S17 E7: The Acquisition Channel JRB Got Wrong ...and How They Fixed It

side of e-commerce, digital marketing, and building consumer brands.

I'm your host, Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling, and investing in brands, and through this show in my weekly newsletter at Nick.co/email. I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics, and the insights, also you can unlock

your next $100,000 in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. If you're a D to C operator and TV feels like a black box, that's because most platforms give you 20% of the actual available inventory, and none of the measurement to see if it

even works. On the other hand, with Tatari, you can buy linear and streaming directly, plus you can measure it like a digital channel. That's the reason over 400 brands like Manscape, Tacobas, and Chime run performance TV using Tatari.

See how they leverage the platform at Nick.co/Tatari. That's NICA.co/TATRI. Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host Nick Sharma, and today we've got a very fun episode. We've had Cody Ploughker, the former CEO of Jones Road Beauty on the podcast before, and

today I've got him back, and we're really diving into what was there unlock on how they scaled so fast. How did they get past the point of diminishing returns on Meta and continue to build awareness and drive people into the funnel and drive them down the funnel.

“I think multiple years in a row, they were a top seller on Black Friday across the entire”

Shopify network. Cody knows exactly what he's doing, especially when it comes to filling the funnel and flushing the funnel. That was today's episode, and I'm very excited to give that to you here. Let me know what you think if you've got any questions, hit up myself or Cody on Twitter,

and enjoy the episode. Alright, Cody, welcome to another episode of Limited Supply. It's great to have you back.

First of all, how's everything been since last time I know you've got a couple of

big life updates? Yeah, it's been a long time. I feel like it's been like two years, which is an eternity. It's a pregnancy. At least one kid since then, and probably about a month ago, stepped down a CEO, Jones Road.

So, still involved on the board and still advising, but no longer did a day, which is great. Something definitely. I'm excited about what happy about, you know, proud of everything we did, but I'm excited to do some new things and advise a bunch of brands and maybe start some new one, so it's been good.

Amazing. Yeah, congrats on all that. We'll have to do another episode where we also just catch up on all things AI and all the things that we've been tinkering on on the side. Oh, we should have to do that and show some of the people that.

“But excited to today to have you here, and I think today, I really want to focus on the”

channel that we've been talking about over the last couple months, especially as we think about going into Q4 in a big way, which is TV. So I'm curious, just to start, right, you built the entire Jones Road engine on paid social

notoriously, especially using, you know, the Bobby Brown video creative kind of first person

approach, but you did all of this with ever really touching a TV budget, and I'm curious why you think that background leading as somebody who built on digital and then came to TV, why you think that's the best kind of persona to talk to today about what it's actually like to go into TV. Well, we did, and then we, you know, did it, and like we were obviously very paid social.

And like me, just like not knowing any better, I was like, oh, TVs for, you know, you got to be a big brand, and like we got to get to a certain size and be, you know, hundreds of millions. Didn't know how easy it was, but, you know, I didn't really, I didn't really know any better so I was just like, let me, let me just keep going on paid social.

That was like what I knew that was, you know, my bread and brother, and it worked and it worked to work. And then eventually it doesn't where you, you know, you got to reach new people. And we, we definitely like, not that we ever had like a flat year, but like we would hit, you know, a month where we felt like with there was like a little plateau and it's like,

okay, we have to go and do some other things.

“And, and, you know, reach new people is really the biggest one, right?”

We can't just pay, pay social, you're running, same strategy is you're going to run out of who you can reach. And, you know, TV is really, especially with where our demo is and was, it was like a natural fit. I mean, when we launched it, it was, it was huge, like we, we probably had like 50% like year

over your growth and like just like some pretty crazy results, which I was not expecting at the gate. So yeah, it's been day. I mean, we had, we had a one point where price spending like 25% of our mix on TV, so it's also one of those channels that can really scale.

So it's been, it's been great and it's still a pretty big part of our mix today. Has the kind of like the rise of TV ads, I feel like as Jones Road kind of got super mature, it was kind of at that sweet spot timing where also a bunch of other larger brands

channel to go and test out.

I was confident because, you know, our demo was definitely on there, I knew that I knew that if it was able to work, there was significant scale there, it wasn't like we're going to put all of our effort in something that, you know, could only spend a thousand or two thousand dollars a day on. I think it also gives you, you know, a little bit of trust credibility, you know, like

there's a lot of trust of being on TV, like not every brand can do that, so it kind of makes you seem like you're a little bit of a bigger brand. And I also, you know, I don't know that I would start like TV in the beginning went on to your brand, but I think the benefit of social is you're able to really get product market fit and test a lot, like we, a lot of our best TV ads, they were actually organic

social tiptox, like with Bobby and then we would just turn them into ads, edit them, shoot them for ad, so like by the time we did go and do a TV shoot, like we felt very confident and a lot of the strategy and now it was just scaling in and bringing it to a new channel. Yeah, I love that.

