From Plateau to Performance: How Dose Revived Growth Beyond Meta and Google

What do you do when your once-reliable growth playbook starts to slow down? 

That’s the question Dose, a fast-growing subscription supplement brand focused on liver and cholesterol health, had to solve after their Facebook and Google performance hit a wall. While these channels helped spur early growth and drove $50-60 million in revenue, over time performance began to plateau. Paid social became saturated, creative fatigued, and new customer acquisition flatlined. Despite launching new landing pages and campaign tests, they struggled to break through to fresh audiences.

They needed a new playbook. 

Conversations with peers revealed a consistent theme: many high-growth DTC brands were supplementing their core channels with TV advertising. That’s when Dose decided to explore a new approach.

Speaking at this year’s DTC Experts Conference, Dose’s Head of Growth, Max Langlois, shared how the brand expanded beyond paid search and social by incorporating TV advertising into their performance marketing strategy. Through careful testing, attribution, and creative learnings, Dose turned linear and connected TV (CTV) into a major growth engine.

Shifting Perceptions: TV as a Performance Channel

Initially, Dose had the same reservations many direct-to-consumer marketers share — that TV is expensive, hard to measure, and requires high-production content. But after seeing the success others were having with Tatari, they launched a small, measurable test campaign.

By leveraging Tatari’s attribution platform and updating their post-purchase survey, Dose was able to track early impact. Within just two weeks, 5% of new customers cited TV as their first touchpoint, offering early validation that the channel was working.

Building a Scalable TV Advertising Strategy

Starting with linear TV advertising, Dose focused on news networks like Fox News, which aligned well with their older demographic. As they gained traction, they expanded into connected TV (CTV) to increase flexibility and targeting precision. Over time, CTV even surpassed linear in terms of monthly spend — a shift made possible by Tatari’s ability to manage both formats within a single platform.

Dose approached TV the same way they approached digital: with constant testing. They experimented with different ad lengths, call-to-action end cards, and creative styles. Surprisingly, their highest-performing creatives weren’t their expensive commercial shoots, but repurposed UGC ads from Meta, lightly edited for TV. These scrappier assets outperformed the polished productions and proved that effective TV creative doesn’t require massive budgets.

They also found that 30-second ads worked better than 15-second ones. Because their product required more education around liver and cholesterol health, longer ad units allowed them to fully tell the story — something they couldn’t easily achieve in social media’s limited attention window.

Measuring Incrementality and Optimizing Results

To confirm that TV advertising was driving incremental results, Dose deployed a comprehensive measurement strategy. This included:

• Real-time attribution via Tatari’s platform

• Enhanced post-purchase surveys

• Media Mix Modeling (MMM)

• Incrementality testing

A market-level holdout test, in which 20% of the U.S. population didn’t see TV ads, showed a measurable lift in new customer acquisition — particularly among first-time subscribers. Another test increased TV spend by 50% and demonstrated that CAC remained efficient, even as investment scaled.

Data from their MMM solution showed that both linear and CTV drove Dose’s lowest customer acquisition costs across all marketing channels.

Reducing Reliance on Meta and Rebalancing the Mix

Today, Dose spends six figures monthly on TV advertising, making Tatari their third-largest channel by budget. Importantly, TV has allowed them to rebalance their media mix. While many DTC brands still pour the majority of their budget into Meta, Dose now allocates just 35% of spend there — a move that has added resilience and efficiency to their overall strategy.

What Other DTC Brands Can Learn from Dose

• TV advertising can be performance-driven when paired with the right platform and measurement tools.

• High-budget production is not a requirement — UGC-style creative can perform just as well, if not better.

• CTV and linear TV can work together, offering broad reach and precise targeting under one roof.

• Testing and attribution are key — including post-purchase surveys, incrementality testing, and MMM.

The takeaway: Dose’s story proves that TV is no longer just a brand awareness play. With the right strategy, it’s a measurable, scalable channel that can complement — and outperform — traditional performance platforms like Meta and Google.