Are you spending more on ads but getting less in return? You're not alone. In this eye-opening conversation, Preston Rutherford, co-founder of Chubbies (which achieved a nine-figure exit and continues to see 8 years of consecutive growth), reveals why most modern brands are stuck in what he calls "the performance trap." Preston breaks down the crucial 95-5 rule—the reality that 95% of your audience isn't actively shopping at any given time—and explains why optimizing only for immediate conversions is slowly eroding your brand. 

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He shares the hard-earned lessons from Chubbies' journey, including their midlife crisis moment when efficiency metrics looked great but the business fundamentals were deteriorating. This isn't about choosing between brand and performance—it's about finding the right balance to build sustainable, profitable growth. If you've ever wondered whether your marketing is building a moat or just buying clicks, this episode is essential listening.

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Key Topics Discussed:

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• The Performance Trap & Brand Erosion - Warning signs you're over-indexed on demand capture, including rising CAC, declining lift from promotions, and the dangerous cycle of discount dependency that mirrors the "going out of business every month" strategy
• The 95-5 Rule Explained - Why 95% of your audience isn't shopping right now, how creative that crushes it for the 5% goes "in one ear and out the other" for everyone else, and why this mismatch is quietly killing your growth potential
• The Incrementality Testing Framework - How to pressure test your "bread and butter" spend with pulse tests, why most brands are already wasting more money than they'd ever spend on brand building, and the shocking truth that even in-platform data is heavily modeled (not the "capital T truth" we think it is)
• Building Resilient Baseline Revenue - The metric P&G's CMO watches obsessively (brand search growth), why your "base sales" matter more than you think, and how focusing on revenue you'd get anyway creates defensible, compounding growth
• The Modern Measurement Stack - Why you need MTA, MMM, experimentation platforms AND long-term brand measurement working together, plus how Marathon Data is democratizing the million-dollar custom models that big brands have used for decades to measure brand impact in performance marketing terms

Chapters: 

(00:00) Intro

(04:08) The Journey of Chubbies

(08:49) Navigating Early Success and Marketing Performance

(16:10) Identifying Brand Erosion and Its Consequences

(22:00) 1000 Free Postcards with Post Pilot

(22:58) The 95-5 Rule

(28:53) Balancing Demand Capture and Generation

(32:25) Testing and Incrementality in Marketing

(52:30) Understanding The Brand’s Impact on Revenue 

(58:47) Insights from Data Analysis

(1:04:18) Running Media Differently for Brand Building

(1:09:37) Identifying ICP for Marathon Data

(1:12:30) Fast Funding the Way You Need It with Wayflyer

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Transcript:

Preston Rutherford:

It's not because my ad sucks, it's because it's speaking to saying the wrong thing to this person. At this time, I'm not speaking to this vast majority of people in the way that they want to be spoken to.

Brett Curry:

Hey, this episode is brought to you by OMG Commerce. That's the agency that I get the privilege of running. Do you ever feel like it's Groundhog Day when it comes to your marketing where every day's the same, you're still relying on the same channels, got the same ads you're leaning into? Maybe it's time to diversify, maybe it's time to unlock new growth. That's what we specialize in. My guess is if you're like most brands, you're probably leaning heavily into meta ads and long live meta. We love it, but you're probably missing YouTube ads. And my guess is maybe Google is under leveraged as well. We've helped multiple brands go from zero to 5, 10, 15, even $25,000 a day. We helped kani a hair regrowth product go from zero to $1 million in YouTube ad spend in 90 days while hitting their CAC target. And we'd love to see if we could do the same for you.

So we'd love to chat, talk about what it takes to scale on YouTube and how ready you are right now. So let's chat and go to omg commerce.com. Click the Let's Talk button and we'd love to help you dominate with YouTube ads. 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 we've got a return guest. This guy is lighting up LinkedIn on the daily. You can hear him on all your favorite podcasts if you're into marketing at all and you've ever tried to determine how much should I be putting into performance versus brand and is any of this real and how do I measure it, then this guy is a beacon of light in our industry and so excited to have him back on the podcast. But I've got the one, the only Preston Rutherford co-founder of Looking Good Today. Preston, how's it going man? And thanks for coming back on the pod.

Preston Rutherford:

Yeah, I mean, we were talking about this a second ago, but I think my first go with you is my first ever podcast appearance. So thank you for just getting me going. But now I'm excited to be here. This would be a lot fun, that glowing intro

Brett Curry:

Playing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you bet. Playing a very small part in your podcast career there. But yeah, I think it was the first, I was watching LinkedIn, I was like, Hey, wait a minute, this guy's good. And it looks like maybe he's just kind starting to post on LinkedIn. So I jumped on it like, Hey, come on the pod. And you did.

Speaker 3:

I love it.

Brett Curry:

And the rest is history, man. But I love what you and team built with Chub. I love how it's continued to succeed and I want to talk about that a little bit in a minute because it's such an important note to make. And then I think really the time is right. You've been talking about this for years. The time is right to be thinking about brand building and performance marketing, sustainable, profitable growth. It's just all kind of lining up. We had the COVID era rock and roll, crazy Hair on Fire growth where just grow growth, spend, spend, spend. We'll figure out profits later to, oh shoot, we got to make money. We're not making any money now. Let's measure everything. And so I think we're coming to this place where it's like, okay, let's look at this holistically. And just so you know, I've always felt like marketing has to drive some kind of actions. It's got to drive some. If we're advertising and people do nothing with that advertising, what are we doing? In fact, you'll appreciate this. My first little consultancy right out of college, I was working with local businesses, my tagline was marketing that builds your brand and your bottom line.

Speaker 3:

Love that.

Brett Curry:

I was trying to help the local car dealership and local retail stores. It was super fun, but

Speaker 3:

Love

Brett Curry:

That. I love how you guys have done this and that led to a nine figure exit with Chub and just your perspective here is really, really valuable. So maybe talk a little bit about the journey for those that dunno with Chubby, how you got to your current philosophy on marketing, and then we'll talk about Chubby's success right now because it's kind of crazy how well it's doing right now, but tell us a little bit of the story.

Preston Rutherford:

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a tiny, tiny part of the success. So one of four co-founders and we started the business back in 2011. We were four or five years out of college, just didn't want to work for other people more than anything and just we're looking for something to start and stumbled upon the shorter, short, the whole vibe of let's just be different. It was different from what was in Vogue at the time from a men's app peril perspective where it was very stuffy and Abercrombie and Fitch shirts off guys standing in front of the store, spring you with cologne playing horrible. I dunno, German house music or whatever.

Speaker 3:

And

Preston Rutherford:

You had to look a certain way, we're too cool for you, you can't hang with us. And there's, thats the opposite of what we think should exist. So that was like a foundational premise. And then the shorts were just super, super long and we all kind grew up either playing soccer or rugby or we were from the south and all of those things. You're used to sort of shorts actual short. And then there was a sort of aspirational look back to our dads on their spring breaks in college when they were growing up and how awesome they look the mustaches and the shorter and that whole thing. So all that kind of came together and we're just like, well shoot, let's just try to, we don't want to work for other people. It'd be fun to work together. Let's just try to start something. So I was back

Brett Curry:

In 21. You guys helped. Were you writing that trend or do you feel like you kind of propelled that trend? Because there was a time, I'm a kid of the nineties and so we were with my basketball team in high school. We were coming off of all the old uniforms from the seventies days were super short,

Preston Rutherford:

Super short,

Brett Curry:

Shockingly, almost obscenely short. Exactly. And then it was the Fab five for missions. Everybody's going baggy shorts. That was the rage. Totally. Now definitely short, excuse me, the trend. Did you guys launch that trend back to short or did you just ride the wave that was already there? What's your perspective on that?

