Retail Guide | How to Launch and Scale TV Advertising
Why Retail Brands Can't Afford to Ignore TV
There comes a moment in the life of almost every growing retail brand when the channels that got you here stop taking you further. Meta costs climb. New audiences dry up. The digital playbook plateaus.
That was Jones Road Beauty in late 2023 — a loyal base, a strong social presence, and a growth engine that had quietly stalled. On Christmas Day, they ran their first TV ad. Within a month, Meta efficiency improved, site traffic rose, and branded search increased.
Tecovas had a similar reckoning. When the Austin-based Western boot brand turned TV off entirely to test its value, website visits dropped over 20%, Google Shopping degraded, and search efficiency plummeted. When TV came back, everything recovered. The result: TV became the fastest-growing budget allocation in their entire marketing mix.
Stories like these are no longer the exception. The rise of CTV, advances in attribution, and a new generation of TV platforms have lowered the barrier to entry dramatically. Brands can now launch a TV campaign for a few thousand dollars, measure it like digital, and optimize in real time. No Madison Avenue agency required. Sorry Don Draper.
Understanding the TV Landscape: Linear, Streaming & Why You Need Both
Ask a room full of retail marketers what "TV advertising" means, and most will say streaming. CTV feels familiar — targeted, measurable, native to the digital media playbook. That's not wrong. But it's incomplete.
Linear TV — broadcast and cable — isn't dead. Not even close. Nielsen consistently shows a near 50/50 split between linear and streaming viewership. Seasonal, high-tune-in moments like the NFL swing audiences heavily back to broadcast. The audience is still there, and for retail brands that ignore it, there's a real cost.
The most sophisticated TV advertisers have figured this out. They don't think of linear and streaming as competing strategies. They think of them as one convergent TV strategy — each channel doing what it does best.
Linear delivers scale. It reaches mass audiences at efficient CPMs, builds awareness broadly, and anchors a brand in the cultural moments where attention is highest. Streaming offers precision. It enables tighter targeting and feels like a natural extension of the performance marketing playbook retail brands already know. Together, they create something neither can achieve alone: a complete conversion funnel, from first impression to final purchase.
The data backs it up. When one of Tatari's long-time advertisers paused their linear spend to lean into streaming, CPV increased and CPA trended upward. Without linear providing top-of-funnel strength, streaming's efficiency eroded.
The brands winning on TV today don't choose. Tecovas ran NFL playoff games, NCAA football, WWE, and MLB World Series alongside premium Yellowstone sponsorships. Boxed secured premium linear on Jeopardy and Yellowstone at 40–50% discounts, then layered in streaming — resulting in a 16% decrease in CPA and an audience linear alone hadn't reached.
Getting Started on TV: Retargeting Is TV's Smartest Entry Point
For many retail brands, the biggest barrier to TV isn't cost. It's uncertainty. How do we know if it's working? What if we can't prove the return?
There's a straightforward answer that any brand with a website and a pixel can act on today: start with retargeting.
CTV retargeting works the same way display retargeting does — drop a pixel on your site, build an audience pool of visitors, and serve them ads. The difference is where those ads appear. Instead of a banner ad scrolled past in a second, the ad occupies a full-screen streaming experience. Full-screen. Unskippable. Leaned-back viewer. 15 or 30 seconds to tell your story to someone who already showed interest. That's a fundamentally different kind of engagement. In internal studies, Tatari has seen retargeting perform 250% more efficiently than prospecting campaigns.
Pholicious, the premium instant pho brand, is one of the clearest examples. After appearing on Shark Tank in 2025, the team needed to turn buzz into sustained retail velocity ahead of a Walmart expansion. They installed the Tatari Pixel through a one-click Shopify integration and launched streaming retargeting targeted at site visitors who hadn't yet purchased. The logic was simple: reach the people already interested, in the highest-attention environment available. Within three weeks, Pholicious expanded from 500 to 1,900 Walmart stores as an everyday item — and gained the confidence to move into linear. "We thought TV was out of reach," said co-founder Joseph Trudeau. "Starting with streaming retargeting felt doable, and the results gave us confidence to jump into linear."
Retargeting works because it meets a warm audience at their most attentive. Start with the people you already have, in the environment where they're most likely to act.
Setting Your Goals: What Do You Actually Want TV to Do?
Before a dollar gets spent, the most important question a retail brand can ask is: what do I actually want TV to do for me?
TV can build awareness from scratch, deepen consideration for an already-known brand, drive discovery for a product never seen outside of Instagram, or lend the kind of credibility no algorithm can manufacture. The brands that get the most out of TV are the ones who enter with a clear goal and measure against it.
