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Should DTC brands cut ad spend after Cyber Monday? Jacob says no. Black Friday customers often come back to buy gifts, the big retailers pull back so CPMs tend to dip, and the first two weeks of December can outperform the end of November. On the third DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck is joined by Jacob and Abby from the social team at Pilothouse. Each topic runs on a timer. They start with rising Meta CPMs and the product browsing default Meta switched on this week, then get into whether the offer or the creative matters more on Black Friday, what a late Thanksgiving means for your sale, why December still pays, and whether a founder should fire their agency two weeks before Black Friday. Get an audit from Pilothouse: https://pilothouse.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Your Meta costs keep climbing. Meta CPMs are running higher than last year, with Q4 and the US midterms both pushing prices up. Brands that fed the pixel with cold traffic earlier in the year are the ones seeing it pay off now. Meta just put a shopping page between your ad and your site. Jacob explains why Pilothouse will test product browsing before opting out, including what opting out could do to your opportunity score. You can't decide between the offer and the creative. Abby keeps the offer front and center in every Black Friday ad and wins on how she says it. One cookware brand in her portfolio saw CPMs go down this year after a flood of new video content. You run the same ads to everyone. Jacob hammers the offer to retargeting audiences and leads with variety and messaging for cold traffic, then narrows to what works three or four days into the sale. Thanksgiving is late and your window is short. Launch early to mid November, then stack an extra 5% or add countdown timers if the promo starts to fizzle. Your ads say 20% off and the sale is pacing behind. Abby leaves the creative alone and lets shoppers find 25% on the site, a happy surprise that helps them pull the trigger. Your discount isn't deep enough. A jewellery brand moved from 30% off sitewide to "up to 50%" by adding more products to its clearance section. You plan to pull back on December 2nd. Keep your Black Friday ads running through Cyber Week, have gifting ready to go, and push until your shipping cutoff. Your gifting ads launch with no learnings. Abby launches evergreen gifting ads during Black Friday so they already have data when the sale ends. Your shipping cutoff has passed. Gift cards, discounted gift cards and expedited shipping keep the last days of December selling. Your brand doesn't fit gifting. Use a self-gifting angle: you did your holiday shopping, now it's your turn. You're not planning Q5. Health brands can ride new year resolutions, and jewelry brands should build their Valentine's Day creative before January ends. You skipped top of funnel in October. Abby explains how she fills the funnel in October with brand-building video, then drains it in November with heavy Black Friday messaging. Your founder wants to fire the agency on November 15th. Jacob would ride it out unless the agency has checked out, and Abby lists the red flags that make switching worth the risk. ABOUT THE GUESTS Jacob and Abby work on the social team at Pilothouse, a performance marketing agency for DTC brands. https://pilothouse.co STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer Want to be on the Rundown? Email [email protected] TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Black Friday creative strategy 03:00 Rising Meta CPMs 07:00 BFCM offers vs. creative 18:00 Why you should keep spending after Cyber Monday 30:00 When to fire your marketing agency

Should a DTC brand cut its marketing budget for 2027? Greg Dolan, CEO of Keen Decision Systems, says cutting is the biggest mistake he expects to see, because a brand that goes dark pays more to get back to where it was. Greg co-founded Keen 16 years ago after a decade as a CPG brand marketer, waiting six to eight months for a marketing mix PowerPoint that didn't help with the next decision. Keen's database now covers 450 brands and $48 billion in media spend. In the final episode of Harness the Halo, he explains how the loop of measuring, planning, buying and reconciling works, why he thinks a brand of any size should invest in top of funnel, and why he would never hand the marketing budget back to the CFO. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Tariffs are squeezing your margin and marketing looks like the easy cut. Greg's advice is to cut non-working dollars first and keep the lights on, because coming back from dark costs more than staying in market.You've been told to wait on brand marketing until you're bigger. Greg disagrees. He says top of funnel spend acts as cover fire that makes your middle and bottom of funnel more effective, and that a brand living on bottom of funnel spend pays more for the same result over time.You're scaling inside one platform. Greg's data favors spreading spend across channels that reinforce each other, like Meta and Amazon, and judging each one on what the next dollar returns in profit.Someone told you a channel doesn't work. Greg calls blanket channel verdicts a broad generalization. What matters is the brand's objective, where its customer is, whether you can buy the channel efficiently, and when you spend.You're relying on Google's or Meta's free marketing mix model. Greg calls them myopic, says they grade their own homework, and says they need a data science team and constant experiments to calibrate.Your business is seasonal and your budget piles into the peak. Greg's biggest client bet was a century-old seasonal brand that spent less during its peak season and more around it, and grew top line and profit.Your CFO only looks at CAC. Greg would show the CFO the net present value of marketing, so it gets judged as an investment the way any other capital spend is.Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Greg says the CMO should, as long as the CMO learns the CFO's language and is held to profit.You plan once a year. Keen starts from two years of data, updates the model as new data arrives, produces a week-by-week buying plan, and checks actuals against the forecast.You blame creative when results swing. Greg says only great creative shows up as a big effect in the model, and that where and when you spend usually matters more than people think creative does. ABOUT THE GUEST Greg Dolan is co-founder and CEO of Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com HARNESS THE HALO Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is the final episode. STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer SPONSOR Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com TIMESTAMPS 00:00 AI-powered marketing measurement 06:00 Using AI to optimize marketing spend 09:00 Why top-of-funnel investment matters 19:00 Marketing budgets during economic pressure 26:00 The future of autonomous media buying

What do investors look for in a DTC brand before they fund it? Norwest partner Lisa Wu, an early investor in Jet, Ritual, and Remedy, walks through the 10 attributes her team uses to spot a breakout consumer brand. She covers why a well-built consumer brand should only need one or two rounds of capital, why replenishment categories need gross margins north of 60%, and why supplements and personal care can sell for five times revenue while apparel can trade at one times. If you run a $5M to $50M brand, use her list as a scorecard and mark yourself green, yellow, or red on each attribute. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: - Know which of the 10 attributes your brand is weak on before you raise, so you fix the reds instead of pitching around them. - Avoid funding a consumer brand like a tech company. Too much capital at rising valuations buys mercenary customers and forces you to chase targets your unit economics can't support. - Be first-ish instead of first. The later mattress-in-a-box brands drafted off the category education the early, venture-funded players paid for. - Build clinical proof into the brand from day one. Science washing (adding a dermatologist, a survey, and a claim once you notice the trend) is something customers can sense. - Cut acquisition costs with a distribution advantage others haven't found yet, like a trusted clinical voice whose audience includes other creators who look up to them. - Make paid acquisition work by pairing it with strong retention. Natural replenishment categories let lifetime value cover what you spend to acquire. - Price for the premiumization of mass, and keep investing in brand, because a cheaper competitor is always coming. - Protect gross margin early so wholesale and retail stay open without a reformulation later. - Choose a category acquirers want to buy. A $100M brand at five times revenue sells for $500M. At one times, it sells for $100M. - Win with one product first, then expand into adjacent products where the customer already trusts you. About the guest: Lisa Wu is a partner on the venture team at Norwest, where she has invested in consumer brands for more than a decade. Her investments include Ritual, Remedy, and Jet, which was acquired by Walmart. Norwest runs venture and growth equity on one platform, so it can back founders from seed through profitable scale. Reach Lisa at [email protected]. https://norwest.com Stay connected: The DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Want to be a guest? Email [email protected] Timestamps: 02:10 Why Health and Wellness Is Booming 08:45 How Ritual Built Consumer Trust 14:05 10 Attributes of Breakout Consumer Brands 24:05 Building a Distribution Advantage 40:55 Consumer Trends Investors Are Watching

How should DTC brands prep for Black Friday on Amazon? This year's Prime Day events show where ecommerce growth is coming from: shoppers stocked up on consumables while big-ticket categories lagged. Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse. He walks through what June and October Prime Day showed. Some consumable brands Pilothouse manages grew 150% or more year over year during October Prime Day, a few sold more in that two-day event than in the four-day June event, and average order value dropped. He explains what that means for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, how premium brands should position for shoppers who wait for deals, and what to set up on Amazon now. Work with Pilothouse: https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Key takeaways: - Know which shoppers are waiting on you. Paper products, household cleaning, personal hygiene and pet food jumped on deal days, while headphones, tablets, wearable tech and TVs lagged. - Sell on value. Shoppers want the product they already like at a better price, so make your differentiator easy to find and quick to understand on the listing. - Build awareness before the deal day. Shoppers do their research ahead of the sale, so get in front of them in the weeks before Black Friday and retarget them on the day. - Test your listing images with care. Amazon once required white backgrounds, and lifestyle and annotated images exist because sellers kept pushing. Deal-day hints in images are a gray area, and a removed listing means missing the event entirely. - Be available where your customer shops. More shoppers compared Walmart, Target and DTC sites during deal days, and if your competitor is listed there and you are not, they get the sale. - Plan a review push after Black Friday. Amazon's new Review Requests ads let you pay per click to ask recent buyers for a review. A click does not guarantee a review. - Start ranking for your Black Friday keywords now. Put the keyword in your title, highlights, bullets and description, give it its own campaign, and use placement modifiers to hold top of search into the deal day. About the guest: Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse, a full-funnel performance marketing agency for DTC brands. https://pilothouse.co Stay connected: Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Sponsors: Advertise on DTC: https://dtcnews.link/advertise Timestamps: 00:03:36 Amazon Prime Day trends 00:05:00 Consumables surge during deal days 00:07:40 How shoppers define value 00:12:30 Positioning premium products for BFCM 00:16:40 Omnichannel holiday shopping behavior

