We are getting very close to the end of the year now. We only have a few weeks left to maximize performance, audit what worked and what didn’t this year and plan for 2026.
Historically, December is still an extremely strong month for DTC sales. You should still be pushing as hard as you possibly can to capture any and all existing demand before the year is over. There is still a ton of shopping happening for the holidays with general purchases for yourself, and gifts for your family, friends, co-workers, etc so now is not the time to slow down.
But with that being said, December is also the best time to audit what worked and what didn’t work for you this year. If you own a brand or work at one, you need to do a year end recap with your team sometime over the next 1-2 weeks. You are going to want to go deep into the weeds and look at monthly metrics, which channels outperformed vs underperformed, what you need to cut vs keep from your budget and where you need to double down next year. You should also be proactively identifying where you’d like to spend money and what new initiatives you want to pursue heading into 2026.
January is typically another really strong month for DTC but for very different reasons than December. I always describe January as the wellness superbowl where there are a bunch of new year, new me resolutions. Not all categories do well but I think beauty and supplements, fashion and apparel, home goods, and electronics tend to be the categories that stand out.
If you are putting together your budget and channel mix for 2026, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, you should be asking yourself, where are my competitors not spending money today where I can actually compete to win sales and attention?
We all know that almost every DTC brand is already spending money on Meta, Google, TikTok and email. But what other channels exist where you could have an edge in 2026?
One of the places I’ve been telling a lot of my clients to look at is CTV and there are a bunch of reasons for that. First of all, it’s one of the only channels that’s not currently being disrupted by AI.
Think about what’s happening to Google and Meta right now. On Google, you have AI recommendations and “zero click search.” The little blue links are still important but they’ll likely become less and less relevant over time.
And with the rise of AI, there is more and more machine generated content across the board that is infiltrating our feeds. Even with Google, most company blog posts that you find via search are now being written by AI. And more and more AI images and videos are popping up inside of Meta and TikTok every single day.
But there’s one channel that’s largely protected from the influx of AI content and that’s CTV. Yes, you could run AI generated ads here but the vast majority of advertisers don’t. You have real media, featuring real people, on the largest screen in your prospect’s home. No major streaming service is making AI shows. It’s just a very different environment and landscape to run ads on vs what’s happening across search and social right now.
On top of that, unlike paid social and paid search, you have far less competition from other advertisers. On Google, there are literally billions of web pages being indexed and only the first 1-2 pages of search results actually matter. There is this famous saying that if you want to hide something where no one will ever find it, just make sure that you put it on the third page of Google. Spending all of your time and money on SEO and trying to beat out the millions of other brands who have done the same over the last 20 years is probably not the best strategy. The way I think about it is that if you don’t have a meaningful chance to rank on page 1 or 2 of Google or in the AI previews from Gemini or ChatGPT, it’s not worth it. On Instagram on the other hand, roughly one out of every 5 posts that you see is an ad.
When you compare that with CTV, you might only see 5-10 ads throughout the entirety of watching a 2 hour movie. There is far less competition for your attention on CTV which means that your ad and your brand can actually stand out.
And the reality is, almost all streaming viewers are primed and ready to watch your ads. With the shift to ad-supported streaming tiers 96% of Roku households (which represents over 100M user accounts) now see video ads, and 74% of TV watching is now ad supported.The inventory is there. The consumer is ready. It’s just that you, the brand, need to take action to get your message onto their screens.
The second reason I like CTV is because of the size of the canvas.
As most people know, the vast majority of traffic on social platforms is coming from mobile devices. So even if you are running the latest iPhone 17 Pro Max, you’re only seeing ads on a screen size of 6.9 inches. That’s not a lot of digital real-estate to make a memorable impression via your campaigns. Compare that to TVs where the most common screen-size is between 55-64 inches. And the fastest growing segment of TV purchases are 75+ inch screens. Consumers are opting for larger and larger screens every year which creates a fundamentally different surface for you, the brand, to display your ads on.
Just think about it, are you more likely to remember one of the 5-8 ads you might see when watching a 2 hour long movie on a 55 inch+ screen or one of the 100+ ads you might see while doomscrolling for 2 hours before bed on TikTok or Instagram on your 5-7 inch screen? In my experience, TV always wins here.