PATTERN Beauty, the clean haircare brand founded by Tracee Ellis Ross, knew this when they partnered with Tatari to launch their first-ever linear TV campaign. Rather than committing everything upfront, they ran a deliberate 12-week phased campaign: the first month for broad testing, the second for optimization, the third for scaling what worked. Third-party brand lift studies validated every step.
For brands in crowded markets, legitimacy is often the goal that matters most but is hardest to quantify. Turtlebox, the rugged outdoor speaker brand, found that TV validated the brand in ways performance marketing simply couldn't. "TV validated the brand in new ways that performance marketing can't," said co-founder Jonathan McKenzie.
For retail brands whose revenue concentrates around key moments — Black Friday, holiday, back-to-school — TV becomes a demand generation engine. BYLT Basics layered TV into their media mix ahead of Black Friday using ambassador-driven creative with Rob Gronkowski, and saw a 50% boost in conversion rates during peak windows. Jones Road Beauty took the same approach heading into Q4, priming new audiences through TV before their biggest sales moments.
Whatever the goal — awareness, legitimacy, or demand generation — define it upfront. Build the measurement framework around it. And treat the first campaign as a learning opportunity, not a one-time bet.
Lowering Your CAC: TV Makes Every Channel Cheaper
The most common objection from retail brands isn't philosophical. It's financial. TV feels expensive. And for a performance marketing team built on trackable digital spend, putting meaningful budget into television can feel like a step backward.
Here's what the data actually shows: for brand after brand, TV doesn't just pay for itself. It makes every other channel cheaper.
Wild Earth saw a 60% drop in CPA after layering streaming retargeting onto linear TV campaigns. Aroma360 slashed CPA by 80% from a single Shark Tank linear placement. Boxed saw a 16% decrease in CPA by combining premium linear inventory with streaming. These aren't outliers. They're what happens when TV is treated as a performance channel.
Jones Road Beauty experienced it from the other direction. Coming from rising Meta costs and flattening performance, they turned to TV to reach audiences social could no longer access efficiently. What they found: TV didn't just open new acquisition channels — it made Meta work better. New audiences exposed on TV flowed into the Meta ecosystem with fresher intent, improving conversion rates across the board.
Fabletics brought a tactical approach to managing TV costs. They developed a strategy of testing creative in 30-second format first, then cutting to 15 seconds once messaging was proven. Since 15-second spots cost roughly half as much while delivering comparable performance on validated creative, this approach effectively doubled their reach within the same budget.
The question stops being "can we afford TV?" and starts being "can we afford not to have it?"
Unlocking TV's Halo Effect: How TV Boosts Every Channel
Imagine you've launched a multi-channel campaign. A few weeks in, Instagram looks like the hero. TV looks like it's quietly holding its own. So the question comes up: should we shift budget out of TV?
Before you do, look closer. The visitors converting through Instagram? A meaningful portion of them saw your TV ad first. They didn't click on it, didn't respond directly. But they were primed. And when they encountered your brand on social or search, they were significantly more likely to buy.
That's the halo effect — and for retail brands running TV, it's often the difference between TV looking like a decent channel and TV looking like the best investment in the mix.
Tatari has measured this effect across hundreds of brands. Methodology: site visitors are split into two groups — those who saw a TV ad in the last seven days, and those who didn't. The conversion rates of both groups are compared. Across 100 brands studied, 9 out of 10 saw higher conversion rates from visitors exposed to TV. 60% saw a CVR lift of more than 50%. A third saw a lift of over 100%.
Tecovas ran perhaps the cleanest experiment. When they paused TV to prove its value internally, the halo disappeared almost immediately. Google Shopping dropped. Paid search became less efficient. Direct traffic fell. When campaigns restarted, everything recovered. The proof was clear enough that even Tecovas' finance team became advocates for increasing the TV budget.
Measuring Everything: Proving TV's Impact Across Every Sales Channel
Ask any performance marketer why they've been hesitant about TV, and measurement is almost always part of the answer. How do you connect a TV ad that aired Tuesday night to a purchase Thursday afternoon — or a store visit the following weekend?
TV advertising's biggest transformation over the last several years isn't reach or targeting. It's measurement. TV's impact doesn't stop at the website. It reaches into search, social, physical stores, Amazon, and call centers. Measuring it properly means following the consumer wherever the purchase actually happens.
Online: Tatari's real-time analytics dashboard lets brands view cost-per-visitor, response rates, and on-site conversion data correlated to specific TV airings — often within minutes of a spot running. PATTERN Beauty used this alongside a DISQO third-party brand lift study to validate a 58% growth in unique visitors and a 3x revenue lift.
In-Store: Roughly 80% of retail sales still occur in physical stores. Saatva wanted to understand how much of their showroom sales were driven by TV. Tatari's data science team built a statistical model connecting DMA-level TV spend to weekly store sales going back to 2023. The answer: 5.7% of total retail sales were directly attributed to TV advertising — completely invisible in a web-only measurement model.