Do influencer partnership ads lower customer acquisition costs for DTC brands, or just move them? They lower CAC on Meta, but rev-share creator deals send a big share of that saving into a new line on the P&L. Yash Chavan, founder and CEO of Saral, the team behind the Sathi affiliate platform, walks through the math on an $80 AOV supplement brand and lays out how to build a creative flywheel instead: an influencer affiliate program where affiliate revenue covers the cost of seeding product, and the posts that win organically become the ads you boost on Meta and TikTok. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: - Work out whether partnership ads are cutting your CAC or relocating it, using Yash's worked example of an $80 CAC dropping to $68 while creator and platform fees add $9.20 back. - See why creator payouts tied to GMV grow as a variable cost when you scale ad spend, and how capping the payout on any single ad stops one viral video from costing you $10,000. - Build a creator pyramid: seed creators who already post in your niche, turn the ones who post into affiliates, give the top sellers bigger deals, and run the top performers by views as partnership ads. - Let organic performance choose your ad creative, with rules like boosting a reel on Meta once it passes a view threshold inside 48 hours. - Raise your affiliate activity rate by rewarding the steps before the sale, like a free product when a creator joins and a small cash reward when they post. - Catch leaked codes, leaked affiliate links, and affiliates bidding on your brand keywords before you pay commission on those sales. - Plan a creator push in mid October that can still produce ad creative and affiliate revenue before Black Friday. About the guest: Yash Chavan is the founder and CEO of Saral, an influencer marketing platform for ecommerce brands. Before Saral he ran an influencer marketing agency. His team also built Sathi, an affiliate platform for creator-led brands with fraud protection and gamified rewards. Saral: https://getsaral.com/ Sathi: https://www.mysathi.io Stay connected: Website and newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Want to be a guest? Email [email protected] Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by Saral and Sathi. Saral matches your brand with creators who already make content in your niche, and Sathi turns the creators who post into affiliates, with fraud protection and gamified rewards built in. Start a free trial at https://getsaral.com/

How do you lower customer acquisition costs for a DTC brand? Bobby Bitton, co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, says TikTok Shop did more for his CAC than any other channel. He launched it as a side project in November 2023, and within 30 days one SKU went from $2,000 a day to $70,000 a day. Bobby walks through how O Positiv runs more than 100 ads a week through an in-house creative team, how they move what works on TikTok Shop over to Meta, and why retention now gets the same attention as acquisition. He also explains why the brand waited until it was a $100 million business to go into retail, why linear TV beat streaming in their geo tests, and the brand architecture decision he would make differently. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: Lower CAC with TikTok Shop by sending samples generously and recruiting affiliates every week. Bobby set a goal of 1,000 affiliates and did the outreach himself on Sunday nights.Start TikTok Shop simple. Get affiliates posting before you touch GMV Max, paid campaigns, or contests.Get more usable creative by briefing creators less. O Positiv's brief is the product, what it does, what creators can say, and what they can't.Feed Meta with TikTok Shop learnings. The winning creator content runs on Meta, and the creators get paid extra for it.Test for creative diversity instead of running ten copy variations on one static image.Hold Meta to an allowable CAC and move spend up or down with the strength of your creative.Grow lifetime value by planning for life stages. A PMS customer who gets pregnant should reach for your pregnancy product, then your menopause product.Launch products customers can feel working. O Positiv's fiber gummy stuck and its immune gummy didn't, and that became the product rule.Go into retail with a big DTC business behind you, push for endcaps and out-of-aisle displays, and fly out for the buyer meeting.Expect retail to break your attribution. When Meta ads drive store sales, your Shopify CAC climbs while the business grows, so build omnichannel measurement early.Decide early whether you are a house of brands or a branded house, and keep it simple. About the guest: Bobby Bitton is the co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, the women's health brand he started with his sister Brianna Bitton in 2018. O Positiv makes FLO, URO, and MENO, and sells through its own site, TikTok Shop, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and CVS.https://www.opositiv.com Stay connected: Follow The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.Want to be a guest? Email [email protected]

