No matter how many sexy labels you slap on TV advertising – like “addressable,” “advanced,” or “performance channel”– some brands just won’t buy it because it’s not easy or cost-effective enough.

Until recently, Breeo, a smokeless fire pit company, was one of those brands. The company got its start with online and social advertising including on Google, Meta and Pinterest.

Breeo first started testing linear TV ads in 2022 for reach. But at the time, it was too expensive and too complicated to determine whether an ad drove a sale, Mike Cantafio, director of ecommerce, told AdExchanger.

Still, the brand needed to raise brand awareness, so it gave TV ad buying another shot last year with TV ad measurement platform Tatari, which has a self-serve campaign manager.

Fast forward to now, and Cantafio said Breeo is ready to make TV an even bigger piece of its marketing strategy after trying Tatari’s new TV planning tool. Breeo was one of a handful of clients that beta tested the product before Tatari formally announced it on Wednesday. It was made generally available earlier this month.

Generating a TV campaign plan

The new media planner, which exists within Tatari’s campaign manager, uses AI to generate TV campaign plans that include the networks, channels, dayparts and spot lengths most likely to help a brand achieve its intended outcome at the desired budget.

After testing Tatari’s new campaign planner for seven months, Breeo saw a 47% decrease in customer acquisition costs and a 68% in return on ad spend.

Like Breeo, many brands are looking for a more organized and cost-friendly approach to buying TV ads, said Tatari CEO Philip Inghelbrecht.

Many brands are looking for self-serve ad platforms to streamline media buying and cut costs. This is particularly important for smaller advertisers and agencies that lack the budget and resources to manage complex TV ad campaigns, Inghelbrecht said.

In the past, Tatari’s clients had to compare campaign reporting across individual publishers – a manual process of many days for human media buyers, said Amit Sharan, the company’s SVP of marketing.

The new media planner generates campaign plans in seconds based on desired budget, reach and frequency, spot length, target audience and outcomes. The planner uses large language models and machine learning to build these plans based on roughly seven years of historic TV ad transaction data from Tatari, including bid pricing, bid clearance rates and overall campaign performance. The new media planner takes advantage of TheViewPoint, the supply-side platform Tatari bought in 2022, which is integrated with most major TV publishers.

The planner also forecasts campaign outcomes based on a brand’s desired result, such as return on ad spend or cost per acquisition.

Breeo’s key metric is cost per site visit, since large appliance purchases that cost upwards of $400 have a long consideration period. But Breeo also looks at branded search, which the brand considers a signal of purchase consideration, Cantafio said.

Homing in on the right viewers

Still, planning a campaign is only half the battle. Brands need to optimize their campaigns based on reporting.

Breeo is also using Tatari’s new planning engine to shift more spend into the networks, programs and dayparts that perform best with its customer base, Cantafio said, which is mostly males with disposable income and, of course, a yard in which to place a fire pit.

Testing Tatari’s new media planner revealed to Breeo that programming on Fox and Magnolia Network channels did well with its target audience in terms of site visits, cost per visit and branded search volume. Other networks, meanwhile, like MSNBC and CNN, generated weaker results, according to Cantafio.

And Breeo also discovered that TV ads airing on weekends drive more site visits than ads airing during the week, he said.

Magnolia Network, which caters to a female audience, would have been a less obvious choice for Breeo – but it makes sense to reach those viewers. Big-ticket items like a luxury fire pit are usually a household purchase rather than one made by an individual, and research suggests that women drive between 70 and 80% of global consumer purchasing.

Over time, Cantafio said, Breeo expects to see more cost savings as it homes in on the TV channels helping drive the most sales.