Bonus: CTV for DTC: How Cantrip Drives Measurable Growth with Vibe.co’s Audience‑First Strategy

0:00Arthur Querou:What really differentiates Vibe from any other player is our ability to hyper-target.

0:04Adam Terry:We also have a certain amount of data that exists on our audience via other tools that we have, so I can tell who's the ideal demographic, what type of job do they have, and we can target a surprising amount of that in Vibe.

0:15Arthur Querou:When people see you on TV, that creates a lot of trust.

0:18Adam Terry:How do you justify going through a single-network CTV platform when something like Vibe exists and you have basically 250 networks that you can advertise through at the click of a button?

0:29Arthur Querou:When you want to do performance, you want to have as much inventory as possible and as much transactional data as possible. And Vibe as today has the largest footprint in terms of inventory. Most of the solutions that you'll find on CTV buy inventory first. Vibe buys identity first.

0:53Arthur Querou:Welcome to the D2C podcast. Today, we are having a CTV bonanza talking about Vibe, talking about Cantrip. Adam, Arthur, welcome to the D2C podcast. Start with a little introductions maybe here. Arthur, why don't you tell the audience who you are? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Arthur. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Vibe.co. We have pretty much built the meta ads of streaming TV or CTV for the ad tech people. And we're turning television into a performance acquisition channel for performance marketers.

1:28Adam Terry:And Adam, you are a performance brand using Vibe. That's right. I run Cantrip, a THC beverage brand. We make THC products derived from hemp and sell them at liquor stores, convenience stores, grocery stores, and direct-to-consumer all across the country.

1:43Arthur Querou:I just did a podcast that'll come out next week with Wink, with the founder of Wink. Oh, cool. And I'm just curious, where did streaming come into your marketing mindset when it came to growing Cantrip? Has it something you did right from the beginning or like talk to me about your journey to use TV?

1:58Adam Terry:Yeah. So Cantrip has had an e-commerce website since the end of 2022, which was kind of unexpected when I founded the brand because we were originally like a marijuana brand, which meant that we could only sell into dispensaries and you weren't delivering things to people's doors. And then in 2022, we switched to making it from hemp. We could sell online. We dabbled in meta ads for a long time. We were one of the first advertisers on Twitter. And it was earlier this year that I found out that you could even run a TV ad. We saw a couple of our competitors that were advertising on Vibe, a couple other beverage brands.

2:33Adam Terry:And I reached out. We got set up. And the cool thing about Vibe for a cannabis brand, and the reason that I say on Twitter that pretty much every cannabis brand needs to be on something like Vibe, is because on meta, I can't say that there's THC in the product. I can't say there's weed in the product. I'm using plant emojis for everything. Everything is sideways. It has to run through a scrubbed landing page, so it's an extra step to conversion. On Vibe, I can just run an ad that says, hey, I sell weed. Come to my website and check it out. I put it in better terms than that. There's a couple of parameters.

3:04Adam Terry:We want people to know that it's a 21-plus product, but being able to reach people like that is just astounding. I can't tell you, I get text messages all the time from people I know who like I saw your ad on TV. And even though we don't spend like as much as, you know, many other advertisers, we're still like a very, you know, middling size brand. It really gives the effect to people that like we're much bigger than we are when they see a TV ad. So I can't say enough good things about working with Vibe, to be honest. So I'm happy to do an ad for them, basically. Yeah, well, I think people are interested.

3:36Arthur Querou:It's definitely a platform people want to know more about. the fact that you're not spending huge numbers, still having really good results. How do you know you're having really good results is my question.

3:45Adam Terry:They have a really good performance like dashboard. So we run meta ads with, I use a third party agency to do it. It's like I tried to bring it in-house. It was very challenging because running restricted ads, like there's a lot of tricks to it. You kind of have to have multiple accounts. And then like, I don't know the meta backend very well. And it's really complicated, frankly, to understand the meta backend, especially when you're running that many ads. And so on Vive, basically, I'm running like three campaigns at any given time that have multiple ads inside them. And like the performance dashboard will pull any metric I want.

4:19Adam Terry:Like I can look at it, you know, the way it should be, which is like a retargeting campaign will automatically tell me ROAS. That's like the key metric. But if I want to look at the ROAS for my awareness campaign, I can click over that, too, which I appreciate because like I like to look at ROAS for traffic, even though our traffic like our middle of funnel is not. The focus for ROAS, I want to know what that is. Ultimately, I want to know what the blend of my ROAS is across all the different campaigns that I'm running. And Vibe makes that pretty easy to see from a dashboard perspective. And then they have pretty good customer service to help me understand any of this.

