With less budget, in a tougher market, and against 2:22 A Ghost Story’s international peak of 468% ROAS, Flying Pigs nearly doubled that result with 808%. By building precise tracking infrastructure, applying behavioural grading, and designing a funnel that moved audiences seamlessly from intrigue to purchase, we produced the most profitable digital campaign the production had ever seen.

2:22 A Ghost Story had already proven itself in the UK and US, but Australia was a very different stage. With a smaller population, higher engagement costs, and less built-in familiarity, Australia posed a unique challenge.

Producers engaged Flying Pigs just prior to the Melbourne launch, looking for digital to deliver. The global performance height stood at a 468% return on ad spend (ROAS), delivered by an international theatre marketing agency with multiple prior runs of the same show across established markets.

The brief was clear: with a smaller budget, fewer resources, and a predictively less profitable market, could digital in its first Australian outing hold its own against the best results achieved in the UK and US?

Solving the brief was going to require more than simply running campaigns. To make digital competitive under all the conditions in front of us, we needed to leverage every feature and nuance available to us. What follows are some of the highlights of what made the difference.

Solving success attribution.

Theatre productions face a unique challenge: ticket sales data is fragmented across productions, venues, and ticketing providers, meaning attribution is often handled via manual spreadsheets long after the fact. This makes it almost impossible for ad platforms to optimise in real time, which majorly affects the potential performance the ad campaigns can have.

Flying Pigs approached this differently. Drawing inspiration from infrastructure we originally developed for the finance industry, where protecting data is law and accuracy is critical, we applied the same discipline to theatre. The framework gave ad platforms the clearest possible picture to optimise against, while operating fully within provider policies.

• Cross-domain attribution: Every user first visited the production site, where we captured first-party signals and passed hashed data into Google and Meta. When they clicked out to the ticketing platform, we flagged the handover so the ad platforms understood the user would “go dark” until purchase. Once purchase confirmations were shared back to the ad publishers via pixels, those signals could be reconciled against campaign activity, giving the platforms a far clearer picture of what was driving results in real time.
• Behavioural grading: Beyond sales, we scored micro-behaviours across all available sources to train algorithms on what “high-value” customers looked like, sharpening targeting faster than purchase confirmations alone could.

Ads that evolve with the audience.

Given the variety of content we could leverage, we needed a way to ensure we could maximise its utility, ensuring the right ad always went to the right person. To solve this, we built a procedural ad funnel that moved people through content based on how they behaved. Anyone could convert at any point; if they didn’t, their behaviour unlocked the next layer.

• Education: Introduced the show, premise, cast and creative pedigree. Assets included short trailers, press clips, media-call footage and simple “what to expect” explainer edits to build familiarity fast.
• Engagement:  Shifted to proof and excitement once someone showed interest signals. Used vox pops, high-comment posts, cast collaborations, behind-the-scenes and audience reactions to make the experience feel social and immediate.
• Urgency: Timed and contextual prompts such as preview-night pricing, weekday specials, last-seats alerts, seat-map scarcity, “tonight” messaging and limited-time offers. FOMO was used from the start, not just near the end of the season.

Creative eligibility changed per user. For example, watch a trailer to 50%, or spend time on key pages and you graduated from ‘education’ to ‘engagement’. If you’d engaged but hadn’t moved toward purchase, you’d receive ‘urgency’ within the next 24 to 72 hours. Budgets were then reallocated in real time across Meta, TikTok and Google based on cohort response, with frequency caps and creative rotation in place to mitigate fatigue.

Collaborating with talent.

Cast talent is one of the most powerful assets in theatre PR, yet their reach is rarely harnessed within a paid digital strategy. The show’s cast carried built-in credibility and ready-made audiences that extended well beyond traditional theatre circles. To unlock this, we proposed co-created collaborator ads. These appeared seamlessly on both the cast’s personal Meta accounts and the show’s channels, with the added ability to scale through ad funding.

This turned cast recognition into a scalable acquisition channel: currently unaware loyal fans booked to support the performers they followed, while new prospects responded to the added social proof that talent-led content can deliver. The approach delivered a major mutual benefit. With ad funding behind their posts, cast members gained significant personal exposure, new followers, and reach into fresh audiences, while the production reaped the payoff in amplified awareness and ticket sales. It was a win-win-win: talent, show, and campaign performance all lifted together.

Adapting to challenges in real time.

Post opening night, some early reviews were less favourable, which we saw as bias against new, experimental theatre rather than a reflection of the production itself. Data revealed that audiences proactively searching the production were more likely to encounter those critiques, while reactive audiences who were being pushed ads independent of any investigative action on their end, were less affected.

Instead of spending against skepticism, we consolidated spend into push ads that produced the best audience reactions, actively creating an echo chamber of enthusiasm. By concentrating comments under these sorts of ads, we amplified social proof and leaned into confirmation bias. New reactive audience prospects therefore saw overwhelming positivity, which reinforced credibility, strengthened intent, and kept conversions strong.

• 808% return on ad spend, almost double the best international benchmark (468%).
• Digital performance tracked with unprecedented accuracy, paving the way for new shows going forward. 
• Converting demographics from digital campaigns near-perfectly aligned with post-season sales reports, confirming what was reported as accurate to what was sold.
• Prevented a usually expected downturn in sales by adapting in real time and applying marketing psychology to offset third-party bias. Conversion rates and ROAS stayed at peak levels as a result.
• Ticket sales exceeded expectations across the entire season, proving digital was not just a supporting act but central to commercial success.

Why it matters.

Flying Pigs showed that outperforming global industry benchmarks does not come from bigger budgets or larger teams, but from smarter strategy, technical innovation, and the nuance to use them in ways others overlook. 

Doubling the best international result in one of the tougher situations proved not just what was possible for 2:22 A Ghost Story, but what is possible when the philosophy ‘only impossible until done’ is applied to any challenge.

Client: GWB Entertainment