In this episode, host Brett Curry discusses seven essential habits that successful brands adopt, which struggling brands often overlook. He dives deep into the importance of measuring actionable metrics, respecting momentum in business growth, balancing brand and performance marketing, and understanding the dynamics of demand generation versus demand capture. Listen in and discover the timeless principles of marketing that remain relevant in today's fast-paced environment. An episode packed with actionable insights to enhance your e-commerce strategies for 2026.

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

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Chapters:

(00:00) Intro

(03:08) Measuring Actionable Metrics

(07:55) The Importance of Momentum in Business

(11:00) Balancing Brand and Performance

(14:47) Demand Capture vs. Demand Generation

(17:24) Recover hidden Amazon revenue with Threecolts

(18:20) Incrementality in Marketing Measurement

(23:34) Creative Rhythms and Diversity

(26:56) Timeless Marketing Principles for Modern Success

(31:55) We Want to Help You Grow

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Relevant Links:

• Join us in LA for Scale with YouTube Ads Live: omgcommerce.com/laevent
• Sponsor Offer | Threecolts: https://threecolts.com

Transcript:

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Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. We want to take just a minute and tell you a little bit about my agency OMG Commerce. Now we work with some of your favorite eight and nine figure DTC and omnichannel brands. And our specialty is profitable scale. We love taking great brands and amplifying their growth profitably. We've helped a number of brands go from zero on YouTube to spending as much as a million dollars in 90 days while hitting a CAC or CPA target. We've also helped multiple brands launch on Amazon or just add scale to Amazon. We took Boom Beauty from zero to almost $6 million in sales their first 12 months on Amazon. So if you're not satisfied with your current level of growth, if you're looking to diversify channels, maybe you're a little too dependent on meta and you want to add YouTube or you're not pleased with your Amazon growth, then we need to chat.

So visit us omgcommerce.com, click the Let's Talk button. We'd love to schedule a complimentary strategy session with you. And with that back to the show. Well hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a unique episode. I'm flying solo on this episode, and I thought this would be important to kick off 2026 by talking about seven habits that the best brands adopt that struggling brands do not. And so if you want to make this your best year yet, which I think everything's going to line up this year to make it possible for this to be your best year, yet, you need these habits in your business. And here's what's interesting. As an agency, we were with a lot of eight and nine figure brands. We partnered with brands like Native and Mando, dude Wipes and Jones Row Beauty and Crumble Cookie and a bunch of others.

And we just get to see the way a lot of great brands operate. We get to watch tens of millions in spend through various MTA platforms and in platform and where we're strategizing and measuring. And so we have a very unique perspective as an agency at OM OMG Commerce. And so I want to share with you what I believe you need to do to make this the best year yet. I love the book Atomic Habits. I fully believe what James Clear says that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And really, systems is just another word for habits. And then I've also heard another quote recently that I love, and this is one that I've had to apply to OMG to my own business, my own life. It's, Hey, your current system is perfectly designed to get the results you're getting right now.

So don't like your results, change your system or change your habits. So I've got seven of them. Let's get after it. First one, the best brands. They measure only what's actionable. You can always tell if there's someone kind of new to digital marketing, new to Google Ads or new to Meta or just new to DTC because they're just going to puke up information. They put together a deck, it's going to be loaded with every metric possible. You have a discussion with them, they're going to talk about all kinds of stuff and a lot of it just does not matter. However, the best strategists, best agencies, best brands, they know the numbers that matter and those numbers are the ones that are actionable. Now, I like having more data. I think having more data can be good, but only if you know what to do with it.

And I think only if you go into building a dashboard or running a meeting or building a deck with the idea of here's what we're going to do based on this data. So I'll give you three questions that I really like before starting some new initiatives, some new marketing or growth initiative. And this will help you measure what's actionable. So we get the privilege of working with some pretty big brands who haven't run YouTube, right? We're known as a YouTube agency. We do more than that, but that's what we're known for. And so there were some pretty big brands that have never been able to crack the code on YouTube and we help them scale on YouTube. A few of the questions we ask ourselves and then we discuss with the brand before we launch are these. So one, what do I expect to see?

