Success Stories

The Beer Home Team

Hulu Ad Manager Delivers ‘Wow” Factor for San Diego Real Estate Team.

The brand authority that a business can gain from TV advertising can elicit a wow-factor by appearing next to TV’s biggest shows. However, for many small to medium-sized businesses, the idea of advertising on TV—both traditional and Streaming—has previously felt out of reach due to budgets, complexity and a variety of other reasons.

With the introduction of Hulu Ad Manager, our new self-service platform, businesses of all sizes are now able to advertise on Streaming TV without the restrictions of big budget requirements and complicated campaign management. The Beer Home Team, a San Diego-based real estate company, knows this first hand. Recently, we sat down with Mary Davis, their Marketing Coordinator, to talk with us about the wow-factor they experienced using the platform.

In this interview, she shared their experience with Hulu Ad Manager, the results they’ve seen, and why Streaming TV has been a timely addition to their advertising mix.

Hulu: Please tell us a bit about Beer Home Team and the audience you are trying to reach.

Mary: Beer Home Team is a residential real estate company based in San Diego county. While we serve the entire county, our niche market is selling homes between $700k and $1.3 million located close to major freeways. We’re primarily seller-focused, and our ideal audience is homeowners of any gender ages 25 and up.

We concentrate less on household income and more on how many kids are in a home and their ages. This is because a common reason people want to sell their homes is they have an infant or a kid in high school and find themselves requiring different space needs than their current home provides.

As believers in the value of authority marketing, advertising on Hulu as a local business really sets us apart in our market.

Hulu: What marketing or advertising challenges did you experience that led you to try Streaming TV advertising?

Mary: As believers in the value of authority marketing, advertising on Hulu as a local business really sets us apart in our market. Streaming TV has been a missing piece of our marketing strategy for a while, but it was only recently that everything lined up perfectly for us to finally tackle it.

Streaming TV is interesting because it is way easier to reach our ideal audience and stand out from the crowd, especially as a local business advertising to specific regional demographics. The authority and tie-in with a trusted brand like Hulu also helps our overall brand recognition, allowing us to advertise at an accelerated level.

Though we love and value advertising through traditional TV, trying to get accurate numbers on engagement and track our ROI can be difficult. This is because our commercials are shown to everyone who happens to be tuning in at the time, not just our ideal demographic. Being able to effectively reach our audience has become increasingly important, and there’s much more control of that in the Streaming TV space. Also, it’s another channel where people are watching and accessing content, so for us it’s not “either/or” with regards to TV commercials, it’s “and.”

Which channels and solutions are currently part of your advertising mix?

Mary: Our advertising mix includes billboards, radio ads, print ads, social media ads, webinars, and commercial spots on every local news station. All of these channels work in tandem to create lift for all of our other marketing pieces, so pursuing Streaming TV was the next logical step.

This opportunity for brands without corporate-sized budgets to get on a platform like this really had that ‘wow’ factor, which is what really attracted us.

Hulu: What do you find attractive about advertising through Streaming services compared to other platforms?

Mary: In our eyes, the Hulu brand is very well respected and used by many people. This opportunity for brands without corporate-sized budgets to get on a platform like this really had that “wow” factor, which is what really attracted us. Unlike most of our other advertising channels, Streaming TV advertising also has the added bonus of providing us with a bigger canvas to tell a more thorough story about our brand and what we have to offer.

While social media ads are affordable, they’re not necessarily as effective as Streaming service commercials. This is because people can watch two seconds of our ad on a social media platform and keep scrolling. With a Streaming service, not only are we able to hyper-target our ideal audience, they’re much more engaged, probably due in part to the fact that they can’t skip the commercial.

We’ve also found the cost, ROI, and overall engagement with Streaming TV to be much better than most other channels. With Hulu, the audience might be watching a specific show or binge watching a series and can’t move through those commercials without seeing our ads, and I think that creates an extremely unique opportunity for us.

Hulu: How has your experience been working with Hulu Ad Manager as a self-service solution?

Mary: Overall, the experience has been extremely positive, and there are a couple of aspects I could talk about individually so I’ll answer based on each.

Budget
We were delightfully surprised at the impressions we got within our narrowly targeted audience, so we think our money went pretty far. We even got great feedback from targeted friends and colleagues who saw the ad, so we knew for sure it was working as intended. Also, in cases where we’ve doubled our budget, we have also doubled our impressions, so adding more money has created incredible growth for us.

With Hulu Ad Manager, it literally takes me less than 5 minutes to build a campaign.

Ease-of-Use
Hulu’s self-service solution was really easy to use compared to other channels while also providing us with advanced audience segmentation capabilities. To compare, I needed to take a course to correctly use one of our social media channels because of the overwhelming complexity. With Hulu Ad Manager, it literally takes me less than 5 minutes to build a campaign.

Audience Reach
Hulu Ad Manager makes it easy for us to segment our audience in an intuitive way. We’ve even had friends in our niche demographic of homeowners with kids or teens reach out and say “I saw your Hulu commercial!” while their neighbors who don’t fit in that demographic didn’t see it. So, it’s been cool to see firsthand evidence that we’re reaching the right people.

People who’ve seen our ads on Hulu come to that first meeting with more knowledge and confidence in us as a company that can help them with their needs.

Hulu: What were the business objectives of your campaign and what key metrics do you use to define advertising success?

Mary: For us, a successful “conversion” from all of our ad campaigns means receiving a phone call, which we can then turn into a meeting appointment and ultimately a closed deal. We understand that it takes a long time to foster brand recognition and trust with an audience so that they reach that decision point.

By becoming familiar with us over time across multiple touch points, someone looking to sell their home will immediately think of Beer Home Team. People who’ve seen our ads on Hulu come to that first meeting with more knowledge and confidence in us as a company that can help them with their needs.

The reporting is simple and clean, and I can understand my results in a few short minutes. Compared to other self-service advertising channels we’ve used, it’s a dream.

Hulu: Can you share some of the results from running your ad campaign on Hulu?

Mary: So far our lifetime impressions are at 50k, and our CPM (cost per thousand) is excellent overall. For example, a campaign that only ran for seven days had 28,087 impressions delivered to our preferred audience, and that’s a good number for us. And again, it’s so valuable to know that this number reflects our ideal audience, not a catch-all number for anyone and everyone who happens to be watching at the time.

And the reporting is simple and clean and I can understand my results in a few short minutes. Compared to other self-service advertising channels we’ve used, it’s a dream. So far, we’ve really enjoyed this experience and look forward to creating more ads and exploring more of what Hulu’s self-service solution has to offer.

Learn More About Hulu’s Self-Service Advertising Solution

Thank you so much for your time, Mary! We’re thrilled to hear you’re enjoying your experience so far and can’t wait to see what’s next for Beer Home Team.

Looking for an affordable way to wow your potential customers? Learn more about Hulu Ad Manager —the new way for businesses of all sizes to appear next to TV’s biggest shows.