Service — brand growth and performance marketing
Soulpapa Marketing is not an agency that simply runs advertising. As a head marketer in a CMO position — building the brand’s philosophy and designing the flow of conversion — we carry out brand directing and performance marketing at the same time. We begin with shooting and producing the ad creative, then collect and analyse data, and on that evidence we design the direction of product, price, channel and promotion together with you.
We began in 2015, when our founder was working as a strategic planning marketer. Most of that work was building brands, and we planned a great many of them. One became a brand we ran ourselves the following year, alongside agency work until 2020. That is where we learned what it is like on the selling side. We stepped away when we went independent as an agency, and that brand is still running today. From 2017 we took on companies both online and offline, starting with local listings and blogs and widening the range from there. Today we do brand-centred growth marketing. In total we have worked with more than 90 companies — 50 in brand directing and performance marketing, and 42 in offline and project work.
The longest relationship among the brands we currently work with is in its seventh or eighth year, and most have continued for more than five years. Ad agencies are commonly swapped out every six months to a year. Spend longer than that with the same brand and you stop seeing a single creative and start seeing the brand’s entire cycle. Peak and off seasons, the year a new product failed and the year it recovered, all stack up on the same data.
We currently run between KRW 2 billion and 3 billion of annual ad spend across five categories, and the cumulative figure to date is far larger. What matters more to us, though, is not the size of the spend but how many cycles we have been through with that brand.
What Soulpapa Marketing does
Shooting and producing the ad creative, and running it
From planning through shooting, editing and copy, we finish everything in-house without outsourcing. The message survives intact only when it is made by the people who know the brand’s philosophy and the product’s appeal most precisely.
- Planning · shooting · editing · copy — finished in-house
- Spend runs on Meta as the axis, in a structure that measures and attributes performance creative by creative
- Campaign and ad set structure, budget allocation, and learning phase management
- Creative that has lost efficiency is ended, but the axis that did not land carries into the next plan
How one creative comes to be
- Re-reading product ingredients and specifications — we re-read the ingredient list and the specifications first. The usable figures and the permissible level of expression are decided here
- Collecting consumer language (VOC) — we gather how that category is actually named, from community questions and comments
- Setting the appeal axis — we identify both the category-wide need that brings this product to mind and the brand-specific evidence only we can claim inside it
- Competitive positioning check — we check whether another brand already occupies the same appeal
- Message structure design — we set out on one page who it is for, in what situation, what hurts, what lies beneath that, and which ingredient of the product resolves it
- Copywriting, shooting and editing — we hold the appeal axis, the audience and the core vocabulary, and sharpen the sentences and the evidence. Shooting and editing follow on top of that
- Korean advertising-law review — we do not delete expressions that catch; we bring them down to a lawful level. Delete them and the edge of the appeal disappears with them
We start from the words consumers already use, not the words the brand wants to use. With only one of those axes you get either a forgettable line, or a line that is true but does not sell. However many versions of a creative we make, we hold steady the message axis the brand is teaching the market. Provocative creative lifts the first month’s numbers and eats away at the perception the brand has built. We are not after hooks or bait — we are after revenue that sells this month and still sells years from now.
A sample of creative we actually ran. Content is masked to protect brand information.
Only as this process accumulates does the brand build up content as an asset.
Collecting the data
Not being able to answer “is the advertising working right now” is usually not a shortage of analytical ability — it is that the data needed to answer was cut off in the first place. We start by putting that part in order.
- Collecting the owned store order ledger
- GA4 events loaded into BigQuery — managed separately per brand
- Meta ad metrics collected daily — attributed down to creative level
- Server-side Conversions API to strengthen match quality, and recovery of orders lost in payment redirects
- Channel definitions unified at transaction level — so that login and payment hops are not counted as traffic
The collection structure actually in operation. Content is masked to protect brand information.
Only when this work comes first do the numbers in the report finally carry meaning.
A monthly analysis report
When each month’s spend closes, we publish an analysis report. Rather than listing metrics, we focus on reading the time series that runs through past, present and what comes next.
A sample of a report we actually issued. Content is masked to protect brand information.
- 01 ROAS — period efficiency and trend, and the cause of change versus the previous period
- 02 Summary — the whole picture of revenue, conversion and traffic
- 03 Campaigns — budget allocation and performance at campaign level
- 04 · 05 Ad set / Ads — efficiency at ad set and creative level, and shifts in response
- 06 Demographics — who actually responded
- 07 Scroll depth — at what point on the product page drop-off occurs
- 08 Retention — return visits and retention
- 09 Funnel Cohort — funnel pass-through by cohort
- 10 Lost Conversion — where conversion is lost on the product page
- 11 Internal conversion funnel · channel media mix — contribution by entry path
- 12 Purchaser Analysis — separating new from repeat, and repeat rate
- 13 Subscription — for brands running a subscription programme only
- 14 Product Mix — the products actually driving revenue
The metrics we work with are ROAS, cost per purchase, average order value, conversion rate, repeat purchase rate, bounce rate, scroll depth, and revenue attributed by channel. We do not, however, judge a brand against any figure as an absolute standard. When category, margin structure and average order value differ, the standard has to differ with them.
6C consulting
If the report covers “what happened”, 6C covers “so what has to change”. Six steps: start from the current state, work through condition and cause, and close with cure and check.
- Current — what rose this period, and what is a warning sign
- Condition — internal strengths and weaknesses, external opportunities and threats
- Cause — why that change happened, on the surface and structurally
- Cure — offence that takes opportunity with strengths, and defence that answers threats
- Check — what will be achieved and to what level, with the target and the basis for it
- Core — diagnosis and direction on one page
6C does not end as a document. The diagnosis drawn from each axis always leads to action items.
A structure that leads to action items
We think the most common form of failure is consulting that ends up as nothing but a report. So our reports always close with a set of action items, delivered together.
- Owner split — what is ours and what is the brand’s
- Priority and expected effect recorded together
- Re-checked in the next report for whether it was carried out
There are matters the brand has to decide directly. We sit in every room where those decisions are made, organise the evidence needed to judge, and review it with you.
Involvement across the 4P
Not many brands are fixed by adjusting the advertising alone. If the problem the data points to sits outside advertising, we say so.
- Product — the products driving revenue, bundle and volume, and rebuilding the set line-up
- Price — the ceiling on cost per purchase you can bear, and how discounting affects the bottom line
- Place — the weighting between owned store, Smart Store and open markets, and the role of each channel
- Promotion — designing and running creative and copy, product pages and events
A sample of the pricing design sheet. Content is masked to protect brand information.
If the brand’s philosophy is not settled, these four end up moving separately. That is why we start our work from the founder’s philosophy.
Contact
We think the reason you turn advertising on is, in the end, to turn it off. Once a brand can stand on its own, advertising becomes an option — and walking with you to that point is what we do. Efficiency follows along the way; it has never been the goal in itself.
That is why we start from the founder’s story. Unless it is clear why you built this brand and what you endured to get here, the creative, the price and the channel all end up saying different things. A brand’s philosophy is not sentimental decoration — it is the practical standard that ties scattered decisions in one direction.
If you tell us the brand’s owned store address, the ad channels you currently run, and what led you to create the brand, we can answer more concretely.
The brands we have taken on and how we work with them are in the Soulpapa Marketing introduction, and the perspective and criteria we actually apply are in the marketing articles.
