Playbook Media, a marketing consultancy driving growth for B2C, eCommerce, and B2B brands, announced the official launch of its new performance branding service. Playbook has spent the last year helping clients pivot into a renewed focus on branding and the upper funnel, with Q4 results from gift exchange and gift-giving app leader Elfster highlighting a wave of successes marked by expanded reach and revenue with lower overall acquisition costs.
“We’re thrilled to bring this offering, which we’ve proven to be effective across a range of business sizes and verticals, to the open market,” Playbook CEO Bryan Karas said. “For decades, the world’s best businesses have understood the power of investing in brand marketing, and our goal is to help more companies benefit from – and clearly quantify – a strategic shift away from overinvestment in direct-response marketing.”
In Q4 of 2024, Elfster, the #1 site and app for gift-exchanges, gift-giving, wish lists, and Secret Santa gift exchanges, serving over 40 million customers globally since 2005, achieved transformative growth after a year in which Playbook helped the brand shift budget away from primary acquisition channels Google and Meta and into upper-funnel channels including CTV, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Playbook’s efforts, which included a repository of original creative and videos and advanced analytics models to quantify the impact of the strategic shift, helped Elfster achieve an overall digital revenue increase of 100% year over year, at 10% reduced acquisition costs.
“Playbook Media has been an invaluable partner for Elfster. Together, we’ve put together a winning performance branding strategy that has yielded results for Elfster that have greatly exceeded our expectations. With the development of a high-performing creative suite of ads, new paid channels, and a solid measurement framework, Playbook has helped Elfster accelerate our growth with new dimensions to reach new audiences,” said Thomas Shin, Elfster’s Chief Growth Officer.
For Karas, who was a founding member of Facebook’s Disruptors team tasked with solving business challenges for high-growth brands, performance branding has roots in classic marketing fundamentals and the limitations of today’s direct-response marketing.
“Google and Meta have taught advertisers to pay high engagement costs for thinking small – artificially short attribution windows, last-click attribution, and high-intent audiences,” he said. “The reality is that scalable growth is a function of reach and good storytelling. There are a ton of undervalued channels in advertising today – TikTok and CTV among them – and I predict that as brands catch on to the power of upper-funnel marketing, Google, Meta, and Amazon will begin to lose their grasp on advertising budgets.”
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