The Client
Gelato is a global print-on-demand platform that lets creators, eCommerce entrepreneurs, and side hustlers produce and ship customized products (wall art, t-shirts, phone cases, books, home decor) without holding inventory. Orders are routed to the nearest production hub in Gelato's network of 150+ partners across 32 countries, which means a customer in Berlin gets their order printed in Germany, not shipped from a warehouse in New Jersey.
The platform competes in the print-on-demand space alongside companies like Printful, Printify, and Gooten. What differentiates Gelato is the local production model: faster delivery, lower shipping costs, and a smaller carbon footprint because products are made close to where they are ordered.
Gelato had just closed a $240 million funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The capital was earmarked for aggressive expansion into the US and key European markets. They needed to move fast.
The Problem
Two months after closing the round, Gelato brought Brighter Click on as an external growth marketing partner. They had three problems that needed to be solved simultaneously.
The messaging was not landing. Gelato had been running some paid media internally, but they had not cracked the messaging that would resonate with their target audience at scale. The platform serves a range of users from hobbyist creators selling a few prints a month to established eCommerce store owners running full print-on-demand businesses. Speaking to both groups with a single message was not working.
The media buying infrastructure was not built for scale. Post-funding startups face a specific challenge: they need to scale spend rapidly to hit investor growth milestones, but scaling spend without the right campaign architecture, creative volume, and testing framework just means burning money faster. Gelato needed an agency that could operate as a true extension of their team, moving at startup speed while maintaining performance discipline.
The international expansion required localized execution. Gelato was already established in several European markets but needed to significantly increase market share in the US while deepening penetration across key European countries. Running English-language ads across all markets was not going to work. Each market needed native-language creative from creators who understood the local culture, not just the local language.
On top of everything, this was late 2021. iOS 14.5 had just reshaped the paid social landscape. Audience targeting had been gutted. The agencies that survived the transition were the ones that figured out how to use creative as the targeting mechanism. We were early adopters of that approach, and it became the foundation of the entire Gelato strategy.
The Strategy
The Core Insight
Gelato's target audience was creators and side hustlers using competitor print-on-demand platforms. These were people who already understood the product category. They did not need to be educated on what print-on-demand is. They needed to be convinced that Gelato was better than what they were already using.
That reframing shaped every creative and campaign decision we made. We were not building category awareness. We were running a competitive displacement play.
Phase 1: Research and Planning
Before launching a single ad, we ran our full creative strategy framework. This was not just voice-of-customer and competitor research (though we did both). We started one level above that.
We analyzed Gelato's existing customer data to understand which user segments drove the highest lifetime value. We mapped the competitive landscape across Printful, Printify, and other POD platforms, studying their ad libraries, messaging angles, and positioning gaps. We ran voice-of-customer research through reviews, Reddit threads, and community forums where POD sellers discuss platform frustrations and switching decisions.
From this research, we identified two core buyer personas: casual creators and side hustlers exploring print-on-demand as a revenue stream, and established POD store owners already running a business on a competitor platform and open to switching for better economics or capabilities.
Each persona had different pain points, different objections, and different decision triggers. We built distinct messaging strategies for each.
Phase 2: 90-Day Creative Execution
Month 1: Persona testing through creative. In the post-iOS 14.5 world, audience targeting inside the ad platform had become unreliable. Our approach was to let the creative do the targeting. We produced ad variations designed to self-select each persona. A talking head video from a creator who runs a small Etsy shop would naturally resonate with casual creators. A screen-share walkthrough showing Gelato's production speed advantage would attract store owners evaluating platforms. We ran both types simultaneously and let the algorithm find the right viewers based on engagement signals, not interest targeting.
Month 2: Scaling with UGC. Based on month one testing data, we doubled down on the formats and angles that were driving registrations at the lowest CAC. UGC was the primary creative lever. We sourced creators who matched the age range and profile of Gelato's target users, and critically, we prioritized creators who actually owned a print-on-demand store. The difference between a generic creator reading a script about POD and an actual store owner talking about their experience was massive. Authenticity drove performance.