What's the best DTC marketing strategy on Meta when every competitor makes the same claims? Liam Robinson, co-founder of Marlbank, says to stop arguing features and lead cold prospecting with your brand's growth story. On this episode of All Killer No Filler, he walks through how that switch got a supplement brand built by chemists scaling on Meta after months of feature-led ads went nowhere. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: - How to sell a product that's better than the competition when the reasons don't show up in an ad - Why feature-led ads turn into a shouting match in cold Meta prospecting - How to imply product quality through your brand's growth story instead of claiming it - What to use when you don't have big numbers yet: a first farmers market, a first hire, a first customer - How to build a then-and-now prospecting ad from your own camera roll - How Marin Skincare and Vyper Industrial pair a product distinction with a founder story - How to turn a Dragons' Den appearance into an ad, whether you got a deal or walked away without one - Which brands this angle won't work for About the guest: Liam Robinson is co-founder of Marlbank, a Meta-only agency for early-growth ecommerce brands, built in partnership with Pilothouse. Before Marlbank, he was one of Pilothouse's first media buyers. Reach Liam at [email protected] or his co-founder Nate at [email protected]. Stay connected: Subscribe to The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Get the DTC Newsletter at https://directtoconsumer.co Want to be a guest? Email [email protected]

How do you get your CFO to approve a bigger marketing budget for a DTC brand? Drew Fallon, former CFO of Mad Rabbit, says finance is watching one number, CAC, and that brand spend only gets funded once direct response is efficient enough to pay for it. Drew is now CEO of Iris Finance, a finance platform for CPG and DTC brands, where he sees the books of 200 brands, most of them between $20 million and $300 million in revenue. He joins Eric Dyck and Claudia Lauture, VP of Client Services at Keen Decision Systems, to work through the argument between marketing and finance, including who should own the budget and when a brand can afford upper funnel. You walk away knowing what to bring into the budget meeting and how finance will score it. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE You don't know what finance is judging your plan on. Drew's answer is CAC. If CAC, retention and LTV to CAC land where his model has them, he says he does not care how much you spend or what you spend it on.You need money for a bet that won't pay back this quarter. Drew wants one of two cases made: that it raises MER and contribution margin, or that the upside is big enough to be worth the risk.You want to start brand marketing and direct response is only just carrying the business. Drew says there is no room yet. Most companies he sees don't start brand work until somewhere past $30 million in revenue, and he would not do it at $10 million.You think you have topped out on Meta. Drew says Meta takes a brand farther than most operators expect, and that you can probably ride it to $100 million.You are looking for the next channel after Meta. Across the 200 brands on Iris, Drew has not seen one scale AppLovin spend and make more money. The pattern he describes is a brand that reaches $50 million on Meta, puts $200K a month into AppLovin and watches its margin go away.Your upper funnel keeps getting cut to hit the quarter. Claudia's team at Keen runs both plans out two and three years, so the cost of the cut is on the table next to the short-term number.Your cash position keeps surprising you. Drew builds a bear, a base and a bull case, then tests the base at 40% over and 40% under. Beating plan by 60% can still run a brand out of money, because of inventory.Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Drew says it is usually the marketing lead and should be the CFO, on the condition that the CFO understands growth marketing, which he calls rare.Your agency bill is being questioned. At Mad Rabbit, Drew let go of an Amazon agency he liked because it cost roughly $60K a month and he could hire two full-time people for two thirds of that.You are planning Q4 the way you did last year. Drew is hearing more brands pull back on TikTok after losing money there last year, and supplement founders tell him they are waiting for January because Q4 brings higher returns, more churn and discount shoppers.You are reporting platform revenue to finance. Both guests named it as the number they stopped trusting. Drew: "It's all higher than what you get on your P&L." ABOUT THE GUESTS Drew Fallon is co-founder and CEO of Iris Finance and the former CFO of Mad Rabbit. https://irisfinance.co Claudia Lauture is VP of Client Services at Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com HARNESS THE HALO Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is episode 5 of 6, and a new episode drops every other week. SPONSOR Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com

