How To Repurpose Offline Events Into Millions Of Online Impressions – Larissa Morimoto, PhotoRoom

David Barnard:

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Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard. Today's conversation is shorter than usual and will be featured in RevenueCat's state of subscription apps report. Each episode in this series will explore one crucial topic and share actionable insights from top subscription app operators. With me today, Larissa Morimoto, senior growth manager working on special projects at PhotoRoom. On the podcast, I talk with Larissa about breaking free from the paid acquisition treadmill, how to repurpose offline events into millions of online impressions, and why a celebrity partnership can go viral, but still completely flop.

Hey, Larissa, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.

Larissa Morimoto:

Thanks so much for having me, David.

David Barnard:

So I was really excited to have you on. You've been doing some really creative, interesting things at PhotoRoom, and we've talked so much about Meta ads and TikTok and organic and influencer and all the things you can do with marketing. We've talked endlessly about it on the podcast, but there's just so many other ways to get people's attention. And I think a lot of apps, especially as they scale, are starting to look at some of these more traditional marketing channels that you wouldn't think of for digital, but that can actually be super effective and can really even compound your digital spend.

So I wanted to talk today specifically about offline, about actual in-person marketing. So let's talk about these offline experiences and why do that? Why as a digital company, as PhotoRoom, are you doing these offline marketing experiments?

Larissa Morimoto:

So PhotoRoom is a mobile app. We're also a web app and we have an API, and we've grown significantly since 2019. So we're able to scale to almost 300 million downloads across a variety of different methods. And I think like most apps, we relied a lot on paid acquisition for our growth, especially the initial stages where we were still testing a lot of things out. We found product market fit really early on as well, and paid really helped us scale that.

But after a while, once you've grown so much through paid channels, you start experiencing similar patterns. So you start seeing things like ad fatigue, you start seeing that your campaigns aren't performing as well. CPAs might go up, especially nowadays where everybody's trying to crack digital acquisition. You need to be creative in some way or another because your next 10,000 customers are probably not going to come from Meta or any other acquisition channel or digital acquisition channel if you haven't been able to see success so far.

And so I self-identify as somebody who's chronically online. It's in my LinkedIn bio, it's my personality. And I love all things consumer marketing as well. So I take a lot of inspiration from that, whether it's in the form of brand trips that makeup companies do and a lot of other consumer-oriented ways of marketing. And the reality is that we're all living in the attention economy. So everybody's trying to get your attention. We're fighting for people's attentions. We're paying for their attention. And offline marketing is just something that helps crack and create memory.

And if you're a digital app where you've relied so much on paid acquisition, if 70% of your marketing budget is concentrated in a single channel, you're likely already putting your growth at risk because if one thing happens to that channel, then you have no other way of getting back. It's kind of like a treadmill. The treadmill's on, you're probably going to be growing, but if your treadmill's off, there's nowhere for you to go.

And so we were able to scale to over 50 million ARR using paid as our main source of growth. And this is public information, I double checked. And it's something that my manager [inaudible 00:04:10] at the time, used to say all the time, we need to capture people where they are. And they're probably on the streets, they're probably in markets and restaurants and thrift shops. And so there's this beauty of offline where you're meeting people where they are and then helping them remember you as a human and not just a SaaS product, because people do tend to remember humans more.

David Barnard:

So now that you've been experimenting with this, and we'll get to a couple of examples to put this more concretely for folks, but what are some of the things you've learned as far as how to be successful, what to measure? Just how do you think about these non-traditional advertising opportunities for an app?

Larissa Morimoto:

I always think of brand and the ultimate goal of brand as being a way to build love with people so that they're willing to grow the extra mile for you and that they're willing to kind of share, I guess, similar passions for you and your product. And that's something that you really can't get with a $5 CPI. And so PhotoRoom is a very data-driven company and it's been so hard to find the right measurement framework for it. Especially because traditionally if you're running a brand campaign, you're likely trying to tie it to the regular growth metrics that we follow. So whether it's installs, whether it's conversions, whether it's retention.

And for us, I guess the moment really cracked when we stopped looking at brand from that perspective and we really looked at love and how can we really build this relationship with our potential users. And so the issue that we had before whenever we would try to do brand related campaigns is that we would always compare maybe CPAs to what we were spending on paid acquisition. And that was really impacting our creativity because we were always so limited in the channels that we would explore.

So we were very focused on influencers and cracking the infamous TikTok ambassador playbook, which did work for us for a while. But after a bit, you start seeing that everybody else is doing the same things and there's no innovation, there's no creativity. And for us, our creativity was unlocked when we decided to look at it from the perspective of love. Right now we measure brand uplift through branded search, we run brand awareness surveys, and we look at very qualitative ways of measuring instead of the traditional growth framework that we normally would look at it from.

