An example of one of the best performing recent ad campaigns.
First of all, while researching this topic, I realized how difficult it is to combine information from everywhere. There are websites saying that these ads are better and give me numbers; on other websites, there are different numbers and different ads. There is also AI, which changes the answers from time to time. In the end, I decided to settle on one ad that, even if not the best, certainly has good statistics. It is CeraVe's "Michael CeraVe" campaign, created by the agency Ogilvy PR.
What was the campaign about? Briefly, CeraVe (a company specializing in dermatology and skin care products) collaborated with more than 450 influencers and dermatologists to create a rumor that the actor Michael Cera was the founder of their brand. The actor himself was spotted with CeraVe products. Later on, during the Super Bowl commercial, it was revealed that this story was actually not true.
The numbers are where the research got interesting. The agency's own award entry claims 15.4 billion earned impressions before the Super Bowl reveal and a +25% sales increase. There is also a marketing blog that cites 32 billion impressions for the same campaign — more than double. I tried to decide which source I actually trust more. The award entry comes from the people who ran the campaign and the figure is specific and defined (earned impressions, measured before the reveal). But it is also self-interested, since they were competing for awards with it. On the other hand, the blog has no stated methodology and its number is the kind that tends to grow as figures get repeated from article to article. The conclusion is that 15.4 billion is the more defensible number, but it should still be read as an agency-reported, best-case claim rather than an audited measurement. I don't think a perfectly neutral number exists here. The real sales data is held internally by L'Oréal, CeraVe's owner and is not published.
The mechanism behind the campaign's success seems to be curiosity: the company created an open question that people wanted to resolve and resolving it required engaging with the brand. The rumor did the work that an ad usually has to do. The main tools were TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and TV for the 60-second Super Bowl spot. It was quite an expensive campaign, where the price for the 60-second airtime alone was around $14M, with additional expenses for the actor's and influencers' involvement.
I can see in this example that using a variety of resources can bring good results. But at the same time, the story and strategy themselves are very important. I tried to think how I, as a user, would have behaved if I saw the advertisement. I think I would have started checking the information for at least a short time to see if it is actually true. At the same time, the realization that it was just marketing and that the company itself was behind the confusion, would not have convinced me to buy their products. Yes, they caught my attention, but I would have felt that I wasted my time.