Preston Rutherford:

I mean, dude, this is 2011, so I'm obviously very biased, but when we came out with shorter shorts, it was absurdly different. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

I think guys really propelled that. I think you did. I think

Preston Rutherford:

So. Yes, I definitely think so. And it's one of those things that takes 15 years to really kind of get going. It just takes a long time. But no, we were starkly different, and I think that was one of the main reasons why we were able to stand out because there was that latent demand of people who were, it was like sometimes there were shorter folks who had to cut the shorts that they had. They had to go to Savers or Goodwill and they had to find older shorts. Or there were folks who generally, maybe they had bigger quads or something like that and they wanted to show 'em off. Or you had folks who played sports and just kind of wanted a better short that just kind of fit with what they were used to. There were all these sorts of things where there was latent demand, and so there was this niche of people who were down with it, but broadly it was very frowned upon and viewed as stupid and less masculine, all of this kind of stuff. So we just tried to turn the tables and did all of these things where from a brand and positioning perspective made it seem completely, our goal at least was to make it completely inarguable that shorts were meant to be short, and that if you were scared to show off your actual legs, maybe that was representative of a lack of confidence or that you're hiding something or that what's in those pockets of those shorts.

So yeah, no, it was very rare at the time. It certainly wasn't a trend that existed in a big way.

Brett Curry:

Totally makes sense. So yeah, I'm going to credit you guys with that for sure. So you say you don't want to work with people, you want to work for yourselves, you want something that's not the stuffy kind of will tell you how to be cool type of thing like Abercrombie and Fitch and stuff like that. So you launched the brand then pick us up from there.

Preston Rutherford:

Sure, yeah. So I mean at the beginning it was like we had no money and the first person that we went to work with to actually make some shorts for us just took our money. So it wasn't a blazing start I guess I would say. But we kind of funded the early days with pre-sales. We were just trying to get emails, sign people up or we were doing straight up in-person sales. We'd do events at bars or we would sell shorts at the park very hand-to-hand combat sort of thing that I think I highly recommend for anyone who's just starting a brand sell stuff in person, but then started to get some early success and I think started to grow a little bit, which was the early goal. And it was the time of Facebook ads were just becoming a thing and you could spend a dollar get 10 out or whatever the exorbitant number was at the time, same

Brett Curry:

Numbers,

Preston Rutherford:

And you just start to feel this godlike power that, I mean, you can't necessarily cure cancer, but you can sell shorts on the internet and put a dollar in and get 10 out pretty

Brett Curry:

Print profit profits at will. Yeah, it was kind of like the very early days of Google where you were literally getting five and Tencent clicks. It's like you could literally print money and then those were such unique times that great take advantage of that. It was never going to last forever. So that's kind of

Preston Rutherford:

Well didn't, that's the thing, we didn't know that, right? I mean it's hard to know that because you're like, why would this stop? No, I don't understand the macro dynamics. So we basically got obsessed with that kind of thing, just like, oh, following the trend of what works, what drives that 10 x ROAS or whatever. And so I think we were growing and I think because we were just so new, we were doing the brand building thing, we just knew that was the way to differentiate and we couldn't spend 30% of revenue on marketing, so we had to do crazy stuff that was free. So that did the brand building stuff in the early days. But then as we started to get more of a flow and we needed more consistency and predictability, that's when we just rotated into just the pure demand capture. There was this latent demand for fun apparel short kind of thing, and we were just capturing that so we didn't feel the pain because we didn't need to create new demand for our brand, for our product until we needed to.

And then that was less fun and that was about halfway in. And so we hit a little bit of a midlife crisis if you'll, but then that's kind of where we had to rebuild the business from the ground up again, all the credit to the team, all the credit to the other founders here. I'm just a tiny, tiny part. I just talk about it on the internet, but I was generally the one who was representative of all of bad decision making and it was the other founders who were more representative of like, no, let's build this thing for the long term. Let's find balance. And so then we had to learn what demand creation, demand capture, what that balance looks like, how to measure it, how to think about it, how to allocate that capital. But ultimately it resulted a great, you mentioned all I can share is a nine figure acquisition, but now we're going on eight years of top and bottom line growth. I'm not in the business anymore, but Rainer one of the four co-founders and exceptional team, great guy, great team on an absolutely crushing it. It's

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Yeah, it really speaks to what you guys built in the early days and to see that sustained growth means that you got a lot of it right? You got product right, you got team, you got the approach to brand building and performance marketing. You got that mix. And so I want to dive in here a little bit. One of the things you talk about a lot online and that you and I have talked about one-to-one is had this idea of the performance trap and brand erosion, which I know is kind of the trap you guys fell into when you thought the 10 to one row as was going to go on forever and ever, and then it did, and then you're like, oh shoot, what do we do now? How to rebuild things, but talk about that a little bit. What is that performance trap and brand erosion? How does a brand know they're in it? And then we'll talk about how do you get out of it?

Preston Rutherford:

Sure. Yeah. I mean I think it's that feeling, you feel it in your gut where you're just like, Hmm, this can't be right. This doesn't feel like this is what leads to a long-term generational sort of thing. You kind of look back at your actions and you're like, am I truly generating building desirability for my brand kind of thing or am I just making all of these withdrawals without making any deposits? If you want to use a bank account metaphor analogy, but then it shows up in the data too. I mean people will cite a variety of stats. My C is going, my customer acquisition cost is going up, or my CPMs are going up, or my reach is going down, cost per a thousand accounts reached going down or contribution margins going down. I ran a sale this year, I ran the same sale last year and the lift from the sale this year was like 50% of what I got last year.

So next year I'm going to have to double the discount. Or the only way I can scale spend on X, Y, Z channel is if there's a really strong offer now and I can't just talk about my product, I've got to throw an offer on it. All of these sorts of things where you just look at the business and you're like, man, do I feel like I'm in a more defensible position or do I feel more reliant on the ad platforms? Am I getting as much of my revenue from people searching for my brand name and coming to my site and buying as I am from a click on a buy button on an ad? You start to realize that probably the answer is no to that, right? That part of, let's call it, I don't want to call it organic demand or unpaid demand, but just the purchase behaviors that were driving the mix of that over time can start to get a little bit more over indexed onto the Let's fight for clicks and get the click kind of thing.

You get into a place where you're like, well, shoot, my ROAS is like whatever the number is, and I've been able to grow it, but has my business grown. You start to see those disconnect between these metrics that we use to evaluate how we spend our money and the actual business. And you start to get into these perverse incentive situations where you're like, okay, I've got to be at a marketing efficiency ratio of a five or something like that. Great. And then I need to maximize realize within that context. Great, and I need to get a blended five on that. So you're like, okay, well I could just remove some audience exclusions and that will help me get a little bit of a higher, realize I could retarget a little bit more. I could spend a little bit more on brand key with, you can do all these things where you're just like, well no, we need to capture that demand.

