About Philo
Philo is a streaming service that lets viewers watch live and on-demand TV from over 70 specialty cable channels including A&E, Discovery, BET, HGTV, Vice, Paramount and many more. Online-only channels including Cheddar, Crackle, and Bloomberg round out the offering and ensure there’s always something to watch.
Client Location
San Francisco, CA, USA
Campaign platform
TikTok, YouTube, Instagram
Campaign snapshot
Increase on Conversion Efficiency
CTR Increase
Additional TikTok Views
The big question
How Does a Streaming Service Tap Influence to Find and Connect With the Most Receptive Audiences?
The background
Unexpected Audiences Drive Campaign Success
When people learn about streaming TV service Philo, it resonates. One low subscription fee unlocks over 70 premium channels that would only otherwise be available with a cable TV subscription or a higher-priced streaming service.
If you’re looking to build awareness and grow, college students would seem an ideal target. There’s no need to explain the concept of “cutting the cord” to this audience and broadly speaking, they’re always looking to do more with less.
With BENlabs AI driving A/B Autopilot testing and delivering clear, Predictive Analytics insights, the data pointed in a different direction. When the data clearly demonstrates that the best opportunity for growth lies with a different audience, smart marketers pivot.
Getting actionable insights early allowed BENlabs and Philo to quickly adapt the audience strategy, accelerating an average influence campaign into a 10x conversion machine.
The AI
Reliable Data, Delivered Early
BENlabs AI helps to make every campaign a success and it learns even more with every single engagement.
Here’s how BENlabs proprietary AI helped Philo achieve influencer success:
Smart A/B
Presenting practically unlimited variations of content, copy, and CTA to smart audience segments, BENlabs deep learning AI quickly honed in on the ideal target audiences where Philo’s smart streaming message was resonating. Where college students were the initial target, the data showed that families, African American moms, and LGBTQ+ audiences were much more receptive and responsive to Philo’s streaming messages.
Predictive Analytics
With deep learning systems refined on thousands of successful campaigns, BENlabs AI offers actionable predictive insights before a campaign even begins. BENlabs Predictive Analytics is deep learning AI and based on early data, was able to quickly create custom algorithms for Philo’s campaign, unlocking a predictive accuracy not possible anywhere else, providing clear, actionable, strategy-defining data.
Smart Creator Matching
With an updated audience focus, BENlabs AI mined its proprietary and ever-growing database of more than 13 million qualified, verified content creator influencers from micro to mega. We surfaced and stack ranked creators who held sway with the most receptive family, African American mom, and LGBTQ+ audience segments and made it easy to engage suitable creators to quickly pivot and scale the campaign.
THE CREATIVE
What We’re Watching
Creators started off by introducing Philo to their audiences, discussing how the service works, the price, the features, and benefits. While laying this important groundwork, BENlabs AI insights and the BENlabs team uncovered opportunities to increase conversion efficiency almost 10x with higher-performing creative.
Early data showed that creators sharing their favorite shows and binge watches on Philo outperformed more general interest content. This content was “slice of life,” and gave audiences an authentic peek at what content creators were watching in their downtime.
Leaning in on early campaign insights, BENlabs sourced actors like Rick Fox and Holly Peete to promote their own shows, available to stream on Philo. In addition, drag queen creators promoted RuPaul’s Drag Race, available on Philo. With home and DIY channels well represented in Philo’s channel mix, interior design creators such as chrislvoesjulia, tarathueson, and ourfauxfarmhouse also shared that a cord-free TV experience is all part of a clean aesthetic. A diverse suite of content creators including Ken and Derra, Prince Family, Bramty, and Bloveslife highlighted Philo’s affordability.
The results
Scaling Success
Freeing content creators to share their Philo insights authentically, in ways they knew their audience would respond to, saw campaign click-through rates improve by 172%.
AI-driven insights and automated A/B testing surfaced meaningful results early in the campaign, when they could make the most difference to overall performance. With these insights, and with the BENlabs team and AI continuously optimizing for campaign performance, we were able to reduce the number of exposures an audience needed to see to go from Philo-aware to happy Philo customer, boosting conversion efficiency nearly 10x.
With incredible results on YouTube and Instagram, Philo looked to scale the campaign further, tapping TikTok to drive an additional 8M views on high-performing creator content.
The takeaway
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
Philo went to market with a great influence campaign designed to increase awareness of Philo as a low-cost, high-quality streaming TV option.
When the data showed that pre-campaign assumptions about target market could be improved, Philo trusted BENlabs to act quickly and decisively on the data. Optimizing and scaling the campaign to feature the right content creators, speaking to the right audiences with authentic messages.
BENlabs AI continuously tested and learned from the results to surface actionable insights. With the campaign focussed on the content and audiences that drove results, the successful campaign found further paths to scale by bringing a proven, conversion-driven, authentic, creator content to new platforms.