4:52Adam Terry:I can't stress enough. I'm not a CEO native to direct-to-consumer. So I didn't come into this industry pre-built with the knowledge of what CPC or CPM meant. I had to learn a lot of that over the last couple of years. And so having some people who are qualified and can help me understand things, it also allow like built in custom audiences, which has been a real cool tool, which I'm sure Arthur will talk more about later. But there's, you know, there's been a lot of functionality. And while like performance is varied week to week, as you know, things always do, I can see a lot of different stuff broken down.

5:25Adam Terry:Like I could see different creative performances. It's actually pretty easy set up. Originally, I had like seven campaigns set up because I had one different one per advertisement. I realized that was not necessary. So yeah, to answer your question, performance dashboard is actually functional and I don't need like a third party built platform like I do for meta just to understand what my daily spend and ROAS is. And are you mainly driving people to store in regions where you have a good distribution set up? So we drive people to our direct to consumer website. I'm hoping I'm also driving people to store.

5:54Adam Terry:Most places that we sell on the ground, we do sell direct to consumer as well. But our business is actually only like 10 % direct to consumer. Like we do 90 % of our stuff at brick and mortar retail. And while I don't have any CTAs in these ads that specifically say go to store, we probably will experiment with running some of those in the future. Because like certain geos, we have like incredible concentration of brick and mortar locations. And certain geos, they're a lot sparser. So where it's sparser, typically I'm trying to run more of an order through our website ad. And certain geos, I will run campaigns that focus more on its availability in store.

6:31Adam Terry:but usually I'm only doing one or the other in ads. The thing is like driving people to store, much harder to tell how that's performing. And so like, I am usually hesitant to run ads like that just because you don't actually know what the performance is. At least I haven't found a way to do that yet.

6:47Arthur Querou:Arter, what makes Adam and Cantrip like an ideal customer? What are they doing with the platform that you think is right on? Yeah, from a like general like view, What really differentiates Vibe from any other player is our ability to hyper-target. So we have buyer's profiles, basically. We don't use third-party data or anything like that. It's solely our own data that we build. And we have, just like Meta, like a buying mystery. And that allows us to do some pretty strong recommendation based on all the campaigns that we have running. We now have thousands of campaigns running in Power. So it's really like being an e-com brand at the end of the day and recommending the right product.

7:28Arthur Querou:That's what makes us very different and allows us to be hyper-targeted. And that's what works really well for Cantrip as well. It's like making sure that we're targeting people who are buyers of those kind of products. And then there is a specificity for THC brands. Of course, THC, there is a reason why like Meta and Google don't want to advertise these kind of brands because it's more sensitive and it's what we call a sensitive category. And so basically Vibe works directly with all broadcasters and streaming apps and all this kind of thing. And very early on, we could tell, of course, that there was a massive opportunity for us to let THC brands advertise on TV.

8:07Arthur Querou:And so very early on, we set up specific deals with specific inventory with all those publishers, streaming apps and those campaigns to be able to run those kind of campaigns. And I mean, Adam, that would be a horrible experience for you to go toward like every single streaming platform to negotiate, like just being able to give them money, basically. Whereas like we've done that work. And that's why we've, of course, been successful in that sensitive category as well. And I like your approach. We were talking in the pre-interview about our histories with DSPs. And this is way back in the day, but whenever I was working with large amounts of inventory from a bunch of different sources, they were always asking me to spend.

8:51Arthur Querou:You've got to spend across all these channels. You've got to spend across all these platforms, and then we're going to see what hits, and we'll really drill on that. But by the time you've done that, you've lost most of your budget. It hasn't worked. So you guys have a different approach where you're sort of hyper-targeting. Adam, I'm interested from your perspective. You don't have to give away your whole targeting profile, but what kind of stuff are you – like, how are you finding THC lovers on TV?

9:14Adam Terry:Yeah. Well, I mean, it definitely depends on what kind of product profile you are, right? Like you said, you had Wink on the podcast a few weeks ago. They're a slightly different position brand, right? A lot of the brands are pushing towards health and wellness, but Cantrip were mostly sodas. So we were pushing a little bit more towards, like, we have a really high-quality flavor profile. People really love like the actual quality of our product more than just the effect of it. And so that kind of buckets for me really well into the craft beer audience. People who are more focused on something a little bit stronger that is really focused on a high level of quality that goes in the product.

