Finding new customers is hard work. Especially when targeting people outside the core demographic.
Online adult retailer Adam and Eve is “always looking to open up more avenues to reach new customers,” says Chad Davis, marketing director who has been with the company for more than 25 years. Mr. “
To that end, the brand has entered the well-established ‘sexual wellness’ category in social marketing. Adam and Eve began working with Cognitiv, an AI performance marketing startup in spring 2020 to create custom algorithms for his KPI needs of clients. Adam and Eve’s digital agency, Media Horizons, is the introducer and manages the partnership.
“We are not a mainstream brand,” says Davis. “Therefore, we are carefully looking for partners to work with us.”
Cognitiv’s technology allowed Adam and Eve to adopt the cost-per-order metric, as well as the percentage of new customers brought in through media programs or partners, Davis said.
Throughout 2022, the brand commissioned Cognitiv to find and convert net new customers with desktop and mobile display advertising. Adam and Eve are direct-his-response-his marketers, so “tying traffic to sales is really important,” Davis said. However, “the display work we do may not be directly attributable to the actual activity.”
Across the campaign, 60% of conversions were from new customers, double the average for Adam and Eve’s previous campaigns. These new customers also had an average order value 13% higher than his existing customers.
Adam and Eve’s media mix includes podcasts, linear and streaming TV, social influencers, radio and more. Paid social is particularly lacking due to brand safety restrictions on the big social platforms. “We can’t clear there,” Davis said.
Adam and Eve used to work with six martech partners, but due to audience overlap and conversion rate lagging, they narrowed the list down to three. “Cognitiv survived and was able to become a key partner,” he said.
Cognitiv’s pitch was that “AI can predict consumer behavior better than humans can,” said Jana Jakovljevic, the startup’s vice president of strategic partnerships.
For example, according to Jakovljevic, Cognitiv’s DSP “evaluates every advertising opportunity” based on more than 1,000 data inputs, including URL, time of day, location, historical pricing data, and demographic information, to provide a brand’s historical Use conversion data to model similar products. A machine learning model weights each brand data input to estimate the likelihood of a new customer.
“If we predict that an ad impression will convert, if it doesn’t, we use that information to readjust the weights and keep readjusting until we have a formula,” Jakovljevic says.
Machine learning models can also identify people who are likely to make a purchase, but probably not immediately or in the media context of that ad. “Sometimes you know someone is going to convert, but they are not ready,” she said. “I can predict that it will be another 5 days before they actually buy this product, so I choose not to serve ads to them.”
For direct response advertisers, find the right customers and know when no Advertising to them can be an efficiency differentiator.
According to Jakovljevic, Cognitiv tracks people in the “maybe” pile to see if they will eventually convert and how long it will take them to do so. In some cases, the model may decide that someone “never converts” and stop serving ads.
Cognitiv’s pattern matching helped Adam and Eve identify seasonal rhythms of what worked and what didn’t, Davis said. “Last year he from October to he March is a very strong period for us as opposed to when the outdoors are more comfortable and people are outdoors,” he said. Sales spike around the holidays and around Valentine’s Day.
Cognitiv’s model responded quickly to changes in new customers’ online browsing behavior after the COVID-19 pandemic hit and everyone went into lockdown, Jakovljevic said. And since 2021, people’s media consumption habits have changed “dramatically” again, so Cognitiv’s tools have adapted as well, Davis said.
The target audience for Adam and Eve products is a wide range of sexually active consumers aged 18-80. But the company’s consumer base is shifting to younger female consumers each year, said Brian Young, her manager at Adam and Eve Media, who has been with the company for 20 years.
“We are moving away from many men’s products that have been central to our business for a long time,” says Young. As a result, she “reaches more female viewers with her ads.”
Adam and Eve won’t run out of potential new customers, Davis said. “People go through different stages of life,” he said.