So week one, month one, month two, as we start to scale, what do I expect to see? What metrics do I expect to be able to get an early read on? And when I do, what does that mean? So what do I expect to see? When do I expect to see it? And then if what I see is better than or worse than what I expected, what am I going to do? And so thinking this through ahead of time is critical. Otherwise you get a few weeks into a new initiative or a new campaign or a new channel and you're like, well, here's the data. I dunno, let's keep going, I guess. And so a few things we'd want to look at as an example. So lemme just break down YouTube for you a little bit. We have different benchmarks we like to look at for a variety of metrics, but a few of them are view, rate and click through right now, these numbers don't really matter in the sense that all I want is sales, right?

I want incremental new sales, I want new customers. I want this channel to grow my business to drive new demand, things like that. But all of these numbers have a meaning and can then inform an action. So I've got different benchmarks I want to see as far as view rate goes across different placements, whether that ads running on TV or shorts or mobile nons shorts or tablets or desktop or whatever. I know what I'm expecting based on a category, based on a type of ad. If it's lower than that, I'm going to say, Hey, I don't like the targeting. We're speaking to the wrong people. Or two, maybe I don't like the hook of this ad or this ad isn't as good as we thought because the numbers are showing it. So if we see these numbers, here's what we're going to do. We're going to tweak the audience and then we're going to go back to the drawing board a little bit or tweak the ad.

So this is what I expect, when will I expect to see it? And then what action am I taking because of that? Another just quick nerdy thing that's YouTube related, but this applies to really any area of business. Looking at numbers like this, inside of YouTube, we see things that are called engaged click conversions and engaged view conversions. So conversions that are click-based versus conversions that are more engaged view based. Well that breakdown or that composition can change over time. Where some campaigns are driving a lot of click conversions, some campaigns driving a lot of view conversions. Well, I want to come into a campaign saying this is what I expect it to be. If it's say more view based and less click-based, then I'm going to have to look at my in platform numbers differently. I'm going to have to look at my triple whale or north view numbers a little bit differently.

So this is what I expect, but then based on what I see, here's how I'm going to look at this a little bit differently. These are the actions I'm going to take. So I believe every internal marketing meeting, every agency update, every meeting you have with yourself looking at something is, here's what I expect. Here's when I would expect it. Here are the actions I'm going to take when I see this. So measure only what's actionable. That's habit number one. Habit number two, the best brands respect momentum, right? Little actions today compound and we'll make a difference in Q2, Q3, Q4, and next year. It was really interesting. We managed a ton of spend this past holiday, black Friday, cyber Monday was really great for most brands. What's interesting is those that crush and we had some big brands who were up over a hundred percent year over year for Black Friday Cyber Monday.

All of the brands that did well also had very strong Q2 and Q3 numbers. There was a couple of brands that did not hit their numbers for holiday, they were struggling. And you know what? Those brands had been struggling all year. Maybe it was inventory related, maybe there were some measurement issues, maybe there were some other underlying factors in the business, but it was a reminder to me, you can't just flip a switch and suddenly crush it as a brand. Momentum matters. So I was just looking at this for a brand recently. They came to us and said, Hey, our return customer numbers are down. And we got looking a little closer and we're like, yeah, you missed your new customer number for three or four months in a row. And so return customer numbers are predicated on those new customer numbers. And so we've got to build that momentum.

You can't just survive off of efficiencies with return customers. You have to be driving new customers. You can't just let things run in platform and then expect to see improvements on search and shopping and with your meta retargeting if you are not doing the little things day in and day out. And so making little tweaks, little adjustments, 1% improvements here or there, stack those up over the course of a month and over the course of a year and you are dramatically better than you were before. Again, that's kind of a principle of atomic habits. I get 1% better every day. I'm actually 360% better at the end of the year than if I just wait and try to make big sweeping changes in one fell swoop. And so that totally applies to ad channels and everything else. And so another thing I would look at is we see this all the time inside of, we manage a lot of Google ad accounts and we'll see man, branded search really took a dive this month.

