More than a year after Apple's ATT move, DTC is expanding again, with TikTok the primary beneficiary. The post How and why DTC advertising hasn’t cooled off as much as once thought appeared first on Digiday ..read more

As direct-to-consumer brands continue to diversify their advertising mix to be less reliant on Facebook and Instagram, the channels they use to do so are becoming more and more crowded. That’s why some brands are focused on finding ways to stand out with direct mail, podcasts, out-of-home and more. Parachute, the DTC bedding and lifestyle brand, aimed to do just that with its recent catalog cover featuring a woman repotting plants in her bedroom with dirt all over her bedroom carpet. The image was meant to be a “less literal and more whimsical” approach to the Parachute’s catalog cover to help ..read more

Alison Monk’s various executive roles in the agency business have given her a body of knowledge that straddles offline media, and the traditional ways of delivering results for clients that come along with it, as well as modern, sophisticated digital tools that enable small businesses to punch above their weight in media spend. For the last three years, Monk has quietly amassed a handful of clients and a small team of media scientists, strategists and performance veterans to form Eden Collective, an independent media agency that specializes in guiding DTC companies holistically through offlin ..read more

Employees at e-commerce startup Bolt were off on “wellness days” for most of the Mondays ahead of Labor Day this past August. Doing so was a way for the company to combat potential burnout — a rising managerial issue for companies to mitigate amid the pandemic — for its nearly 300 employees, according to Tom Berger, vp of marketing at Bolt.  “As a startup in the tech space, we realize that one of our biggest risks is burning out the team,” said Berger. “Things like wellness days are put in place to help alleviate burnout and ensure that our employees are taking time off.”  Bolt is on ..read more

This year, in an attempt to lift customer engagement and interaction, Olaplex is focusing on paid social advertising and is on track to double its total ad spend year-over-year. By doing so, the hair care company, which was founded in 2014, is aiming to build brand awareness as well as grow its community with forays into Instagram and TikTok. “We are definitely spending more,” said JuE Wong, CEO of Olaplex, adding that until 2020 the company wasn’t spending much on advertising. “We do it as a percentage of our net shipments so the more we [sell] the more we spend [on advertising]. Because we h ..read more

Simple Mills is looking to use connected TV to cement its brand name with consumers. Founded in 2012, the snack brand has a presence in 25,000 brick-and-mortar locations and, over the last year, invested in growing its e-commerce business.  Now, Simple Mills is aiming to continue that growth by boosting brand awareness with its first national ad campaign by its creative and media agency FIG. The “majority of the budget” for the campaign was spent on video on Hulu, Roku, Samsung and YouTube, according to Jamie Rubinstein, senior brand manager at Simple Mills.  “As we continue to grow ..read more

With vaccines promising a soon-coming return to normal travel and office commutes, telehealth company Ro, parent company of direct-to-consumer men’s health brand Roman, has started reinvesting in subway ads. Like most brands at the beginning of pandemic lockdown, Ro paused out-of-home advertising for months. But by spring of this year, alongside a vaccine rollout and an upward trend in New York City public transportation ridership, the telehealth brand was ready to get back in the game. It went live with an OOH campaign for Roman at several subway stations and for Rory, its women’s healthcare ..read more

Dormae Sleep Products, a 70-year-old mattress manufacturer based in Texas, found a way into the direct-to-consumer market with its own bed-in-a-box brand by creating a private label brand from scratch. To do so, it worked with Austin-based ad agency Greatest Common Factory to build it out — including its platform, branding and advertising ahead of the brand debut this July 4th weekend. The result of the last year-and-a-half is a new bed-in-a-box brand, Milton, a brand that touts the parent company’s 70-year legacy while targeting an older demographic of consumers who may be more skeptical ..read more

Archery product maker Pure Archery Group has been on a three-year hunt for customer data, according to its director of marketing Jeff Suiter. Like other consumer product manufacturers, the Oregon-based sporting goods marketer — which makes products for hunting and backyard target shooting, including Bowtech brand bows with model names like Guardian and Revolt — has worked to establish direct relationships with its customers. And the pandemic provided an opportunity to deepen those connections as well as the brand’s database. In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic started to become very real f ..read more

Last July, Maddie Fantle left digital marketing agency Direct Agents with the goal of starting her own direct-to-consumer brand. In her role as an associate director of creative and marketing at Direct Agents, 28-year-old Fantle had worked with DTC brand founders and entrepreneurs, many of whom were also in their late twenties, and that served as inspiration to her.  For Fantle, becoming an entrepreneur was a long-time goal that was accelerated by the pandemic. Hearing from other entrepreneurs and working with brand founders to help them accomplish their goals made Fantle reevaluate her o ..read more