Sell Expensive Stuff by Making Ads People Actually Want to See (a case study)

Snapshot

We made cinematic quality long-form ads that customers actively chose to watch.

We did this by making videos that felt more like organic content and less like an advertisement.

This enabled Kokomo Vans to sell high ticket luxury van builds and build a small fan base that they then leveraged by expanding into product re-selling.

The Client

Kokomo Vans is a bespoke luxury van build company. They sell their Class B RV’s to adventurous people that value hand built quality over mass-manufactured RV’s. There is only one van to be sold at a time and months go by until another one is finished ready to sell.

The Goal

Pretty simple here: help Kokomo Vans exude luxury quality and get their vans in front of the biggest fans of the van build community to sell vans.

Difficulties

Nobody in the world knew Kokomo Vans existed! How do you sell vans for a premium when you’re unknown?

What Worked?

Making long-form van tour videos for each new van and pushing them using display ads.

Why Van Tour Videos?

Van Tour videos are beloved in the Vanlife community.

People that are into the idea of living and traveling in a van are obsessed with seeing what they look like inside. They want to see the layouts, designs, gadgets, and gismos.

Any “Vanlife influencer” that posts on social media regularly will be sure to post a van tour video and that video will most likely be their most popular video.

Short and sweet: prospective buyers want to see these videos.

Why Display Ads?

Normal advertisements we see are shoved in our faces against our will. On TV shows, billboards, facebook ads, and the news. They interrupt what we really want to be focusing on with whatever message they have to push.

In contrast, a display ad comes up on the YouTube feed like this:

It looks like organic content! And the only people that watch it are those that actively choose to click and watch.

In the mind of the viewers, this video is no different from all the other content they watch on YouTube that’s made by their favorite creators. They couldn’t care less that we paid to get it in front of them.

Instead of interrupting the show to say “hey look at our product!”, now our advertisement is the show they want to see.

Results

We helped sell 3 vans with an average ad spend of $1,463 per van sold.

But we didn’t only sell vans.

Kokomo Vans was able to gain a small fan base.

And that small fan base translated into people needing help with their own builds. So Kokomo was able to branch out into re-selling build products that they recommend. Expanding their revenue streams leveraging the trust built through the content we made.

Key Takeaways

The less your advertisements feel like advertisements, the better. One way to think about it is asking yourself: what would my potential customers be excited to see?

This doesn’t mean that YouTube display ads are the only advertising you should be doing. This philosophy of making ads your customers want to see can be applied to in feed Meta ads, Tiktok ads, etc. Just simply being empathetic thinking of where they’re consuming your ad goes a long way.