TL;DR
- The client: FilterBuy hired Ubiquitous to build top-of-funnel awareness for an everyday, low-interest product: residential air filters.
- The result: Nearly 40 million blended views at a blended CPM under $3, with one creator video alone hitting 8.1M views.
- The move: A comedy-first creator program built on relatable skit comedy, with creators trusted to make content people actually choose to watch.
- The proof: For broad-market products that struggle to feel exciting, entertainment-led creator content beats louder product messaging.
FilterBuy sells residential air filters direct to consumers. The product is about as low-interest as it gets: people buy filters when they remember they need to, then forget about them for three months. The company came to Ubiquitous with one goal, and it was not conversions. They wanted attention. As much of it as possible, as efficiently as possible, for a product most people never think about.
What followed was a comedy-first creator program that turned an invisible product into appointment viewing. Nearly 40 million blended views across organic and paid, at a blended CPM under $3. One creator video alone reached 8.1 million views. This is the story of how the right creative thesis, the right creators, and a brand willing to trust both produced those numbers.
The Challenge: Making an Invisible Product Impossible to Ignore
Air filters are out of sight, out of mind, despite touching daily life in every home that has them. That is the marketing problem in one sentence. FilterBuy sells a replenishable product to an enormous audience, effectively anyone who owns a home, but the product itself gives people almost nothing to talk about, share, or care about.
FilterBuy's addressable market is wide rather than niche. They sell filters in virtually every size across three MERV-rating tiers. The breadth is an advantage and a trap: a huge potential audience, and no obvious hook to reach it.
The company had already worked the lower funnel. They had run conversion-focused campaigns on Meta and had not found much success there. The lesson they drew was the right one. For a product like this, building genuine awareness at the top of the funnel was the smarter play, and the halo effect from that awareness would do more work than another round of direct-response ads.
So FilterBuy came to Ubiquitous with a clear and unusually mature brief: build awareness, maximize views, and do not optimize for a single conversion. They understood the awareness play better than almost any brand we have worked with. What they needed was a partner who could generate that reach at a scale and quality their in-house team could not produce on its own, and the creative judgment to make a forgettable product worth watching.
"FilterBuy has understood the value of a pure awareness play more than any brand I've ever worked with in the last three years." — Bree Mitchell, Account Manager, Ubiquitous
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The Strategy: Entertainment First, Product Second
Most brands approach a product like this the wrong way. They find creators who make home and DIY content, hand them a list of four product features, and ask for a video of someone holding the filter and explaining why it is good. That content gets no organic distribution, because nobody chooses to watch an ad.
Ubiquitous proposed the opposite. The thesis: in 2026, awareness is won by entertaining creators who weave the product in so naturally it does not feel like a pitch at all. It feels like a funny piece of content that happens to have a product in it. The viewer finishes the video before they realize it was sponsored.
That principle shaped every creative decision. The deck framed the approach as making the invisible visible: use creators and relatable, viral moments to shift perception, on the conviction that personal content has a bigger impact than product-focused messaging. Air filters do not need explaining. Everyone already knows they should change them. The job was not education. It was relevance.
Three choices followed from that thesis.
First, comedy over instruction. Ubiquitous prioritized comedy creators, and within that, skit-based content built on everyday couple dynamics. This was a recommendation Ubiquitous brought to the table, not a brief the client handed down. The reasoning: relatable, funny content about ordinary domestic life travels far beyond a creator's own audience, and a filter can live inside that content without breaking it.
Second, let the creators create. The program gave creators near-total creative freedom rather than scripting them or forcing product call-outs. Many videos do not even name the brand. The filter is simply in frame. As the client's own point of contact put it, the content performs best when creators are trusted to make what they know works for their audience.
Third, embrace creative that provokes a reaction. FilterBuy did not want safe. They wanted content with enough edge to spark real engagement, and they backed concepts other brands would have killed in review. In one couples skit, a wife appears to open her robe to tempt her husband into finally changing the filter, then turns to reveal she is holding a gun rather than anything else. Ubiquitous expected a no. The brand approved it, and that lane of bold, reaction-driving comedy became one of the program's best performers. Audiences reward brands willing to be genuinely funny instead of sanitized, and that willingness bought FilterBuy real goodwill in the comments.
This is the human layer that no platform automates: the creative judgment to know which creators fit, which concepts will travel, and when to back a risky idea instead of softening it.
