Hey friends, I hope you're at work with your AirPods in, listening to some tropical house music while sipping on an ice-cold Sanzo. I want you to take a quick sparkling water break to read this email and learn how you might be able to scale your top of funnel and performance media without spending more on paid search or paid social, but before we get there, I want to share one thing that’s been on my mind.
First, let’s start with the obvious. It’s an interesting time to be a marketer at a DTC brand. 2025 hasn’t started as we all expected, and numerous changes are happening right now. Between continuously rising CPMs, shifting consumer sentiment, and increased pressure to justify every dollar, most CMOs and media buyers I talk to are going back to the drawing board to reevaluate what success looks like for them this year. It’s less about double-digit growth and more about taking the opportunity to experiment, find new channels, and maintain the run rates they already have, with money in the bank at the end of the day.
As Steven from CUTS has pointed out several times (on national news - go Steven!), tariffs are also causing a lot of uncertainty and affecting margins for a lot of brands, too. By the way, don’t get me wrong, I still have friends who are absolutely crushing it (shoutout Aaron from BREZ, who I just had on Limited Supply), but overall, companies are thinking more about maintenance than growth in 2025.
That said, when there are challenges, I always think it’s a great opportunity to take a step back, audit what you are doing, look for new channels, ways to test, learn, and hopefully find a new avenue/unlock for growth. Everyone in DTC is already spending the majority of their media dollars on the typical big 3 (Meta, Google, and TikTok). After they have used these channels to get to their first 10m, 15m, or 20m in revenue, they begin to branch out and look for other ways to grow. Maybe they begin testing Snap or X, Pinterest, influencers, affiliates, OOH, etc. But there’s one other channel still getting overlooked that is currently performing better than the others I just mentioned above… that is convergent TV (connected TV, linear TV, online video).
I’m not talking about the traditional, bloated, slow-moving TV that you were used to 10 years ago. I’m talking about modern, data-driven, digital-feeling TV that bridges both brand and performance in one channel. Done right, I think it can complete a brand’s full funnel from upper-funnel awareness to lower-funnel conversions. It’s the one place I don’t see brands testing enough, so I wanted to share some thoughts on it below.
Outdated Beliefs Are Holding Brands Back
The reason I think most people aren’t testing their TV is that they hold outdated beliefs. I asked a few marketers why they aren’t using TV/CTV today, and the common responses I got were:
• “TV is just for branding. It’s only for top of funnel and doesn’t help with sales.”
• “It’s too expensive and costs hundreds of thousands to stand up.”
• “You can’t measure the results well enough.”
• “It’s really hard to buy high-quality inventory compared to Meta, Google, or TikTok.”
• “It can’t scale to be as meaningful as Meta, Google or TikTok for my brand.”
And in my opinion, none of these are true anymore.
I definitely think early 2000s TV was like this. It was hard to buy. It was expensive, and the culture around TV was centered on super high-production-value spots that actually cost hundreds of thousands or millions to make and then run. But a lot of that has changed. Modern TV is much more accessible, measurable, and performance-oriented than it was before. If you want to try TV and CTV, here’s exactly how you think about it.
The Sharma Performance TV Playbook:
1. Choose the Right Platform
The biggest mistake I see brands make with TV is treating the media buying side like a black box. They pick a programmatic vendor, throw money at CTV, and then hope it works. That’s not a real strategy. Instead, you want to look for a vendor who can do several things well. You want them to have access to a wide range of inventory (across linear, streaming direct, programmatic CTV, etc.), and you want them to have robust tracking and attribution. You also want the CPMs to be competitive with your other channels. When I think about checking all of these boxes, Tatari is the platform that comes to mind.
Tatari gives you the best tools to launch, measure, and optimize TV like it's Facebook. You can mix linear and streaming, buy direct or programmatic, retarget site visitors, and see exactly what you're paying for by publisher, network, and your individual campaigns. Their data infrastructure is really good, so you can see closed-loop attribution, real-time reporting, some incrementality testing, and media efficiency insights that most other platforms don’t have. It’s built for brands that care about ROAS and ROI, not just reach and it’s very easy to use.
2. Set Up the Right Tracking Infrastructure
You wouldn’t run a Facebook campaign without setting up your tracking pixel. Same deal here. TV tracking has come a long way and with Tatari, you’ll get robust tools for measurement. This means that you can actually see metrics around site visits, conversions, revenue, and branded search lift tied back to the specific ad you ran.
You’ll obviously want to integrate the platform you use with your full analytics stack (think website analytics, MTA, MMM, incrementality, or any other measurement parameters you put in place), but Tatari does a really good job. You should tag your landing pages, set up short URLs with embedded UTM parameters for post-TV attribution, and consider TV-driven conversions using the same principles you apply to view-through paid social channels like TikTok, YouTube, and Snap. Also, it's super important to have a solid data setup. If that's not right, your reporting won't reflect the true impact of your TV campaigns. So, getting your data infrastructure in place before you even start is key for getting dependable results.
3. Produce Creative That Converts
Next is creative for TV. This does NOT mean you have to go out and hire a really expensive commercial agency that wants to charge you $200K to launch your first spot. Some of the best-performing spots I’ve seen came from iPhones and lo-fi edits. You can also just repurpose your best-performing Meta ads as a really easy way to get going.
Here are a few creative formats to consider:
• 30-second brand spots: These are your story-driven ads, great for top-of-funnel awareness, and used to build trust and credibility as you introduce the brand.
• 15-second direct-response style spots: These should be more focused, with a clear offer and CTA. It could be a product in use, day in the life, unboxings, or first-person POV-style with an offer.
