Going from Social to the Super Bowl, with Lucas Coyle, Director of Brand Media & Awareness at MANSCAPED (CTV Mini-Series Episode #3)

0:00TV is back and I don't mean the TV you grew up watching. I'm talking about TV as a performance channel. Measurable, scalable, and finally accessible to brands of all sizes. I'm partnering with Tatari to pull back the curtain on what it actually looks like to run TV like a modern marketer. We're talking linear, streaming, CTV, all of it in one place. Here's how we're structuring this. We're going from zero to hero. Growth brands testing TV for the first time, mid-market brands scaling what's working, enterprise brands building full brand strategies, and yes, Super Bowl campaigns. And then we're getting tactical on how you can plan and budget for TV in 2026.

0:44TV has always been a performance channel. Markers are just catching up to what's possible, and Tatari is the platform making it happen. They give growth teams access to all of TV and let them evaluate it the same way they evaluate paid search or paid social. No black boxes, no guessing, just results you can tie back to your business. This is the TV series for marketers who are done leaving this channel on the table. Excited to dive in. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies.

1:27The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials and this is the third episode in our series. This one is focused on enterprise TV advertiser with a strong history of running across TV and streaming. And we're going to get into this episode. We have Lucas from Manscaped and Mauricio from Tatari. Excited to chat. But Lucas, do you want to go first and introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Lucas. Thanks so much for having me and having Manscaped as a part of this. I am the director of brand marketing and awareness here.

2:13I've been with Manscaped about five years. I live in a small town in central Oregon in Bend. But yeah, I started on like the sports marketing side with Manscaped, came from the team side, had worked in sports for a number of years. And then, yeah, I've grown to take over our full suite of brand marketing. So it's been a really exciting journey and fortunate to work with the fine folks over at Tatari for part of it. And Mauricio, I mean, they're fortunate to work with you, so you're going to hype yourself up now. Thanks, man. Yeah, appreciate it. Really happy to be here with both Lucas and you, Daniel.

2:50My name is Mauricio Lizarazu. I run the client development team here at Tatari based on the West Coast. Got started in performance advertising 15 years, pretty much had CPA carved across my forehead my entire career. and I'm really just here today to kind of talk more about Manscaped Enterprise TV. I'm excited to chat and go from there. Okay, we're going to get into this, but before we get into the strategy, for anybody who hasn't heard of Manscaped, could you give us the quick pitch? Who are you building for and what makes the brand different? Yeah, we started as like a below-the-waist grooming brand.

3:26We were the first to tackle that traditionally taboo category, led with humor and a high-quality product. And that's really like how most people know about us. And probably the first thing that comes to mind when people hear manscaped or manscaping, they just immediately jump to groin grooming. But over time, we've really grown into a full men's grooming brand. We offer a full suite of trimmers that are tailored specifically for various parts of the body and grooming needs. We've got a full line of wet goods, skincare, hygiene kits. So really needing to tell that story of where we are today versus what people knew us in that initial push.

4:04The bigger mission's always been to normalize male grooming and self-care, but doing it in a way that feels approachable, maybe a little irreverent while all still being a premium product. And I think a lot of people who watch the Super Bowl might have seen Manscaped's ad and you were trying to push away from the so-called manscaping, what it was known for when you first pushed out. You're trying to go for all hair, all face, body, and all that stuff. Yeah, exactly. We've called it going from ball to all. The easiest way to pitch it, you just cut out the first letter. And I think that's really the mission that we've been on and where we've gotten to.

4:49I want to get into a little bit of the strategy and you've built a really recognizable brand by doing TV. So what makes sense that TV became part of the equation? You're not new to the channel though. So what's your relationship with TV and how has it evolved? Yeah, when we started, I mean, Manscaped in general was so digital first, social, short form, very performance driven. And TV wasn't initially just a way to expand the audience and sort of something we knew we would be testing into eventually. really trying to tell more complete stories, be a bit more longer form, showcase our product quality.

5:31But what's changed is we don't really treat TV like a branding experiment anymore. It's really become more of a growth channel for us. It has to drive both brand and performance, and we measure it that way. I think coming into it, we needed to measure it in a way that was native to what we've been seeing for paid media, paid social. So to Mauricio's point about CPA, like we needed to be able to have an answer for that and, and look at that with a really performance driven lens. So that's where we started and where we've gotten, we continue to today to add more to it. So it's telling a more holistic story for like how it impacts our, our broader business.

