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A brand doing under $50 million a year is putting roughly half of its combined retail media, trade, and shopper marketing budget into retail media. At larger companies that share drops toward 30, 20, then 15 percent. Mike Chiasson works on Keen's models, which cover $45 billion in marketing investment, and his read on where that money comes from is the part worth sitting with. It is mostly net new, sourced out of trade rather than pulled from Meta and Google, which is why so much of it sits with sales teams and never gets measured the way media does.
If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what the retail media line in your budget is actually buying, and which part of it is buying customers you already had.
If you own the media budget: Chiasson makes the case that the untapped return in retail media is upper funnel, inside retailers where almost everyone is still only buying search.
What he gets into:
Where the money comes from, and why trade budgets rather than media budgets explain retail media's growth
The benchmark: about half the retail media, trade, and shopper marketing bucket at brands under $50M, versus 15 to 30 percent at large ones
Why small brands with a narrow distribution footprint default to bottom-funnel search, and what that costs them
The Amazon question: whether retail media spend compounds on a retailer's algorithm the way it does on a listing, and why brick and mortar has no real equivalent
Retail media ads that carry no visible association with the retailer at all, and why targeting is the actual product
Walmart, Vizio, and streaming video as the moment upper-funnel retail media became buyable
Retail media social, which he calls very small and rapidly growing, with returns he thinks reflect how early the curve is
The two flaws in ROAS, and why the return on your next dollar is the only version of the number that helps you plan
Bayesian priors, and how Keen gives a brand a response curve for a retailer it has never advertised with
Patience as a budgeting problem rather than a virtue, and why cash-strapped brands structurally cannot buy upper funnel
Who this is for: operators whose product is landing on shelves in more places every quarter, and whose retail media invoices are growing faster than their ability to explain them.
What to steal: find out which budget your retail media is actually coming from. If it is trade, the people approving it are measuring a retailer relationship and the people spending it are measuring sales. Those are different jobs and almost nobody has reconciled them.
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. Episode 1 was the market read. Episode 2 was the first brand. This one maps the fastest-growing line in the budget.
Timestamps:
00:00 Why retail media is becoming a major growth channel
04:00 Where retail media investment is growing
08:00 Why retail media ROI is outperforming other tactics
13:00 The upper-funnel opportunity in retail media
Most ecommerce brands are paying for every contact in the database, including the tens of thousands they have not mailed in a year. Then they mail them anyway, because they are paying for them. Channing Ferrer argues both halves of that are costing you money, and he has his own company's data to back the second half.
Brevo studied its customer base and found the brands sending the least email posted the highest conversion and click-through rates. The heaviest senders were worse on conversion, worse on click-through and worse on opens. Brevo bills by the message sent, so telling customers to send less costs them revenue. They say it anyway.
For a retention lead, a lifecycle marketer, or a founder still building the sends themselves, this is a conversation about where the money actually goes in a retention program. Channing spent six years at HubSpot running sales strategy through the run from $200 million to $1.5 billion in revenue, then ran sales at Semrush and led Brandwatch back to growth.
Eric told Neil Patel that Pilothouse is now getting about 30% of its inbound from ChatGPT, with higher close rates and bigger deals. Neil's response: "I guarantee your leads are down overall. Would you confirm or disagree with me?"
Down about 40%. Revenue up.
Neil explains why that pattern is showing up everywhere. Someone used to run a Google search, click six blue links, fill out four forms, sit through screening calls, then pick. Now they ask an LLM, filter down inside the conversation with follow-ups, and go to one website with their mind already made up. Same intent, same buyer, one visit instead of seven.
The rest of the episode is what to do about it.
What's inside:
The real search market: Google at 5 trillion searches a year and 27% share, Instagram at 6.5 billion a day, Amazon and YouTube at 3 billion each. Neil's point is that 73% of search is not Google.
Whether Google's ad revenue is actually getting hit by AI Overviews (his answer is more specific than the headlines)
GEO and SEO are two different scores. Domain authority carries SEO and means nothing to GEO. GEO looks at the last 30 to 60 days.
