How Skylight Quantified Linear TV’s Incremental Business Impact

Linear TV is notoriously difficult to measure. It's operationally complex to geo-segment the buy, and CPMs can increase for anything short of a national campaign. Additionally, unlike digital channels, locally available inventory is not a perfect proxy to national remnant cable. 

But the Skylight team saw opportunity where others hesitated. They believed Linear could unlock reach and awareness that digital alone couldn’t — especially for a category as new and visually intuitive as digital calendars. What they needed was a reliable, defensible way to quantify its true business impact across both DTC and Amazon.

Skylight’s Director of Growth, Matt Delman, explains: 

“Our team had a mix of optimism and healthy skepticism towards linear TV. Because digital calendars are still a relatively new category with low awareness, we felt linear might help us reach people we weren’t reaching through digital alone. Linear is a great format for showing the product in a clear, visual way –  but we needed to be able to quantify business impact.”

Skylight collaborated closely with Haus’ Measurement Strategy Lead, Victoria Brandley, and their TV advertising partner, Tatari, to design a rigorous testing plan. Together, they implemented a Fixed Geo Test within the Haus platform — a method used to measure the incremental impact of a campaign when exposed locations are predetermined and can’t be randomized into test and control groups. Tatari developed a local plan that aligned as closely as possible with Skylight's national strategy while Haus built a synthetic control group from the unaffected regions. The test ran for five weeks, followed by a two-week post-treatment window to capture any lagging effects.

The results validated Skylight’s thesis: Linear TV was driving incremental reach and meaningful business impact. And for the first time, Skylight had robust, experiment-backed data to guide future media planning.

• +5.3% lift in DTC sales
• +11.2% lift in Amazon sales
• +8.6% total omnichannel lift

Despite the strong performance, CPIA efficiency came in slightly above goal — a nuance the Skylight team immediately turned into an opportunity to optimize.

Looking ahead, Matt explains:

“We expanded into national inventory, where CPMs are significantly lower, and we have more flexibility in how we buy and optimize. The goal is to see if those advantages can help linear reach the efficiency levels we need for more sustained investment.”

A follow-up test will validate whether these optimizations bring linear TV within target efficiency benchmarks - further demonstrating Skylight’s commitment to disciplined, data-driven growth.