We need to make sure we're defending our brand. We need to make sure we're doing X, y, z, blah, blah, blah. The meta algorithm will handle it or whatever. And we can get into these slippery slopes where it's like, huh, but maybe I'm just claiming credit for a lot of transactions that would've already happened. So anyways, there's this whole cycle where it's like, okay, well we're spending more to get less. I'm discounting more now. I'm more and more competing on the level of features and price rather than just who I I'm as a brand. It ultimately manifests generally in contribution dollars going down or contribution margin going down just like the cash flowing through the business. Even if revenue's going up, the cash actually dropping to cover your fixed costs, you're not looking as good as you would generally like it to look. And if you trend that out two years, three years, four years, it's no bueno kind of thing.

Brett Curry:

You see where we're headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes as ROAS climbs or often as ROAS climbs, your overall contribution margin may be going down and the incremental impact, incremental lift of your marketing dollars often going down as well, meaning we're making ourselves feel good by looking in the ad account and pat ourselves on the back with great ROAS numbers, but ultimately we're not driving new customers at an acceptable cost. We're not fueling we organic growth, we're not actually driving the brand to grow. And that is absolutely no bueno.

Preston Rutherford:

Two points of nuance on that super quickly, two points of nuance on that. We were mentioning CAC and customer acquisition. I got to hit my new customer count. So then one of the things that you do kind of as a last ditch effort or it just continues and you don't stop it, but it's like bring them in with these big promos, right? You're like, oh, I hit my new customer goal crushed on new customers. And then you look back six months later and you're like, wow, that cohort LTV is horrible and I'm predicting some of my worst

Brett Curry:

Customers that I've ever had right there.

Preston Rutherford:

Yeah. I'm predicting I'm requiring so much revenue from that cohort to just float my business and it's not manifesting. That's doom spiral land. You know what I mean? And so that's one other thing where you're just like, oh wow, okay, I'm predicting an LTB to CAC and now that's not a real number at all because of how I've driven so much new customer acquisition through just buy now promo 15 minutes rather than I freaking love this brand, I'm going to buy from them. Stepping nuance number one where it's like, okay, it's not just about hitting your new customer count goals, it matters, but it's like how we get them in. Number two is maybe more of a subjective thing where I kind of think about it as being the wacky, wavy, inflatable tube man kind of blow up mascot at used car dealerships where it's

That kind of being the typical or even the sleazy used card sales person where it's just like, okay, we're going to use all the tactics. That's the whole idea. You look at, if I'm just going to be putting out 10 million impressions of those 10 million impressions, how many of those impressions are with creative that is like fricking buy right now. Here's a problem you have. Here's my solution, here are the top features and here's 50% off if you buy right now versus I'm just going to make you laugh and it's going to tie back to what I do and who I'm, but that builds the brand, that builds the desirability, that preps the 95% that I know we're going to talk about. You pick your head up as a founder, as a marketer, as a whoever, and you're like, I don't like how this mix has shifted. I don't really, is this how I'm presenting myself to the world? You know what I mean? And that is one of those humbling things where you're just like, oh crap. Regardless of what any metric says, that just is not right. You know what I

Speaker 3:

Mean? If

Preston Rutherford:

All we are at the end of the day is a feeling that gets someone to take an action to stop them from buying the incumbent who's currently meeting their needs for what I'm trying to do, that's the thing where you're just like, I think I got to change. So those are two nuance on that front.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. And I'll share a quick story. When I was right out of college, I was doing some consulting with local businesses and met this piano dealer. Great guy, loved him, but they found out that the only success they were really having was these going out of business sales. And so they would sign up to acquire this distressed piano dealer and then they would just do a liquidation sale. And they got so addicted to their, we just got to go out of business every month. They have these distressed inventory sales every month, and that's legitimately what they did. So they would start, we've got this distressed inventory from this dealership in Illinois, it has to go today, and that's all they could get to work. So it's like we're going out of business every month. That's our strategy. And that's an extreme example, but totally this discount spiral. That's what some D two C brands can get into as well where it's like, I can only exist if I give these deep discounts and dial up the urgency to 11, then I can make money otherwise I can't. And it's like, I like this brand building where you're still creating desire, still making people say, I want that. I want those shorts or I want that look, but it's not the same buy now limited inventory going out of business type of thing. It's just a totally different approach.

Preston Rutherford:

Totally. Yeah. I mean we can talk tactics and positioning all day, but the going out of sale thing and only doing that over and over is just classic.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's like the perfect picture there of the trap we can get into. For

Preston Rutherford:

Sure. Everyone can imagine the sign. You can imagine what the ad looks like on local tv, right? Because all seen it before.

Brett Curry:

I kind of joked too. I was like, we need to start running ads where we're like, we're still going out of business, it's just we're going out of business again. So yeah, pretty funny. Today's episode is sponsored by post pilot. It's the secret weapon behind some of your favorite e-commerce brands and they're using it to print money on the regular. So if you're already crushing it with Klaviyo with meta, then imagine taking that same segmentation and automation and sending it straight to your customer's mailboxes. That's right. We're talking physical mail, personalized postcards that drive serious trackable revenue. And right now post pods giving E-commerce Evolution podcast listeners 1000 free postcard credits just to test it out. But this is for new users only. Just go to post pilot.com and tell them that we sent you to claim your credits break through that digital noise and beat rising ad costs. That's direct mail done post pilot.com. Well, let's talk about this shift that you had where you talk about your 95 5 rule, and I think part of the point that you've been making and I've been making for years is a lot of our businesses have succeeded off of just capturing existing demand. Not a bad thing. We got to have demand capture and demand generation. You got to have those balanced and the right mix and whatnot. But talk about the 95 5 rule. What is that? How do you use that to approach healthy growth?

Preston Rutherford:

Yeah, and this is not, I wish it were mine. I think it comes from the Berg Bass Institute, which I would definitely look them up and John and Byron Sharp and the book, how Brands, all This availability gets into some marketingy stuff, which kind of makes me gloss over personally, which is why I try to make this stuff a little bit more fun. But the general idea is, and I didn't know about this until more recently, so I felt it felt like a jumble of pain and anxiety in my soul when I was actually running the media myself and in the trenches operating. But just the general idea that 95% of our audience at any given time is not actively shopping for my category. So what there is two things. One, if I'm spending 95 or a hundred percent of my marketing dollars where the goal or the outcome of success is I convince you to purchase, there's this massive mismatch, and this is how I think we were for a long time at Chevy's, we were spending 95% of our dollars going to demand capture, rational appeal product offer urgency. I'm going to get you right now. And a better ad is just an ad that is more convincing, but we were only hitting that five ish percent of people, the vast minority, whether it's 95, 5 or 85, whatever the number is, there's that. And then the other idea, it's simply being the creative that crushes it for the 5% just goes in one year and out the other for the 95%, right? Not actively shopping. So it's kind of like if you've heard of the term reticular activation or reticular

Speaker 3:

Love, it's like,

Preston Rutherford:

Okay, I want a red Ferrari, so then I see red Ferraris

Freaking everywhere kind of thing. Where if it's not that, you just don't see it, right? You don't even see it. So I'm just like if I'm only evaluating my creative, my media, whatever it is by how I'm capturing that demand, my job with the 95 is to prep them, generate a memory, generate a feeling, get someone to say, I freaking love that ad when X, Y, Z happens with that brand. One of my favorite ads of all time, that just maybe hit me at a great time. I don't know, it was the classic Dollar Shave Club ad that YouTube ad was just so epic, funny, so memorable. You had to watch it, could talk about it. It was easy to refer to watch it multiple times. And I'd like to think CHS made a bunch of those as well, and I think we did. But from another brand and just going way back, that was one that just true classic true classics.

