PhotoRoom · AI photo editing app
Rent giant street screens where passersby try the app and see their photos
15,000 people reached, 4M+ online views, 18% more branded search, trade press coverage
Workedeventsin-personoffline-adspr-launch
What they did
Goal: show PhotoRoom is more than a background remover. Picked a smaller test market (UK, London) to get clean data. Rented high-footfall places with physical screens (the Outernet) and huge LED screens; people walked in, used a PhotoRoom photo booth, edited their pictures, and saw them blown up on the screen. Planned for UGC/online distribution from the start. Measured via branded search uplift.
What happened
15,000 people walked by/experienced it, including existing users travelling from Manchester; 4M+ views on repurposed UGC; 18% uplift in branded search; coverage in Campaign Magazine (250K monthly visitors).
- Stage
- Scale (scale (post $50M ARR))
- Effort
- One multi-screen activation in London; budget undisclosed (less than $1M)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · How To Repurpose Offline Events Into Millions Of Online Impressions – Larissa Morimoto, PhotoRoom“we rented out these huge LED screens so that people could walk in, they could experiment the PhotoRoom photo booth. So they would take pictures of themselves, they could edit their pictures, and then their images would get blown up on this huge screen.”
“we found a smaller market to test in because we really wanted to have as much raw data as possible. And so that was the UK, specifically London”
“Whereas in London, we saw an 18% uplift in branded search, for example.”
Related topics
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More from PhotoRoom
All 9 PhotoRoom tacticsMore from this episode
- PhotoRoom: Grow mainly through paid ads once the product clearly worksReached ~300M downloads and $50M+ ARR; later hit ad fatigue and rising CPAs
- PhotoRoom: Bring your ad makers to live events and reuse the footage in ads and posts4M+ views; TikTok-style clips did better than expected on LinkedIn
- PhotoRoom: Judge brand campaigns by brand-name searches and surveys, not cost per installFreed the team to try new channels; claim only
- PhotoRoom: Host a press-only store event with a famous comedian and a hobby brandNo branded search uplift, vs 18% in London; an expensive lesson
- Calm: Partner with a sports superstar to promote a sleep appMost expensive and worst-performing campaign, per a former employee
- PhotoRoom: Run a TikTok ambassador programWorked for a while, then stalled as everyone copied it
- PhotoRoom: Make ads for small-business owners fun and consumer-style, not businesslike
- PhotoRoom: Team up with a hit movie so users can put themselves on its set