While often seen as an upper-funnel tool, CTV is a powerful engine for new customer acquisition. It reaches untapped audiences that are saturated on social platforms. For example, hair care brand Lola V saw a 53% increase in new customers year-over-year from their Roku campaign.

When brands hit a point of diminishing returns on search and social media, TV becomes a critical next step. It provides incremental reach to new audiences, builds brand legitimacy, and can accelerate the path to purchase for customers discovered on other channels.

A major barrier to TV advertising for DTC brands is the cost of producing a commercial. AI tools are solving this by modifying existing search and social media creative for CTV formats, allowing brands to enter the TV space without a dedicated, high-budget production shoot.

Manscaped's success stems from treating TV not as a sporadic, campaign-based brand play, but as an always-on performance channel. This requires the same analytical rigor, continuous testing, and focus on business outcomes as paid search or social, unlocking its full potential as a demand generator.

A high-cost TV ad shouldn't be a standalone bet. Instead, it should be the central play surrounded by dozens of low-cost, purposeful social media ads. This approach allows marketers to target different segments strategically (e.g., Star Trek fans vs. seniors), gather valuable qualitative data, and avoid the high-risk "pray" approach of traditional broadcasting.

Manscaped shifted its TV strategy from a branding experiment to a core growth channel. They measure its success with performance metrics like Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), applying the same rigor used for paid search and social, ensuring TV directly contributes to business goals.

The next major shift in ad tech is performance-based CTV. This merges the attention of linear TV with the accountability of digital media, allowing advertisers to tie ad spend directly to outcomes like sales—a revolutionary change from traditional television's limitations.

Unlike digital ads that suffer from rapid creative burnout, TV commercials have a much longer lifespan. Gab successfully ran the same four creative concepts for over a year, making the initial high production cost more digestible when amortized over an extended period.

Don't assume TV advertising requires expensive, high-production creative. Brands can de-risk their TV investment by using lo-fi, UGC-style creative that has already proven effective on social media. This approach lowers the barrier to entry, allowing for faster testing and learning.