Vans needed to grow awareness and sales of their custom shoes with a working media budget of only $300,000 USD. How do you grow sales without losing your unique brand identity in a landscape dominated by two major competitors that aim to be for everyone? That was Vans’ challenge. In our campaign’s month of launch alone, there were over 75 sneaker releases, 68% from Nike and Adidas.

A differentiator for Vans is its customizer. Competitors offer the ability to make custom shoes, but only provide a limited, pre-determined set of colors and options. Vans allows people to become footwear designers by uploading their own artwork to create fully personalized shoes, from sole to tongue.

To grow, Vans needed to expand into new territories beyond Action Sports and Music. We wanted to reach “Expressive Creators,” the people behind underground culture and trends that spread. They share the same DNA as Vans in that they don’t want to be like everyone else. They are ages 13-34, trendsetters especially with fashion, and Instagram is their social media of choice (239 index). To them, creating is the purest form of expression. What we found in common among this diverse group was that they hated being boxed in. Give them a set of rules their art should follow? They’ll break ‘em. Impose limits? They’ll ignore ‘em. This led us to our insight: Expressive Creators are programmed to color outside the lines.

Our idea was to design a campaign outside the lines, with an influencer and programmatic social approach as unique as each creator.

We identified 16 creators who were top influencers in the new-to-Vans creative territories, including Corey Divine (tattoo art) and Christopher Pointdexter (poetry). We turned these into 16 programmatic audience segments based on social data, including terms for specific artistic interests, additional artists they follow in those same spaces, and behavioral engagement around the topics.

We had the influencers make custom Vans using their own artwork and develop original content about their artistic process, which they shared organically to followers on Instagram, directing to the customs tool on Vans’ site.

To increase scale, we needed to expand our content reach with promoted, paid media. We figured out a relevant way to connect Expressive Creators with the influencers’ original artistic content that avoided being commercial.

We distributed each influencer’s original content as promoted Instagram posts from their handles to the 16 bespoke programmatic audience segments we developed. In total, we had 48 different pieces of content from our Influencers’ original posts that we promoted programmatically. By not sacrificing their original artistic visions, our paid approach avoided being commercial.

We chose Instagram as it is the social platform of choice for Expressive Creators, with engagement double that of Facebook, and used storytelling units like GIFs and Carousels that gave the influencers more space to play. We maintained a regular cadence of posts to keep attention, maintain freshness of the content, and build momentum.

We found influencers Vans never tapped before and created customized social content connected programmatically to audiences the brand never reached before. Our budget may have been small, but with less than $300,000 USD, we successfully got the word out about Vans truly custom customizer on Instagram and sales took off.

Throughout the campaign, Awareness rose 22% and Word-of-Mouth Exposure rose 24% (more people were talking about Vans), both exceeding goal. Our campaign generated the most sales at the most efficient rate of all social campaigns Vans had run to date. Vans garnered nearly $1 Million USD in revenue directly from our Instagram campaign, as measured by Facebook’s revenue tool, with a Return-On-Ad-Spend rate of 390%, significantly outperforming Vans’ average campaign benchmarks.