First big video ad I think was fricking awesome. The guys sitting in the office love their product boss. It's just such a memorable scene where just that captures what we're all about. And I remember it and there's countless examples, but I'm just thinking about more modern brands and that probably did a really good, both of those probably did a really good job at capturing demand, right? You're like, that's freaking awesome because these are unicorn basic creative, but it did a much better job at just prepping all of these people who are, I don't need a razor subscription today kind of thing, but, or I don't need a bunch of t-shirts today because I just bought some crappy Hanes at Macy's or whatever. But I will when my wife says, you look ugly, and I'm going to think. So I think those are the things where if it was just like 20% off product shot, white background, buy now, buy now, that'd be total wasted money.

I think that's the kind of general idea was that totally floored me where it was like, oh my gosh, it's not because my ad sucks, it's because it's speaking to the wrong saying the wrong thing to this person at this time, I'm not speaking to this vast majority of people in the way that they want to be spoken to. My job there is to prep to drive that emotion, whereas with the 5% or whatever the number is, rational appeal, be as efficient as possible. You've to your point, you got to balance that. We call it brand and monetization, build that brand, build that mental availability, build whatever, but then you got to clear that funnel the best of them. And many of us are good at that, right? The thing we're not doing is filling the funnel or building the desirability, but it's not, the whole idea here is just to add balance because many modern brands, they've gotten out of balance and it makes sense, right?

Because the data that we now have access to makes us feel like we're media gods and that that's all there is and that's capital T truth. But I think everyone kind of learns when you start to feel this and everyone feels this and you earn this problem, this means you've gotten to this place and you've stayed in business long enough to have is the ceiling for my brand or why am I spending more to get all of these sorts of things? So you earn this problem, it's a great problem to have, but it's just like a classic what got us here won't get us there sort of situation. And it's like, okay, reset. What does balance look like for us now? How do we get to that next stage of growth?

Brett Curry:

And I would love to hear your perspective on this. I've got a couple thoughts myself, but how do we find that right mix of demand capture and demand generation? I do agree with you that most modern brands are better at the demand capture piece, whether that's through met Google or likely a combination of the two. But how do we find that right mix of demand generation, demand capture? How do you view that?

Preston Rutherford:

Totally. I mean I think what we learned for the Chu's example, for instance

Speaker 3:

Would say

Preston Rutherford:

We're at 95 5 in favor of performance, right? 5% was just the slush fund, you know what I mean? That just would get cut if you miss a number on a month kind of thing. And I was like, okay, great. Nice to have. I don't have any metrics against it, blah, blah, blah. And then I think where we evolved over time after midlife crisis, let's say two, three years after that, and again, buckets are tough. So to say this is brand and this is DR and blah, blah, blah. It's like a channel tactic, creative kind of thing. What's the job to be done? So we can have that conversation, but broadly, just to give numbers, it got close-ish to that 60 40, right? The classic brand, 60% to brand, 40% to activation. And it's not just on the paid side too, right? It's like we've got email. Email is a freaking awesome way to capture demand workforce, and I'm not paying that much for what we did a lot and SMS too. So what we did a lot of was like, let's also view that as our demand capture engine as well.

And not only use paid for bottom funnel demand capture because that can just, and it's a math problem, but what is the cheapest way to get you to exit my funnel is kind of part of the way to think about it. But yeah, man. And that freaks people out, right? No one is at 50 50, no one's even at 40% to brand. No, I mean maybe if you're Clorox or whatever, but if we're talking modern brands that freaks people out, they think lack of accountability, lack of measurement, they think lighting money on fire. So the easier answer and what I think is a productive answer is just more

To brand building more to demand. You're so far from having a conversation, we're like, is this too much brand building? Most of us are sub 10%. So if it's 10, get to 11. If it's 11, get to 12%. Find a way to inch that up and just test maniacally. And you can talk about what we're testing and how we measure. But I think one of the big things is there's this humbling reality that for many brands, if you just take the 10% least efficient spend on dr, well first of all, you got to do those tests to find what the 10% least efficient is. Most brands are just like, no, this is my bread and butter. It works. And if you ask them, how well does it work? If you were to cut spend 10%, what would happen if you were to pulse spend up 30% in a week? What would happen? Would you see 30% more growth?

No, I've not done that. We can't do those tests. No. Or you explain it away in a variety of different, so I think the first part there is let's get to a little bit more precision on the level of incrementality. If we're spending 95% on performance and the thing like the bread and butter, like our top spending ad sets, let's pressure test the hell out of that first. And that kind of opens up the conversation because the whole reason why there's a debate about the split of brand and performance is because a fear that you'll waste money if you put it towards brand. But the reality is that most brands not all, are already wasting way more money, not pressure testing their existing performance spend. They don't have a testing framework. They're testing, and I love house. I think they're the coolest. I love measured all incrementality testing is amazing.

However, what I would encourage, and I'm sure they encourage the same, is let's test some of our bigger closer held assumptions rather than these little ticky tack micro optimizations on the margin that you're like, oh, was trying nothing. Is trying a view content versus an add to cart, is that going to, sure, maybe there's something there, but what about my bread and butter kind of thing? These are the things that I encourage us to get a better feel for the incrementality of because that's more fundamental. And that's where we could basically say, if I'm spending a hundred million bucks a year on X, Y, z, I can free up $15 million because it's really not doing anything for me. Or the marginal contribution dollar generation on that 15 million is so low that either I could not spend it or I could just put it to demand gen, but nothing, there would be no downside to that in my business.

