On the third DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck is joined by Jacob and Abby from the social team at Pilothouse. Each topic runs on a timer. They start with rising Meta CPMs and the product browsing default Meta switched on this week, then get into whether the offer or the creative matters more on Black Friday, what a late Thanksgiving means for your sale, why December still pays, and whether a founder should fire their agency two weeks before Black Friday.

Get an audit from Pilothouse: https://pilothouse.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

Your Meta costs keep climbing. Meta CPMs are running higher than last year, with Q4 and the US midterms both pushing prices up. Brands that fed the pixel with cold traffic earlier in the year are the ones seeing it pay off now.

Meta just put a shopping page between your ad and your site. Jacob explains why Pilothouse will test product browsing before opting out, including what opting out could do to your opportunity score.

You can’t decide between the offer and the creative. Abby keeps the offer front and center in every Black Friday ad and wins on how she says it. One cookware brand in her portfolio saw CPMs go down this year after a flood of new video content.

You run the same ads to everyone. Jacob hammers the offer to retargeting audiences and leads with variety and messaging for cold traffic, then narrows to what works three or four days into the sale.

Thanksgiving is late and your window is short. Launch early to mid November, then stack an extra 5% or add countdown timers if the promo starts to fizzle.

Your ads say 20% off and the sale is pacing behind. Abby leaves the creative alone and lets shoppers find 25% on the site, a happy surprise that helps them pull the trigger.

Your discount isn’t deep enough. A jewellery brand moved from 30% off sitewide to “up to 50%” by adding more products to its clearance section.

You plan to pull back on December 2nd. Keep your Black Friday ads running through Cyber Week, have gifting ready to go, and push until your shipping cutoff.

Your gifting ads launch with no learnings. Abby launches evergreen gifting ads during Black Friday so they already have data when the sale ends.

Your shipping cutoff has passed. Gift cards, discounted gift cards and expedited shipping keep the last days of December selling.

Your brand doesn’t fit gifting. Use a self-gifting angle: you did your holiday shopping, now it’s your turn.

You’re not planning Q5. Health brands can ride new year resolutions, and jewelry brands should build their Valentine’s Day creative before January ends.

You skipped top of funnel in October. Abby explains how she fills the funnel in October with brand-building video, then drains it in November with heavy Black Friday messaging.

Your founder wants to fire the agency on November 15th. Jacob would ride it out unless the agency has checked out, and Abby lists the red flags that make switching worth the risk.

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Jacob and Abby work on the social team at Pilothouse, a performance marketing agency for DTC brands. https://pilothouse.co

STAY CONNECTED

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YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

Want to be on the Rundown? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Black Friday creative strategy

03:00 Rising Meta CPMs

07:00 BFCM offers vs. creative

18:00 Why you should keep spending after Cyber Monday

30:00 When to fire your marketing agency

Greg co-founded Keen 16 years ago after a decade as a CPG brand marketer, waiting six to eight months for a marketing mix PowerPoint that didn’t help with the next decision. Keen’s database now covers 450 brands and $48 billion in media spend. In the final episode of Harness the Halo, he explains how the loop of measuring, planning, buying and reconciling works, why he thinks a brand of any size should invest in top of funnel, and why he would never hand the marketing budget back to the CFO.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Tariffs are squeezing your margin and marketing looks like the easy cut. Greg’s advice is to cut non-working dollars first and keep the lights on, because coming back from dark costs more than staying in market.
• You’ve been told to wait on brand marketing until you’re bigger. Greg disagrees. He says top of funnel spend acts as cover fire that makes your middle and bottom of funnel more effective, and that a brand living on bottom of funnel spend pays more for the same result over time.
• You’re scaling inside one platform. Greg’s data favors spreading spend across channels that reinforce each other, like Meta and Amazon, and judging each one on what the next dollar returns in profit.
• Someone told you a channel doesn’t work. Greg calls blanket channel verdicts a broad generalization. What matters is the brand’s objective, where its customer is, whether you can buy the channel efficiently, and when you spend.
• You’re relying on Google’s or Meta’s free marketing mix model. Greg calls them myopic, says they grade their own homework, and says they need a data science team and constant experiments to calibrate.
• Your business is seasonal and your budget piles into the peak. Greg’s biggest client bet was a century-old seasonal brand that spent less during its peak season and more around it, and grew top line and profit.
• Your CFO only looks at CAC. Greg would show the CFO the net present value of marketing, so it gets judged as an investment the way any other capital spend is.
• Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Greg says the CMO should, as long as the CMO learns the CFO’s language and is held to profit.
• You plan once a year. Keen starts from two years of data, updates the model as new data arrives, produces a week-by-week buying plan, and checks actuals against the forecast.
• You blame creative when results swing. Greg says only great creative shows up as a big effect in the model, and that where and when you spend usually matters more than people think creative does.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Greg Dolan is co-founder and CEO of Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com

