Stonebriar builds brand awareness with compelling Streaming TV ads

(Candle)lights, camera, action

Based in Dallas, Texas, Stonebriar is a leading retailer that specializes in trendy home décor pieces ranging from wall art to candles. By 2020, Stonebriar was looking to collaborate with a creative service provider with knowledge of Amazon Ads best practices to showcase two of their most popular products, tea lights and pillar candles, via high-quality video assets. After selling on Amazon for seven years in North America, Stonebriar aimed to reach new audiences and drive brand awareness through Streaming TV video ads.

In June 2020, Stonebriar begun working with Kaizen Ad, a creative service that specializes in delivering high-quality video ad creatives at scale. Kaizen Ad works with clients to enable experimentation, uncovering creative learnings, and help reach business goals. Kaizen Ad is one of the first creative services providers to support video across Amazon Ads offerings, including Sponsored Brands video, Amazon DSP, online video (OLV), Streaming TV ads, and Amazon product and Store page videos.

Creating high-quality Streaming TV ads

Kaizen Ad was tasked with creating a variety of Streaming TV assets for Stonebriar’s tea light and pillar candle products, providing a variety of evergreen and seasonal creatives that would help reach new audiences. Success metrics for the new Streaming TV campaign—aimed at building brand awareness—included increasing video impressions, completions, and click-through rates.

Additionally, Kaizen Ad planned to help inform creative optimizations across Stonebriar’s Streaming TV campaigns by running A/B tests for different creatives, and analyzing impact based on click-through rates and product detail page view rates.

Streamlining the creative process and planning for A/B testing

Leveraging Kaizen Ad’s creative briefing tool, Stonebriar was able to quickly provide details on their products, audience, and business goals, helping Kaizen Ad quickly move into action.

“Kaizen Ad made planning and execution fast and efficient. We used the Kaizen Ad service to provide creative briefing information, using a simple form. Once we aligned with Kaizen Ad on campaign concepts, they quickly created mood boards, shot lists, model selections, and voiceover scripts which were sent to us through their ad service for approval. This enabled us to move quickly into production, where Kaizen took the lead, sending us live updates behind the scenes. Within one week of the shoot, we already received six video creatives for our review.”

— Sadie Redinger, VP, Online Sales and Marketing, Stonebriar

Using the information Stonebriar provided in the creative briefing process about their products and audiences, Kaizen Ad conceptualized and scripted a series of "Make any moment extra special" video spots that carried a brand message that would resonate across a variety of audiences and concepts for A/B testing.

Achieving results

Stonebriar’s first Streaming TV campaign with creative produced by Kaizen Ad launched on July 15, 2020, and included an A/B test measuring performance between 15- and 30-second video ad variations. The campaign ran until October 15, 2020. The results of the A/B test, pulled from Amazon Ads performance reports available through Amazon DSP, indicated that the 30-second variations drove the following results, compared to the 15-second variations.

  • +37% video completion rate
  • +0.0012% click-through rate
  • +0.006% product detail page view rate

These learnings informed the strategy for Stonebriar’s holiday 2020 campaign, where Kaizen Ad launched seasonal videos to Amazon Streaming TV, allocating 100% of Stonebriar’s Streaming TV ads budget to 30-second ads. From October 1 to December 31, Stonebriar’s campaigns yielded the following performance metrics, compared to the summer-fall campaign:1

  • +196% click-through rate
  • +39% product detail page view rate

Overall, looking at performance from July 2020 to March 2021, the Streaming TV ads launched as a result of this collaboration drove a 24% increase in click-through rate. With a 96% average video completion rate, Stonebriar is excited to see how engaged audiences are with their brand story.1 Additionally, and perhaps unexpectedly, Stonebriar observed a 2x increase in brand searches everywhere customers spend time2 that correlated with the Streaming TV campaign dates.

Kaizen Ad’s philosophy is that quality creative is the most influential driving force behind ad engagement. Since continuous improvement is Kaizen Ad’s core philosophy, this collaboration with Stonebriar is a reflection of the results that can be achieved with compelling creatives. It’s important to have an understanding of your audience and how they might use products differently. Using the information Stonebriar provided about their audience and products, we were able to build video creatives that showcased popular candle product use cases and a brand message that resonated with a variety of audiences, and leverage A/B test creative learnings to improve Amazon Streaming TV ad performance over time.”

— Vera Knaus, Head of Business Development, eCommerce, Kaizen Ad

Looking ahead

The Amazon Streaming TV ads created through this initiative are still running, as of September 2021. Going forward, Kaizen Ads and Stonebriar look forward to shooting new videos to share across Amazon Ads channels in 2021, focusing on products within Stonebriar’s best-selling home décor categories.

1 Advertiser-provided data, United States, March 2021.
2
Advertiser-provided data, United States, March 2021.

Highlights

  • +24% increase in click-through rate
  • 96% average video completion rate
  • 2x increase in brand searches everywhere customers spend time