TV lacks a click, so last-click attribution models will severely undervalue its impact. A modern approach requires a holistic dashboard that triangulates performance across multiple metrics, including incremental CPA, view-through CPA, attributable Amazon purchases, and lift in retail sales.

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.

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.

To get budget approval for upper-funnel channels like TV, avoid positioning it solely as "brand awareness." Instead, frame it as a "performance multiplier" that will improve the efficiency and scale of existing direct response channels, making the investment more palatable to finance teams.

Early TV tests for DTC brands often focus on a strict Cost Per Acquisition (CAC). As a business scales into omnichannel, the definition of "performance" must expand. Success metrics should include the halo effect on other channels, like branded search lift and increased sales on Amazon.

Data shows that while combining brand and performance is best, adding brand advertising to a performance-only strategy provides a significantly larger ROI lift than adding performance to a brand strategy. This suggests most marketers are over-invested in performance channels.

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.

In mature ad markets, creative quality is the biggest variable for success, not media spend. High-performing companies now shift budget away from platforms like Meta and Google and reinvest it into producing more content. This superior creative makes the remaining, smaller media spend far more effective.

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.