Darkroom uses Varos to navigate IOS 14 and add trust to the agency-client relationship

about

Darkroom is a full-service DTC digital agency. A category leader in results-driven growth marketing, Darkroom’s success is attributed to their unique partnership model, purposefully built to launch brands to market and accelerate growth.

It was founded in 2017 when Lucas DiPietrantonio & Jackson Corey, an entrepreneur-designer duo who launched a number of successful brands, kept getting requests to help on other projects.

Darkroom focuses on building brands for premium products and on finding memorable ways to communicate with consumers.

Some of its secrets to success are a) focusing on specific attributes of quality like zooming in on fine materials, b) taking consumers behind the scenes into the product-creation process and c) keeping imagery natural and not over-engineered. Now they’re the fastest growing agency in LA and work with brands like Jessica Simpson, Necessaire, Maaji and more.

Industry
Advertising
employees
40+
location
Los Angeles, California

Challenge

“IOS 14 drove up costs for nearly all advertisers on Facebook,” said Lucas DiPietrantonio, co-founder and CEO of Darkroom. After Apple released its industry-altering privacy update in April 2021, ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and CPAs (Cost per Action) started to skyrocket for everyone.

“Our customers are less attuned to the macro trends of ads results, and all they saw was increasing costs in their Facebook Ads manager,” explained DiPietrantonio.

Darkroom has consistently delivered market-beating results for years, but was suddenly left stuck fighting an uphill battle in the face of globally deteriorating ads numbers.

Solution

Darkroom started using Varos after a friend told the founders about its competitive dataset of aggregated and anonymized marketing benchmarks from hundreds of leading DTC brands.

Darkroom integrated with Varos in a few clicks via Facebook Ads Manager. Now, via the Varos dashboard, it can see how iOS 14 affected brands with the same Vertical, AOV, and Ad spend as each of their clients.

Then, filtering by date range, ad type, and audience, Darkroom builds reports to show clients exactly how their results compare to industry averages.

Darkroom also gets a weekly email for each of its clients which summarizes the results of companies just like theirs, which adds extra context, transparency, and communication to the agency-client relationship.

Results

“Ever since we’ve been able to report our results together with market data, you can feel the added trust in the relationship,” DiPietrantonio told us.

Sometimes Darkroom sees awesome results, which clients especially love seeing when the market is on a downward trend. In other instances, ROAS has gone down, but by less than the market, and that visibility helps add context to their conversations.

“Results aside, both we and our clients feel more knowledgeable. We can be more confident in our approach when we see in real time what’s happening in the market” DiPietrantonio concluded.

“Ever since we’ve been able to report our results together with market data, you can feel the added trust in the relationship.”

Lucas DiPietrantonio
Darkroom CEO

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Tweets

Chase Dimond | Email Marketing Nerd 📧
@ecomchasedimond

Bottom line: I’m recommending Varos to you all because it’s FREE (for now) and it’s already added a ton of value for myself and my clients.Check it out 👇

Social Savannah
@social_savannah

I would definitely recommend checking out Varos. With Varos you can easily see how your peers are performing, for free. You get insights into not only TikTok Ads benchmarks, but also similar data for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and more. #VarosAmbassador

jason wong
@eggrolI

Varos allows thousands merchants to upload anonymize marketing data across meta and google and aggregating it to show what the average is across different categories and ad spend

Cody Plofker
@codyplof

With varos.com, I can see exactly how our performance across channels stacks up against our competitors in our space.

Barry Hott ☄️
@binghott

Compare your ad performance to benchmarks of companies just like yours, anonymously.
I would've killed for this tool years ago and now it's here and oh it's free. Amazing.

Ron Shah
@obviceo

I've been seeing some content about @Varos_com so we decided to check it out.

One underrated feature of theirs is the Shopify Benchmarking, which is FREE btw.

Literally impossible to access this data anywhere else. Check out what we're seeing at @my_obvi 👇

William Harris
@wmharris101

I'm loving what @Varos_com is doing with providing much more relevant benchmarks for #ecommerce... especially since it shows that we are absolutely DOMINATING @Elumynt on #facebookads!

This is in the Baby and Children vertical.#fbads #ppcchat #retail #dtc

Chase Dimond | Email Marketing Nerd 📧
@ecomchasedimond

Bottom line: I’m recommending Varos to you all because it’s FREE (for now) and it’s already added a ton of value for myself and my clients.Check it out 👇

Social Savannah
@social_savannah

I would definitely recommend checking out Varos. With Varos you can easily see how your peers are performing, for free. You get insights into not only TikTok Ads benchmarks, but also similar data for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and more. #VarosAmbassador

jason wong
@eggrolI

Varos allows thousands merchants to upload anonymize marketing data across meta and google and aggregating it to show what the average is across different categories and ad spend

Cody Plofker
@codyplof

With varos.com, I can see exactly how our performance across channels stacks up against our competitors in our space.

Barry Hott ☄️
@binghott

Compare your ad performance to benchmarks of companies just like yours, anonymously.
I would've killed for this tool years ago and now it's here and oh it's free. Amazing.

Ron Shah
@obviceo

I've been seeing some content about @Varos_com so we decided to check it out.

One underrated feature of theirs is the Shopify Benchmarking, which is FREE btw.

Literally impossible to access this data anywhere else. Check out what we're seeing at @my_obvi 👇

William Harris
@wmharris101

I'm loving what @Varos_com is doing with providing much more relevant benchmarks for #ecommerce... especially since it shows that we are absolutely DOMINATING @Elumynt on #facebookads!

This is in the Baby and Children vertical.#fbads #ppcchat #retail #dtc