DTC brands are beginning to hit a wall in terms of growth. In an effort to find more scale they are moving more budgets towards performance marketing, direct mail and catalogs.

As Digiday put it in a recent article:

When a marketing mix is 50% Facebook, 50% Google, it’s easy to tell how money is being spent and to what effect. But eventually, those channels get tapped out. Companies like Boll & Branch, Greats, Parachute, Harry’s, Quip, Glossier and Away have all started testing direct mail, from discount-code fliers to fancier product catalogs, in an attempt to cut through the clutter.

Performance marketing has a natural advantage in these kinds of situations: affiliates can find new scale that ordinary media buyers may struggle to make work, while networks have masses of experience in converting real customers. There’s a huge opportunity here too for those networks with technology platforms built to handle non-digital channels like out-of-home and TV. Growth is everything for DTC companies given their nature as startups, and so any network or martech company that can help them develop attribution metrics to drive that growth should be chasing that business aggressively.