BONUS: An Ecommerce Brand’s Guide to TV that Performs

Summary

Podcast Summary: BONUS – An Ecommerce Brand’s Guide to TV that Performs

Podcast: The Marketing Architects
Episode Date: July 13, 2026
Guests: Stacey Haas (Chief Strategic Growth Officer, Marketing Architects) & Aaron Polander (Chief Brand Officer, GovX)
Event: Commerce Next Growth Show

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Episode Overview

This special episode features a talk from Commerce Next, focusing on how ecommerce brands can successfully leverage and measure TV as a marketing channel. Stacey Haas and Aaron Polander deconstruct myths about TV’s relevance and measurability, share actionable frameworks for tracking effectiveness, and detail GovX’s journey with TV as a growth lever. The discussion emphasizes both the short and long-term impacts of TV advertising, complements with real-world examples, and provides clear recommendations for marketers on strategy and measurement.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Changing Role and Perception of TV

• TV is Not Dead: Despite assumptions, many people still watch TV, including live sports and streaming.
  • Quote: “TV’s not dead. So we already debunked one myth for the day.” (00:35, Stacey Haas)
• TV’s Accountability Gap: Historically, TV was seen as hard to measure compared to digital, but new methods are bridging that gap.
• Full Funnel Impact: TV not only drives immediate purchase but also builds brand awareness and future demand.

TV’s Measurement Challenges and Solutions

• Short-Term Metrics: Immediate impact can be tracked via:
  • Response rates, cost per visit/order, calls, QR scans, website visits, CPM.
  • Quote: “CPM is an easy one to compare against the other channels ... Cost per response, cost per thousand impressions, cost per new member, cost per order.” (06:53, Aaron Polander)
• Long-Term Metrics: TV affects brand recall, trust, and downstream digital channels:
  • Brand lift studies, Media Mix Modeling (MMM), Lifetime Value (LTV), share of voice.
  • Geo-based incrementality tests (holdout markets) offer insight into causal impacts.
  • Quote: “TV’s biggest effects aren’t showing up in the short-term ... most powerful effects don’t even show up within the first 24 hours, maybe not even the first couple months or maybe even years.” (07:09, Stacey Haas)

TV’s Amplifying Effect on Other Channels

• TV boosts performance channels (paid search, social) by driving branded search and making other investments more efficient.
  • Quote: “TV also boosts other performance channels as well. So it makes all of your channels work harder.” (04:44, Stacey Haas)
  • Example: One client saw a 60% increase in branded search right after airing a TV commercial during live sports.

GovX Case Study: Brand Building Meets Performance

• Who is GovX?: A member-only ecommerce site serving military, first responders, government employees, and their families.
• TV as a Growth Engine:
  • Started TV in 2020 after seeing diminishing returns from digital; switched to a “reform performance marketer” mindset.
  • Shifted from last-click, short-term focus to a 60:40 budget split (long-term brand:short-term performance).
  • Initial attempts led to lessons learned, e.g., turning off all marketing was a mistake.
  • TV allowed the brand to tell its story, reach a broader audience, and inject emotional resonance—impossible via search or some social ads.
  • Quote: “TV allows us to tell the story... put humor and emotion and distinctiveness into the market.” (14:51, Aaron Polander)
• Impact:
  • Tripled TV impressions year-over-year while cutting CPM in half.
  • Orders closely tracked with increasing impressions, surprising even leadership.
  • Quote: “We’re seeing growth right now that we would not have anticipated at this stage of the company. And we give a lot of credit to TV for what we're seeing.” (16:18, Aaron Polander)
  • Organization-wide buy-in—including from the CFO—was achieved through “proof” and incremental learning.
  • Currently testing personalized TV creative and moving further into attribution modeling.

