Dickies CTV Campaign Scores With DIY Spots Created Using Spaceback’s CTV Launchpad

Dickies social content is used to create an ad for CTV

Ad tech has been mostly focused on the media-buying part of commercials. Artificial intelligence is being used to find audiences for marketers to target, deliver the right commercials to the right devices and measure how many consumers saw the message and how that exposure impacted their opinions and behaviors.

What those ads say is increasingly being shaped by AI. Why? Because its cheaper and faster than traditional commercial production. But also because with target audiences becoming more specific it makes sense to have messages more closely tailored for those viewers.

“I've been in the ad tech space for a long time, and so much of the focus was always on targeting and measurement,” Spaceback CEO Casey Saran, CEO of Spaceback told TVREV. “ But study after study showed that over have of campaign performance is due to the creative.

Spaceback developed software that lets anyone build high-quality ads based on a brand’s social media content. At first, it created ads for display advertising, and then it turned its attention to connected TV.

Last month Spaceback introduced CTV Launchpad, a self-serve AI platform that lets advertisers of all sizes convert their effective social media assets into TV-ready commercials.

One of the first marketers to use Launchpad was Dickies, the work wear brand.

Dickies was working with Target to launch some new products. It wanted to drive awareness of the brand’s presence at Target stores, said LIndsay Burgor, senior manager of brand media at Dickies.

“The objective of the campaign was to generate visibility and engage consumers at scale by leveraging Spaceback’s technology to amplify social media content on CTV,” Burgor said.

Dickies media campaign was confined to Texas and Dallas, Houston and Austin emerged as the top performing markets in terms of site traffic and campaign efficiency.

“The campaign’s cross-platform CTV strategy delivered strong results, with Vizio, Hulu, and Pluto driving the majority of performance—demonstrating a balanced approach to scale, cost-efficiency, and content quality,” Burgor said.

The campaign achieved a TVQI (TV Quality Index) score of 77, outperforming the 70 benchmark by 10%—indicating strong creative relevance, high viewability, and quality inventory selection.

“CTV Launchpad is well-suited to meet the diverse needs of a brand like Dickies, which targets multiple audiences across various business lines, said the happy client. “Its ability to rapidly and effectively develop creative assets makes it a valuable tool, especially for brands with small teams.”

You know who else likes the idea of making it easier for marketers to make high-quality TV commercials? Anyone selling CTV inventory. Spaceback has been making deals to integrate its self-serve ad creation platform with streamers media buying and ad insertion systems.

At its NewFront presentation in May, smart TV set maker LG said it had made a deal with Spaceback that would enable advertisers to extend their social media content to the biggest screen in the room for unified cross-platform campaigns, starting in Q3.

And in its first-quarter shareholder letter Roku talked about integrating Spaceback into the Roku Ads Manager. Roku cited a campaign for shipping company Rollo, which used Spaceback to create streaming video assets based on their top-performing social posts. Rollo then used Roku Ads Manager to enable viewers to click on ads directly from the TV screen. The campaign reached 700,000 households while reducing cost per site visit by 76% compared to CTV ads on non-Roku platforms, Roku said.

Spaceback also made a deal to become the first creative partner for Universal Ads, Comcast’s CTV buying platform.

"At Universal Ads, we are focused on democratizing TV advertising by breaking down traditional barriers of time, cost, and complexity, and Spaceback’s CTV Launchpad does just that," said James Borow, VP of product & engineering at Universal Ads. “Innovative companies like Spaceback are helping build the future of TV where brands of any size or budget are empowered to reach new audiences across premium video."

The CTV partners are “betting on us to help them democratize the future of television advertising,” said Saran.

In addition to removing barriers for marketers who might otherwise not be able to advertise on TV, “we’re taking it a step further and helping brands create lots of different videos so that they can test and learn and optimize to what's actually performing best according to their their brand objectives,” Saran said.

Launchpad automatically manages the duration of social video so that it fits into TV inventory. Spots can also be made interactive or shoppable.

Some spots made from social media include their likes, comments and follow counts on the big screen. Viewers can’t have social interactions with TV ads, but they can go to their phones to do that.

Launchpad also automates the ad trafficking process. “A brand like Dickies can take a social media post and in a few clicks, get out the production ready tag that they could launch with any of our media partners,” Saran said

Saran also thinks that making it easier for marketers to make TV commercials out of popular social media content is good for viewers.

“We started the company in 2017 and we called the company Spaceback because it felt like ads were getting worse and worse and more and more intrusive,” he said.”Our first mission statement is like, turn ads experiences into content experiences, and give people their space back. So the name kind of stuck.”