9:49Adam Terry:You know, I'm an engineer by background, so I do all our formulations too. I've been doing that for a long time. So people really, that resonates with a lot of people. The other thing is we also have a certain amount of data that exists on our audience via other tools that we have. so I can tell like who's the ideal demographic, what type of job do they have? And we can target actually a surprising amount of that in Vibe. It was funny as I just onboarded AppLovin as like, because they just opened to the public and I went in and it's like targeting options for that is literally just geography. Like I can't even put age on there.

10:19Adam Terry:And I had to email them and be like, guys, you can't be serving my ads to 13 year olds. Like let's make that very clear. And even if they got one, by the way, they can't buy it because we have age getting on the website. But I don't want them seeing the ads because that's just a waste of inventory, right? So the targeting in Vibe goes down to like you can target people who have like what specific occupations, specific income ranges across multiple networks. And so we look for a lot of lookalike audiences. And then Vibe was kind enough to build a THC beverage audience for their THC consumers. And so that one pops in.

10:54Adam Terry:But like the default for most is, like I said, that health and wellness channel. we decide to target other channels because we're not as health and wellness oriented as other THC brands might be and that allows us to have like a little bit clearer of a lane and i mean there's even like vapors is like an audience there and then they have a lot of retargeting options because vibe integrates directly with our clavio so we can also trigger certain events we can put people who are on our email list who have seen a vibe ad onto a specific list and then retarget them with tv stuff like hey about that THC drink you saw on tv that type of thing so there's i mean tremendous functionality above and beyond like a lot of other platforms i've seen and like to be honest i'm managing it right now which means we're under utilizing it by a lot like we need to hire somebody who understands this stuff better and we're working on bringing a person in-house uh so you know for listeners out there interested in dtc check out our job boards upcoming soon um because we need somebody who can really maximize this and there because there is like you could be spending

11:51Arthur Querou:a lot more like what like what are the i think you know people talk about meta all the time because it's just this absolute workhorse platform that you can just scale to the moon. What does scale look like on CTP, Arthur? It really depends on the sizes. I would love to tell you that we can scale as much as Meta, working on it. But basically, we have clients spending millions of months without too much issue. It really depends on also the budget, of course, the geo you want to target. Because at the end of the day, we're hyper-targeted as well. So we try to avoid running super wide campaigns. And we always recommend our clients to scale progressively.

12:34Arthur Querou:CTV is new for everyone. I mean, at the end of the day, even for us, but as for everyone. So figuring out the right strategy for your brand. There is no one playbook that works for everyone. Everybody has to experiment. That's why we always recommend to start with retargeting. Because as Adam said, when people see you on TV, that creates a lot of trust about your brand. And that also gives you, retargeting will give you a lot of insights of like, where are my conversions coming from? Are they coming from this or this specific channel, this specific audience, geo, et cetera? And that allows you to build a larger targeting to scale your budget.

13:10Arthur Querou:And so you do that progressively. What we've seen is not client, I hate when client, that's going to sound so cliche, but I hate when client come and say like, oh, we have a million dollar budget. You know what? Like, don't spend that million. Like, keep spending that on Meta. starts with$1 ,500 ,000. Let's scale progressively and then we'll see. I mean, our business model is pretty straightforward. There's no commitment, so people stay if they're happy. So I'd rather have them find success rather than just burn money. And for most of them, it's the first time they advertise on TV. So don't burn more money.

13:44Arthur Querou:Start progressively and scale, just like you would do, actually, with Meta. We're in this interesting time right now, too, where people aren't used to TV ads being as hyper-targeted as the ads on the internet are. So it's like, while people aren't in that mindset yet, there is that opportunity to have a bit of arbitrage there where you could be doing more localized ads or things to drive. And people would be kind of impressed by that because you say there is this, TV is the prestige platform. It's the rectangle we look at when we want to relax. We have rectangles we look at at all other stages of our life, but it's the big rectangle, which we love.

14:18Arthur Querou:Why is TV, why do you think TV so, so good, Adam?

