Crown Resorts Powers Relevance-Driven Facebook Ads with Dynamic UGC

Crown is one of Australia’s largest entertainment groups. With its flagship Crown Resorts and casino serving 29 million visitors annually, the company contributes $4 billion per year to the national economy.

The goal: Tap into existing streams of high-quality content

Crown’s Melbourne and Perth resorts are among the most visited tourist destinations in the country, and user-generated content (UGC) showcasing patrons enjoying themselves abounds in social channels. Until they teamed up with Stackla and relevance-powered advertising platform Brand Networks, however, that earned media went largely unutilized.

With breathtaking architecture and serene spaces like restaurants, function areas, conference facilities, theaters, and over 2,800 hotel rooms, Crown’s visitors post a steady stream of high-quality photos on Instagram. Crown hoped to use this UGC to reach and engage its loyal patrons as well as travelers researching the brand and its destinations on social media.

Brand Networks automates the creation of dynamic, UGC-driven social ads

Stackla and Brand Networks helped Crown Resorts devise a way to simply and effectively convert UGC into paid media through automation. The combination of Stackla and the Brand Networks Platform surfaced the best user-generated Instagram photos to the Crown marketing team, empowered them to easily gain permission to use the photos, and enabled them to instantly publish the photos into Facebook ads.

To automate the promotion, Brand Networks deployed its award-winning Open Signals technology, which receives the incoming feed of UGC and turns it into Facebook Photo Ads.

Results: 25% more Post Likes, 40% more impressions, 21% lower CPMs

The new cross-channel strategy utilizing user-generated content topped the performance of other engagement-focused campaigns. Compared to concurrent campaigns with similar budgets and targeting, the UGC-driven campaigns produced a 21% lower cost-per thousand impressions (CPM) with 40% more impressions. Positive sentiment as measured by Post Likes was 25% higher at a 61% lower cost-per Post Like. Crown’s Instagram follower growth rate also increased in stride.

“Our new social advertising strategy, powered by technology from Brand Networks and Stackla, ensures our best earned media is instantly promoted into ads that are timely, highly relevant to our audiences, and extremely authentic,” says Christopher Coyne, Chief Marketing Officer at Crown Resorts.