And just side note, I don't think branded search paid search is very incremental. I think you should really limit it, and there's ways to do that, but it's still something that you want to measure whether you're paying for it, it's all organic. Usually though, if branded search is down, it's because meta is down or YouTube is down or TV is down. So we have to respect momentum and know that momentum is built over time. If you want a great q4, a great holiday in 2026, that starts right now. Habit number three, the best brands, they have the right mix of brand plus performance. One of the trends I'm seeing and I'm hearing from some of our best clients is, Hey, they're investing in organic social, they're investing in some organic reach. They want to build their brand. And if you think about brand, what is that?

Right? That's its personality, its style, its positioning, and one of my favorite definitions for positioning is what the product does and who it's for. So Tylenol is this is like the any, it's the headache medicine really for everybody. Advil, it's the aches and pain medication really, again, for anybody who is Nike. Nike is the performance footwear, athleisure, whatever for athletes, people that play, it's for athletes, right? I'm wearing OnCloud shoes right now. I love OnCloud shoes. I don't really know how they want to position it, but as I observe people that are wearing on clouds, I'm like, this is kind of position for people over 40 that probably have pain in their knees and they're wearing on clouds. I don't think that's actually on clouds positioning. I just see that. Or people that are in the nursing profession or on their feet all the time or whatever.

What is your brand or positioning? I'm a believer that brand is the ultimate moat. It's the hardest thing to duplicate. It's the hardest thing to recreate. It's why I'm not bullish on pure Chinese sellers of stuff on Amazon. I'm very bullish on brands. So build a brand, but brand can be a little bit squishy. I can be a little bit squishy and hard to measure. And so getting the right mix of brand plus performance, and we see this now and we have the privilege of working with native deodorant as an example, working with Moise Ali, the founder, all the way through the exit with p and g and then in part of the p and g for five years. And so I got to see it firsthand there. I think some people look at the bigger companies and they say, oh, well they're just worried about brand.

That's all they care about. No, no, no. They're measuring all kinds of stuff. Very sophisticated. We helped native grow in retail store. There's some really sophisticated ways to measure that. But what the bigger brands know is that running top of funnel and building brand demand can be extremely profitable. But on the performance side, we know that we have to measure everything. Everything we do has to be held accountable. My YouTube ad has to be accountable. All of my meta ads have to be accountable if I test connect the TV or if I'm running Apple 11, all of it has to be accountable, but it's all measured a little bit differently. I'm going to measure my YouTube a little bit differently than I measure my Google shopping. I'm going to measure my prospecting meta differently than I'm going to measure my retargeting meta and I'm going to measure all that differently than I measure my app.

Love it. And so having the right mix of brand plus performance is incredibly valuable. I heard on one of my favorite podcasts, marketing Operators podcast, shout out to the Connors and Cody, Connor McDonald and Cody pla. They were talking about, Hey, I think brand spend, you should be able to put it on the balance sheet, capitalize that because it's valuable. It's like building a location. Really, you can't do that, but it kind of makes sense. Spending and investing in brand pays dividends for a long, long time. But the best brands, the top brands get the right of brand plus performance. You need to think that in habit number four related, but the best brands, they get the right capture and demand generation. And so this is the world we've lived in for a long time, being a Google and a YouTube shop and an Amazon shop, is that there's a lot of activity, a lot of growth to be had across most verticals by just capturing existing demand, right?

We're consulting right now with a very large auto parts manufacturer, and we've assessed their business right on audit, and we believe we can grow them tremendously by a few multiples just by leaning into demand capture on Amazon. So we're going to do it, but throw in some demand generation there and you've got a real winning formula. So this mix of demand capture and demand generation, it does vary based on your product. So boom by Cindy Joseph, longtime client, shout out to or Firestone, we've managed their Google YouTube, I think for nine years, 10 years, something like that, maybe a little bit longer. Helped them launch on Amazon. They went from zero to 6 million a year their first year on Amazon when we launched them. But this is one of those brands that's interesting in that in the early days, nobody was looking for age cosmetics.

