Small Social Impact-Driven Brand Soapply Goes Big With Times Square Billboard Advertising

Soapply, a luxury better-for-you hand soap brand notable for its food-grade organic oils, recycled glass bottles and give-back program, will be in Times Squares’ bright lights with a 24-hour billboard running from Monday to Tuesday.

Though Soapply declined to share the cost of its splashy advertising move, outdoor advertising firm Inspiria Outdoor estimates a one-day billboard in Times Square is between $5,000 and $50,000, depending on the exact size and location of the display. How can the small startup with a meaty education component and no large institutional investors draw notice in a domain usually ruled by legacy brands like Calvin Klein, Coca-Cola and Toyota?

Soapply is betting on an unusual discount code to do the heavy lifting. Instead of offering a code that’s short, memorable and easy to use, founder Mera McGrew, in partnership with Decker, an advertising, strategy, branding and content agency that’s worked with Howard Johnson, Orangina and Frangelico Liqueur, decided to provide the exact opposite: a lengthy 255-character discount code.

The code, which will be active for a month, is Soapply’s manifesto. With spaces added between words, it reads, “A brand that always puts sustainability first, Soapply takes a holistic approach, transparent & safe ingredients, third-party EWG verified for your health, refillable packaging & every 8 oz helps fund global essential water, sanitation & hygiene initiatives. We turn handwashing into an act of good.” The brand donates $1 to clean water, sanitization and hygiene organizations for each 8 ounces of product sold.

McGrew says, “For Soapply, where our budget fell and what made sense was a single day [billboard] and to say, ‘How do we make the most out of this? And how do we test this?’ We’re a startup, we’re innovative, we’re learning, and we want to see if this works.”

Soapply is hoping to grow its reach with consumers it hasn’t connected with before and convert a portion of them to drive sales. The brand has experienced growth lately. Last month, its sales increased 34% from the prior year. Soapply’s business is primarily in direct-to-consumer distribution, although it has a $20, 8-oz. liquid hand wash available at clean beauty retailer Credo.

“We’re a startup, we’re innovative, we’re learning, and we want to see if this works.”

Without a bulging marketing budget, Soapply has been strategic about testing and reinvesting in advertising and marketing tactics where it’s registered meaningful conversion. Its bold Times Square billboard ad follows a recent pivot from focusing on social media growth to focusing on tactics such as email campaigns that produce higher returns on investment. It repurposes email campaign content for social media.

McGrew explains, “It doesn’t take more than five minutes on Instagram scrolling to realize how many things are sponsored and even things that aren’t sponsored are gifted, and if they’re not gifted, it’s another roundabout way of being paid for content.”

McGrew launched Soapply in 2016 after spearheading charitable efforts for a tourism operator in Africa. The brand’s hand soap, its only product, is blended by soap makers in Middlebury, Vt., and its recycled glass bottles are packaged in New York and screen printed in Newark. Although the ROI of its Times Square ad is yet to be determined, McGrew plans to keep a sharp eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) and take a beat to enjoy the novelty of the moment with Soapply’s team.

“The people that silkscreen our bottles, the people that pack every single box of soap, that silkscreen our boxes, all of those people are coming tomorrow and are so excited to come,” she says. “This is in our backyard, and it’s an opportunity for us to take a moment, high five a little bit and say, ‘We’re doing it, it’s working.’”