If you've ever struggled to justify brand spend to a CMO or CEO — this episode is for you.

Joe Shelerud is joined by Tony Miller, Director of Programmatic Strategy at Ad Advance (now powered by Podean), to break down one of their most powerful tools: Customer Avatar. Instead of relying on assumptions about who your customers are, Customer Avatar reverse-engineers your actual best buyers using Amazon's purchase data — and builds targeted, scalable audiences from there.

Key takeaways:

• Why upper funnel advertising has historically felt like guesswork — and how to fix it
• How Customer Avatar is built from real purchase behavior, not assumptions
• The Venn diagram approach to layering audiences for precision targeting
• How to measure upper funnel success beyond ROAS (the metrics that actually tell the story)
• How Amazon Marketing Cloud unlocks path-to-conversion data to tie brand spend to revenue
• Real-world results: campaigns driving 68x ROAS, 81% new-to-brand customers, and page views as low as $0.11

Plus: big news — The Ad Project is now powered by Podean, a global agency that expands the team's ability to support clients across creative, international markets, and more.

Next episode: Co-founder of Podean, Mark Power, joins the pod.