6:13And what does that TV halo look like? and mariso i i want to go into like i what are you seeing with like the like mature advertisers in the space um when it comes to tv yeah i mean most advertisers to lucas's point first have to establish that tv performs is it driving response is it driving cpa cac incrementality once advertisers have done that that's where tv gets really exciting that's when you can start exploring live events, sports, things like the Grammys, the Super Bowl, right? That's kind of the golden goose for most brands. So once brands have really established that foundation of performance, that's when they can start picking out, okay, well, where are we going to get more of that?

6:55Where are we going to find better audiences and more incremental audiences? So a lot of mature advertisers, they'll test and do, let's say like a NBA game, you know, they'll do like Lakers Warriors and see a huge response. They'll go, okay, well, maybe we should not do an NBA playoff game or a more marquee matchup. So it's really just leading with data and letting the data kind of guide or optimizations go. But you first have to figure out what performance is before you make that massive heavy up investment in a larger 10-pole event or a premium opportunity. Yeah, that's a super smart way. Go at the lower, maybe fire sale type buys and then work your way up to okay i need to go from a smaller basketball game to a key matchup to playoffs to maybe finals if we're seeing um sell through and kak and all that all that good stuff working so that's super smart strategy i want to go um to you uh lucas basically that shift from always on requires the right infrastructure behind it, which is where platform side of things come in.

8:03What attracted Manscaped to working with Tatari versus going more traditional or purely programmatic CTV? Yeah, and I really think it goes into three buckets for us. I'd say the first we would call a need for convergent TV, the ability to bring linear and streaming together into the same measurement strategy. I think I would assume a lot of brands go into it just buying like programmatically. And we wanted to have the option to go linear in streaming. And yeah, like I said, just keep it all into the same measurement platform and measurement framework. And then the second is transparency. We wanted that visibility into like a dashboard that was able to track our KPIs really clearly.

8:51And as I said earlier, really kind of stay consistent with the way we were measuring media in other channels. So we had sort of like a North Star to be comparing back to. You know, that like new customer site traffic, search lift, etc. And then the third bucket is honestly the buying power that working with a partner like Tatari offers allows us to test into some of those bigger moments. Like, I'm not sure we would be aware of some of those fire sales you were talking about of, you know, getting into the NBA finals or the World Series or something like that. And certainly not at the same price tag.

9:31Allowed us to, you know, not be as locked into those big upfront costs and upfront budget commitments and really have that flexible budget so that we could sort of toggle on and off as needed early on. Hey, this is really working. Let's lean in a bit more. Or, hey, we're seeing a little bit of a down cycle. Let's pause or let's pivot our creative accordingly. And then, yeah, so really it's just, you know, Tartari was able to give us that converged view, real-time reporting and make us more confident in how we were approaching TV. Marisa, how does that look like from your side of things? Like you're seeing, let's say, the bear or like all these different types of buys and you're going to Manscaped or your other clients and telling them, hey, this will work well for your audience.

10:23How does it look like in the back end when working with Manscaped? Yeah, I mean, conversion TV is really important, I would say, for three main things. One is scale, then measurement, then incrementality. Scale is really quite simple. And if you really think about it holistically, let's say that Manscaped only did programmatic and that's all they focus sit on. That still permits a tiny sliver of all TV, something like 7 % of all total ad-supported TV is even available programmatically. So you're missing out on 93 % if you do not go beyond that. So the very first thing is scale, right? It gives Manscaped the ability to be in live sports, to be on the Bear on Hulu, to be on the Roku channel or to be on Tubi, wherever it is.

11:05So it gives them a ton of scale. The second piece is measurement. A lot of the times, a consumer won't even know that they're watching streaming TV. I'm sure a lot of us here have YouTube TV. A lot of those ads are plugging in straight from the broadcast feed. So if you don't have no way of actually measuring that holistically, Lucas and other brands are going to have a very, very hard time to make sense of it all. So we give them one platform to measure all of it. And the last thing is really just efficiency. Pergamatic is really expensive. It's a very, very strong tool. Great targeting, great levers you can pull.

11:37Everything's in pretty much real time, but it's really, really expensive. So someone like a Lucas, you could really lean into those direct publisher relationships or those fire sale opportunities and get in front of those same exact eyeballs and impressions at a fraction of the cost. So in reality, convergent TV is really what TV is because if you just focus on streaming or you just focus on linear or just programmatic, you're kind of siloing yourself and limiting where you can go in terms of scale and measurement. and of course, most importantly, efficiency. And then the walled garden effect, if you don't have a platform, you buy on programmatic and then you have to go find direct buy somewhere else and you're just going to find a way to measure it all and it becomes hell when it comes to that because you need measurement to win, especially in this day and age with marketing.

