Case Study
How a Health & Wellness Brand Used Connected TV to Scale
An 8-figure health and wellness brand partnered with us to overcome diminishing returns on its paid social advertising. This is how diversifying their digital ad spend with programmatic ads improved their scale and performance.
Objective
Scaling Beyond Social: Finding the Next Growth Channel
This 8-figure health and wellness brand* had built a thriving direct-to-consumer business on the back of paid social advertising. But growth at scale has a ceiling, and the brand was approaching it. Rising CPMs, shrinking new customer acquisition, and the inherent saturation of social channels were converging to compress margins and slow momentum.
The objective was clear: prove that a coordinated CTV + Display strategy could independently drive incremental revenue beyond what organic and paid social efforts had already delivered, with a measurable, defensible ROAS.
*Client name withheld by request
Challenges
The Invisible Ceiling: When Your Best Channel Stops Growing
Diminishing Returns on Paid Social
Scaling paid social beyond a certain threshold is a well-documented phenomenon: audience pools thin out, frequency rises, creative fatigue sets in, and the cost to acquire each new customer climbs. The brand had mastered social advertising, which meant it had also largely exhausted it. Their high-quality video assets deserved a bigger, more engaged stage.
Attribution Blind Spots
Traditional pixel-based attribution can obscure the true contribution of upper-funnel media. Channels like CTV don't typically generate last-click conversions. Without a rigorous measurement framework, the true impact of CTV can be cloudy, making investment decisions difficult.
Reaching Genuinely New Audiences
Retargeting known visitors and purchasers had a finite ceiling. To achieve the next leg of growth, the brand needed to reach genuinely new household segments: audiences who had never interacted with the brand and could not be reached through social algorithms alone. The challenge was doing this efficiently.
Solution
A Multi-Screen Acquisition Engine Built for Incremental Growth
Our team designed and deployed a full-funnel programmatic strategy anchored by CTV at the top of funnel, with Display serving as a coordinated mid-funnel conversion layer. The two channels were orchestrated together via a proprietary cross-channel optimization algorithm that treated new customer acquisition as a single unified goal.
1. CTV as the Prospecting Engine
Connected TV was identified as the ideal channel to deploy the brand's existing high-quality video creative. Premium streaming environments gave the brand's production value the stage it deserved — reaching household-level audience segments entirely outside the brand's existing customer base.
2. Display as the Conversion Layer
Users exposed to CTV were re-engaged across mobile and desktop environments through custom-designed display banner campaigns that mirrored the CTV creative narrative, extending the brand's message from the living room screen to the device in the consumer's hand.
3. Proprietary Cross-Channel Optimization
Our unique optimization algorithm synchronized spending and delivery decisions across both channels in real time, optimizing CTV and Display in harmony toward a shared objective: net-new customer acquisition at efficient ROAS. This prevented channels from competing with each other or duplicating spend.
4. Geographic Lift for Clean Measurement
To prove the real-world impact, we would run a double-controlled lift study, establishing a clean organic growth baseline and isolating the incremental orders and revenue attributable solely to the CTV campaign. Results were independently validated by a concurrent Meta lift study showing consistent findings.
Results
Proof That CTV Works: 2.99x in Incremental ROAS
The lift study results were definitive. Across every spend tier, every geography, and every level of investment, CTV-exposed postal codes outperformed the organic baseline with no exceptions.
Performance Scaled Consistently With Investment
Across the postal codes analyzed, the share of geographies generating positive ROAS rose steadily as spend increased toward the optimal range. At the recommended spend-per-postal-code level, 76.5% of postal codes returned positive ROAS, the highest rate observed across any spend tier. Beyond this level, efficiency deteriorated, confirming a clear saturation point in high-CPM metro geographies. This revealed optimal spend levels in these areas for future investment.
Incremental, Not Cannibalized
Postal codes that received no CTV advertising saw a 61.7% decline in first-time customer sales during the study period, which coincided with a regular seasonal down-period. However, CTV-exposed postal codes declined only 42.0%. That 19.7 percentage point gap represents customers who were acquired specifically because CTV was running. CTV was clearly generating net-new demand against a deteriorating seasonal baseline, demonstrating itself as a net-positive hedge against seasonal revenue drops.
Independent Validation via Meta Lift Study
The findings were corroborated by an MMM study conducted in partnership with Meta during a previous lift study, which yielded consistent directional results. The convergence of two independent methodologies adds significant confidence to the conclusion that the observed gains are real, incremental, and attributable to the programmatic strategy.
Otherside
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An 8-figure health and wellness brand partnered with us to overcome diminishing returns on its paid social advertising. This is how diversifying their digital ad spend with programmatic ads improved their scale and performance.