When should a DTC brand move into retail? Flex founder Lauren Schulte Wang said no to Target twice, and retail is now over 60% of revenue. She waited until her supply chain and her marketing engine could handle it, and she went because customers told her every month that they wanted to buy the product in a store. On the DTC Podcast, Lauren tells Eric Dyck how Flex got from a landing page with 200,000 emails and no product to 30,000 retail doors and more than 185 million menstrual discs sold. She covers the DTC strategy behind the timing of the retail move, how connected TV and subway ads lift every other channel, and what she is doing about a category that only 3% of people have heard of. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE A big retailer wants your product and you are not sure you are ready. Lauren turned Target down two years running until supply chain, manufacturing and margin-based LTV to CAC were dialed in, because a marketing engine that cannot scale before retail will not scale once you are on shelf.Your subscription keeps missing the moment customers need the product. Flex changed pack sizes, changed frequencies and opened fulfillment centers on both coasts. The fix was in the customer research the whole time: people wanted to buy it in a store.Your product needs explaining before anyone will buy it. Flex ads without an education piece perform worse, so the answers to "will it get stuck" and "is it messy" go inside the ad itself.You are about to spend real money on your first TV campaign. Flex hired a big agency, shot a high-production spot Lauren had doubts about, and had to spend out a contract on ads that did not perform. The rule since then is that nothing runs on TV unless it has already worked on YouTube.Your category has almost no awareness and you cannot outspend the giants. With unaided awareness of menstrual discs at 3%, Flex added CTV, New York subway ads and campus marketing so that a friend's recommendation, a subway poster and a TikTok from a small creator all reach the same person.You do not know which content will move retail sales. A plain YouTube video explaining how the Flex Cup's pull tab works went viral and lifted Flex's velocities at Walmart by double digits.You launched to a huge waitlist with no way to fulfill it. Flex could not ship in the US yet, so the founders flew to Europe on cheap Iceland fares and hand-packed discs at local post offices. They had $80,000 in pre-orders before demo day.You found a competitor's patent on the product you wanted to make. Lauren pitched the company, got turned down, designed around the patent, and then acquired that company while she was still in Y Combinator. ABOUT LAUREN Lauren Schulte Wang is the founder and CEO of The Flex Company, the period care brand behind the Flex Disc, the Flex Cup, Softdisc and Softcup. She started Flex in 2015, went through Y Combinator in 2016, and coined the term "menstrual disc." Flex products are sold in 30,000 stores including Walmart, Target and CVS. https://flexfits.com Instagram and TikTok: @flex STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer TIMESTAMPS 00:00 How Flex turned viral attention into growth 08:00 Why doing things that don’t scale works 12:00 How retail became Flex’s biggest growth channel 17:00 Why product education drives performance 32:00 What makes TV and YouTube creative work

How can AI agents speed up ad creative for a DTC brand? Braydon, a creative strategist at Pilothouse, has agents build his swipe file every Monday and Claude write his design tickets, which saved him five and a half hours last week. Braydon joins Eric Dyck on All Killer No Filler to walk through the full workflow. Grok Bot handles the research with a chief of staff agent that manages a team of sub-agents. Higgsfield turns the references he picks into on-brand mockups. Claude writes the tickets for the designers, who still make the finished ad. He also explains why he is not bullish on AI-generated ad creative right now, and why some of his clients have asked for zero AI in their ads. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE You trigger every AI task by hand. Braydon sets up a chief of staff agent in Grok Bot that manages sub-agents on a schedule, so the research is waiting for him on Monday morning.Competitor and creative research eats your week. His agents go through Pinterest, the ad library and Motion, and one run came back with a swipe file of around 70 creatives relevant to the brand.You write the same design tickets over and over. Braydon loads his internal processes into Claude, hands it the ideas he picked, and it writes the ticket descriptions for the designers.You can't tell where AI belongs in the creative process. He uses it for strategy, references and mockups, then gives the work to designers for the finished product.Your AI images look like AI. Braydon starts from a reference photo taken on a phone or a real UGC image, which gets the output closer to an iPhone shot.Your client has banned AI creative. Eric shares what he heard from larger brands, who test AI creative on a separate third-party brand page instead of the main account.You copied an AI ad trend and it stopped working. Braydon on Pixar-style video ads and why formats like that grab attention for a moment and then fade once everyone runs them.Your team keeps building the same AI tool three times. Braydon and Eric talk through shared context, token bills and what Pilothouse is building internally to fix it. ABOUT BRAYDON Braydon is a creative strategist at Pilothouse, the performance marketing team behind DTC. To talk through this workflow with him, fill out the form at https://pilothouse.co and ask for Braydon. STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer TIMESTAMPS 00:00 How AI workflows save hours every week 05:00 Building an AI agent team 08:00 Where AI creative works best 16:00 Using AI as a personal assistant 22:00 Building shared AI workflows for teams