HARNESS THE HALO

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn’t pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is the final episode.

STAY CONNECTED

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YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

SPONSOR

Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 AI-powered marketing measurement

06:00 Using AI to optimize marketing spend

09:00 Why top-of-funnel investment matters

19:00 Marketing budgets during economic pressure

26:00 The future of autonomous media buying

Norwest partner Lisa Wu, an early investor in Jet, Ritual, and Remedy, walks through the 10 attributes her team uses to spot a breakout consumer brand. She covers why a well-built consumer brand should only need one or two rounds of capital, why replenishment categories need gross margins north of 60%, and why supplements and personal care can sell for five times revenue while apparel can trade at one times. If you run a $5M to $50M brand, use her list as a scorecard and mark yourself green, yellow, or red on each attribute.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Key takeaways:

– Know which of the 10 attributes your brand is weak on before you raise, so you fix the reds instead of pitching around them.

– Avoid funding a consumer brand like a tech company. Too much capital at rising valuations buys mercenary customers and forces you to chase targets your unit economics can’t support.

– Be first-ish instead of first. The later mattress-in-a-box brands drafted off the category education the early, venture-funded players paid for.

– Build clinical proof into the brand from day one. Science washing (adding a dermatologist, a survey, and a claim once you notice the trend) is something customers can sense.

– Cut acquisition costs with a distribution advantage others haven’t found yet, like a trusted clinical voice whose audience includes other creators who look up to them.

– Make paid acquisition work by pairing it with strong retention. Natural replenishment categories let lifetime value cover what you spend to acquire.

– Price for the premiumization of mass, and keep investing in brand, because a cheaper competitor is always coming.

– Protect gross margin early so wholesale and retail stay open without a reformulation later.

– Choose a category acquirers want to buy. A $100M brand at five times revenue sells for $500M. At one times, it sells for $100M.

– Win with one product first, then expand into adjacent products where the customer already trusts you.

About the guest:

Lisa Wu is a partner on the venture team at Norwest, where she has invested in consumer brands for more than a decade. Her investments include Ritual, Remedy, and Jet, which was acquired by Walmart. Norwest runs venture and growth equity on one platform, so it can back founders from seed through profitable scale. Reach Lisa at lw@nvp.com.

https://norwest.com

Stay connected:

The DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

Timestamps:

02:10 Why Health and Wellness Is Booming

08:45 How Ritual Built Consumer Trust

14:05 10 Attributes of Breakout Consumer Brands

24:05 Building a Distribution Advantage

40:55 Consumer Trends Investors Are Watching

Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse. He walks through what June and October Prime Day showed. Some consumable brands Pilothouse manages grew 150% or more year over year during October Prime Day, a few sold more in that two-day event than in the four-day June event, and average order value dropped. He explains what that means for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, how premium brands should position for shoppers who wait for deals, and what to set up on Amazon now.

Work with Pilothouse: https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse

Key takeaways:

– Know which shoppers are waiting on you. Paper products, household cleaning, personal hygiene and pet food jumped on deal days, while headphones, tablets, wearable tech and TVs lagged.

– Sell on value. Shoppers want the product they already like at a better price, so make your differentiator easy to find and quick to understand on the listing.

– Build awareness before the deal day. Shoppers do their research ahead of the sale, so get in front of them in the weeks before Black Friday and retarget them on the day.

– Test your listing images with care. Amazon once required white backgrounds, and lifestyle and annotated images exist because sellers kept pushing. Deal-day hints in images are a gray area, and a removed listing means missing the event entirely.

– Be available where your customer shops. More shoppers compared Walmart, Target and DTC sites during deal days, and if your competitor is listed there and you are not, they get the sale.

