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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
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:
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
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
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
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
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
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