12:30It's going to get more and more budget. you need some sort of tracking tool to tell you if it's working or not. Yeah. I mean, hey, we all have less time, Ed. I have a one-year-old at home. I'm sure Lucas is also very busy. You don't have time to have five or six different vendors giving you four or six different reports, and you've got to stitch it all together. So it makes it a lot easier just to have one platform to buy and measure it all in one roof. I have a 17-month-old, so it's really similar here. You might have heard my seven-month-old crying in the background two minutes ago. So we all have kids.

13:06We're all in the box. All parents trying to fight for their life and do marketing at the same time. So I love it. But I want to go, I know the, so once you've like sorted out this infrastructure problem, I know that like D2C and CPG is such a crowded space and you're all chasing the same eyeballs and audiences. So what specific challenges do you see in the TV marketplace for a brand like Manscaped. Yeah, you nailed it. I mean, it may come as a surprise. We're not the only brand that wants to be with live sport and the male skewing sort of cable providers. And that's, you know, an objective I think a lot of folks take.

13:47It's where you see a lot of the most traction and engagement, especially on linear. And the prices, you know, reflect that, right? Prices continue to rise on those obvious linear spots and on some of the CTV platforms as well. So clutter is like a really big hurdle for us and how we navigate that. How do we show up a little bit differently? How do we keep that somewhat irreverent manscaped tone when we show up? It's a tricky one. So like that creative piece is also really, really important to us. For TV, we do view it as both a performance driver and a brand piece as we've talked about. And we have creative that matches that.

14:31Like we have brand intended creative. That's more storytelling, like what you saw in the Super Bowl. And then we also have DR versions of that and more DR native creatives as well that are really leaning into the product descriptions. Our CTAs are much stronger and really try to call out more of like the features of why you choose Manscaped. And they both land on TV. It's really like, what do we expect to see? when we run each of those and forecasting and setting expectations internally based on what we're planning to run. It's also really important to avoid that over-showing or creative wear.

15:11If you just start a campaign with one video and you just launch it and see what happens, I think oftentimes people get pretty fatigued of seeing the same one over and over again. So especially as we increase budgets for television, how do we balance that out with like a mix that keeps it exciting or slight variations or behind the scenes content included in there as well. And then the third challenge I would say is like that internal pressure to show more than just TV accomplishes like reach and awareness for Manscaped. It's how are we contributing to acquisition? How are we driving revenue? They're not easy challenges to tackle, but I think we continue to make progress each year and with each campaign and with each creative that we're putting out there.

15:56I think it's just that ability to see each performance compared to the past and try to test these different little tweaks. We're not shy to try new things and take some risks in our creative too. How are you deciding when to launch a brand storytelling creative on, say, a Super Bowl buy versus more of a DR type? creative on another channel? How are you deciding where you're launching DR Creative versus brand, or is it the same channel or is it different channels? I would say there's seasonal tentpoles for us that we're launching brand around. And it's more dictated by that, like our business needs.

16:42We want to tell a story about a product that's coming out, or we really have a key focus that we have to let everyone know that we aren't just a ball grooming brand that we've got products for elsewhere. So it's like we have an initiative that sparks the brand piece of it. And the DR sort of comes in as a balance, like knowing that it's not going to drive the same performance. We try to keep the campaign as balanced as we can because we, so that's when the DR comes in to sort of have a version of that brand creative. So we're still supporting recall and still getting the frequency up on that visual and that story, but also adding in that component of like that, you know, quick second where you just saw the lawnmower, here's a little bit more about the lawnmower.

17:27And then here's a version that's, you saw that, you saw the beard hedger. Here's a little bit more about the beard hedger. So it's kind of like trying to have that balance where like we get to do our storytelling and then support it and think about how, you know, me as a viewer, my experience, if I saw the first, the second, the third, and try to bring people through the funnel that way. um marisa i want to go into like so how do you how does like the unified data across linear and streaming actually change planning decisions for like say manscape and other buyers yeah it completely changes the view and perspective for someone like a manscaped especially on lucas's team because now he can log into the platform and see exactly how his creator performs not just across certain publishers but also across both linear and streaming so for lucas he can log into the platform, he can say, okay, cool, Creative Concept 1A2, which is more of a branding kind of creative, actually had this downstream effect on his campaign.

