How To Start TV & CTV Advertising Like A Pro (Masterclass 2025)

John Gross: My name is John Gross. I'm the founder and CEO of Fat Earth Media. > [VISUAL: Slide titled "Ecosystem thinking: Expanding into traditional media from Meta". Subtitle: "Helping brands confidently expand into TV, OOH, and beyond". On the left are video feeds for John Gross, Savannah Wisham, and Jason Moran. On the right is a photo of four "SKINNY DIPPED" snack bags on a table. Logos for Motion, fat earth, and Red Antler are at the top.] Uh, we're a performance marketing agency that's really heavily focused on uh creative strategy and creative execution for our clients. And I think we'll we'll talk a little bit more about that when I introduce Savannah and Jason. We're going to talk really specifically about our individual skill sets and how that, you know, comes to life when we think about things like what we're going to present today. So, I want to start off with, you know, just introducing what this conversation today is all about.

Um, and so I think the first thing is what is ecosystem thinking? Um, in this particular case, it's really just simply the idea that we need to move beyond as marketers, particularly as things continue to evolve. We really need to move beyond this narrow, you know, siloed view of marketing and advertising constraints in favor of paying much more attention uh to the entire system. And so the point of the webinar today is going to help you all understand a little bit more about how we think about, you know, how the media environment is changing on a broad level.

You know, although we continue to see, you know, new channels come out, diverse places to to spend your media dollars, generally there is, you know, a a bit of a consolidation of channels as well as people's attention, you know, happening really across the market. And I think the brands and agencies that are that are the most successful right now, they are still paying attention to those those areas where they can get quick wins, where they can carve out, you know, a smaller niche media channel to really expand their customer base and get uh efficient returns on investment, but really paying attention to how things are expanding and continuing to consolidate over the course of the last year and a half to two years and into the future is going to be really important I think for brands to continue to succeed and you know, the barrier to entry for channels like Meta and TikTok, they're constantly changing and I'm sure most of you on this call are feeling some restrictions in terms of the ceilings or the potential for returns. And so we're going to really talk today about how to think about uh strategies and channels beyond just paid search and social and hopefully gain some confidence and ultimately making that transition into TV. There's a lot of traditional media channels that you can go into. TV obviously isn't the only place to expand beyond paid search and paid social. But in this particular case, that's what we're going to be talking about. We think it's a really good consideration for a lot of direct to consumer brands. And, you know, if you remember one thing from this call, it's that you probably already have the resources and the data that you need to make these really really confident investments in these expanded channels. And so I don't want you to think about your first foray into TV as being something that's fully net new or that you're doing in the dark. And you shouldn't be thinking about these bigger media investments as being binary. Like it doesn't have to be 100% direct response versus 100% brand awareness. And if you're an operator and you really understand your business's objectives, then I think you can craft better media strategies that are going to facilitate longer term growth beyond thinking about just the ROAS within a single paid media or distribution channel.

And so, you know, most of you on this call, uh obviously, probably all of you are running ads through Meta. And for most direct to consumer brands, and today we're going to talk about one of our clients, Skinny Dipped quite a bit, the the majority of their spend, the majority of their strategy is usually focused around Meta. Now, there's there's obviously um, you know, some exceptions to that point. There's TikTok, there's a lot of other places that you can show up. But still a lot of businesses at scale and through the launch period are leveraging Meta in a really substantial way. And so typically brands go to market, they launch into Meta, they scale their business and they start to think about what is next. And usually, um, you know, they scale as much as they can, they start to hit some ceiling, they start to have diminishing returns and it's really difficult for them to figure out like what is the next step. And today we're going to talk a lot about how TV can be that next step for you. And hopefully we can build some confidence around how you can get into those other markets without it feeling like a huge financial risk.

