Gilroy Gardens is a family theme park with more than 40 rides and attractions, and over 10,000 trees (yes, you read that right — 10k!). With one of their busiest times of the year coming up — Halloween — they wanted to promote their special seasonal events with audiences they hadn’t previously reached. In collaboration with creative agency Articulate Solutions, Gilroy Gardens launched a new performance channel — Connected TV (CTV) — to boost ticket sales and decrease cost per visit (CPV). Using MNTN Performance TV paired with an audience-based advertising strategy, they produced impressive campaign results — for the Halloween season and all seasons.
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Gilroy Gardens Beats Performance Goal by 31% During the Spooky Season With MNTN
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For the Gilroy Gardens' Halloween CTV campaign, our primary objective was to engage a demographic segment comprising families with young children in order to optimize ticket sale conversions. We were thoroughly impressed with the ad slot allocation and the resulting revenue performance. MNTN's user-friendly interface, sophisticated audience targeting capabilities, and comprehensive analytics played a crucial role throughout the campaign's lifecycle.
Jason Raby
Principal, Articulate Solutions
22%
Under Goal Cost Per Visit
Objective
Use Precision Audience Targeting To Reach New Customers and Increase Ticket Sales
Gilroy Gardens wanted to drive consumers to their website leading up to and during one of their peak seasons — Halloween. Their family-friendly Halloween celebration “The Great Big BOO!” was approaching, and they had a niche audience to reach: not just families, but families in a specific geographical location. With MNTN, the theme park was easily able to launch CTV — a brand new channel for them at the time — while maintaining a customer-first approach and beating their performance goals.
Solutions
Prospecting
Excited to kick off their inaugural CTV efforts, Gilroy Gardens launched a comprehensive prospecting campaign to reach and convert new customers.
In preparation for the Halloween season, they leaned on Performance TV’s precision audience building to target their ideal customers. The theme park wasn’t just focused on targeting a large number of potential customers; they wanted to target the right types of people, meaning those who would engage with their ads and ultimately purchase tickets. With Performance TV’s unique audience suite, Gilroy Gardens accessed thousands of audience groups, honing in on segments like: theme park enthusiasts, parents of children ages 0-12, and leisure travelers with an interest in theme parks.
Another key piece to their audience strategy was geo-targeting — serving advertisements to consumers in a particular geographic area. To ensure that their ads were served to consumers with the highest likelihood of visiting their park, Gilroy Gardens created geo-targeted audience groups so that only in-market consumers viewed their advertisements.
To further ensure top ticket sales for “The Great Big BOO!”, Gilroy Gardens developed seasonal ad creative. In order to best resonate with their ideal customers, they strategically tailored messaging to targeted audiences — their video advertisements featured real footage of costumed families enjoying a spooky, fun evening at the park.
The Results
More Tickets, Sold More Efficiently
MNTN’s comprehensive reporting and measurement enabled Gilroy Gardens to accurately track performance throughout the course of their first CTV campaign. They were thrilled with what they saw. After just one month of running Performance TV, the theme park produced a CPV that was 30% lower than their goal. In addition, by adding MNTN to their marketing mix, Gilroy Gardens increased online sales by 55%.
This success encouraged Gilroy Gardens to relaunch their prospecting campaign leading into and during another of their busiest seasons: summer. Moving forward, the theme park will continue to drive results with MNTN.
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