Another reason is around the targeting capabilities. You can now do hyperlocal and precision targeting to make sure your creative gets in front of the right audience. TV is no longer about broad national buys. When you have self-serve platforms like Roku Ads Manager, they allow you to do ZIP-code level targeting to reach whoever you want to. This is perfect for using CTV to drive in-store foot traffic for your brand.
For example, let’s say you’re a DTC beauty brand and you also have your products inside local Sephora’s. You can run targeted CTV ads to the zip-codes in and around the areas where stores carry your product and make the CTA be “Shop now at your nearest Sephora.” I have seen a bunch of brands do things like this and they are getting excellent results.
But even if you are 100% DTC native and only sell via eCommerce, you have many of the same targeting parameters that you would expect from other digital channels. You can target by location, demographics, interests, income levels, and more. You can also upload a CSV of your customer list from Shopify and if there is an email on file that matches with an email on someone’s Roku account, you can target them.
Another thing I love is that CTV is no longer just a brand awareness and top of funnel reach focused channel. With Roku’s action ads, you can now drive interactive conversions directly from CTV. Roku developed this new format where you can have overlays on your ads to “learn more, or sign up, or buy now” etc on your ads. If a viewer wants to engage, all they need to do is click OK from their remote and it will automatically send the user a text message to move forward. You can have this message say whatever you want and you can send a special link to a landing page that you built just for CTV for them to check out.
This alone has turned viewers of CTV from casual streamers into direct response shoppers while sitting on their couch or in bed watching movies and shows.
I think there are a ton of reasons to be bullish on CTV which is why I have been recommending it. Not to mention the CPMs are often cheaper than most other digital channels. If you are running ads on Meta in a competitive niche like cookware for high-income earning households in NYC, LA, Chicago etc, you are going to be paying anywhere from $20-50 CPMs. On CTV, you might be paying $10-20 CPMs for the same impressions. I have even seen CTV CPMs in non-major markets be $5-10 which is a steal right now.
Because of tools like Roku Ads Manager, you can get setup and start running campaigns for as little as $500. You can reuse creative from other channels, upload it to Roku, utilize their video upscaling engine to make your ads super sharp for the big screen, select your budget and targeting and start running ads today.
It takes about 10-15 minutes to set up, a short period for your creative to get approved once you upload it, then you’re good to go. If you’re reading this, I recommend trying it out this week.
To make it super easy, you can duplicate a landing page for one of your top products, make the URL www.yourbrand.com/tv, update the copy slightly to say “As seen on Roku” make a special offer, and then take the creative you were running to the old LP on Meta, repurpose it for CTV, go to Roku and build a campaign. A junior assistant could do this for you in less a few hours this week. Start with a very small budget (a few thousands dollars) test a few different audiences, and see how it performs.
Because Roku has their own pixel that you can install on your site, you will be able to see the performance of your campaigns immediately after running. It will show you a breakout of site traffic increases, conversion, CPMs, ROAS etc just like any other digital ad platform would.
Outside of other tools like mobile app ads or SMS, CTV is one of the top places to test for brands. You want to get on this before it gets saturated like Meta and Google. The good news is I think we still have a ton of time. There is a massive user base on Roku and there are new shows and inventory being added every day but there’s a mismatch between how many advertisers are running campaigns vs how many users there are and how much attention there is.
The last thing I’ll point out is the quality of these views. Again, when you are on TikTok, you are seeing short 15-60 second clips. You’re casually scrolling and might watch 200+ videos in a single session before bed. With CTV, you have someone’s attention for 1-2 hours straight while they are trying to watch a show or movie. They are focused, and watching with intent because it’s a narrative, story driven show vs a dance or a trend or a meme that you might see on other channels. I just think the audience's mindset of how they are consuming this media is something you can’t overlook. TikTok and IG are for small hits of dopamine from funny reels throughout the day. CTV is more serious, prolonged, focused attention spans which is why I think ads on this channel do well.
Anyway, if you want to give this a try, you can sign up for Roku Ads Manager here.
All of marketing is testing and experimentation to figure out what performs and if you haven’t tried this yet, you really should. No matter what I guarantee you will learn something and you will walk away as a more experienced marketer. And the best thing that can happen is it ends up being one of your new top performing channels and all you had to do was start running ads instead of waiting for the “perfect time.”
Alright, I hope this helps and I’ll see you back here on Sunday!
Thanks again for reading.
I hope that you have a great rest of the week.
Nik