Haha Haha Co.

Media

When the pandemic began, the UNT Health Science Center embraced its position as a leader in our community by providing a singular source of uplifting and empowering content. This culminated in coviddayxday.com serving as the center of the UNT Health Science Center’s covid-19 campaign. We knew that we had to engage a wide audience and convince them to adopt new, healthy behavior practices to meet the campaign’s goals and keep our community safe. Sounds hard, right? It is – but reaching the right audience with the right message can be done through thoughtful strategy and nimble responsiveness. 

Goals

  • Generate community awareness of the coviddayxday.com website in Fort Worth, North Texas and beyond
  • Drive meaningful traffic to the new coviddayxday.com website
  • Encourage optimism and empowerment through reliable information

Meeting Audiences During the New Normal

Reaching audiences during a pandemic is tricky for numerous reasons, the largest of which is that people’s normal day-to-day routines have been overhauled, which makes reaching them difficult with traditional targeting strategies. So, when we began laying out a paid media campaign for DAYxDAY, we had to be creative and think about how to capture the attention of our audience in their new normal. Furthermore, we needed to communicate our message to English – and Spanish – speaking audiences that make up the bulk of North Texas’ demographic composition.

For general targeting, our strategy was adjusted for the lack of commute time where we would normally distribute content and re-tooled to focus on reaching audiences in-home. That meant leveraging Pandora and smart speakers to get media in front of people working from home. We also partnered with reputable news sources in North Texas for paid media, which elevates the trustworthiness of our content. To reach Spanish-speaking audiences, we used the same tactics and leaned into Spanish-speaking news partners as platforms to run paid media. 

Reliable Information

When we began the DAYxDAY campaign, one of the primary goals was to cut through the noise and provide consistent, reliable information that was rooted in science and verified to be a best practice for community health. While framing the content pillars, we asked ourselves “what kind of information would be most helpful to our target audiences?” After ample deliberation, we chose five pillars under which we’d publish and contextualize our website content: News, Tips, Community, Well-Being, and Health Experts. Each of these pillars represented a different scope of information that could help inform and uplift our community in the face of disinformation and the harsh reality of life-altering quarantine protocols.

To fill up our content buckets, we reached out to community health and news partners to provide a steady stream of topical, up-to-date information. In addition to partner content, we created organic articles that were based on thoroughly researched subjects that were reinforced with trending search traffic.

Adjusting in Real-Time

Navigating the ever-changing world of covid-19 – from evolving health protocols, to shifting rules on social media and search engines, and understanding new clinical study updates – made this campaign particularly challenging. However, there was nothing more difficult than adjusting to the shifting regulations on social media to boost our campaign messaging. Shifting social regulations meant that we had to be nimble and responsive to the latest updates and incorporate the ambiguity of the restrictions into our paid and social media strategies. Throughout campaign implementation, we had to adjust our boosted messages so they adhered to the latest regulations on that specific platform, but still communicated the points we needed to convey.

Results

  • Over 12.4 million media impressions served
  • Over 1.4 million people reached through social channels
  • Over 166,800 pageviews registered
  • Over 118,400 unique website visitors
  • Email, display advertising and paid social media performance each greatly exceeded industry benchmarks

Audience Engagement isn’t Rocket Science

Providing useful content to a receptive audience will almost always return quantifiable gains. Through careful market research and detailed audience targeting, we were able to exceed the healthcare industry benchmarks for each of our analytical KPIs. Through it all, we not only exceeded expectations, but we also held true to the goal of empowering an informed, optimistic response among the North Texas region. When your mission is to Make Life Better, these results make us all humbled to play a role in changing minds. 

Some campaigns are planned well in advance, which provides ample time to uncover strategic ideas and develop tactical solutions. However, certain campaigns operate under more confined deadlines, which necessitates expedited action to get to market quickly. No matter the planning time available, our goal at Hahahaha is always the same— meet our client’s goals and provide a positive impact on their business.

Station House is a luxury, multi-family development in Frisco, Texas. Their team approached Hahahaha with a unique situation: they needed to drive 60 new leases in just around 90 days in order to capitalize on peak leasing season. In addition to more residents, Station House needed to generate more brand awareness with their target consumers, young professionals working in the Frisco area.