Brand strategist Eugene Healey on DTC marketing at high creative volume: why creative is the new targeting, why brand books fail with creators, and how teams approve hundreds of ads a week. How do you keep a DTC brand coherent when you're shipping that much creative? Eugene says the fundamentals of brand still hold. The job around them has moved from controlling every campaign to orchestrating hundreds of pieces of creative the brand no longer controls. Eugene lectured in marketing and brand management at the University of Melbourne, runs a brand strategy studio, and is an equity partner in the brand tracking platform Tracksuit. On his second DTC Podcast appearance he tells Eric Dyck where brand strategy goes when media becomes the key variable, and how a team builds the judgment to approve work at volume. Eugene's live cohort course, The New Fundamentals of Brand, starts October 12. It runs seven weeks, with live sessions, studio groups of five or six people in your time zone, and interviews with brand leaders from Hinge and Nothing. Final-release seats are limited: https://thenewfundamentals.co Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Your team ships more creative than any approval chain can review. Eugene's model has senior people approve the overall pattern while juniors and mid-levels own the day-to-day sign-off.Your brand book can't govern creators, partners and communities. Why you hand third parties a suite of assets that can travel into their context, instead of 80 pages of logo rules.Your team still works strategy, then creative, then media. Creative has to be conceived inside its distribution, which is why on Meta the creative has become the targeting.All of your brand knowledge lives in one long-tenured person. How to spread that judgment across the team by debating why a piece does or doesn't feel right.AI is producing work nobody on the team has read. Tobi Lütke's "slop grenades," and why saving money on copy makes little sense when media costs more than it ever has.Your brand keeps trying to make memes. What Gap and the studio Invisible Dynamics did instead, bringing back music video culture with dance covers people remix on their own.Your positioning sits in the aspirational middle. What Everlane's sale to Shein says about brands whose promise is that tomorrow can be a little better than today. ABOUT EUGENE Eugene Healey is a brand strategist and co-founder of The New Fundamentals of Brand, a seven-week live course for marketers and brand leaders. He previously lectured in marketing and brand management at the University of Melbourne and is an equity partner in Tracksuit. https://thenewfundamentals.co Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eugbrandstrat 00:00 Cold open: the funnel is now a tornado 00:22 Two years of making content, and what changed 01:51 Why he turned it into a course 03:50 The central thesis: from control to orchestration 04:50 Salience in the Andromeda era 05:39 Creative is the new targeting 06:56 Walter Cronkite and the creator model of trust 08:51 Everlane, Shein and the death of the middle 12:16 What happened to the analog revival 15:23 Private social and the entertainment platforms 17:26 Creative velocity and who approves the work 19:39 Slop grenades and human discernment 22:56 Can AI hold the brand's judgment? 25:06 Hiring top screenwriters for UGC scripts 25:45 Stop making memes and become the meme: Gap 29:08 Tracksuit, queryable brand tracking and Hall 30:17 Sydney Sweeney and why we let ourselves get rage baited 34:54 Inside The New Fundamentals of Brand 38:02 Seats, and where to sign up 38:30 Wrap

How do you run Black Friday when your DTC brand is already hooked on discounts? Split your customers into new and repeat, keep the coupon-trained cohorts on their deal, and use the Black Friday offer to bring in new customers who have never seen your 30% off. On the second DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck is joined by Jordan Gordon, who leads email and retention at Pilothouse, and Rafael Gi, who works on partnerships and client strategy there. Each topic runs on a timer. They start with a brand that has run 30% off sitewide five times this year, move to why Meta keeps spending in the markets you have already saturated, and finish with the worst things Pilothouse finds when it audits a brand's email program. Get an audit from Pilothouse: https://pilothouse.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Your customers only buy when there is a coupon. Jordan separates the coupon-addicted cohorts, keeps showing them their price through email, and controls the offers new customers see so they settle on a new normal.Your Black Friday offer is the same one you ran all year. Push it to 35%, or lead with an "up to" offer on a door buster that is not your most important product.You treat your discount as a flat rate. Rafael budgets discounts like media spend, with a goal for each offer, such as a one-day drop on your best seller to capture new customer emails.You give away margin in Q4 and get nothing back in January. Set an AOV threshold that earns a gift card customers can only redeem in Q5.Your early access list waits weeks for the deal. Give them the Black Friday offer the day they sign up, then use the flow to sell them on buying from you all year.Meta keeps spending where you are already strongest. In one Pilothouse audit of a nine-figure brand, two regions near where the company was founded held 8% of its addressable market, produced 40% of its revenue, and were being over-delivered by 20 to 30%.Every region carries the same ROAS target. Set targets by market maturity instead: higher efficiency in saturated markets, break even or a small loss in new ones, and something in between for markets that are emerging.Your email program is turned up to maximum. Jordan found one brand with 700 live flow messages sending up to four campaigns a day, and another using 30-day open attribution that credited email for sales driven by ads.You do not know what email earns on its own. A control group that only receives the first welcome email