Nectar is the world’s fastest growing online mattress business. It offers affordable prices, excellent comfort, home delivery, a 365-night trial and forever warranty.

In the past, Nectar relied heavily on Search to acquire new users but the US online mattress market was increasingly competitive. To stand out and drive sales, a new approach was required: Nectar’s first ever video campaign. Being an extremely performance and data-driven business, we applied a data-oriented approach to this creative medium.

We undertook extensive research and analysis to understand how best to address the key target audience: US 25-44 year olds in major cities, who are active online, and likely to compare different mattress brands before purchase.

The primary goal was to drive sales, and the campaign had to be memorable and engaging to keep the brand front of mind as people research online, to later drive them to purchase on the Nectar website.

Our insights impacted and supercharged the creative output. The ad featured a funny animated brain interacting with the presenter, to visually convey that wonderful feeling after a great night’s sleep, and to explain the common side effects that result from a lack of sleep. The animated brain appeared at the start, a strong hook, critical for digital video, to keep users from skipping. This striking visual also helped to differentiate our campaign and brand from the competitors.

Building on this, we explored the idea that world leaders don’t get enough sleep. When Trump, Kim and Putin were making news headlines, our campaign dared to imagine if world peace could be achieved...through sleep! We animated the sleep deprived brains of these world leaders to amuse and engage users with the topical content and emphasize our message: the transformative power of sleep.

Then to close the sale, we conveyed a series of messages relating to the ease of purchase, knowing from our data that this was a critical pain point to address. We used humor for emphasis: “you don’t even need to tip the guy” who delivers to your house, “it’s so easy you could do it (order) in your sleep”

We gathered data from a range of sources including quantitative data from a consumer survey of 1000 people who had purchased a mattress in the last year, official public data and sleep statistics from the American CDC, and YouTube view data for sleep related content. We also conducted a qualitative analysis of 500+ 4 and 5 star Nectar user reviews and a creative analysis of competitors ad campaigns on YouTube. We reviewed all the data sources, referring back to the brief, and discussing the findings with Nectar and the creative team in order to identify the strongest insights for the creative.

We also analyzed the most searched for and best performing keywords, based on historic performance for Nectar’s SEO activities as well as industry-wide trends. We then grouped the top 100s of keywords into several themes, and used this to inform our media targeting. We specifically targeted users who searched for these words on Google.com, thereby serving our creative to the most relevant, high intent users, for whom our messages would appeal. We then employed a data-driven strategy for optimizing the campaign, by AB testing different versions of the creative and targeting to see what performed best.

After extensive research and analysis, we understood that Americans are obsessed with how to get a great night sleep, and that sleep related concerns are the number 1 trigger for buying a new mattress.

While Nectar’s competitors all focus on the product, the mattress, our idea was to focus instead on great sleep. We featured a funny animated brain interacting with the presenter, to visually convey that wonderful feeling after a great night’s sleep, and to explain the common side effects that result from a lack of sleep. And we explored the idea that world leaders don’t get enough sleep. When Trump and Kim were making news headlines, our campaign featured animated versions of these politicians’ brains and dared to imagine if world peace could be achieved...through sleep!

The results were phenomenal. Our campaign (consisting of 6 different creative versions and lengths) led to 190% ad recall lift, 95% brand awareness lift, and 382% brand Search lift. The huge and direct impact on sales fuelled the growth of our entire business. The campaign achieved a lower cost-per-sale than Search, making YouTube a key, strategic acquisition channel for our business.

Our data-backed approach to testing allowed us to quickly optimize and scale. For example we saw that the longer creative lengths lowered the cost per add-to-cart and drove incredible engagement from the audience.

In less than 1 year online, the 02:26 length has over 13.7 million views on YouTube, over 1000 comments, and a 91% like ratio. “I was about to skip the ad but then I saw this tiny brain” has 300+ likes and is just one of hundreds of comments about the sleep related ad content. Average view time cross-device was very high at 96 seconds (2/3 ad). In YouTube Analytics, we see that users even clicked back to re-watch the part with Trump and Kim Jong Un, and searched on YouTube for the title ‘Make America Sleep Again’