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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

17:00 Why marginal ROI matters more than ROAS

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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.

Discover More: https://www.brevo.com/solutions/enterprise/?utm_medium=partnership&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_term=enterprise&utm_content=dtc-podcast-0926

What you get in 38 minutes:

• What changes when you stop paying for stored contacts and start paying for messages sent
• The mobile wallet as a retention channel, including how a loyalty card gets pushed a new offer and changes appearance on the lock screen
• Salomon's use of a wallet pass, and how the same mechanic works for a brand with no physical stores
• 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

25:00 Building loyalty through customer advocacy

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npdigital.com

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
• 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.

Timestamps:

00:00 How AI is changing product discovery

04:00 Why ChatGPT leads convert better

07:00 Search has multiplied beyond Google

15:00 How brands can rank in AI recommendations

25:00 SEO vs. GEO for AI visibility

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pilothouse.co

"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.
• 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

13:00 Evergreen marketing vs. campaign moments

22:00 Audience targeting and wasted media spend

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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

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.

Follow Phillip: futurecommerce.com

Timestamps:

03:00 Why Commerce Is Culture

06:00 How Brands Participate in Culture

24:00 Why Consumers Can Spot AI Content

32:00 How AI Is Changing the Marketing Funnel

44:00 The Rise of Consumer Sovereignty

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pilothouse.co

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
• 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.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Amazon Paradox

04:00 Why Amazon Is Getting More Expensive

10:00 Hidden Amazon Fees Hurting Margins

15:00 Why Brands Still Need Amazon

21:00 How to Make Amazon Ad Spend More Profitable

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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
• 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.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Halo Effect of Digital Marketing

07:00 Measuring Growth Across DTC and Retail

15:00 How Marketing Channels Influence Each Other

21:00 Streaming TV and YouTube Opportunities

37:00 Why ROAS Can Be Misleading

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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
• 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.

Timestamps:

00:03:00 AI Shopping Agents

00:05:00 TikTok Shop for Premium Brands

00:10:00 Branded Resale and the Circular Economy

00:14:00 AI-Generated Creative and Brand Identity

00:24:00 Wholesale, Amazon and Discount Strategy

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pilothouse.co

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.
• 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.

Timestamps:

00:03:00 Creative Volume vs. Strategy

00:05:00 Building Better Creative Coverage

00:10:00 Creative for Full-Funnel Performance

00:20:00 Why Creative Is the New Targeting

00:28:00 Why Ad Copy Matters More Than Ever

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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.

Want the setup Olauto uses? HumanTouch is taking on its first 100 Founding Merchants, with white-glove onboarding and 24 months of locked pricing.

What's inside:

• 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
• 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

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Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs (carvedesigns.com), the Northern California swim and apparel brand founded in 2003 and acquired by Komar Brands in December 2025. Before Carve she spent years at Amer Sports on the digital team behind Salomon, Atomic, Suunto, Arc'teryx and Wilson.

If you run retention or growth at a brand with a seasonal core product and a loyal base you have not fully mined, this one is for you.

What's inside:

• The retention rebuild: what was already working at Carve after 20 years, and the one thing they were not doing with their customer data
• Mapping the full customer journey in Figma, then finding the gaps where nobody was talking to the customer and the places where they were talking too much
• RFM segmentation as the floor, then layering category purchase behavior on top to move a swim buyer into denim
• The cohort analysis that changed the media mix: dresses and accessories produced the highest-LTV customers, so those categories now lead the creative and seed the look-alikes
• Direct mail as a performance channel: 5 to 6 catalogs a year to prospects and past buyers, plus programmatic postcards that only drop if the email win-back does not convert
• Employee-generated content, and how one test turned into a full content pipeline with the organic social team shooting UGC-style video on the catalog shoots
• Connected TV without a commercial budget: an agency turns UGC and EGC into the spot, the founder does the voiceover, and success is measured on cost per site visit with MMM picking up the Amazon halo
• Loyalty built on early access and product feedback instead of percent-off, with roughly 2x the LTV of a non-member
• Q4 without heavy discounting: point multipliers and added value inside the tentpole moments
• What she is using AI for right now, from LTV dashboards in Moby 2 to Orita surfacing customers when they are most likely to buy

Who this is for: retention and lifecycle leads, growth marketers at seasonal brands, and operators who moved from a big portfolio company to an SMB.

