Owlet’s target customer isn’t in market for very long.
The publicly traded baby tech company is best known for its smart “sock,” a wearable that wraps around an infant’s foot to track heart rate, oxygen levels, movement and sleep, and then sends alerts to a parent’s phone. Owlet also sells a Wi-Fi baby monitor and a bundle with both devices.
The challenge for Owlet is that most people only research baby monitors from the second trimester through the first few months after birth, and they’re usually picturing a camera when they do. A lot of discovery also happens through word of mouth, which is powerful but hard to measure.
This combination – a short buying window and a product that doesn’t fit the typical idea of a baby monitor – forces Liz Teran, Owlet’s chief parent officer, to be very specific about how she approaches performance marketing.
And that’s before you factor in medical device regulations.
Owlet had been selling its smart sock as a wellness product since it launched in 2015. But in 2021, the FDA decided it should be regulated as a medical device and ordered the company to stop selling the product until it got medical clearance.
The next two years were tough. “Getting FDA clearance is expensive,” Teran said, “and so the largest part of our budget – marketing – had to be cut.”
In the past, Owlet would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars across paid search and social, almost as a reflex. But the cuts forced Teran’s team to rethink its approach, including shutting off Google Search.
It was a decision made under duress, but they learned something surprising and valuable.
“We did see quite a big drop in traffic, but it wasn’t qualified traffic,” Teran said. “In other words, we were still performing well even though we lost a good chunk of what we now understand was not qualified traffic.”
Teran spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: Last year, your title changed from CMO to “chief parent officer.” Did your job responsibilities change, too?
LIZ TERAN: My background is in product marketing, so I’ve always been both a marketer and a product person.
Last year, when our founder was transitioning out, we were also making other broader org changes, but we wanted to make sure we stayed really focused on parents and their needs. We stitched product management, design, customer service and marketing together into what we call the “parent org” so that every discipline is focused on serving parents and communicating in a way that resonates.
The title is meant to reflect that focus.
Can you share an example of how that “parent org” approach has impacted a product or marketing decision?
The best example is Owlet360, which is a subscription service we launched last January. It unlocks more value from the data we already collect, like daily and weekly trends on heart rate, oxygen, movement and skin temperature.
There was pressure to generate recurring revenue quickly, and one obvious idea was to take certain existing features and put them behind a paywall. That would have been fast, but it would also have broken trust with parents.
Instead, we ask parents what other things would be valuable to them and built against that. Because we listened, the subscription product is performing well. We ended last year with over 100,000 subscribers.
Since Owlet was founded in 2012, you’ve monitored more than 2.5 million babies with your tech, which means you’ve collected – and continue to collect – quite a lot of infant health data. What are your guardrails? Health data involving kids is about as sensitive as it gets!
Today, most of the data is used to make the product experience better, helping parents answer the question “Is this or that normal?” with more confidence by showing patterns and benchmarks based on babies of the same age.
Because we’re a medical device company, there are a lot of regulatory considerations around how we share that information and what we can say about it, and we’re very careful.
Longer term, there’s real potential for this data to contribute to better outcomes in infant and child health more broadly. We already have an internal data science team exploring what’s possible, but anything beyond the product experience has to go through the right medical and regulatory pathways.
Your target audience is narrow and time‑bound. How do you think about targeting and acquisition?
Our TAM is constantly refreshing. We basically have a six- to nine-month window to reach someone, and then they age out.
The good news is that the product does what it promises, and parents talk about it. More than half of our customers say they first heard about Owlet from a friend or family member. We don’t really need a big paid influencer program or anything like that, because regular parents are already recommending us to everyone they know who’s pregnant.
The job of paid media is to reinforce that with real parent stories and creator content, so that when someone is in that research window, Owlet is already in the mix.
After the FDA warning, you guys had to cut acquisition costs dramatically and even turned off Google Search, which actually turned out to be a good thing, even though it hurt at the time. What did you learn?
It forced us to question a lot of assumptions. Before the cuts, we were following what you’d consider a pretty standard growth playbook: CTV, paid social, search. And if you looked at the blended performance, the numbers were acceptable.
But when you don’t have the budget anymore, “acceptable” isn’t good enough. You have to ask, “What, specifically, is this channel doing for us?” When we turned off paid search for generic terms like “baby monitor,” it was eye-opening.
It made it really clear that a lot of people searching “baby monitor” just wanted a camera, and when they landed on our site and saw a sock, that wasn’t what they were thinking of. We were essentially paying for that disconnect.
Does that mean you don’t spend on search anymore?
For the record, we do paid search again now, but our strategy has shifted. Our takeaway wasn’t “search is bad.” It was that not all search is equal.
Now we think more about intent. What is a person actually looking for and where are they in their journey? Thinking this way has changed how we use search and how we evaluate every channel.
We’re not ticking boxes and we’re less interested in what’s considered “best practice.” We’re just trying to focus on what actually works for our funnel and our customers.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