Beyond the marketing goals, there were some interesting challenges facing our team as we approached this opportunity. Construction crews surrounded most of the major entry points into Station House, which made it difficult for potential residents to enter; there was limited visibility from the tollway, hurting their curb-appeal to traffic passing by; potential residents had to drive by major competition on their way to Station House; and, the amount of construction made prospective residents unsure if Station House was even open.

Between lofty marketing goals under a tight deadline, and the factors affecting local brand visibility, our team had plenty of challenges to navigate as we began strategizing.

Goals

  • Generate 60 new leases to meet occupancy goals in a tight window – 90 days
  • Increase brand awareness among target audience

Strategy

Station House needed a way to entice potential residents with their beautiful amenities and overall space, despite the temporary challenges with their location. Based on time and budget constraints, we chose to evaluate Station House’s existing marketing assets and make strategic recommendations about how to better leverage them to help the Station House rise above the competition in a crowded market.

In addition to photography assets, we identified an existing drone flyover video that would allow us to show off the complex, and its close proximity to dining and entertainment, unconstrained by the surrounding construction by leveraging an aerial view.

We leveraged the flyover video in rotation with other assets in a variety of channels, including Paid Social, Display and Paid Search to spread awareness about Station House, and all that it has to offer residents in Frisco.  We geotargeted strategic locations near Station House to capture the attention of young professionals in the area. In addition, we leveraged Facebook lead generation ads to expedite the process for connecting with a leasing agent. We also leveraged an offer message to incentivize web conversions.

As our campaign unfolded and the numbers began coming in, it was clear that our team had crafted a winning strategy for Station House.

Video Credit: Station House 

Results

  • Netted 68 new leases
  • Improved occupancy to 96% leased space
  • Increased website sessions 2X YOY during campaign period
  • Generated over 250 form fills
  • Produced over 900 phone calls through Google search ads
  • Provided clear strategy and exceeded predicted results

Make Life Better

It was a pleasure to work with the team at Station House, and we thoroughly enjoyed putting together a comprehensive campaign that was driven by a tight window of performance. It is such a treat to shape the fabric of neighborhoods by helping people find a spot to call their home, and turning prospects into residents.

A season of ballet programming is made up of a series of performances, each standing alone as a unique story being told on the stage. How, then, do you create a campaign that communicates these different stories under one cohesive message? That was the obstacle we faced when ideating creative assets for the Texas Ballet Theater’s 2019-2020 season campaign, and here’s how we solved it.

Campaign Goals

  • Tell the individual story of each performance, while also fitting the unique designs into one cohesive, identifiable campaign.
  • Conceptualize ideas that work in photography to incorporate the dancers as crucial campaign assets.
  • Illustrate the ballet’s marriage of art and athleticism.
  • Attract a wider audience and convince them to become season subscribers.

The Challenge

Branding an entire season of ballet was a huge puzzle for us because each performance has its own story to tell, full of imagery and icons that are significant within the individual narrative but may not translate into one clear campaign. Plus, it was crucial for the dancers to be featured in each advertisement, so finding a way to marry all of those elements into a unified campaign was crucial.

We needed to create a full season campaign that is cohesive, blends together as a collective vision and message, but that also has enough individuality for each performance that a creative asset could confidently stand on its own. For that to occur, there needed to be enough interest and variety on a performance level as there was on the campaign level, so that the creative assets could be used in advertising on multiple platforms and mixed media.

The Creative Solution

We developed “Alive with Wonder,” a concept featuring the tagline Let Beauty Envelop You. This central message was accomplished by creating illustrations unique to each performance and then having those designs envelop the dancer on the page. Each pattern visually represented individual performances with elements that are important to the story on the stage.

This interaction between dancer and design alluded to the immersive experience of witnessing performances on stage and hammered home the overall campaign tagline – Let Beauty Envelop You.

Once finalized, the campaign imagery was extended into a full graphic system that allowed for both consistency and customization in the promotion of each performance. To accommodate the variety of mediums in our cross-platform media strategy, the flexibility of the system was imperative.