The single highest-leverage GEO tactic he's seeing for ecom, and it isn't Reddit
Why he'd skip Reddit if he ran an ecom brand, and what he'd do instead
Ep 645: DTC Rundown: "Don't Run Ads Until $10M?," Evergreen vs Campaigns, and Sites Built for the Wrong Customer
"There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing five to ten million in revenue."
That was Codie Sanchez, and the post went wide enough that DTC marketers spent a week arguing about whether they should be doing their jobs at all. Eric came back from vacation, saw it, and used it to launch a format he has wanted to make since the beginning of this show.
The Rundown is Pardon the Interruption for DTC. A few topics off the week, three people, everyone gives a take. First panel is Jordan Gordon, who runs post-click and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, and Rafael Gi, who works partnerships and client strategy.
What you get:
Both sides of the Codie Sanchez take. Jordan defends the free traffic position: if twenty percent of your traffic is organic and your total margin is twenty percent, that organic traffic is your profit. Rafael's counter is that paid media is a muscle, and a brand that waits until $10M to build it has to relearn its culture, team, and workflows at exactly the wrong moment.
What paid media does: accelerate. Good product grows faster. Bad product fails quicker.
The wastage Rafael sees most across ten to fifteen audits a week. Brands paying to reach customers who were buying regardless, the platform taking view-through credit for purchases with no click, and that false signal then deciding which creative gets scaled.
Ep 644: 77% of AI Shoppers Want a Recommendation: Phillip Jackson on the New Bottom of the Funnel
Phillip Jackson has spent 22 years in ecommerce, first building the software, then running agency strategy, and now running Future Commerce (futurecommerce.com), where the operating thesis is that commerce is culture.
If you are a founder, brand lead, or growth operator trying to figure out what AI traffic is actually doing to your store, this one is worth the 50 minutes.
What's inside:
The Future Commerce study: 77% of shoppers want AI to recommend and nothing more. No booking, no buying, no agent acting on their behalf
What that shopper does when they land: converts about 3x more often, spends about half as much, does zero browsing
Why the fix is counterintuitive. You now have to add friction back into the buying process and tell more brand story on a product page
Nike's decline read from someone with a partnership inside the turnaround: streetwear over sport, owned channels over retail partners, and the running category handed to On and Hoka
"Ma," the Japanese cinema concept, applied to brand. Nobody wants to hear from you constantly, and the brands that never rest never get a cultural high point either
Proof of work: Dr. Martens selling pre-broken-in secondhand boots at Brewer Street, Levi's repair, $1,200 Pope tees, and why patina is now the product
The agentic reader. Future Commerce stopped treating a human as its primary audience for discovery
Cannes Lions and the collision of retail media with the traditional ad ecosystem, plus what that means for creator strategy in 2026
Ep 643: Amazon Fees Hit 40%: How to Claw Back Margin and Stop Wasting Ad Spend (Pilothouse)
In 2020, Amazon's fees ran about 26% of your product cost. Today they run 34 to 40%, and once you add advertising most brands are at 50 to 60% before they reinvest a dollar. For the first time in years, the number of sellers on Amazon is shrinking.
Tyler, head of Amazon at Pilothouse, is back to explain what he calls the Amazon paradox: you can't afford to be on Amazon, and you can't afford not to be.
If you sell on Amazon, buy Amazon ads, or keep putting off the decision to launch there, this is the operator's version of the math.
What you get:
Where the 40% actually goes, and which parts of it you can still fight
The hidden fee stack (long-term storage, inbound, freight, returns, chargebacks) that quietly takes another 5 to 8% of margin, one fraction of a percent at a time
Reimbursements: Amazon loses and damages inventory and wrongly charges you for it, and will pay it back if you dispute it. Most brands never do
AGL / AWD, shipping straight from your manufacturer into Amazon's fulfillment network, and the 2 to 5% freight savings that comes with it
Why the April 15 change (Amazon pulling ad spend out of your disbursement instead of your credit card) is a cash flow problem, not an ad problem
The death of the middle: half of Amazon's GMV now sits with roughly 8,000 sellers, down from 15,000, and what changed in the algorithm to cause it
How Once Upon a Farm's DTC Ads Grew Its Retail Business | Harness the Halo 2/6
Once Upon a Farm did $85.4 million in Q2, up 42% year over year, and reached 6.2% of US households against 5.0% a year earlier. Some of that growth traces back to a campaign that was never supposed to produce it. They were running lower-funnel media to their own site, a clean shop-now call to action, the kind of campaign you judge by tomorrow's site revenue. What moved was the retail business. Instacart got more efficient. Programs with accounts picked up momentum. Jennifer Berglund has spent the years since trying to see that effect properly instead of guessing at it, and now she is watching paid search at one retailer lift sales at another, and that's where Keen is worth its weight in premium baby food.
