How Lyka barked their way to a Series A funding using Pencil

LYKA is Australia's healthiest dog food subscription. They have customized meals for dogs that help with canine allergies and stomach issues.

They're disrupting the dog food industry, by putting nutrition first; and literally eating their own product.

Learn how this scrappy startup, with a 3 person marketing team; cracked the Facebook code using Pencil to scale their ad creative.

James Harding
Head of Growth at Lyka

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Data
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Best Pencil ad 2.82% CTR

20% cheaper CPA with Pencil Ads  ($44.84 vs $36.32)

13% CPC reduction with Pencil Ads

$100,000 USD spent on A.I generated ads

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"The ability to generate video creative at scale, know what works, and iterate quickly; I love it."

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Lyka's Challenge

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Lyka had a small team for their country wide brand and building out content at scale was becoming too time consuming, they didn't have an efficient process that could help them reach their aggressive growth goals.

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"I was building ads on my phone, it was generic looking, no different placements available either"

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James explained to us that he had recently joined Lyka and was in charge of their soon to be-massive scaling efforts that was heavily reliant on paid Facebook ads.

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Creating Ads At Scale

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"With Pencil, you sit; click generate, and it just starts building more ads, you wonder what its going to come up with next...its truly awesome"

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Knowing that there had to be a better way than manually creating ads, Lyka entrusted Pencil with their efforts to scale their Facebook campaigns and help their small but scrappy team achieve scale .

They had discovered Pencil to be an efficient way to get creative produced at scale to meet the growing companies needs.

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"The joy of Pencil is that you can add templates on top of video, animations for text and video; its these nuance changes help us beat ad fatigue"

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Ads That Perform

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Creating ads is only half the battle, the other side of Facebook ads are finding winning creative ads. Even better if you can predict those winners, luckily, Pencil can do that too.

Lyka ran their ads through Pencil, training the platform's algorithm to create new differentiated creative. The Lyka team was able to take those learnings and inform their creative/business decisions.

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"The ads that Pencil created, absolutely killed it for us. It was performing 30% better than any of our other creative across Q4. It was also the most engaging"

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They were able to find better ads by leveraging the performance predictions Pencil was able to provide. They are codified "Similar To Winners" or "Similar To Losers" for the given metric you are trying to predict.

By using these insights, James and the marketing team at Lyka were able to create more winning ads, reduce unnecessary budget waste on ads that the system predicted were likely to lose; thus increasing the proportion of budget spent on ads that grow the business.

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Ease of Use

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A new software is often a daunting task for teams to adopt, Pencil provides an immersive but efficient onboarding experience with our customer success team that is a melds the core principles performance marketing and platform expertise.

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"The onboarding set up has been great, and the ongoing support from the Pencil team has been incredible."

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James and the entire team and Lyka were taken on by Chase, our Head of Performance; who was able to ensure they were able to create video ads quickly using Pencil, while creating the proper framework to test them effectively to drive performance.

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"We hired someone new, and they're in their second week at our company, but already they are building video ads with the Pencil platform...and she's not even a creative, so its super straightforward for anyone to use. ‍It writes all these sorts of new ideas, that brings fresh angles to the table, and I would have never been able to come up with that myself. So its been a massive win for us

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Big Picture

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Lyka was a small team struggling to make professional and scalable video content for their brand. By leveraging Pencil as their partner in growth, they were able to significantly expand their ability to create video ads for all their paid channels.

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More importantly, they were able to easily identify winning ads that produced huge gains in performance and ultimately, revenue.

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Fun note: They recently announced their Series A funding 🎉

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