From June to August 2024, H&M partnered with Meta on a summer campaign in the US titled ‘Find Your Beach’ focused on bringing the collection to life however H&M customers spend their summer. The campaign featured diverse creators across thematic Meta Advantage+ shopping campaigns, partnership ads and product level videos, which lowered the cost per lift for brand consideration by 94% compared to its usual campaigns.
The main goal of this campaign was to successfully boost fashion perception, consideration, and preference — as well as online and in-store sales — among young fashion-forward female shoppers in the US during the extended summer period. From previous studies, H&M had discovered that ad creative from traditional fashion photoshoots didn’t resonate as well with young female US audiences on social. Therefore, the team focused on diversifying with a social-first approach by tapping a variety of different creator types and formats – using creator-built ad creative, different campaign objectives, various ad formats and reaching out across multiple placements with a consistent theme.
H&M partnered with Meta Business Partner VX Media to source creators with strong video editing or computer-generated imagery skills to help the campaign stand out and be relevant for a wider audience. H&M moved away from a launch and leave campaign strategy and invested in a 3-month campaign with three creative refreshes on Meta combining awareness objectives with conversion campaigns optimized for product exploration and purchase on hm.com. This combination enabled them to connect with audiences with different levels of interest for the brand to influence a net new young female audience.
The team held a workshop for the creators to clearly iterate the concept brief for the “Find your beach” theme, and to ensure that the creators fully understood the project’s objectives and best practices. The creators filmed their video content, and the assets were packaged into multiple digital ad formats.
H&M then ran a paid partnership ad campaign with the awareness objective, brand presence and text hooks designed to deliver on the campaign’s key performance indicators. With partnership ads, advertisers can greatly expand campaign reach because the ads are not only sent out via the advertiser’s Facebook and Instagram handles, but via the handles of each individual creator as well, which enables them to reach entirely new audiences.
The team also ran Advantage+ shopping campaigns to boost interest and sales among a net new young female audience. All assets featured locally relevant products that the audience could explore through personalized product recommendations in the collection ad format and product level video. These were developed with Meta Business Partner Smartly to ensure brand consistency and also make the video ad creative more diverse.
H&M delivered all ads to a relevant audience in the US in Facebook and Instagram Feed, Stories and Reels, and Instagram Explore.
Given that H&M tapped a new set of creator types for this campaign, there were a few challenges and considerations along the way. The brand had to adjust best practices to ensure the product looked enticing and on-brand across these new content formats, which included various video editing styles and computer-generated imagery. Additionally, maintaining consistency in brand messaging and managing the quality of content produced by various creators was crucial to the campaign's success. Understanding how different content formats and creator styles resonated with the target audience also played a significant role in optimizing engagement.
H&M and Meta leveraged authentic creator-built content through various touchpoints to drive reach at scale and forge a connection with new audiences. The campaign was a resounding success, particularly at engaging and activating the young consumer.
The ‘Find Your Beach’ ad campaigns resulted in:
In the young female audience H&M saw a 7.2pt lift in top-3 brand consideration.
In total, the campaign drove 1.35M people to start considering H&M as a top-3 brand. Compared to H&M’s business-as-usual campaigns, the creator collaboration was 94% more cost efficient at driving top-3 consideration.
The campaign also drove a strong impact on omni-channel sales. The incremental omni-channel ROI was 1.8x on top of business-as-usual campaigns.
4.8X higher lift in brand consideration for campaigns featuring creators
9-point lift in message agreement for campaigns featuring creators, compared to no lift for usual campaigns (“To what extent do you agree/disagree that H&M is a fashionable brand?”)
5.9X higher lift in message agreement for campaigns featuring creators
2X online and in-store incremental return on ad spend on top of usual campaigns
Secondary outcomes:
The campaign succeeded in driving incremental reach, with 22% of the people reached by this campaign not reached by any other H&M campaigns.
Additionally, the campaign drove 4M incremental product views at a 34% improvement in cost efficiency compared to other H&M campaigns.
H&M also saw an 8.8pt lift in “fashion perception”, a metric where its business-as-usual campaigns showed no impact. This translated to 1.6M people starting to perceive H&M as a fashionable brand.