If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what happens to your job when the sale stops closing anywhere you can see it, and what you measure instead.
If you own the media budget: Jennifer walks through how a one month TV test in 2021 turned into always-on upper funnel, including the matched-market holdout testing she used to defend it before she had a model.
What they get into:
The early signal: lower-funnel DTC media running, and the retail business taking off instead
The finding out of Keen that surprised her most, paid search at Kroger or Target showing an effect on a different account entirely
Why she treats ROAS as an education problem inside the company rather than a KPI
The trap in "new to brand" at a retailer, and why she takes it with a grain of salt
How she built the case for TV: 2021 test, then TV plus social plus out of home, then geo tests against comparable holdout markets, then always-on
Streaming TV and YouTube, and Brad on buying top of funnel through retail media DSPs so the money still funnels to the retailer
Why every retail media network's conversion methodology is different, and what she uses those platform numbers for instead
Ep 642: Kick or Keep These Trends with DÔEN's Ashley Kick: AI Creative, TikTok Shop, Amazon, and Branded Resale
Ashley Kick runs ecommerce at DÔEN (shopdoen.com), the Los Angeles apparel brand founded by sisters Margaret and Katherine Kleveland. Eric met her at the Whalies giving hot takes on stage, so this episode is a new format built for exactly that: World Cup themed, 15 ecommerce topics, kick it or keep it.
If you run a premium brand and you are tired of advice written for a $30 AOV, Ashley draws lines most operators are still arguing about internally.
What's inside:
AI generated ad creative, kicked as hard as anything gets kicked on this show: "they didn't fall in love with the clanker generated things"
Her pendulum argument: everything used to be human made, the swing to AI has been fast, and the vacuum it left is the differentiation opportunity for brands willing to keep humans on the work. DÔEN has hired novelists to write copy
Why she will not trade a discount or free shipping for an email address, with the list math behind it: a million names sending at 20%, or 300,000 sending at 60 to 70%
Hand Me DÔEN, the resale program that runs on Treet: trade in for store credit, quarterly resale events, and an answer to the dupe sellers, because buying from the program is how a customer knows the piece is real
The AOV line where she thinks TikTok Shop stops making sense, and why discovery on TikTok still matters for the brand through user generated content
Losing money on the first order to win it back on LTV, kicked. Her hero products are chosen as the best first experience of the brand, and they are not loss leaders
Where she is happy to let algorithms work: media buying, placements, and Klaviyo send-time optimization
Ep 641: Creator-Handle Ads Ran 70% More Efficient: Aves on Creative Coverage and Hyper Relevant Ads
DTC Twitter has spent the last few months arguing about volume versus strategy. Aves from Pilothouse thinks both camps are answering the wrong question. Eric brings her back for an all killer no filler on creative coverage: what it means now, how she decides what to make next, and the system she spent her summer building.
For anyone who briefs creative, buys media, or signs off on either.
What you get:
Why a thousand Grok ads in a month spikes CPMs and stops finding your audience, and why one precious video every two weeks fails for the opposite reason.
The three layers of coverage that matter now: right people, right product, right angles. Sizes and placements should be second nature by now.
Persona coverage past your bread and butter. If the answer is always "a woman in her twenties," you are not covering the audience you need in order to grow.
Product coverage, the layer most teams skip. Cross-referencing which SKUs bring people in cheapest against which ones are most efficient to ship, then testing returning-customer-only products at top of funnel to find margin nobody was looking for.
Diagnosing by problem rather than format. Heavy cart abandonment usually means a trust gap, which points to whitelisting first and conversion-friction statics behind it. Creator-handle delivery ran 70% more efficient than the same creative from the brand.
Selling the cloud when the economy tightens. Aspirational is outperforming pure problem agitation right now.
