Three months of rising customer acquisition costs.
That was the challenge facing this beverage brand (and no, it’s not Pepsi!)
Their ads were polished and on-brand, but that was part of the problem.
While aesthetically pleasing, they didn’t connect with their ideal audience—women 45+—in an authentic way.
The messaging felt too corporate, too staged.
Meanwhile, the only content that had consistently performed well was customer-generated content (CGC), but we were stuck in a cycle: not enough customers were submitting content, and the only CGC available was static images.
But not videos.
We knew what worked.
We had months of testing proving which angles drove the most engagement and purchases. The problem?
We didn’t have a scalable way to get more of this winning content in different, more engaging formats.
Instead of waiting for more organic customer submissions, we took a proactive approach.
And that’s when everything changed.
I enlisted the help of a content creator to replicate the raw, unfiltered feel of customer-generated content—but this time, in video format.
Instead of polished, studio-quality ads, we asked the creator to shoot her footage as if she were a real customer sharing her experience on social media. The goal was simple: make the ad feel native to the platforms where our audience was scrolling. No flashy edits, no overproduction—just real, relatable content.
But we didn’t stop at just creating a single video.
We know that a video’s first three seconds are the most critical. It’s the difference between someone stopping to watch or swiping away. So, instead of betting on a single opening line, we crafted five different hooks to test against each other, all using neuroscientific tactics to trigger both attention and emotion.