“I remember that was how I first got started on TV too, it was like basically figuring out”

the angles that work best on that cold Facebook traffic and then figure out how to merge it in with a TV piece of creative as well. All right, I want to talk about, you know, actually before we get into the next chapter, isn't it funny how you've seen all these TV companies come out and know where with these crazy offers and try to recruit you with like 500 bucks in spend.

I've seen, I've seen some slightly larger offers in that, but yeah, yeah, they're all trying

to start, you know, basically see who can get you on with the lowest, with the lowest, you

know, like barrier to entry, basically, but I feel like it's a bad, bad judge a character when you're starting TV. Yeah, and it only goes so far, and this credits will go away, really what we're all after is value and performance and, you know, a huge part of that is having access to the right inventory.

That's a big part, obviously, having, you know, it's not like paid social as much as some of these other vendors will try to say it is, but, you know, it's not just like you can toss it in an A.S.C. and bands off, like there is a lot more strategy and skill, like I feel credible to speak on the overall concept of TV, how to, you know, like I've wrote our TV ads, I wrote all of them like involved in production, measurement, but that

“being said, like, I've never actually successfully bought TV, and I think you need somebody”

who really understands that, because it's a very different skill set and just like experience that compared to like a paid social. Yeah, totally, we can't, we can't forget attribution, you're the king of attribution wars. Alright, so going into TV now, so you just talked about this a little bit, but I'm

curious, like when when people hear advertising on TV, they usually think either I'm going to do a quick DSP sign up, you know, and spend a few hundred bucks and see if I can drive some traffic, and try to use this, you know, TV ad unit, or I'm going to go spend a hundred grand on a piece of creative and then do a huge national buy. So I'm curious, like, for you guys, when you started, you know, way before you ramped up

to a quarter of your paid budget going to TV, how did you guys start and approach testing the channel in a way where, like, you, as a performance marketer, felt like this was going to hit Statsig, not just, alright, let's test it with a few grand and see what happens and then go from there. Yeah, and I'm Sean, I would love to hear what you, what you guys recommended, and have

to say about this, but we work with an agency, it was, you know, very close to Terry Partner, household, so work with them today, Nick, you actually introed me to Greg, awesome guy, awesome agency, and so his recommendation, and I totally agree with, like, any mistakes I've had launching new channels in the past was like, kind of dabbling, and you, you, you know, you, yeah, you don't need to go and do a $250,000 production and spend hundreds

and hundreds of thousands to prove it out, but you also can't, you know, go with no creative and then spend 500 bucks and shut it off, right?

“Like, you do have to do it, so his recommendation, and I think it was partly based on the”

size of the brand we were at, like, we were actually pretty established, you know, then, and so we needed a little bit more budget to kind of see signal compared to where we were

at, so we did a production, we tried to always keep things clean and stuff, so it wasn't

like a 200K production, it was probably like $50K, but we got like eight assets out of it, right? So good amount to test, and again, like we felt like there were relatively proven, at least in the market, not on TV, and then I think we went with like $200K, $100K to 100K over a month, and we're like, we're gonna spend that, we're gonna commit to it, you know, no

matter what, so that was what we went with, Sean, I'm curious, like, what you guys normally recommend. Yeah, a couple of things you said there really resonated, I mean, there isn't a one-sized that's all, and it's gonna kind of depend on where the brand's at, and what the available budget is, you know, the more you can spend early on, the more you can can learn, right,

and achieve those stat-sake results, and then scale them, but to your point, you don't mean to go in at a $250K budget starting out, and certainly not a creative budget in here.

Be strategy, right? Think about assets that maybe are working on YouTube and social, et cetera, how can those be kind of up-leveled for the TV format, so that we can, can, can get you on there, but yeah, to your point, there's no one-size-fits-all, you do want to really consider kind of what, what are gonna get you stat-sake results, and what are gonna get you to learn things that

“can really make it as scalable, channel a long term for the brand?”

