How Shinesty proved CTV before scaling it for BFCM

When Northbeam measures CTV on a one-day attribution window, about half of its performance goes unseen. When performance goes unseen, it doesn't get credit, and it gets underfunded

Shinesty wasn't willing to let that happen. The underwear and loungewear brand had already reached an estimated 40% of US adults on Meta alone, and CPMs kept climbing as most of that spend retargeted the same audience over and over. Danny Hershey, Shinesty's head of growth, wanted to test CTV properly: set up against specific business goals and measured against the channels the team already trusted.

That's the position a lot of performance marketers are in, heading into BFCM this year: a channel that could work, and a finance team that wants proof before the budget moves toward it.

The math behind the missing half

Marketers default to tight windows for good reason: fast feedback for daily budget calls, and less risk of crediting CTV for a sale another channel already earned. Shinesty's own team wanted one-day attribution too, at first. That instinct isn't wrong, it's just built for channels that convert the way Meta and Google do, but television doesn't convert that way.

Shinesty tested this directly. Using Northbeam's Clicks + Deterministic Views model, they found that only about half of Vibe-attributed purchases landed within a day of the ad. Stretch the window to seven days, and that climbs to roughly 70%. Northbeam's model is what actually surfaced the gap: judged on one day alone, advertisers are missing about half of what CTV is actually driving.

This is the tension our upcoming webinar with Northbeam digs into: how to build a BFCM CTV program that can survive contact with your finance team, with numbers a CFO would actually sign off on.

How Shinesty built a measurable CTV program

Shinesty was very intentional in how they built for their CTV program. They applied the same ethos they apply to every other paid channel.

They indexed on identity, before reach. Shinesty suppressed its all-time purchaser list, a Klaviyo segment built over a decade, and synced its full email non-purchaser list, more than 4 million people who'd engaged with the brand but never bought. That's why 70% of Vibe-driven purchases come from net-new customers, rather than existing buyers Shinesty was already going to convert through other channels.

They moved fast, without a media agency in the loop. Shinesty repurposed existing TV creative, chosen by highest spend and lowest cost per purchase, and went from deciding to test CTV to a live campaign in about a week.

They negotiated their measurement instead of defaulting to it. Shinesty's team wanted a one-day attribution window. Vibe argued for thirty. Using Northbeam's Clicks + Deterministic Views model, both sides tested actual data instead of picking a number and moving on, and landed on seven days as the window that reflected how the channel really performs.

They read CTV the same way they read everything else. Northbeam's native integration with Vibe meant no manual data uploads. Shinesty could pull CTV performance into the same view as every other paid channel, instead of treating it as a separate, harder-to-trust line item.

What it added up to

Over the trailing six months, Vibe has held roughly 1.2x ROAS for Shinesty on a seven-day window. That number reads modestly on its own, but nearly all of that spend is going toward net-new customers by design, not retargeting people Shinesty was already going to convert, so it isn't a number built for direct comparison to a retargeting-heavy channel.

CPMs have averaged under $19 since Shinesty's November launch, including through Q4, with no holiday spike, at a time when most channels get more expensive heading into the same quarter.

CTV has earned a fixed place in Shinesty's budget heading into its biggest quarter, with plans to scale meaningfully above the sustained spend level for BFCM.

Where Shinesty's measurement story goes next

Attribution windows answer when a purchase happened. They don't answer whether it would have happened anyway. That's the harder question, and until now, getting a real answer on CTV meant a managed-service project that took weeks and a dedicated team.

Northbeam just closed that gap with native incrementality testing built directly into the measurement tool marketers already use, and Vibe is the only CTV platform supported at launch.

Shinesty is a natural first case for this. A brand with a purchaser-matched suppression audience, a negotiated attribution window, and months of consistent CPM data already has the measurement foundation an incrementality test depends on. The next step isn't guessing whether CTV is working, it's proving how much of what's already working wouldn't have happened without it.

That test is being built live during the webinar on August 26th. We'll be there to show the setup and walk through what it finds.