D2Cs have become journalist catnip as of late, and it makes sense. The exits are astronomical and it’s a way to talk about how technology is leveraged by marketers in a way that doesn’t lead to a self-lobotomy.
The Wall Street Journal had a great piece recently:The Ad Industry Has High Hopes for Direct-to-Consumer Businesses. It’s behind a paywall but honestly, you should pay for a WSJ subscription. If you work in this industry (and if you are reading this and don’t work in this industry, rest assured things are not going well for you), the Publications doing the hard work of winning eyeballs and creating worthy content deserve your support.
Anyways, back to the article: Several theses are explored in the article, including that D2Cs are taking their spend outside of the traditional walled gardens (primarily social) that they’ve built their practices on.
D2C brands are moving spend from Facebook in order to not get caught with all their eggs in one basket, a strategy that we saw a lot of our Publishers employ (Publishers saw that they had built traffic, not audiences on Facebook and Facebook could wreck their footprint with a twist of algorithm. Publishers doubled down on the email channel, which they could control sans intermediary). The article points out that Bombas has reduced their Facebook spend dramatically, from 85% of their spend to the mid-30s.
What was fascinating (and, frankly, fortuitous for us) was Vincent Létang’s, the EVP of Global Market Intelligence at Magna, insight: that D2Cs, in the interest of scaling to the point of becoming a household name (not just an Instagram darling) need to diversify their campaigns to where everyone is present and paying attention.
We’ve seen enormous growth from D2Cs over the past year. D2Cs are obsessed with driving acquisition, subscriptions and purchases and that’s clearly in our bailiwick and one of the many privileges that having exclusive fluency in the email channel affords us.
For example, one of our clients, ThirdLove was interested in converting their prospects into customers. They worked with LiveIntent to run a second-price campaign on our platform against their audience file, optimizing towards their CPA. They were able to come in under their CPA goal by about 30% and had 700 conversions in a short test time.
LiveIntent is proud to be a diverse source of inventory for D2Cs looking to scale. Just this week, Bret Fredrickson, the Customer Acquisition Manager at Vuori, said this during a recent webinar we hosted titled Overcoming the Challenges of Growing a Direct-to-Consumer Brand, “Facebook has been a huge channel for us, but we like to operate like it is going to disappear tomorrow. So, what does that mean? That means taking advantage of it while it’s here, but also looking at new channels and investing where we think attention will go to.”
Want to learn how some of the world’s fastest growing D2C brands are diversifying their marketing strategies and fostering consistent, profitable growth? Check out this webinar featuring marketing professionals from Vuori, Public Rec, and eBags.
