How Creator Ad Boosting Decreased Disney’s CPE 78.4% Below Benchmarks

The Objective

Moments like 100-year anniversaries don’t come around very often. For Disney, their ‘Disney 100: May Your Wishes Come True’ campaign was an opportunity to offer audiences magical experiences, content and collections under the theme of ‘wishing’.

To help gain maximum awareness of this historical moment, the Disney team partnered with TRIBE and our creator community to speak about the concept of ‘wishing’ through family-led, heartwarming content that would resonate with their target audience.

Having previously run successful organic campaigns via the TRIBE platform, Disney knew the power of organic creator marketing. However, to achieve the results they were looking for, they ran their first TRIBE Plus campaign and further partnered with TRIBE’s Media Buying team to amplify their message and drive further, cost-effective results.

The Solution: Targeting over 1M potential customers with the authentic storytelling of 3 Disney fans

Working closely with their TRIBE team, Disney cleverly developed a strategy to:

1. Run an organic campaign with family-focused Instagram creators to post content to audiences largely located in London, UK.
2. Boost the 3 best-performing posts as Partnership Ads to gain further reach, impressions and engagement.

By leaning into our TRIBE Plus solution, Disney could do the fun part, while our tech & team did the heavy lifting. From delivering custom cohorts of creators to optimising the brief, managing all creator comms, payments and scheduling while consistently feeding insights back to the Disney team. Ultimately, by strategically managing the campaign end-to-end, our holistic approach ensured the delivery of content that would perform in both organic and paid social.

First, the organic campaign. In the leadup to Christmas, creators were offered 4 creative angles to interpret through their unique style; 
1. A family Pamper night
2. Magical Christmas
3. Family moments with Disney decor
4. Nightmare Before Christmas

Dozens of creators Pitched their creative ideas with 5 chosen to shoot a Reel, a carousel of still images and a Story linking to featured products available to purchase on the Asda | George website - with additional messaging to drive customers to shop in-store and online.

While the paid campaign only called for 3 Reels, the advantage of running an organic campaign allowed Disney to generate multiple pieces of content in a variety of formats and effectively test what performed best organically, before investing more of their budget. 

To be ad-worthy, the content needed to be authentic, human and relatable, feature the product organically within the first 5 seconds while authentically telling a story of wish-making and the magic of Disney bringing families together at Christmas.

Once the top content was identified, the TRIBE Media Team focused on reaching a much larger audience of Millennial and Gen X parents based in the UK.  Importantly, instead of running the ads from Disney’s brand account, they gained the rights to boost the content as Creator Ads, a format known for outperforming brand-led ads.

Watch the 3 boosted Reels below:

The Results: Great organic results inform exceptional paid performance

Imagine launching ads with content you already knew your customers would love. That’s the superpower Disney unlocked by running an organic creator campaign with their sights set on generating boostable content.

The organic posts themselves achieved incredible reach, clocking up well over 200K impressions and a 36%+ impression rate, not to mention over 12,000 engagements including almost 700 positive comments. But, by identifying posts like @alpz_smith’s with a 25.39% engagement rate Disney went to market with content proven to resonate with a much larger segment of their target audience - one only reachable via boosting.

Once boosted, the true impact of the posts was revealed.

Over the 7-day paid media campaign, Disney racked up over 1.2 million impressions - with a CPM rate 5.9% lower than the industry average. As an awareness campaign, impressions and reach were the primary objectives, however, the real magic lies in the 270k engagements gained - achieved with a CPE rate a staggering 78.4% lower than industry benchmarks. 

What's next?

After their first TRIBE Plus x TRIBE Media experience, Disney are leveraging the results and insights from our team to inform their next organic + paid campaign. By testing the waters with awareness objectives, the insights provided can inform how Disney can move their customers further down the funnel with UGC-powered consideration and conversion ads.