What to steal: run LTV by first-purchase category before you plan next season's creative mix. And give partnership content 6 to 12 months before you call it. Hannah says that is how long it took at Carve before influencer content started working.

Follow Hannah: LinkedIn, Hannah Fleming | carvedesigns.com

Timestamps:

00:00 Building Loyalty Beyond Discounts

05:00 Using Customer Segmentation for Retention

10:00 Direct Mail as a Performance Channel

16:00 Building a High-Value Loyalty Program

24:00 Testing Direct Mail and Connected TV

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Media owns the traffic. Brand owns the site. The page in between belongs to nobody, and it's been sitting in a Notion doc called landing page priorities Q3 since 2022.

Eric brings Daniel from Pilothouse back for an all killer no filler on the post-click experience: why it stayed generic for a decade, what changed in the last twelve months, and what the team is seeing in its pilots with Black Crow AI.

For media buyers, creative strategists, and founders whose ads are working and whose conversion rate isn't.

What you get:

• The middle child problem. Media assumes brand is loving the page, brand assumes media is, and nobody has touched it since 2022.
• Why this was never a priority question. Personalizing creative is cheap. Personalizing destinations used to mean five pages through design, dev, QA, and deploy, which took literal months. So teams built one page, pointed everything at it, and updated it once a year.
• The 65-inch OLED analogy. You walk into a store, tell the salesperson exactly what you want, and they hand you the catalog. That's what a generic PDP does to someone who just clicked a very specific ad.
• The creative is the brief. The ad unit becomes the input for the storefront: the copy, the image, the targeting, the interests, all of it read and matched.
• What the pilots are showing: roughly 20 to 21% lift in conversion rates, on storefronts now taking about half the budget rather than one test ad set off in the corner.
• Where Black Crow adds something a general purpose model doesn't. Persistent ID across sessions means the page knows you're back and can serve a different experience.
• The technical prerequisites that actually gate this: Shopify, and enough Meta budget to test a difference. Brand and creative prerequisites matter less.
• Brand safety. These aren't fully dynamic pages. You can lock images and titles and adjust on the fly.
• Which brands it suits so far: a few concentrated top SKUs rather than a long tail catalog.
• The third party cookie, revisited. Daniel's verdict on the biggest talking point of 2022: what a nothing burger.
• Why the strategist now owns this. No IT ticket, no web team queue. That's the difference between now and twelve months ago.

Who this is for: performance marketers and DTC founders who have solved pre-click and never touched what happens after.

What to steal: treating your best ad as the brief for its own landing page, and the Shopify plus testable budget prerequisite check before you invest in any of this.

Timestamps:

00:03:00 Why the post-click experience matters

00:07:00 Personalized landing pages lift conversion rates

00:10:00 AI-powered landing page personalization

00:15:00 Matching landing pages to ad creative

00:21:00 Using ad creative as the landing page brief

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A brand doing $10 to $15 million a year puts 15 to 20 percent of revenue back into marketing. At $100 to $500 million it drops to roughly 8 to 10 percent. Past a billion it is 2 to 3 percent. Justin Jefferson has a view across 450 brands and $45 billion in media investment, and those numbers are the opening for a harder conversation about where the money should go.

If you run growth: this is the episode about defending a slow-payback bet to a finance team that closes books quarterly.

If you sit closer to the P&L: Justin explains discounting future marketing revenue back to present value, so marketing and finance can argue about the same number.

