Rhone Strikes Gold with a UGC-fueled Ad Testing Strategy

Rhone, a premium men’s activewear brand based in Utah, needed to diversify its portfolio. Its content portfolio, that is. It all started with a conversation with Gary Vaynerchuck. “Your content is indiscernible from every other men’s activewear brand!'' said Gary. “How do you expect to compete with Nike and expand your market share if you’re only representing a specific, narrow demographic?” 

In short, their campaign creative looked too much like their competitors’.

“For us, we knew there was a problem,” said Chief Marketing Officer Adam Bridegan. “We were creating really good content, but we weren’t able to generate that content at the scale that we needed to in order to reach new audiences and bring additional customers into our funnel.”

Rhone leveraged a variety of Cohley Briefs within the platform and turned the dial up to 100, generating large swaths of custom, diverse content with the specific plan to incorporate them into their digital ads. 

“We were testing about 10 to 15 things a week, right?” Bridegan said, referring to digital ad tests. “But now we have this extensive library of content, and our team is now testing 50 things a day. So we’ve just massively scaled up the amount of content we have to work with and, from there, we’ve allowed the data to drive performance.” 

While Bridegan said he expects Rhone to reach a testing cadence of 150 ads and assets per day in the near future, they’re already seeing a tangible impact on the company’s bottom line.

In terms of the aforementioned impact on the bottom line, Bridegan summed the results (and the impact of those results!) perfectly.   

“I’m talking about an increase of between 3 and 4X ROAS versus our internal content,” he said. “And when you think about 3 to 4X ROAS, and what that allows us to do as a brand — it allows us to now scale on Facebook — whereas everyone else is jumping off and saying, ‘Oh, the Facebook costs are rising.’

While others have thrown in the towel and given up due to heightened ad costs, Rhone, armed with Cohley generated content in their quiver, has doubled down. 

“Well, guess what?” said Bridegan. “We’re going to take our strategy and continue to execute it on Facebook. We’re going to go right into TikTok and look for those areas of arbitrage there as well.”