• Repurposed ads from other platforms. As I mentioned earlier, you can certainly take your top Meta creative, refine it for broadcast standards, and air it on TV. I’ve seen this outperform traditional TV creative many times. It’s a great low-risk way to start and test TV.
• Testimonial-style spots: You can feature real customers discussing real results and run these as ads.
• Founder-led ads: These are my personal favorites. When the face of the company speaks directly to the audience, it creates a connection. As I’ve said for years, people buy from people, and having that founder story ad is a simple, proven creative format that almost always works.
In general, don’t overcomplicate it. Just start with what already works on your digital channels and build TV variations from there.
4. Build the Right Offer and Landing Page
Just like on Meta, your TV creative is the hook, but your landing page is what closes the sale. I would avoid sending traffic to your homepage. You need a TV-specific landing page built for conversion. This is where you reinforce the message, restate the offer, and eliminate any remaining friction.
You should anchor the LP design and content around whatever CTA you pushed in the creative, whether it’s a discount, a free trial, or a limited-time offer. You want a clean headline, benefit-driven copy, social proof, and a compelling offer. IMO, this is where most brands leave money on the table. Brands do everything right but they mess up their LPs after working so hard to get traffic there. Don’t be that person.
5. Measure What Matters
This is where a platform like Tatari really comes in handy.
With an dedicated data science team in-house, Tatari embeds a pixel on your site to provide offline and modeled reporting, enabling you to see:
• CPV (cost per visit) to tell you how efficiently you are driving traffic.
• CAC (customer acquisition cost) to tell you how much you spent to acquire someone.
• ROAS to tell you if your campaign is making money.
• Branded search lift. Are people Googling you more post-TV?
• Cross-channel lift. Are your marketplace, paid search, and paid social campaigns performing better because of the halo effect of TV?
With Tatari, you’ll know which networks, creatives, times, and geos are working for you, then you can use that data to help you refine your strategy and execution moving forward.
6. Iterate & improve, then scale spend
You should treat TV like anything else that you do in marketing, which means you should always be testing, analyzing, and optimizing.
I think it’s best to start small and launch with a mix of a few creative formats and placements. Watch how they perform and then kill the losers and scale your winners. Swap in new creatives every few months. Refine your landing pages and adjust your spend based on what’s working. It’s not rocket science. It’s about doing the basics well before you scale it.
Think About the Full Funnel: TV Creates the Halo Effect
This is another piece that most marketers overlook. They treat TV like a standalone channel and forget that its real power is in how it elevates everything else they’re doing.
TV doesn’t just bring in net-new eyeballs. It creates a halo around your entire funnel and brand. It typically improves the effectiveness of your Meta ads, and it should also increase your branded search volume. Oftentimes, it also helps strengthen your sitewide conversion rate even if the shopper originally came in from another source.
Why? Because people don’t convert linearly. No one sees an ad and immediately pulls out their credit card the very first time. They see your Meta ad in the feed. They hear about your product on a podcast. They catch your TV spot later that night. Then, maybe they Google you, click the link, and make a purchase. That’s how brand awareness and performance work together. In other words, TV creates a halo effect and boosts all of the other efforts you already have going on.
When someone sees your brand during a French Open Match on ESPN or an NBA finals game, it adds legitimacy. That trust carries over into their next touchpoint, whether that’s an Instagram story, an email, or a Google Shopping ad. Your existing channels perform better because the prospect now has context and familiarity, and TV is a very high-trust channel. When someone sees that TV spot, they think, “Wow, this brand is legit” and they want to buy from you more
And the data backs it up. Brands running convergent TV through Tatari consistently see:
• Higher click-through rates on Meta
• Lower CPAs across Google and YouTube
• Better email conversion rates post TV exposure
• An overall lift in blended ROAS
Study The Results
I was chatting with the Tatari team, and I asked them how well some of their clients are doing. They told me that Tecovas, the beautiful boot brand hit a ceiling with digital and needed a new lever to drive national growth.
• One TV spot triggered a 16x spike in site traffic
• Brand search volume and direct visits stayed elevated for 8+ weeks
• Paid search and CRM became more efficient across the board
• TV is now their fastest-growing media line item
And then they told me the luxury mattress brand Saatva, another rapidly growing DTC brand, had hit a wall on channels like paid search and referral marketing. To drive further scale, they turned to TV. Not only did their TV campaign drive a significant increase in brand awareness, it helped boost performance across their other marketing channels.
• They started on linear TV to drive scale and brand awareness
• Added streaming to extend reach and improve efficiency
• Saw TV spark a 40% lift in branded search volume and a 20% increase in branded search-generated revenue
• Used MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling) to validate TV’s impact on revenue and web traffic
Why TV Wins Right Now
I feel like the game has changed for TV over the last few years. It costs way less to stand up (you can get started for $20-30K if you are repurposing winning creative from other channels) and the platforms to buy and measure it are so much better than they were before. TV has become a performance channel that’s finally accountable to real business outcomes. If you’ve already maxed out Meta, Google, and TikTok, TV is likely your next unlock. If you're new to TV, Tatari can show you how it could work for your brand, and if you're already on air, they'll run a free audit to help you optimize your results.
I’m personally excited about TV because I have seen how much it’s done for clients like HexClad and others. I think many of the smartest brands are testing it, and it’s worth looking into.
That’s all for this week.
I hope you learned something. I’m curious, have you tried TV or CTV? What were your results in the past? If you have any questions, let me know and I can answer them on a future segment of Limited Supply. Thanks again for reading.