David Barnard:

It's tough because a lot of people listening will be like, "Well, that's nice for you." And it is a privileged position and a way to be at a company where you can spend marketing dollars where you're not tying as directly. But that's the thing, is that when you get to that point... And I think even smaller apps can find ways to do it on the cheap. It doesn't have to be super expensive. It doesn't have to cost a lot of time.

And again, we're going to share some examples of offline campaigns that you've done. I think it's just so important to be able to invest in the company in this way and then creativity in this way. And then those kind of things can lead to new formats, new ads, repurposing assets from the things that you did. There is a lot of benefit in the long run to thinking this way and experimenting this way, but nearly impossible to actually measure.

And so if you're a company who has to get that dollar for dollar return, then maybe this is not the thing for you, but it can be so rewarding in the long run. So I did want to put things in more concrete term for folks of some of the campaigns that you've run. And so I know one of the more interesting ones you ran recently was an offline campaign in London where you did a bunch of stuff in person. What was that?

Larissa Morimoto:

Yeah, it's funny that you mention it being a privilege, because you're so right. I'm definitely in a privileged position where we have resources to spend and it kind of takes me back to when this campaign originated. So I worked on this campaign with one of my best friends and colleagues, Aisha, and I'm very proud to call her a colleague and friend. And this all started because I was sitting on the couch with Aisha and all of a sudden my CFO walks in and we jokingly asked him like, "Hey, what would happen if you just gave us a million dollars for a campaign?" And I kind of expected him initially to be like, "Ha ha, that's a really funny joke." But he did take it seriously. And we started talking, the three of us, we started brainstorming ideas. And obviously I didn't spend a million dollars on my campaign, but just to give you an idea of how this all worked out.

And that's kind of how the origin story of the campaign came up, because our initial mission was to help people perceive PhotoRoom as more than just a background remover. So like I said earlier, we found our initial product market fit through our background remover software, but then now we've gotten to the point where we have so many other tools to help people selling goods online actually maximize their chances of conversions that we didn't have a clear way of showcasing it. And so this campaign started out with that kind of seed and it eventually grew into something that we could never have imagined it grown to.

And so what we ended up doing is we found a smaller market to test in because we really wanted to have as much raw data as possible. And so that was the UK, specifically London, where we rented out kind of high footfall traffic places that we could find that had kind of a physical screen. And what we really knew that we wanted to do was we wanted to showcase the power of PhotoRoom. So we wanted to bring all of these different tools to life, whether it was in the form of a digital activation or anything physical that people could experience. Because like I said earlier, people really do resonate more with your brand if they can see humans working on it, especially in the age of AI.

We're a very AI-driven product, so it's always been important for us to have that human touch. And what we ended up doing is we rented out these huge LED screens so that people could walk in, they could experiment the PhotoRoom photo booth. So they would take pictures of themselves, they could edit their pictures, and then their images would get blown up on this huge screen. That ended up resulting in was a lot of user generated content.

That's my biggest tip for anybody trying to go offline, that you always have to factor in UGC or online distribution to maximize your chances of return, especially of ROI. And what ended up happening was that we had 15,000 people walk by this billboard, they were able to experience PhotoRoom, see pictures of other people on the screens. And it was such an amazing moment to not only connect with future users of PhotoRoom, but also to existing users. So we had people coming in from Manchester to try out the PhotoRoom photo booth. We had people walking by who walked up to us and said, "Really? AI can do this." And for us, that was so rewarding to be able to really have these interactions with people. So, yeah, in the end it was amazing.

David Barnard:

You mentioned repurposing some of the content that you created there. So I imagine you had a small film crew or somebody with an iPhone going around taking video. Were there any particular wins from that? I mean, just such a powerful thing to... And it's not the standard UGC, just influencer with a selfie cam kind of thing. Where you have PhotoRoom blown up on a billboard, you have people really reacting excitedly, how did the assets from that perform and were there any kind of standouts from that experiment?

Larissa Morimoto:

So we actually had over four million views on our collected UGC campaigns. So what we ended up doing is we brought our three ad creatives to the Outernet. And so they were also there with us on the day of the campaign and they recorded so much content that they were able to repurpose for ads and socials and even LinkedIn. I never would've thought that LinkedIn would be kind of a UGC first channel in the same way that TikTok is, but we threw some TikToks on LinkedIn and it went... I mean, it didn't go viral, but we got way more engaged with than we expected. But yeah, I think just having those four million impressions in addition to the 15,000 people that we were able to interact with was such a win. And it really showed us that, one...

I mean, it kind of made us feel bigger than we actually were at the time because we had people commenting and even messaging us asking about how the campaign went, that it was so rewarding for everybody involved. One of our biggest wins, I would say, was getting coverage on Campaign Magazine, which was one of the biggest publications for anybody doing offline campaigns. They have 250,000 monthly visitors. So I think that was such, such a rewarding experience.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And then with the partnerships that y'all do, y'all did an incredible partnership with the Barbie movie where you take a selfie and it removes your background and puts you in the Barbie set or whatever. And so what's cool about your business is that getting exposure in those kind of places actually can drive future partnerships and things like that. And that's another thing I think folks don't think about is that as you grow, there are opportunities for partnerships. There's just bigger opportunities that start to come along.