Amazon: Two-thirds of consumers start product searches on Amazon, not brand websites. When marketers measure TV by website conversions alone, they're dramatically undercounting its impact — and artificially inflating reported CPA. For some brands, factoring in Amazon reduces reported CPA by 20%. For others, CPA drops by more than 90%.
Phone: Phone calls to businesses convert 10–15 times more often than web leads. Saatva partnered with Tatari and AI-powered platform Invoca to create a complete attribution path: TV impression → website visit → phone call → purchase.
Going Big: Premium Placements, Tentpole Events & Contextual Fit
There's a moment in most successful TV advertising journeys where the question shifts. It stops being "does TV work for us?" and starts being "how do we go bigger?"
When that moment arrives, premium placements and tentpole events become the conversation. The brands that get the most out of high-profile TV moments aren't just buying scale — they're buying the right scale, in the right context, at the right time. And you don’t need Super Bowl-sized budgets to do it, as evident by some of the brands we helped get in the Super Bowl.
Tecovas is a shining example. As their TV strategy matured, Tatari helped identify the high-impact moments where Western boot and apparel buyers were most likely to be watching: NFL playoffs, NCAA college football, WWE Monday Night Raw. And most memorably, the MLB World Series — where their spot delivered a 16x increase in site visits from a single placement, one of the best-performing World Series spots in Tatari's history. Tecovas also secured premium sponsorships in Yellowstone — a placement so contextually perfect it didn't just reach their audience, it spoke directly to their identity.
Ariat found the same thing. "Yellowstone was one of the most watched shows on TV over the last few years, and just an absolute perfect fit for our brand," said Tricia LaBarge, Ariat's Sr. Director of Brand Media and Digital Marketing. "The response was phenomenal — it was the highest response rate we've ever seen."
For brands worried that premium placements are only for Super Bowl budgets: Made In accessed MLB Home Run Derby and NFC Championship placements at up to 86% off through Tatari’s direct publisher relationships. Boxed saw discounts on popular programs like Jeopardy and Yellowstone through Tatari's direct publisher relationships. The access isn't just about budget — it's about having the right partner.
Planning for What's Next: Interactive CTV and the Future of Retail Advertising
Interactive CTV ads have been "the next big thing" for years. Hyped at conferences, mocked up in pitch decks. But actually encountering one in the wild has been rare.
That's changing. And for retail brands paying attention, the timing matters.
The core idea has always made sense: TV is the biggest, most attention-commanding screen in the home — what if viewers could actually do something while watching? Browse products. Find a nearby store. Scan a QR code. The reason this promise took so long to materialize was practical friction: inconsistent specs, fragmented publisher workflows, unreliable measurement. The formats existed; the infrastructure was catching up.
Avocado Mattress partnered with Tatari and Innovid to test one of these formats: viewers watching on their streaming platform could use their remote to browse nearby Avocado retail locations directly on screen. No app switching. No disruption. Just a clear, optional action in a high-attention moment. The campaign exceeded planned delivery, came in under budget, and drove meaningful foot traffic to retail locations — a critical conversion point for a product most customers want to experience before buying. "Interactive CTV ads helped us bridge the gap between attention and action on TV," said Sidrah Althaus, VP of Digital Marketing at Avocado Green Brands.
Pause ads are emerging as the breakout format — appearing when a viewer initiates a break, occupying the full screen during a moment of natural attention. Industry research shows 51% of viewers take action after seeing a pause ad, and 63% of TV viewers actually prefer them to a frozen screen.
For retail brands, the shoppable and action-oriented formats are particularly worth watching: the ability to compress the distance between a TV impression and a purchase decision addresses one of the oldest limitations of TV advertising. TV has always been powerful at creating desire. Interactive formats are increasingly capable of converting it on the spot.
Wrapping it Up: Building Your TV Playbook with Tatari
Every brand in this guide started somewhere. A pilot budget. A first spot. A leap of faith made a little less frightening by the availability of real measurement and a platform built to make TV feel as accountable as digital.
What happened next followed a remarkably consistent arc. TV worked. Other channels got better. The team got bought in. The budget grew. And the question shifted from "should we be on TV?" to "how do we get more out of it?"
That arc is what happens when a channel with TV's reach and trust is paired with the infrastructure to prove it — and a partner with the relationships, data, and expertise to keep optimizing it.
The brands featured in this guide are diverse. What they share isn't a category or a budget. It's a willingness to take the channel seriously, measure it honestly, and let the results guide the next decision.
The playbook is here. The only thing left is to run the first play. Download the full guide to learn more.