Jellop: A Brief Insight Into the Marketing Juggernaut

[BaconWise]

Salutations and Seasons Greetings!

I wanted to share a brief* look into my experiences (good and bad) with Jellop and explain how they work for those creators who might not be familiar with them.

*This kind of got away from me. It’s not brief.

Jellop is a marketing firm out of Tel Aviv, Israel. They run ad campaigns for Kickstarter projects and they are typically very effective at what they do. Some appropriate examples for the card community would be The Photography Deck (10,000 backers) and Air Deck 2.0 (7,000 backers) – both of which were promoted by Jellop. Some well-known producers in our community, like Sunish Chabba (Guru Playing Cards) and Jody Eklund (Black Ink), have utilized Jellop for some of their past projects. I have employed their services for two of my campaigns: Ink Beast and War of Realms.

What do they do? They place ads and they are very skilled at doing so. The project creator will create a shared folder (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) and share as many image assets as they can. Jellop then creates a few dozen different ads to place on Facebook (Instagram included) and Google. Once they develop the ads, you are assigned to a team to talk about ad spending and performance targets. They also create a dashboard to see real numbers that track ad effectiveness for every day of the campaign. They work with the creator to determine the ROAS target (Return on Ad Spend). Basically, for every dollar spent on advertising, how many dollars you want to see come in.

How do they get paid? They get paid based on backers they bring into the campaign. They track those backers by creating custom referral links that have unique URLs. They aren’t cheap: it’s 22% of the tracked pledges that came from one of their ads. They do offer a lower rate if you spend more than $2,000 a day on ads, but that is not an option for a lot of creators.

Pros
- They are very effective with ad placement and know how to target niche groups
- They bring in a lot of new faces who could potentially come back for your future projects
- Even if Jellop is a wash on pledges they bring in, those backers can help you get closer to print minimums or even the next printing volume discount.

Cons
- They are expensive. As I mentioned, they charge 22% of the pledges they brought in. You are also getting charged by Kickstarter (around 10%) for those same pledges.
- They will walk away from your campaign if it is underperforming (more below).
- Tedious onboarding process
- They recommend gimmicky reward tier tactics

Jellop can be a very valuable partner and they have proven to make quite an impact for the right project. Is your project a good fit? That depends on a lot of factors, but hopefully the details above help give a glimpse into how they operate.

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PERSONAL THOUGHTS - FEEL FREE TO MOVE ALONG
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Here’s a bit on my personal experiences with Jellop. Keep in mind, I am a smaller creator and not likely the best fit for a group like Jellop. My first campaign with Jellop was Ink Beast and it outperformed my expectations by a wide margin. Jellop ended up being a wash, but they brought in a lot of backers who helped me with printing numbers, which has great value.

War of Realms is my most recent project using Jellop. I was expecting more activity on this project mainly because my artist is pretty well-known and I have a couple of projects under my belt to hopefully bring in repeat backers. The result was disappointing. I only brought in 200 backers compared to 1100 with Ink Beast. Both were marketed with Jellop. My strategy with Jellop was to pause ads after the first few days, then run them again for the final stretch of days to capture those on the fence. It worked well with Ink Beast. However, Jellop does not like failing. Their claim to fame is that Return on Ad Spend I mentioned earlier. The return was negative after the first three days for War of Realms and I decided to pause ads until the end of the campaign. Just a few days later, I got an invoice and the entire ad team left the group chat. There was no word. No discussion. No warning. They abandoned my project instead of fighting for some kind of recovery in the final days. That means the ad campaigns they created were no longer available – ad campaigns I am not familiar with setting up effectively (hence why I hired them).

The experience was completely unprofessional in my biased opinion. Leaving without a word, then not responding to my inquiries for days after really left a sour taste in my mouth. It made me realize that Jellop is not a relationship-driven company. They will honor their commitment as long as they can make money. That's completely fine for a company that works in volume, but that approach feels sterile and completely lifeless. I tend to actively seek to build relationships with my partners, whether it's for project fulfillment, printing, or otherwise, so that kind of response from Jellop ensures I will not be working with them in the future.

I just wanted to share this as a cautionary tale. You will spend a lot on ads when you run with Jellop and, if they are effective, you will bring in a lot of new faces. If it's not effective, be prepared for them to abandon ship.

[Evilgamer]

I dont like someone who doesnt follow through on what they say they will do for sure. But I do wonder if they understood your intent to restart the ads at the end clearly.
I would expect that if I hired an ad company they would work to make more money than just write you off because what they gave you wasnt working.

Also would be curious to hear what their ideas for "gimmicks" are.

And yes when I saw war of realms posted initially I was pretty sure it was going to do a lot more than it ended up doing...not sure what to attribute that to.

[BaconWise]

I dont like someone who doesnt follow through on what they say they will do for sure. But I do wonder if they understood your intent to restart the ads at the end clearly.
I would expect that if I hired an ad company they would work to make more money than just write you off because what they gave you wasnt working.

Also would be curious to hear what their ideas for "gimmicks" are.

And yes when I saw war of realms posted initially I was pretty sure it was going to do a lot more than it ended up doing...not sure what to attribute that to.

It's a tough economy in playing cards for small creators. Interest rates are high, food is expensive, gas is expensive - it all factors in to bad timing, unless you are one of the big players.

Jellop was fully aware of the pause strategy as it was the same thing we did for Ink Beast to good effect. Their decision was deliberate and such a disappointment!

[hsbc]

Did they ever get back to you at all?