present and see visually just how far not only Nacoa has come as an organization but how Calum has grown as an individual: his growth from blaming himself for his fathers’ actions to understanding the significant impact an alcoholic parent can have on a child’s upbringing.

For the footage of Calum speaking, the team wanted ‘to camera,’ primarily portrait framed, short videos that would have potential to score high numbers with social media algorithms. Stripped back visuals with Calum directly addressing the audience were used to convey his sincerity visually, as if the viewer was having a private conversation with him. The music chosen was ambient and contemplative to not distract from what he was saying but to still provide the necessary audible context to make his words pack more of a punch.

The videos focused on Calum’s triumph over adversity but put it into a context that doesn’t prescribe his journey to anyone watching. The videos seek to demonstrate and elevate his process of opening up, not a set of life hacks or a route map out.

This feeling was communicated through Calum’s style of speech as well – he had no concrete script and spoke from personal experience. Each question he answered revolved around a core message or theme:

• What is a child of an alcoholic?
• What does it mean to be reached out to as a concerned other?
• What does stigma do?
• What needs to change?

BEFORE: Text-based opening

On posting the first couple of clips, the team realized that text frames showing the questions were delaying precious early recognition of the TV personality to people scrolling through Instagram.

AFTER: Human opening (with subtitles)

The team trimmed all of the questions off, allowing the footage to catch attention from the first moment the video popped on their phone.

“We also noticed mid-way through the campaign that adding Instagram-generated subtitles significantly improved engagement, despite removing some of the high polish that the documentary-style material provided,” Henriques said. So the team ended up adding text supers to the videos, which required manually generating and editing the scripts.

Creative Sample #1: A frame from nonprofit’s Instagram Reels video showing text supers

STRATEGY: Budget-conscious filming

Since Nacoa is a charity, its budget was limited. So the main challenge was ensuring the series was impactful and qualitive yet stayed financially feasible.

The team did this by bulk-filming the entire series in one day in the video production company’s studio. The style across each episode of the series also remained consistent, since a creative pivot would result in more costs.

Animation was also used in a few episodes to anonymously convey the story of a COA. Animation allowed the viewer to imprint their own story onto the visuals. To make the animation cost effective, the team re-used styles from a previous project for Nacoa.

The nonprofit’s team directed which content to include and highlight when. “For example, Nacoa had an upcoming media push ahead of COA [Awareness] Week and thus directed one of the videos (scheduled to release in that week) to be more politically focused, calling upon the government and certain members of Parliament to act,” Southard-Woolf said.

RESULTS: Views and calls

The videos garnered over a million views online. Nacoa’s helpline received 33% more calls, many from first-time callers.

The videos were posted on both Nacoa’s and Calum’s Instagram accounts. “This was proven especially helpful as Calum has 1 million followers on Instagram, a good percentage of which are children interested in football and his father and thus could be suffering from alcoholic parents and not know who to turn to,” said Southard-Woolf.

Here's a breakdown of the results for the seven videos posted from September 15^th to October 24^th, 2023:

Nacoa Instagram:

• 100,600 views
• 3,124 likes
• 187 comments

Calum Best Instagram:

• 1,063,900 views
• 33,222 likes
• 1,858 comments

“We’ve had better overall responses and conversions from the Calum campaign than having all-day national coverage on BBC News outlets,” Henriques said. “The fact that they [Calum and George Best] both lived this issue in the public eye allows us to represent in hyper-bold terms the kinds of events that everyone going through this faces. Gathering and using B-roll footage of Calum at his father’s national funeral hits hard to someone who knows what it feels like to be putting on a brave face when it feels like the world is watching on.”

The lack of CTAs did hinder other objectives though. For example, in hindsight the team realized that could have added a call-to-action to ‘sign a petition’ to the video that focused on the UK government’s abolishment of funding. And while the team was pleased with the viewership and increased visibility and outreach, it’s still not entirely clear to them whether a campaign like this has a ‘donate now’ potential. The team felt that side of the campaign didn’t go so well.

But the charity’s patrons aren’t there to directly drive funding streams. They are there to help break the silence which leads to positive change over time. “In our case, as an entirely community-funded charity dealing with a widespread but highly hidden issue, those moments of noise lead to action and support in various forms. Our membership scheme is a huge part of how we are funded, and a large number of members will tell you when you ask ‘How did you find out about Nacoa?’, they will mention Calum Best, Vicky Pattison, or Jonathan Ashworth,” Henriques said.

