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.
]]>“For most of the DTC brands and even the performance brands that we’re talking to, the conversation is about business building and brand building. I use those two things synergistically because there’s never a conversation that we have with a brand where we’re only talking about sales,” Turner says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.
Conversations tend to center on metrics reflecting sales and brand health, according to Turner.
“We need to hit our performance goals. I think we recognize that there’s a lot of competition in most categories and we need to be making sure that we’re thinking about awareness and those metrics simultaneously.”
The goal of connecting TV environments is combining the right audiences with the right strategies. “So we’re constantly testing and learning like we would do in a digital channel and then from there we’re leveraging data to make quick, fast decisions so we can actually drive those businesses forward.”
At the end of the day, says Turner, performance can mean many different things. Signals can help to understand initial engagement, site visitation “and how we’re getting folks interested in our brand.” After that, “most of what we need to make sure we’re doing is actually driving incremental sales and incremental sales lift within the video channel.”
While initial signals might suggest that “this campaign is moving well but the analytics and the decisions that are driven by those analytics are really driven by the ability to drive incremental sales and better overall ROI for our clients.”
Beyond traditional linear, broadcast and syndicated TV lies the growing promise of OTT.
“I see the big opportunity as OTT, and then around OTT making sure that we have the measurement in place that we have in linear TV and that we have in Facebook that we can make quick, fast decisions in the OTT space so we’re making holistic decisions of how to make video dollars move fluidly.”
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.
]]>“We are aggregating all our addressability, not just for the two minutes an hour we sell to our local national spot buyers but soon national networks like AMC or USA Network, or pick any network, will be able to come to NCC and be able to make their national time addressable on our platforms,” Kline says in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent VAB Direct To Success event in Manhattan.”
NCC is the national TV advertising sales, marketing and technology company owned by Comcast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications. Three months ago it expanded into digital ad buying so as to be able to deliver cross-screen campaigns across linear, VOD, addressable TV, digital video, display, social media, out-of-home and mobile, as Multichannel News reports.
“We’re going to make it very easy for networks to be able to make their inventory, the fourteen or twelve minutes an hour, addressable using our two-way interactive platform,” Kline says.
“Right now they can all do it on our digital feeds and on our set-top box dynamic ad insertion, our Spectrum TV app where they can do streaming on linear addressability or even VOD on our streaming apps addressably.”
With the bulk of ad impressions being on linear TV, “Coming soon you’ll be able to buy literally our full footprint, which could be up to fifty, sixty million households addressably on linear as well as on demand as well as on demand as well as on streaming.”
Kline says the local TV marketplace has changed dramatically in the last few years because of viewing data and infrastructure.
“Part of what we’re trying to do with the VAB is to take some of those wonderful things that we do locally and apply them nationally to our national network partners. And we’re working fast and furious on that. NCC is going to be the hub of that. More on that in the coming months.
“It’s really a great time to be in local advertising.”
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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