Photo and styling by Clare Barboza for ACME Ice Cream
Case Study: ACME Ice Cream (Crooked Spoon)
B2C · Consumer Food & Beverage · Paid & Organic Social · Brand Launch Strategy · Influencer Program
February – September 2019, via Plaid Pig PR
The product was exceptional. The digital presence was essentially nonexistent. Eight months to close that gap.
The Challenge
ACME Ice Cream - later rebranded as Crooked Spoon - had something a lot of brands spend years trying to manufacture: a product people genuinely loved. What they didn’t have was a digital presence to match. No established voice, no content strategy, no paid infrastructure. The goal was to build brand awareness with local consumers and start generating retailer interest; simultaneously, from scratch, on a real-world timeline.
The Approach
I started with a full social media branding audit; assessing each platform, the existing audience demographics, competitive landscape, and where the brand’s current content was falling short. From there I built the strategy from the ground up: four audience personas, platform-specific goals and content cadence, a hashtag strategy, a UGC framework, and a paid campaign architecture - all before the first post went live.
Organic and paid launched in parallel. Five paid campaigns ran across Facebook and Instagram, each optimized in real time against audience targeting and budget. Organic content ran alongside, building voice and visual identity between campaign bursts - shifting the tone from corporate-cool to warm, nostalgic, and genuinely inviting.
The strategy was informed by a thorough competitive analysis spanning ten brands across national, regional, and craft ice cream categories; including Halo Top, Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream, and Enlightened at the national premium level; Tillamook, Molly Moon's, and Snoqualmie Ice Cream regionally; and Three Twins, Julie's Organic, McConnell's, and Straus Family Creamery in the craft and mission-aligned space. Monitoring content strategy, audience growth, platform behavior, and messaging positioning across all ten informed ACME's voice development, visual identity, and campaign targeting throughout the engagement.
The creative work was hands-on: I wrote all copy and managed campaign strategy throughout. Photography came from a dedicated photographer with creative direction on content and visual approach. Early video content was produced to get ahead of Instagram’s growing preference for it in the algorithm.
An influencer program ran in parallel through Plaid Pig PR; recruiting Pacific Northwest micro-influencers aligned to the brand’s target personas, managing contracts and timelines, and briefing creators on key messaging around the brand’s local sourcing, ingredient quality, and “Celebrate You” positioning.
The Results
In under eight months, across five paid campaigns:
305,900+ total reach
+3,154% Instagram impressions growth
+360% Facebook reach growth
Starting context: under 1,000 followers on both Facebook and Instagram at launch, with a Twitter account that hadn’t posted since 2016 that was later removed.
Digital Platforms: Facebook · Instagram · Pinterest
Services: Brand Audit · Audience Persona Development · Voice & Creative Development · Paid Social · Organic Social · Campaign Management · Real-Time Optimization · Influencer Program Management · Creative Direction · Video Content · Retailer Audience Strategy · Contest Strategy & Management · Competitive Analysis & Ongoing Market Monitoring