And so just kind of thinking about like what does this usually look like? This is some real, you know, a real graph that we've pulled from um a lot of different accounts. And where this inflection point happens for any particular brand is dependent on a lot of different things. It could be your addressable market, it could be your product market fit or your product channel fit. But over time, you're going to start to saturate, you know, how much you can get out of a single channel. This happens because of competition. It may happen because of, you know, lack of creative variability or understanding how to to scale behind specific creatives. And Motion obviously has been a big part of how we've, you know, reduced um or how we've helped elongate this curve for most of our clients. But regardless of how good we are at creative, regardless of how many amazing assets we can get into the account, if you're a single channel brand or if you're just running Meta, Google and TikTok, you're going to start to have these ceilings because those particular channels represent and contain finite addressable markets. And for some brands, this might be really big, for some brands it might be it might be kind of small. And then also some of these channels too just have content limitations. Meta, for example, we know how important the first couple of seconds are within motion. I know we're all running reports around hook scores and that can be really important and it can be a way to get in. But other channels will represent um, you know, the appropriate space to tell longer form longer format stories. If you're on if you're on TV, you can have 15 and 30 second cuts that folks are essentially going to watch the whole thing, where we don't really have that on Meta, sometimes on Google and definitely not on TikTok. And for brands that have larger stories to tell or bigger educational series that they want to lean into, this transition can be super helpful.

Um and typically what this chart is showing, um is that around $250,000 a month, TV typically has a lot lower uh marginal cost per acquisition opportunity. This is a chart we we've taken from one of our partners, Tatari, that I'm sure many of you on this call are familiar with. Uh we work with them quite a lot for for TV advertising. They've got a lot of data around this type of thing that I really recommend you look into. But keep this in mind, like if you're spending $250,000 a month either in Meta by itself or across your your top two to three channels, this can become a really important and practical channel for you to look at.

So lastly, how do you make the leap into into TV confidently and seamlessly? And I'm going to pass it over to Savannah in a couple of slides and she's going to get really specific about how to look at the data. But again, going back to my first point is, you know, most of you on this call already have enough data and enough assets to really start to do this without a massive investment. And so we kind of think about this in four major steps. The first being common sense analytics, identifying the KPIs that actually matter at each part of your funnel. The next part, leveraging motion specifically, it's how we do it, is what we call finding the formula. So really trying to match those actionable learnings to a creative taxonomy and finding real ways that you can define those and understand what's really working across your assets so that you can transition that into another channel. It's never going to be one to one from Meta to TV, but as Savannah is going to show, there's really smart ways to do it that give you a lot of confidence and really gets you off to the races with a bit of a head start. And then turning that into channel specific concepting. Again, translating those creative insights that we typically already know with a high degree of specificity through channels like Meta and again, translating that into into TV. And then production. Sometimes this can be nothing but post-production. Sometimes this can be totally net new. But Jason's going to talk a bit about a bit today about forgetting the rules of TV. There's a lot of value to be had and a lot of different approaches here for getting those those uh assets that are really appropriate for really high-end, strong TV commercials. So with that, I'll go ahead and pass it over to Savannah and she's going to talk through a couple of these uh aspects in more detail.

