A Fresh Shave Reveals a Brand-New Audience

The Challenge

Known as the holiday that receives the brunt of jokes about ties and paperweights, Father’s Day can be quite stressful for those who want to show their appreciation for dad, but feel that a tie doesn’t quite express what they’re trying to say. This dilemma was the perfect excuse for national barbershop chain Tommy Gun’s to step up with a grand plan to give dads something they’d actually use and appreciate—a little bit of pampering. The idea was a gift card with the cost of a cut and hot shave preloaded. Before working with us, Tommy Gun’s had run aggressive campaigns on previous Father’s Days, using traditional and digital markets, but had grown so significantly as a company, they could no longer stretch their former budget using those mediums.

We love the challenge of executing big ideas and for this campaign we had to figure out a creative way to target the gift givers of the household—significant others and grown children—instead of the dads themselves. Tommy Gun’s’ data showed that the majority of their customers were dads and most still had fathers, fathers-in-law and sons, who would also make good recipients of the gift cards. A brand-new audience had to be reached so that the dads themselves didn’t receive the ads. A few dads would no doubt see the ads, but Tommy Gun’s wanted the gift cards to primarily be gifts, not something their dad customers had to buy for themselves or ask for as a gift.

The Approach

Our strategy included a number of steps. Using leading technology, and working with thousands of apps to determine mobile phone locations, we first collected the device IDs from the mobile phones of Tommy Gun’s’, and their key competitors’, customers during open hours. We did this by mapping out the latitude and longitude of all of these barbershops. This ensured we’d reach both an established customer base who already enjoyed the services of Tommy Gun’s and men who got their cuts and shaves elsewhere.

Our data science team then mapped out these customers’ home locations, which were determined by noting where they most frequently spent their time and followed certain behaviours. We triangulated the home, wifi and cell towers to identify other devices inside the same household. Using algorithms from multiple servers to crunch through several billion data queries of information, we sorted out which ones were the devices in customers’ homes belonging to significant others and grown children. The next step was to make sure those devices were targeted with ads promoting the gift card. To ensure each customer’s privacy, all data remained pseudonymized and anonymized. There was no personal information attached and each device ID was gathered into a large group so that there were no personal identifiers.

Our agency partner provided artwork for this part of the campaign, which really played up dad jokes. Wanna hear one? What type of magazines do cows read? … Cattlelogs! If you groaned, that was the exact response we were hoping for with these ads. An attention grabber that would make the reader stop and laugh. The remainder of each ad had a version of “Make dad’s gift better than his jokes,” and info about purchasing the gift card. We wanted to drive traffic to Tommy Gun’s locations and to the website where gift givers could make their purchase.

The Conclusion

Tommy Gun’s were very pleased with how well the campaign was executed and impressed to see that by incorporating data science to determine device IDs, home locations and the other devices in the home, we were able to meet their goal of targeting the gift givers of the household, rather than their existing dad customers. This entire campaign cost a fraction of the price of a traditional national campaign and Tommy Gun’s’ e-commerce site saw a lift of 6800% over the three-week Father’s Day campaign compared to the year before.