Bonus: $65M Exit, Zero Employees: How Olauto Automates Everything Except Customer Service
Tyler Handley sold Inkbox to BIC for $65 million. His new company, Olauto, sells a $33 car air freshener, launched last September, is already profitable, and has zero employees. Four people, some contractors, and AI running the back office. The one thing they refuse to automate: when a customer emails, a human answers. Every time.
The guy who built the software behind that is Mike Maleszyk, Tyler's friend since high school, who started HumanTouchCX after a support chatbot swore it was human but couldn't say what it had for lunch.
If you run CX for a Shopify brand, or you're deciding right now which parts of your business AI should touch, this episode is the two of them drawing the line in public.
Why Braden reviews every automated reply "from hi to buy," and the one automation he had to be convinced to allow (off-hours only)
Deflection rate, and what the merchants bragging about theirs are actually counting
Product questions as the worst place to put a bot: those customers are low funnel with a cart open
The Inkbox moderation story: 13 to 20 CX agents, custom tattoo uploads in a gray area no AI could judge, and the customer emails that started "why do you want this?"
Article 50 of the EU AI Act, live since August 2nd: transparency, record keeping, and audit logs for every AI touchpoint if you sell into the EU
What Channing puts on a dashboard for a $20M ecommerce brand, and why send volume belongs near the bottom of it
How Brevo customers run campaigns through Claude and ChatGPT over an MCP connection without opening Brevo at all
The three ways a customer outgrows a pricing tier, and how Brevo handles each one
Why loyalty points should reward a social post and not only a repeat purchase
Who this is for: retention leads, ecommerce founders, lifecycle marketers, and anyone weighing a move off Klaviyo or Mailchimp.
What to steal: pull volume off your primary dashboard and replace it with open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate and revenue per send. Then look at what your platform charges you for and ask whether it is charging for the list or for the work.
Timestamps:
00:00 Why personalized messaging converts better
05:00 How Brevo is using AI agents
07:00 Turning mobile wallets into a loyalty channel
14:00 Why sending fewer emails can drive better results
His five-step visibility audit: where you rank now, technical SEO and content freshness, the questions people actually type, review recency, and monthly mention volume
The trust study across 100 eight-figure businesses, and the gap between what those operators thought built trust and what buyers actually weighed
Discounts versus bundles, and what discounting does to LTV
Why he reversed his position on personal brand after building one of the biggest in marketing
The Zappos story about a guy named Jason, a first date, and a shoe pun that got him two-day shipping
His most expensive mistake, on air, with numbers
Who this is for: DTC founders and operators watching organic traffic fall while close rates climb, and anyone trying to work out where GEO actually fits next to their SEO budget.
What to steal: audit your review recency this week. If your best reviews are five years old, the LLMs are reading a version of your brand that no longer exists, and a smaller competitor with fresh coverage will get recommended over you.
Marketing is downstream from business, and business is downstream from markets. Jordan on why your marketing mix is often not your decision to make.
Why "evergreen versus campaigns" is the wrong framing past seven figures, and what demand creation looks like next to demand capture.
"Shift our thinking from tests to bets." Rafael on what changes once you have proof, and why the change is philosophical before it is tactical.
Audience hygiene as the precondition for everything. Until existing, engaged, and net new are defined across every channel, none of your tests are valid.
Advertising is vertical, email is horizontal. Jordan on campaigns for launches, flows for evergreen, and why someone who re-enters your world nine months later still needs to be sold your core product.
Acute versus routine entry points in supplements and beauty, and the cross-sell each one opens.
How to spot a brand that has the ratio wrong: growth decelerating quarter over quarter while the new-to-returning revenue ratio inverts. On the email side, campaign-heavy, flow-light, with Klaviyo revenue low against Shopify.
Unique opens are brand impressions. The argument for email as an advertising layer sitting just below reach.
The IKEA tote bag, and campaigns that exist to buy eyeballs rather than revenue.
The car category rule that applies everywhere. If you are not one of the three brands already in someone's consideration set, your revenue and your fame do not matter.
Who this is for: founders and operators between seven and nine figures, media buyers, and anyone who owns both the acquisition and retention number.
What to steal: the audience definition audit, the growth-versus-new-customer-ratio chart, and the absolutes-not-rates rule for judging new customer work.
