Traditional advertising is declining in effectiveness, fast. We pivoted to create a content studio, enabling us to deliver authentic, narrative-driven stories that align with our brand beliefs, and occasionally feature our products. We create entertainment that people actively want to seek out and view, not advertising. How did we do it?

First of all, we developed authentic, valuable and real relationships with 100s of content creators across Instagram and YouTube. Then we commissioned them to make THEIR passion projects aligned to our brand beliefs. Finally, we publish these stories and add fuel to them with our local market's paid media.

Our objective (which we're more than meeting!) is to build a deeper relationship with our consumers, around the topics they care about, whilst encouraging them to spend longer with our brand and communications every time they sit down to view our latest projects.

We bet big. We built a huge machine - an agile content studio that works with 100s of creators. We're on the hunt for authentic voices - those with one hundred followers or one million. We want to tell great stories about our passion points. This approach ensures authenticity and relevance to our consumer - we're not putting our brand first, we're putting shared values first.

Our 100s of content creators set out on amazing adventures for us every day, providing a weekly cadence of studio film releases. Each film connects to one of our five editorial verticals: travel, surf, sustainability, creativity, and wellness.

This comes together in a truly 'always on' format, supported by daily curated influencer photography. We reach our audiences at high frequency with dazzling, premium entertainment from up-and-coming storytellers, giving us license to scale up effective themes into ownable IP productions, all featuring our brand.

We began by utilizing our existing audience knowledge, but then built on that by curating and publishing dozens of images and videos each week - analysing and deriving insight from the engagement of these curated assets.

From this we build a strong understanding of what resonates with our audience, with the most successful content undergoing a paid-media based testing regime to ensure it lands with wider audiences and undergo optimisation.

This is all built around our target demographic - an adventurous, upwardly mobile and travel-obsessed consumer, already fiendishly devouring Instagram's abundant travel content. Their love of travel and it's perfect organic presence on the platform made it possible for us to identify and partner with literally hundreds of influencers, ensuring content produced for us is perfectly 'on brand' for the platform.

It's simple: We identify the best creators to share our voice, and empower them to do so at scale.

We curate several Influencer-created images and videos for publishing every day, supported by a weekly film project (complete with trailers and supporting photography), each week from new content creators. These films are then made available to local market teams for further paid support, ensuring that all markets can operate an 'always on' approach whilst picking the content most effective for their specific market.

We activate this content across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, with local markets identifying the best media formats and channels for their goals.

Our social and influencer content plays a critical role in driving brand menaing. This programme operates across more than 10 markets and has driven > 100M views. On average, content co-created with brand influencers results in an organic engagement rate of 6.2% on Instagram. With a recent studio content series, we saw the same Brand Recall lift as traditional ads (+6pp on YT), with ~6x longer average view time, and the same media effieciency. The content also led to statistically significant lift in "Closeness/Affinity" among current consumers who watched and a statistically significant lift in "Relevance" among non-consumers.