I think that's kind of step one in a lot of these situations we're just like, let's get a little bit of humility around where all of the money's going to acknowledge that we're probably wasting quite a bit of money there. So then that takes the conversation away from the fear being wasting money. And then it can be a conversation around different things. How are we going to build brand? How are we going to measure it? Yes, I agree. Having more demand makes sense. So then what are we going to do about it? But it's like let's make it as inarguable as possible and less of this, I know I'm not wasting money on performance. I'm running a massive, I'm taking a massive flyer, a massive risk of wasting money on brand. That's a fundamentally flawed premise that I think we need to get alignment on first before we then talk about what the ideal split should be. So it's kind of like those two things, it should be more, and then we're already wasting way more money on our bottom funnel demand capture kind of stuff. So let's acknowledge those things and then I think we can have productive conversations going forward.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it is really a great point. And I think that first piece, we've got to key in on whatever you're doing now to build your brand to drive demand rather than just to capture it. You got to start testing doing more of it. And yes, we would love to get to a point with our marketing where we've got 0% waste, probably never going to happen. Nope. And it's certainly not happening now, even if you think you're measuring all of your marketing the way that you should be. And so I really do credit house, I'm glad you brought them up. I'm a big YouTube guy, and so they've done a lot for us where this huge YouTube mentality test and showed that man, you look at YouTube performance and platform, the actual incremental impact is probably almost three and a half times that. And so really showing, hey, the way you're measuring it, what you should be thinking about is this driving a creative growth or incremental growth or growth I wouldn't have already had. And there there's some challenges there, but I love the way you frame that. And I would be curious, how do you look at maybe some of those initial tests or initial looks at how do we understand how incremental this activity is? Because there are some tools out there, some of them are really quite expensive and house is probably in that bucket for a lot of brands. How do you start to test incrementality? What did you guys do? What do you recommend that people

Preston Rutherford:

Do? Great question. And the thing about the YouTube findings with House, what we're seeing with Marathon, which is just effectively just trying to measure the longer term stuff, is that it's even more pronounced. So I think houses helpers understand the short-term impact of YouTube and a variety of tactics on YouTube, which is strong, stronger than chosen platform. But then the longer term impact we're also seeing is also pretty massive. So it's like there's generally people are sleeping on YouTube, I guess is my point, both from the short and the long-term perspective. And it backs out to a rational first principles perspective. You're at the end of the day, seconds of focused attention is the thing that, and so that's why TV has been a thing for so long. Like the switching costs

Brett Curry:

Really odd, built some of the best, the most iconic brands were often built on tv. YouTube is our version of tv.

Preston Rutherford:

Exactly. Right. And with YouTube, I dunno what it's like 50% of impressions are on a tv, I don't dunno the exact number, but I think it's

Brett Curry:

Between 50, 60%. Yeah, it's growing, growing.

Preston Rutherford:

So I don't know where else you get those seconds of focused attention as cleanly and efficiently and effectively as on YouTube. So anyways, that's one note that I want to mention, but in terms of how do we start to think about incrementality testing? So there's the poor person A, let's call it the duct tape solution thing. I was going to say poor man solution, but let's call it bubblegum duct tape. And then there's like, let's do it, right? But then broadly philosophy, philosophy on measurement, and obviously I'm biased because I started the measurement software company, but this is why, it's because I think brands under invest in measurement, if we're going to spend in aggregate, let's call it, I dunno what the number is, 1% of our marketing budgets on measurement, you just say it like that rather than thinking about it as a fixed cost and I've got a broad software budget.

And then you're like, oh, okay, is that a good no, you think about it, percentage of marketing spend, do I think I can get more than a 1% improvement in the results? From my experience? You're wasting way more than that, not knowing some of these answers. Totally. So I highly recommend, yes, use all platform tools, but then have your MTA tool, have your incrementality tool, have your MM tool, and then while we're building marathon, your long-term have precise performance brand stuff too, which was a big missing piece is why we're trying to take it invest, don't short shrift the measurement stuff. And even, I know you were on the Marketing Operators podcast recently, if you think back on one of their older episodes was when times were maybe a little bit tougher and they were talking about what do we cut and what do we not cut?

And I think Cody from Ridge made a good point where he was just like, thing you do not cut is marketing software. You just don't cut that, right? Because that's marketing measurement software, sorry, because that's the north star. If you're flying blind, our marketing spend is our biggest cost in this business. So if it's not guided by anything that's really, really bad, you can get really upside down on your economics. So it's like a broad philosophical thing. It's like whatever you're investing in measurement software now invest more and then obviously use it, prioritize use of it. You can have an account with name your tool, and if you don't spend time on it, you're going to waste money. So essential something like how, if you're wanting to just try some tests now, first it's a mindset shift outside of I need to use measurement software. And that's really important. Or measurement tools, let's call it. If you're not going to, regardless of how you're going to test, you need to commit to, this is not going to change my business tonight.

This is an evolution in how we operate. So let's think about what each test for the next 12 months looks like. Let's plan it out and let's commit to it and let's allocate enough budget to it. And let's just know that it's more about information gathering, like neutral information gathering than test if that's a failure or not. And that's a different way to approach it. So that being number one, but I would start with some of our core things. If you think about an ad set where you spend your most dollars, let's pressure test that. Let's cut that 30%, cut that 40% for a week, see what happens,

Brett Curry:

Post it up hundred percent geos if you can, and measure those geos if you're set up to do that.

Preston Rutherford:

Yes. So then we can talk about that. So the pulse up and down, just do that to everything and cycle through that. I mean starting with the specific strategies that you're spending the most on at any given time. Because the other thing is the result from a may test doesn't necessarily apply. Next May might not even apply to December. These are moment in time tests kind of thing, which is fine. That doesn't make it bad. It's just like we tried that two years ago and it didn't work, so we're not going to try it ever again. We don't want that stuff to happen because things change. Economics change auctions change, ad products change, our brand changes, our creative changes, but just cycle through, if I'm going to test and just work down from the things that I'm spending the most on, pulse up, pulse down is a great way to do it. True point on holdouts. Holdouts are great. We've built the long-term brand version of it at Marathon House, measured name your tool. They've got amazing tools. Some people run them themselves and that's okay, but I caution because you can do it wrong. And then if you don't understand the level of statist complic significance or if you don't, all of these, it's, it's a statistical exploration. It's less like I tested Texas and Texas grew faster than rest of country. It's like, no,

Because Texas behaves different from rest of country for a of reasons. It's got a different seasonality curve. You went into that month with different numbers, and so it's like you can very easily be steered in the wrong way. And I've made this mistake personally, I would just like, let's just Texas, California, New York, let's just do it there. Boom. That's our test.

Speaker 3:

I'd say,

Preston Rutherford:

I dunno. I dunno if that's better than nothing, to be honest. To the extent you can get down to a DMA level

And do it in that way or even a zip level, I think that's better. But regardless, you got to spend more and you got to run it for longer generally. I mean, I think people want answers today, tomorrow, and you want to spend as little as possible. And that's why I think these tools are clear on how confident are we in these solutions or what is the variability of potential outcomes Here I'm showing you some number, but that's not the number. That's not as, that's not the specific, there's a range of outcomes and I would always just caution double click on what that number is, what the range of outcomes is, what the error, are you happy with this outcome? Are we happy with this outcome kind of thing. It could be something like that, especially if we cut the test off earlier, whatever. So the way you set this up, the way you run the test, just counter the short-termism that we as humans are fully laden with and know that it's just a systematic thing. You got to give it enough time, you got to run it correctly. But the pulse up, pulse down and just understand, okay, I added a marginal 20%, what did I get? And do that over and over and over and over because you're always going to have variables. You're going to have a good product launch on the next week and you're going to have a bad product launch on next week.

