About TDT Events
The Desi Troop Events is Canada's largest Bollywood nightlife operator. Runs ticketed parties across 6 cities: Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver Events include Bollywood nights, Holi, Diwali, NYE specials, and a lot more. The business has one job: put bodies on a dance floor on a specific Saturday No subscription. No lifetime value stretched over years. No second chance. Either the room fills on the night, or it doesn't. That constraint is what makes event marketing brutal; every campaign has a hard deadline, every ticket is a one-shot sale, and every wasted dollar can't be recovered on a Tuesday.
The Challenge
When we got access to TDT's five Meta ad accounts, the account was running at roughly 1.2X ROAS. For a ticketed event business, that is not a marketing problem. That is an existential one. The diagnosis was less interesting than most agencies would have you believe. The account wasn't broken because of a sophisticated attribution bug. It was broken because of the accumulated cost of small, default decisions. 1. The pixel was half-configured Automatic event tracking was off on multiple accounts No audience segments defined No custom audiences for retargeting The pixel was blind; every campaign was optimizing against a ghost 2. Meta's "helpful" defaults were bleeding money Creative AI testing was on Advantage+ creative enhancements were on End dates set on campaigns (a reliable way to hand Meta a reason to underperform in the final 48 hours) Attribution was standard instead of incremental 3. The targeting was wrong on two axes Age stretched to 40+, despite purchase data showing almost all revenue came from 18–34 No placements excluded, ~20% of spend was burning on Marketplace, Explore, Rewarded Video, and other zero-conversion placements 4. The creative was under-rotated and under-tested Reels weren't being tested seriously Carousels, which had the highest ROI, were underweighted Frequency hit 6 to 8 on several campaigns (the same person saw the same ad seven times) High unique clicks, low repeat clicks → people were interested, just not being converted
Outcome
We made five sets of changes across all six cities. 1. We fixed the infrastructure first UTM parameters on every active ad Pixel tracking turned on across all five ad accounts Six core custom audiences built on a 180-day window: PV, VC, ATC, IC, AWV, Purchase Audience segments defined at the campaign level (engaged audience + existing customers) This is the unglamorous part nobody puts in a case study. It is also the reason the next four things worked. 2. We turned off everything Meta had turned on Creative AI testing → off Advantage+ creative enhancements → off End dates on campaigns → removed (we kill ads manually, always) 13 active AI generation features on one account → off Meta makes money when you let it "optimize." You make money when you don't. 3. We tightened the targeting Age capped at 18–35 across every campaign Placements cut to four: Instagram Reels, Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories, Facebook Feed Everything else excluded Locations set per event, not per account default 4. We rebuilt the creative pipeline 12 creatives per event: 4 Reels, 4 Carousels, 2 Static, plus variations Each creative attacked a different angle: the dance floor, the men and women in the room, the DJ, the venue, the FOMO of last year's sellout, and early-bird urgency The Beond Approach Over February, March, and April 2026, across six cities, the numbers moved: ROAS: 1.2X → ~4X average across the 90-day window Peak ROAS: ~5X on events using the full 12-creative rollout Tickets sold: 5,000+ through Meta in 90 days (including walk-ins attributed to Meta) CAC: Dropped as a function of cleaner pixel data, excluded placements, and disabled AI features Frequency: Brought back into the 2 to 3 range on healthy campaigns, sustained by the 12-creative-per-event rotation The reason this worked is not that we did something clever. We did a lot of small things correctly, and one thing, the gendered pricing, that the client had not been asked to consider. Agencies like to sell the clever thing. In our experience, the clever thing is almost always the last 10%. The first 90% is refusing to let Meta run your account for you.
Next projects.
Book a Call
Have a project in mind? Reach out to us, and we’ll discuss the best way to move forward.
Anurag Attri
Founder & Creative Director