Investing in Upper-Funnel Marketing Is a Long-Term Play

Editor’s note: This piece is part of our Columnist Network series, which explores the tactical thoughts and actions from Adweek’s community of high-level experts. Today, Shutterstock CEO Stan Pavlovsky shares the thinking behind a recent video campaign. Below, in his own words, he insists that a slower-paced, longer-term focus on performance can pay off for brands at any stage. The challenge At Shutterstock, we’ve historically spent the vast majority of our ad budget on performance media. Like so many other companies that primarily transact online, we had always gravitated toward digital media because of how measurable it is and how quickly we could see our investment transform into results. This past year, however, we started to notice our customer acquisition cost growing due to increased competition in our space. We had ended up fishing in the same relatively small pond, speaking only to existing customers and look-alike segments who resembled them. We needed to cast a wider net. We needed to get nonprofessional creatives and other audiences familiar with our brand so that Shutterstock would come to mind at a point in the future when our platform could help them. The approach Our in-house creative agency, Shutterstock Studios, developed our first sustained brand campaign, “100% Shutterstock,” which launched this month on linear TV, OTT, audio and digital channels. Our internal creatives were encouraged to think big; the only constraint was that the hero TV spot had to be created exclusively using Shutterstock production services and assets (e.g., the imagery, videos, animation, music and other content available to users of our platform). Since our company is often just associated with “stock” images, our goal was to educate audiences about our wide range of assets and services to help creatives build any type of content, from websites to social ads and more. The final TV spots show a confident young woman walking down a city block, which is suddenly transformed into a digital wonderland overlaid with vibrant animation, video, 3D renderings and other interactive elements, which are products of her imagination. After doing upfront creative testing to validate that our target audiences and the general population would respond positively to the concept, we brought it to life with talent from across our distributed network, including RSA Films (co-founded by renowned director Ridley Scott), and Final Pixel, using the same production technology as in “The Mandalorian.” Then we worked with our media agency, Horizon, to develop a new communications plan that capitalizes on the wide reach of linear TV (40% of the budget ended up being allocated there) along with more targetable streaming platforms to reach our audience wherever they're viewing content. While upper-funnel media is famously hard to measure, we're working with Analytic Partners to set up media mix modeling to help us understand our marketing spend holistically and zoom in on what is and isn’t working. This will be a long-term effort, and it will take time to collect enough data and refine the models. But we’re proactively applying the same rigor to our brand investment as we do to our performance media. The takeaway We fervently believe that brand awareness drives demand and that a diverse media mix is the best way to capture a larger share of our total addressable market. But it’s important for any DTC company planning to branch out into upper-funnel marketing to understand this is a long-term play. The attribution window is much longer than what marketers who have historically gone all in on performance media are used to, so companies have to be willing to make a sustained investment. If they get impatient early on, they’re probably doomed. Since we’re taking an investment mentality toward brand marketing, we also wanted to make sure we were spending enough to make an impact. Given the current size of our business, it's important to build a sustained effort at high enough levels where we'd be able to capture enough data to gauge effectiveness. This is a better strategy than investing conservatively, which can often leave more questions unanswered. Shutterstock is lucky to have a marketing budget that provides plenty of options. But the main thing to keep in mind—which I believe is relevant for even early-stage companies—is that generating awareness however you can is always a good thing. As your investment grows, it doesn't mean you have to sacrifice targeting and measurement; rather, you just have to get smarter about bringing in the right partners and tactics to do it effectively.

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Investing in Upper-Funnel Marketing Is a Long-Term Play

Shutterstock is focused on capturing extensive data to increase awareness

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Stan Pavlovsky

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