Tiger Balm Ignites Olympic Advertising

Tiger Balm works with E29 Marketing, its agency of record, and Goodway, E29’s digital media strategy and execution partner, for marketing campaigns in the U.S. As a manufacturer of pain relief balm for athletes and world-class warriors, Tiger Balm knew the Olympics would be the perfect opportunity to advertise its products to Olympians and viewers alike. But before 2024, accessing tentpole CTV inventory such as the Olympics required working directly with a publisher, which often came with long lead times, high minimums and other hurdles.

Goodway, a longstanding strategic partner with The Trade Desk, learned that CTV ad spots were now available to purchase programmatically across all 39 medal events through this demand-side platform. After evaluating this opportunity further, Goodway and E29 put together a custom recommendation for Tiger Balm, suggesting they take advantage of this opportunity to spread brand awareness at a national level. Tiger Balm jumped at the opportunity. Goodway purchased the CTV ad on a dynamic CPM, using existing assets and adding this cost-effective, time-saving solution to Tiger Balm’s existing media mix (display, audio, display out-of-home, paid social and paid search).

Tiger Balm ran CTV ads programmatically at the Olympics. During the 19 days when Tiger Balm’s Olympics CTV buy was live, the brand experienced an outstanding lower-funnel halo effect. Compared to the same period immediately prior to the Olympics, display experienced a 14% decrease in eCPA — delivering nearly 11% more site activities. Retargeting activities spiked by 32%. With a longer sales cycle, to experience this sort of shift in performance in such a narrow window can be attributed to the only change in media strategy at the time: the Olympics CTV ads.