What our outdoor campaigns taught me about scale and community

Our first outdoor and billboard campaign, last year, felt like a real milestone. As a marketer at a fast-growing challenger brand, that's not a moment I expected to reach this early.

Above-the-line channels like billboards have traditionally been reserved for much bigger brands with much bigger budgets. What changed for us was not our budget. It was the media landscape.

In the past, booking billboards meant going through media planners, long lead times, big budgets and a fairly complex process. Now, self-serve tools have rewritten that. Using Global's platform, we could set a budget, choose placements, upload assets and go live in a way that felt much closer to launching a Meta campaign than to the old world of out-of-home.

The gap we set out to close

Our thinking was clear before we booked a single site. Kantar data showed that around 80% of people were aware of matcha, but only around 30% were aware of PerfectTed. For a five-year-old brand, that awareness is strong, but there's still a big gap to close.

Our ambition is to own the matcha category, not just in sales, but in people's minds. We need to make PerfectTed synonymous with matcha. Outdoor is still one of the most effective channels for building brand awareness at scale, so it felt like the right moment.

Why we built the creative from our own community

This year's campaign supported the relaunch of our four energy drinks, which we had redesigned with our female Gen Z consumer at heart. Our USP in the sports and energy category is that we bring a female buyer into a space that has traditionally felt quite male and intimidating.

Some of our data suggests as much as 80% of the sales we generate in that category come from consumers who are entirely new to it. That gave us a clear creative direction. The work needed to feel vibrant, youthful, energetic and distinctly us.

The packaging redesign was community-driven. We brought members of our community into focus groups, studied the brands they loved, worked through hundreds of design iterations and tested throughout. For the campaign itself, we featured four women who represented our community and embodied the flavours in the range, including our co-founder Marisa, who is so central to the PerfectTed story.

How it actually came together

This was months in the making. We knew we wanted to reformulate and redesign our energy drinks around eight to ten months before they hit shelves. It was a big strategic bet, so product, brand, marketing and operations were all involved from the beginning.

Once we moved into the campaign itself, the team had a lot of fun. We brought around 12 members of the marketing team together for an Apprentice-style offsite. People paired up and pitched different campaign platforms, covering everything from messaging to visual world to activations.

We did it that way because I genuinely believe our internal team understands our consumer and our brand better than anyone outside could.

Many of our team sit within our core demographic, and there is so much creativity in the room. We chose our direction from that session, then worked with brilliant creators and our wider team to bring it to life. It was highly cross-functional, and pulling the whole business behind one clear brand moment was one of the most rewarding parts of the process.

How the campaigns performed

Our latest campaign delivered, in three weeks, a 13% lift in brand awareness, a 6% lift in consideration and a 33% lift in ad recall. But for us, the key measure is sustained brand awareness. You expect to see a spike during a campaign, but the real value comes if the baseline afterwards is higher than where you started. That's what we have been able to achieve, which is really exciting.

The first campaign set that arc. At the start of last year, our brand awareness among our core target audience was in single digits. By the end of the year it was 85% within London, which was our target market for the campaign period. That is a huge shift for us.

We also look at commercial impact. We track the rate of sale uplift in stores that are close to our campaigns and billboards. With this year's energy drink relaunch, in the first month of the products hitting shelves and the campaign being live, we saw a 25% increase in rate of sale in key retailers. That's a huge result for us, and it shows the campaign is not just building awareness, it is supporting commercial momentum too.

What I would tell another challenger marketer

Outdoor will probably become a regular part of our mix, but always intentionally. We are not interested in plastering billboards around cities for the sake of it. We look at where our stores are, which sites are closest to the shelf, whether we are reaching our audience, and how each placement supports the wider strategy.

The biggest lesson was how powerful outdoor becomes when you pair it with community and real-life activation. The billboards build mass awareness, but the in-person moments build connection and loyalty.

During the latest campaign we hosted six nights of raves at Taste of London with a DJ truck, and the response was incredible. People were mobbing us for tote bag drops and DJ sets. We also sent parcels to hundreds of community members who were already advocating for the products on social. Outdoor gives you scale, but community gives you depth. The best results come when those two channels work together, and that is what we will keep building.