Congrats, You're Getting Waxed

Merlin were launching their world famous Madame Tussauds brand in Sydney with a brand new venue right on Darling Harbour. 

Merlin wanted to launch the Facebook page prior to the attraction opening to raise awareness and excitement around the new venue. Deepend developed a pre-launch campaign, centering on a Facebook competition. We also saw Facebook Advertising as an opportunity to gain insights into the consumers who would be most likely to visit Madame Tussauds.

Deepend devised a launch competition for the attraction which asked Facebook users to choose the next celebrity to be immortalised in wax from a selection of six potential local personalities. To support this activity, a four-week Facebook advertising campaign of 72 creative executions was formulated to grow a fan-base of Sydneysiders likely to visit, and to gain psychographic insights into this group.

Instead of merely translating the offline audience into Facebook, we tested multiple segments to determine the best for both reach and relevance. We targeted a mixture of demographics, locations, interests and social circles, and the development of multiple images and copy allowed us to test against those different target audience segments on a daily basis. 

The pre-launch campaign generated invaluable PR from a number of well-known Australians including Kyle Sandilands, comedian Will Anderson, TV host Kerrie Anne Kennelly and the competition winner, TV and radio presenter Amanda Keller. Tickets to the opening weekend also sold out prior to launch.

We achieved a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of $0.65, a massive reduction (84%) on the client’s previous average CPA of $4.00, and achieved 11,000 likes for the $7,000 media spend, 62% lower than the Facebook average CPA of $1.70.

The ads proved to be highly relevant to the demographics and psychographics we targeted, delivering a 72% conversion rate from users clicking on the ad to liking the Madame Tussauds page.

Many fascinating consumer insights were gleaned during the campaign, for example, would you have guessed that fans of Australian events and attractions such as V8 racing were better respondents than Facebook users with an interest in Hollywood celebrities?