How We Drove Major Results Without Urgency, IP, or a Sellout Limit

Sometimes marketers are handed the perfect scenario: urgent deadlines, recognizable branding, built-in scarcity. This wasn’t one of those times.

The team at Marigold was brought on to help drive ticket sales for a large-scale pop culture convention—but with some major limitations. While the format (celebrity guests, franchise fandoms, immersive fan experiences) was tried and true, this year came with a twist.

The challenge? We could use celebrities’ names and images—but not the franchises they were known for. And to make things even trickier, there were no planned urgency periods or ticket price increases, meaning no natural incentive for audiences to buy now instead of later.

A familiar marketing playbook was suddenly off the table. So we built a new one.

View CASE STUDY Inside The Facebook Advertising Campaign That Returned $9.71 For Each Dollar Invested

Strategic Targeting: Selling Without Context

The venue allows for nearly unlimited scaling, and we were told by the client, “There is no sellout number,” when we asked about it. Our mission was clear: sell as many tickets as possible for the budget we were given. We reviewed the client’s marketing efforts the previous year to ascertain what kind of results were possible. The bar was high, with strong volume and low CPAs all around. We did a thorough analysis of exactly what prior efforts worked and which we would abandon. We want to undertake each new client and campaign with a well-formulated understanding of the landscape in which we are working. Due to the nature of the audience, we knew that dialing in the interest groups was going to be one of the primary keys to success. Warm traffic was important, but in order to sell as many tickets as we needed to, we would have to find the right users and show them the right ads.

Letting Social Proof Do the Heavy Lifting

Proper targeting would be key to success, we knew. We created audiences within ad sets that most effectively represented the likeliest avatar of an attendee given the celebrity guests attending. Some guests’ fan bases were flourishing in multiple sectors, and we used multiple adjacent interest groups to locate interested users. These audiences and their lookalikes proved to be integral to the campaigns’ success. The client maintains a strong organic presence, and in order to ignite the energy amassed by social proof, our team used well-performing social posts of guest announcements as ad creative. We ran these alongside designed graphics and videos but celebrity-led creative far outperformed anything else. Our efforts were to get the right ones in front of the right users, causing the algorithm to do as little work as possible to pair the two. Geographic targeting was another piece of the puzzle we had to get to fit. Since the event was held in a major metro area, we targeted geographically broadly for most of the sales campaigns. The last several weeks were spent targeting users within driving distance of the event’s location. Implementing this strategy required agility, as we had to shift budget and focus multiple times in the duration of the campaign. A month before the event, we were tasked with selling celebrity photo op and autograph packages. We leveraged the existing interest-driven audiences and the celebrity creatives that were producing purchases in a series of campaigns. Then, with the event several weeks out, we were directed by the client to shift focus from the photo op and autograph sales, and once again shine the light on volume since the CPAs were so low and ROI was surpassing expectations. They could make more money by selling tickets than they initially expected, the event organizers realized.

The Final Push—Without a Real Sellout?

Although we’d been told the venue had “no sellout number,” we were given the green light to test “90% Sold Out!” messaging during the final countdown. That campaign delivered some of the highest returns of the season.

By the Numbers: Inside the Campaign Results

On Meta platforms, we sold 1,258 tickets (41% more than last year!) with a CPA of $7.60 and 33x ROAS. We sold an additional 610 photo ops/autographs with a CPA of $5.18 and 48x ROAS. On Google, we sold 5,927 tickets with a CPA of $2.11 and ROAS of 118x.

Lessons That Transcend Any One Event

“Know your audience” might be a cliché, but it’s true for a reason—especially in an era where algorithms demand precise inputs. Without urgency, price breaks, or recognizable IP, we had to lean hard on interest-based targeting, social proof, and geo strategy to drive results.

We met fans where they already were. We spoke their language. And when the tools we usually rely on were stripped away, we still delivered an overwhelming turnout that exceeded the client’s expectations.

That’s the power of well-informed strategy—and knowing how to build the right audience even when the rules change.