ecobee makes the best smart thermostat and has the product reviews to prove it. Sundae was hired to build the marketing program worthy of the product — and to do it in a market where competitors spend more, ship more SKUs, and discount harder. Five years in, we operate as ecobee’s creator-led growth function across earned, owned, paid, and IRL.
ecobee makes a product that wins on its own terms. Glowing reviews. Genuine engineering credibility. The kind of word-of-mouth that comes from being the smart thermostat people actually recommend to their friends.
The challenge wasn’t the product. It was the field.
ecobee competes head-to-head with Amazon and Google — companies with effectively unlimited marketing budgets, owned distribution channels, and integrated hardware ecosystems that make it easy for a smart thermostat to disappear into a bundle. Underneath them, a steady stream of lower-priced international entrants compete on price and SKU breadth, eroding the bottom of the category.
For a brand like ecobee, “more marketing spend” isn‘t the answer — the math doesn’t work. The answer is smarter marketing: a program that compounds, that uses creator content as a flexible creative engine across the full marketing stack, and that gets measurably more efficient the longer it runs.
That’s what Sundae was hired to build: a creator-led growth function that could carry a premium brand into a market where the default outcome is being commoditized by giants.
A best-in-class product creates a specific kind of strategic opportunity. The marketing doesn’t have to argue the product into existence – it has to make sure people experience the product the way it deserves to be experienced. That’s a premium brand-building problem disguised as a performance marketing problem. That framing shaped every decision that followed.
The work had to feel like ecobee — clean, confident, design-forward, technically literate — while delivering the unit economics of a performance creative program. Most agencies pick one. We treated both as non-negotiable from day one.
Creator-produced content isn’t a channel. It’s a flexible creative input that can power influencer programs, organic social, paid social, retail media, programmatic, CTV, and event content with consistent brand voice. The strategy assumed reuse from the first brief.
ecobee’s marketing runs across multiple agencies, internal teams, and media partners. Sundae leads the creator-led growth function in a way that integrates cleanly with paid media, brand and creative leads, and retail and event teams — without losing operational coherence.
A category this competitive shifts in real time — feature parity, price cuts, retail moves, review cycles. The program is wired with social listening so briefs are built against the current market, not last quarter’s reality.
Long-term influencer partnerships built for brand storytelling, seasonal campaigns, product launches, and earned-media moments — plus an always-on creator bench producing performance content for paid social, Amazon, retail media, and programmatic. The two streams share a creative system but run on different cadences, briefs, and KPIs, which is what lets the program function as a brand asset and a media engine without compromising either.
Creator content built from the start to perform in paid auctions and organic feeds alike — briefs account for hook structure, format variants, captioning, on-screen product visibility, and CTA placement. Thousands of design iterations across the engagement keep cost-per-click trending down quarter over quarter. The discipline is closer to a growth team’s than a content shop’s.
Continuous listening across the category: ecobee, Amazon and Google smart home, lower-priced entrants, retail review cycles, and adjacent home and energy conversations. The intelligence feeds creative briefs, creator selection, and competitive response, and it surfaces when ecobee should lean in publicly and when staying out is the smarter move.
Support at the moments that matter in market — tentpole sports activations at the U.S. Open, industry presence at CES, and executive hospitality moments. Sundae’s role spans creator and content support, on-the-ground production, and the social and earned amplification that extends each moment beyond the event itself.
Sundae leads the creator-led growth function inside a sophisticated multi-partner ecosystem — coordinating with paid media, brand, retail, and PR teams so creator content shows up in the right place, at the right cadence, with consistent voice. The operational backbone is Scoops, Sundae’s operating platform: discovery, contracting, briefing, review, rights tracking, and reporting on a single source of truth.
Performance reports back into creator selection, brief design, and content lanes — so the next round of partnerships and creative is informed by what actually moved in-market, not what looked best in a recap.
Across the engagement, Sundae has run the full creator-led growth program end-to-end: strategy, creator sourcing and partnerships, influencer campaigns, UGC production for paid and organic, social listening, creative testing and design iteration, rights and licensing, paid amplification, IRL activation support, multi-agency coordination, and ongoing measurement.
creators sourced, vetted, contracted, and managed across both program streams
content assets and ad units produced, licensed for multi-channel deployment from day one
of creative iterations tested across hooks, formats, lengths, and on-screen treatments
ecobee’s product earned the kind of category-leading reviews most brands market toward. The creative work could be confident, not defensive.
Creators were selected against defined audience segments and content roles — a coherent set of voices instead of a rotating cast.
Briefs accounted for paid performance from the start. Production planned for versioning. Rights were structured for reuse.
A multi-year program isn’t a creative problem; it’s an operations problem. Clear briefs, fast approvals, organized rights, dependable reporting, and a single system of record kept the creative sharp through five years of category change.
Review process, briefing structure, and creator vetting were designed to protect the brand without flattening the creators.
reduction in CPC on creator-led paid ads
creator content became ecobee’s top-performing upper- and mid-funnel paid media asset class across Meta, Amazon, and programmatic
200+ creators and 1,000+ assets at sustained scale as Agency of Record
“We stopped marketing thermostats.
We started marketing modern home life.”