Savannah Wisham: Thanks, John. Hi everyone. So good to be here with you today. Uh, I'm going to start us out by looking at the first step of that formula John just presented. So we all know that the first piece of understanding any audience is really to get into the analytics to start to get to know them and understand what resonates with them, uh what they're clicking on, what they're interested in. So obviously we love Motion and really find their approach to data visualization invaluable. We use them on all of our accounts. Um but really getting that clear understanding of KPIs like click through rate, thumb stop rate, one of our favorite motion metrics, and then view through, of course, ROAS, these are all key to performance marketing, but to understanding our audience as well. So they really help us get to know what's resonating in the moment, but also on an emotional level. So we start to see some common themes that really move the needle at each step of the customer journey. And with Skinny Dipped, that really began with a retail support strategy that evolved into a greater understanding of our audience's desires and tendencies. So we really saw that concepts that scaled and click through rate that soared for their creative had featured messages like guilt-free deliciousness or transparent messaging around sugar, what was in the product. And this began to really tell the story of what our audience cared about and what we started to see as a trend. Um one area we really wanted to lean into was exploring little treat culture and really starting to understand um what folks out there are finding to be resonant with Skinny Dipped as they're finding them through Meta. So by drawing out these deeper insights, we're really actively de-risking their channel expansion. So with this testing, with this creative strategy, we begin to understand those key themes, those elements that really become fundamental to the way our audience engages with the brand. So this means that as we start to build that bank of elements and understandings that we get more channel agnostic learnings. So these through lines are ultimately going to guide a brand beyond just Meta or YouTube, whatever platform we're learning from, and help to begin guiding them into new channels. So this is where performance marketing expands beyond the channel being tested at hand and really can help you make the leap to somewhere new. In this case, that's making TV less of a leap into the unknown because you already have the data with the help of Motion to really help you understand what's resonating with your audience. So that's how we get started here. In the next slide, I'm going to talk a little bit more about building a taxonomy, starting to differentiate your creative and learn. So this takes time, takes reps, but it's what we call finding the formula. So to do this for Skinny Dipped, we've worked with them for over a year now and we've really created a robust and diversified strategy that's helped us build a bank of insights that we can begin testing into other channels with. So while we know that motion is obviously an incredible data visualization tool, really essential to what we do, it's only going to show you the insights based on what you feed it. So this is where the creative strategy comes into play. We want to make sure that we're testing different formats, concepts, visuals, messaging, hooks, creators, y'all know all the different elements we want to explore. And that's really all in service of giving the meta engine the ability to pair that right creative with the right audience. So for Skinny Dipped, that meant following the lead on our learnings around guilt-free deliciousness and really focusing on the amount of sugar as well as the taste. So you'll see we started to explore some in the creative featured on the right here. We're playing with guilt-free treats. We're exploring the snack goals language. And then also really trying to play more into um just the frameworks and the different concepts and the different types of content that we're testing. So you're seeing we're playing around with some polished brand photography. We're doing some low-fi UGC, really testing within different frameworks to diversify the account. And that ultimately gave us a greater understanding of what's resonating with our audience while still supporting their retail goals. So we're driving our overall strategy while getting those more emotional connections defined and getting to know who's resonating with Skinny Dipped more and well. So while we know our main audience and we get that understanding of what they like, we're starting to get to know more of what kind of the zeitgeist of the world is interested in when they're discovering Skinny Dipped via Meta. So this is where we ultimately are striking a chord with a larger group of people and those varied learnings are helping us find that through line that we can use across platforms. So with Skinny Dipped, we were really able to confidently move the snack and the treat language into our taxonomy, which helped us build a naming convention that we can then track and understand what's resonating. So we map that naming convention back to our KPIs and get the learnings of uh what's most impactful here. So we know how invaluable it is to understand your click through rate, to understand what's stopping the scroll and finding out that combining this snack language with a really beautiful product hero is something that we can start to bring through to other channels and start to see success with that elsewhere. So this is all of the thinking and analysis that goes into what we call finding the formula. So we take all of these ingredients that we've found, we bring them together and it really starts to make a clear path to developing ads that resonate with your audience and ultimately increase our understanding of the broader demographic beyond just your core. So month over month, we're tracking wins. We also want to know what's not working. Y'all know it's important to understand both sides of it. So we really use all of those pieces to understand what's driving performance. And then we start to capture that red thread that's really going to be a through line beyond just the channel at hand. So this is where we're really actively building our confidence in being able to test a new channel ahead of time with an already proven approach. So John, on the next slide, I'll give you all a little sneak peek here. I can't show you everything yet. The spot isn't live, but this is how we're bringing it all together and we're using that historic knowledge from Meta for really any platform. As a way to leverage what works and take those proven elements as a foundation for a new channel. For Skinny Dipped here, it's TV, which is a really exciting way to expand their world. So this again, a D to C brand that we've helped grow their retail presence while also gaining those emotional truths about our audience and preparing us to step into this new channel with confidence. So now we're able to use that winning formula from our message uh our meta testing and effectively translate that to TV. So we know Travis mentioned in the chat, I think maybe digital platforms, Meta wants short, attention grabbing, thumb stopping content, and TV really offers us the opportunity to spend more time with our viewers, to tell a richer story, drive more emotional connection, but still keep that performance mindset at top of mind. We know that's what got us here. So let's lean into those learnings as we start to concept specifically for the channel. So Skinny Dipped, what that really meant for us was leaning into that snack language, the angle of guilt-free deliciousness, and really the taste and experience of enjoying the product. So again, really exciting to see the Skinny Dipped world expand beyond the 9 by 16 and into this bigger format and getting out of the feed into a more intimate viewing experience that we hope has a longer attention span. Of course, we want folks to watch this through, not just jump away. Um but that means we need to respect the medium of TV. So instead of optimizing for that quick scroll stopping, maybe jarring moment, we have the opportunity to build tension and character and storylines that really give payoff in a way that isn't always possible in Meta. So while we're still seeking to grab that attention, we're using those learnings around click through rate, thumb stop rate, our formula from Meta as we expand the Skinny Dipped world here to really be something vibrant and colorful. We have a main character that really captures a cool confidence of the brand with some tone of voice we've experimented with on Meta and just capture some cheeky moments that I'm really excited for y'all to see. So we're incorporating some of the language we've found successful in those direct response ads along with a more brand forward lens to really meld those learnings together. So that means we've got a well-crafted TV spot that maintains our direct response principles where relevant and also reinforces long-term brand equity. So the goal is really to elevate that proven formula into a TV ready execution, one that's harnessing the strengths of the medium while really staying true to what's already driven engagement and results. So I'm going to pass it over to Jason now who's going to tell you a little bit more about what TV is looking like these days.