Quick Case Study #2: How comedy club increased ROAS from less than 1 to 5x+ on Facebook and Instagram

The Creek and The Cave is a comedy club in Austin, Texas.

BEFORE: Minimal targeting, promotional ads

The comedy club’s ads on Facebook and Instagram consisted of a show poster and a caption. Targeting was minimal –  anyone in the area, ages 18-65. The campaigns were being optimized for views rather than ticket sales, and every campaign had a below 1 return on ad spend (ROAS). In other words, they were losing money on their advertising.

Creative Sample #2: Static Facebook ad for promoting comedy show

The team decided to hire a new agency.

“Unless you were already familiar with the comedian in the ad, you would have no clue their humor or what it might be like to see them at the Creek,” said Sam Kimelman, Creative Director + Founder, 8AM Creative (The Creek and The Cave’s new content studio and strategy agency).

AFTER: Preference-based targeting, content-based ads

The new team shifted most of the ad creative to video – clips of individual headliners and local shows. Rather than just seeing the performer’s face and name in a static ad, the audience could watch a whole joke.

Creative Sample #3: Instagram video ad for comedy show featuring a joke

Early ads had highly polished and professionally produced videos. They expressed the intended message and got good results. But the team noticed that campaigns using more amateurish clips provided by the performers tended to do even better. So the next round of creative had a more DIY feel, which likely felt more authentic and less ad-like.

The team also had to be mindful of the social media platform’s content standards. “The Meta algorithm cannot distinguish between a comedian riffing on Donald Trump and a genuine political ad, which they have a blanket ban on,” Kimelman said.

The team developed standards around how they select clips to turn into ads. If a comedian’s style is too blue or if limited available material leaves them no choice but to run an obscener bit, they censor the sensitive parts – hopefully without ruining the joke. And they turn lemons into lemonade, adding a CTA along the lines of ‘if you want to see the comedian in their full, uncensored glory, you need to get tickets.’

The most popular clips on social media – in ads and organically – are of comedians interacting with the audience in unrehearsed, impromptu dialogue. “When people go to a comedy show today, they are enticed by the possibility of becoming part of the act, by the possibility of showing up on that comic’s Instagram a week later,” Kimelman said.

Targeting for the ads was fine-tuned to reach fans of each performer’s style of comedy. If a comedian had a raunchy routine, the ads might target fans of Sarah Silverman, for example.

The initial audiences were built off six buyer profiles, assembled from a mix of qualitative info and some highly educated assumptions. After a month of A/B testing, the team identified two of those groups that performed best, which weren’t the groups they had expected.

“For example, I thought University of Texas students would be a prime demographic but that ad group got the worst results,” Kimelman said. Today, they have a target audience of college students from areas just outside of Austin and that performs better. “If I had to guess why that is, a $25 comedy ticket might not be a priority for a college student on a budget who wants to go downtown and party regularly. But if you’re making the effort to drive into Austin, a comedy show makes it a real destination event,” he said.

Along with campaigns for each show, the team also produced ongoing brand awareness campaigns. “We wanted to express that this could be their favorite bar that happens to have some of the funniest comedians you have and haven’t heard of,” he said.

Creative Sample #4: Instagram video ad for brand awareness

The team also tested different types of shows. “Just as a comedian can test their material at an open mic and gauge the response, we can try out new programming and let our sales data reveal the audience reaction,” said Chase Sterling, Co-owner, The Creek & The Cave. When they noticed that raunchier shows tend to sell better, they created a general awareness ad that mimics old late-night, adult hotline ads.

Creative Sample #5: General awareness ad on Instagram

RESULTS: Increased ROAS

“The Creek’s ticketing platform supports Meta’s conversion pixel so we can accurately track money spent vs. dollars coming in on ticket sales,” Kimelman said. A year after starting the new advertising approach, in August-October of 2022, the average ROAS was 5.31.

But that doesn’t include alcohol sales. So they regularly discuss which shows are providing that extra revenue and determine if that show should be advertised more heavily, even if ROAS suffers a bit to increase volume overall.

He sees the trend for live event advertising to be moving towards a focus on how the audience experiences the show and away from traditional, highly produced ads. “They’ll be replaced with iPhone recordings capturing ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ moments,” Kimelman said.

As for the future of celebrity-based live event businesses, the team built a podcast studio right in the venue along with its own production arm. “The future of live comedy is in furthering the connection between the in-person experience to the digital. Our long-term success depends on us being not just a stage, but a broader venue for new and established voices in the comedy scene,” Sterling said.

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