How We Helped The Cape Playhouse See a Major Impact Without Major Investment

The Cape Playhouse, located on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is the longest-running professional summer theater in the country. Lauded as “America’s most famous summer theater” and the “place where Broadway goes to summer,” the Cape Playhouse has a long list of celebrities who have performed there, including Julie Andrews, Bernadette Peters, Olympia Dukakis, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, Betty White, Gertrude Lawrence, Humphrey Bogart, and Ginger Rogers.

The Cape Playhouse began a partnership with CI in 2024 with a limited history of utilizing digital channels for advertising (no problem!). With a small team, they were eager to take advantage of CI’s “extension of your team” partnership approach. They were also thrilled to be able to leverage their Google Grant, which prior to our partnership they had lost access to. We worked with Google to get the current team set up as Admins on the account so they could benefit from this valuable resource. Together, CI and the Cape Playhouse were poised to launch a large ramp up in this organization’s digital efforts, despite this organization not having a huge amount of money to invest.

A Streamlined Strategy to Maximize Limited Resources

To get the most impact without major spend, we honed in on Meta and Google for the Cape Playhouse. We allotted the bulk of the media budget to Meta to ensure we could leverage the storytelling and targeting capabilities that the platform provides, with some spend allocated to Google’s Demand Gen. We included a strong investment in tourism prospects on both Meta and Google, given that Cape Cod is a tourist destination—the population more than triples over the summer—and expanded our targeting for acquisition audiences to reach prospects in the Boston and New York City DMAs, as well as Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Meta: One Campaign to Rule Them All

We launched a single Meta campaign to promote the programming of the Cape Playhouse’s 2024 summer season. The campaign ran for 2.5 months and, despite beginning after the season started, was still hugely successful due to highly intentional strategizing by CI’s team to account for the condensed timeframe.

Though we invested in reengaging existing audiences, a solid portion of our spend went to reaching new audiences and tourists to the Cape during the summer months when the playhouse is active. Both of our acquisition audiences, Lookalikes and Interests, ended with a positive ROI, with Lookalikes having a very strong ROI over 680% and driving over 75 purchases—all with an investment under $2,000.

The Cape Playhouse provided creative assets to ensure we could supply the content swaps needed to keep the Meta campaign fresh. We utilized organic posts from their page to capitalize on the excellent engagement and to limit the content asks of their team, such as the post below which kicked off the campaign:

The campaign also included dark posts, like the one below, for which CI collaborated with the playhouse on effective copy. Given the short runs for their summer programming, we focused on cast announcements and show graphics to start. This built audience interest while allowing time for the organization to gather production footage:

Google: Engaging Assets in Unmissable Placements

Our paid Google efforts focused on utilizing Demand Gen to reach users across a wide range of Google placements. Demand Gen is a dynamic campaign type, which means it requires more assets (video, images, and text)—but that doesn’t necessarily mean more lift for your team. We worked with the Cape Playhouse to identify some engaging production assets that would do the work for them and leverage all the placements available through Demand Gen. We supplied all text-based elements of the ads and selected the best visuals, so all the client needed to send was a link to the assets.

Below are the RDAs (Responsive Display Ads) that promoted their production of Waitress. We honed the copy and refreshed ad content as new assets became available throughout the campaign.

We specifically targeted Tourists through In-Market and Affinity audiences, which drove over 1,450 clicks and 15 purchases, for a 230% ROI, from just over $1k in media investment.

The Takeaway

With a modest media investment and a focus on reaching tourism prospects, we were able to effectively and dramatically jumpstart the Cape Playhouse’s digital marketing efforts. By focusing on the channels we identified to be most impactful for this client, we launched a campaign that was successful and sustainable—it utilized content they were already creating, which reduced the lift for their team. Our campaigns helped bring more awareness to this well-loved organization and helped them exceed their goals—win-win!