As a direct-to-consumer bra and underwear company, 2020 was going to be ThirdLove’s brand awareness year. Well, that got put on the back burner when COVID hit, changing the focus to efficiency, Megan Seman, Sr Growth Marketing Manager, told our Search & Performance Insider Summit on Tuesday.

But, fortunately, as a D2C brand, it was already comfortable with trying to operate in a really efficient marketing mix. It was on linear TV. “We had bought scatter, luckily,” she said. “We reallocated some to OTT, Facebook, audio and search.”

Paid social is the brand’s bread and butter. ThirdLove’s story is complex, Seman said. It’s about fit, education, size, style so video is a good medium for them to communicate their messages. “We hold all our campaigns to strict CPA goals. For OTT and linear, we leverage burst-attribution tools to measure the performance of the channels and optimize our buys. We track purchases based on who has seen those videos.”

ThirdLove’s in-house video team know how important it is to understand the kind of messaging that works in each channel. The brand did a Hulu buy this year, she said, and aligned with “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Mrs. America,” putting together an ad that spoke to the issues raised in those shows. “Buying the right audience is important, but it’s also important to consider the content you’re aligning with to ensure contextual relevance,” she said.

For Hayden Spencer, Associate Brand Manager with Reckitt Benckiser, who joined Seman for the panel discussion, “Lights, Camera, Action: Performance Video,” the crisis spurred no big changes. RB is a British multinational consumer goods company with brands like Lysol, Clearasil, Air Wick and Calgon.

Since its audience is the older demographic, it advertises on the news networks. “Enhancing that worked out well when the crisis hit,” he said, “with everyone watching the news.” Online, it put out a “way to help” campaign.

It purchased on “Jeopardy,” with its “very engaging audience,” creating social content, adjusting keywords, and with video on social, RB was able to adjust to hit its current target audience and overlay it with “Jeopardy.” 

Finding the right audience, using the correct talent inside creative and relating points the products have to offer was the key to “strong success,” said Spencer. A key learning, he noted, was the importance of e-commerce, which had been on the back burner at RB. “Now that we’ve learned a tougher way to go about it, we’ll keep e-commerce top of mind into 2021.”