As Co-founder of the Podcast App platform, Martin Siniawski found that many users listened to podcasts in bed as a sleep aid. So to meet the needs of this sizable audience, he subsequently co-founded Rest, a subscription app that draws on cognitive behavior therapy to serve as an AI-powered sleep coach.
Now Siniawski and team are reaching out to potential users when they’re most in need of the app: in the wee hours as they scroll social media while battling insomnia.
On March 9, during Sleep Awareness Week, Rest launched its “Late Night Mistakes” campaign by hijacking TikTok Shop broadcasts, working with nearly two dozen creators who typically engage with their audiences around 2–3 a.m. Rest and its agency, BeautifulBeast, gave the influencers significant leeway regarding their creative and the exact time they’d be pitching the app.
One influencer segued from sharing makeup hacks to help disguise a bad night’s sleep to talking about Rest; another discussed gummies as a temporary insomnia fix before touting Rest as a solution that addresses the root causes of sleeplessness.
Rest also created 15-second spots to air on TikTok Shop. Rather than harping on the tossing, turning and clock watching of sleeplessness, the ads poked fun at the bad decisions insomniacs have been known to make: texting a high school ex at 3:45 a.m., for instance, or applying for a job in Iceland at 2:00 in the morning. When buying keywords, Rest selected those popular with its target audiences during the early hours rather than those related to insomnia.
“We focused more on the behavior over the demo,” says Flor Leibaschoff, Chief Creative Officer at BeautifulBeast. While women over 40 are a major audience for Rest, “at one point in life everyone will suffer from insomnia,” she notes, so the keywords as well as the creators they worked with were chosen to ensure appeal beyond millennial women. “Having content creators who reflect the audience — different genders, age groups — was an important piece. We wanted to make sure there was representation,” adds Siniawski, who is Rest’s CEO as well as Co-founder.
Beyond the initial campaign “content creators are commenting on the takeover,” says BeautifulBeast CEO Aldo Quevedo, “and that’s creating a loop for more people wanting to come in.”
Empathy, Endorsements and Emotion
Rest will continue to post ads and work with creators on platforms including Instagram throughout the rest of March. And it is not ruling out expanding across additional platforms and outside the U.S. in the future.
Although Rest had been doing PR and performance marketing, “Late Night Mistakes” is the two-year-old app’s first “true awareness campaign,” Siniawski says. To gauge effectiveness, they’re tracking impressions, how many people are visiting the Rest website (“we were able to see traffic skyrocket,” he notes) and how many are completing the site quiz that is the preliminary step of subscribing to the app. To aid conversion, Rest is offering a discount on the first month of the subscription.
Prior to the campaign’s launch, Rest reported more than 100,000 downloads. With its messaging and early-hours placements, the app aims to demonstrate that — unlike brands that advertise during the day and focus more on relaxation — it understands the tribulations of sleepless nights. Once prospects head to the Rest website, they see endorsements from the American College of Physicians and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, which along with links to medical journals and profiles of the app’s scientific advisers, establish the brand’s scientific credibility.
Then there’s the tagline, “Start sleeping. Get dreaming,” which aims to make an emotional connection. “We want to show there’s actually hope,” Siniawski says.