– Plan a review push after Black Friday. Amazon’s new Review Requests ads let you pay per click to ask recent buyers for a review. A click does not guarantee a review.

– Start ranking for your Black Friday keywords now. Put the keyword in your title, highlights, bullets and description, give it its own campaign, and use placement modifiers to hold top of search into the deal day.

About the guest:

Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse, a full-funnel performance marketing agency for DTC brands.

https://pilothouse.co

Stay connected:

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Sponsors:

Advertise on DTC: https://dtcnews.link/advertise

Timestamps:

00:03:36 Amazon Prime Day trends

00:05:00 Consumables surge during deal days

00:07:40 How shoppers define value

00:12:30 Positioning premium products for BFCM

00:16:40 Omnichannel holiday shopping behavior

They lower CAC on Meta, but rev-share creator deals send a big share of that saving into a new line on the P&L. Yash Chavan, founder and CEO of Saral, the team behind the Sathi affiliate platform, walks through the math on an $80 AOV supplement brand and lays out how to build a creative flywheel instead: an influencer affiliate program where affiliate revenue covers the cost of seeding product, and the posts that win organically become the ads you boost on Meta and TikTok.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Key takeaways:

– Work out whether partnership ads are cutting your CAC or relocating it, using Yash’s worked example of an $80 CAC dropping to $68 while creator and platform fees add $9.20 back.

– See why creator payouts tied to GMV grow as a variable cost when you scale ad spend, and how capping the payout on any single ad stops one viral video from costing you $10,000.

– Build a creator pyramid: seed creators who already post in your niche, turn the ones who post into affiliates, give the top sellers bigger deals, and run the top performers by views as partnership ads.

– Let organic performance choose your ad creative, with rules like boosting a reel on Meta once it passes a view threshold inside 48 hours.

– Raise your affiliate activity rate by rewarding the steps before the sale, like a free product when a creator joins and a small cash reward when they post.

– Catch leaked codes, leaked affiliate links, and affiliates bidding on your brand keywords before you pay commission on those sales.

– Plan a creator push in mid October that can still produce ad creative and affiliate revenue before Black Friday.

About the guest:

Yash Chavan is the founder and CEO of Saral, an influencer marketing platform for ecommerce brands. Before Saral he ran an influencer marketing agency. His team also built Sathi, an affiliate platform for creator-led brands with fraud protection and gamified rewards.

Saral: https://getsaral.com/

Sathi: https://www.mysathi.io

Stay connected:

Website and newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

Sponsors:

This episode is sponsored by Saral and Sathi. Saral matches your brand with creators who already make content in your niche, and Sathi turns the creators who post into affiliates, with fraud protection and gamified rewards built in. Start a free trial at https://getsaral.com/

Key takeaways:

• Lower CAC with TikTok Shop by sending samples generously and recruiting affiliates every week. Bobby set a goal of 1,000 affiliates and did the outreach himself on Sunday nights.
• Start TikTok Shop simple. Get affiliates posting before you touch GMV Max, paid campaigns, or contests.
• Get more usable creative by briefing creators less. O Positiv’s brief is the product, what it does, what creators can say, and what they can’t.
• Feed Meta with TikTok Shop learnings. The winning creator content runs on Meta, and the creators get paid extra for it.
• Test for creative diversity instead of running ten copy variations on one static image.
• Hold Meta to an allowable CAC and move spend up or down with the strength of your creative.
• Grow lifetime value by planning for life stages. A PMS customer who gets pregnant should reach for your pregnancy product, then your menopause product.
• Launch products customers can feel working. O Positiv’s fiber gummy stuck and its immune gummy didn’t, and that became the product rule.
• Go into retail with a big DTC business behind you, push for endcaps and out-of-aisle displays, and fly out for the buyer meeting.
• Expect retail to break your attribution. When Meta ads drive store sales, your Shopify CAC climbs while the business grows, so build omnichannel measurement early.
• Decide early whether you are a house of brands or a branded house, and keep it simple.