Month 3: Market expansion with localized creative. With winning creative formats and messaging angles validated in English, we expanded into localized campaigns. We sourced native-language creators in Italy, Germany, the Nordics, France, and the United States. Each creator received the same structural brief (pain point, product moment, outcome) but was instructed to adapt the message to feel natural in their language and for their local audience. Our internal translators provided quality control to ensure the localized content maintained accuracy while feeling native.
This was not translation. It was localization. The hooks, the cultural references, and the pacing were all adapted by creators who lived in those markets. A German creator talking to German POD sellers about shipping times within Germany carries a fundamentally different weight than a dubbed English ad.
Landing Page and Conversion Optimization
We worked closely with Gelato's VP of Customer Acquisition to align the landing page experience with the paid media campaigns. This included landing page optimization to improve conversion rates from ad click to registration, and restructuring lead form questions to enable self-attributed conversion source tracking. When your paid campaigns are running across five markets and multiple personas, understanding which creative and which market is driving the highest-quality registrations (not just the cheapest ones) is critical for scaling decisions.
Creative Insights That Extended Beyond Ads
One of the most valuable outputs of the engagement was the creative testing data itself. Through structured testing of messaging angles, hooks, and value propositions across thousands of ad variations, we identified which messages resonated most strongly with each persona segment.
We passed these insights back to the Gelato team, who applied them beyond paid media to their website copy, email marketing sequences, and onboarding flows. The ad account became a live testing laboratory for the entire marketing organization. What won in paid creative informed what went on the homepage. What drove the highest-quality signups shaped the onboarding messaging. This feedback loop between paid media testing and broader marketing strategy is one of the most underutilized advantages of running a high-volume creative testing program.
The Results
117% growth in monthly ad spend while reducing CAC by 17.6%. This is the number that matters most. Scaling spend is easy. Scaling spend while improving efficiency is hard. We more than doubled Gelato's monthly Facebook ad investment while simultaneously bringing down the cost to acquire each new user. That combination only happens when the creative is working and the campaign architecture is built to scale.
Successful expansion across five markets. Localized campaigns in Italy, Germany, the Nordics, France, and the US drove significant registration growth in priority markets, particularly in the United States where Gelato needed to build market share against entrenched competitors.
Three-year continuous engagement. We began working with Gelato two months after they announced the $240 million funding round and continued as their paid media partner for three straight years. Fast-moving funded startups churn through agencies quickly. The average agency-client relationship in this space lasts 12 to 18 months. A three-year engagement with a SoftBank and Goldman Sachs-backed company says more about the quality of the work than any metric on a dashboard.
Creative testing insights adopted across the marketing organization. The messaging angles validated through paid media testing were integrated into Gelato's website, email marketing, and onboarding sequences. The ad account did not just drive registrations. It became the primary source of customer messaging intelligence for the entire company.
What the Client Said
"Their understanding of social media advertising and creative strategy is impressive. Brighter Click is always on top of new trends and current with all things social media, keeping our accounts from falling behind. They take time to understand our business and always come with new ideas on top of their own expertise. They are always flexible and willing to work with our company's fast pace."
Dylan G., Social Media Advertising Manager, Gelato
Why This Worked
Most agencies would have taken the budget, run broad English-language campaigns across all markets, and celebrated the CPL. We did something different.
We started with research before we touched the ad account. We built persona-specific creative instead of one-size-fits-all messaging. We used creative as the targeting mechanism in a post-iOS 14.5 world where audience targeting alone was no longer reliable. We localized with native creators who understood their markets, not with Google Translate and stock footage. And we built a feedback loop where creative testing data informed the entire marketing organization, not just the ad account.
That is the difference between managing ads and building a growth system. Gelato did not keep us for three years because we hit a CAC target in month one. They kept us because the system we built kept compounding. New creative insights feeding better messaging. Better messaging feeding higher-quality registrations. Higher-quality registrations feeding better LTV data. Better LTV data feeding smarter scaling decisions.
That is what a real agency partnership looks like.
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