Brett Curry:

Totally

Preston Rutherford:

Email toss. So that's why you got to do it multiple times as well. It's not just a one and done thing. It's broadly, I'm committed to learning this set of things this year. I'm not going to boil the ocean. Because you look back and you're just like, even if you think about running a test that maybe is a little bit longer, you're like, oh my God, that's an eternity. But then it's like it takes you 10 to 15 years to get to any real material scale and profit generation anyway. So you're like, you're not going to spend a month testing what could be something that changes your changes the way you spend 30% of your marketing. Again, I would've felt this exact thing and I was the one who was like, no, we can't test that stuff. Just we got to go. We got to go. We got to go. We got to go. So I'm the guilty guy here. So I've felt all of these things, but those are just some thoughts as it relates to how to do tests.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, man, it's so valuable and so much to unpack there. I want to talk a little bit about your measurement stack, and then I want to really dive into what marathon data is measuring, how that fits into the overall stack. But I'll give a quick analogy here that I think will help. And you talk about how running one test is silly. You had to run multiple tests. So there's the heart issues in my family, at least with a few people, and it's like I'm diving into some of this. And so you can measure your resting heart rate. In my heart, resting your heart is really good. You can then measure heart variability and how that speaks to the health of your heart. You can also then do lipid panels and see what's my cholesterol, but not just cholesterol, but there's 20 ways to measure cholesterol.

And then it's like, well, I need to measure that probably three or four, five times throughout the year because you measure once, it could be based on some other factors. And so then you're like, well, maybe I need to do a calcium check and all of these things, but if you want to say, I want be healthier, or I want to build for the longterm with my health, you're going to have to measure all of those things, understand what they're measuring, understanding then based on the reading, what do you do with that? And then measure on an ongoing basis, which kind of feels a little bit overwhelming, but it's just the way it is. And I feel like it's the same with marketing. We can't run one test and be like, great, we know what to do forever now with our marketing, or this is the salvation for our brand. We have MTA now multi, multi touch attribution. Everything is solved. It's never the case, right? It's like we've got to stack these things. We have to understand what they're measuring, what that's telling us, what we expect, and then what do we do with it? And so talk about that. What do you believe is your perfect marketing measurement stack? And then let's go deep on

Marathon data.

Preston Rutherford:

For sure, for sure. Yeah. So I mean, I think broadly, before you even start talking about marketing measurement stack, there's a bit of these things are true and you can't really argue them. And maybe this applies to the whole conversation, but where it's just most likely if you're running into a little bit of this with I'm spending more, getting less or CACs up or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You've just reached that stage where it's like, maybe we got to change. I think we tend to jump to like, oh, it's like conversion rate optimization, or I need more creative diversity or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I'm like, those are symptoms rather than the cost. Part of it is like, let's get to the cause and let's understand that most likely it's that we've just eaten through most of the people who know about us, care about us or thinking about us. That's very rational. And I think we need alignment on that first. Great. Now let's talk about measurement stack, and that's more specific, but I do think that there's a nice multi-touch attribution tool. Awesome. A lot of people don't know that GA has that.

It does. It does. So you can get it in a variety of different places and then some kind of experimentation platform to just test something. And so we all, I think, know the great vendors there some kind of statistical analysis tool like an mm M of sorts, an MM where you could just put a lot of data in and get an understanding of what's doing what, and it's not susceptible to the cookie apocalypse, to the iOS 14, to the blah, blah, blah. It's just stats, right? So that's what I would view as just, and I think all of the ad platforms put out papers where they talk about, that's the trinity of measurement, right? It's MTA, it's testing, it's MM, M, all of that together, you triangulate. And then in my strong opinion, we need to understand how we're building the long-term compounding value. How are we going to over time make sure we get more and more of our revenue coming from people searching for our brand coming direct to our site where it's not fighting in that auction all day, every day to get that click. And so I think that's maybe the segue to marathon, but definitely all of them. And I recommend that if you're spending, I don't know, more than a million bucks a year or something like that on marketing. So it's actively every brand to have a full measurement stack

Brett Curry:

Got to have it. And I think that that's one of the flaws that people are coming to understand is MTA alone won't solve it, right? It's good to see click data and clickstream data and what are people doing after they see an ad? It gives you some insight, but you need that m that shows correlation when spend goes up on TV or YouTube, what happens to sales if there's no correlation, there's no causation, but then you got to run experiments to see, okay, but is there causation? Is it, is there causation? So all those things work together.

Preston Rutherford:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

Let's

Preston Rutherford:

Talk about, I think the other thing though, the one point that I think might be helpful, and I know we're short on time, but I think this might be helpful, is the MTA or even the end platforms, we think they know all of the clicks and they know all of the purchases, and that's deterministic. Whereas models are probabilistic and therefore less trustworthy. The reality is 85% of people are opting out of tracking on iPhones.

Speaker 3:

A lot of our

Preston Rutherford:

IPhone users, you hover over the little I in ads manager, when you're looking at data and it says, this data is modeled. So even the click based roas, which we think is the highest we switched to from seven day click, one day view down to one day click because we're like, we're accountable. And then the reality is that the vast majority of this data is modeled because there's so much data loss. So there are often questions around, okay, I view what's in platform as capital T truth, right? Because you've got all of the clicks, you know what everyone did. It's unfortunately bullshit. And so I think the more we realize that the flaw of this, just from that perspective, not in terms of all of the other negative implications that it has on us in terms of optimizing just for short term and just getting into this doom spiral, but of the fact that that data is modeled, heavily modeled, I dunno how much, I don't know the specifics, but just hover over the little eye in Mads manager, I'll tell you. And then look at the data. The vast majority of people are opting out of being tracked on their phones, and I don't know what the number is, but 70 to 80% of sessions are on mobile for many of our brands, for many of our DC context, I don't know what the number is for Amazon, but it's like it's all modeled and that's okay. It's okay. So let's not poo poo statistical analysis. Let's not poo P all of this stuff that we tend to poo because all of it's modeled.

Brett Curry:

Great point, great point. Love that. And it's only going to become more and more true. There's going to be less and less clarity. There's going to be more and more privacy. That's kind of part of this, but we can then still triangulate and understand, okay, when we're doing these things, it leads to this kind of business outcome that I'm looking for. And so walk through the, and I'm fine on time actually just to clarify that, but what's the thesis behind marathon data? What problem are you solving? And talk to us about how that works.

Preston Rutherford:

Totally. Well, it starts with this realization that brand is important. Brand is the moat. Brand is the thing that protects our ability to generate profits over time. Protects us from competition, protects us from someone who's willing to come in and try to steal my customers because they can spend twice as much as I can. Or some brand from name your country who just straight up copies my product and tries to sell it for half price, which has happened to I think many of the listeners of this podcast ourselves included. What then do we have? How then do we continue to have people come to our site and pay twice as much for our thing, you know what I mean? Or keep coming to us and not need to only buy on a discount or whatever, selling our souls, that being important and that being something that tends to happen to every brand as they reach some level of success.

I don't know what the annual revenue is, but this general idea that brand is important, brand is ultimately the most important thing for many of us consumer brands, unless we have some patent, some other IP brand ends up being that IP if we're just selling consumer goods. So, okay, that being said, it's been really hard to measure that so that we can connect that to actual revenue growth. Historically, the way it's historically been done is surveys, brand tracker surveys. Let's get our brand awareness. Number two, problems with that, right? Is that you've got this intermediary metric. First of all, it took three months to get that metric. So you're already like, okay, what is this? Okay, my brand awareness went up five points, but what period of time are we even looking at? I don't even remember. I'm thinking about Black Friday, cyber Monday, right?