About the guest:Bobby Bitton is the co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, the women’s health brand he started with his sister Brianna Bitton in 2018. O Positiv makes FLO, URO, and MENO, and sells through its own site, TikTok Shop, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and CVS.https://www.opositiv.comStay connected:Follow The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

Liam Robinson, co-founder of Marlbank, says to stop arguing features and lead cold prospecting with your brand’s growth story. On this episode of All Killer No Filler, he walks through how that switch got a supplement brand built by chemists scaling on Meta after months of feature-led ads went nowhere.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

Key takeaways:

– How to sell a product that’s better than the competition when the reasons don’t show up in an ad

– Why feature-led ads turn into a shouting match in cold Meta prospecting

– How to imply product quality through your brand’s growth story instead of claiming it

– What to use when you don’t have big numbers yet: a first farmers market, a first hire, a first customer

– How to build a then-and-now prospecting ad from your own camera roll

– How Marin Skincare and Vyper Industrial pair a product distinction with a founder story

– How to turn a Dragons’ Den appearance into an ad, whether you got a deal or walked away without one

– Which brands this angle won’t work for

About the guest:

Liam Robinson is co-founder of Marlbank, a Meta-only agency for early-growth ecommerce brands, built in partnership with Pilothouse. Before Marlbank, he was one of Pilothouse’s first media buyers. Reach Liam at liam@marlbank.co or his co-founder Nate at nate@marlbank.co.

Stay connected:

Subscribe to The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Get the DTC Newsletter at https://directtoconsumer.co

Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

Drew is now CEO of Iris Finance, a finance platform for CPG and DTC brands, where he sees the books of 200 brands, most of them between $20 million and $300 million in revenue. He joins Eric Dyck and Claudia Lauture, VP of Client Services at Keen Decision Systems, to work through the argument between marketing and finance, including who should own the budget and when a brand can afford upper funnel. You walk away knowing what to bring into the budget meeting and how finance will score it.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• You don’t know what finance is judging your plan on. Drew’s answer is CAC. If CAC, retention and LTV to CAC land where his model has them, he says he does not care how much you spend or what you spend it on.
• You need money for a bet that won’t pay back this quarter. Drew wants one of two cases made: that it raises MER and contribution margin, or that the upside is big enough to be worth the risk.
• You want to start brand marketing and direct response is only just carrying the business. Drew says there is no room yet. Most companies he sees don’t start brand work until somewhere past $30 million in revenue, and he would not do it at $10 million.
• You think you have topped out on Meta. Drew says Meta takes a brand farther than most operators expect, and that you can probably ride it to $100 million.
• You are looking for the next channel after Meta. Across the 200 brands on Iris, Drew has not seen one scale AppLovin spend and make more money. The pattern he describes is a brand that reaches $50 million on Meta, puts $200K a month into AppLovin and watches its margin go away.
• Your upper funnel keeps getting cut to hit the quarter. Claudia’s team at Keen runs both plans out two and three years, so the cost of the cut is on the table next to the short-term number.
• Your cash position keeps surprising you. Drew builds a bear, a base and a bull case, then tests the base at 40% over and 40% under. Beating plan by 60% can still run a brand out of money, because of inventory.
• Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Drew says it is usually the marketing lead and should be the CFO, on the condition that the CFO understands growth marketing, which he calls rare.
• Your agency bill is being questioned. At Mad Rabbit, Drew let go of an Amazon agency he liked because it cost roughly $60K a month and he could hire two full-time people for two thirds of that.
• You are planning Q4 the way you did last year. Drew is hearing more brands pull back on TikTok after losing money there last year, and supplement founders tell him they are waiting for January because Q4 brings higher returns, more churn and discount shoppers.
• You are reporting platform revenue to finance. Both guests named it as the number they stopped trusting. Drew: “It’s all higher than what you get on your P&L.”

ABOUT THE GUESTS

Drew Fallon is co-founder and CEO of Iris Finance and the former CFO of Mad Rabbit. https://irisfinance.co

Claudia Lauture is VP of Client Services at Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com

HARNESS THE HALO

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn’t pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is episode 5 of 6, and a new episode drops every other week.