What Justin gets into:

• Spend-to-revenue benchmarks at $10 to 15M, $100 to 500M, $500M to $1B, and past $1B
• Marginal ROI against blended ROI, and why a 1.4 return can hide a next dollar worth 60 cents
• The brand that went zero to a hundred on top of funnel, lost sales volume in year one, cut budget in response, and then had nothing left to capture the demand it had created
• The golf apparel brand that moved deliberately into CTV, linear, and audio: roughly flat in year one, about 23 percent growth in year two
• Why Amazon search is often the most overspent line in a budget, and where he sees real incrementality on Amazon instead
• The gap he sees between top and bottom of funnel returns: roughly 180 against 120 to 140
• Why brands growing 5 percent or more changed their channel mix significantly more year over year than flat ones

Who this is for: operators between $10M and $500M who have squeezed Meta and Google as far as they go and need a defensible case for spending where the attribution is fuzzy.

What to steal: report return on the next dollar by channel alongside blended ROI. Most teams have only ever seen the second number.

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 sets the state of the market. The next five are the bets themselves, told by the operators who made them and the people who signed off.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Marketing Mix Modeling Is Changing

03:00 Why Meta and Google Are Getting Harder to Scale

07:00 When Brands Should Invest in Top-of-Funnel

13:00 How to Measure and Predict Marketing Performance

19:00 How the Marketing Halo Drives Growth

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Adam Gillman co-founded Hiya Health (hiyahealth.com), the kids' vitamin brand that launched in March 2020, stayed bootstrapped, and sold to USANA at the end of 2024 at a reported $260M valuation. He and his co-founder Darren still run it, and 2026 is the year Hiya finally hit retail shelves at Target.

If you're a founder or operator building a subscription DTC brand, this episode is a start-to-exit walkthrough from someone who did it without a single VC check.

What's inside:

• The "single SKU phase": why Hiya sold one multivitamin for 2.5 years before launching anything else, and what had to be true before product two
• Attacking gummies head-on: porous form factors that kill vitamin content, and sugar as "candy in disguise"
• How new SKUs stayed accretive instead of cannibalistic as the catalog grew
• Why influencer was the backbone of a channel mix that hit 25% month-over-month growth in stretches from 2023 to 2025, including creators Hiya has worked with for 3 to 4 years
• "We want this to sit on your counter, not inside of your cabinet": the packaging and sticker-pack decision that quietly built enterprise value
• Disney, Barbie, and Marvel collabs done properly: rebuilding the entire customer experience per license, to the point that existing subscribers repurchased product they already had
• The exit itself: open bidding process, why he can't imagine doing it without an investment bank, and the leverage of not needing to sell
• Lightning round: the metric founders obsess over too much (revenue growth), the one they ignore (gross margin to CAC), and the e-commerce trend he thinks has peaked (creative velocity for its own sake)

Who this is for: subscription DTC founders, operators fighting rising CACs, and anyone who wants to see what a bootstrapped nine-figure exit actually looks like from the inside.

What to steal: Adam's channel discipline. Under $20M in revenue, put the majority of your effort into making one channel work before touching the next one.

Follow Adam: @AdamGillman on X | hiyahealth.com

Timestamps:

00:00 Building Hiya From a Single SKU

08:00 Expanding Products Through Customer Trust

18:00 Why Brand Building Creates Enterprise Value

23:00 Scaling Growth With Influencer Marketing

35:00 Creative Velocity, CAC and Sustainable Growth

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pilothouse.co

Every year around this time, Eric and Jacob record some version of this episode. This is their seventh Black Friday together, and the through-line hasn't changed: brands sprint through summer, look up at the end of October, and realize the Halloween sale and Black Friday are on top of them with none of the groundwork done.

If you run meaningful spend on Meta, this is the checklist to work through before the CPM doubling kicks in.

