Pet Brand Reaches New "Highs" with CTV

King Kanine, an all-natural and organic pet wellness brand, was started in 2015 by Jeff Riman and Jon Neveloff, when they invented the King Komb for Jeff’s great Dane. That first product was so successful that the team decided to continue to create innovative products for pet lovers, many of which now incorporate CBD. “We saw the great results athletes were getting with [CBD], so we were some of the first to use it in the pet space! It’s been a challenge but also wildly rewarding.”

The team kickstarted their marketing efforts like many other small businesses do: focusing on social media campaigns, events, and word of mouth; but all of that came to a screeching halt when they introduced CBD into their line of products and got kicked out of Google and Meta ads.

"We were on Facebook and Google and all that stuff. And as soon as we introduced CBD, we got kind of kicked off and shut out of everything. We didn't even know it was a thing. It was devastating."

They turned to broadcast television advertising with a two minute commercial they eventually whittled down to 60, then 30 seconds, but even though their business was doing well, the lack of trackable ROI on linear TV was grating for the King Kanine founders. 

"Without the ability to track, it's a maybe and we hope so. If the commercial ran at eight o'clock, did we get a spike in traffic at eight o'clock? I don’t know! And then it just kind of fizzled out a little bit. When Vibe came along and said, look, you already have the commercials and I always wanted to be on CTV, we were thrilled. "

After a few weeks, and with the help of their Vibe customer success manager, the King Kanine team set up different target and ad set tests which they were able to optimize against within a few weeks.

Because of the stringent and forever-changing regulations around CBD products, the brand was especially meticulous about building a performance-focused website and content-heavy CRM campaigns that provided a solid foundation for upper funnel Streaming TV campaigns with Vibe. 

"We’re just trying to get the word out with TV, knowing that I'm going to be looking at the ROI the whole time. We want top of funnel, we just need the eyeballs, because once they come into my process, then we do some drip campaigns, we do retargeting, etc. and it works great."

The team decided to start out with awareness campaigns, which they then supported with retargeting campaigns based on their CRM audience segments, allowing them to increase brand recognition, web traffic, and ROAS over the course of a few weeks.

When the King Kanine team first started building their campaigns, they were so excited to develop actually targetable TV campaigns that, according to co-founder Jon Neveloff, they went a bit overboard:

"We kind of threw the kitchen sink at it at first and went way too fast. We thought we could play with all these knobs and kept clicking on things but it's more of a broad stroke, right? Because 68% of households have a pet. So 7 out of 10 people watching TV have a pet. I don't have to get that granular."

It was important for them to understand how their customers would behave on a new channel and build their campaigns off of those insights. They developed separate campaigns for top of funnel, web traffic, and CRM retargeting, with different ad sets to test inside each one so they could narrow in on the channels, demos, screen types, locations, and types of creative that worked best for each campaign type. 

"Ahnalies was an incredible help, and the platform was super easy to use. It’s fun!"

The ability to link Vibe with their CRM audience segments from premier marketing automation partner, Klaviyo, was especially helpful. Because the King Kanine team runs a very tight ship with their client email addresses only remaining “active” for 20 days post-purchase, they had an extensive list of high-value audiences they no longer reached by email but could now target on TV, so that’s what they did. Results were stunning. Running this campaign alongside a web traffic retargeting campaign allowed King Kanine to hone in on the exact client personas to focus on while filling out their upper funnel campaign optimization criteria. 

Meanwhile, their creative juices were flowing. They combined seasonal promotions (turns out dogs need to chill during halloween, new years, fourth of july, and more, poor things!) with product highlight videos running alongside brand-focused creative to prevent ad fatigue and make room for optimization. The team loved their ability to control all aspects of their campaigns themselves, without ever having to pause to make changes:

"There are enough toggles to play with and you can make really substantial changes without pausing your campaign and it doesn't affect your budget. You can just kind of move things around and compare them to a control campaign. "

The team started seeing results slowly but consistently, and they continue to grow. Because of the brand’s absence from other traditional marketing channels the awareness channel grew the slowest, but web and CRM retargeting exploded:

"The Klaviyo integration was such a great bonus for us because all these people have already raised their hand over the last two, four, nine years, saying they love pets and once you have a pet, you always have a pet."

Meanwhile, top of funnel campaigns helped identify new audiences and expand the brand’s reach nationwide. Next up? More creative testing, frequency capping, and daily CPM budgeting for more granular tracking.