Touch of Modern, whose app and website cater to millennial males, started business in 2012 as the result of a conversation among its four would-be founders about the best audio speakers, Hum explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.
“The CTO at the time was a real audiophile and he had all this knowledge about speakers and technical specs. And so he won that argument. And then we found that each one of us had a hobby or an interest that we were obsessed about,” Hum says.
Thus was born Touch of Modern to go direct-to-consumers with products “that were really valued by enthusiasts not so much things you find in mass market.” As a category, the 125 DTC companies tracked by the VAB added $1.4 billion to the TV marketplace last year, as Broadcasting & Cable reports.
Like many modern-day startups, the company relied largely on Facebook to reach its target audience. It had few competitors at the time.
“We were able to get great rates and find our core male demographic,” Hum says. “Over time, more players moved in and we branched out to other platforms,” including Google search.
About two years ago, Touch of Modern started to experiment with TV with a small test.
“What we found was that when we started spending on television, the metrics on the digital side started to improve a lot as well.” He attributes the results partly to the company having achieved a certain scale and that measurement of TV ad campaigns had become more comparable to digital media. Touch of Modern uses TVSquared to measure campaign performance.
One unexpected outcome from TV “was a halo effect on the digital side. Google started performing a lot better, Facebook to an extent also started performing better and then just general brand recognition really increased.”
Relying primarily on its mobile app for most of its traffic and revenue, Touch of Modern sees “a lot more mobile traffic” generated by TV advertising, “which is really great for us because the mobile user also tends to be a more valuable one as well.”
This video is from a Beet.TV’s coverage of the VAB’s Direct to Success summit held on June 12 at Viacom in New York City. Please visit this page for more segments.
]]>Performance has always been a priority for the retailer geared to millennial men “because we grew up in the digital realm, where everything could be tracked and you can attribute revenue specifically to ad campaigns,” Hum says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.
“What we don’t like is a general if you spend it you’ll just kind of see it materialize somewhere and it’s all kind of wishy washy. It’s really important for us to be able to measure the actual performance of television and not just kind of throw the money into the air and hope it comes back to use later on.”
Hum was one of the main presenters at the VAB session, along with Peloton Founder & CEO John Foley. For TV campaign attribution, Touch of Modern— which offers unique and new-to-market products not easily found at retailers—works with TVSquared.
“We measure a baseline of traffic before and after each airing and then we attribute the spike in traffic to television,” says Hum, noting that the company’s most important KPI’s are “sales, signups and sessions.”
His key takeaway for other companies is that “TV nowadays can be measured just as precisely as digital, and it’s really important to have a diversified portfolio when it comes to marketing.”
Launched in 2012, Touch of Modern shot its first iteration of a TV commercial using its employees and an in-house production team. While it worked pretty well, version #2 created largely by Marketing Architects “opened up new markets. Things that didn’t work before suddenly started working with the new creative.”
One way in which creative for digital media differs from TV is that “every banner is pretty short-lived, whereas the creative you produce for television tends to have a longer life span.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled TV: Now an Outcome-Driven Medium. For more segments, please visit this page. This series is presented by TVSquared.
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