Apparel company Men’s Wearhouse drives about 95% of its sales from in-person sales – but it’s notoriously difficult to track the effect that marketing has had on in-person purchases.
The brand began focusing on audio marketing in 2025, hoping the medium could effectively reach its primary customer base of men who fall in the mid- to upper-income range, but it needed a strong measurement partner to prove it.
Men’s Wearhouse developed an audio-only campaign with its measurement and media agency, Ovative Group, and activated it through The Trade Desk’s Kokai platform.
The core message of the campaign was that “you can get whatever you need at Men’s Wearhouse,” said Maren Graves, director of video and programmatic media at Ovative. The campaign highlighted three parts of the brand’s offerings: its “everywhere look” for a typical day, suits and wedding attire.
The campaign ran from March to June of 2025 across digital audio channels, including Spotify, iHeart, Acast and Pandora, and ultimately increased sales by 16% among audiences who were exposed to it.
Starting fresh
Ovative uses its proprietary marketing intelligence platform, EMRge, to determine a brand’s target audience and where to reach them. Its measurement tools track and optimize campaigns based on past performance.
Within EMRge is a marketing mix modeling tool. Men’s Wearhouse used the MMM tool to track both in-store and online attribution on a weekly basis, said Shannon Kast, SVP of client services at Ovative, and measures across all media types that Men’s Wearhouse advertises on.
The in-store conversions were tracked by LiveRamp, said Graves, which sent conversion data to TTD via the latter’s CAPI pipes.
The campaign was part of a larger rebrand of Men’s Wearhouse as it aims to expand its customer base and redefine its formal, more serious brand voice.
In spring of 2024, Men’s Wearhouse entirely relaunched the brand. Gone are the days of selling exclusively formalwear, and the brand’s familiar “you’re going to like the way you look” slogan. Though, the company’s About Us page promises that the message still “rings true,” and assures readers that if they need pants tailored, Men’s Wearhouse will “do it faster than you can say ‘fashion emergency.’”
The brand introduced more casual clothes and lighthearted content to its catalogue, hoping to appeal to new customers.
Men’s Wearhouse focused on reaching two main audiences with the campaign: “Stylish Steve,” or younger men who may be less familiar with the brand, and “Professional Paul,” an older demographic that already has a knowledge of, and perhaps loyalty to, the brand. (Since the campaign, Men’s Wearhouse has shifted its audience segmentation and no longer delineates the same way.)
The primary audience for the campaign was the Steves – younger men who gravitate to everyday-wear and consume more audio. They tend to be digital-first consumers, said Kast, and spend a lot of time in gaming and audio environments.
But there was no difference in the creative used to target Steves vs. Pauls, said Graves – the distinction was just in frequency and environment. For instance, both demographics index highly on Spotify and YouTube, but only the younger, more contemporary audience was likely to be reached on ESPN.
Ovative targeted the new, younger customers at a higher frequency, said Graves, since the goal was to build brand awareness pretty much from scratch. It also targeted those men with a higher number of ads about daily attire, rather than formalwear, since they’re “more predisposed” to wear that style of clothing, said Kast.
Heard it on the radio
The campaign reached a number of customers who had not received Men’s Wearhouse ads before. Forty-eight percent of households reached through the audio campaign hadn’t been reached by any other channels in the past, according to the results of the case study.
Audio can reach consumers listening to music and podcasts at moments when they would be “otherwise unavailable,” said Taylor Ash, TTD’s general manager of inventory development, like walking to the grocery store or cleaning the house.
In terms of who to target, Ovative took first-party data from Men’s Wearhouse (as well as data from TTD’s data marketplace) and used Kokai’s look-alike modeling and AI tools to develop audiences and scale the campaign, said Ash.
And, despite complaints that Kokai lacks transparency and concerns about its inventory quality, Ovative says its experience has been decidedly positive. The team pulls daily reports to track its spend and ad placements, said Graves.
Ovative’s team is still “hands on keyboards,” said Graves, and able to make their own tweaks and optimizations to ensure that its dollars are going wherever they will “deliver the greatest impact.”
