Samsung Ads Cracks the CTV Performance Code: How Crumbl Made Television Convert Like TikTok
While marketers debate whether CTV is a brand or performance play, Crumbl just made a Samsung TV spot pay for itself faster than a Facebook carousel.
A seven-week Samsung Ads CTV push drove 16,000+ app installs and five-figure sales for the cookie chain, posting a 23 % purchase rate that beat Crumbl’s own social benchmarks—hinting that television’s newest walled garden is ready to eat ad budgets once reserved for Meta and TikTok.
The App-First Imperative
Crumbl’s mobile app isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s the cash register.
Over half of the brand’s revenue already flows through the thumb-sized storefront, a stat that made Paid Media Specialist Giana Flores prioritize app events long before iOS kneecapped site pixels.
“People just convert more in our app than on the web.”
— Giana Flores
With ATT eroding click-through paths, Flores leaned on AppsFlyer MMP data to keep Samsung’s smart-TV impressions tied to real purchases, not proxy page views. The clean signal let Samsung’s optimization engine bid toward actual cookie pickups, not vanity reach.
From Weekly Menu to Evergreen Seasonal
Social creative for Crumbl is normally a treadmill: film the rotating weekly menu, edit, post, repeat.
CTV can’t move that fast. So the team flipped the model:
- Swapped menu-specific posts for evergreen, seasonal spots (15- and 30-second).
- Let Samsung’s ACR data find the right frequency cap without creative burnout.
- Freed the internal studio to focus on holiday themes instead of chasing frosting in real time.
The result was a durable asset pool Samsung could weight toward households showing QSR or dessert-app affinity—no weekly re-shoots required.
Samsung’s Mid-Flight CPI Cut—The Real Story
Three weeks in, installs surged ahead of forecast. Instead of the usual “congrats, you hit your goals,” Samsung lowered the guaranteed CPI without a new IO or buyer renegotiation.
“It’s been great to really trust the tech, versus hands-on-keyboard media plan changes.”
— Caryn Banchek, Managing Director Customer Success & Data Insights, Samsung Ads
Translation: Samsung’s OS is quietly layering biddable, outcome-priced inventory inside today’s insertion-order world—an early cookieless challenger to The Trade Desk. Expect other OEMs to follow; whoever owns the glass owns the auction.
Benchmarks & What They Mean for Buyers
- 16,000+ app installs attributed to Samsung TVs.
- 23 % install-to-purchase conversion—roughly 3-4× the QSR vertical norm.
- Five-figure revenue from Samsung users alone.
The delta proves that first-party app events, not site pixels, are becoming the real performance currency for privacy-era CTV. Retailers still pushing desktop checkouts risk under-indexing once cookies finally crumble.
Industry Ripple—Consolidation & Budget Shifts
Samsung’s closed-loop attribution competes head-on with Roku’s OneView, YouTube’s ads data hub, and Walmart Connect for lower-funnel CTV dollars. Holding companies are already in talks to re-bundle Samsung spend into outcome-based PMPs, accelerating the sector’s consolidation wave. If your measurement stack can’t ingest smart-TV postbacks, you’re renting rails from someone who can—a theme agencies like Boathouse are starting to own outright.
15-Second Close
Crumbl proved TVs can sell cookies like feeds—now every DTC brand with an app will want Samsung’s remote to double as a cash register.
💡 Deep Dive: Don’t miss our Ultimate Industry Guide for advanced strategies.