That was not a search term. They kind of invented it, so nobody was looking for that. So everything really had to be very top of funnel or bottom of funnel. There's really no mid funnel because there wasn't existing demand for their product. Now over time, they've created this category. Now a lot of skincare companies are talking about age and things like that, and so now there is kind of a mid funnel and there is some existing demand that other people are creating that boom can go and capture. But in the early days, it was all demand gen and a little bit of bottom of funnel demand capture with auto parts. There's a whole lot of demand capture right there in the middle of the funnel that you can just go get and you'll still do better to run some top of funnel, some demand gen as well.

So the best brands get the right mix. What does that look like? What should that look like for you and where are you missing opportunities? We see this all the time, again, because of the nature of our agency where someone's smashing it on meta and we help with meta as well, but they're smashing it on meta, but they've ignored non-brand search. Well for certain categories, a ton of categories, even vitamins to auto, parts to apparel. People are searching for stuff on Google and you need to get your products there. And so getting the right mix of demand capture and demand generation, that's what great brands do. That's what you need to do as well. This episode is brought to you by three cults. What do L'Oreal, Celsius, Samsung, and Quest Nutrition all have in common? They trust three cults to recover hidden revenue, unlocking two to 5% in extra cash flow.

That's more budget for PPC channel expansion or pure profits to fight margin compression. Now three Colts is offering you the same advantage, completely free. They'll recover your first $1,000 at no charge. Go catch upfront costs, just a real $1,000 to show you why the world's leading brands choose three cults to recover cash cut shipping costs by 10 to 30%. Alternatively, three cults offers a complimentary month of Multichannel Pro valued at $999 to facilitate the launch of your products across 30 plus e-commerce marketplaces. Either way, improve your margins and grow your online revenue with three Colts. Next, once. This is habit number five, the best brands they measure and calibrate based on incrementality. So really important, I love multitouch attribution tools. We have clients on Trip Whale, north Beam and others. I love them. They can be quite valuable connecting data from Shopify and all the platforms and kind of creating their spin on what they think is happening.

So it's still very reliant on click-based data, which yeah, mms, like prescient and many others. Media mix modeling tools or marketing mix modeling tools. I love these. These are correlation based. So when spend on certain platforms goes up or down, what does that do to total sales? And with that, you can look at, hey, which of my optimal marketing mix be and is this channel actually driving performance or not? We've seen this a lot. Where can we help brands launch on YouTube or grow on YouTube where man, as YouTube grows, tools like Presant will say, whoa, something going on here because a sales move is happening when we spend more on YouTube. But here's the deal. All of that needs to be calibrated with incrementality tests, right? So how are we pressure testing that? How are we sanity checking that and getting a good read on whether we're looking mostly in platform or we're looking at an MTA like triple or North Beam or whether we're using a an MM M tool.

Are we calibrating that with incrementality? Now, house Analytics gold standard for sure. We've had the privilege of working with House on a number of brands, love looking at those reports. Highly actionable if you know what you're looking at. But there's also other places to start. And so this is something that Google's leaning into. Meta is leaning into, I think for this year, they're going to lean more into it. I think it's going to become more table stakes. I think all good brands are going to be measuring incrementality at least in platform if they're not doing something like House or something more advanced. But we see on the Google side as an example is they've got a couple of tools, but one is called conversion lift. And this is similar to what a house does. House does. Geo holdouts. Hey, this part of the country, we're going to run YouTube ads in it.

This other part of the country we're not going to run YouTube ads in, but everything else is going to remain constant. We're going to measure sales over the course of two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, plus a post treatment window. And then we're going to see how incremental was YouTube, how many more sales did we get in these treatment markets or test markets versus the control? And that's going to give us some data on how incremental was this? Well, the cool thing is now Google and Meta will do this for you. You got to set it up, but they can do holdouts or what's called user holdouts. So what's cool about a user holdout is basically what Google or Meta would be saying is, Hey, this is the universe of an audience that is eligible to see your ad, meaning they fit your targeting and your parameters and your campaign settings.

