How Backbone Media Made Linear and CTV the Backbone of a Scalable New Service Offering
Growth Spotlight
From a Single Client Brief to a Scalable TV Practice
How Backbone Media Made Linear and CTV the Backbone of a Scalable New Service Offering
Backbone Media is an independent media agency headquartered in Colorado, specializing in paid and earned media for outdoor and lifestyle brands. The agency’s philosophy is people first; grounded in real-world human insight and backed by data. Clients span the spectrum from digitally native to traditional brand marketers. The turning point for TV came when a client brief asked for help reaching a specific audience: rural consumers, many of them cord-cutters and cord-nevers without reliable internet access, with an awareness goal and a heavy investment in out-of-home to amplify. Digital simply couldn't reach that audience. Television could.
Rather than treating the brief as a one-off, Backbone Media partnered with Tatari to build a durable convergent TV capability across linear and streaming. One that applied the same audience-first planning discipline the agency used in digital, moved fast enough to hit tentpole moments like March Madness, and could be measured with the rigor performance-minded clients expect.
Campaign Objectives
Reach the Audience Digital Couldn’t
Answer a client brief targeting rural cord-cutters and cord-nevers — an awareness audience unaddressable through digital channels — and amplify a heavy out-of-home investment.
Launch Fast Without Giving Up Control
Get live in market ahead of March Madness through a managed service model, keeping strategy, audience, and the client relationship in-house while Tatari handled execution.
Build a Repeatable TV Practice
Turn one successful engagement into a scalable service offering with disciplined pilots, clear benchmarks, and measurement clients can buy into.
Solution
Backbone Media chose a fully managed service model with Tatari, driven by speed to market. The team needed to be live by March Madness and couldn’t scale headcount fast enough. Tatari handled creative trafficking, network approvals, quality checks, optimization recommendations, and negotiations, while Backbone stayed focused on strategy, audience research, tentpole prioritization, and the client relationship. Full dashboard access preserved the real-time visibility media buyers expect, with a path to “hands-on-keys” self-service down the line.
Planning followed the agency’s standard audience-first process, using first-party client data, MRI, census, and internet serviceability data, translated into a segmented budget across always-on cable, syndication, episodic content, and tentpole sports, plus an opportunistic line item for last-minute network discounts. Pilots were structured to succeed from the start: four-to-six-week flights funded at roughly $100K, client buy-in secured upfront on benchmarks and next-phase investment, and measurement built around next-day linear reporting, incrementality, and TV’s halo effect on branded search, site visits, and call volume, all optimized in-flight by content category and by testing new markets with 15-second creative at half the cost of a 30 on linear.
"The years of experience that Tatari brings to help us look bigger picture, not get distracted by last week or next week, and really think about how that mix aligns with our audience has been really helpful."
— Nicole Stahlecker, Director of Media, Backbone Media
Results
TV became a signal the agency could act on. Tentpole investments showed clear, one-to-one spikes in search intent, site traffic, and on-site conversions, with college basketball significantly outperforming professional basketball for Backbone’s rural-skewing audience. This allowed the team to correlate what aired in-market directly with what happened in the client’s business. Those learnings compounded: once TV identified what worked, the client went on to form direct partnerships with sports leagues, using the channel to inform its broader go-to-market.
The practice also scaled well beyond the original brief. Backbone now buys nationally, locally, and in Canada, applying a layered sports strategy built on audience-aligned packages and reserved scatter-market budget for discounted inventory. Most importantly, TV is now a repeatable muscle for the agency itself — a framework that extends across Backbone’s entire book, opens new business conversations the agency previously couldn’t answer, and gives a digital-rooted team conviction in a channel it once considered out of reach.
"If your audience is broad or you're introducing a new segment to your brand, TV is an amazing tool to reach that next concentric circle of people that maybe weren't brand aware."
— Nicole Stahlecker, Director of Media, Backbone Media