• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 1, 2022

You probably never heard of Eaglemoss, but their products are as familiar as Batman, Star Trek, Wonder Woman and The Beatles -- because that is precisely what they are.

The company has been licensing the largest entertainment properties into the collectibles market, lining the shelves of comics and video game shops for many years. But as those retail venues collapsed over the last decade, the company has moved from a 70% wholesale business only eight or nine years ago to a 70% D2C business now.

As Imran Hassan, Eaglemoss’s vice president of global ecommerce & marketplaces, relayed at last week’s Brand Insider Summit: D2C, this took an exceptionally tuned performance marketing team across search and social channels. But as he saw his CPMs skyrocket from $2 pre-pandemic to $6 now on his go-to platforms, Eaglemoss had to buy smarter. And Hassan brought the receipts.

In one of the more tactically detailed sessions we have had at an Insider Summit in some time, Imran shared a range of insights about how he is using new and old channels to fight the high cost of customer acquisition.

Investment in branding and content does pay off, he contends, often in more effective social and search buys that offsets their higher costs. Don’t mistake newish channels like Snapchat and TikTok as playpens; they are aging in the same way Facebook did.

Personalization into display advertising has lifted their CTR over 20%. And, yes, NFTs have a place in marketing, but they will require creative execution.

Yeah, there was a lot here. The interview with MediaPost’s Deputy Editorial Director of Events, Lisa Singer can be seen in full above.