What you get:

• Stocking the pond. Low-cost lead gen and engagement campaigns at 5% of budget (or less), optimized to engagement instead of purchase, so Meta buys you cheap eyeballs now that become warm retargeting audiences in November.
• The giveaway playbook, start to finish: partner bundle (the beer brand and the beef jerky brand), a $750 prize, a squeeze page, leads firing on signup, and an October 15 end date. The FOMO purchases from non-winners are typically what push the giveaway spend into the green before the dripping even starts.
• The audience-window answer: engagement audiences hold up to 180 days, purchaser lists now build to roughly 720. Engage someone in August and you can still recall them for Black Friday.
• Warming the algorithm: start ramping spend two months out, 10 to 15% a week, instead of a 500% budget jump on November 1.
• Value-based lookalikes in the Andromeda era. Export your top 500 purchasers by lifetime spend, upload, build the 1% lookalike. Less central than it used to be, still working.
• The CAPI audit: if your events manager shows a 5 or 6 out of 10, you're not sending enough parameters back. Click IDs, event IDs, name, email, phone. Target an 8 or 9.
• The invoicing trap. Meta has moved brands to monthly invoicing, and an unpaid invoice can pause your account until it's resolved. Check your payment settings and your spend limit now, and set the limit way above what you plan to spend.
• Offer architecture: why tariff-squeezed brands can finally offer again, sitewide vs. tiered thresholds, which catalog shapes suit which structure, and why you test at 5 or 10% off in an end-of-summer sale instead of guessing at 40 in November.
• Creative as the gift guide: "perfect gift for your wife" hooks, unboxing reels, catalog frames with Christmas theming, and countdown urgency tied to real shipping cutoffs. No smoke and mirrors.
• ASC structure: one broad Advantage Plus campaign with the full catalog, plus manual bottom-funnel catalog campaigns per collection so you have levers to pull during peak windows.
• And Lennying a campaign. Eric's Of Mice and Men metaphor for over-managing an account to death, plus Jacob on why human interventions during volatile weeks add to the volatility.

Who this is for: media buyers, retention leads, and founders who want their November spend converting instead of prospecting.

What to steal: the 5% engagement budget, the giveaway structure with a pre-BFCM end date, the CAPI parameter audit, and the payment-settings check you should do today.

Timestamps:

00:00 Pre-Warming Your Q4 Audience

05:00 Building Leads Before Black Friday

11:00 How to Warm Up Meta’s Algorithm

18:00 Testing Your Q4 Offers Early

28:00 Managing Meta Performance Volatility

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Fifteen videos in a shoot day. A writer's room where creators cross-edit each other's scripts. Hair, makeup, and wardrobe walkthroughs before anyone hits record. This is what organic content looks like at Kiyoko Beauty (kiyoko.ca), the curated Asian beauty retailer that hit 8 figures in 5 years, bootstrapped, while all three co-founders kept their full-time jobs.

Gillian Liu walks through the whole machine, from a part-time student's 3M-view TikTok to a production calendar planned a month out.

If you run content, growth, or a retail business on thin margins, this episode is worth a notebook.

What's inside:

• The full production process: concepts and formats planned a month ahead, scripting against a reference hook library, a writer's room because "sometimes you're in it too much by yourself," script read-throughs with talent, then batch shoot days. "It's not vibes at all."
• Her comparison for why the pros post consistently: comedians who have joke-writing down to a science.
• The hiring filter for content roles: "What's your screen time? Show me." Her most recent hire clocks 8 hours a day. Gillian's reaction: "That's it?"
• Where it started: a student with 1,000 followers, found via Instagram DM, told to post three times a week with no direction. Three months in, one video hit 3M views on a niche product only Kiyoko carried, and site sessions 10x'd overnight.
• Platform roles: TikTok reaches strangers, Instagram converts them through stories and community, YouTube Shorts reposts overperform, and Red Note gets Gillian recognized on the street by the Chinese Canadian community.
• The math forcing all of this: retailer margins. A Meta top-of-funnel ad runs ~$10 CPM; organic works out to under a dollar. Paid has been bottom-of-funnel Google only for five years.
• The curation model itself: pay brand premium on COGS, then harvest demand created by other people's marketing budgets.
• Merchandising by data: Amazon US/Canada volume, Korea's top sellers, brand heads-ups on strategic SKUs, and Shopify's "search queries with no results" report.
• Brands as partners: one runs a 50/50 ad split with Kiyoko, others commission content monthly and pay in inventory value.
• The early jank: a $2,000 first order, a free Shopify theme, shipping from a co-founder's basement, and buying out-of-stock items from the Asian grocery store down the street.
• Why three co-founders kept their 9 to 5s (cash flow first, risk second), plus two warehouse moves in five months and the new California fulfillment center.

