What is in a name?
The idea of Shaded came from two key ideas.
The first being that there is too much grey area when it comes to creative brand-side.
If you are a brand operating on Meta ads, at least 52% of the ads effectiveness is driven by creative alone. If you’re a brand advertising on Tiktok, then it’s the most important factor by far in performance.
But it’s not just performance marketing that is impacted by creative, it’s how you convince your audience to purchase or re-purchase via email.
Or how you present your community via organic social media.
It even affects how your brand is perceived when users click on to your website; it can be the difference between shopping DTC or shopping via Amazon… or even worse, potential customers not shopping on your website at all.
Enough people talk about the fact that platforms are demanding more engaging and higher-quality videos, photos and copy than ever before. But not enough brands are good at identifying the gaps in where content needs to be changed to adapt to the platforms, where teams need to talk to each other to share insights and ultimately where the best opportunities for growth across creative and performance are.
Back in December 2019, Co-founders Cassi Idun and Shivali Bennion both went for the same job, and were both hired, with a new role being created.
Cassi came from a deep understanding of content and Shivali’s expertise lies in the technical aspect of all things digital marketing, which is why their skill sets complimented each other so well that they grew the DTC department by 197% year on year, resulting in their part of the business going from low five figures to a comfortable six.
Without either of these two aspects together, creative and performance, these results would have been unachievable.
The second reason why Shaded was born
There are so many horror stories of brands being “cancelled” for not resonating with their target demographic as the campaigns or even worse, isolating their current customer base.
Quite often, it’s because these brands lacked a deep understanding of culture and nuances surrounding the people they were aiming to target.
Cassi and Shivali (mostly known as Shiv) are both from multi-ethnic backgrounds and have pushed for authentic representation throughout their careers; from Cassi being one of the first team members at Coco and Eve / Sand & Sky, to Shiv pushing internally to ensure a wide range of models for every brand she’s worked with.
This was reflected in the campaigns they created for Noughty, an organic hair care company. They looked to understand the psychology of the “curly girl” customer, a key demographic for Noughty, alongside showing the breadth and depth of the other ranges.
That’s why Shaded is going to put the brand's target customers first, and look to get a better understanding of what makes their customers tick then utilise these insights in their proposed marketing campaigns.