After two years of the pandemic and working from home, people were burnt out. Hustle culture and its "sleep when you're dead" mantra were out and quiet quitting was in. People were reprioritizing self care and now talked about how much they'd slept the same way they used to talk about how much they worked.

Casper, a mattress company, founded on the love of sleep, saw this cultural shift as an opportunity to connect with consumers in a new way. They'd once revolutionized the mattress industry with their D2C bed in a box but with so many new competitors pouring into the space they'd created, they were getting lost in the crowd.

They wanted to regain their reputation as an industry disruptor with a campaign that would cut through culture and get the attention of the press. Our goal was to get people talking about Casper in a major way.

We created social content around the idea of doing less and sleeping more,

including a post of someone sleeping in a Casper store. It went viral and became Casper's top performing TikTok of all time, garnering millions of views. Hundreds of comments piled in with people asking us if being paid to sleep was a real job. So we made it one.

We created an entire campaign promoting the role - and the idea of being paid to sleep. The campaign emphasized Casper's core brand value that good sleep has value

We created social content promoting the role across all Casper social channels including an official LinkedIn job posting. This content along with out OOH ads and in-store promotions and job interviews really got people talking.

We got nearly 3000 applications, eventually hiring two Casper Sleepers. They became official Casper employees, really sleeping on Casper Mattresses in-store and around NYC.

We use a micro cohort targeting approach, targeting multiple very specific

groups of overlapping psychographics. For example:

- City dwellers with young kids, debating whether they should keep their job & buy their first home or rethink their relationship with work.

- Recent college grads living with their parents and looking for their first job in a remote world. They don’t believe that working hard for someone else equals success.

- Middle management professionals who are burnt out, questioning their careers and shifting their focus towards self-care.

We tailor social creative to each cohort then use quant and qual analysis to see what content performs well enough to be amplified and tested across multiple cohorts.

Eventually idea of being paid to sleep emerged, then exploded across all cohorts. This process allowed us to put a campaign out into the world that we knew would resonate on a large scale.

07/08/22

Organic TikTok post of someone sleeping in the Casper store goes live.

07/10/22

Post has over a million views and counting and hundreds of comments.

07/11/22-07/31/22

Team mines social comments, CM's & creates follow up social comments to learn more. A strong theme emerges. We need to create a job.

Agency pitches Casper Sleepers to clients who love it and give it full sign off. Coordinate with the lawyers & HR to create the role.

Agency creators go to the Casper stores to hold live mock interviews and generate buzz & create more content.

08/01/22

Casper Sleepers job posting goes live on Linked-In (in-feed):

Boosted LiveStream event ad for sleepers application (driving to casper.com)

DOOH ads go live around NYC driving to casper.com job posting

08/25/22

Casper Sleepers Hired.

09/07/22

Casper Sleepers Start Sleeping in-stores up to 20 hours a week

9/31/22

Casper Sleepers NYC OOH Sleeping Stunt

- 100% increase in search for Casper immediately following the campaign

- 135 million organic social impressions

- 6.5 billion total impressions

- 25% increase in organic site traffic

- 94% reduction in cost per lead

- +590% clickthrough rate

- 8M in earned media

Our clients asked us to do something that would get people talking about Casper and engaging with the brand. They wanted a ton of organic press and they got it. Everyone from CNN to The Wall Street Journal to Stephen Colbert was talking about Casper Sleepers. None of these articles or features were paid placements. People heard about the campaign, liked it, wrote about it, talked about it and shared it with their friends. The campaign sentiment was hugely positive with people talking about and engaging with Casper like never before.