Sean, I'm curious, like, when you look at the brands that are coming into tutorial and end up scaling really well over time, what kind of signals do, does that cohort of brands have when they come and test? 'Cause I think, like, just hammering a little bit on what we were just talking about with these offers, it's, you know, it's almost like the meal kit companies, just trying to

steal a customer from one another to get that first purchase, but there's no real retention

behind that offer, and so I'm curious here, like, what do you see, when you see clients coming in, like, what are the traits you see around a brand where you're like, all right, this is gonna be a legit brand, like a Jones Road, is gonna come in and test with a meaningful budget, and this is the right partner to come in and test versus just like, all right, these guys, you know, they want all these features for 500 bucks and spend.

I think Cody kind of mentioned this, but I do think that brands need to be effective on search and social and executing at a pretty high level, you know, as they're coming

“into TV, so they're not just coming into it cold, right?”

And they're not just scraping by, so to speak, right? They've kind of, again, figured out product market fit, you know, margin revenue, et cetera. It helps, as far as other signals go, I mean, again, if you are starting to see diminishing returns, or kind of diminishing audiences on some of the other channels that you've been cranking and growing the business on for a while, then that's a sign that

TV may it may be a great option to. And then for those first few tests, again, I mean, you want to be able to invest enough money to gain the learnings that are going to unlock this channel for the long term versus just a flash and a pan, you know, $5,000 test or something. It's really not going to give you much, and again, especially if you already have, you know,

some noise and a lot of other channels that you're running on, right? So, so you do want to make sure that you have an investment that kind of matches where the brand is at and where the long-term goals are, um, et cetera, but it's not a one-size-fits-all again, yeah, make sense, going off of that podium curious where when and where you started

“to see that point of diminishing returns, which made you start to think you should look”

outside of, you know, kind of the core strategy we're running across meta.

It was definitely, it was a year we did, like, $105 million one year.

So it was, it was that year, we were growing, you know, pretty quickly, um, but along the way, and definitely, like, had, like, a few months where we were plateauing, we were, like, 80% paid social, you know, and so it was very heavy and kind of diagnosed it as, you know, a reach issue, um, and, you know, dabbled with some other things, like, tried to run reach campaigns in meta, but like, they're just, you know, I don't know that that's,

that should have been the best strategy there was kind of like, uh, you know, just trying to bandate it, but we really needed, like, another place where we could reach people and put budgets and continue to scale. Um, and so that was it. And I think part of it, like, I just, naively, ignorantly, it was probably a better word, like, assume that, like, we weren't ready for it, you know, just because I didn't really know any better. And when

I started talking to people in here and, like, it wasn't, it wasn't this, like, big behemoth that, like, we had to be a giant brand to do. Like, we were ready. There were smaller brands and us, like, often brands get started, you know, that, like, I was talking

about like $15 million, like, brands get started and, like, have a bit, it was very successful

for them. It's not, I, I just, my head thought it had to be this giant, you know, production and fancy thing. Well, we're the signals that you saw that made you think that you are hitting that put admission returns. Was it just, like, inefficiencies were starting to go up, or you felt like frequency was getting really high? Yeah, exactly. So, so just seeing, like, reach

get worse, seeing, you know, not, not able to kind of scale. And so losing efficiency when you tried to scale, uh, you know, reach, reaching worse frequency going up, um, all that stuff, what was really cool when we, when we did launch. So, like, there was this, this clear, like, halo. I said, we used an arch being in preparation. And one of the things we would look at, and, and this was the challenge was, was, um, new visitor rate was just

going down and down, right? Um, and when we launched TV, like, just shot up. So, our overall efficiency was really good. But, like, without even changing anything on our paid social strategy or creatos, I think it just brought in this new audience that was just, like, really, you know, brought in this new audience into our funnel, and maybe gave it some credibility.

eyeballs. Yeah, makes sense. Sean, is that kind of what you see also in your side as, uh, brands are coming in? Yeah, absolutely. I think that that, um, mentioned there, the halo effect is really important. So, sometimes it can take a little bit of time as you start

“not on TV to build some momentum. There's some clear signals right away. You should see,”

which is kind of an increase in branded search, um, traffic to the website, et cetera. But, eventually, you start to see that pressure kind of down funnel. And, you know, your campaigns on meta start to convert it to higher rate. You're retargeting pools, um, become larger, et cetera. Um, and so we really are trying to gear it to Tari. You know, our campaigns to drive those signals as soon as possible, right? So, so that, uh, brands can, can kind of

see that and feel the impact as soon as possible. Yeah, makes total sense. Um, Cody, can you tell us about the first, uh, the first ad you ran? I think you ran it on Christmas, right? Yeah, we launched good memory. We launched, I think, on Christmas day. Yeah, so we launched with like

a few different creatives. You know, we didn't want you and always try to be as efficient as possible.

