About Bloomingdale's
Bloomingdale’s helped to kickstart the department store concept. Its first store at 59th and Lexington in New York was founded in 1872 and transformed the entire city block. This flagship store remains an important part of the NYC landscape to this day.
Not content to rest on its laurels, Bloomingdale’s has continued to innovate in retail over its storied 150 year history.
Client Location
New York, NY, USA
Campaign platform
TikTok (organic + paid), Pinterest (paid)
Campaign snapshot
Organic Views
Organic Engagement
Paid Impressions
Improvement on benchmark link in bio CTR
Paid TikTok CTR
The big question
How Does a Household Name Build its Connection and Cachet With the Next Generation?
Bloomingdale’s is a household name. Customer and other data showed that the brand held a special place in the hearts and minds of women over 40. The growth opportunity and challenge, then, is to find new and authentic ways to reintroduce Bloomingdale’s to rising generations.
The background
Making a Connection
Bloomingdale’s has trusted BENlabs to connect with content creators and deliver results since 2021. The brand knew just where to turn to celebrate its 150th anniversary and introduce the Bloomingdale’s 150th collection to the next generation.
To help Bloomingdale’s connect with rising generations, BENlabs engaged 10 incredible fashion-forward creators who had a clear and meaningful connection with the target.
With organic creator content on TikTok supported by BENlabs AI-powered paid optimization on TikTok and Pinterest, Bloomingdale’s built the foundations for a lasting connection with the next generation of shoppers.
The AI
AI Insights Fashionably Early
The BENlabs team is supported by a powerful suite of proprietary AI tools that help make every campaign a success. What’s more, BENlabs AI learns even more with every single engagement.
Here’s how BENlabs AI helped Bloomingdale’s connect with the next generation of shoppers:
Brand Safety
BENlabs AI mines structured and unstructured data to create deep insight into potential creators. These creator profiles go way beyond follower authenticity and bot checking and ensure alignment with brand values as well as campaign goals.
Smart Creator Matching
BENlabs AI mines a proprietary and ever-growing database of more than 13 million qualified, verified content creator influencers from micro to mega. Smart Creator Matching surfaced and ranked influencers whose personality, audience, and content connected with the rising generation target.
Predictive Analytics
Bloomingdale’s is a longtime BENlabs partner. Using data from past Bloomingdale’s campaigns, the BENlabs Predictive Analytics AI trained on client-specific data to improve the customized Bloomingdale’s algorithms. With this client campaign data and learnings from thousands of successful campaigns, BENlabs AI unlocked incredible predictive accuracy for the campaign.
THE CREATIVE
Creator Trust and Authentic Content are Key
The understated Bloomingdale’s Big Brown Bag is itself a bold statement; Bloomingdale’s enjoys instant name recognition and affinity, not awareness, is the goal.
Authentic content — content creators and influencers sharing their thoughts with their audience in their style — is key. 10 fashion and beauty content creators were selected based on their fit and alignment with the Bloomingdale’s brand and their connection with the rising generation target.
Creators were given the freedom to select the Bloomingdale’s 150th products they wanted to share in a way that would connect with their followers. With this trust, each influencer created four videos sharing their fave finds. Organic videos were shared on TikTok. With BENlabs AI surfacing organic hits early, a complementary paid media campaign used winning organic content to supercharge results on Pinterest and TikTok.
The results
With Authentic Content, Audiences Engage
40 pieces of content from 10 leading fashion content creators aimed at the rising generation helped the target audience to see Bloomingdale’s in a new light.
Allowing influencers to engage the Bloomingdale’s 150th collection with creative freedom ensured authentic content.
Leading up to the 2022 holiday season, creator content achieved over 7M views, 1.5M of which were organic and net a 5.2% organic engagement. Winning organic content was boosted with paid media. Thanks to BENlabs influencer relationships, content was boosted from the creator accounts as opposed to the simpler but much lower-performing practice of boosting creator content from the brand account.
Winning creator content was shared in a paid content campaign on Pinterest and TikTok with paid TikTok content achieving a nearly 4.5% click through rate (CTR).
A “link in bio” call to action is helpful to share a deeper story or a collection with audiences, but it comes at a cost to CTR. With influential content creators and an engaged audience, Bloomingdale’s influencer content “link in bio” CTR of 2.67% beat the industry benchmark 0.9% by an incredible 197%.
Bloomingdale's Video Gallery
The takeaway
Trust Breeds Authenticity
Tapping influencers that spoke directly to younger, fashion-forward, upwardly mobile target audiences gave Bloomingdale’s a warm introduction to its next generation of shoppers. Or should we say reintroduction, given that Bloomingdale’s is a household name. Creative, targeted influencer content cast the brand in a new, relatable and accessible light with the rising generation.
BENlabs connects brands with trusted content creators. That trust affords creators the freedom to create content they know their audience will love. In other words, authentic content.
With BENlabs AI surfacing predictive insights early, identifying the content that will perform in paid efforts is easy. The best creator content gets a paid media boost early in the campaign, when it can make the most difference.
It all starts with authentic content, and creator trust is the key that unlocks authenticity.
