The Varnholt Energy campaign wrapped, and week two beat week one
Six weeks, three creators, one shoot day, forty-one posts. The opening week missed its number, we changed where the posts started, and the rest of it worked.
SAMPLEVarnholt Energy came to us in January with a launch date and a complaint: they had run creator campaigns before and every one of them read like an ad. Six weeks later the campaign is finished. Here is what it was and what it did.
Three creators, one shoot day in February, forty-one posts across six weeks. MOTHRA took the street-level angle. NIGHTCART folded it into the night market runs she already posts six times a week. RAINPATCH did the Sunday cooking stream with a can on the counter and no script for it.
The numbers
- 9.4 million views across the six weeks
- 3.1 percent save rate, which is the number Varnholt actually bought
- 41 posts, 34 of them cut from footage that already existed
- One shoot day, shared between all three creators
The save rate is the one worth explaining. Views were never the point. Varnholt wanted people to keep the post so they could find the flavor again later, and a save costs a viewer far more attention than a view does.
The first week did not work
Week one opened every post with the product. It landed at 1.1 percent saves and we killed the format on the Thursday. What replaced it opened with whatever the creator was already doing and got to the can in the second half. Same shoot, same footage, different first three seconds.
“The version we approved in the deck is the version that failed. The one that worked was the one they sent back on a Thursday night asking whether we would let them start somewhere else. We said yes and it doubled.”
Signe Halvorsen, brand lead at Varnholt Energy
We would rather publish that than a clean story. Campaigns that go right on the first attempt usually mean nobody was reading the numbers in week two.
What we would do differently
Book two shoot days, not one. Three creators through a single studio day meant the last block was rushed, and you can see it in the footage we did not use. Everything else holds up. The clips came out of feeds that were already running, the schedule stayed off the weekend, and none of the three had to turn into an advertisement to make the thing work.
Varnholt is back for a second run in the fall. Same three creators, two shoot days, and the hook stays where the creator puts it.
Placeholder story. The people, numbers and quotes in it are invented, and it is here to show the shape a real one takes.