Um, launched, you know, linear to start. As, as the guy who is, you know, notoriously cheap about where you're spending your money. How did you decide to launch on Christmas versus, you know, the first time I launched TV, it was like, we're launching the overnight remnant buys on like the gifting networks and all of that. So, how did you decide to go, you know, just start on Christmas? It was remnant. The first one, right? Like I remember being at my, um,

family's house, my, like, uh, brother in law's house and Miami. I'm like Christmas day or day before it, but it was on like, I don't want to say life time, but it was on like one of those channels, you know, like you would never watch, but it was like, you're like, making everybody sit around

lifetime TV. Yeah, we did. For a 15 second spot, a 30 second spot. Um, but it was definitely remnant.

“I think, you know, part of it was timing. I think part of it was, uh, you know, there was,”

we thought there was a little arbitrage kind of like Q5 period. People are, you know, sitting around. So, it just could be a little bit cheaper, CPM because, you know, that's when people are sitting around, having time to kind of watch, watch TV, not, not at work. So we thought it was like a really good, good time to start for us. Yeah, I was just going to chime in there. I think remnant is, is not a dirty word, right? I think maybe sounds like it means that it's like cheaper, lower quality

inventory, but particularly in the TV space, you know, this is the same inventory that's some of the largest advertisers in the world are spending, you know, a gazillion dollars on and up fronts, et cetera. There is just, of course, a portion of that inventory that goes unsold and so, it is smart sometimes to start out that route to find efficiency early. Yeah, is that how brands mostly start like, what's typically the path for a brand that's coming in and wants to start? How

“do they make sure that, um, you know, they're not like spending a ton of money out the gate, but also”

they're not spending not enough, but also, you know, they're not buying bad inventory or, you know, not focusing on exclusively smaller sets of inventory because it's more premium. Yeah, so it, it does depend on the brand and kind of what their target audiences, as far as how

we would build that initial pilot campaign strategy with regards to, you know, how much first

on streaming versus linear and and whether we're buying programmatically, we're buying directly, et cetera, but, you know, we, we would go in and basically take kind of a balance to approach. So for Jones Road, right, you want to be on some of those larger tier one cable networks, you know, your Brabos, your E entertainment televisions of the world, but then there's those smaller networks that hit that same demo, and we have, you know, research to support that, such as lifetime,

et cetera. Um, and want to make sure that we're on some of the smaller networks, the larger networks, and again, in that remnant space, we're able to effectively bid essentially at a rate that we think is fair and is going to clear the spots, but in, in kind of the most cost-effective way possible. So it's kind of this balancing act. We want to make sure we're delivering spots on the networks. We think are going to matter and we need to gain learnings on. Um,

we don't want to pay necessarily talk dollar for it either. Um, and that's something that our model at Tatari has really been able to execute effectively with a lot of data over time, and identifying what is the right rate to pay within the remnant space. Yeah, makes sense. Now, going off that, you know, one of the things that, um, TV companies are very particular about just like food companies is how they write about the inventory that have, whether it's, you know,

organic versus all natural versus natural and TV. It's like programmatic versus TV versus CTV, versus fast. And so I'm curious, like, can you explain all these acronyms? And, um, just tell us a little bit about like, uh, you know, what do people think they're getting? What are people actually getting? And, you know, for example, what did, how did Cody's plan differ than what people might

out there, which is notorious in the ad tech space. I mean, at the highest level, there's linear

and they're streaming and, and linear is that that more traditional TV that people think about that cable subscription or the broadcast networks. You could, you could get on the bunny ears antenna, right? Um, your NBC ABC, etc. Streaming is really anything delivered over IP. Um, so OTT is somewhat synonymous there, um, and CTV as well. Sometimes gets referred to, to, to that as well.

