Carl’s Jr.® and PMG mean business with IRIS-enabled™ PMPs

PMG used IRIS-enabled PMPs to target audiences watching CTV for Carl’s Jr, and they converted at a higher rate than all other targeting methods.

YEAR

INDUSTRY

FORMAT

2024

QSR

CTV

Founded in 1941, Carl’s Jr. has been a West Coast favorite for over 80 years, known for their iconic charbroiled burgers. Today, they have more than 1,000 locations across the U.S. and serves 28 countries worldwide

PMG is a global marketing and technology solutions company that helps the world’s most iconic brands connect with humans through media, strategy, creative and insights, powered by Alli, our proprietary technology program.

CHALLENGE

Reaching the right people at scale

Carl’s Jr. understands that young hungry males on a budget are a key target audience for driving sales to their restaurants across the U.S. While QSR brands have traditionally allocated large budgets to cable and broadcast advertising, CTV offers a medium that pairs high-impact and brand-building awareness with the accountability, targeting, and feedback loop of lower-funnel digital media.


While offering more opportunities for geo-targeting, CTV presents challenges for measurement and planning, where premium content is available on native apps and is distributed across thousands of FAST channels and other streaming services. 


Carl’s Jr. tasked their agency PMG with the challenge of placing CTV ads to their target audience in specific regions in the U.S. to drive in-store visits and sales.

“With CTV, you may have several people that live in the home. One person might be a 55-year-old male and the other might be that 20-year-old. What’s interesting about this approach with IRIS.TV is the ability to make sure we reaching not just the right households, but the right individuals within the household. We are really interested in finding out if targeting the right programs and the right context...would result in better ROI.”


Jennifer Tate
CMO
CKE Restaurants

SOLUTION

Reaching the right people at the right moment

In addition to targeting first-party identity and demographic data, PMG looked to target content that aligned with the interests of Carl’s Jr.’s customers.


Carl’s Jr.’s customers tend to be younger and male. A significant proportion are Hispanic and are interested in video games, sports, and anime. PMG targeted run-of-network content that aligned with these interests, as well as IRIS-enabled PMPs, a solution that targets curated CTV inventory with video-level contextual data enriched by AI.


IRIS.TV’s data partners, including Captify, GumGum, KERV.ai, Pixability, and Silverpush, utilize AI to analyze CTV content frame-by-frame to create contextual segments via the IRIS.TV platform.

Doug Paladino
Programmatic Director

“IRIS.TV is a solve for fragmentation in CTV as users are consuming content across hundreds of apps. If we want to target “Anime” content, it’s unrealistic to go to every single app and have them each curate anime content for us. IRIS.TV gives us a centralized solution across all apps that they are integrated with. It’s a good way to scale our targeting contextually.”


MEASUREMENT

Can IRIS-enabled contextual data drive store visits and sales?

Carl’s Jr. determined that store visits were the critical KPI. They use short-term, real-time measurement using credit card data to understand which household saw the ad and whether that household transacted at Carl’s Jr.


The campaign was executed across millions of impressions on IRIS-enabled CTV inventory from thousands of streaming apps and FAST channels. PMG used their DSP to layer on 140 U.S. DMAs to ensure the desired in-market audiences were reached.

RESULTS

IRIS-enabled contextual data drives superior lift for in-store visits

CTV viewers targeted by IRIS-enabled PMPs converted at a higher rate than all other targeting tactics deployed by PMG, including 1st-party identity and behavioral data, as well as content-based strategies, including run-of-network.

35%

+21%

Higher Than Average of Other Tactics

Incremental Visit Lift

Michael Treon
Head of Connected TV Strategy

“IRIS.TV enables us to scale beyond human-centric curation and audience-based targeting alone. The scale and segmentation across FAST inventory not only offer us incremental delivery against our audience and strategy but afford us the ability to message within key environments and alongside relevant content. In addition, it's delivering results that drive direct business outcomes for our clients.”

RESULTS

IRIS-enabled contextual data
drives sales lift and ROAS

Additionally, IRIS-enabled PMPs drove a 152% incremental sales lift and were the most cost-efficient with more than double return on ad spend.

152%

2.2x

Incremental Sales Lift

ROAS

“​​We are always looking for new ways to advance our ability to serve current and potential guests messaging in relevant communications channels, particularly when those strategies can drive business outcomes at scale. We've been very encouraged by the performance of our IRIS.TV partnership. This is a unique combination of targeting ability, contextual relevance, high ROI, and scale which will always be important for us.”


Jennifer Tate
CMO
CKE Restaurants

LEARN MORE

Read the full case study and learn how brands and agencies are leveraging video-level contextual data to drive superior results in CTV.

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