Gymshark swapped light for dark imagery to mark Black Friday
People reached by the campaign
16.4m
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lack Friday is a retail phenomenon that has grown from a single day of sales to become a week or more of deals targeting discount-hungry consumers.
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“We are an aspirational brand and our content reflects this, showing people striving to be their best with our unique bright photography style. So when we drastically changed this with aggressive dark pictures we knew it would shock our loyal fans and tell them something was happening. It was the perfect link with Black Friday,” says Mack.
“We sat down with the Facebook Creative Shop team and explained our idea and what we wanted to achieve in terms of messaging and sales. We know our brand creative works but Facebook has the expertise to fine-tune these pieces of content to maximise their potential and reach.”
Mack adds: “The advice confirmed our thoughts on best practices for the campaign and we received help to know how quickly we should reveal information during the ads.”
Gymshark began its Black Friday sale on the Monday before and ran it for a week, using an array of different content each day.
The Black Out campaign featured models wearing Gymshark’s Black Friday exclusive product and even featured user-generated content from fans who truly bought into the campaign. A combination of Instagram ad products were used, including ads in ‘stories’ (where users create slideshows of images and videos that disappear after 24 hours) and ‘carousel’ ads (consisting of up to 10 photos or videos) in the Instagram feed. The use of dynamic ads complemented the brand’s organic content.
“We only have two sales a year; one for Black Friday and one for our birthday month in July. We embrace Black Friday, especially in the US where we consider ourselves very local,” says Mack. “The Black Out campaign was all about combining art and science to grab people’s attention and convert that into sales.”
The campaign reached 16.4m people and a large amount of purchases made during the campaign period came from Instagram. Gymshark also achieved a 6.6:1 return on its ad spend.
Facebook’s client solutions manager for retail and ecommerce, Dave Morrissey, says this was an example of a game-changing brand executing best-in-class advertising.
“Gymshark was lightning-fast in adopting the very latest products in the Facebook marketing suite and mastering them in the run-up to the shopping season,” he says. “This was coupled with great execution. The stunning Black Out concept generated results that are the envy of many marketers.”
Black Friday is one of only two sales a year for fitness brand Gymshark, and for last November’s promotion its finely tuned timing and stand-out creative led to a huge influx of sales via Instagram.
How Gymshark mastered Instagram to drive instant sales
October 2018
High street and online retailers know they cannot afford to miss out. UK spending on last November’s Black Friday was up by around 7% on 2016 and volume sales by 32%, according to data from Barclaycard.
For the British online fitness brand Gymshark, it was essential it could tell its Black Friday story in the place where its customers spend time – on Instagram
“Instagram is a huge part of our story because of the communities we create, but the challenge is always how to stand out among so many online businesses vying for consumers’ attention,” says Gymshark’s chief creative officer Noel Mack. “We have been building our following organically since day one of the brand, six years ago. We like to think a Gymshark Instagram post is very recognisable because of our unique photography style, almost over-exposing pictures to create a really ‘aspirational’ look, drawing particular attention to the athlete and our product.”
Gymshark, which manufactures and sells gym clothes and accessories, was founded in 2012 by teenager Ben Francis from his parents’ garage in Birmingham, England. In the past year its turnover has more than doubled from £42m to around £100m, it has 7 million engaged social media followers across 131 countries and boasts over 60m followers when combined with its team of ‘Gymshark Athletes’.
6.6:1
return on ad spend
Noel Mack Gymshark
“Instagram is a huge part of our story because of the communities we create, but the challenge is always how to stand out among so many online businesses vying for consumers’ attention.”
For Black Friday, the brand worked with the Facebook Creative Shop to devise a powerful campaign that would ensure its brand awareness and sales were maximised during this crucial retail occasion.
The company decided to take the opposite approach to its usual tactics, switching away from the brand’s emphasis on bright images and using blacked-out pictures instead.