Resident got its start in 2017, when founders Eric Hutchinson, Ran Reske, Craig Schmiezer, Sharon Dagan, Tomer Hatav, and Scott McLeod set out to make high-quality, affordable memory foam mattresses available online. In just three years, the company grew to $500 million in sales and secured $130 million in funding.
This is the story about how a seasoned head of acquisition marketing helped Resident use TV streaming advertising to build a stronger brand, attract and engage more customers, reduce dependence on social, and fuel impressive business growth.
Resident is a house of digitally-native brands in the home-goods space, with a mission to provide customers with better choices when it comes to everyday home products.
The brand owns and operates multiple products including the award-winning Nectar, DreamCloud, Awara, Level Sleep, Cloverlane, and Siena.
Jared Brody is Resident's VP of Acquisition. He has been doing growth marketing since before it came to be known by that term. Starting out in telemarketing in 1998, he has witnessed the field’s rapid development while never losing sight of the fundamentals.
“It comes down to making more than you’re spending and doing what works until it doesn’t,” Brody said. “Growth is about testing and learning from your tests. It’s about constantly pushing those limits until your numbers even out and you find what’s next.”
Jared never imagined working at a direct-to-consumer (DTC) mattress brand. He admits that at first glance, the space seemed saturated. But he was won over by the people at Resident. He soon found himself heading an advanced, data-driven marketing team that would help the brand compete in a crowded market.
Since 2019, Jared has helped Resident stay on the path of steady growth by uncovering new opportunities for the brand. With a keen focus on effective ad spend and a data-founded approach to media, Jared has discovered the biggest challenges and opportunities of scaling DTC brands.
Everybody sleeps. So that means everyone is a potential Resident customer, right? Not quite. Resident has been successful because it knows how to use data to connect with the right audience.
“Our challenge as a mattress brand is to be as specific and targeted in our marketing as possible,” Brody said. “That means having the right data infrastructure to support our marketing and operations. It’s also about knowing how and what to test to uncover new opportunities.
From day one, Resident’s acquisition strategy has been grounded in data. Starting with small budgets, Jared figured out the right combination of creative and audience targeting that worked. They fine-tuned their multi-touch attribution (MTA) models to account for the channels they used. From there, it was easy to assign key performance indicators, or KPIs, to assess performance and make scaling easier. Spoiler alert: this methodology would pay dividends when they branched out into TV streaming.
“We’re performance-oriented and data-centric,” Brody said. “For us, being data-driven means amassing all the data we can get our hands on and putting together detailed models of paths to conversion. From there, we look at the results and analyze how each platform and fluctuations in spend within each platform affects these paths to conversion.”
During the fall of 2021, many DTC marketers began to look for a more diverse media mix due to Apple's iOS 14.5 update, as they were faced with a lack of incoming reporting data but also because of the difficulty attributing the remaining data to different demographics. Many growth marketing teams confronted challenges from iOS changes. But Jared’s team was prepared and already looking towards the next channel: TV streaming.
As Resident began to scale beyond social, Brody invested in TV streaming advertising to build brand awareness and make retargeting more efficient. They made this decision based on output from their multitouch attribution (MTA) model and after testing vendors. The same data infrastructure that had had helped them grow on search and social now pointed the way to TV streaming.
"This is important in light of some patterns we’ve observed about streaming as a medium. It turns out an audience might not be at their most receptive when they’re actually streaming content. But that’s okay, because with Roku’s first-party data, we can reach them on a different screen when they’re more receptive,” said Brody.
In other words, TV streaming resulted in both broad audience reach and delivering a large and engaged audience that Brody’s team could retarget.
The key to making both reach and retargeting work? OneView by Roku, the ad buying platform built for TV streaming.
“Working with a streaming-first ad platform has been a totally different experience from just running a streaming ad. The OneView platform is the key difference. It allows us to bring all the elements together—inventory, data, scale, machine learning, identity, and measurement," said Brody.
Brody and his team leverage the Roku Core 6 a framework that is designed to help growth marketers take what makes them successful on search and social and apply it to TV streaming.
Resident didn’t have to go it alone as they adopted TV streaming. Roku was there every step of the way to nurture their success on the platform.
“We look for partners rather than just providers,” Brody said. “A true partner can help us get the data we need and work with us on our data-driven approach. We like to work with subject matter experts in their platforms just as we’re subject matter experts in our business. We look for that partnership of equals and a meeting of the minds.”
“Efficiency isn’t just our yardstick for marketing outcomes; it’s how we do everything as a distributed team,” Brody acknowledged. “Marketing and data infrastructure efficiency aren’t possible if you don’t have human organizational efficiency. You need teamwork. You need a stellar team.”
This goes beyond just analyzing and reacting to the right data. It’s about understanding what’s in the hearts and heads of your customers.
“Success in data-driven marketing is about listening to your customers,” Brody said. “You have to listen through the data, but you also have to listen to their feedback. Like authenticity, listening starts internally. You have to build it into your culture at a deep level.”
“We built our business on search and social. Our next phase of growth will be based on both performance and branding, and TV streaming will be crucial," confirmed Brody.
TV streaming helped Resident scale their data-driven, highly targeted approach to marketing. As a DTC brand grows, frameworks like Roku’s Core 6 make it possible to reach a wider audience without sacrificing efficiency.As recent platform and OS changes have exposed vulnerabilities in even the most sophisticated acquisition models, the value of customer data has never been clearer. Brands looking to break their dependence on search and social would be wise to follow Resident’s lead by investing in TV streaming.You can find Jared Brody on LinkedIn, and follow Resident here:
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