Practical Tips for Marketers

Three Closing Tips:

1. Think Full Funnel: TV impacts every stage from awareness to conversion and boosts all digital channels.
2. Use Multiple Measurement Models: Don’t focus solely on instant metrics; validate performance with both short and long-term approaches.
   • Quote: “Don’t just pick one measurement model… You’ve got to have multiple measurement models to validate the success and the efficacy in both the short-term and the long-term.” (17:27, Stacey Haas)
3. Embrace the Different Mindset: Measuring TV efficacy isn’t “easy,” but it’s entirely possible and justifiable.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On TV’s Measurability:

  “TV might be the OG of doctor channels … infomercials, 1-800 numbers ... But most consumers today have two screens going at all times."
  — Stacey Haas (03:32)

• On Channel Synergy:

  “As TV has grown for us, alongside of it, our performance channels … everything is increasing along with TV, which is why we’ve been doubling down.”
  — Aaron Polander (05:47)

• On Changing Mindset:

  “Step one was mindset change … we now adhere to the 60:40 split. 60% of our marketing budget goes towards the long view, 40% towards the short view.”
  — Aaron Polander (14:33)

• The Single Takeaway:

  “If you leave with one thing today, marketing makes a difference.”
  — Stacey Haas (12:54)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:35 – Debunking TV “Death” Myth and Introduction to Measurement Challenges
• 03:32 – TV’s Direct Response History and Multi-Device World
• 05:47 – TV + Performance Channel Synergy, Short-Term Metrics
• 08:00 – Long-Term TV Impact and Cross-Channel Influence
• 10:28 – GovX’s Brand & Mission Overview
• 12:40 – GovX’s Shift from Digital to TV, Mindset Change
• 16:18 – Concrete Results and What’s Next with Personalization & Attribution
• 17:16 – Final Three-Tip Framework for Marketers

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Tone and Language

Conversational, accessible, and relatable, the speakers blend data-driven advice with personal anecdotes and industry examples. The tone encourages a shift from “old-school performance marketing” to a more holistic, audience-building approach.

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In Summary

This episode delivers a clear, actionable roadmap for ecommerce brands looking to unlock TV’s potent blend of immediate and lasting results. With first-hand case insights and tactical measurement advice, it reframes TV as an accountable—and essential—channel in the modern marketer’s toolkit.

Transcript

[A]

Hello. You're about to listen to a special episode of the podcast. This is a talk that our Chief Strategic Growth Officer Stacey Haas gave with Aaron Polander, the Chief brand officer at GovX. At the Commerce Next Growth show a couple of weeks ago they talk about how to measure a brand channel like tv. And there's a lot of great information here for any marketer who's interested in effectiveness and investing in and measuring brand. Hope you enjoy.

[B]

Hi everyone, thanks for coming and joining us. I know it's jam packed schedule today. I might start with a question. Show of hands. Does anybody in here watch television anymore? Okay, we have TVs not dead. So we already debunked one myth for the day. Live sports. FIFA. Crazy. Yeah. Streaming. Streaming tv. How many brands are in the room? Okay, good amount of brands. You feel like you've just got streaming TV measurement mastered. That's why you're here today. Okay, awesome. We got a good audience then. Well, as everybody knows, TV's been around a long time but it's not the easiest thing to measure. And as E commerce marketers. So oftentimes you're like I know how to calculate my roas, my cac, whatever metrics that you're tackling for digital. But it's a lot harder to measure across television. So we're going to spend a little bit of time on that today. As was just mentioned, I'm Stacy Haas. I am Chief Strategic Growth Officer at Marketing Architects. I spent the majority of my career at a company called Epsilon where I ran the data practice. But I got my start in this industry at DoubleClick many years ago. I'm often referred to as one of the first five. So it was DoubleClick Mafia. We can talk about that later if you'd like. And. And this is Aaron.

[C]

Hi, I'm Aaron Palander, Chief brand officer at GovX. Like was mentioned. I've been at GovX for almost 12 years. Overall I've had about 20 years in the E commerce and marketing space. The last I'd say six of which have included tv. And excited to tell you some of our story about that today. What better way to start off a session about TV than to show you a commercial. We have three commercials running currently for GovX. Another one we'll show you later. This is one that we did with some content creators from a brand that sell on govx.com called fire department Coffee. These are actual firefighters who have curated a huge following by doing social content and they do content for us as well. This was a video that did really well on paid social and YouTube. We decided to turn it into a TV commercial instead. So this is currently running across the country. Enjoy. Sweet new boots, man. Where'd you get them from?

