A leader in large crafting, Provo Craft was limited by its retail footprint consisting of company owned stores and retailers catering to the industry. Mercury helped them expand their reach and drive incremental retail volume by helping set up their entire long form direct response operation to introduce their first brand, Cricut. During a holiday push, unit sales increased by 250%, soon enabling Cricut to strengthen retail presence and expand to new distributors. This success led to expansion into DR for other products in their line. Long form DRTV alone accounted for an overwhelming percentage of units sold, and a recent survey concluded the 2nd most popular reason why retail customers purchased Provo Craft’s products was due to “TV infomercials”.

Guthy-Renker and Mercury Media had a history of success introducing products in skin care and self-improvement via DRTV. With Proactiv, we had several challenges. Was the best target teen, parent or adult acne sufferer? What level of upfront spend would pay out on the back end based on the continuity of purchase? Mercury worked with Guthy-Renker to find the best solution to these issues and more, determined the lifetime value of their customers, and found the right balance of offer and spend to enable a quick re-investment of media dollars. Long form infomercials soon made Proactiv a household name—with a direct response campaign heralded as the most successful in history—and allowed Guthy-Renker to take advantage of various other sales venues.

After the successful launch of InStyler in the general market, Mercury proposed targeting the Hispanic market due to its high index usage of the beauty category. We applied historical data on the category in the Hispanic market to develop a Spanish-language campaign that eventually surpassed the general market ROI by over 25% and virtually doubled the number of overall weekly transactions. In addition, Mercury developed a “save-a-sale” tactic that increased unit sales an additional 6% per week at no risk or incremental cost to Instyler—all leading to a solid foundation for the brand at mass retail in high density Hispanic formats.