Who this is for: content leads and founders doing organic at scale, and any operator whose margins can't support paid top of funnel.

What to steal: her writer's room. Have creators cross-edit each other's scripts before anything gets shot.

Visit the brand: kiyoko.ca

Timestamps:

00:00 Building an Eight-Figure Brand While Working Full-Time

06:10 The Organic Content Strategy That Changed Everything

10:02 How Kiyoko Produces Viral Content at Scale

17:07 Merchandising and Choosing Winning Products

28:03 Why Organic Beats Paid for Customer Acquisition

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pilothouse.co

Meta has been up and down since the outage a few weeks back, and the timeline is full of advertisers feeling it. So Eric pulled three of Pilothouse's most senior people onto the after-hours couch: Abby and Aves from the creative and strategy side, and Taylor from the Meta side, for a live conversation about what to do when the platform wobbles.

If you buy media on Meta, or you're a founder whose revenue leans on it, this is the difference between a bad two weeks and a bad quarter.

What you get:

• The tactical spin cycle. Performance dips, panic sets in, and buyers ship 15 more ads built off the ones already dying. That amplifies poor delivery and raises CPMs. "Amplification of what's not working is never the route forward."
• The full list of panic moves to skip: un-strategic ad volume, rushed channel expansion, rescue promos that train customers (and Meta) to expect discounts, account rebuilds, the "fresh pixel" request, and firing your agency.
• The diagnosis question: Meta crumbled, so what part of the business fell through? No new customers points one direction. No conversions points at email and retention first. The gap picks the channel.
• Stocking the pond. Why every brand should already know its next channel, and how to tell a reach problem (Pinterest) from a conversion problem (TikTok Shop) before you spend a dollar.
• The iOS 14.5 precedent: partial blindness, no drastic changes, better measurement on the other side.
• Pausing ads without tanking the account. Fractional touchpoints, checking median customer-journey length in your MTA before making the swing, and why Meta usually has a reason for pushing spend where it does.
• Creative is the targeting. Millennial moms who look identical on paper but speak completely different visual languages by region. Butter yellow instead of white. A luxury brand that sells milestone moments instead of USPs.
• "This is an ad and it's so stupid." Why absurdist, self-aware ads are out-earning earnest millennial branding with marketing-aware customers.
• Where AI belongs (reporting, automation, surfacing phrases from your own data) and where it doesn't (creative direction, insights, your next steps). Plus the term for what happens when you outsource the thinking: cognitive debt.

Who this is for: media buyers, creative strategists, and founders running meaningful spend on Meta right now.

What to steal: the diagnosis question, the pause-decision checklist, and the competitor-review mining tactic for finding customer language.

Timestamps:

00:00 Meta Volatility and Common Mistakes

08:56 Building a More Resilient Growth Strategy

17:45 Should You Pause Underperforming Ads?

21:53 How to Research Customers Better with AI

35:40 AI, Creative Strategy & Content Volume

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Bar Bruhis spent ten years building SaaS for Shopify brands. He helped start one of the first email capture tools in 2015, then co-founded KnoCommerce, the post-purchase survey tool 6,500 brands use. In December he finally took his own leap: Boostcous (boostcous.com), the first protein couscous. Six months later he's about to cross 10,000 orders, bootstrapped, with a team of two.

Try it: boostcous.com. The tagline says it all: "Finally a carb that pulls its weight." (An AI copywriting agent wrote that. More on this below.)

If you're sitting on a product idea you haven't launched, or you're a CPG founder trying to turn DTC numbers into retail meetings, this episode is the working playbook.