“For the audience, I think it's important to realize that they're just considering what they're”

watching TV, right? They're not going and it's, uh, turning on their TV and going, oh, I'm watching Paramount Plus, this is TV or logging into my, my spectrum or satellite, you know, network account and this is TV, right? It's, it's, to them, it's, it's not viewing experience and that I think is, gets kind into the heart of what we talk about with convergent TV. Um, that fact that there's these different kind of services and platforms and delivery methods. Um, but at the end of the day, it's all TV

and they're from a, from a media buyer's standpoint, there can be importance to any of the, the pieces of that puzzle, right? So for one brand, and maybe really important to be more heavy on linear than streaming, but they're still a place for streaming, right? Or it may be important to be on the subscription streaming services because they're, they're demographic and they're product, but not on the free ad supported platforms, right? And so that's something that we, you know,

really try to educate the brands that are new to TV on and then come up with this strategy that's tailored to them. Yeah, makes total sense. And, um, Cody, as, as like somebody who came in from the digital side, you know, no TV background before, were these formats different to you or how

did you decide which one's to approach first? They were very foreign to me and out here all the

things and like, let's see TV, what's OTT, so I had to like do a lot of research, listen to a lot of podcasts, even like understand what a lot of the acronyms are. We decided to go linear again, a demo, right? We felt like our demo was watching, watching linear at the time and then, you know, CPMs and then just, you know, my strategy going into any new channel is just use my network, talk to as many people as possible. So, you know, talk to people like you, like Greg,

like talk to other brands and just see what they recommended and kind of put the pieces together, because, you know, you might have one person saying one thing and whatever, so that was it, but I think just based on the CPMs and based on, you know, we thought we could get to, you know, some decent scale before then introducing, you know, like a streaming or a CTV, which is what we did and I think they worked out pretty well. If you've ever wondered how the top brands

actually run TV, here's calm on why they used to tarry. At come V3 TV, just like any other digital channel from a KPI standpoint, so we look at how many people we are able to kind of reach with our offering and product down front and metrics like cost-but install, cost-but trial, and kind of the not-so-metric is the profitability metric, which is ROS, the written on that spin. With the dice, add platforms, we were able to measure our business outcomes across both linear

and streaming, and then we were able to independently verify it with the data that we see on

“our end in our back end. That's what real TV performance looks like. To learn more,”

go to Nick.co/totary. And Sean, unlike the streaming and CTV side, and I guess even all of it, like, you know, there's also the up front that happened, which is where the real premium stuff gets sold. Is that much different than what I'm able to get here from Totary or or is that different than what, you know, some of the other CTV vendors are getting? Well, again, going back to that conversation on Rimnet, linear, and Bintori, so it's some of

the same inventory, but certainly in the up front, there's some opportunities that are kind of carved out there and sold, you know, exclusively, and/or they get all bought up, you know, at that moment. But for the most part, we're able to access, you know, the full range of TV that's available, and that's what sets Totary apart from some of the more self-service, kind of CTV-only programmatic platforms that are out there, which only offer a more limited sliver of the inventory

“that's available. Yeah, I think I saw it's like 20% of what's actually out there is what you get”

from most of the other DSPs. Yeah, I mean, I don't know the exact figure, but that sounds like definitely what it could be. Yeah. And when they're offering things like free ad credits, I guess to both you, like, you know, what are your thoughts there in terms of like testing something new? Sometimes they're matching ad credits, sometimes they're just giving a dollar amount,

you know, what are your thoughts on those offers? I'll go first. I mean, it's to me it's I think

It's got to be like the reason why and again, we tried and we had mixed success, we actually had a great first test with one of the programmatic partners, and it was one of our more efficient

“CPS, and then we tested it again, and it was wildly unprofitable, and I think part of it is”

the inventory issue. It was good at the beginning, and it's just not a sustainable strategy,

and obviously could never get an answer from them on it. So, you know, we ended that experiment

as quickly as we could, but I think it's not anything to just get swayed by. It's like, it's not going to take you, you know, into the block if you're in the red. It's icing on the cake, but really it's like, what's the right strategy for you? Who's got the right inventory? Who's got the right platform? What's the right channel for you to be on? Yeah, I would agree, you know, it's an opportunity to test something, and it should be regarded as that, and obviously anything

for free is nice as well. We, you know, just want to caution any advertiser out there to take that as a TV test, right? I think sometimes, and again, going back to the fragmentation and all these different opportunities and the scale of TV, right? I would, I would feel bad for a brand if they're like, oh, we tested this one, you know, isolated platform or this one limited sliver of inventory and it worked out or didn't work out, and they think that's it for TV, right? Or are they walk away? And

