Momvertising Opps: Carter's cuts back on marketing promotions, focuses on digital events (Score 57)

Carter's increased ad spend in Q4, which was primarily due to increased digital spending, per its Q4 2020 earnings report. It is doing fewer promotions, and instead is simply showing its products to consumers. The company believes digital ads provide the highest ROI and drive more traffic to its website. eCommerce has flourished since the beginning of the pandemic, so Carter's launched a new mobile app and improved its website design. Carter's also started hosting virtual marketing events with such as visits with Santa and PJ parties with celebrity influencers. These events help it reach millennials, which are a growing target audience for the company. 

It also brought Jason Jennings in earlier this year to serve as global marketing activation VP. Jennings most recently served as acting CMO of Amazon, and will be responsible for customer analytics, loyalty, rewards and retail marketing. 

According to iSpot, Carter's only spent around $8.8k on national TV ads in 2020 on one spot during the "Kelly Clarkson Show." It spent about $5.k in 2019. It has not allocated any budget towards this channel so far this year, but this follows the same pattern as the last two years. Lookout for it to run a small campaign in H2. 

Per Pathmatics, Carter's earned 75.2m impressions through Instagram ads (57%), Facebook ads (36%) and desktop display ads (7%). It placed the majority (93%) of these ads site direct onto sites such as instagram.com, facebook.com, thebump.com and sports.yahoo.com. It placed the remainder (7%) through a variety of indirect channels onto sites such as yahoo.com, reddit.com, finance.yahoo.com, brainly.com and ratemyprofessors.com. It spent around $465.1k on digital display ads YTD, a 35% decrease from $628k spent during the same time period of 2020. Full-year spend equaled $3.4m in 2020, just 34% of the $9.9m spent in 2019. 

Pathmatics reports Carter's subsidiary OskKosh B'gosh earned 21.2m impressions YTD through Instagram ads (58%), Facebook ads (36%) and desktop display ads (6%). It placed the majority (94%) of these ads site direct onto instagram.com and facebook.com. It placed the remainder (6%) indirectly through Quantcast and Criteo onto sites such as yahoo.com, wattpad.com, finance.yahoo.com, keloland.com and mapquest.com. So far this year, the brand spent around $132.6k on digital display ads, an 86% increase from $71.3k spent during the same time frame of 2020. It spent around $687.4k in 2020, just 30% of the $2.2m spent in 2019. 

Sellers-- Carter's mainly targets Gen-Z and millennial women (moms) through digital display ads. It does invest a small amount in national TV ads, but normally not until the second half of the year. It also invests in local broadcast TV ads, per Kantar. Sellers that can provide a high ROI and can get ads in front of millennial and Gen-Z moms will likely have the most success. Contact this company offering digital display ads space. 

Agency & martech readers-- I believe Carter's has an in-house media team with Organic serving as digital AOR and Edelman providing PR. I do not think the new VP has authority over the agency roster, so these relationships should be stable. You will probably have better luck looking for other opportunities.