Timestamps:
00:00 Should brands wait until $5M to run paid media?
05:00 Building organic traffic alongside paid growth
10:00 The hidden problem with scaling paid acquisition
Who this is for: DTC founders and operators watching LLM referral traffic show up in their analytics and not knowing what to do about it, plus brand people who want a sharper vocabulary for what is happening to culture.
What to steal: rebuild your PDP for answer engine traffic. That visitor arrived pre-sold on one SKU and will not browse unless you give them a reason.
Cosmo and what comes after A9: why external traffic into your listing now reads to Amazon as brand authority
Nike showed up. What happens to the small sellers who used to feast on big brands' unconverted branded search
TACoS as a vanity metric, and the three-report method (SQP, Helium 10 rank, ad spend) that shows whether your ads are driving incremental sales or paying for organic ones you already had
Rufus is now Alexa for Shopping, most people use it on the product page rather than in search, and what that means for your listing copy
What Tyler expects out of Amazon Accelerate 2026
Who this is for: Amazon sellers, DTC founders weighing the channel, and anyone managing Amazon ad spend.
What to steal: the reimbursement audit, the AGL freight move, and the zero-sale keyword sweep on your last quarter of ad spend.
The moment a brand should stop putting every dollar into working media and start paying for measurement
Brad on awareness as the leading indicator of household penetration, and household penetration as the leading indicator of revenue
Amoeba marketing, which Brad coined live on the recording and Jennifer immediately claimed for her LinkedIn
Who this is for: operators whose business has outgrown the channel their reporting was built for. DTC brands going into retail, retail brands building ecommerce, anyone whose media now shows up in someone else's numbers.
What to steal: the biweekly omnichannel meeting. Jennifer runs one across her media team and sales leadership. Sales says "I see this happening here," she says "we were running media during that time." That meeting found the halo before any model did.
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. Episode 1 was the market read. This is the first brand.
AI for customer service, kicked. If someone wants to talk about the fit of a dress, that is a person
Retail as an experience play, including a roughly 20% brand awareness lift in a market when a store opens, plus wholesale through boutiques with an aligned aesthetic
Amazon, extended sizing, and buy now pay later, each with a verdict
Who this is for: operators at premium and considered-purchase brands, retention and email leads, and anyone building the argument for keeping humans on creative.
What to steal: the email capture stance. Stop buying addresses with 15% off and measure your list on deliverability and send rate rather than raw size.
Hyper relevancy. The echo chambers have gotten small enough that a meme Aves sees every third video is one you've never heard of, so the ad has to match the exact font, the audio they've been hearing, even the camera angle. She ran "kinda chic" in ads without ever learning what it means.
Nobody is watching. Most people are lurking, and most of them are half-watching from the toilet or a waiting room. Aves watched a woman scroll Instagram through the entire Odyssey.
Creative is the new targeting, five years of everyone saying it, and the spaghetti metaphor that finally explains it.
Landing pages as the insurance policy on all of it. Spend two thousand dollars on a t-shirt and it still looks bad wrinkled.
Ad copy. Aves writes hers first, before any visual, and uses no AI for it. One emoji-only ad carried by copy alone did over six figures in a weekend.
Who this is for: creative strategists, media buyers, and founders heading into Q4 wondering why more ads stopped working.
What to steal: the product coverage audit, the cart-abandonment-means-trust diagnosis, and starting your brief with copy instead of a visual idea.
Tyler's vibe-coded ERP: why it hooks into Shopify and nothing else
"Friend founding," and how four people split brand, supply chain, CX, and ads
Hewie, the AI that helps train your first CX hire off your own past tickets instead of your calendar
Who this is for: DTC founders and CX leads between launch and $100M who are being pitched full automation from every direction.
What to steal: Braden's rule. Automations answer the 65% (shipping status) during off hours only, and a human still has eyes on every single reply before the relationship is on the line.
Timestamps:
00:00 Building an AI-powered brand without losing the human touch
05:00 Why AI customer service needs transparency
12:00 The problem with optimizing customer support for deflection
21:00 What the EU AI Act means for ecommerce brands
28:00 How a four-person team uses AI to scale an ecommerce brand