The Execution: Casting, Testing, and Doubling Down
The program runs in waves and began at the end of January 2026, with the first wave of creators live by March. It runs on TikTok and Instagram, with organic content posted as Instagram Reels cross-posted to TikTok, and Ubiquitous managing paid amplification on TikTok.
Wave 1 was a test. Ubiquitous activated roughly eight to nine creators ranging from mid-tier to macro, spread across lifestyle, DIY home renovation, and comedy. The data came back fast and clear: comedy creators, and especially couples doing skit comedy, outperformed everything else on both views and CPM. So Waves 2 and 3 concentrated there. That is the optimization cycle working as intended, reading the signal and moving budget toward it.
Casting decisions were driven by performance, not rigid budget rules. FilterBuy trusted Ubiquitous to spend up when a creator was worth it. In one case, Ubiquitous invested $31,000 in a single macro creator with roughly 13 million followers across his channels. He became one of the top performers in the entire program by both CPM and views, despite being the most expensive name on the roster.
"We invested $31K in him and he is still one of the top-performing creators, CPM-wise and view-wise, even though he was the most expensive. They really trusted us on that." — Bree Mitchell
Negotiation protected the economics throughout. Creators routinely quote high opening rates, and bringing those rates down is a direct lever on CPM. Ubiquitous has negotiated creator fees to as low as a quarter of what those same creators had quoted FilterBuy directly. To date, 13 creators have gone live, with 17 pieces of content produced in the first wave alone.
The Results: 40M Views and a Sub-$3 CPM
The headline: nearly 40 million blended views across organic and paid, at a blended CPM under $3. For a product most people never think about, that is reach that rivals categories people actually enjoy talking about.
That blended figure spans the full program to date. The first wave is now complete and fully analyzed, while later waves are still in flight, so the verified detail below is drawn specifically from Wave 1. Even at that early stage, the efficiency was already clear:
19.5M organic impressions at a $2.31 CPM, with 432,000 engagements
Paid amplification delivered 8.2M impressions at a $1.65 CPM, against a $12–$15 target
The paid CPM came in roughly seven to nine times more efficient than the benchmark target. The organic side generated 428,000 likes and 3,400 comments at a 2.21% engagement rate across 17 pieces of content. On the paid side, the content held attention: a 98.03% video view rate and a 7.92-second average play time, a strong signal that viewers were genuinely watching rather than scrolling past.
The creative thesis showed up most clearly in the top performers:
- Kelsey Pumel (macro, 3.5M followers): 8.1M views, comedic rage-bait content
- Gabby Dolechek (macro, 560K followers): 4.8M views
- Logan Durrance (macro, 1.6M followers): 4.5M views, marriage humor
- Charles Hsu (mid-tier, 342K followers): 1.1M views, Gen Z humor
Engagement was not the goal, and it came anyway. Strong, active engagement landed across the program, including positive sentiment toward FilterBuy for backing creators and for being willing to be funny rather than corporate.
The outcome that matters most: FilterBuy could not produce organic results like these on their own, which is precisely why they brought in a partner. After seeing the numbers, they increased their monthly budget and renewed through August 2026.
"People are sick of so much seriousness, and they're sick of being sold to. With this kind of content, they don't feel like they're being sold to at all." — Bree Mitchell
The Takeaway: Trust the Creative, Win the Feed
If your brand sells a broad-market product that struggles to feel exciting, this program proves the path is not louder product messaging. It is entertaining, creator-led content people actually choose to watch, plus the discipline to cast the right creators and back them.
FilterBuy did not earn 40 million views by explaining air filters better than anyone else. They earned them by stepping out of the way and letting funny, relevant creators do what they do, then putting paid behind the content that worked. The product was present. It was never the pitch.
The brands that win at this understand the difference between a creator and a media placement. A placement reads a script. A creator, briefed well and trusted, makes something the audience wants to share. That trust is the entire strategy, and the numbers are what that trust produced.
Build Your Own Influencer Marketing Channel
If your brand has a broad audience and a product that struggles to feel exciting, a comedy-first, creator-led approach can make it impossible to ignore. Ubiquitous helps brands build influencer into a real, ongoing channel: the creative thesis, the casting, the negotiation, and the paid amplification that turns content into reach. If that is the program you want to build, get in touch with us to talk about what it could look like for your brand.
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