Mermaid (Isle of Wight Distillery)

Mermaid is a premium spirits brand operating in a highly competitive retail and D2C landscape. The brief to The MTM Agency was clear: use Meta as the primary performance engine to drive sales, support retail partners and strengthen brand salience across key moments in the calendar.

MTM was responsible for the strategic planning, execution and optimisation of all paid media campaigns. One of the platforms we used was Meta, because its vast, highly engaged audiences and powerful segmentation capabilities made Facebook and Instagram the ideal platforms to reach Mermaid’s core consumers and drive ecommerce sales effectively. We also advertised through Google ads, and through an exclusive John Lewis, using a new D2C platform (Epsilon) for Mermaid's Winter Gin campaign.

Activity spanned always-on acquisition, limited edition product launches, seasonal campaigns and major brand moments, including Mermaid’s 10th anniversary.

The client’s objectives balanced short-term commercial return with longer-term brand impact. They needed bottles to be moved off shelves, strong D2C revenue, and cost-effective investment, while ensuring that brand awareness continued to grow among a tightly defined audience demographic. Paid media needed to work harder, faster and smarter, without distracting the internal team from wider brand and operational priorities.

The premium spirits category is crowded, promotional and increasingly reliant on paid media to cut through. For Mermaid, the challenge was not simply driving volume, but doing so while protecting brand equity and improving the efficiency of spend.

Campaigns frequently required rapid turnaround, particularly around limited edition drops and seasonal opportunities such as Father’s Day and Winter Gin. Mermaid’s target audiences were already well defined, and very narrow, centred primarily on gender, age and a specific buyer persona, meaning growth depended on data-informed audience realignment, deeper penetration, smarter retargeting and stronger creative performance, rather than broad reach alone.

There was also a strategic shift underway. The brand needed to increase the proportion of D2C sales, reducing reliance on off-trade and retail alone, while still supporting partners such as John Lewis through halo brand activity. Paid media had to act as the connective tissue between awareness, consideration and conversion, all while remaining accountable to ROI.

Creative was treated as a core performance driver. Existing brand assets were carefully refined and deployed to resonate with the identified premium audience segments, ensuring every element, from product imagery to copy tone, reflected Mermaid’s elevated positioning.

Campaign creative was continuously optimised through data-led testing, aligning aesthetic appeal with performance insights to drive stronger engagement and conversion. This demanded a more experimental creative approach to ensure each campaign struck the right balance between visual storytelling and performance efficiency.

Brand-led activity, including the Winter Gin campaign, was structured to deliver reach and awareness while still generating meaningful conversion volumes.