• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 17, 2018

When The Basement became Schlage’s agency of record in 2017, it transitioned the door hardware brand’s ad-buying strategy from traditional linear TV to programmatic, resulting in a year-over-year sales growth of about 30% online and more than 9% in stores.

Together with Centro, a media-buying technology, The Basement set out to integrate parts of the campaign strategy that brought in social, search, traditional, and out-of-home strategies.

Centro integrated data from Samba TV, an interactive TV monitoring app, and programmatic inventory in Placemedia, a digital video supply-side platform.

With several key strategies in tow, The Basement and Centro set out to find the networks that would reach home owners and households generating more than $75,000 in annual revenue.

Schlage wanted to raise awareness for its products by creating and influencing secondary targets with more frequency, less waste and at greater scale. It also wanted to extend reach and frequency by developing an audience profile with demographics and psychographics, as well as through traditional Nielsen and comScore audiences and secondary audiences -- and do it all with increased transparency.  

“The data from the digital display ads informed the decisions for the TV creatives,” Brian Philips, The Basement's co-founder and CEO, said -- adding that the key performance indicators for digital and TV are very different, but the strategies complement one-another.

The results drove 60% lift in ad efficiency, six times the improvement in creative performance, 50% year-over-year increases in qualified leads, and three times the increase in return on investment.

Based on the same budget in 2017 that Schlage had in 2016 using programmatic, the campaign gained 2.5 times the number of impressions. The CPM was drastically lower in the 2016 plan versus the 2017 plan, due to the strategic targets and the capability of programmatic TV technology to determine more efficient dayparting and consumer targets.

Still, the biggest challenge remains tracking the attribution from TV to searches and the entire path to purchase. The company is able to determine the amount of revenue that searches drove. All sales are through co-op partners like Home Depot and Lowe's, so the transaction ultimately gets lost along the path.