[A]

Thanks.

[C]

I got them from Goxdot.

[D]

Why did your voice just.

[C]

Hey, Fet, you got the new Yeti cooler?

[B]

Yeah, man, I got this baby at.

[D]

Why is everybody's voice narrow?

[B]

Tell me you got the tickets. Yep, I got them from.

[C]

It's nowhere.

[B]

All right, let's go. What? Awesome.

[C]

It's doing well. Thank you.

[B]

It's doing well. And for those of you who have not heard about marketing architects before, we are an all inclusive TV agency, full service. And what that means is not only do we buy the media and place the media for linear connected TV and ott, we also do the brand strategy and the commercial development, the creative development as well. TV remains today one of the most underutilized channels around. And it's probably because it's so hard to measure and hard to gain budget for it if you're going into test for the first time. Let's face it, it was built for reach and frequency and that's what we've always been told. And it consistently ranks as one of the hardest channels to measure. But it drives results. And it doesn't just drive immediate results in the short term. It drives results through the full funnel. It drives purchases, immediate purchase. But if you're not looking at both short term metrics and long term metrics, you're really going to be losing out on the efficacy of tv. And I would argue that TV might be the OG of doctor Channels. I mean, if you think back to infomercials like proactive nutrisystems, if you think about 1, 800 numbers, I'm probably aging myself, but 588-2300 empire. Sound familiar? Yeah. So TV's arguably one of the most direct response channels that are out there, especially today in an era where where you're sitting and watching television and you also have your smartphone in your hand. So most consumers have two screens going at all times. So if you think about your recent television experiences yourself, if you see something, a QR code or something flash up on a screen in real time, you can click on that and make your purchase right then and there. And you may be surprised to know that according to work, TV drives more sales impact than than Facebook video, which I bet most of you are investing in, and YouTube, which I would bet most all of you are investing in. So TV is driving more immediate sales than either of Those channels and TV also boosts other performance channels as well. So it makes all of your channels work harder. I was recently, just last week talking with a client and they said they had seen a 60% increase in their branded search results right after they saw one of their commercials during a live sporting event. It really amplifies the effectiveness of all downstream channels. So what are you seeing @govx?

[C]

Exactly this. So as TV has grown for us alongside of it, our performance channels, the budget that we're putting towards that immediate 5% of people that are in market to buy something, the ads geared towards them on paid search, paid social, et cetera, everything is increasing along with tv, which is a reason why we've been doubling down.

[B]

And you mentioned 5% of people that are in the market. That means 95% of your potential prospect market are not in the market today. But you need to be planting the seeds with them and growing that what we call mental availability with those that could be a customer of yours. So how do you measure immediate response on television? There are a lot of signals that you can track. You think about leads, orders, calls into a call center, QR scans, website visits. You need to be able to connect those short term signals back to when a commercial spot aired. And Erin, you look at things like response rate, cost per visit, cost per new member acquisition. What are some other shorter term metrics you're looking at?

[C]

Yeah, I mean CPM is an easy one to compare against the other channels. So we really do take the approach of reaching a broad audience and that's a starting point for us. But cost per response, cost per thousand impressions, cost per new member for us, cost per order. These are the short term things we look at.