“I think in my experience, we've allowed brands to go do those tests, right? If if they want to,”

and they want the free eye credits, and sometimes they come back to us and say, hey, well, this was learning experience, we actually want, you know, to be able to buy everything that is available in the TV world and to tell you can provide that. I don't know, Cody, if you had that experience or not, but yeah, we did. I mean, it was, it was simple to buy, it was easier, it was very good pitch, you know, credits, lower fees, we could do it ourselves, but the performance wasn't there,

so no amount of poor performance is kind of, you know, it's kind of justified that. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about measurement here. So, you know, previously TV was measured by GRPs and CPMs. I'm curious, you know, Atari being the more performance marketing platform,

every D to C brand, you know, wants to basically see scale and results, and then they have to take

those and and ladder those up internally. What are the metrics that you guys are looking at as a Sean on your side as the platform and Cody on your side as as the actual buyer and then, you know, the chief revenue officer or, you know, the signer of the next chunk of the budget. Sure, I can go first. So, GRPs are certainly kind of a legacy way of measuring TV. I had to learn about them, so I came actually from a social background and when I started at Atari, that would come up

sometimes. Again, it's not how we are generally looking at things. It's essentially just to reach and frequency, my cohesion against TV or household population in a given area. But ultimately, you know, we find, and I'm sure Cody would echo this. That it's more important to look at outcomes. When it comes to TV and and make sure you're measuring things, not only just impressions and reach and frequency, but those website visits, sales or registrations or whatever kind of mid to

lower funnel conversion events are important. And so we tend to kind of focus on that, you know, first and foremost, and let that data drive things. I got curious what Cody was leveraging when he was, was there, too. Yeah, I'm, you know, we're boot, bootstrap, D to C brand. So like,

like awareness is great. Reach is great. I don't have budget for it though. I never had

like a awareness budget brand budget. So for me, it's a performance channel. Yes, there's going to be a halo and everything else, but we got to be able to measure it. So obviously, there is the in-platform attribution. I think it's, it's definitely good and directionally helpful. My, my just, you know, skeptical overall thumb is never allowed anyone to create their own homework.

“So you have to have, you know, your independent ways where you're doing it. And so, you know,”

there's no one right answer. Everyone's going to talk about trying a relation. But yeah, you got to do it. So post-purchase survey is number one, right? And you can kind of get, you know, some, I do have CPA and, you know, multiply right of half the people are taking it, multiply that, you know, by two, to get like the exact number of people to sell you there. And, and, you know, you can kind of do some analysis where you're looking at that and then looking at,

like, a different touch models of it, right? Different outreach models with the post-purchase. That's helpful. Obviously, later, down the road, we had, you know, media, mixed model. And so that's probably the best way to measure TV. And obviously, I'm a big income mentality guy. So, you know, whenever we are able to, it's slightly harder on linear because you pay a CPM premium. So there's definitely a cost of doing that. But that's like the, you know, to me, the Holy Grail. And then generally

looking at things like looking at organic and direct traffic as your TV budget's changed. So

And, and traffic. And, you know, you should see, search go up. You should see traffic go up from

those sources, revenue go from the sources as TV budgets are scaling. So just thinking it's important to build, you know, build some reports and build some dashboards for them as well. Was there anything, Cody, that came as a surprise to you in terms of what you saw, go up as a result of TV being turned on, you know, whether it was a direct sales channel or or things that came, you know, outside of that? The, the impact of meta, like what I talked about

before with having, you know, our percent knew so much better and just like how much more better

“meta performed, especially reaching nuances. I think it just gave this fresh new signal. Like,”

I don't even know that it was like people that met it was re-targeting that saw TV. I think it's just gave this kind of fresh new signal of a bit of audience. So we're able to reach and actually provide like signal to meta's algorithm. And then we also are, our, our brand, our Google brand search volume really spiked. You know, we were press spending a thousand a day before that. And then we started spending like four granted a day. And so actually ran, we ran like a, you know,

incrementality test on brand search prior to that wasn't really great, but we weren't spending that much so we'll leave it. And then when it spiked, I was like, all right, let's test it again. And I figured it was going to be very incremental then because a lot of people were searching, right, from TV. And it actually wasn't. And so we decided to cut it off, which was little nerve cracking. But what we saw is almost all of that traffic went to organic search. But definitely there

was very clear signal. Like that was, you know, not a TV thing, but there was very clear signal that it was driving search. Like very clear as we scaled budgets, it was driving search. Yeah, and super high intense search too. If you saw, there was no difference between, you know,

the ads running for branded or not. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Sean, on your side, I'm

“curious to what you see as in terms of clients. Like, you know, I remember hearing a couple of weeks”

ago at Hudson's Mastermind, one of the founders turned down TikTok shop. All of a sudden, target sales jumped, you know, by two acts in the next week. And I know TV has a very similar TV. And I feel like TikTok running organically is almost a version of like Gen Z TV to some degree, like a, a very powerful version. So I feel them, I feel like they have a lot of parallels between the two channels. I'm curious what you see is like halo effects that hit the other part

of the brand outside of just the direct consumer, just TV. That's a great question. I'm not on TikTok, but that, that's the first time I've someone heard someone use that analogy and it kind of makes sense to me. Yeah. So, so as Cody mentioned, you'll see that kind of clear impact on branded search. But in I mentioned before, like on meta, you'll typically see that postal convert of it better to. We actually had to tary with the pixel based attribution that we leverage for our platform.

