Overview
DTC Brand Turns TV Into a New Customer Channel to Drive Growth
The pandemic presented a challenging boundary for families attempting to celebrate Mother’s Day in 2020. Between travel restrictions, social distancing and strict visitor rules on hospitals and nursing homes, those lucky enough to still have mothers in their lives needed to get creative with how to show their appreciation. For these reasons, gourmet food brand Harry & David wanted to spread its message to help connect more families than ever before on this special occasion. The challenge was that the unprecedented surge in ecommerce created an increasingly competitive environment for the 110-year-old direct-to-consumer brand. At the same time, viewers (and potential customers) were becoming more difficult to find across a fragmenting video landscape.
Goals
- Expand video channels to modernize marketing and establish new customer baseline
- Tell brand story to connect with a broader set of customers
- Reach untapped members of target audience at lowest cost possible
Results
- The campaign reached 88MM unique households
- Drove 21,479 sessions to the brand’s site confirmation page
The Challenge
Facing Increasing Competition During Historically Challenging Period
DTC brand Harry & David faced an increasingly competitive environment early into the COVID pandemic as ecommerce was surging while viewers were harder to find across video landscape. They also identified an opportunity to modernize marketing to establish a new customer baseline.
It was very important that a partner helped us use our customer data efficiently and gave us the ultimate value for our budget, while still being surgical to the right audience. They needed to ensure we had the impact we’d hoped for and were able to optimize in a digital-like fashion.
The Solution
Identifying Likely Potential Customers and Reaching Them With the Scale of TV
Simulmedia pixeled Harry & David’s website to build a site visitor lookalike audience. That was combined with third-party data segments to reach potential customers who’d be more receptive to the brand’s ads.
Simulmedia tapped into the scale of television by forecasting where the brand’s target audience would be watching across national TV during the flight of the campaign and quickly activated their ads.
The Results
Provable Benefits of TV's Full Funnel
Optimizations between campaigns led to improvements across all of Harry & David’s key metrics: The campaign reached 88MM unique households and drove 21,479 sessions to the brand’s site confirmation page. During the campaign, search activity was 286% higher when compared to the same time period in the previous year, with 240K incremental online searches for the term “Harry & David.”
The Conclusion
Understanding the Impact of a Linear TV Campaign
Simulmedia delivered a strong return on investment for Harry & David, driving significant new customers to the brand over the course of an occasion-based holiday. The brand also gained better knowledge of the impact of linear TV video, which helped in its planning for the rest of the year and subsequent holiday season. Harry & David was also pleased to know that Simulmedia’s short-term attribution methodology only takes credit for website visitors that have arrived within 5 to 15 minutes after a spot airs, giving statistical significance to the results connecting TV exposure and website visits.
Being able to tie audience data and multiple channel data together is the secret sauce and is a core capability that we need to continue to refine and get better at. We think Simulmedia can be a key part of that.