How The Wine Society Reduced CPA by 23% Through Creative Automation

Breaking through to younger audiences, without breaking the budget

As one of the UK's oldest wine cooperatives, the Wine Society has a strong value proposition: high-quality, curated wines delivered by one of the UK’s oldest wine cooperatives. But, in a market crowded with subscription services offering free trials and flashy discounts, the brand faced a barrier to attracting younger audiences – its £40 membership fee.

The Wine Society needed to justify their premium positioning to younger, affluent audiences who either didn't know the brand or perceived it as exclusive. The challenge was clear: shift perception and drive acquisition through modern, targeted campaigns while maintaining the brand's heritage and quality standards.

Smarter Workflows for Personalised Campaigns

The Wine Society's marketing team recognised that reaching different audience segments effectively would require personalised content across multiple channels and formats. Traditional creative production, while perfectly capable of delivering quality, has natural constraints when it comes to large-scale personalisation:

• Individual asset creation for each variant requires significant time investment
• Extensive versioning across channels and formats multiplies production requirements
• Testing and optimising multiple creative approaches requires rapid iteration capability
• Large-scale personalisation can become resource-intensive with traditional workflows
• Campaign optimisation benefits from the ability to quickly implement learnings

CreateTOTALLY offered an opportunity to achieve scale and agility that would complement their existing capabilities. With multiple audience segments to target and messaging pillars around Value, Quality, and Approach, a traditional production approach would have required significant resources and time to achieve the same level of personalisation.

Building Agility with CreateTOTALLY

With the following objectives, The Wine Society partnered with CreateTOTALLY to automate and scale their creative operations through InDesign and AfterEffects automation:

• Reduce cost per acquisition while maintaining quality leads
• Create personalised content for different audience segments
• Enable rapid testing and optimisation of creative variants
• Streamline production across static and video formats
• Maintain brand consistency at scale

Before: Creative teams manually produced individual assets and adaptations in InDesign and After Effects, managing versioning through file systems, and coordinating campaign updates through lengthy production cycles.

After: Master templates were created only once, with CreateTOTALLY automatically producing personalised variants – combining visuals, copy, and formats for each target audience. The platform handled asset versioning, messaging logic, and multi-channel output automatically.

The Results

Delivering this acquisition campaign through CreateTOTALLY gave The Wine Society the ability to test, learn, and optimise rapidly with the speed and reactivity to respond to performance insights. This ultimatley helped deliver measurable improvements:

• Cost efficiency: CPA reduced by 23%, landing at £74—£22 under target and £46 lower than previous campaigns
• Audience growth: Subscriptions from 30-45 year olds exceeded forecast by 23%, successfully attracting the key growth demographic
• Production speed: An automated pipeline eliminated manual versioning and enabled rapid iteration
• Campaign agility: Top-performing variants were scaled instantly and new variants could be created instantly from master templates
• Resource optimisation: Creative operations delivered through automated workflows, enabling scale without proportional resource increases

The campaign successfully attracted younger audiences while achieving strong cost-efficiency results, demonstrating how creative automation can enhance campaign performance.

Key Takeaways for Other Brands

The Wine Society's campaign demonstrates how heritage brands can leverage modern marketing technology to reach new audiences effectively, all while maintaining the core brand values that make them distinct. 

• Scale doesn't sacrifice personalisation. Automated systems can deliver relevant, tailored content without increasing production complexity.
• Speed-to-market enables smarter marketing. Fast iterations helped the team act on performance data mid-campaign—not just after the fact. When you can iterate quickly, you can respond to performance data and improve results continuously.
• Templates help maintain brand integrity. Template-based systems ensure brand guidelines are maintained across all variants, giving you control over how your brand appears.
• Efficiency unlocks experimentation. When production scales efficiently, you can test more creative approaches and find what resonates with different audiences.
  

Reimagine What Your Creative Team Can Do

The Wine Society didn’t achieve these results by cutting corners – they did it by working smarter. With automation, they delivered personalised, high-quality campaigns faster and more efficiently.

If you’re ready to scale your creative output without sacrificing control, book a demo with CreateTOTALLY today.