Polished London

Hummingbird digital: Our results

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The Challenge

Polished London — a fast-growing oral-care brand known for its premium teeth-whitening and dental products — came to Hummingbird with a clear goal: to dominate the digital oral-care category in the UK.

The brand had strong retail distribution, glowing influencer partnerships, and established awareness. But online performance had stalled.

Across Meta and Google Ads, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) was rising, creative fatigue was setting in, and campaigns were no longer bringing in new customers efficiently. Performance metrics were solid — but not scalable.

Despite a desirable product range and strong brand equity, Polished London’s paid strategy had become overly focused on bottom-funnel tactics. Their ads were reaching the same loyal audience repeatedly, while new customer acquisition was slowing down.

The brief was simple — but demanding:
Reignite paid performance with a full-funnel, creative-led strategy that scaled profitably.

That meant:
• Refreshing creative to overcome fatigue
• Building new customer acquisition pipelines
• Integrating Google, Meta, and TikTok into one cohesive performance ecosystem

And it had to happen quickly — before Q2 campaign launches.

Year

2024

Channels

Google Ads | Meta Ads | TikTok Ads

Industry

Health & Beauty / E-commerce

Our Approach

We started by conducting a deep-dive performance audit, analysing everything from creative fatigue and keyword overlap to audience segmentation and spend allocation.

From this, a pattern emerged: campaigns were overly reliant on a narrow retargeting base. Creative repetition had led to declining click-through rates and reduced engagement, especially across Meta and TikTok.

To fix that, we re-engineered the system — uniting performance marketing and creative storytelling under one measurable framework.

Our plan was built on four pillars: creative, audience, performance, and testing.

1. Creative Refresh: Making Performance Feel Personal

We developed a new suite of UGC-style creative that leaned into authenticity over aspiration. The new content showcased real users and real routines — brushing, whitening, and smiling — all filmed on mobile to feel native to TikTok and Instagram Reels.

Instead of polished studio shots, we captured everyday transformations — “morning mirror” clips, bathroom lighting, and natural reactions.
This decision not only improved engagement but also repositioned the brand as premium yet relatable. The “no retouching” rule became a core part of the creative direction — giving Polished London an edge in a market oversaturated with unrealistic before-and-afters.

We ran creative sprints weekly, testing hooks like:
• “Your smile deserves this.”
• “No filters. No edits. Just results.”
• “See why 100k+ customers trust Polished.”

The impact was immediate: thumb-stopping content that audiences actually watched to completion.

2. Audience Segmentation: Smart Prospecting Meets Intent

To expand reach without wasting budget, we synchronised Google Search intent data with Meta’s lookalike audiences.

This created a closed feedback loop between search and social: high-intent queries on Google informed who we targeted on Meta, and vice versa.

For example: people searching “best teeth whitening kit UK” or “sensitive whitening toothpaste” were then retargeted with social ads highlighting those exact product benefits.

This data-driven refinement reduced wasted impressions and helped deliver ads that felt personal to each user’s stage in the journey — whether they were comparing, considering, or ready to buy.

3. Performance Sync: Channel Collaboration, Not Competition

Rather than treating Google, Meta, and TikTok as isolated silos, we built a shared learning system across all three.

The best-performing headlines on Google Search informed Meta ad copy. Top-performing visuals from Meta were repurposed for TikTok. Creative learnings from TikTok’s short-form engagement tests fed back into Meta carousel and story ads.

This cyclical feedback approach meant insights were implemented weekly, not quarterly — keeping campaigns agile and responsive.

By turning each channel into a collaborative feedback loop, we increased blended ROAS and cut wasted spend by 22% in the first 60 days.

4. Testing Cadence: Always-On Experimentation

Every week, our team launched new creative variants with different hooks, visuals, and CTAs.
We didn’t wait for creative fatigue — we anticipated it.

Each test was measured not only by performance metrics (CTR, CPA, ROAS) but by watch time and scroll depth — early indicators of engagement that helped us identify winning creative faster.

This “creative sprint” model became the engine of sustained optimisation.

The Results

The outcome was immediate and dramatic. Within three months, Polished London saw performance metrics reach record highs across every platform.

Key Highlights:
💎 +196% increase in ROAS across all platforms
🔥 41% reduction in CPA within three months
📈 +2.8 million incremental impressions on TikTok during campaign launch

TikTok quickly became Polished London’s fastest-growing acquisition channel — driving cost-efficient awareness that later converted through Meta and Google retargeting.

Meanwhile, brand search volume grew by 63%, demonstrating that performance and brand-building weren’t competing — they were feeding each other.

sted brand search volume by 63 %, proving performance and brand building can coexist beautifully.