Acquired in 7 months
Jewel was an affiliate marketing service company, similar to Honey, that started their engagement with us in May of 2020. 7 months later they were acquired by Capital One. Was this because of our team? Who knows. But between May and December we worked restlessly on their paid and organic channels, constantly testing different creative in order to boost their engagements and signups.
Cash Back is King
After a successful foray of their organic channels in the beginning of May, Jewel started tapping us for additional work, specifically with the creation and management of their paid ads. While exciting, this was no easy task. Jewel was focusing on a niche luxury market, while at the same time trying to compete against Honey and Rakuten. So we got to work, brainstormed a few ideas to pitch to the client. We ended up deciding to go with 3 distinct product categories with two versions of copy to test. The first one included the language "Only shop ______ with Jewel" to suggest exclusivity. The second copy version we were testing was simply displaying the cashback percentage users would get for shopping that brand. You'll never guess which version won out...
That's right, the version with the cash back percentage on it worked so well that the client immediately ordered a second batch and wanted to run even more ads with more brands to see what was really going to stick with their target audience. This was terrific news, I immediately got to work on the next round to keep the ball rolling.
It felt like we hit a gold mine. Months into the engagement and the ads were still performing very well. We would swap out brands every now and then to keep things fresh, but for the most part the only thing we had to update was the Cash Back percentage since that would change every few weeks. Then suddenly and swiftly at the end of the summer, ad fatigue finally started to hit and we suddenly we desperately trying everything to get performance back up.
The Troubles
This is where things get....interesting. We started throwing spaghetti as the wall, trying out new brands, different color schemes, different copy. You name it, nothing was working. Finally someone came across a campaign ran by Wikibuy which essentially was spoofing the style of a clickbait article. And when I say click bait I mean clickbait, right down to the horribly amateur look of the ads. So we decided to give it a shot and directed the ad traffic to a blog post that was meant to look like an article. And....
Forgive me design gods
Forgive me design gods
Forgive me design gods
Forgive me design gods
Forgive me design gods
It worked surprisingly well! So well in fact, I almost tossed my design degree into the garbage because clearly it is meaningless. But nevertheless a sigh of relief as the client was finally happy and we were no longer scrambling. This was all working fine for a few months until the client wanted us to start updating the creative in time for their holiday push.
The Beginning of The End
If you read the beginning of this page, you should know that I already spoiled the fact that they ended up being bought out by Capital One in January, which unfortunately means we are starting the wrap up. The first holiday on the list was Black Friday and the client had big expectations. But there was a catch, Jewel doesn't actually do anything for Black Friday. Nothing. Zip. So the social team and I got into a brainstorm to drum up some ideas and ultimately landed on two directions for the copy. The first one was an ad simply saying "Black Friday 365" with the jewel logo.
The idea behind it was that Jewel had deals going on year round so it was always Black Friday. The second one was "Better Black Friday" where the post copy went into how you don't have to wait in line with Jewel. And...
They bombed so hard. Probably the worst performing ads I've made in my entire professional career. I've since vowed to NEVER make a Black Friday ad unless it has at minimum 10% off in the creative copy. C’est la vie, onto Chrsitmas.
Happy Holidays
I cant' say for sure, but if I had to guess, Jewel was already in the midst of their acquisition in the beginning of December because they were suddenly less involved in the concepts and just kind of let us make whatever we thought was best, with the only requirement being we had to follow their holiday branding. I got together with the social team and we came up with "A gift for them and a gift for you", With the underlying message being that using Jewel to buy Christmas gifts got you cash back.
I actually don't think I remember hearing how these ones performed since it was around the holidays. But the client liked how they looked and that's what matters! After this ad set finished running, things started to slow down primarily do to their acquisition. With a few projects given to us here and there until they finally ended with Capital One fully absorbing them into their organization, never to be seen or heard from again.
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