How TechStyle Keeps Selling Amid Facebook's Targeting Woes

With more people choosing to opt out of excessive data tracking, targeting audiences across platforms like Facebook has become more tricky for brands like Fabletics and Rihanna's Savage x Fenty. It was “very hard in the beginning,” when Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency in 2021, said Baylie Minney, head of media measurement at TechStyleOS, an operations and services provider for brands like Fabletics and Rihanna’s lingerie line, to geographically launch, scale and grow across product categories. Along with a change in performance across platforms, such as Facebook, the cost of advertising became inevitably expensive too. TechStyleOS runs a membership subscription model and currently has 5 million active members. It uses paid advertising on Facebook, Instagram and others to promote its subscription service. TechStyleOS spends millions of dollars annually across all of its digital marketing platforms, between 40% and 60% of which previously went into Facebook, the company said. Now, thanks to diversifying to platforms like Google, linear TV and TikTok, that number has dropped to 50% and even less for some of its brands. Facebook Urges Apple to Think of the Small Businesses With iOS 14 Changes Amid a growing labyrinth of privacy laws and privacy-driven decisions by Big Tech companies like Apple, there has been a scarcity in addressable inventory for advertisers. Brands can no longer amass a thick dossier about people and customize ads based on that data collected. For platforms like Facebook, Apple's ATT is expected to result in a revenue loss of almost $12.81 billion this year, according to data management firm Lotame via Insider, diminishing the accuracy of its ads and making the measurement of ad conversions more difficult. “Because you don't have that detailed targeting, it's tough to align a campaign to an audience,” Smartly.io’s CMO, Lyle Underkoffler told Adweek. Although 87% of people prefer opting out of receiving targeted ads, by testing elements of creatives and targeting customers throughout their journey, TechStyleOS has expanded its reach on Facebook by over 30% across all brands. With this, brands have been able to unlock lower media costs, according to the company. Prioritizing creative asset Historically, TechStyleOS produced thousands of ads a week with micro iterations that targeted people at the bottom-funnel, or the last stage in the customer's path to conversion, focusing on acquiring new subscribers across all marketing channels. “As user-level data has become less and less available to advertisers, our multi-touch attribution systems have in turn become less insightful,” said Minney. For example, before Apple’s privacy changes, Fabletics was serving most of its ads to iOS devices and had access to an individual's data across multiple advertising channels, allowing the brand to develop an attribution system to convert consumers. Back then, a campaign would include a product, like high-waisted, three-quarter leggings, on the creative with huge promo offers on the right. The sole intention would be to convert every targeted consumer to a subscriber. We need to meet the customers where they are and speak to them differently at each step.—Bailey Minney, head of media measurement, TechStyleOS Now the creative uses a storytelling narrative by advertising to a broader audience through brand-awareness driving channels, like linear television. As a result, a brand’s message depends on where a consumer is on their journey. For example, a new shopper would see educational ads about the brand, whereas a shopper that is closer to making a purchase would be targeted to subscribe. “We need to meet the customers where they are and speak to them differently at each step,” said Minney. Working with Smartly.io’s AI platform, Viralspace.ai, TechStyleOS can understand what element of creative works for which audience cohorts. Recommendations from Viralspace range from product recommendations on the creative, to text placement and other similar micro iterations to enhance ad performance. “Viralspace allows you to decompose a [creative] asset and get learnings on which parts of the asset are working more advantageous lead to others,” said Underkoffler. “And that that is uncorking new abilities to engage audiences.” Analyzing the next ad dollar spend TechStyleOS is building an attribution model that looks at various market conditions and identifies how much each channel contributes to Fabletics’ daily conversions, for instance. “We use this model in tandem with other internal systems to develop a deep understanding of our media channels and tactics,” said Minney. “It allows us to a feel more confident in where we are going to put our next advertising dollar.” This, along with geo testing with its measurement partner means it doesn’t push media spend towards ineffective channels. For example, a brand could be serving ads in New York and not in California, yet could still be seeing conversions in the latter, meaning that spending money in that state is less necessary. When Fabletics rolled out two campaigns on Facebook, one with the objective of driving brand awareness and another driving reach, the former objective outperformed the latter campaign. However, with geo testing, the brand scaled both these objectives across different states and found that the reach campaign made more conversions through ads. “We pulled the money out of the brand awareness and shift it more into the reach objective,” said Minney. Apple iOS 15 Has Marketers Poised for Hardship Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that TechStyle carried out lift testing via Facebook.