Future of Consumer Marketing

Aja Beckett, CEO and founder of Shotsy, didn't set out to build a company. She got prescribed a GLP1 medication, found herself completely unsupported after leaving the doctor's office, and built the companion app she needed. Two years later, Shotsy is the #1 companion app for GLP1 users — 1 million+ downloads, 100,000+ paying subscribers, 25,000 five-star reviews, available in 185 territories across 18 languages, with zero paid advertising and no data sales. In this episode, Aja shares how a Reddit post became her launch strategy, why her 7th app was the one that finally worked, the business model that lets her answer only to her users, and why she has made a deliberate decision to keep AI entirely out of the Shotsy user experience — even as she uses it aggressively to ship faster on the development side.

Topics Discussed

Adam Herstig, SVP of Marketing & Partnerships at Lids, brings two decades of sports licensing experience to one of retail's most recognizable brands - nearly 1,300 stores globally, the NBA and NHL store operations, college bookstore businesses, and a growing lineup of categories from trading cards to in-store customization. In this episode, Adam breaks down what it actually means to market a brand that is simultaneously a licensed retailer, a destination experience, and a cultural institution in the sports world. He talks about when sports marketing sells itself (World Series, anyone?) and when it needs a real push, why media diversification is the only honest way to measure attribution, and how a team of just 30 people manages campaigns across dozens of leagues, hundreds of teams, and thousands of SKUs. He also gives his honest read on AI in consumer-facing marketing - cautious, deliberate, and smarter than most.

Topics Discussed

Pascal Hanle, Chief Operating Officer of Pets Deli, tells one of the more unusual origin stories in German DTC: a pet food company that went bankrupt, was bought out of insolvency, and was handed to its most tenacious early employee to rebuild from scratch — beginning with Pascal literally sawing frozen meat blocks with a bow saw in the office kitchen to test new suppliers. Now in his 10th year at the company, with 135 FTEs, a warehouse that grew from 3,000 to 11,000 square meters, B2B accounts at Rewe and Edeka, and a target of €100M by 2030, Pascal shares what it actually takes to build durable unit economics, why ownership is the only metric that matters beyond revenue, and why the real sign of a healthy company is whether its CEO can spend two weeks in Egypt without opening a laptop.

Topics Discussed

Rita Zahir, VP of Marketing and E-Commerce at Unique Vintage, delivers a data-dense masterclass on the one metric most e-commerce brands are still getting wrong: the difference between revenue and profit. With 20 years across Shoes.com, Famous Footwear, Polaris, and now a female-owned vintage-inspired brand, Rita breaks down why "let the algorithm handle it" is the most dangerous phrase in modern performance marketing — and how a combination of custom behavioral segmentation and contribution-margin-level analytics helped her team beat Meta Advantage+ ROAS by 30% during the most volatile periods of the calendar. This is a rare, practitioner-level conversation about the infrastructure behind profitable e-commerce growth.

Cass Zawadowski, Executive Creative Director at Lyft, takes us inside the most significant transformation in Lyft's 14-year history — a year-long rebrand that touched everything from color palette and logo to photography, brand strategy, and brand archetype. She walks through what it actually takes to evolve a beloved brand without losing the soul that made it iconic, how Lyft launched its first major brand campaign post-rebrand targeting young working adults in New York and San Francisco, and how an entire marketing org moved from AI skepticism to daily creative practice through a CMO-led "ground zero" approach. From the three pillars of brand longevity to the tension between cultural creativity and boardroom-measurable impact, this is a rare behind-the-scenes view of creative leadership at one of North America's most recognized consumer platforms.

Carmen Fadel, VP of Marketing at WILDE, takes us inside one of the most unusual products in the CPG snack aisle — a 100% all-natural chicken breast chip that is growing 50% year over year and landing on shelves at Whole Foods, Costco, Target, and beyond. She breaks down the brand's "chips and lips" obsession with driving trial, the "shock and disbelief" campaign strategy that turns first reactions into word-of-mouth, and how she used a mixed media modeling platform to turn top-of-funnel brand spend into a board-ready, data-backed argument. From a NASCAR partnership to AI-powered competitive tracking, Carmen offers a candid, practical look at what it takes to build a brand-new snack category from scratch.

Topics Discussed

//

Sponsors:

Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

//

Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire

Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.

Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Liz Vanzura has spent her career turning around and launching iconic consumer brands — the New Beetle at Volkswagen, the civilian Hummer, Truly Spiked & Sparkling at Boston Beer, and three-plus years at Fanatics. Now she's CMO of Solo Brands, the platform behind Solo Stove, and she came in as a board member first during a company turnaround. In this episode, Liz shares the national loneliness study that became Solo Stove's core brand insight ('we sell togetherness, not fire pits'), how the Snoop Dogg campaign went viral and what it took to build something that actually sustained, and how 'Squash the Beef' at the Super Bowl Players' Tailgate introduced the new steel fire griddle to a massive audience. She also unpacks Solo Stove's AI roadmap — a media mix model, AI-personalized landing pages, and a digital AI assistant named Ember — and shares the Klarna cautionary tale about what happens when you push AI too far, too fast.

//

Sponsors:

Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io

The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co

//

Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire

Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.

Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

Malk Organics started at a farmer's market 11 years ago. When Jason Bronstad joined as CEO in 2020, the brand was in 1,200 stores. Today it's in more than 16,000 — across all 50 US states, in most major chains — with 17 SKUs, a new line of coconut creamers, and shelf-stable Tetra products built entirely on three ingredients: water, organic almonds, and salt. In this episode, Jason walks through the data discipline that turns shelf space into profitability, the counterintuitive decision to cut back to three SKUs before scaling to 17, and why 'liquid to lips' is still the most powerful marketing move in CPG — and why events, not in-store demos, are where that has to happen now. He also shares how AI is being used to measure the gap between the message delivered and the message received, and why dream culture is the key to keeping a remote team of 40 aligned across 14 states.

Rob Kligman is the Chief Revenue Officer of Anthem Sports & Entertainment Inc. and the founder of Collectible Lane — a low-fee, AI-powered collectibles marketplace built to give collectors back control. In this episode, Rob draws on 30 years of advertising and sponsorship experience to break down how he built an authoritative brand voice before the app ever launched, why storytelling and FOMO are the only marketing engines that work in collectibles, and why his 6-to-9-month goal isn't to beat eBay — it's to earn the loyalty of 1% of the market.

Ollie’s subscription model doesn’t just deliver fresh dog food — it runs machine learning models on photos of your dog’s teeth, tracks body condition and stool health, and feeds all of it into a wellbeing score that adjusts portions over time. Kalina Fridrich, VP of Growth and Retention at Ollie, joins The Future of Consumer Marketing to break down how a direct-to-consumer pet wellness brand is building a full-stack growth engine on top of that data. She covers the launch of “Feed the Obsession,” Ollie’s new brand campaign hitting TV for the first time; why AppLovin has emerged as a breakout performance channel for a health-app-native audience; the AI-generated dog bowl ad that went so viral on Meta they manufactured it and added it to the member experience; and the three-layer measurement stack — media mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, and direct customer surveys — that Ollie uses to make weekly channel decisions across a rapidly evolving media mix.