shows you the incremental revenue.Your SMS budget looks expensive. At one brand, email click-through sat at 0.09% while SMS reached 2.5%, and an SMS click cost 25 cents against roughly $1.30 for Meta and Google retargeting.The algorithm narrowed your brand to one message. How a testosterone supplement ended up with a site built around libido, and why the fix meant rebuilding creative, site and email together.Your pricing sits behind a quiz. At one subscription brand, only 3% of people who went through the quiz checked out. ABOUT THE GUESTS Jordan Gordon leads email and retention at Pilothouse and hosts The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-worlds-best-email-and-retention-podcast/id1772940578 Rafael Gi works on partnerships and client strategy at Pilothouse, a performance marketing agency. https://pilothouse.co STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer Want to be on the Rundown? Email [email protected] 00:26 Raf's hamstring and Jordan's white belts 04:49 Budget your discounts like media spend 07:15 Do bundles and gifts with purchase fix it 16:06 How a market matures 27:16 The supplement the algorithm turned into a libido brand 33:08 The subject line typo the investors saw 34:20 Budweiser Red Light and the Bud Light UFC promo 37:36 The $10,000 retreat ticket paid in Bitcoin

Carve Designs gave connected TV 60 days at a $20K monthly minimum before deciding it worked, which is about as clean a test as a DTC brand runs on a new channel. The lift showed up first in direct traffic and search, and conversion rates rose across channels for customers who had seen the ads. Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs, the coastal apparel brand that grew out of swim. She joins Eric Dyck and Jesse Math of Keen Decision Systems to walk through the bets that take months to pay back: direct mail, connected TV, TikTok and whitelisted ads, plus the Pinterest test that never worked. You walk away knowing how to size a first test, where to look for the halo, and how long to wait before you cut a channel. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Your direct mail gets credit for every buyer on the mailing list. Jesse's question is how many of them would have bought anyway. Carve answers it with holdout panels, including tests that also suppress email and paid social for the held-out group.You can't tell whether to mail more. Carve tracks contribution per piece, tests catalog count, page count and size, and reweights audiences between 0 to 12 month and 13 to 24 month buyers.Your average ROI says spend more. Jesse's example: a $2 return on $1 million tells you nothing about the next dollar, because the first dollars into a channel return more than the last ones.Your other channels swing around the catalog drop. Carve plans spend in every other channel around catalog in-home dates.You don't know what a first connected TV test costs. Carve ran 60 days at a $20K monthly minimum, with a fixed window, set objectives and targets, and landed on target or slightly ahead of it.You can't find where connected TV sales land. At Carve they land mostly on the site as direct traffic, with a small portion on Amazon, and GA4 shows higher conversion rates for customers who saw a CTV ad and then clicked an email or a paid social ad.Your CTV attribution looks too good. Jesse sees brands arrive with platform numbers their CFO doesn't believe. The question to ask is whether you are buying new customers or buying inventory your existing customers already watch.You judge upper funnel on a 14 or 30 day window. For brands buying CTV for awareness, Jesse says Keen sees roughly 30% of the measured impact in the short term and roughly 70% over time.You're about to kill a channel at month three. TikTok took Carve about six months to gain momentum, and whitelisted ads took close to 18 months before they became a top performer.You treat every test as a pass or a fail. Jesse's alternative is to find the 30% that worked, pare back the rest, and keep going. ABOUT THE GUESTS Hannah Fleming is Performance Marketing Director at Carve Designs. Shop the collection or request a catalog at https://carvedesigns.com Jesse Math is VP of Strategic Partnerships at Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com HARNESS THE HALO Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is episode 4 of 6, and a new episode drops every other week. STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer SPONSOR Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com

How do you grow a DTC brand without a big brand awareness budget? Terra Kaffe founder Sahand Dilmaghani pre-sold 10,000 espresso machines from a single page with no reviews, and word of mouth has been the top reason customers buy every month for five years. On the DTC Podcast, Sahand tells Eric Dyck how he left investment banking to bootstrap a super automatic espresso machine, what he cut to get it shipped with $2.5 million already spent, and why Terra Kaffe now puts its money into community and performance marketing instead of brand awareness. Terra Kaffe has 70,000 machines in homes today. