BRN AGENCY X COMIC CON BALTICS +40% TICKET SALES

Comic Con Baltics is a next-generation entertainment festival that gathers 37,000 visitors from across the Baltic region every year. The three-day festival takes place at LITEXPO in Vilnius, serving as a massive hub where cinema, comics, gaming, cosplay, K-Pop, technology, and various other communities come together.

However, this story isn't just about how we 'ran some ads'. Most advertising agencies treat projects of Comic Con's scale purely as 'brand awareness' campaigns. We, on the other hand, approached it as a data-driven sales mechanism.

This is the story of how cutting out wasted traffic and aligning budgets directly with actual revenue helped the largest pop-culture event in the Baltics grow by a further 40%.

From Ads for Everyone to Data-Driven Precision

It all started when we opened up the accounts managed by the previous agency and found a classic scenario: ads were being blasted to absolutely everyone, including pensioners who had completely dominated the algorithm.

When you invest your budget into an audience that doesn't even know what 'cosplay' means, you get a beautiful 'Reach' figure in your report but total silence at the box office. In our view, if an agency tells you that 'you need to show ads to everyone for awareness' – they either don't know how to optimise conversions, or they think you have money to burn.

We made a simple but strict move: we cleaned up audience hygiene. If you aren't in the target age bracket and don't share specific interests, you simply won't see our ads. The budget we saved this way was redirected to where the real action was happening: TikTok, Reddit, and the Google PMax/YouTube ad ecosystem.

Creative Segmentation: Cold vs Warm

We stopped showing the same banner to the entire internet. Instead, we split the strategy:

• For the cold audience: We showcased the scale and emotion of the festival (using visuals from previous years). The goal here was to spark interest.
• For the warm audience: For those who had already shown interest in the event, we cooked up completely different content: featured guests, the event programme, and constant reminders about rising ticket prices.

It was precisely this 'pressure' through retargeting, combined with the urgency of price increases, that drove the bulk of the conversion surge.

Hygiene and Daily Management

Many expect magic in marketing, but we believe in the Asaichi method. We review results daily and maintain strict 'hygiene': underperforming ads are paused instantly, and the budget is shifted to where the sales are actually happening.

Every week, via a shared Google Sheet, we provided the client with uncompromised transparency: exactly how much was spent on each channel and how much revenue it brought in. When you are looking at actual cash rather than charts in a PDF report, decisions to scale up budgets stop being a gamble and become a logical investment.

Success is a Team Effort

We want to emphasise that this was a joint effort. The client was incredibly proactive throughout this project:

• They invested heavily in social media growth (Facebook 'Going' responses, Instagram followers, YouTube subscribers). This provided us with a massive pool of 'warm' data for our ads.
• Communication took place in a WhatsApp group, where responses from both sides took less than an hour. When both parties work at this pace, growth is inevitable.

The Result

The 40% growth is the direct result of stopping buying 'noise' and starting to manage the full funnel.

We still see massive potential ahead with Comic Con Baltics because when marketing expertise meets an excellent product, the growth ceiling simply vanishes.

BRN AGENCY. Simple with us (doesn't mean easy).

Actions Taken

• Expanded our ad channels: Added TikTok, Reddit, and Google, and started utilising YouTube ads.
• Optimised conversion tracking: This allowed the ad platforms to identify and target relevant audiences more effectively.
• Strictly defined age-based audiences: Moving away from the previous agency's approach, which allowed pensioners to skew the targeting.
• Segmented our ad creative: General visuals from past festivals were shown exclusively to the cold audience. Ticket carousels, guest announcements, event programmes, and price-increase warnings were reserved strictly for those who genuinely cared about the festival updates.
• Daily account hygiene: Routinely reviewing and optimizing ad performance.
• Rapid feedback loops: Communication and turnarounds took just a few hours.
• Cross-platform budget allocation: Tracked weekly in a shared Google Sheet featuring costs and revenue breakdown for each channel.
• Dedicated growth budgets for other social channels: Driven strictly by performance metrics to fuel the retargeting pool.

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