14:21Adam Terry:Well, like Arthur said, it builds that level of consumer trust. I mean, there is like a sense to write it. Just like you said, there's like, people don't necessarily expect targeting. So they just assume you're running some big national campaign, right? That's going to change, I guess, as time goes on. People understand that almost everything they do now is more targeted and things get more targeted and more AI involved. But there is like, also you can do some stuff like if you're sitting on a couch watching a tv you're not getting up off that couch or flicking away the way that you do on meta right like meta i almost never run anything that's more than like 10 seconds long because people aren't usually going to stick around for that depending on the type of content the um on ctv it's really 15 or 30 seconds and i've actually found that our 30 second ads perform much better than our 15 second ads because there's a lot more opportunity to keep the brand on screen there's a little bit of a disadvantage in like you know you're not clicking directly to it but then again you can throw up a qr code there's some interesting tools they have we haven't really used yet that allow you to like take viral content and turn that into an ad it almost looks sometimes a little bit like the like if you've ever seen ads at like a gym uh like a lifetime or something where you have like rotating stuff and they have qr codes but there's like some functionality and some more like cinematic element to it i mean so far almost all of our ads I've generated with AI and a lot of effort into those AI ads, but we don't have the budget to like produce like a$50 ,000 spot most days.

15:47Adam Terry:So like there is like, there's a different level of what you want to put on there. But I, you know, as I talked through with my account managers, they've also pointed out a lot of like UGC stuff can also be successful. So there's a lot of experimenting we still have to do in generating content, but like it's got that gravitas that other things don't right now and you know how long that'll last i don't know but you know the interesting thing i'm if i could ask a question i'm interested in like i'm confused in some extent because you know there's paramount like has been trying to has been targeting me on meta to try to get me to advertise on their platform i don't think they would allow me to first of all but even if i tried like how do you just even justify going through like a single network CTV platform when something like Vibe exists and you have basically like 250 networks that you can advertise through at the click of a button.

16:35Arthur Querou:Fairmounts are great partners and like really appreciate them. I think it's just a different audience. Like Fairmount has, and should keep that by the way, has some capabilities that they'll never give us or anyone else. Like, you know, targeting Yellowstone or specific shows, those kind of thing. Now, they have just announced, I think, today that they can now sell a guaranteed placement for five days on specific shows, which I think is great. But it's a very different approach to advertising. It's not like performance marketing. This is more like for branding, larger advertisers. We're looking for like, you know, brand money, brand dollars, however they call that.

17:15Arthur Querou:It's just not made for performance. Like Paramount, when you want to do performance, think about like Meta. You want to have as much inventory as possible and as much like data, transactional data as possible. And Vibe as today has the largest footprint in terms of inventory, but same as some competitors. But what we have that they don't is like the largest transactional like data set in that we provide to our clients to make like recommendation and the right targeting and therefore delivering ROI. But yeah, Paramount is just, Paramount ads is just a very different, it's just a very different platform for a different use case.

17:52Arthur Querou:And yes, they would likely not allow country to advertise it. But as you said, like you can show up alongside those programs and have the same prestige, even though you're not buying the Yellowstone premiere or whatever, right? People don't necessarily know. You don't need, like, who cares? Who cares? Like, you don't need to buy, like, an ad during Yellowstone. Like, you'll pay a huge premium for that. If it's the right person, sure. But if it's not, like, doesn't really make a lot of sense. That's the whole thesis. Like, Vibe buys identity first, whereas most of, like, the solutions that you'll find on CTV buy inventory first.

18:30Arthur Querou:And that's a big difference in terms of philosophy and how you drive performance.

18:38Adam Terry:Right. Well, you would have to know that your audience really likes Yellowstone before you bought that ad, right? It's more like traditional TV advertising where you pick a program based on who you think your audience is, whereas you guys are buying audiences and then redirecting brands back into them. It's just sort of like an inverse. You know, there's also like the so like the only other platform I know of that allows me to advertise THC directly is Twitter X. And we were one of the earliest people on there, which was greatly to our disadvantage because the early days they basically said you can advertise cannabis now.

19:11Adam Terry:But all you can really say in the ad is learn more. And then they kept revising those policies and forcing us to start our ads over, which meant we lost all the algorithmic learnings. It was very expensive. And I got into some Twitter fights with the woman who was running that program. Anyway, the point being that I've gone back to it since and the inventory there is just garbage. I could get a really low CPM, but it's just not bringing back any customers. The bounce rate is just insanely high. It's not just the ability to put the letters THC in your ad, it's also the quality of that inventory and who it's targeting.

19:51Arthur Querou:Adam, can you walk me through what like the path to pay dirt? Like how long, how much did you have to spend before you knew that this was going to be an incrementally valuable channel?