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE You sell a high-ticket product and cannot seed it to a thousand creators a month. Sahand built word of mouth by calling customers himself, and it now drives well over a third of Terra Kaffe's orders. Your brand awareness budget is too small to register. Why $15K to $20K a month will never make you a household name, and when to hold that money for one campaign big enough to count. Your best video flopped on Meta. A $30K shoot that never converted on Instagram or Facebook became one of Terra Kaffe's strongest performers on CTV. Your investors want proof of demand before the product is finished. One pre-order page, a teaser campaign, an email to the subscriber list and a booth at a New York coffee festival produced 10,000 orders. Your product is over budget and behind schedule. The features Terra Kaffe cut in a do-or-die meeting to ship in six months, and which ones came back later as a fast follow. Your outside partner has spent double to go half the distance. How Sahand replaced his engineering firm mid-build while it still held most of the product knowledge. You cannot afford tooling or a production deposit. The trade he made with his manufacturer on the first machine's design rights, and what it cost him later. ABOUT SAHAND Sahand Dilmaghani is the founder and CEO of Terra Kaffe, the Brooklyn-based maker of super automatic espresso machines, including the TK-02 and the Demi. Before Terra Kaffe he worked in investment banking and at an electric vehicle startup. https://www.terrakaffe.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terrakaffe STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer 00:49 From Wall Street banker to "barista" 02:25 Carrying a 30 pound espresso machine on the subway 04:40 The only espresso brand anyone could name 05:22 The Larry David campaign idea 06:13 Building complex hardware during COVID 08:52 $2.5 million in, with no guarantee it ships 09:09 Funding one milestone at a time 10:42 The meeting where the features got cut 13:36 Replacing the engineering firm mid-build 16:33 Giving the manufacturer the V1 design rights 20:44 Answering the dropship accusations 21:32 The investor test: does anyone want this 23:22 10,000 pre-orders from one page 25:11 The Terra Kaffe manifesto 26:16 What a super automatic machine does 29:39 Why people bought before they could try it 32:33 70,000 machines in homes 33:25 Word of mouth, every month for five years 36:28 Brand spend versus performance marketing 38:23 The three problems every operator hits 40:39 Why a small brand awareness budget is a trap 41:15 Coming for Nespresso 42:37 CTV and the $30K shoot that flopped on Meta 46:34 Survival by a thousand band-aids 47:34 Raising $2.6 million in 13 days 48:03 You are going to get punched in the face

What are Meta partnership ads, and how should a DTC brand test them before Q4? They run through a creator's handle with your brand tagged, so Meta combines both accounts' engagement signals, and Pilothouse typically sees lower CPMs on them than on ads from the brand handle alone. Jacob Geary runs Meta accounts at Pilothouse and joins Eric Dyck on All Killer No Filler to lay out how partnership ads work in practice. On the larger accounts his team runs, 30 to 50% of the ads now go out as partnership ads, and most of the creators behind them are micro-creators. You walk away with a test plan for a brand spending $50K to $100K a month on Meta: the budget, the number of creators, the formats to brief, and the metrics that decide what scales. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Your customers have seen your brand ads so often they scroll past them. The same message from a creator's handle, with your brand tagged, gives them a fresh face and tends to deliver at a lower CPM.You don't know where to find creators. The Partnership Ads Hub inside Meta suggests creators in your vertical, surfaces people already posting about you, and hands you the ad code once both sides approve.You don't know what to brief. Jacob's starting formats are "why I switched" problem and solution videos, holiday gift guides, and raw unboxings shot on a phone.You don't know what to pay. Jacob's range is $100 to $300 per creator for a few videos and 60 days of usage, and some creators will take the exposure from your ad spend without a fee.You assume you need big names. Micro-creators make up 80 to 90% of what Pilothouse runs, with performance Jacob describes as very similar and a faster testing cadence.Your Q4 creator ads die the day the sale ends. Brief creators three to four weeks ahead and have them mention the sale in general terms instead of reading out a discount and a date.You don't know how big the first test should be. At $100K a month on Meta, Jacob puts 10% toward three to five creators with one or two videos each, then builds toward 20% by month three.You're not sure how to judge the results. Use the same purchase conversion rate and ROAS benchmarks as any new creative test, with a little more patience in month one. ABOUT JACOB Jacob Geary is a Meta media buyer at Pilothouse, the performance marketing team behind DTC, where he runs paid social for ecommerce brands. To talk partnership ads with his team, go to https://pilothouse.co and ask for Jacob. STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer 00:49 Intro: Jacob from Pilothouse on Meta partnership ads 01:28 What partnership ads are, versus whitelisting and dark posts 02:53 The Partnership Ads Hub as a creator discovery network 03:53 Why they matter: combined signals and ad blindness 05:17 Are partnership ads incremental? 06:30 Why partnership ads get cheaper CPMs 07:34 Fresh looks, Andromeda and ad sequencing 08:59 Formats that work: why I switched, gift guides, unboxings 10:30 Gifting angles for each creator's audience 11:24 Usage rights and how creators get paid 12:10 Deal structures: affiliate, paid per video, or free 13:32 Planning creator volume for Q4 15:40 Briefing sale language that won't expire 16:12 What share of Meta ads run as partnership ads 17:37 Test budgets for brands just starting out 19:38 Micro-creators versus mega-influencers 21:17 Post-click: when a dedicated landing page earns the build 22:06 Creator communities and leaderboards 23:06 Setup steps, and why to get permissions before November 25:11 A test plan for a $5M brand spending $50K to $100K a month 27:58 The metrics that decide a winner 29:43 Close and how to reach Jacob