We're able to kind of monitor, you know, paths, etc. And we are have seen, you know, across clients, upwards of almost 50% increases in conversion rates from people that are visiting the site after coming through the social path meta path versus those that had not also been exposed to a streaming TV ad, for example. So just showing that the power of that additional touch on the biggest screen in the house, right? We'll drive more conversion and more intent from the folks that are

also seeing you in their feed on, you know, these other social channels. So really cool things and to your point with target or also Amazon, right? We see we do see that certainly a lot of the purchase lift and traffic will go into Amazon to from TV. And so that's something that we've actually been building a model for too and in adding into our platform and trying to get that

complete picture beyond just D to C for brands. Amazing. Yeah, one last thing I want to touch on is

I'm curious how, like, you know, more tactically, how are you guys handling measurement? I know Tatari has got a suite of measurement tools internally. And then Cody, it sounds like you're also

“doing some stuff outside of the platform. How often are you continuing to run those tests?”

And what does that set up look like? The actual test not that often, again, especially linear, like your CPMs are really going to go up if you do a local test. So linear is much more challenging. CTV is a lot easier to test. Those might be quarterly and it depends on what answers you're trying to get. If you're trying to validate some of the other sources or really, you know, figure out how much do we have to scale how efficient is this really? But, you know, if you're using

a, you know, maybe mix model usually, that's looking at monthly and I would say, you know, me being CEO and probably with CMO when we launch it at the time, like, I'm probably looking

total channel, it's weekly. And then, you know, it's not like a social where you can just change

your budgets every day, like generally monthly as we would run a media mix model and, you know, figure out allocations where we're giving, like, we're giving our budgets monthly to it. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I liked what you said of not liking platforms that great they're on homework and we certainly have seen most brands have other proxies that help them understand T.B. in their broader channel mix. Question for you, Cody. I'm just curious

in your direct experience. I know you mentioned you started with linear and then it sounds like you added streaming. Were their differences, I guess, in the way that you were measuring those two

“or the way that you felt those and some of the other internal attribution models that you had?”

It's a good question. I don't know that we saw the same halo effect of, like, you know, the meta performance improvement we launched streaming, but it also could have been that, like, just because we, you know, we've had been on TV for a while, like maybe we, if we started with streaming, maybe we would have seen the same thing. So I don't know that we saw that, but I think, you know, we saw performance fluctuate. Like we would look at the same sources and stuff. I, you know,

there's a little bit more that's available. Obviously with, like, demographics and stuff, I'm streaming, but we would see performance fluctuate. Sometimes linear does better. Sometimes streaming does. So as we're, you know, running the models, we would look and check in some of it as audiences and who are trying to reach. That makes sense. I think that the delivery of a linear TV spot is just inherently different than streaming, right? So it's delivered one to many. And so sometimes we'll

see kind of clear spikes, right? Just after a spot aired, this traffic is coming to your side or searching for your brand. More clearly, whereas streaming is delivered on a kind of one to one, you know, more user tuned in basis. And so it's spread out a bit differently. So sometimes, you know, there could be some different challenges from that versus linear. So yeah, I'm curious if you all tested any kind of larger linear spots and felt halo effect from that kind of down the line

or with more premium opportunities. Yeah, that's a good point. We never did any like giant ones,

but even with the ones we did, and with your guys attribution, you know, methods like you can definitely see the spike in traffic from there. And you just, you just don't have access to that with CTV because it's, you know, there's no, this is one time it goes live. Yeah, we're going back to our

“earlier conversation. I think that again is just one of the key, you know, reasons why you want to”

think about the full TV puzzle of the linear streaming and the different execution types in order to see that halo effect and feel those different impacts of it. Yeah, I guess on that notion, like, you know, a brand that's going to start building their media plan today. Maybe going into the rest of Q4, maybe planning for Q1, you know, how should they think about their split between linear direct streaming, programmatic, all of it? It's a good question. Again, it kind of

depends on the brand. So, and kind of what their demo skew is, right? And we can use some different sources of data to understand where they're going to best find those results, right? I think, you know, I work with ManScape, for example. So, and I've been working with them since they launched on TV in 2020, but if they were new to TV coming in today, we're trying to gear up for a big Q4. One, this would be a great time to start, right? We're in Q3. Let's get some learnings now,

