I want to share an interesting case study and know what the community thinks about it. Well, Picsart was facing a problem that a lot of apps are running into, the ad campaigns are getting more expensive across Meta and google, CPMs are rising and downloads are staying flat.
Sponsoring a product like Picsart is especially tricky with static creatives, since it's not intuitive to explain and it's hard to show the actual use case. Instead of burning money on creatives with high CPMs, they decided to scale distribution volume by running a UGC campaign through Sideshift. They brought in a huge number of creators and focused the content on showing the product actually being used, like a stunning photo getting retouched or an interesting app feature in action, and that's what made the content go viral.
They flooded TikTok with content, some videos went viral, others performed normally, but the result was mass distribution across both TikTok and Instagram. After 6 months they got:
- 185M total views
- 13,500 posts published
- $400k total spend so $2.16 CPM
- Top 10-25 App Store for 5 consecutive months
The $2.16 CPM is the key metric because for a mobile app campaigns on Meta hovers around $8-14 CPM depending on targeting.
So thanks to this UGC campaign, they saved a lot of money and growth organically
What made it work was:
1. Product-Focused videos: The hook was always the editing moment, the before/after, the transformation, so they focused on a good feature
2. Go with the gut: 13,500 posts over 6 months is roughly 72 posts per day You can't get there with a curated influencer approach. Lots of the success of this was driven by the creativity of the creators itself and good idea sourcing processes
3. Mass distribution: High volume... Really really high. By the law of large numbers, out of a huge amount of content, some of it is bound to go viral.