Average monthly ad testing spend: $2,000
CASE STUDY
Audio ad agency Oxford Road offers a proprietary creative messaging system, known as Audiolytics™, that provides a blueprint for building Oxford Road’s clients the best audio ads possible. The blueprints are based on nine key messaging components and 71 sub-components — building blocks that can be rearranged in specific ways to drive specific listener actions.
Audiolytics™ logic is built upon a growing database of audio and communications knowledge, and the Oxford Road team is always looking for new tech and data to inform it.
Part of the future of Audiolytics™ is to one day be able to multivariate test audio ads. To begin building multivariate logic into the Audiolytics™ system, Oxford Road turned to Marpipe.
Marpipe’s platform for multivariate testing image and video ad creative helps brands and businesses find winning ads and creative assets. The team at Oxford Road had a hypothesis — use Marpipe to multivariate test static image ads on Facebook, then apply the learnings from the winning creative to audio ads. The question was, would they see a performance lift there, too?
The Oxford Road team needed to partner with a client that was willing to try something new and innovative. They very quickly landed on Moink — a subscription box service that delivers high-quality meats sourced only from family farms.
Moink had given up on Facebook as an advertising channel. It just hadn’t proven to be a cost-effective way to bring in new customers and grow sales for them. But they were willing and excited to see how multivariate testing might be able to turn that around. Together, Moink and Oxford Road set their sights on a CPA that would make sense for Facebook to scale, but nobody really believed they would be able to accomplish in a test. Then they got to work.
To effectively test against the nine key components of the Audiolytics™ messaging structure — Setup, Value prop, Positioning, Demonstration, Substantiation, Offer, Scarcity, Path, and execution — Oxford Road charted a nine-phase testing approach. They tested each component one by one.
Oxford Road’s first few tests for Moink were small, testing only four ad variants at a time. But as time went on, their trust in the process and the size of their tests grew.
First, they determined which protein their audiences preferred by testing a small set of ads, each with a different product image. Bacon was the clear winner.
Next, by testing copy variants, they discovered that the value prop of Fighting for the Family Farm really resonated with audiences. “Eat like the family farm matters,” and “Family farms do it better,” were consistently top performers. The headline “Save the family farm!” had a CTR nearly on par with the winningest headline, “Eat this bacon.” And an image of the family of one of Moink’s suppliers was also a consistent winner.
Finally, when an image of the individually packaged cuts of meat performed well in their ads, they realized that perhaps they should be even more explicit about which specific cuts of meat future customers would receive in their boxes. This was a meaningful change to consider for audio copy.
The Oxford Road and Moink teams planned, designed, and ran multivariate tests on more than 50 ads, each test delivering new insights about their top-performing ad creative. Throughout testing, they were able to stay below their goal CPA. This improved even more when winning ads were scaled — dropping the Moink Facebook campaign by almost 30% below goal.
Using Marpipe, Oxford Road was able to bring Moink back to Facebook, a channel they had strayed from for over five years. In seeing the power high-performing creative has on Facebook, Moink decided to 5x their spend on the social media platform.
“Brick by brick, we did what we'd set out to do at the beginning: to build Moink’s ‘super ad.’” — Stew Redwine, Creative Director, Oxford Road
Oxford Road now had the creative data they needed to try and spark similar performance breakthroughs with Moink’s audio ads.
They translated the learnings from the static image multivariate tests into a previously produced audio script read by Moink’s founder, Lucinda Cramsey.
They pulled in the top-performing Value Prop with the line, “I created Moink so you can eat like the family farm matters.” They then listed the available cuts of meat as a proxy for the image demonstrating what comes in a subscription box. Finally, knowing that bacon had been their top-performing protein image, they updated their offer — free bacon for a year.
Listen to the final ad:
The new spot played on satellite radio and garnered some incredible results. CPS and CPA dropped by nearly 60% and 70% respectively from previous levels. Oxford Road proved that extending creative intelligence across a campaign can — and should — be part of a larger performance strategy. The messaging from the successful satellite radio ads was then tailored by Oxford Road to Moink's podcast messaging and that channel has since scaled dramatically, as well.
“Wouldn't it be nice to know if individual lines of audio worked? Wouldn't it be nice to see if one far outperformed the others? Knowing that we have to make that leap from something visual to something auditory and still … Marpipe made it possible.” — Stew Redwine, Creative Director, Oxford Road
