The Casper Sleepers campaign started as a TikTok, evolved into an interactive conversation with consumers, then into a real job, and finally live interactive product demos on and offline. This campaign evolved in real time and was guided through every consumer touchpoint by consumers themselves. We listened to what people wanted and gave it to them in real time, elevating every way they interacted with the brand from in-store to social & digital to OOH. The Casper Sleepers campaign fueled brand love and engagement, elevating the customer journey by finding a new way for Casper to connect with consumers.

After two years of a 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 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 job position, 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 hrs 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

The campaign received a huge amount of organic press coverage. This was our most important result because this was our primary campaign objective and KPI.

Our clients asked us to do something that would get people talking about Casper on a large scale. They wanted a lot 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.

Work hard and you'll be rewarded with a better life was the definition of The American Dream. Hard work has historically been a very celebrated part of the country's cultural identity.

But in 2022, things were changing. There was a major cultural shift around the idea of working yourself to the bone. People were burnt out by hustle culture and no longer believed that working around the clock would pay off. They began prioritizing their health and wellbeing. Quiet quitting (doing the bare minimum at work) caught on along with a new focus on health & sleep. Slowly but surely, working less became the new working hard.