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Marc-Oliver Schmiedle heads up high-impact marketing at luxury e-commerce retailer Ounass. He has over 20 years of experience in the field and is passionate about scaling the brand globally while preserving its DNA.
In the world of high fashion, we often speak of the “perfect fit”. Yet for years, luxury marketing has been wearing a split wardrobe. On one side, brand marketing evokes the dream, on the other, performance marketing secures the transaction. This traditional divide has long forced an unnecessary choice between the beauty of storytelling and the reality of driving sales.
At Ounass, the leading fashion and beauty luxury e-commerce platform in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), we’re redefining this journey by bridging the gap between inspiration and conversion. We believe the path to a purchase should be as seamless and elegant as the collections we curate, a philosophy that moves us past the idea of shopping as a series of disconnected stops. Because in the high-stakes world of luxury, choosing between awareness and action is so last season.
For our most recent fall/winter campaign, this shift meant dissolving traditional silos in favour of a full-funnel strategy. With the main goals being to increase brand awareness and purchase consideration, every impression had to do double duty, heightening the brand’s allure while driving the bottom line.
Bridging the ‘luxury paradox’
As a luxury retailer curating over 1,000 coveted brands, Ounass has long enjoyed exceptional awareness. However, data recently revealed a nuanced “luxury paradox”.
The path to a purchase should be as seamless and elegant as the collections we curate. Because in the high-stakes world of luxury, choosing between awareness and action is so last season.
While our name was well known, we were trapped in a cycle of passive admiration. Our online platforms served as engaging, aspirational touchpoints where consumers explored the brand lifestyle, but this engagement didn’t translate into immediate conversions. People knew Ounass, but the brand wasn’t top of mind. Without that immediate recall, they didn’t feel the pull needed to bridge the gap between inspiration and checkout, stopping short of making us their go-to shopping destination.
The mission was clear. We had to evolve Ounass from a purely aspirational brand into a top-of-mind destination that people wanted to shop from.
Curating the journey: A 3-part video strategy to connect with shoppers
To move shoppers from discovery to decision, we had to create, capture, and convert demand in one seamless loop. That’s where YouTube came in. It’s the ultimate digital style lookbook, bridging the gap between immersive storytelling and commerce.
We curated a three-part video strategy designed to invite our audience deeper into the Ounass world along every step of their shopping journey:
Part 1: Shining the spotlight on Ounass
Our opening act had to be a grand invitation. Working with Google’s Creative Works team on asset direction, we launched a cinematic hero film. This long-form ad was designed to be both aspirational and inspirational, focusing on the clothing within a luxury setting:
Leveraging YouTube Masthead as a digital billboard alongside Video reach campaigns, we became an unmistakable focal point for 20 million unique individuals in Saudi Arabia and 6.1 million in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Together, these solutions — anchored by the big-screen impact of Connected TV — offered us a digital canvas that paired cinematic quality with unrivalled presence. By turning YouTube’s most visible placements into our flagship online storefront, we ensured it was Ounass greeting people when they arrived.
Part 2: Tailoring a multi-layered approach where each format feeds the next
With our presence established, we shifted our video strategy to deepening emotional resonance and lifting consideration. By adapting our long-form ad into dynamic, shorter edits, we deployed a multi-layered ecosystem where each format fed the next based on the customer journey:
We told our story with video views campaigns, while YouTube Lineups placed us alongside prestigious beauty and fashion content. Demand Gen turned our ads into a virtual storefront, bridged the gap between inspiration and action for mid-funnel “window” shoppers. And ads on YouTube Shorts kept Ounass top-of-mind by embedding visually striking moments directly into people’s daily scrolling habits, driving them to our website.
Overall results were applause-worthy, generating 89 million views across Saudi Arabia and the UAE. View-through rates reached 69% in the UAE and 50% in Saudi, significantly outperforming regional retail benchmarks. On top of that, Shorts secured the second-highest consideration lift.
Demand Gen proved to be the catalyst that really took our results to the next level, proving that thoughtful brand-building is the true engine of a healthy mid & bottom line.
Part 3: Turning interest into action
The final act was dedicated to conversion, transforming newfound interest into definitive action. Crucially, we wanted to see the direct impact of our earlier branding efforts on actual shopping performance.
Moving away from broad targeting, we built custom first-party remarketing audiences from people’s direct, high-intent interactions with our brand during the first two phases. We focused on two distinct groups:
- Campaign-driven website visitors drawn in by our awareness efforts.
- Highly engaged viewers who had actively interacted with our video campaigns.
We re-engaged these receptive audiences using dedicated Shopping Campaigns. By reaching people already inspired and ready to buy, we clearly demonstrated how top-of-funnel campaigns have the potential to boost lower-funnel sales.
Designing discovery and desire across the funnel
The results of our Brand Lift study speak for themselves, delivering full-funnel impact at a massive scale:
- Brand awareness lifted by 3.6 million people,
- 5.3 million recalled our ads
- 3.9 million moved into the consideration phase.
Our overarching approach also transformed brand discovery, inspiring over half of Saudi viewers to search for “Ounass” by name after seeing our ads.
Looking ahead, we’re excited to keep using the formats that worked so well for us while trying out some fresh YouTube solutions in upcoming campaigns. We’re also planning to bring in creator ads to help us connect with our audience and really drive brand engagement.
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