3 Ways DTC Brands and Performance Marketers Are Winning With TV Ads

Sight, sound, and motion have built brands, sold products and gotten presidents elected since 1941. However, both performance marketers and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands have traditionally been leery of advertising on television because it was perceived as too expensive, hard to measure, geared purely towards branding and unnecessary overall in light of digital alternatives, such as paid search, social and display.

But the savvier DTC brands and performance marketers have been able to win with TV, especially when taking advantage of Simulmedia’s digital approach to the mass medium, which utilizes surgically precise targeting, real-time reporting, affordable cost of entry, advanced measurement, provable cross-channel impact and more.

Here’s how those advertisers are generating significant business results with TV, and how you can too:

Data, Data, Data

Focusing on ROI has been a cornerstone for performance marketers and DTC brands. The more data, the better, ideally in real time. For example: Experian, the global credit company needed a way to apply that customer data to national television advertising to find and convert audiences to its free product Experian Boost™, which allowed people to upload outlier payments, such as electric, gas, cable and phone bills, to their credit reports through the Experian website or app. By using a combination of machine learning, predictive analytics, and a digital-first approach, Experian was able to optimize for cost-effective reach on linear TV, driving real-time spikes in app and web traffic. (For more details, see our full case study.)

Engaging More of Your Target Audience

Assuming they know their audience’s interests is the fastest way for a marketer to dig their campaign into a theoretical black hole. By the time the marketer realizes that they’ve made a mistake, they’re far too deep to get back out again – the budget’s been spent, with little to show for it. That’s why brands that are winning with TV ads don’t assume interests, they understand them.

When a certain DTC subscription company was having trouble reaching and converting more likely customers on TV, whose scale and cache they loved, they turned to Simulmedia and our superior targeting capabilities. We used our predictive technology and direct national integrations to run an 11-day campaign across 39 networks. The result was a 47% increase in response rate at 85% less of the budget than the DTC company’s traditional agency would’ve spent.

There’s No Substitute for Scale

At the end of the day (or, perhaps, at the beginning of prime time), TV remains the most effective medium for reaching audiences at scale, whether it’s linear alone or combined with the growing power of Connected TV. DTC marketers who recognize this are the ones who win.

For example, there was a particular DTC apparel brand that was facing an increasingly competitive market on paid social and search channels, with increasing CPMs and decreasing conversion rates. The brand decided that to active a channel it had ignored – national television.

With Simulmedia, the company was able to tap into the scale of linear by forecasting where its audience would be watching across networks during a flight of its campaign. We then quickly optimized in advance of the next campaign flight, doubling-down on high-performing networks and dayparts while cutting the ones with little impact, resulting in improvements across all of the DTC brand’s key metrics.

Download our Cross-Channel TV Playbook for a detailed guide on how to unlock audiences on both linear and connected TV.

Want to learn more? Contact us or email us at advertise@simulmedia.com.