Parents Media Opps: Purple decreases overall spend but significantly increases TV, digital

Purple Innovation's brand evolution has kept making progress as its campaigns focus on its products' benefits, as revealed by execs in its latest earnings call. Purple's overall marketing spend is dropping - marketing and sales for the past quarter dropped to 29.9% compared YOY to 30%) - so sellers will have the best luck offering ways to help the company optimize a lower budget.

So far this year, iSpot reports Purple has spent approximately $8.2m on national TV commercials, up 26% from the approximately $6.5m it spent within the same 2020 timeframe. The company ended up spending approximately $19.4m on this channel last year, almost double the approximately $10.6m it spent in 2019. Purple's commercials of 2021 have targeted millennials and Gen-X viewing shows such as Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Guy's Grocery Games, Blue Bloods and NCIS: Los Angeles.

According to Pathmatics, the company has allocated roughly $63.5m toward digital ads YTD, around double the roughly $38.6m it had allocated by this point last year. Purple's estimated full-year spend of 2020 nearly tripled to $146.4m compared to that of $53.9m of 2019. Since the beginning of 2021, the company has earned ~15.7b digital impressions via desktop video (42%), Facebook (36%), desktop display (16%), Instagram (4%) and mobile display (1%) ads. Top site destinations of this year's desktop video ads include yahoo.com (49%) and finance.yahoo.com (35%).

As you can tell, Purple is primarily targeting millennials and Gen-X right now; however, it's also targeting Gen-Z through Facebook ads. The data above certainly doesn't reflect the drops in spend mentioned in the call. Purple does largely target parents. I've also noticed OTT ads for this company via Hulu. Purple primarily operates as an eCommerce site, but it's also expanding its brick-and-mortar presence.

Agency & martech readers - It's been almost a year since Veritone One became the mattress company's audio advertising (digital) AOR last June, so Purple has expired from our VAI and, in other words, is unlikely to add more agencies to its roster anytime soon.