LA MER
La Mer ran Facebook ads to raise awareness about its partnership with GreenWave, a nonprofit focused on regenerative aquaculture, and achieved a 1.4-point lift in how consumers rate the skincare brand’s “commitment to ocean conservation.”
La Mer is a luxury skincare brand. One of its skincare cream’s integral ingredients is sea kelp. Because of this connection with the sea, the brand created the La Mer Blue Heart Oceans Fund, which provides charitable donations to protect marine habitats and support ocean conservation.
lift in how consumers rate La Mer in terms of “commitment to ocean conservation”
lift in ad recall for La Mer Blue Heart Ocean Fund among people aged 35–44
increase in landing page visits (Blue Heart Oceans Fund) year over year (2021 versus 2020)
La Mer wanted to drive higher insight into the brand’s association with ocean conservation, raise awareness of its partnership with the nonprofit organization GreenWave and encourage more people to become involved in ocean conservation.
THE SOLUTION
Showcasing a partnership
La Mer runs a campaign to boost awareness of its Blue Heart Oceans Fund every year on World Ocean’s Day and invites consumers to “join them.” This year the team decided to test a campaign with a more defined, actionable goal.
Since sea kelp is an integral ingredient in its skincare products, La Mer chose to showcase its partnership with GreenWave—a non-profit organization dedicated to developing regenerative kelp farming techniques—for this new campaign.
To understand how the new strategy performed compared to the old, the team built a split test. In cell one, La Mer ran its business-as-usual campaign focused on its special edition Blue Heart jar along with messaging encouraging people to make a product purchase to support the Blue Heart Oceans Fund. In cell two, the team ran the same campaign as in cell one, plus new ads showcasing GreenWave’s kelp regeneration initiatives along with a call to action to donate directly to GreenWave.
THE CREATIVE
Building immersive experiences
For the cell two content, La Mer channeled a variety of paid and organic media. For the paid media, the team ran Instagram and Facebook video ads as well as full-screen, immersive Instant Experiences, which brought the campaign to life. The ad creative showed ocean scenes and kelp farmers, along with text overlays such as: “Join our Mission.” These ads included “Learn More” or “Dive Deeper” buttons that enabled viewers to donate straight from the ad unit to help GreenWave’s Alaskan Native Kelp community.
La Mer showed these ads to US adults aged 18 and over, including those with an interest in beauty and sustainability, as well as to a lookalike audience with characteristics similar to its top recent customers and repeat customers. The team then re-engaged with the people who had viewed one of the video ads. La Mer delivered ads in Instagram feed, Instagram Stories, Facebook News Feed and Facebook Stories, and used campaign budget optimization to automatically distribute the budget across the best-performing ad sets in real time.
For the organic media, La Mer ran a Live fundraiser for GreenWave. This entailed using a countdown sticker beforehand to get people excited for the event, interviewing the GreenWave founder on a boat during the Live, and using the Facebook Social Good product suite, which includes fundraising tools and donation stickers to encourage more donations.
La Mer determined the results of the June 8‒30, 2021 ad campaign using a brand lift study, which revealed:
- 1.4-point lift in how consumers rate La Mer in terms of “commitment to ocean conservation”
- 10.8-point lift in ad recall for La Mer Blue Heart Ocean Fund among people aged 35–44
- 3X increase in landing page (Blue Heart Oceans Fund) visits in 2021 compared to 2020
- 3 million people reached
