Some digital marketers cozy up to TV advertising when it looks and feels like digital.
At least that’s been the case for Rumpl, a blanket brand historically marketed to people with an active outdoor lifestyle, such as campers, hikers and athletes.
Rumpl built early sales momentum by targeting these audience niches across the big social platforms, including YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. The brand also increased its visibility through less targeted means, including an appearance on “Shark Tank” in 2020.
But Rumpl wanted to generate more awareness, including among new audiences, such as people who enjoy the outdoors from the comfort of their home, such as by sitting on their porch or in their backyard (aka most of us).
Opening up
In 2021, Rumpl added CTV to its digital media plan to reach a broader audience without sacrificing the precise targeting and retargeting it’s become accustomed to on digital channels, said Ashlee Anderson, director of ecommerce and digital marketing.
To relate to its new audience, Rumpl is using video creative featuring scenes of people both at home and adventuring, plus product-based creative variations for retargeting. Rumpl used a video creation service from MNTN, the self-service ad platform it also uses for CTV buying, to create the spots.
When Rumpl tested a campaign against the new audience last year, the ads generated 35% higher conversions than they did from the brand’s core outdoor lifestyle audience. Now Rumpl is gearing up to run its next holiday campaign with its new audience at the forefront.
Although widening its net has been a priority, Rumpl approaches CTV with the expectation that it should work like a performance marketing channel, Anderson said.
Rumpl credits its new audience for a 138% increase in conversion rates tied to paid search.
The CTV squeeze
Rumpl used MNTN’s platform to create a streaming audience segment with a focus on people interested in home decor built on data from LiveRamp and Oracle Data Cloud. Rumpl also used Oracle data to find its own core outdoor audience on CTV through MNTN. For CTV campaigns, Rumpl tracks unique web visits and site engagement to determine who to retarget.
MNTN tracks CTV attribution based on site traffic – not including traffic referred by other channels like digital or social – within roughly two weeks of an ad exposure, although the timeframe is flexible. MNTN also has a direct integration with Google Analytics, which Rumpl uses to compare attribution on CTV versus on Google-owned platforms and move dollars around midflight to favor certain channels or audiences.
“Performance advertisers prefer measuring the impact of CTV campaigns in the same [place as] other performance channels,” said Jon Zucker, MNTN’s senior product marketing manager.
Even though MNTN only handles the media buying for CTV inventory, it’s still helpful to have attribution data in one spot – especially for Rumpl’s retargeting strategy, which includes CTV and display, Anderson said.
The brand retargets viewers who visit at least two pages on its site and/or make a purchase after seeing a CTV spot. For retargeting, it uses ad creative that focuses more on product features (e.g., being waterproof) rather than using more general creative that shows friends cozying up on the porch with their Rumpls, for example.
For Rumpl, the point of CTV retargeting is to prove return on ad spend (ROAS), Anderson said, and that means sales. The brand has similar ROAS goals for CTV retargeting campaigns as it does for Google and Meta platforms, Anderson added.
Although not everyone thinks of CTV as a performance channel, she said, it can play a role in helping boost sales and conversions while bringing new customers “into the fold.”
