IDUS
When this online handcrafted products marketplace featured its own sellers as influencer for a unique branded content ads campaign on Instagram, it increased app installs by 23% compared to ads with professional influencers.

The largest online platform to purchase handmade goods in South Korea, idus is used by more than 19,000 artists who sell their products via its ecommerce app. The marketplace prides itself on the unique, personalized handicrafts it sells, as well as the artists who create them.
increase in app installs
decrease in cost per install
decrease in cost per completed registration
To save time and boost productivity, idus wanted to find a more efficient way to produce ad creative. It also wanted to drive more app installs. To do this, the company decided to test running branded content ads and partner with the artists who sell items on its platform.

For this campaign, idus wanted to compare the performance of two different branded content ad strategies: one campaign featuring their sellers and another campaign featuring professional influencers. idus provided the sellers and influencers with Facebook’s best practices for ad creative and guidelines for the call to action, and then gave them free reign to design the creative assets.
The campaign included various ad formats so that the sellers and professional influencers could use either images or videos. All video assets were optimized as mobile-first creative in a square format, with a maximum runtime of 15 seconds and with the idus logo prominently featured. While the sellers and influencers were asked to write the captions in their own voice and style, the content was geared towards emphasizing the benefits of installing the app.
The campaign was broadly targeted to men and women over the age of 15, and used automatic placements and campaign budget optimization to make its budget most cost-effective. When idus compared the results of branded content ads that used artists as influencers with a campaign that featured professional influencers, it found that the ads created by the sellers drove better results over two weeks in June 2020:
23% increase in app installs
19% decrease in cost per install
32% decrease in cost per completed registration