Jason Moran: Awesome. Thanks, Savannah. Um, I'm now going to be a bit of a spirit guide for the journey into TV because I think for advertisers who are in that growth mode, scaling to TV can feel like this really big deal. And the reality is that it's not not a really big deal. Like all of a sudden your brand, its story, its identity are about to share a screen with blockbuster entertainment, right? Like Shogun, Severance, White Lotus, content that eventually will get mememed by Evan Ross Katz. Like you're there too. Um and there's also kind of that big bold silhouette of the Super Bowl, all those spots that feel like they sort of cast this great big shadow creatively over whatever you might end up making. Like does it need to hang and be in the caliber of that work? I do think any pressure that you feel, whether it's driven by an experience in the channel, hearsay of mega million production budgets, um or it's just the advertising industry's sort of general preciosity and kind of historical overinvestment at times in traditional approaches to TV. Um, it's a lot of pressure, but it's just pressure. Um the reality is that the way we ideate, plan, produce, create TV commercials has really drastically changed. It's not your mother's television commercial. I think a lot of what Savannah talked about, sort of some of those contemporary principles for creative marketing today, flexibility, adaptability, iteration, experimentation, all of which have really been propagated by that like rise and eminence of social content, mobile first content creation and advertising. Like those are all still really relevant for the way that we creatively approach TV as a channel, both from the way we ideate for it, also through to the way that we produce it. And I'll I'll talk a little bit more about that. But I think generally that idea of blindly going straight from this abstract idea on a page to a high production investment TV commercial, the idea of a creative director, sorry to Savannah and myself, in an ivory tower coming up with your silver bullet for you, uninformed by anything, that really is less relevant than ever. Um and so TV can be less of a leap of faith than it might seem. Data can be your driver creatively. Um and I think as John and Savannah so expertly mapped out, that that really is the case with Skinny Dipped. The third, uh you know, and I think everything that John and Savannah spoke to really underscores this, but while TV can be a really big swing, right? It no longer has to feel like blind faith and big risk. It can be highly informed and highly shaped by in-market creative performance from social, whether as Savannah walked through that informs your actual big creative idea, like with Skinny Dipped, or is even more tactical in the choices that you make, like a specific product descriptor or message that's over indexed in its resonance, or maybe you're referencing like a seemingly niche way that people experience your product that you've learned actually has this broader appeal, right? I don't know how you eat your Oreo, right? But there could be a whole campaign around that based on what we learn in feed. And I think data and insight from in-market creative performance in social really is just at the end of the day an opportunity to buttress how you de-risk your TV production investment, right? To make sure that the production is also high ROI in its approach. Okay, fourth, this is probably the most spiritual of everything I've said, but last but not least, as the wonderful Faith Hill so memorably sings, just breathe. It's just a TV spot. The word spot is also a great name for a puppy dog, so it doesn't have to be big and scary and growling at you. I think just remember that you've already been in your audience's feeds, in their literal hands, taking up their full phone screens, right? Which they arguably might care more about than their TV sets. If you had to take one away, I think I could probably bet which one it would be. So just release some of that pressure, let go of the preconceptions that are in your head about how this all should go and dare to air. Thank you.