Recovery footwear is a category most consumers had never considered before Kane Footwear started advertising it. The brand makes science-backed shoes with sole nodes that promote blood flow and a two-piece mold engineered for post-workout decompression. Selling something that specific requires demonstration, not just awareness. Paid search only reaches people already searching, and a static image on Instagram conveys nothing about how a shoe feels. Kane needed a format that could hold attention long enough to explain something most people had never thought to want.
Courtney Bennett, Kane's Director of Performance Marketing, made a bet that would have been out of reach for a brand of Kane's size just a few years earlier. She allocated the company's growth budget to streaming TV, ran a single 30-second creative across more than 150 premium networks, and beat her internal ROAS target by 250%.
The creative was built around what sets Kane apart from every other shoe on the shelf. Close-up footage of the sole node technology, athletes moving from hard effort into recovery, and the moment a foot settles into something designed specifically for that transition. Thirty seconds of video during premium and relevant streaming content delivered a message that wouldn’t hit the same on a social feed.
During March Madness, Kane pushed a targeted campaign around the tournament's streaming audience. Viewers who had already visited Kane's site were retargeted as they watched, and that audience converted at a 450% ROAS. Across the full campaign, blended ROAS combining prospecting and retargeting reached 319%. Every dollar was traced back to actual purchases, whether through online conversions or demand flowing into retail. The attribution model connected a household's streaming exposure to what happened next on other devices in the home, giving Bennett's team a clear line between the ad and the sale. The platform's optimization engine adjusted delivery more than 650,000 times per day, shifting impressions toward the audiences, networks, and time slots generating the strongest returns.
"With data and analytics driving every decision, having clear, real-time visibility into performance made it an essential partner," Bennett said.
Streaming gave Kane an uninterrupted viewer who had chosen to sit down and give the screen their full attention. Video ads with an immediate attention-hook, clear branding within the first few seconds, and a direct call to action achieve a measurably higher sales lift. Kane's creative hit those marks because the product naturally lends itself to visual demonstration.
For Kane, that meant hooking viewers in the first seconds with the sole node technology in motion, keeping the brand visible throughout, and closing with a clear path to purchase. Content built for the living room performs differently from content repurposed for it, and the numbers reflected that.
Kane is a useful case study partly because its challenge is so specific, and because other brands with equally specific challenges have arrived at the same answer. Beddy's, the zipper bedding company founded by two moms who couldn't get their kids to make their bunk beds, needed a moving image to sell what a product photo could not. A CTV spot showing a child making a bunk bed in seconds exceeded their holiday ROAS goal by 150%. Tuckernuck, a lifestyle apparel retailer, increased its Q4 CTV budget by 32% and saw a 304% year-over-year jump in conversion rate alongside a 56% increase in ROAS. A family-owned convenience store chain used geographically targeted CTV to support 70 grand openings, and sales of promoted items spiked between 69% and 930%.
Each of these brands had a product story that only made sense in motion. CTV gave them the format and the targeting to prove it.
Streaming captured a record 47.5% of all U.S. television viewing in December 2025. CTV ad spending is projected to grow 13.8% in 2026 and surpass traditional TV advertising entirely by 2028. Ad-supported tiers on Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video have pushed average CPMs down from the $35 to $50 range to roughly $20 to $40, and self-serve platforms have dropped minimum campaign budgets to as low as $500.
Nearly 70% of CTV advertisers plan to increase spending this year by an average of 17%. MNTN, the platform Kane used, reports that 97% of its customers have never run a television ad before. Small businesses went from being structurally excluded from television advertising to having more targeting precision and cleaner attribution than national brands that had been buying TV for decades.
The infrastructure that made Kane's campaign possible is now accessible to almost any brand willing to test it. Five years ago, getting onto television required a budget, an agency, and a media buyer with network relationships. Self-serve platforms, falling CPMs, and household-level targeting have since removed it entirely. Kane had a product worth showing and a creative that did it justice. They showed up, and the screen did the rest.