SPONSOR

Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com

On the DTC Podcast, Lauren tells Eric Dyck how Flex got from a landing page with 200,000 emails and no product to 30,000 retail doors and more than 185 million menstrual discs sold. She covers the DTC strategy behind the timing of the retail move, how connected TV and subway ads lift every other channel, and what she is doing about a category that only 3% of people have heard of.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• A big retailer wants your product and you are not sure you are ready. Lauren turned Target down two years running until supply chain, manufacturing and margin-based LTV to CAC were dialed in, because a marketing engine that cannot scale before retail will not scale once you are on shelf.
• Your subscription keeps missing the moment customers need the product. Flex changed pack sizes, changed frequencies and opened fulfillment centers on both coasts. The fix was in the customer research the whole time: people wanted to buy it in a store.
• Your product needs explaining before anyone will buy it. Flex ads without an education piece perform worse, so the answers to “will it get stuck” and “is it messy” go inside the ad itself.
• You are about to spend real money on your first TV campaign. Flex hired a big agency, shot a high-production spot Lauren had doubts about, and had to spend out a contract on ads that did not perform. The rule since then is that nothing runs on TV unless it has already worked on YouTube.
• Your category has almost no awareness and you cannot outspend the giants. With unaided awareness of menstrual discs at 3%, Flex added CTV, New York subway ads and campus marketing so that a friend’s recommendation, a subway poster and a TikTok from a small creator all reach the same person.
• You do not know which content will move retail sales. A plain YouTube video explaining how the Flex Cup’s pull tab works went viral and lifted Flex’s velocities at Walmart by double digits.
• You launched to a huge waitlist with no way to fulfill it. Flex could not ship in the US yet, so the founders flew to Europe on cheap Iceland fares and hand-packed discs at local post offices. They had $80,000 in pre-orders before demo day.
• You found a competitor’s patent on the product you wanted to make. Lauren pitched the company, got turned down, designed around the patent, and then acquired that company while she was still in Y Combinator.

ABOUT LAUREN

Lauren Schulte Wang is the founder and CEO of The Flex Company, the period care brand behind the Flex Disc, the Flex Cup, Softdisc and Softcup. She started Flex in 2015, went through Y Combinator in 2016, and coined the term “menstrual disc.” Flex products are sold in 30,000 stores including Walmart, Target and CVS. https://flexfits.com

Instagram and TikTok: @flex

STAY CONNECTED

DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 How Flex turned viral attention into growth

08:00 Why doing things that don’t scale works

12:00 How retail became Flex’s biggest growth channel

17:00 Why product education drives performance

32:00 What makes TV and YouTube creative work

Braydon joins Eric Dyck on All Killer No Filler to walk through the full workflow. Grok Bot handles the research with a chief of staff agent that manages a team of sub-agents. Higgsfield turns the references he picks into on-brand mockups. Claude writes the tickets for the designers, who still make the finished ad. He also explains why he is not bullish on AI-generated ad creative right now, and why some of his clients have asked for zero AI in their ads.

Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• You trigger every AI task by hand. Braydon sets up a chief of staff agent in Grok Bot that manages sub-agents on a schedule, so the research is waiting for him on Monday morning.
• Competitor and creative research eats your week. His agents go through Pinterest, the ad library and Motion, and one run came back with a swipe file of around 70 creatives relevant to the brand.
• You write the same design tickets over and over. Braydon loads his internal processes into Claude, hands it the ideas he picked, and it writes the ticket descriptions for the designers.
• You can’t tell where AI belongs in the creative process. He uses it for strategy, references and mockups, then gives the work to designers for the finished product.
• Your AI images look like AI. Braydon starts from a reference photo taken on a phone or a real UGC image, which gets the output closer to an iPhone shot.
• Your client has banned AI creative. Eric shares what he heard from larger brands, who test AI creative on a separate third-party brand page instead of the main account.
• You copied an AI ad trend and it stopped working. Braydon on Pixar-style video ads and why formats like that grab attention for a moment and then fade once everyone runs them.
• Your team keeps building the same AI tool three times. Braydon and Eric talk through shared context, token bills and what Pilothouse is building internally to fix it.

ABOUT BRAYDON

Braydon is a creative strategist at Pilothouse, the performance marketing team behind DTC. To talk through this workflow with him, fill out the form at https://pilothouse.co and ask for Braydon.

STAY CONNECTED

DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 How AI workflows save hours every week

05:00 Building an AI agent team

08:00 Where AI creative works best

16:00 Using AI as a personal assistant

22:00 Building shared AI workflows for teams