CTV Ads Turned This Farm Store Into a Goldmine

Farm & Home Supply was founded as a single store in 1960, rapidly expanding operations which now include 15 physical stores across three states and an e-commerce website. Today, Farm & Home Supply provides millions of customers from unincorporated neighborhoods and major cities both, with goods in sporting, farm/ag, automotive, clothing, footwear, pets, livestock, hunting, and home/patio.

Advertising such a wide range of goods in disparate locations has proven a consistent challenge for a business that is now so much more than a farm supply store. That’s why Marketing Director Nathaniel Jones reached out to Vibe: to create high quality, targeted, trackable campaigns on the most engaging channel in the home: Streaming TV.

"We're trying to fight against the name, essentially, because we're not just a farm store anymore so we have to tell a story."

After over 30 campaigns together, the Vibe x Farm and Home Supply recipe is clearly a winner.

Why Vibe?

The FHS marketing team chose to give Streaming TV advertising a chance under the guidance of their marketing director with extensive experience in traditional television advertising. In his words,

"Sure, CTV is different from social but it’s not as disconnected from lower funnel initiatives as brands tend to think."

After an extensive ad platform search, they launched their first Streaming TV campaign with Vibe because of its ability to seamlessly deliver multivariate ad sets and optimize campaigns in real time on hundreds of premium TV apps and channels. 

"We chose Vibe because I really like a nimble platform able to do different targeting for different creatives. In my opinion, that's where you see success, if you're making a specific piece of content for a specific person at a specific time."

According to the FHS team, one of Vibe’s major advantages over any other Streaming TV ad platform - big or small - is the ability to bid on individual premium channels and cherry pick a custom mix of apps, channels, and live sports that suited their targets’ unique profiles.

"With CTV media companies, you target an audience and it serves random platforms. You can blacklist some channels , but you can't say ‘Hey, I want HBO Max, I want Hallmark and I want Food Network.’ Flexibility isn't necessarily there with most major media companies, and that was a huge plus for Vibe."

The Farm and Home Supply team was clear eyed about their goals for their CTV campaigns: massive reach at a reasonable cost and sales lift across e-commerce and brick and mortar locations which would have to be estimated by using geo-location targeting proxies. 

The team understood that the specificity of their ads by product type and location would help them boost revenue for key product categories, with or without exact attribution, while massively enhancing brand recall. 

They could also boost brand reputation by selecting only premium channels like ESPN, CNN, HGTV, etc. - a cachet well beyond the reach of the social media channels they were used to relying on.

"Social video is great, but it was really focused on awareness and e-comm. With Vibe we were able to diversify our reach and outcomes, which is key because a large portion of our annual growth still comes from brick and mortar sales."

Marketing leadership at Farm and Home Supply had very specific demands like bulk zipcode uploads, premium inventory, and frequency capping, while the rest of the team needed to make sure they could take ownership of their campaigns on a new platform. Thankfully, onboarding was seamless thanks to intuitive testing modules, automatic campaign launch processes, and flexible parameters. 

They got started immediately, figuring out how to set precise targets for each market by uploading bulk zipcodes while also selecting interests and demographics that they optimized in real-time as campaigns progressed. 

It was important for the team to pay close attention to their targeting mix in order to scale campaigns enough to have a real impact on high-value viewers, even in smaller geographic areas, but they were able to rapidly hone in on a winning formula thanks to Vibe’s quick campaign launch and optimization capabilities.

"The turnaround time with your platform is crazy fast compared to everybody else. As far as getting approved and being able to launch, I'd be able to get impressions within two hours, where you'd be lucky to get two days with some of the other platforms."

Flexibility and testing were especially important as the team developed a set of creative best practices for TV, trying out 15 vs 30 sec ad lengths, and testing which marquee channels to prioritize. That’s Farm and Home Supply realized some of their social media videos in vertical formats could still work for TV as long as the rest of the screen was used to grab attention:

"Whether that's showing maps of our store locations or store hours or the entire ad flyer, it works better than just the vertical video. We figured out how to take something that had a lot of attention on social media and bring that to a bigger screen."

Ultimately, the team was able to segment and define which video lengths, formats, and promotions worked for different types of products and locations, always keeping in mind that a whopping 85% of TV viewers watch TV with a phone in their hand, so a strategy that leverages phone use to encourage online traffic or prioritizes attention grabbing is key.

Ultimately, the ability to target specific campaigns to specific audiences across the country is the real win for Nathaniel Jones and his team. Their focus on promotion based retail has yielded solid results all year long, and assisted in increasing conversions across their mix of channels.

"I will say, you know, the low CPMs I'm able to bid and get through vibe and reach the channels that I want to reach and the people that I want to reach in the geographic area, is the success."

What’s next? Dynamic creative, ads with promotional overlays counting down to specific deadlines, testing out Vibe Studio - a creative generation tool - and retargeting segmented web traffic.

Hungry for more? Book a demo!