I’m pretty sure I’ve missed the window on becoming a Crumbl fan. Just walking into one of their locations would probably lay me out for a week, thanks to a pernicious gluten intolerance I developed several years ago.
Which isn’t to say that I have no familiarity with the indulgent dessert brand founded in 2017. If you spend any amount of time on the internet, it’s pretty hard to escape that millennial pink, constantly rotating cookie menu.
Much of the brand’s success and growth can be attributed to social media, and mostly to organic user-generated content as opposed to sponsored posts, Crumbl Paid Media Specialist Giana Flores told me recently.
Despite knowing Crumbl’s social media reputation, I was still surprised to learn that Crumbl’s mobile app is responsible for over 50% of sales, in Flores’ estimate.
“People just convert more in our app than on the web,” Flores said.
That explains why the app is so often featured in the brand’s more acquisition-focused ad campaigns. And lately – stop me if you’ve heard this one before! – CTV has become a magnet for just those kinds of performance-based tactics.
C is for CTV
Crumbl first dipped its toes into programmatic ad buying a few years ago, working with The Trade Desk and various other managed service partners to reach their target audience of moms and families above a certain income level. (Another surprise to me, given all the media hand-wringing over the brand’s popularity among teen girls.)
One of those partners was Samsung Ads, which Crumbl worked with on a seven-week-long CTV acquisition campaign during Q4 last year – at Samsung’s suggestion, it turns out.
“We wanted to prove that our CTV solution is just as viable as a performance solution,” said Caryn Banchek, managing director of customer success and data insights at Samsung Ads.
Samsung Ads’ integration with AppsFlyer was especially appealing to Crumbl, because it allowed them to validate the attribution data on their own back end. Not a whole lot of other vendors are able to share that kind of data so transparently, according to Flores.
That data, by the way, definitely speaks for itself. A case study Samsung Ads published earlier this month revealed that Crumbl’s Q4 campaign resulted in over 16,000 app installs and at least five figures’ worth of revenue attributable to Samsung users.
Flores also shared that the campaign revealed a 23% conversion rate to purchase, slightly above their average social-based acquisition campaigns.
The ads performed so well that Samsung was able to lower the guaranteed CPI (cost per install) about halfway through the campaign, Flores shared.
Trusting the tech
Of course, “it doesn’t hurt to have really pretty pictures of cookies,” as Banchek pointed out.
Speaking of which, even if CTV and social perform in similar ways for Crumbl, the brand still had to change up its creative strategy a little bit for streaming television.
On the internet, Crumbl’s creative mostly revolves around keeping up with its rotating menu. Four new limited cookies are swapped out every single week. (It was more until January of this year, when the brand launched a permanent Classic Menu).
But on CTV, Crumbl is trying to stay more focused on the “long-term play,” said Flores –meaning a more deliberate focus on evergreen messaging that will stay relevant for longer periods of time. Although, yes, that sometimes includes incorporating seasonal ads, which the brand did for Halloween and Thanksgiving during its Samsung campaign.
Although Samsung’s performance data validated to Crumbl that their evergreen content strategy was working, the platform’s optimization tools also allowed the brand to build off what was already converting when they pivoted to new time-sensitive creative, said Banchek.
“It’s been great to really trust the tech, versus hands-on-keyboard media plan changes,” Banchek added.
