New customer acquisition
Creative output
Global market efficiency
Creative cadence
Channel performance
Where the spend actually moved.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
The brand had built genuine pull across multiple markets, but the acquisition engine wasn't reading cleanly. New customer contribution was sitting inside a blended view that flattered the channel mix and made it hard to know which dollars were actually expanding the customer base versus harvesting existing demand. For a brand selling globally, that ambiguity gets expensive fast.
Creative output was the other constraint. The brand carries a strong aesthetic and a clear voice, but the volume and variety of work needed to feed paid social, particularly across regions and short-form video, was outpacing what the existing pipeline could produce. Without a creative engine matched to the channel's appetite, spend was always going to plateau.
And the period itself opened on a soft start. Demand was uneven coming into the engagement, which meant the work couldn't lean on a tailwind. The acquisition programme had to do the recovery rather than ride one.
THE APPROACH
How the engagement was structured.
The work started with a clean read of the funnel. New versus returning splits were unpacked on the commerce platform so that paid media wasn't being credited for demand it didn't generate. That meant separating prospecting performance from the brand's existing pull, and rebuilding the acquisition view around incremental new customers rather than blended return.
Paid social was rebuilt around creative velocity. Hooks, formats, and angles were tested at pace, with the strongest performers carried into broader prospecting and the weakest cut quickly. Short-form video carried the load on prospecting, with static and carousel formats playing a secondary role for retargeting and consideration. The creative pipeline was structured to feed the channel weekly rather than in seasonal drops, which kept fatigue down and surfaced sharper learnings on what was actually driving new customers.
Acquisition spend was scaled with regional intent rather than a single global setting. Markets were treated on their own merits: what worked in one didn't get force-fitted into another, and budget followed the markets where unit economics held up. Creative was localised where it mattered and held consistent where the brand voice did the heavier lifting.
Through the quarter, the cadence settled into weekly working sessions focused on the levers that moved: creative refresh, channel mix, and the new-versus-returning read. A soft-start period early in the engagement was navigated with restraint rather than reactive spend, and recovery was managed through creative and targeting discipline rather than discounting the brand into a corner.
POSSE · IN THE ROOM
Inside the engagement.
The working moments behind the numbers.
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THE OUTCOME
The quarter closed with new customer contribution materially ahead of where the soft start signalled it would land. Paid social carried the recovery, and the cleaner read on new versus returning meant the team could prove the lift rather than argue for it.
Creative output moved from a constraint to a strength. The volume and variety feeding the channel weekly surfaced sharper learnings and held fatigue down across regions, which added up steadily as the quarter progressed.
Across global markets, the regional approach to spend and creative delivered efficiency where it was earned rather than averaging performance into a single number. The acquisition programme finished the quarter outperforming its starting trajectory, with a clearer view of which markets and creative angles to lean into next.
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