Making Life Better

The common misconception about ballet is that the performances are only suited for fans of high art or those that understand the nuances of performative arts. General audiences sometimes mistakenly assume that a barrier exists between them and enjoying and understanding ballet performances. The reality is this: over the course of a season of ballet programming, a performance will occur that is enjoyable for all types of audiences with different levels of ballet experience. Creating a campaign that cohesively communicated the different themes and tones of each performance and enticed a wider audience to attend was a hugely rewarding endeavor.


National Addy Award Winner


An Award-Winning Campaign

The Texas Ballet Theater’s 2019-2020 season campaign took home some prestigious awards from the American Advertising Federation at the local, regional and national levels. All totaled, the 2019-2020 season campaign won 9 Gold Awards, special Special Judge’s Awards at both the local and regional competitions and a National Silver Addy. It is such an honor to be recognized and earn shared success with our clients.

When the Texas Ballet Theater needed a way to reinvigorate their marketing, we created a comprehensive marketing campaign that expanded their ticket sales from a steady group of subscribers into a larger group of new season ticket holders.

The Problem

Season subscriptions to Texas Ballet Theater, while strong, had stagnated. Subscribers were offered the same options year after year, purchase the entire season or purchase single tickets at a later date. Within performing arts, the prospective ticket buyer ranges from the devoted fan to the person that wouldn’t even consider attending. Marketing resources are precious, and we have to ensure they are being invested where they will yield the highest ROI.

The Solution

Using data to drive decisions, Hahahaha proposed restructuring subscriber packages to give existing patrons more choice and convince new people to become subscribers and single ticket purchasers. Beyond subscriptions, the campaign was designed to have a positive impact on single ticket purchases. Single ticket sales launched in the middle of the campaign on July 1st, and within the first day, more than 3,500 individual tickets were sold.

The Approach

One of the largest components of our overall campaign was audience segmentation. To accomplish this, we appended audience data from TRG Arts – the Ballet’s consultant.

We divided the Ballet’s existing consumers into four distinct groups of:

1 – previous year subscribers
2 – lapsed subscribers
3 – multi-performance buyers
4 – single ticket buyers

 

By building package options, we were able to convince larger subsets of people to subscribe to Texas Ballet Theater.

We added historic subscribers and single ticket purchaser data to create persona profiles based on audience demographics and psychographics. We then built lookalike audiences based on the four groups and mapped each of the groups’ behaviors to identify purchasing trends across multiple digital channels. This gave us the insight needed to better understand their consumption habits and likelihood to purchase either a full or partial season or if they were likely to be a single-ticket purchaser.

Once we isolated recurring trends in the audience segments, we hyper-targeted the right ticket package to each group through paid digital media. Further, website retargeting enabled us to identify those that had expressed interest but not yet purchased and then retarget them with the TBT message most likely to yield a purchase.

Goals

  • Clearly brand the full 2019-2020 ballet season, while also promoting individual performances on their own merits.
  • Earn more new, full-season subscribers.
  • Define the main buyer personas and outline their purchase-decision journeys to understand their motivations for purchasing a full-season subscription and a single-performance ticket.
  • Outline a way to recapture people that did not renew their full-season subscriptions from the previous year.

Results

  • Paid media campaign delivered 1.8 million targeted impressions, and generated more than $40,000 in ticketed revenue in just a few weeks.
  • After only 2 weeks of a dedicated full-season campaign, subscription sales up by nearly 3% YOY.
  • New subscribers up by 45% YOY.
  • Exceeded last year’s launch-day single ticket sales by more than 10%.
  • Total ticket sales up 18.43% YOY, despite a later season launch than 2018.
  • During the campaign, overall website sales totaled $199,000.

Earning highly qualified leads is critical to the success of a conversion-based digital campaign, and Haha Haha employs a blend of intelligent thinking and data tools to develop strategic campaigns that yield highly qualified leads that meet our client’s business objectives.

The Approach

Pomona – by Hillwood Communities – is a master-planned community in Manvel, TX, located just south of Houston. To meet their sales goals, Pomona depends on driving awareness and conversion in order to build foot traffic to their community, and ultimately close home sales. In 2019, Haha Haha leveraged very specific and unique tactics to create a full-funnel digital marketing strategy for the community.

