Founded in 2016, the male grooming company Manscaped started out primarily as a performance marketing engine.
The products were simply a way for the brand to use its expertise in social media marketing and direct-to-consumer dynamics.
Fast-forward six years, and Manscaped has broadened beyond one product and mobile performance marketing.
In addition to launching a new portfolio of creams, beard trimmers and grooming products, Manscaped has branched out into linear TV, out-of-home advertising, sports marketing, podcasting and every other advertising channel.
But the company still brings the same focus to understanding how media and marketing drives DTC sales, said CMO Marcelo Kertesz.
In today’s advertising landscape, a brand must be “very open and nimble when it comes to turning the dial on performance,” he said.
What he means by “nimble”
Take the holiday season. In the old mode of consumer marketing, you’d produce two or three main pieces of content – like commercials – to push across all the networks over the campaign, Kertesz said. The initial DTC model relied heavily on platforms like Facebook and Google to optimize content and manufacture practically endless variations of the same creative assets.
Nowadays, marketers have far more must-have channels under their purview, and each requires more oversight by the brand.
“Right now, [we’re] about to enter holiday season, and I have over 1,000 different creative pieces on video alone,” he said. More than 650 of these creatives are different cuts of original content and video assets from channels like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, including influencer campaigns and general user-generated content.
Identifying one or two ads or messages that work best and pushing hard on those no longer works, he said. Instead, marketers must flit very quickly between channels and be able to test content, ramp up spend and pull the brakes on a dime.
For example, a video that excels on one social channel may not work at all on another platform, even if they have similar audience demographics and types of content, Kertesz said.
“I don’t mean going between TikTok and television,” he said. (Can you imagine importing a landscape-mode video to TikTok? You’d be laughed off the feed.) “Even for TikTok and Instagram Reels, the worst performer on one might work best on the other.”
And YouTube is a different kettle of fish entirely.
To figure out the why behind which content works where, “we hypothesize, strategize around it and test, test, test,” Kertesz said.
Portfolio management
Scaled DTC marketers don’t limit their scope to a handful of walled gardens. They must cultivate massive stables of influencers, podcasts, content creators and publishing partners that can be dialed up or down at a moment’s notice as well.
If you listen to podcasts, for instance, you probably have heard Manscaped ads.
“We have a program that goes from the biggest podcasts to nano podcasts,” Kertesz said. The company creates direct buying channels (Manscaped prefers host-read ads, so it can’t often use programmatic placements).
The same mentality applies to how the company approaches influencers, he said. Manscaped has worked with more than 1,000 influencers, ranging from huge celebrities (Channing Tatum is an investor and endorser) to nano-influencers with perhaps a thousand followers.
“We became experts at managing campaigns from big to very small and making them efficient in both ways,” Kertesz said.
Sports marketing follows the same trend, he said. Manscaped has gone big with some prominent sponsorships: It’s an official UFC sponsor and has an NFL marketing partnership with the San Francisco 49ers.
“But then we have smaller, regional partnerships that allow us to be funny and irreverent in ways that appeal to people in more local ways,” he said. Manscaped struck a partnership with the South Carolina Gamecocks (groan) as well as with Ball State in Indiana.
It can all feel like a lot of wasted energy, what with the constant testing and quickly dialing spend up or down, Kertesz said.
“If you’re making one-size-fits-all decisions, it’s much easier,” he said. “But you’re going to find yourself making false assumptions and wasting spend even more quickly.”