So this is a group of people that could see your ad. We're going to hold out a portion of them and they won't see the ad and the rest will. And then we're going to measure what is the difference, what's the difference or the delta between those exposed to the ad and those not exposed to the ad. We did this for a large home product brand recently, and it was fascinating. What we saw actually was the results when they did the holdout tests were better for YouTube than even in platform. And we were able to see kind of the incremental lift in conversions, purchase conversions, and add to car conversions and overall roas and stuff. It just gave a lot of confidence. It was like, Hey, we were seeing good things. We were seeing traffic increase, we're seeing all these positive things. We saw conversions in platform.

But one thing that happens now is even if you're excluding past customers and you're excluding visitors even getting really restrictive on your exclusions, previous customers are just going to sneak in. They're just going to sneak in there. And so we want to run these incrementality studies to understand truly how incremental was this campaign? You can do the same thing with meta now and run incrementality studies, and eventually we're going to be able to optimize for incrementality and some really cool things like that. And so the best brands, they're continuously testing incrementality because we've also seen, and we've seen this with big brands where they'll run an incrementality test for connected TV or for YouTube and they'll do it through a non-peak part of the year. They'll get an incrementality read, they'll do another incrementality read during a sale period or during a holiday, and they may get a much different read.

There's a lot of noise and a lot of stuff going on during holiday especially, but also during other sales periods. And so you've got to be continuously looking at incrementality, understanding how incremental is a channel, how incremental are different offers or different ads, and how incremental is it at a set spend, because we may find that at a certain spend, it's highly incremental. You go too far beyond that and it becomes less incremental. And so the best brands as a habit, they're measuring and calibrating for incrementality. Make this the year you get serious about incrementality. Habit number six, the best brands they master creative rhythms and creative diversity. And so this is something that we lean into a lot as an everyone knows that creative is the biggest lever. You'll win or die as an agency or as a brand based on your creative. How good is it?

How does it resonate? How much the platforms love it, how much the users love it, and can we grow with this creative? But you got to get the right creative rhythms, as we call these creative feedback loops. These can be very compressed very fast, or they can be a little bit more drawn out depending on the channel that you're leaning into. But ultimately we need to start with a hypothesis. Then we're going to ideate for new ideas, right? Then we're going to create some ads. We're going to launch those ads we're going to measure, and then we're going to repeat. So based on the measurement, we're going to come with a new hypothesis, new ideation, new creation launch, and the cycle just goes on and on. That's going to vary though, right? Some of my friends that run huge meta ads accounts, they're launching a hundred ads a day on YouTube.

If you're just getting started, you don't need nearly that many. In fact, the system won't handle it. You may need a handful and then over time, a few dozen or whatever, but you're constantly launching new ads, testing them, learning from them, iterating, launching new ones. If you're running TV as an example, we consult with bigger brands that are successful on tv. We help with YouTube, but with tv, it takes a little bit longer, right? To hypothesize, to ideate, to create, to launch, to measure, and then to do the whole thing again. But you've got to establish creative rhythms. They need to be part of your business, structure them understand who owns them, who owns which parts of them so that you can really make magic happen with your creative. And then also you need creative diversity, right? We're seeing this all the time now with YouTube.

We love partnering with agencies like Raindrop, and we have other editors who we work with, but the best brands, we're with a snack brand right now. That was one of the fastest starts on YouTube we've ever seen. But they are really succeeding because they have some really polished, nice raindrop creative that actually works great on tv, but also mobile and desktop. And then they've also got some creator and UGC mashup, so some real authentic raw type of maybe learn about how great the snack is, but they're mashed up and they got some style to it and they look great. And then also top performing videos from social. And so we see this a lot now across YouTube is the best brands. Those are really scaling. They've got some hero type videos, something that's going to feel or maybe lean a little more like tv, but it can be direct response.

They've got some mashups of real stuff, real creators, real customers, and then they're taking the best of what they have on paid social. They're running that on YouTube shorts and on mobile non shorts on YouTube. I know creative diversity. It's all the rage on meta now, that's what Andromeda needs is creative diversity. And so the best brands, they have creative rhythms, creative feedback loops that enable creative diversity that then enable you to crush your goals. We've also seen, and I know this is true on meta as well, you just have one type of creative, you're going to hit ceilings. It's going to stop working. So you need that creative diversity all powered by creative rhythms. And number seven, finally, the last habit is the best brands. They understand what's timeless about marketing so that they can crush what's new. This is where I think guys like me have been around a while.

