Nick Archibald
Creative Strategist

Big River Coffee

Big River Coffee

Brand Platform, Cause Strategy, & Paid Social Campaign

Challenge

Big River Coffee was launching a new direct-to-consumer coffee brand and needed to establish a clear and differentiated brand position while also generating early awareness and sales through paid social.

In a crowded DTC coffee market, the challenge was identifying a brand platform that could stand for something beyond product quality or price and translating that positioning into campaign creative capable of driving measurable engagement and early purchase intent.

Strategy

I helped shape the brand platform and creative concept, Big River. Big Cause., positioning Big River Coffee around the connection between how coffee and rivers fuel our adventures, and that’s worth protecting.

To bring the platform to life, we introduced a 5% giveback from coffee subscriptions to river conservation, creating a clear cause driven brand mechanic tied directly to the brand promise.

We then launched paid social campaigns on Meta, testing multiple creative hooks and messaging variations to identify the combinations that drove the strongest engagement and conversion signals.

Insight

Outdoor enthusiasts love coffee as much as they love the outdoors. That overlap created an opportunity to connect the brand directly to river conservation, turning everyday coffee purchases into a way for customers to support the places they care about.

Framing the brand this way created a clear creative platform to test in paid social, allowing the campaign to evaluate whether mission-led storytelling could outperform product-only messaging.

Key Results

  • Roughly $1.6K in Meta ad spend leading to:

    • 59,079 impressions generated

    • 851 link clicks (1.44% CTR)

    • 68 adds to cart

    • 36 checkouts

    • 4 purchases

  • Mission-led creative outperformed product-only messaging, validating the conservation-driven brand platform

  • Video creative combining river footage + conservation messaging drove the strongest engagement and CTR

  • Three ads generated 59 of the campaign’s 68 carts, identifying clear creative winners for scaling and retargeting

*A website glitch during part of the campaign prevented some users from completing purchases, meaning final conversion results likely underrepresent the actual purchase intent demonstrated in the funnel.

Work Samples

Art Direction/Editing: Matt Peters