Apparel Brand Crushes ROI Goals with CTV

Iconic Minnesota apparel brand, Sota Clothing, started out as a design class project for CEO Spencer Johnson while still a student at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Encouraged by an overwhelmingly positive response from peers and mentors, he decided to take the brand to the next level after graduation. Today, you’d be hard pressed to walk through any town in the land of lakes without spotting the brand’s famous double-oar logo. 

Since its inception in 2011, Sota Clothing has grown steadily and sustainably thanks to a small but mighty team primarily made of Jonhson’s friends and family. The company’s mission has always been crystal clear: to enhance and support state pride for both native and visiting Minnesotans.

"We tend to Minnesotans, that’s it. We are laser-focused on our community and need to find them wherever they are."

Faced with diminishing brand awareness returns from traditional digital channels like Google Ads and social media, the Sota team decided to give Streaming TV advertising a try:

"We're a pretty small company, really, when it comes to marketing. I work with our CFO and COO and once we broke down our budget it became clear we could afford to give Streaming TV a shot."

Getting Started with Vibe

More than anything, the Sota team entered the holiday season hungry for impactful reach across the state, so marketing manager Tim Shea was struck one night, while watching TV, when he realized other local brands were finding their way onto TV screens across the state, and so could he. 

"I thought to myself: okay, how are people actually doing this? There's got to be a way, and within a week I got a message from Vibe. It actually worked out perfectly."

They started their campaign quickly, leveraging Vibe’s goal-specific campaign setup - which allows first-time TV advertisers to automatically tailor their campaigns to discrete goals like web traffic, app install, retargeting, or awareness - to reach a maximum amount of unique households:

"We had a video campaign that we already used for social media so it was an easy fit for us to take that video and get rolling. It's been great."

The team was hungry for channel diversification to enhance their brand’s broad appeal beyond niche segments and eager to learn more about the types of KPIs they could reliably measure on Streaming TV. 

They started by launching a simple awareness campaign for just $50/day, focused on household reach, view through rates, and cost per impression, to test how far this new channel could really take them. Results poured in immediately. 

Their campaign setup progressed seamlessly thanks to Vibe’s intuitive platform and powerful audience segmentation capabilities, but the team was still apprehensive about the types of results they could bring to the table at the end of the day:

"It's always a little nerve wracking when you start something new, just because you're used to your “solids” like CPAs, CPCs, but I think it's huge to have something that's so easy to set up, and reaches hundreds of premium channels. I couldn't believe it, honestly."

Within weeks, the team decided to deepen their marketing penetration with a second campaign, this time focused on retargeting and lookalike audience building thanks to Vibe’s integration with powerful SMS and email automation platform, Klaviyo. 

The Sota team worked with their Vibe customer success team to pick from Vibe’s inventory of hundreds of first and third party audiences, while restricting their geo-targeting exclusively to their home state. 

Because of how narrow their targeting was for an awareness campaign, they knew their creative and audience segmentation had to hit it out of the park. 

Creative

First, they used Vibe’s AI-powered creative generator, Vibe Studio, to create custom voiceovers and visuals that they then blended seamlessly with their existing video assets. The tool allowed them to keep the high-production footage they already had, while facilitating the insertion of new product updates and flexible CTAs:

"I took the video that we had and used VibeStudio to add a custom voiceover for it. It worked really well, because I was able to blend the two to make it work better. I'm not an Adobe person, but this, I was able to do."

CRM Integration with Klaviyo

Following a successful awareness campaign, the team integrated their Klaviyo audience segments with Vibe to create a high-impact retargeting campaign, just in time for the holidays. 

"I had a ton of questions, but it's been really simple to set up. If you've ever set up a Facebook ad, it's honestly easier and more transparent than that."

The integration allowed Sota Clothing to effortlessly connect their email marketing data to maximize campaign impact and resulting insights which will help extend their holiday surge well into the new year. 

This approach maintains brand awareness and nurtures customer loyalty, particularly among holiday shoppers who might have bought gifts and could now be encouraged to buy more for themselves. The ability to create and refine lookalike audiences further extended their reach, ensuring a steady pipeline of potential customers throughout the year. 

"I've been talking to the team about how this integration links everything together so we can get a great customer base match across the board. It’s amazing."

Sota Clothing successfully launched their first-ever Streaming TV campaign with a 98% view-through rate and $0.22 Cost per View. The campaign exceeded expectations across KPIs, but their most important benchmark - driving impressions and reaching households within Minnesota - was exceeded by far.

While the brand is still new to CTV, the team is already building the groundwork for a solid evergreen Streaming TV strategy. 

"For me, at the end of the day, it was truly all about impressions and households, so being able to maximize reach and impact within our state has been amazing, especially at such a low CPM. Our cost per impressions has been fantastic."

Looking ahead, they see even greater potential for growth and refinement. Leveraging segmentation capabilities in Klaviyo, they plan to retarget specific audience groups, explore AI-enhanced campaign development, and test sequential ad delivery, enhancing their ability to deliver personalized messaging. Future campaigns could also capitalize on opportunities tied to Vibe’s live sports content offering, by showcasing team-focused apparel during Minnesota Vikings, Wild, or Timberwolves games. This strategic alignment with local interests promises to deepen engagement and reinforce brand relevance, positioning the campaign for sustained success in the evolving Streaming TV landscape.