18:25Maybe it had a lower CAC, but it really was able to drive website visits. And then he can look at it both holistically across linear and streaming or just on streaming properties. The other piece too, right, that's just for looking at creative, but overall for inventory, it creates an incredibly strong way for you to really isolate where TV is driving that impact. So when we had that quick example earlier of how to get into fire sale opportunities, you really should know which fire sale opportunities to take a swing at. And having a platform that's really unifying both streaming and linear allows you to do that.

18:57The other piece too that a lot of, I would say marketers overlook is that they really get kind of addicted to like that really niche kind of targeting. You know, we all have cell phones, right? We all get really good IG targeted ads. a lot of people kind of note this as a downside of TV, but could actually be a positive. When you're watching TV, you're not watching it alone. You're usually watching it with your wife, your partner, your friends, or whatever it may be. So a brand like Manscaped could actually start uncovering, hey, you know what? Even though this was a male-focused campaign, we saw a really strong response from females.

19:29And that's what a lot of brands have noticed, is that because TV isn't so addicted to that very niche one-to-one targeting and it opens it up a bit more, it gives brands a really strong way to kind of learn more about who their audience is. So someone like a Lucas could now say, okay, wait a minute, actually females are really buying our products. That wasn't the intention of the campaign, but the data that we're able to get from that broader targeting, especially on linear TV that you're able to do, really helps uncover new revenue channels for tons of brands out there. That's such a good point because if you think how many times, for example, sports, it's either watched with you or your partner or or you're having a watch party or it's at a bar with 30 40 50 people watching not many channels you could get that many eyeballs at one time on a screen most of it's just like one-to-one but like facebook nobody's looking over your phone and being like oh look at that ad together where tv you have you can get 50 60 eyeballs if you're at bar watching the same exact ad as everybody else which is pretty cool on one screen so oh yeah i mean yeah i've never i've never wanted to watch love island but i've definitely been there right next to my wife when she does so maybe hey it's female targeted but you know you're also getting me on those eyeballs too i feel like i feel like all guys say like they don't want to watch it and then they're watching it more than their wife it's it's just how it ends up happening like my wife watches the housewives and i'm like oh i'll sit and watch with you and then i'm like end up watching the whole show and i don't know why i did um so yeah i've been the one putting on love island all-stars my wife's like i think we're over this i'm like we're not over this um so lucas i know you're constantly navigating the balance between where to put dollars across linear and streaming so walk us through how you think about that split is the freight is there a framework or is it more fluid based on what the data tells you?

21:30It's pretty fluid. It really do follow the data. I will say like linear still wins for that broad reach, especially around those major sports like Super Bowl and major tent poles like Super Bowl or Love Island premieres. I think showing up there is really important to get those reach numbers as a part of your campaign and a part of your TV strategy. But streaming, we're a bit more refined, maybe even a little bit surgical. We try to be more targeted and add more demographic layers onto what we're doing and who we're running our ads for. Try to reach that younger cord cutting audience, which I think we do very well with as a brand.

22:10The key is really just to have a mix that's not static and changes based on the campaign that we have live, the creative that we have live, the time of the year, what we're trying to achieve as a brand in that moment or with that creative. And we always try to just continue to be testing as well. So trying to, you know, hey, Tatar is saying that this streaming platform is something we should be considering for whatever reason. And let's give it a shot. They make the barrier of entry pretty achievable. And so we start bringing in more and more. And honestly, it's where we found some really great incremental lift and drove the most site traffic is on some of these ones that we wouldn't expect.

22:53um and i think initially we were just planning on let's just do cheap linear sports and sports adjacent highlight shows and things like that and where we stand now is uh a lot more complex i think we would have missed out a ton if we had just stuck with that initial like let's make sure we're running on sports center and in big male dominated events what what were the placements that actually really surprised you when you when you bought into them i don't think we've run on love island but some of like those like reality tv shows have been really surprising like we've done some some of the bachelor um we've done because you're right it's catching a room of people where there's usually you know multiple folks watching um but also running on bravo running on e um and some of like those more female skewing networks have been a little bit of a surprise we know that a lot of females buy our products for you know seasonal gifting events I would say.

