Why more brands are airing streaming TV ads
Brands from beauty to bedding are increasingly dipping their toes into streaming advertising as they compete for consumers’ attention.
Cakes Body, a nipple cover brand, is airing its first-ever streaming ads on more than 15 apps, including Max and Paramount+. Meanwhile, the hair-care brand Odele ran its first streaming ads this year in June and August. Mattress company Saatva began running TV ads a few years ago but ramped up its streaming spending in January after seeing the channel have a high response rate.
Big brands have run commercials on linear TV for decades, but small brands usually skipped out because campaigns were expensive and difficult to track. When streaming broke through, it allowed these brands to be more targeted in their approach. Until recently, however, there wasn’t enough supply. That started to change as more services, like Paramount+, introduced ad-supported plans in 2021, while Disney+ and Netflix did the same in 2022. In 2023, Amazon began selling ads for Thursday Night Football, and in January, it announced that Prime Video watchers would start seeing ads by default when watching content. Now, Amazon is offering more ad spots for 2025. It’s likely Amazon’s competitors will soon follow.
Put together, brands will soon have access to more streaming ad slots and air time than they did previously — making it easier than ever to test out the channel.
Some of streaming’s newest brands — like Cakes Body — have made a name for themselves on social media. Cakes Body launched in 2022 and started running organic ads on TikTok. After seeing sales balloon, it began investing in paid media in 2023. This is now the first year that Cakes Body is “able to prioritize putting money back into top of funnel,” co-founder Taylor Capuano told Modern Retail. That’s where TV ads come in.
“The amount of reach we can get on social media, especially on TikTok, is so exponential and so cost-effective compared to what we could get on OTT,” Capuano said. “But the thing that I think we can’t get on social media, which is our hope in doing TV, is the credibility and positioning as a more legitimate and credible brand in the space… [We want to] double down on the audience that’s seeing us on social media and retarget them on TV.”
Cakes Body worked with Raindrop Agency on its ad, which comes in two 30-second versions. The ad is running in two markets for now: Los Angeles and New York. “The idea is, get learnings, and then we’ll blow it out in the spring and summer and bring it to life nationally,” Capuano said.
Odele, which sells cruelty-free hair-care and body-care products and launched in 2020, is also fairly new to streaming TV. It started working with Tatari on a four-week test for streaming ads at the end of August. It wanted to increase brand awareness, and “TV and streaming, in particular, just seemed like a must do,” Kimberly Francis, chief growth officer at Odele, told Modern Retail.
Odele aired its ad in three markets — Greensboro, Las Vegas and Providence — and multiple platforms, including Disney+, Hulu, Peacock and ViacomCBS. “Before and after, we saw a six-point increase in brand awareness among our target audience,” Francis said. “I absolutely think that when we look at next year, streaming will be a part of the mix.”
While Cakes Body and Odele began streaming this year, other brands have been in the game longer. Bobbie, a formula brand, ran its first streaming ads in 2022, coming off of the formula shortage. “We felt like there was more attention on our industry and us as a new player than ever before, and it was a moment where we wanted to run streaming to show what we stood for,” Bobbie’s chief brand officer Kim Chappell told Modern Retail.
However, streaming wasn’t a channel that Bobbie could “turn on and leave on” because of product inventory constraints, Chappell explained. Therefore, Bobbie took a break from streaming ads until August of this year, when it aired a spot with model and mom Ashley Graham. Now, it’s running two new ads: one about its origin story and one featuring “Queer Eye” star and dad Tan France.
Like Odele, Bobbie is seeing streaming pay off. “Purchase conversion rates have been increasing week over week on streaming since we went live [this summer],” Chappell said. “It’s still light spend, but it’s been very promising. So far, the response rates are consistently higher than linear… It’s a two times higher response rate.”
Saatva launched in 2010 as one of the original DTC mattress disruptors. It ran a couple of local TV buys prior to 2022 and partnered with Tatari in November of that year. At first, Saatva primarily ran linear TV ads via remnant inventory — or unsold ad space sold at a discount — because the CPMs were lower than on streaming. However, after testing streaming more, Saatva saw streaming be a “really efficient medium,” Casey Jones, senior paid media manager at Saatva, told Modern Retail.
In January, Saatva shifted more dollars to streaming. “Now, it’s closer to about 35% of our [TV] budget,” she explained. “Our overall budgets on TV have also increased, so we are spending now probably three times what we were on streaming when we first started, on a monthly basis.”
Analysts said they are optimistic about the future of streaming — especially after Amazon Prime opened up more ad inventory. “This year is a big inflection point… We haven’t had CTV advertising at scale,” Andrew Lipsman, an independent analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce, told Modern Retail.
Similarly, Adam Epstein, founder of Gigi, a CTV advertising buying platform specializing in Prime Video, told Modern Retail that “proliferation across streaming TV services is exploding.” “Amazon Prime Video was the green light for many ad-supported streaming services to increase the ad load across the board,” he said.