So what? There are two, so whats that are unanswered? What did I do to get that? And then what's, how much more money am I making because of that? So we're intending to kind of get out of surveys, focus on actions like you're mentioning, right? Everything I do should drive an action. Yes, love. So behaviors, what people do rather than what people say. There's a crap ton of that being generated every day on the internet. So use behavior and then solve the two. So whats that have been? The pernicious problems with measuring the impact of brand one is tie it to action as much as you can. Not everything,

But as much as you can tie it to actions you've taken. Give yourself a daily number that is in the form of dollars, which is solving the second. So which is like how do I quantify or predict or look back and analyze the incremental revenue impact of this brand building stuff, actually make that connection. And so those are the two things we're trying to do with brand. And so think of us as all of the things I was talking about on the short term kind of stuff, but for long-term. So our whole focus is not the clicks, not the short-term purchases, but what's happening over the next six months and how can we think about building that bank revenue if you'll that future revenue that I'm going to be building into and realizing. But then also, how am I driving what we focus on, which is called resilient baseline revenue. So even as you look at an mm m readout for instance, over short-term stuff, you'll always get some percentage of the revenue that wasn't explained necessarily by your short-term tactics. It was the base sales, right? The sales you would've gotten anyways is kind of another way to talk about it. The big aha for us was like, yeah, it's fun to look at all the colors in the chart of the MMM, but what about this base sales? Wouldn't it be cool if that was much larger

If the sales I would've gotten anyways was more? That seems like that's awesome from the perspective of resilience and risk reduction and better forecasting and less reliance on third parties that I don't control. But these all seem like good things. Why do I focus on trying to build that? And we realized there was nothing out there that does that. So think of us as how do I build that resilient base, however you want to define it, right? If it's like revenue from brand search or if it's not as simple, right? You've got to remove all the spikes. You've got to invest for spend and seasonality and blah, blah, blah, blah. How do I build that resilient base of revenue? How do I drive more people to search for my brand and buy or just memorize my fricking URL I'm coming by? Those are the purchase actions that I want to drive more of.

And that comes from activating the 95% when they become the 5% sure they're going to be more likely to click on my ads, which will make my performance more performant. But I also want them to just not have to go through that thing. Let's play different games. Let's spend our dollars to drive brand search and revenue from brand search, that kind of stuff. So anyways, we're trying to, for modern brands, turn this, it's like incremental future growth. Think about it that way. Less brand brand's a scary word, but it's an important word and you got to stand by it because brand matters from a performance marketing mindset mindset. We're just trying to turn incremental future growth beyond what you would achieve if you were just continuing to spend in the way you are today. So brand but into performance, into a performance marketing workflow where I get data today on what I did yesterday so that I can act and make decisions and basically run a full funnel ad account basically across YouTube and meta TikTok, whatever.

Brett Curry:

Man, I love that. I 100% agree brand is moat. At the end of the day, it's what you have. And I think brand shows up in the ability to charge the right prices. You can protect your profits. It's the ability to continue to grow and to have people searching for your brand. I know Mark Pritchard, the marketing director at p and g always says one of the greatest signs that we look for knowing that a brand has traction is brand search growing over time. That's what we need to measure. And I like this idea of resiliency, this baseline revenue is that growing and that's going to be an indicator of am I doing things right? And I do think there's this sense that brand is mushy and it's fluffy and you can't measure it and it's just in the ether or whatever, but that's not really true. Brand can be measured, you just don't measure it in the same way. And you do kind of need of a collection of tools. But I think this piece that you're solving of how do we measure the resilient growth of our brand shows up with chubby, right? Would you say eight years in a row? Like the top bottom line growth or whatever.

Yeah. Even in the midst of craziness. Totally. It's important. It's important to have that resilient growth. And so I guess maybe as we wrap up here, what are some of the insights that pop up? Do you have any examples of with this data, these are the insights that pop up and then what we can do with those insights?

Preston Rutherford:

So some of the data that has come to the surface, it's actually pretty interesting. So the one point though that I would make is that sometimes people think about, ah, it seems too good to be true that you can measure this brand thing in a performance markety ish way or even measure the impact, the revenue impact of the brand. The reality is that p and g or Ford or these massive advertisers, they've worked with firms to build these custom models, they cost millions to build and to maintain, and they take a really long time to get all the data in, et cetera, et cetera, which is why we lowly 50, a hundred million dollars. Brands don't really do this, but they've been doing it for a long time. But they've just been these crazy complex models that were built by these analytics firms and they took just a really long time, but it's proven methodology. They've been measuring this stuff for forever. How else for us modern consumer brand builders to think that all of the traditional multi-billion dollar brands have just gotten there because they've been flying blind, they've had no data. I think we need a little humility ourselves. These are very precise people. Absolutely. It's expensive to do it that way. So I think the thing that we're doing in

Brett Curry:

America, not that it's not measurable, it's just not measurable in the way we're used to. And so makes sense

Preston Rutherford:

Not in the way we're used to and then up until I guess what we're doing is, and not a way that we could afford

Speaker 3:

Because

Preston Rutherford:

It would be very expensive to build these custom models. So part of the thing that we're doing is, let's try to generalize it. A lot of the people who built those super custom models for those big advertisers from these analytics firms are the ones who were like, this is how I would do it if I would democratize this for everyone. So when we came together it was like, oh, this is awesome. Let's figure this out. But some of the big things that have stood out, one of the things we've always knocked on is whether or not a follow or a share is valuable. I think we've all gone through this. Well at least I have this hype cycle of that's all that matters. It's the worst thing. There's no value. Maybe it does matter. So the reality though is somewhere in the middle there's some value of someone taking an action and that is an action, it's a precursor action. It's a non shopping behavior, but there is a statistical relationship between people taking those actions and your future revenue. So if you can find that. So I think that's one of the big things. So we think about then spending our money not to drive a purchase. So now I'm talking about non purchase campaigns, which freaks people out because they're just like, why would I do a subscriber campaign that is insane?

Does it have value, blah, blah, blah to get IG follows, to get, TikTok follows to get Facebook follows. Can you imagine getting a Facebook page like that? But the reality is that these sorts of things are opening up additional reach, lowering the cost per a thousand accounts reached, reaching different people. Because as you think about if you're the ad auction, right, you're going to serve media because you're going to get the highest bid on this set of people. It doesn't make sense to serve media to these people who haven't shown all these intense signals that they're in market. So they're not going to do it. So then when you choose different objectives, yeah, the bid is different because the auction's different and you're reaching all these people that you weren't otherwise reaching. And if you use your best creative creative that our friend Jacque makes or that any of these brands have made that has earned engagement, talks about who they're what to do, you're doing the brand building thing in a performance market.