[B]

So important to measure the short. But TV's biggest effects aren't showing up in the short term. The most powerful effects don't even show up within the first 24 hours, maybe not even the first couple of weeks or months or maybe even years. So you're going to have to have different measurement approaches to measure both the short of those and the long of those. And TV drives brand recall. According to Comcast, TV ads drive two times higher ad recall than mobile. And when TV commercials combined with mobile, that outperforms just digital advertising alone. And if you think about like that organic search that showed up last week, your attribution model may say, oh, we're attributing that to the organic search channel, but it very well could have been from a seed that was planted from a television commercial that they saw last week. Last month or last year. And TV is the most important influence at every stage of the purchase funnel. And this is beyond YouTube, beyond social media. This is from a study that was just recently released and it's also the most trusted ad medium ahead of social and ahead of influencer as well. And that awareness and trust transfers directly to your brand. So how do you measure the longer term effects? There are a number of ways to do this. Think about brand studies or brand lift studies where you're measuring awareness, recall someone's intent before or after they were exposed to your ad. Media Mix modeling and econometrics modeling. These are statistically built models that can help isolate each of your channel's revenue contribution. Ltv. If you've been listening to a lot of the content Yesterday and today, LTV's come up quite a bit and then cross channel. So TV's biggest impact can really come not just to attribute directly to tv, but it's showing up and helping the other channels as well, your other digital channels. A lot of our more sophisticated clients are running geo based incrementality tests now as well, where they're doing hold back panels and showing, picking five or 10 test markets to run TV ads in versus not and really looking at the revenue lift of what's working and what's not in those markets and the difference there. But no single metric is going to be the right metric. You really need to measure a lot of different things and do it all at once. So multiple attribution models are going to give you a more complete picture of performance and that really should track both the long and the short of things together. And how do you do that? If you look at some of these shorter term metrics that are on a weekly basis. Erin, you mentioned cpm, reach impressions, sales, maybe in a few months after launching into television, it's brand engagement types of signals. In six months and maybe a year doing brand studies or brand lift studies and then after 12 months and beyond looking at market share share, a voice in your market, within your category. So now I'm going to turn it over to Aaron. He's going to talk to us about how GovX uses TV to drive both performance and results. And I would say out of many of our clients that we really have a shared belief system in both measuring the short and the long. And that's why you make such a great partner.

[C]

Thank you. All right, so quick background. Like I said, I've been with GovX for about 12 years. We started TV in 2020. There's been some ups and downs along the way. But like Stacy just said in that previous slide was depicting, we really have kind of experienced the full phase of TV and stops and starts. And now we're in a position with a great partner, with a shared belief system about how we want to go to market and how we want to measure that we've seen just tremendous performance with over these last couple of years. So I'm going to go through that just a little bit first, if you don't know govx, we are a closed discount shopping site just for the service community. So those who serve our country and our communities, current former military, government, law enforcement, firefighters, public school teachers, nurses, really those that do the service jobs for us every single day, it's free to be a member. You just have to verify that you did or do one of those jobs. Then you have access to govx.com and you also have access to any other e commerce site or ticketing site that uses GovX ID, our verification service as the gate to the discounted offering. We just passed 12 and a half million members. We have about 2,700 brands on govx.com right now. There's more than 5,000 that use govx ID on their own sites. So we're in our 15th year. I've seen much of that growth over the last 12. We're also a mission driven company. Every order that comes through Gov X, a portion of that sale goes towards a military or first responder nonprofit. So we've donated over $3 million to date. That number is getting bigger every year as we drive more orders. While TV is performance also, I would call myself a bit of a reformed performance marketer. Like many people that were in the space 10, 15 years ago, Facebook, paid search, all of that and quick return have to get your dollar back on the dollar spent within the hour. That's really what GovX did for the first decade of our existence. 3ish years ago we really started shifting that mindset into this can't be it because we were hitting a ceiling of who we were reaching the efficiency of our spend and things were just kind of stalling out a little bit. We even got to the point of shutting everything down for a quarter. Just turn off all marketing and then layer stuff back in incrementally to see what happens. I can tell you from our experience a bad idea. The impacts of that were long lasting and negative. And surprise, surprise, marketing makes a difference. So that did not last thankfully.

[B]

Leave with one thing today. Marketing makes difference.