And your standard like digital advertising where you're just going after your exact customer profile and somebody who's going to download the app, that matters most early on. But as you grow and there's bigger opportunities, getting in front of creatives outside the industry and other things can provide tons of benefits. It's fascinating how you're able to land in that campaign magazine, and I'm sure that got in front of the kind of people that you would potentially partner with or hire or do other things with.

So that's such a great example. And then there was another one you did in Japan. Tell me about that one.

Larissa Morimoto:

Yeah. I mean, just to follow up on the ICP, on targeting your ideal customer profile, I try not to use acronyms, so it's so hard. But our ICPs are essentially small businesses, so anybody who's trying to sell online. And for us, I mean, we also kind of go into with the mentality that yes, you're a business owner, but you're also consumer first. Because you're likely already on Instagram, you're likely already on TikTok, you're likely already existing in these spaces. And that's also why whenever we run paid acquisition, we don't even try to optimize our creatives fully for businesses. We try to have a fun twist to it, because ultimately consumers can also be businesses.

And when we tried applying that mentality to a campaign that we ran in Japan, it actually ended up backfiring in the most interesting way possible. So Japan is also a pretty big market for PhotoRoom. And what we ended up doing is we secured a partnership with Tamiya, specifically because a lot of our user base in Japan are also collectors. So that's a huge market. If anybody has an app in the collector industry, Japan is definitely where you should be. And what we ended up doing is we ended up partnering with Tamiya to host a community event in their new offices that they opened up, I believe, a year or two ago, and they wanted to increase the traffic to their store.

And so what we did is that our team in Japan, they actually reached out to a local comedian, Kamuri, who's potentially the equivalent of Pete Davidson in Japan, to go in and host this event. But what we didn't optimize for was the actual foot traffic. And this was before the London campaign, by the way. So we took all these learnings and we keep on iterating. But we didn't optimize for foot traffic specifically because Kamuri's profile was very, very discreet and he didn't want anybody that he didn't know in the audience to randomly show up and potentially interact with him.

And so we kept it very, very limited to journalists and press. And we thought, "Okay, well, if we're already thinking about online distribution, then why not make it fully about online distribution?" So we relied 100% on press and journalists and TV coverage to maximize your chances of exposure. But since Kamuri has never, A, sold online and B, doesn't have a conventional business, his audience did not care about what we were doing. So what they were focused on was the comedy aspect.

And of course, it doesn't mean that they don't care about PhotoRoom or that they don't know what PhotoRoom does, but we didn't see any uplift from the Kamuri campaign. Whereas in London, we saw an 18% uplift in branded search, for example. So for us, I mean, it was shocking that we didn't move the needle, and that was a huge learning and a very expensive learning to have made. If you're going to try this strategy out, please, please, please at least focus somewhat on your ICP or make it a very wide consumer event.

David Barnard:

We talk about channel product fit and things like that. It's so funny to think about as you're trying to get attention, you do need to get attention with at least some kind of audience that's going to be at least tangentially related. And great examples, apps all the time want to get featured in the big tech publications or other places. But a lot of times those don't end up driving much download because people reading TechCrunch, it's like, they don't care about your app. They're not reading TechCrunch to find out about the new apps. That was a decade ago, right?

And so it is funny that by hiring a comedian, you got a lot of attention and it's great to brainstorm ways to get that kind of attention, but that you do still need to figure out the scope of that attention and figure out ways to lean it toward people who are actually going to care and people who are going to engage with PhotoRoom.

Larissa Morimoto:

For sure. I was talking to somebody who used to work at Calm, and Calm did a lot of celebrity partnerships back in the days. I think they still do today. And I remember asking them like, "Oh, but you partnered with LeBron James. That was so cool." And they were like, "Yeah, we did. But actually that ended up being our most expensive campaign and our worst performing campaign because LeBron James' audience actually does not care about getting better sleep. They care about basketball." But that was a huge learning as well. And I think I wish I had heard that before the Kamuri campaign came out. Yeah,

David Barnard:

That's such a great example. Well, this has been so much fun. As we wrap up, anything you wanted to shout out, any job openings on your team or anything like that?

Larissa Morimoto:

Yeah, I just want to shout out Aisha and Kaya, who are my go-tos when it comes to anything brand campaign related. We have a new one coming out in May, so very excited for that. It's going to be in New York and we're hiring for a lot of positions, so check out our website and you can stay in touch through LinkedIn or any other social media platform that you can find me on.

David Barnard:

Awesome. Thanks so much for joining me.

Larissa Morimoto:

Yeah. Thanks so much, David.

David Barnard:

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