Christmas Wishlist UGC

The concept

Organic social content that centers around "wishlists" captures a high-purchase-intent audience. Individuals who search for this content are actively looking to buy items for their family/friends/partners during US holidays. At Shortlist, we identified this as an opportunity to partner with brands who wanted to get their products seen by millions of shoppers, and coordinate an effort with popular content creators who often post carousels and wishlist-style content.

We discovered, in particular, a niche within the Christmas Wishlist post market that excited our team. There were plenty of creators who were consistently getting high engagement on these types of posts. Seeding these posts with organic product would enable us to reach this high-purchase-intent audience with relatively little friction. No product shoots necessary; we could reuse existing product shots from CPG brands and work with creators (faceless or not) to promote them.

The effort

To start, we reached out to a few CPG brands that we knew to have ongoing holiday promotions. Through direct channels and warm intros, we solidified partnerships with five brands, with products varying from streetwear to luxury goods. We had these brands submit packages to us that included product links, promotional content, and descriptions of which items they wanted us to promote / drive traffic toward. We then built a simple sign-up flow for creators after we partnered with them. Our outreach campaign was through mainly cold DMs and other warm intros; but by the end, we had a team of ~25 creators ready to go.

To orchestrate this whole thing, we set up our own sign-up flow where creators could register with our campaign and choose items from a curated list to include in their posts. They were briefed on how to post for this campaign specifically and optimize for virality.

1Sign up2Products3Confirm

NameEmail

Join the campaign

In order to make sure that our partnered brands felt secure, we built a prototype: real-time post tracking software. When a creator submitted their final tiktok URL, it would automatically start being tracked by our software. Whenever a client logged into their workspace, they could immediately get a summary of the total engagement on posts that contained their products. This laid the foundation for what today is RoarOS: an AI social marketing agent with access to real-time post data, creator sourcing tools, and campaign management, all in one.

The impact

When the dust settled, we saw that this campaign went exceptionally well.

Posts

30+

Views

1M+

Likes

65k+

Comments

300+

Engagement rate

6.5%+

The lessons

We learned a lot about how to run influencer campaigns end-to-end. The team also learned about what brands really care about while their campaigns are ongoing. Visibility and transparency are everything; influencer spend is still something that many brands struggle to wrap their heads around, and aren't sure how to attribute dollars in to dollars out.

The single most important outcome from this campaign for Shortlist was that it gave us the push to start building software targeted at the creator economy. That, and the learning that wishlists are definitely a viable post format for CPG companies looking to optimize their brand exposure to effort spent ratio. Shortlist will continue to explore this campaign format as an ongoing effort to promote products year-round. If that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, or if you want to run your next creator campaign in a high-trust environment, reach out.