“so that when we get closer to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc, you know, we know kind of what's”

working and where we can scale. So, one, I would say it sees that, sees that moment. And depending on kind of what the available budget is starting out, given they have kind of a younger male skew. I mean, I, I, I maybe would start at kind of a 50/50 split, really, between linear and streaming, right? We'd want to be airing on different male sports networks. We would want to have an opportunity to buy maybe college football games, maybe some, you know, not Ohio State,

or when I've heard right off the gate, but you know, some smaller kind of opportunities there for live sports. So, we get a taste of that. Make sure we're also testing the top kind of streaming publishers that are out there, you know, you're who, you're paramount plus, etc. And we have enough kind of weekly budget to get signal there. And then carving out kind of a smaller part of that total streaming budget for a programmatic execution. So, we're typically starting kind of buying

direct from publishers because we, yeah, it sounds like if you were using any other TV platform,

you'd get like 10% of the media buy of what basically you're putting together here as like a great

test to start with as a premium brand. Exactly. Yeah, and that's exactly again how we look at it. We, we want to make sure that we're getting the maximum kind of scale and the maximum kind of

starting out. Yeah. And Cody, like looking back on how you guys started buying TV,

is there anything you would change or if you were, you know, to do this with another brand and

“start again, is there anything you do differently in your process or approach to going live on TV?”

It was pretty successful. So, it's hard to say that I would do anything like when we launched. There were definitely some learning lessons along the way in terms of how we were allocating budgets and, you know, analyzing performance. Like it does take some time to kind of understand the impact to your business. One of the things that we saw that is success with, like, yes, is the typical produce creatives, but also like adapting some social assets and,

and there's, you know, you can either edit them or there's some services out there that do it, or you can kind of like punch them up, like Sean said, and like, you know, give them borders and backgrounds and stuff like that. And, and those can, you know, maybe they're around the most branded, like, they can actually perform really well. And I think things like that can actually help a lot of brands, you know, start sooner than having to do these giant productions. And I think

the landscape has changed a little bit in terms of, you know, viewership. So, I probably would go closer to like the 50/50 in test streaming and, you know, and linear at the gate versus just

going with with linear. Amazing. And, um, I'm curious, like, uh, your takeaway on, you know, again,

going back to the credits thing. It sounds like you'd rather have a partner that can continuously deliver than a partner that's going to give you some, uh, a few free shackles. Yeah, you got to look at total performance. And, you know, you got to, you got to look at your fees, you got to look at your agency fees, you got to look at your, um, you know, credits and whatever's going to give you the best return at the end of the day. And for us, we're on to Terry, because that's where we're getting

the best return. Amazing. And Sean, um, you know, somebody who's thinking about TV, maybe, maybe they're on the fence, um, you've already given kind of the reasons why Tatari is, uh, you know, just a far better, more robust platform, you know, from, from the, from the, from the get go really, like even just thinking about inventory, not even thinking about measurement and all the other stuff. But what's something you'd say to somebody to get them over the fence and, you know, like really

encourage them to run a test. Again, you know, the, the barrier to entry is not high, right? So, we can come up with a strategy in a plan that can work for any any size brand, um, really any size budget candidly, just to kind of get in there and start testing the waters. Um, and again, the sooner that you can do it, you know, the better, especially if your peak seasonality is coming

“up, right? If you want to get those learnings, um, sooner. And so that would be something I would”

have to encourage. And we, we let the results speak for themselves, right? And we, you know, I've seen many brands be able to scale, grow, um, on TV. And, and so I would, obviously, have a lot of confidence there and would let them know that it's an opportunity that they, they need to make sure, um,

they're, they're trying to work on. So, amazing. Um, all right, guys, well, that pretty much

reaches the end of this episode. Uh, I want to thank you both for jumping on, um, Cody working people to find you. Uh, if I'm going to Twitter, probably, best place, uh, Cody plough on an X, I guess, is called now. Amazing. And Sean, if people want to, um, you know, just pick your brain on things, all things TV, media buying, approach, et cetera, how can they find you? Yeah, you can find

“me on LinkedIn, um, also just my name at tatari.tv, uh, if you want to email and drop a lime.”

Amazing. Thank you both. Thanks. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG, retail, and e-commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen, so you don't miss the next one.