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How MISSION's Top-Performing Ad Hit 3x the ROAS of Everything Else

Their cooling technology has to be seen to be believed. soona UGC gave MISSION the creator content to prove it, and now it's the best-performing paid social they've ever run.

3x

The ROAS of MISSION's other paid social ads

#1

Top-performing ad on Meta, outpacing all other formats

1

Platform powering all of MISSION's studio and UGC content

UGC photos of active people wearing Mission products like hats and bandanas

Challenge

Proving a product that has to be experienced

Alisa Bouthiller has been running marketing for MISSION for years. As Director of Marketing at a brand sold in over 25,000 retail stores across the U.S., she's precise about where to invest, focusing on the channels that actually move the needle for a company growing at scale.

The challenge with MISSION's products has always been the same: cooling technology is genuinely hard to communicate in a still image. The product works when it is wet and active. You have to see it on someone's head mid-hike, worn multiple ways, doing something real. A clean product shot on a white background doesn’t tell the whole story.

"You need that human reaction to show how to use it."

MISSION was using influencer partnerships, which came with their own complications: content they did not totally own, creators who were not the right fit for an active performance brand, and no straightforward path to using it as paid media.

MISSION had been using soona for studio content since 2022. When soona launched UGC, the question was whether real creators could check all the boxes MISSION needed.

Solution

Vetted creators, detailed briefs, one platform

Alisa has a specific philosophy about what good UGC looks like, and unboxings are not part of it. The best creator content does not look paid. It looks like something someone would genuinely post because they use the product and it works.

"I don't want someone to know that I paid you. I want this to feel like something that you would actually wear and support."

That meant finding creators who fit the brand… active people, outdoorsy people, not just fashion-forward people who apply to every campaign that crosses their feed. One of the things that drew Alisa to soona's creator pool specifically was the diversity of it. Other platforms skew heavily toward lifestyle and fashion. soona gave Mission access to people who actually made sense for a cooling bandana or a performance hat.

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"Unlike most platforms that serve a specific genre of people, the creators on soona are versatile, able to meet different demographics, classification of people and ages. They're also suited to create a variety of content that looks different so not everything feels so ‘uniform’ and cookie cutter.”

Brief creation was easy. The platform was easy to set up. And Alisa was able to find creators that paid careful attention to the needs of the brand and brief.

MISSION was already getting strong value from soona on the studio side; one well-planned shoot regularly yields 100-plus usable images across channels. Adding UGC to the same platform meant one relationship, one workflow, and content built for every channel they were already running.

Outcome

The ad that's blowing everything else out of the water

The video that took off was a creator hiking in a MISSION bandana. She showed different ways to wear it: different positions, on her head, around her neck, in a way that communicated versatility and actual use without feeling staged. The product was wet. It was working. You could see why someone would want it.

Within a week of going live, that ad was outperforming every other ad by 3x.

"It's blowing everything else out of the water."

The team is now using that video as the baseline for their next round of creative briefs. Hopping back onto soona UGC and seeking content creators who can emulate the learnings.

One successful ad is a start, but the scalability of soona UGC means that this learning can expand to new creators and new concepts. The cooling bandana story is applicable to a variety of consumers and users, and the network of soona UGC creators is diverse enough to allow the brand to replicate that success.

Alisa recommends soona to other brands regularly. When a partner brand asked how MISSION was producing content so efficiently, the answer was simple.

"soona makes everything so much easier. Just the idea that I don't have to set up a shoot, hire a producer, hire the stylist, do all the production… it's the best thing ever."

— Alisa Bouthiller, Director of Marketing at Mission

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