To begin the marketing planning process, the Hahahaha team carefully scrutinized data related to Pomona’s key target audiences by evaluating the current homebuyer segment against prospective homebuyers. This information provided us “look-a-like” profiles that we applied to our targeting criteria, enabling us to get very specific demographics, psychographics and geographical insights. As a result of this granular audience definition, we were able to identify that many of Pomona’s homebuyers were employed at the Texas Medical Center, located just 15 miles from the community.

With this knowledge, the Hahahaha team developed a very targeted GeoFencing campaign as a tactic within the integrated digital strategy.

The Goals

  • Move high-value prospects through the lead funnel by:
    • Building brand awareness for Pomona among a very specific subset of the medical community within the Texas Medical Center
    • Capturing a strategic audience group to retarget with outbound marketing efforts
    • Driving qualified leads from the medical community to model homes within Pomona
    • Closing home sales in Pomona

The Strategy – Hyper-Targeted Geofencing

GeoFencing is a targeted digital strategy that specifically serves display ad units to users who have entered a digitally fenced area. In order to structure a GeoFencing campaign, a virtual fence is mobilized around the targeted area to capture prospects and then deploy ads. A corresponding conversion zone is also established, allowing advertisers to track prospects from the GeoFence to the conversion zone. At Hahahaha, we utilize variations of GeoFencing strategies across verticals to satisfy numerous goals such as driving event ticket sales or, in this case, selling homes.

Pomona Map

For Pomona, our team devised a GeoFencing strategy focused on capturing highly qualified prospects at the Texas Medical Center. We identified five key parking garages used by medical professionals that mirrored a large portion of the current residents of Pomona. Additionally, we eliminated patient traffic in order to maximize the media spend on the most qualified prospects. After outlining our geographic target area, we developed specific ad creative to target those audiences, with messaging focused on proximity between home and work – “Pomona, just minutes from the Texas Medical Center.”

The Ads

Pomona GeoFencing Ads

The Results

  • First GeoFencing campaign delivered 245,000 impressions and 18 conversions of highly qualified leads.
  • Second GeoFencing campaign delivered 335,000 impressions and 40 conversions of highly qualified leads.
  • The entire campaign delivered 580,000 impressions and a total of 58 conversions.

Making Life Better

A community is made up of far more than just buildings and geography. It’s about the people that say hello to each other every day, the experiences they share and the memories they make as neighbors. All of this turns a collection of buildings into a living, breathing community. We are proud to partner with Hillwood Communities, and help shape the fabric of their neighborhoods by delivering their message to the right audiences, and filling their communities with vibrant people.

November 1, 2017

A little stronger

One of our clients, Air Comfort, is located at the heart of Southeast Texas, where Hurricane Harvey hit a few months ago. While the area was still reeling, they came to us with an urgent request – help us create a powerful video that embodies how we’ve been part of the community effort in dealing with this natural disaster. Through our partnership with N8 Visuals, we were able to bring that request to life.
Creating this video was a delicate line to walk, showing the damage and rebuild without appearing to capitalize on the situation. It was also an incredibly time sensitive assignment, where we needed to be nimble and move quickly.
Hurricane Harvey Video BTS
With that in mind, the concept we developed relies on storytelling VO and speaks more to the community’s spirit of resilience and heart rather than focusing on Air Comfort. We were inspired by the true stories of a community coming together and helping their neighbors, and it showed. Air Comfort employees opened their homes to our team and let us film during an incredibly sensitive time, laying bare entire neighborhoods that were destroyed.
The results of those efforts show in the final video, and we couldn’t be more proud. #SETXSTRONG

March 9, 2016

Empowering innovation

What happens when a billion dollar, Berkshire Hathaway company, a global market leader in the distribution of innovative, technologically advanced semiconductors and electronic component parts, approaches you to create a brand persona? At Hahahaha we think big. In 2015 we introduced Grant Imahara, celebrity engineer, robotics expert and Mouser customer for 20 years as the company’s spokesperson. We blended Grant’s appeal to the Mouser audiences with true stories from real-world engineers who are responsible for some of the world’s most cutting edge initiatives. Ultimately, creating the “Empowering Innovation” campaign. Cast across digital, social, event and traditional platforms “Empowering Innovation” reached millions and continues to engage and inspire engineers across the world in 2016.

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