For over 170 years, Timex has been a trusted name in watchmaking, blending classic designs with innovative craftsmanship. By partnering with Northbeam, Timex DTC unlocked significant growth opportunities, achieved record-breaking revenue, and redefined their marketing attribution and media strategies.
We spoke with Dan Gallagher, Director of Performance Marketing at Timex Group, about the improvements he’s been able to unlock with Northbeam to bolster Timex’s rapid direct-to-consumer (DTC) growth.
Timex opts for data integrity
“I joined Timex Group’s DTC team in 2022. Timex Group is a large organization operating multiple brands with DTC channel being a main area of focus for hypergrowth.”
“Prior to Timex, I worked at a brand that had every tool under the sun when it came to media measurement,” said Dan. “We had media mix modeling (MMM) that was custom-built in-house. We had everything you could imagine to effectively evaluate the success of our investments.”
“My charter was to onboard a measurement partner that could start to give us a full picture of what was being driven by our spend. We wanted consolidated views. We wanted deduplicated attribution. We wanted multiple attribution models. With that in mind, we evaluated the space back in 2023 and selected Northbeam as our partner because of what seemed to be a strong process for attribution and transparency. If we ever need the back-end data, we can get it.”
“There are a lot of fancy user interfaces out there that make it look like you’re going to get a lot on the surface, but when we evaluated our options there seemed to be some holes in data processing and transparency of how accessible the data would be for ad hoc analysis, which was another priority of ours when selecting a partner.”
Northbeam helps Timex make the case
“With Northbeam, we unlocked attribution at the tactical level, the creative level, and allowed us to scale our programs and justify our investments internally. We were able to illustrate different investment models and make the case for the path to drive the DTC business forward.”
Dan and team started to leverage Northbeam’s MMM solution in 2024 as a trusted tool to justify substantial shifts in their media investment.
Picture this: historically just under half of Timex DTC’s media mix has been allocated to Meta. Per Northbeam’s MMM recommendations, during the BFCM season, they raised that allocation significantly which saw the following results:
- Before utilizing these MMM recommendations (July through September) their total business revenue was up double digits YoY.
- After implementing MMM and utilizing the platform’s recommendations (November 1st through 23rd), their total business revenue was 3x YoY.
- Then, after trusting the MMM recommendations to increase their contributions to Meta further during Cyber Weekend, total business revenue doubled YoY.
“We have been happy with the product and plan to continue to work with Northbeam into 2025.” Dan said. “Q4 2024 was so great for us in large part because of the insights we received from Northbeam and my team’s ability to apply the learnings across their channels.”
Turnkey MMM leads to Timex’s best quarter yet
“Even before Northbeam, our primary metric was incremental return on investment (IROAS),” said Dan. “When we onboarded with Northbeam, we used that same principle and IROAS was the driving factor in day-to-day optimizations. Now that we have MMM, we’ve created new incrementality factors that we can apply to the MTA view of performance that has given us a clearer picture of where and how we should be spending our dollars and resources.”
“Before we signed on with Northbeam, we were using another MMM tool for a year. It required manual work of pulling together data via each ad platform and lacked automation. We also were capped at the number of models we could run in a given year.”
“With Northbeam, having all the connections in place, you just make all your connections via native integrations and go. The barrier of entry was low as a new customer and we were able to start using the tool quickly.”
“Once we started getting regular reads on performance via MMM we could confidently start saying: Meta is actually performing 2x better than we thought it was via MTA alone, and other channels are underperforming. The new data from MMM led us to completely change our media mix leading to a great end of 2024.”
MTA + MMM = magic
“We’re using MTA as a guide to keep us on track on a day-to-day basis, and MMM on a monthly basis as an investment planning tool to help guide our media mix for the following month and validate IROAS trends from previous months. The combination of the two tools has given us the tools necessary to continue our growth trajectory as we introduce our brand and offerings to new customers.”
“We’ve been with Northbeam now for over 18 months and are pleased with the results thus far.”