Bentley x Peter Blake
Paid Social Fundraising
Raising £250,000 for Bentley: a Facebook ads agency case study in HNW paid social
How do you get a 100:1 ROMI from a Meta advertising agency campaign for HNW philanthropy?
Challenge
When asked to support fundraising for the Sir Peter Blake x Bentley Mulliner one-off edition in aid of St Luke’s Hospice, Niki, then in-house at Bentley, recognised that organic content alone could not deliver the precise HNW targeting needed in the time available. She proposed and managed the brand’s first-ever custom audience advertising campaign on Meta, enabling sealed bidders to pledge while promoting the live Bonhams auction at Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Insight
Brand
Bentley
Industry
Automotive
Pop Art
Skills
Custom Audiences
Paid Social Advertising
A/B Testing
Led by
Niki McMorrough
How do you out-perform traditional high-budget luxury campaigns with a fraction of the investment?
We moved from broadcasting to strategic targeting. Using a dual-consent hashed custom audience inside Meta Ads Manager, we isolated a hyper-qualified HNW segment and a controlled lookalike audience so the work stayed highly targeted. We ran a relentless A/B testing programme across facebook meta ads and instagram, testing narrative hooks to identify the strongest driver of desire. By optimising spend daily toward the winning creative, we secured £50,000 in pledges before the auction opened, de-risking the event and delivering a 9,900% ROI before the first bid.
Collaborators
Peter Blake
Bonhams
St Luke’s Hospice
Locations
Goodwood Festival of Speed
Platforms
Instagram
Twitter
Linkedin
Facebook
Google
Results from a Facebook ads agency campaign for Bentley's HNW philanthropy fundraiser
£50,000
direct pledges
via paid social before Bonhams live auction opened
100:1
ROMI
On pledges through GDPR-compliant segmentation
20+
posts
organic and paid creative on 5 social platforms
Questions worth answering
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Yes, through strategic exclusion. Suppress the audience unlikely to convert and concentrate spend on verified advocates, so even a test budget becomes a high-frequency nudge to the right people. If your paid social budget isn’t pulling its weight, let’s look at that.
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Every project starts by agreeing the metrics that define success — brand favourability, qualified leads, retention, revenue, whichever matter most to you. Those metrics shape every decision and optimisation that follows. If you’d like marketing investment that’s accountable from day one, let’s talk.
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When the environment is right for your brand and timing matters. Paid social earns its place inside an omnichannel campaign, where channels, contexts and intermediaries compound to reach affluent buyers. If you’d like to see where it fits in your mix, let’s discuss.