23:51And sometimes even for themselves too. I've got a white product that we have behind us that's been doing very well with female consumers buying for themselves. And so I think, yeah, it's been a little bit of a shock to see how well some of those female skewing channels and audiences have done when we've put our programming against them. Yeah, it's good to test those things because I know, for example, guys don't like to buy things that of those type of things like razors or um deodorant and stuff it's annoying buys to them but if their wife sees it or their girlfriend sees it like hey we need you to buy this like they're like the convincing factor in the room so it's super helpful to get or if their wife sees it they could say hey reminder to buy that razor or remind it you need to you need to groom a little bit, go buy that right now.

24:46So I think that's super important. It's definitely evolving, but like that self-care piece is kind of tough for a lot of guys. Like they just sort of like won't even notice it, won't think to buy it. And then you show it in front of an audience that is regularly buying self-care products, like body products, you know, lotions, all the different things that women typically will consume in the beauty space. And they say, oh, you need this too. Like, it's okay to take care of yourself. Sometimes you need someone looking out for you. Yeah. Marisa, how have you seen like the optimizations that people are making and things like that?

25:23It's a bit interesting, you know, for branding goals, you do need a little bit longer of a window before you start making those optimizations. I would say for brands that are just starting, you typically want to kind of buy and plan week to week. But at the end of the month, you really want to take a harder look at how everyone performed. I think a lot of advertisers get a little bit too mixed up into saying, oh, we saw a great response. Let's optimize in and out of that network. But sometimes TV campaigns need a little bit more time to breathe. So the way we do that at Tatar is we can actually forecast out what that performance will look like.

25:55So brands are able to be a bit more agile. A lot of mistakes brands make is that they'll spend for months on end and then finally their MMM tells them something different or their attribution tells them something different. So I'm all for shifting into high-spending networks or higher performing networks, excuse me, but you really want to be able to trust that data and let that data really breathe. The real goal, I would say, for a lot of advertisers when they come in with us, it really isn't just to hit their cackle in the first month. It's to uncover which exact publishers, audiences, and networks can hit their cackle.

26:29So that way in that second, third, and fourth month, you're only shifting spend on those top performers versus just kind of making wholesale changes month over month without really understanding what works. And that's really where having that convergent platform makes a huge, huge difference. Because if you just try to pick this off one by one, you're not really buying on TV. You're just buying programmatic, or you're just buying linear, or you're just buying streaming. So it's really important for advertisers when they test TV, they don't really have any kind of bias and they test it fully. A lot of brands are surprised both ways.

27:02Sometimes like, oh yeah, nobody watches linear TV, but hey, older people are actually buying their product. or they, hey, you know what? Our product doesn't really do well for younger audiences. And then boom, out of nowhere, now younger people are buying their product. So don't just kind of limit yourselves by any kind of assumptions. Really let the data do the talking there. Yeah, I love it because you could audience test, you can message test. And also that's the issue with a lot of TV, right? Is people assume that I'm going to make this big buy on one channel and if it doesn't work, I'm screwed.

27:36and that's where people leave TV because they make a one, maybe that wasn't their audience or that buy was not the right buy for them or the message didn't hit with that channel. And having something where you can test like basically like other channels that you could test right now, like a meta or a Google, it's helpful to be able to test multiple creatives with multiple audiences and see what works and what doesn't work for that audience at scale. I want to go into, I mean, talking about like proving value and talking about measurement. So from a measurement and accountability standpoint, what are the hardest things about proving TV value at your level of maturity?

28:21And how have you and like Tatari worked through those challenges? is yeah i would say it's really like a it's been a big shift from kind of what we talked about is like the entry point and the why you get with tatari and and some of the agencies similar of wanting to make these one-off tests like oh let's try a lakers game oh let's try a nba playoff game and while that's valuable and was a great way to get into it i think it's really the shift to being more like looking at the system um and more system thinking rather than just one-off buys and campaign to campaign. I think it's, you know, really like helping us like understand TV's over total impact and forecasting against that and measuring appropriately.

29:06It's not always going to be like in the same session conversions as we see with some of our other channels. We need to be more following like the assisted conversions, branded search, direct traffic, conveying that, conveying all that internally so that everyone's aligned that TV is a, you know, full funnel uh contributor and something that should be always on versus just another channel that we measure exactly the same as everything else so i think it's like really like you know seeing the full uh impact in the halo of what tv can provide and then uh you know forecasting accordingly and and having that expectation as we go into some of our like nmns and studies like that that will will run i think that's the key i think you just said the halo i think a lot of people don't realize how tv impacts other channels also other um retailers say you like on amazon or you're selling on different you might see a spike on amazon versus another place and you're not even attending to do that but the halo effect of tv is making people think of your product and then go buy on multiple channels.