After a decade of heavy social media marketing, insole brand Vktry was ready to take its marketing to the next level with a national TV ad campaign, said Drew Arciuolo, Vice President of Marketing at Vktry (pronounced victory.)
“We wanted to add credibility,” Arciuolo said. “We wanted to add brand trust and have even a little bit of a perception shift from not just the viral insole brand, but the performance insole trusted by the best. And we thought TV would be the perfect medium for that.”
Vktry is a family business that manufactures and sells patented carbon fiber insoles that provide support, springiness and enhanced performance for athletes, according to the company. Vktry sells its products on its own website and Amazon.com, and it eventually wants to sell at retail stores. Thousands of professional athletes wear its insoles, but a main target audience for the brand is high school athletes.
Social media is a perfect way to reach this audience, especially to demonstrate the effectiveness of its product, Arciuolo said. To that end, since 2023, its social media videos have amassed 1.5 billion organic views. Roughly half of those are on TikTok, with Instagram, YouTube and Facebook Reels generating the remaining share.
Live Sports Draw a Captive TV Crowd
As the brand grew (annual sales are between $30-$100 million, Arciuolo said, without providing an exact figure) Vktry wanted to put its brand on the same stage as companies large enough to invest in a TV ad, he said. Linear TV ads are still relevant during live sports, he said, when consumers sit down and watch a game. As a sports product, the channel is a good fit.
In addition, Vktry realized that as a $150 product, kids are not purchasing the product but rather their parents are buying it for them. And those parents are less likely to be on TikTok, and more likely to be watching sports on TV with their kids, Arciuolo said.
“Why not try to create validity, credibility and then create excitement of like, ‘Wow, that brand I’ve been seeing on social media … on TikTok, mom and dad, we’re watching the game together, this is the company that I’ve been telling you about,’ and trying to be a part of that family dynamic,” he said.
Ad Campaign Reach and ROI
Vktry hired an agency to create a 30- and 15-second video ad that features professional athletes who use its product, such as Ladd McConkey and Mac McClung, as well as college and high school athletes. It invested six figures on the ad, and the spots are running on channels including FS1, ACC Network, Big Ten Network, ESPN 2, Fox Business Network, SEC Network and ESPN U. The brand will also run the ad on connect TV and social media.
After two months in the field, results have been good, Arciuolo said. After its ad airs, the brand receives traffic spikes from consumers searching for its products on Amazon, branded search queries on Google and searches for “basketball insoles.”
Vktry doesn’t have a hard return on investment goal, but one of the largest impacts is the halo effect to its lower funnel marketing tactics, including paid search, social media ads and mobile gaming ads, he said.
“We’re also just seeing efficiencies in our Meta advertising account,” he said.
Turing Celebrity Users into Marketing Fuel
Vktry has tapped into its professional athlete customers for marketing before. Once the brand noticed these athletes purchasing its products organically, it reached out to their agents about turning them into spokespeople.
For example, in 2023 Vktry created a video with Mac McClung, who at the time played in the NBA minor league team, the G League. McClung posted the video on his social media account the day of the annual NBA annual Slam Dunk competition. McClung won the competition, and consumers flocked to Google searching for the insoles that McClung mentioned in the video.
“Because we were right on his profile — and the ad was awesome, people loved it — it became at the time, the most searched day in our brand’s history,” Arciuolo said. “So we built off of that years after.”
In February 2024 before the dunk contest the brand did another social media post featuring McClung. (The athlete again went on to win it.) At the contest, Vktry had a giveaway of $500,000 worth of its products, which is roughly insoles to 3,350 consumers. But about 200,000 consumers entered the contest, providing their name and email address. Those consumer then received a coupon for a product, which roughly 1,000 consumers redeemed.
“We almost loved the brand elevation just as much as we wanted a big sales impact,” he said. “We wanted the brand out there in that way; So we didn’t go into it saying, ‘We need this return on investment.’ We know our product is great for basketball players, and this is a fun, interesting dialogue-creating partnership and activation.”
2025 Holiday Season Plans
To finish the year, the brand is creating a gifting version of its TV ad to run during the holidays. The final two months of the year are critical for Vktry, as they account for roughly 40% of its annual sales, he said.
Not only is November the start of the the holiday season, but its also the start of basketball season, which is key sport for the brand.
The brand is on track for a 35% sales growth increase this year, although that could all change with how the holiday season performs.
