How a 140-Year-Old BBQ Brand Boosted Online Sales Using TV Ads and First-Party Data
Southside Market & Barbeque, the oldest BBQ joint in Texas, is proving that even legacy brands can thrive in the digital age—with the right tools. To expand its e-commerce footprint beyond the Lone Star State, Southside turned to Spectrum Reach, Charter Communications’ advertising division, and leveraged a powerful tool often out of reach for small businesses: advanced audience targeting through first-party data.
The key to the campaign’s success? Customer Data Match—a privacy-first solution that allowed Southside to use its own database of past and potential customers to serve personalized video ads across screens, devices, and platforms. The result? Double-digit gains in orders, returning customers, and overall revenue each time a campaign launched.
Turning Customer Lists into Smart Campaigns
“Our challenge was getting in front of the right audiences beyond Texas,” said Kelly McLouth Staha, Marketing Director at Southside. “With Spectrum Reach’s Customer Data Match, we found a scalable, cost-effective way to turn our customer data into real results.”
This isn’t just CRM retargeting—it’s full-scale TV and digital activation. Spectrum Reach’s technology matched 90% of Southside’s customer list to actual households—far exceeding industry norms of 50–70%. This enabled the BBQ brand to deliver highly relevant ads not just to loyal customers, but to lookalike audiences likely to crave brisket, sausage, and some Lone Star smoke.
TV Ads Without Big Agency Headaches
What makes this notable isn’t just the ROI—it’s the accessibility. Spectrum Reach has long aimed to democratize TV advertising for small and medium businesses. Tools like Customer Data Match and the Audience Reach Optimizer (ARO) bring the kind of media planning once reserved for enterprise giants into the hands of local businesses.
For businesses like Southside Market, that means:
- Hyper-targeted TV and streaming ads based on real customer behavior
- High match rates even with modest data sets
- Cross-platform campaigns without complexity
- AI-powered ad creation through partners like Waymark
It’s not about replacing digital—it’s about integrating TV into a modern marketing funnel with the same precision, measurement, and agility marketers expect from platforms like Google and Meta.
Local Businesses, National Impact
According to Jason Brown, EVP of Spectrum Reach, more than 800 local campaigns have already used Customer Data Match with success. The offering aligns with a growing trend: local and mid-size brands demanding enterprise-grade targeting without enterprise budgets.
“Whether you’re a BBQ chain, a furniture store, or a dealership group, we want to make targeted TV advertising work for you,” Brown said.
As Southside continues to smoke briskets in Elgin and ship them nationwide, it’s also proving a larger point: that first-party data is the future of local advertising, and when paired with scalable tools like Spectrum Reach, even century-old brands can grow like startups.