[C]

So the paid search. It's a Paid social, they're still an important part of what we do. Targeting matters when appropriate. But we really shifted that mindset to we want to reach as many people as possible with the govx story. That pain and over reliance we felt on the paid social paid search got to get our dollar back right now or else it's not working. It just led to over reliance on we got to send more emails. The declining efficiency in the paid social paid search like I mentioned and it just was not a strategy that was going to win long term. So it took some time to get it right. Like I said, we've been doing this since 2020. It's our kind of second go around, I would say on TV. But TV has been the answer for us and step one was mindset change. So I mentioned like reform performance marketer really diving into what is the theory out there of what's going to work and marketing architects believes these same things. So in that short and long term mindset, just to give you an example on the budget side of things, we now adhere to the 60:40 split. So 60% of our marketing budget goes towards the long view, 40% goes towards that short view. There's a good book that's coming out or is out now called Future Demand and I like the way that that is phrased where you're investing in TV and channels like this for generating that future demand. The current demand is that short term, 5% of people that are actually in market to buy something right now. Our job as brand marketers is to make sure that when somebody actually does enter that 5% zone, they're thinking of gov X and I should check them to see if they have the thing that I'm looking for at a good price. And TV allows us to tell the story of what gov X is, who it's for, what we offer. It allows us to put humor and emotion and distinctiveness into the market. Unlike a paid search ad or in some cases paid social ads. The result of all this, which I'll get into here in a second, has just been that the growth has been unmistakable as TV impressions go up for us now as we invest more and more orders are right along with it. And this has been a process. It hasn't been like we started TV and all of a sudden things skyrocketed. It has been stick with this, invest more, learn from the short term effects like we mentioned, like what's working from a network perspective, daypart perspective, all that. But there's complete buy in now in our organization and as Many of you probably know some of the hardest conversations are with the CFO and justifying the investment. Everybody has bought in. Now. The hard part for me now is things like sports sponsorships. And then we start talking about really hard things to measure. But I want to play one more commercial. We're already getting close to time somehow. But Stacy mentioned that marketing architects, one of the benefits of working with them is that they also produce commercials. So this is a commercial that they created for us. It's one of the three that we have running right now. Much different. It's not going to be as loud as the last one. It does a good job of showing who govx is for and what we offer. It's doing really well and it kind of presents GovX in a different way.

[D]

At govx.com, this is what service looks like. And this because service wears many uniforms. If you or your spouse served military, first responders or government, you've earned more than respect. @govx.com Unlock special savings on the brands you trust because your service should be rewarded every day. Over 1900 brands. Thousands of exclusive discounts just for you. Savings for those who serve. Join for free [e-mail] so the results,

[C]

like I said, have been positive with what we're doing now. The impressions in year one with marketing architects tripled over the prior year. I know we led with kind of connected tv, but while we were doing that, we cut CPM in half. Linear is not dead yet. A lot of people still watch cable TV and it's very cheap. So I suggest you invest there. And like I said, orders are just climbing along with impressions. We're seeing growth right now that we would not have anticipated at this stage of the company. And we give a lot of credit to TV for what we're seeing. What's next for us? We're doing some things with marketing architects around their mass customizer product. So testing NGOs, testing variations of our commercial that tailor to the nursing segment versus the military segment, showing different brands and products, things like that. Continuing to dig deeper into attribution. Mmm is something that we're moving into next and we're just continuing to grow nationally. This is a starting point for us where when we're looking to increase budgets, TV is the first place that we go.

[B]

It does have the ability to be personalized, which I think a lot of people don't know about. Television channel. So as any good commerce next session wraps up, we have three tips for you. First, one, think about TV's impact across the full funnel and on all your other digital channels. So tip number one. Number two, don't just pick one measurement model. Don't just measure immediate. You said looking at it by the hour, by the day. You've got to have multiple measurement models to validate the success and the efficacy in both the short term and the long term, and then evaluate TV in that way. It really is a different belief system. It's not something that's easy to prove, but it is provable, it is measurable, and it does work for brands like Gov X and a lot of others. So thank you all so much for your time today. Flew by.

[C]

It did.

[B]

Oh, and scan this code if you would like to know more information about Marketing Architects and the podcast that we have every week.

[C]

It's a great podcast.

[B]

Thank you.

[C]

Thank you.

[A]

That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor Delos Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing Marketing Architects.