For e-commerce leader Shutterfly, the holidays are a make-or-break moment for selling its popular gift packages and personalized photo deals. But despite deploying advanced addressable targeting and ID-based audience signals, Shutterfly faced increasingly saturated markets and climbing customer acquisition costs as it headed into Q4 2024.
Then, a powerful partnership with EDO and Chalice AI changed the entire cost equation. Instead of targeting based on IDs, demographics, or other identifiers, Shutterfly started optimizing for business outcomes.
In just three months, Shutterfly achieved a 380% lift in return on ad spend (ROAS) and slashed customer acquisition costs by 76%. Let’s take a closer look at how the brand achieved this breakthrough.
For years, brand advertisers have built their addressable TV strategies around deterministic, ID-based audience signals. This approach wisely targets individuals who've already demonstrated purchase intent, relying heavily on retargeting and lookalike modeling to identify prospects similar to existing customers. However, these tactics also systematically limit reach to consumers who are already deep in the purchase cycle.
While retargeting delivered conversion rates between 8-15%, Shutterfly was essentially trapped in expensive bidding wars — paying premium prices to compete for the same prospects every other brand was chasing. Meanwhile, massive pools of potential customers remained invisible to its traditional programmatic campaigns.
By partnering with EDO and Chalice AI, Shutterfly flipped the acquisition script. Instead of waiting for customers to signal purchase intent through traditional behavioral data, this innovative collaboration used EDO's online engagement data combined with Chalice's custom AI algorithms to identify geographic markets where category interest was high but brand awareness remained low.
Here's how the breakthrough approach worked.
First, EDO analyzed search patterns at the DMA level to identify markets with high category engagement but low brand-specific searches. This way, Shutterfly could target consumers who were interested in digital photo services, but not yet engaged with its brand.
Next, Chalice's custom algorithm ingested EDO's search data to determine which geographic markets Shutterfly should target and when. The AI then optimized media buys across premium streaming TV private marketplaces (PMPs) like Hulu, Peacock, Spectrum, Paramount, Samsung, and Roku, reallocating spend from saturated markets to high-potential regions.
The results from this new engagement-powered approach speak for themselves:
More than a one-time holiday bump, engagement data powered by best-in-class Vertical AI consistently outperformed other methods across the entire three-month campaign period, proving its effectiveness extends beyond seasonal spikes.
“Conversion can be a bad signal when you want new customers,” notes Adam Heimlich, Founder and CEO at Chalice AI. “Shutterfly used a better signal — EDO’s Share of Search metrics – and got a better result than even their DSP lookalike. And they did it without using any first-party data.”
By reaching consumers earlier in their purchase journey, brands unlock a cascade of benefits:
While Shutterfly's case study focuses on e-commerce, the underlying principle applies across every category where consumers research before purchasing. Whether you're selling insurance, financial services, automotives, apparel, or pharmaceuticals, engagement data can reveal untapped market opportunities that traditional targeting methods systematically miss.
Shutterfly's 380% ROAS improvement happened by fundamentally rethinking how TV targeting should work in the age of TV outcomes data. The key is understanding where category interest exists but brand awareness remains low — then reaching those prospects before your competitors discover them.
Ready to find your hidden growth markets? Contact EDO today for a free consultation to discover where your TV ad dollars can have the biggest impact.