From Drop Dependency to Durable Growth: How YoungLA Transformed Its Paid Media Model

Before any meaningful strategy shift could take hold, the team needed to establish ground truth. Power Digital deployed a Phase 1 incrementality testing program across YoungLA’s four primary paid channels, using geo-based matched market holdout tests (MMTs) to isolate the true causal impact of each channel on revenue.

The results were definitive, and gave the team a data-backed mandate to reallocate budgets, scale investment with confidence, and move away from platform-reported metrics that had historically overstated efficiency. Measurement became the operating system for every budget decision that followed.

The most transformative strategic shift was reorienting the media calendar away from drop-centric spend spikes toward a consistent, always-on investment model. Prior to the partnership, ad budgets peaked during product launches, the exact moments when organic demand was already at its highest and paid media’s marginal contribution was at its lowest.

Power Digital restructured the approach: spend was pulled back during drops, then redistributed toward evergreen windows where advertising could drive genuinely incremental revenue. Within a single quarter, non-drop daily gross revenue climbed +57% versus July on just a +5% increase in daily spend. The brand was no longer paying to confirm what would have sold anyway.

With a validated measurement framework in place, Power Digital restructured campaign architecture across every channel to eliminate waste and concentrate investment where it drove the most demonstrable return.

On Meta, the account was consolidated from 50+ fragmented campaigns down to a streamlined structure organized around three clear priorities: evergreen prospecting, drop-specific ASC campaigns, and retargeting. Eliminating that fragmentation allowed budget to concentrate where it had proven incremental impact, rather than spreading thin across campaigns competing against each other.

TikTok delivered strong year-over-year growth in both revenue and efficiency, validating its role as a high-performance acquisition channel when structured around incremental outcomes. Programmatic was scaled through premium CTV inventory on Hulu and Disney+, proving its value as a brand amplifier with measurable downstream revenue contribution.

On Google, measurement testing clarified the channel’s role within the broader mix: primarily demand capture rather than demand creation. That insight informed a more deliberate push/pull between brand search protection during drops and non-brand prospecting in evergreen windows, concentrating spend where Google’s incremental contribution was strongest.

Snapchat, already running in the US, was expanded into EU markets to broaden the channel mix and extend YoungLA’s reach across a growing international audience, building on the optimization learnings from domestic performance.

With a strong domestic foundation in place, Power Digital worked with YoungLA to identify international expansion as a meaningful lever for long-term revenue diversification. The EU represented a largely untapped opportunity: a region where YoungLA’s brand had natural appeal but paid infrastructure hadn’t yet been built to capture it.

A dedicated EU media strategy was developed across Meta, Google, and Snapchat, casting a wide net across key markets to identify where YoungLA resonated most. As high-signal markets emerged, the team leaned in with localized creative and language-specific ads to improve relevance and conversion efficiency. Early results exceeded expectations: the EU consistently operated at the most efficient ACOS of any region, delivering +14% MoM revenue growth on flat spend. New customers outpaced returning customers, confirming the acquisition engine was generating genuine incremental growth.