Client Spotlight: Kettle & Fire

In our client spotlight series, we interview TV advertising champions in various industries. Last month, on the Wavebreak podcast, we sat down with Victoria Belinsky, Senior Director of Brand Marketing, and Niccolo Gloazzo, Director of eCommerce, at Kettle&Fire, to learn more about how their team is scaling the business with TV advertising.

You can listen to the full episode here.

What does Kettle & Fire do?

Kettle & Fire creates high-quality bone broth products, made with 100% grass-fed and finished bones and organic ingredients. They source the best, nourishing ingredients and treat them with care to create delicious and nutritious products to support consumers’ health journeys, and a better food system. Over the past few years, they’ve also expanded into the Cooking Broth and Soup category to bring consumers more, better-for-you options.

What did Kettle & Fire’s marketing mix look like before TV?

As a DTC-first brand, our marketing mix prior to TV included social and digital channels like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Why test TV advertising?

Our team turned to TV advertising to build brand awareness and reach new audiences. While our other social and digital channels were helping us hit mid to lower-funnel KPIs, we wanted to develop a full-funnel marketing strategy and tapped into TV as the channel to do that.

Did your team have any preconceived notions about TV advertising prior to working with Tatari?

Initially, we believed TV advertising was reserved for large, well-established brands, too expensive to test, and demanded high creative investment. However, we quickly learned that it’s possible to run an effective TV ad campaign without requiring large media and production budgets.

We also didn’t believe there was a way to accurately measure TV ads. However, Tatari's platform showed us we could track campaign performance in real-time. We were comforted by how familiar Tatari's TV ad measurement capabilities felt compared to our other digital channels.

How did Kettle & Fire approach testing?

We tested one 30-second brand spot across various streaming publishers to learn how it would perform against main KPIs, such as CPV (cost per visitor). By leveraging Tatari’s direct relationships with these publishers, we were able to secure our media buys at very price-efficient CPMs.

We also leveraged online video (OLV) and two programmatic tactics: retargeting and prospecting. On the retargeting side, we targeted previous website visitors, and for prospecting, we tested two different audience groups: behavioral and demographic. With this approach, we were able to gather key learnings that helped us indicate areas to optimize away from and opportunities to continue scaling.

At Kettle & Fire, how does your team approach creative, from concept to production?

With this first TV spot, we wanted to show people how to enjoy the health benefits of bone broth. To communicate this message, we partnered with a creative agency. We repurposed the previous ads we had used for our linear TV campaigns, by changing it slightly for streaming.

When it comes to creative optimization, Tatari’s platform makes it so easy to test at the creative level and gather the learnings quickly. In the future, we’re looking to leverage UGC content and explore other strategies, such as using a product-focused creative.

What role does OLV play in Kettle & Fire’s streaming TV strategy?

We’ve learned that online video (OLV) and streaming TV go hand in hand and by leveraging them together, we can generate impact across the entire marketing funnel. On one side we are building strong brand awareness with streaming TV; on the other, we’re driving lower funnel KPIs at price-efficient CPMs with OLV.

Was there anything surprising about TV advertising?

We were very surprised by how our TV campaign drove impact across our other marketing channels, especially branded search on Google and Amazon. We noticed that when we maintained our TV advertising efforts, we saw a continued increase in brand awareness, which subsequently led to a continued increase in branded search volume.

What’s one highlight of running this campaign?

Our team has enjoyed using Tatari's platform for its TV performance tracking capabilities, transparency, and ease of optimization.

Any last takeaways from this experience?

TV advertising has proved to be a very efficient channel, allowing us to reach an audience we could have never reached before. From a creative perspective, TV offers a powerful way to communicate our message to an already engaged audience, given its long-form format.

What would the Kettle & Fire team say to brands considering adding TV to their marketing mix?

1. You don’t need a large budget to get started.

2. With Tatari’s platform, you can run TV campaigns and optimize them, similar to other digital and social channels.

3. Streaming TV and OLV go hand in hand.

With that, we recommend any brand try TV advertising!