Wildgrain wishes every brand would test TV earlier — and drive 150% subscriber growth Year over Year

Rose Hopkins joined Wildgrain as employee #5, just after their subscription service launched. At the time, the team was small. But momentum was building, and their product (the first bake-from-frozen sourdough, pasta, and pastries subscription) was already resonating.

Almost three years later, Rose now leads a growth team that has doubled in size and built a diversified acquisition strategy that scales efficiently across multiple channels. The catalyst? A methodical approach to Performance TV — powered by Guaranteed Outcomes — that she now wishes she'd implemented much earlier.

In this story, Rose shares how she brought tvScientific into the Wildgrain channel mix, what made it work, and why she now encourages other marketers to start sooner, not later.

For a CAC-focused subscription brand, every new channel test needed to prove itself quickly. Rose and her team had two main concerns about Performance TV:

tvScientific offers a Guaranteed Outcomes model, which changed the conversation around getting started, as Rose put it: “Even with limited resources and tight budgets, testing Performance TV is a worthwhile endeavor."

The second fear was bigger: creative production. Rose was concerned TV meant professional actors, studio shoots, and massive production budgets.

tvScientific has a creative team who worked with them to use existing creative assets that they were using for social campaigns… meaning they were all shot vertical on a Pixel phone." We didn't make anything new. Everything was repurposed from Meta. The team helped us edit and build it into something that worked for TV. That was a huge unlock."

"Performance TV is different than social media. People aren’t mindlessly scrolling; they are half-watching TV, maybe they're grazing or talking to someone, or on their phone. So when I imagined the creative, I wanted something that would match the moment… like you're watching a show and suddenly you see this warm bread come out of the oven."

For food brands, this context is perfect. Rose emphasised the importance of testing and not being too perfectionist, though. For Wildgrain, it wasn’t about polished creative, but about getting something out there to test. Broadly speaking, the principle Rose applied was:

When Wildgrain was smaller with fewer channels, Rose could rely more on individual platform reporting. But as they scaled, attribution became more complex.

"When you're smaller, you can rely on the individual platforms a little bit better, but when you have more channels in the mix, it's more likely for customers to touch many different things."

Eventually, Wildgrain implemented Rockerbox for better attribution across channels. But Rose still maintains a holistic validation approach:

"Every Monday, I go through CAC by channel and overall CAC, trying to make sure all the puzzle pieces fit together. We know our total spend and total customers acquired — that's our north star metric. No platform is perfectly accurate, and that’s ok. You have to let go of perfect metrics and piece together whether the overall picture makes sense.” 

As a small team, bandwidth is always tight. Because of that, having smart and strategic partners who understand the channel and help with the heavy lifting is key — and the team at tvScientific has been that. Our account manager, Emily, is an expert and helps guide all of our testing, proactively bringing results to our meetings.

The always-on incrementality feature has also proved particularly valuable: "We don't have to run formal incrementality tests where some budget goes toward PSAs… but we can if we want to since the tvScientific team can do both! For a small team, that's huge."

Looking back, Rose identifies four main factors that made Performance TV successful for Wildgrain:

tvScientific didn't just become another channel in the mix. It became a meaningful way to reach new audiences in a context that made emotional sense for the product and operational sense for the team.

For subscription brands looking to expand beyond Meta and Google, Wildgrain's approach offers a blueprint: find partners who understand your constraints, leverage what's already working, and trust that fast learning beats perfect planning.

Because as Rose learned, sometimes the biggest risk isn't testing something new — it's waiting too long to start.