Touch of Modern Co-Founder & CEO Jerry Hum’s advice for direct-to-consumer brands is quite simple. He recommends having a diversified marketing portfolio and, if a company’s just spending on digital media, “definitely look at TV.”
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.