I started running marketing in the early two thousands, so I'm 20 plus years now at this game. Good marketing principles still apply and understanding human behavior and psychology and all those things that matters. But here's what's interesting. If you take a look at what really matters with marketing, really, and we all know creative is king, but let's just set that aside for a minute. What matters more than anything else is who you're talking to. If I sell dentures, which I don't, but if I did actually hearing aids, I used to work for some hearing aid, big hearing aid companies, if I'm selling hearing aids and I'm running the best creative, the best ads ever to people in their twenties, I'm going to struggle because they don't need hearing aids. For the most part. If I am selling the latest fashion, latest hoodies, whatever, to my dad who's 74, he's not going to buy it because that's not his style.

So who you talk to really matters, and I think it's the most important. What is second most important? I believe it's the offer. What offer are you giving someone that matters more than anything else? If there is, and the offer doesn't have to be financially based, it doesn't have to be a discount or anything like that, but offers can come in all kinds of shapes and sizes offering you this benefit at this price. This is a killer offer. I'm offering you this benefit at this price with this kind of guarantee. That's a great offer. So who you speak to is most important. The offer is second most important. And then the way you position it, the way you say it, all the elements of your creative, that's third. Now, what's interesting is with meta, you're not picking your targeting almost at all, right? I know some people have different philosophies there, but mostly the creative is the targeting, right?

You're building an ad so that you can reach the right person. And so one way I think to frame this or look at this is if you're not reaching the right person, it's because you're not saying the right thing, right? That's what's true on meta. The creative is the targeting. Now, on YouTube, it's a little bit different. We actually do some targeting, right? We're actually picking some audiences and we're targeting people based on what they're searching for on Google, what they're searching for on YouTube or what they're in the market to buy and things like that. But we're also using the creative as targeting as well. And then we're really thinking through what is that offer? Am I just talking about the product and that's it? Or is there an offer that I'm presenting and making it very, very clear, this is what you'll get from this product.

Here's how much it is. It's a killer offer. And so thinking through all of those things, understanding what's core to marketing, then you can apply it to what's new and what's working right now. That's why every year, and I've started doing this again this year, I revisit some of the classics, Ogilvy on advertising, scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins, the style, some of the things don't translate, but the core still works. Human nature still is human nature, just we got different flavors and different applications of things. And it's interesting. I actually picked up an advertising book from college. It was like media buying. And what's so interesting is I was looking at some of the concepts and I'm like, wait a minute. The platforms are doing these things right now. They're trying to implement these like a cdi, BDI report and other nerdy stuff like that, but understand what's timeless, so you can crush what's new.

That's a killer habit. So let's review really quickly here as we wrap up the best brands. And if you want to have your best year in 2026, these are seven habits you need to adopt. Number one, they measure only what's actual. You need to measure only what's actual two. They understand and respect momentum. You can't just crush it overnight. Momentum is built over time, deliberately, systematically. Number three, have the right balance of brand plus creative. Number four, strike the right balance of demand generation and demand capture. Number five, measure and calibrate for incrementality consistently, not just once, but over time consistently. Number six, master creative rhythms and creative diversity. And finally, number seven, understand what's timeless about marketing so you can crush what's new and what's now. And so hope you enjoyed this. Thank you so much for tuning in. It means the world to us that you tune in.

Would love to see that review on iTunes. If you found this episode health helpful, please share with someone else and visit omg commerce.com. If you want someone like our team to take a look at your YouTube, Amazon email or meta. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening. That'll do it for this week's episode. Hey, if you're serious about profitable scale for your brand, we would love to chat. Over the last 15 years, we've worked with some amazing brands like Native Boom, beauty, Arctic Organify, crumble, cookie, true Earth, and many, many more. We want to help you unlock new channels, find profitable scale, have better creative, better campaign, better measurement strategies, and ultimately hope you have more fun and grow in all of your relevant channels. So take a look@omgcommerce.com, and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.

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