You don't only have to do billboards and linear tv, you can do enough performance market. So we're getting people to take those actions because that's a lot of the playbook that we used at to do this. It was very much like let's build our community by distributing content that wouldn't crush it in a bottom funnel. Performance marketing a set necessarily wouldn't beat the very product offer urgency sort of thing that you got to do. Not knocking that. Totally. So then I think the key things are run media differently, use different objectives and it matters. It helps, it works kind of thing. And if you want to lower CPMs, you want to reach more people, those are the unarguable rules. But now we're helping to provide a little bit more context on how valuable it's so that you can think about how much to budget, think about what is the split for me given my cash profile, given what I demand from an incremental role on a 30 day roll basis, whatever that might be.

So that's kind of what we're finding, but finding that YouTube is super valuable on a long-term context, pretty meaningfully. But then Facebook as well, I mean just going out absolutely, whether it be post engagement campaigns or trying to get Facebook page likes, yes, that action matters, but then it's also the fact that you're just reaching people you weren't otherwise reaching. And then it's like, ah, do I have the creative? Everyone has more brand building creative, whether it's amazing and fricking awesome, different conversation, but everyone's got to start somewhere. You know what I mean? And so we're helping you to put numbers to your gut, whereas that putting this piece of content in front of what people is just good. That's who we are. That's what we do kind of thing. Now we're just validating that with numbers. But yeah, I mean to your point, brand search not a perfect metric. Yes, it's tied to spend. Yes. If you spend more on dr, you will get more brand search. That's not the point. The point is that there are other ways to spend your dollars to more efficiently drive brand search

And to more efficiently then get those clicks to your site and more efficiently have them be high converting. That's more the point. What we learned at Chubby's is like, yeah, let's spend our money to drive brand search more efficiently. That's what I want to do. That's how I want to use the ad platforms. That puts me in a different bucket where I'm leveraging it to meet my needs. And so we're just trying to help brands. I don't want to say see the light because that's implying that they're blind or whatever, but just free them up

Speaker 3:

To

Preston Rutherford:

Do the things that'll help to truly drive their business without seeing this mythical dip. I think that's the other thing is people transition. They're like, oh, I going to go out of business. Well, I'm transitioning to reality is absolutely not, but it matters how you do it. It matters how you do it. And so we're trying to help people through that as well. But those are some just quick takeaways

Brett Curry:

That's so important and putting data behind your gut and your intuition. I trust and believe that if I invest in marketing in this way with a really strong brand message that compels people, but it's not the buy now save a hundred percent type of thing. It's like it's a good brand message. I believe that's going to work. I'm going to trust it, but I'd sure like some data to back me up. And that's what you guys have built and what you're doing here, and it just makes sense. We look at this all the time with YouTube and then there's been such an influx of people coming to MG for us to help them solve YouTube, which we do all the time. But hey, if we can reach the right audience maybe for a five or $8 CPM or a $10 CCP M and you're getting a 30 or $40 CPM somewhere else, that's going to have an impact. And if I can drive more branded search, which comes to me at 50 cents or whatever, that's going to be better than driving $7 clicks and some of these other areas. And so it's understanding some of those things are powerful, but now you're putting some of the measurement behind it to see the real business impact of those things.

Preston Rutherford:

And then just trying to validating it with straight up well run. Do you hold that incrementality studies so that when you get those results, yeah, I mean it trains your MMM or your statistical model, but it also gives you data that you can take to the CO and CFO and just be like, because the tough thing that always happens, and you probably deal with this with your clients, it's like, oh crap, October soft or September was rough.

Speaker 3:

You

Preston Rutherford:

Got to cut all that stuff, right? Only bottom funnel. And then when you don't have any kind of causal holdout data, there's no way for you to say, we would be doing worse if we weren't doing this brand building stuff. There's no way to say that. But that's true

Or it's potentially true. And if you're running these experiments constantly, if you have this culture of experimentation, you can actually say that, right? Here's the data. Look at these geos doing way worse where we're not doing this demand gen stuff or I don't want to say demand creating net new demand for our brand, let's call it. And so that's what we really encourage. Anyone who's doing any kind of stuff that doesn't necessarily optimize for driving that short-term today purchase is just run experiments so that you can have that conversation where it's just like, no, this is the whole goal. We want to make more money than we would had we just been sticking to bottom funnel demand capture. That's the goal. More profit dollars sustainably over many, many years. We're all aligned on that front, right? Yes. So if we have some numbers in this missing fluffy piece, that is the compounder, right? That's the end of the day. It's the compounder. It's the compounder,

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Preston Rutherford:

The bottom funnel land capture. It is the thing that cash is in on the compounding. But if you don't have a compounding, right, I mean, then we're in trouble. So we want to solve that

Brett Curry:

In trouble. Man, it's so good. So good. I could keep going on this all day. I absolutely love this stuff. But we do need to wrap up and we'll have to do another round in the future and hopefully not wait a couple years, but who is marathon data for? What's your ICP or your ideal client profile and how can people find out more?

Preston Rutherford:

Sure. So ICP, it's like, let's call 'em generally modern consumer brands who maybe reached a point where they're just like, I think part of the reason maybe why we're not seeing the results we want to see is because maybe we haven't been able to invest in this brand stuff, or

I know brand is important, but I can't figure out how to invest in it or measure it. So there's that little bit of pain or I'm crushing it, but I don't know what I'm doing that's helping my pressure. What should I be doubling down on? What should I be cutting? Everything's seemingly working? What's, there's those things You're generally spending a lot of money on meta, Google, YouTube, TikTok, you've got active socials, you're trying to expand multichannel, right? You start a D two C, now you're on Amazon, now you're in Walmart or Nordstrom or whoever, and you don't have to be all of that stuff. But those are generally the folks that we work with may need to be around for three, four years to have enough history. So all that stuff, but pretty much any consumer brand.

Brett Curry:

Love it. Love it. And then how can they find out more? Where can they get a demo? How can they dive in? That sort of thing.

Preston Rutherford:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can just slide into my dms on LinkedIn, just search Preston Ruther with shorts in the middle of the first and last name. Or you can go to marathon data co com or Marathon Taco. Someone told me that I think is a way better

Brett Curry:

Way to taco marathon taco. That's perfect. You'll never forget that.

Preston Rutherford:

But yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn, read some of the stuff that kind of helps articulate these Yammer rings on the internet, but

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

Yep. Love it, man. Really appreciate the time. I'll double down on this. You're still one of the best follows on LinkedIn out there if you're in the marketing and brand building and consumer product building. And if you're in marketing, you got to follow precedent on LinkedIn. So just do that. Checkout marathon data co.com or the taco. I like that even better. And so Preston, thanks man. Ton of fun. Thank you Brett, as always, and always great to catch up.

Preston Rutherford:

Pleasure dude. Love what you're doing and thanks for the opportunity. Hope this is helpful for the audience.

Brett Curry:

A hundred percent. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you found this episode helpful and you think it'd be helpful for someone else, please share it. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening. This episode is brought to you by WAY Flyer. You've got demand, you've got ads that are converting without enough inventory, you're leaving money on the table. And when your bank doesn't get D two C, they won't structure funding the way you need it. That's why thousands of D two C brands turn to way fast. Flexible funding design just for e-commerce. No equity, no dilution, no hassle. Trusted by 5,000 plus brands and backed by JPMorgan Wayer has deployed over 5 billion. To help D two C brands go visit way flyer.com/omg commerce, learn how way can help you and discover how you could get a 5% rebate off of your fees.

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