What's inside:

• Why couscous: protein pasta has Banza, Brami, and Goodles. Couscous had nobody. Chickpea, lentil, and pea flour, gluten free, protein and fiber naturally derived from the legumes themselves.
• The launch: a front-page story in the local Carbondale paper and free pickup from his garage. The first 400 to 500 orders were handed over face to face, and he asked every customer why they bought.
• First-order profitable on Meta with a product almost nobody has ever bought online. "That doesn't really happen" in CPG.
• The KnoCommerce lessons applied to his own brand: "what almost prevented you from buying today" for CRO, and "which retail stores would you like to see Boostcous in" as ammo for buyer meetings. The pitch: in the last 30 days, this many of our customers asked for your store by name.
• The first one-star review, after 155 five-stars. He emailed her, got on a call, learned she was cooking it wrong, and updated the packaging. She rewrote the review herself as a five-star essay.
• Where AI actually helps a two-person brand (product seeding draft orders, static ads, most of the website photos, sell sheets built from survey and review data) and his warning: "we swung the pendulum a little too far at first." Calling customers stays human.
• Expo West on a $0 badge. He got the ticket by pitching his podcast, and the Gelson's deal came from walking the floor.
• His read on the protein trend: protein soda and protein sprinkles exist now. Naturally derived protein in foods you already eat is the part that lasts.

Who this is for: founders sitting on a long-gestating idea, CPG operators heading into retail, and SaaS people wondering what their skills are worth on the brand side.

What to steal: add two questions to your post-purchase survey today. "What almost prevented you from buying?" fixes your site. "Which retail stores would you like to see us in?" fills your retail pipeline with proof buyers can't ignore.

Try Boostcous: boostcous.com

Timestamps:

00:00 Building a First-Order Profitable CPG Brand

07:24 Launch Strategy That Validated Product-Market Fit

11:50 Using Post-Purchase Surveys to Drive Growth

18:08 Turning DTC Success Into Retail Expansion

31:12 Advice for Launching Your First Ecommerce Brand

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Liam Robinson and Nate Vankoughnet were two of Pilothouse's first employees and spent years scaling some of its biggest accounts on Meta. Now they've spun out Marlbank Digital (website coming soon), a Meta-only agency built for the brands Pilothouse moved past as it went upmarket: pre-launch up to $100K/month.

Want them in your ad account? Email nate@marlbank.co or liam@marlbank.co. No website yet. They've been busy in client accounts.

If you're a founder running your own Meta ads, or the one marketer at a brand doing under $100K a month, this episode is a working session on why your account structure is probably answering the wrong question.

What's inside:

• The Meta hierarchy of needs: unit economics at the base ("you'd be surprised how many people need a 3.5 ROAS to barely break even"), marketing strategy in the middle, creative at the top. Most brands skip the middle.
• Circumstance testing, their replacement for jumping straight to creative: articulate your product's real distinction, find the cultural currents it's relevant to, then map the specific moments it fits into someone's life. Each moment becomes a campaign.
• A full anonymized case study: the ceramic to-go cup brand that couldn't scale on pretty product shots or the eco angle, and unlocked the account with one question: "Would you use a metal mug at home?" Selling an upgrade to existing to-go cup users beat converting the single-use crowd, and the commute became the winning niche.
• What this looks like in the account: open audiences, existing customers excluded, CBO single ad set, 4 to 6 ads per set, creative held constant so circumstance is the variable.
• Why one ad usually takes 80% of an ad set's spend, and how to structure launches around that.
• The four foundations they ask for before a brand spends a dollar: a decent website, email flows, some social presence, and Meta.
• Plus the origin story: the agency is named after the small Ontario town where they spent a summer hand-building tree stands for a bow-hunting brand.

Who this is for: ecom founders and marketers between pre-launch and $100K/month, and anyone whose Meta account is a graveyard of creative tests that never compounded.

What to steal: before your next creative batch, write down your product's distinctions, then list every circumstance where it slots into a customer's day. Test those against each other first.

Work with Liam and Nate: nate@marlbank.co / liam@marlbank.co | marlbank.co

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Meta Marketing Has Changed

02:01 The Story Behind Marlbank Digital

08:14 Why Foundational Marketing Beats Meta Tactics

13:15 The Ceramic Cup Case Study

20:10 How to Structure Circumstance Testing on Meta

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Melissa Dusendang ran a summer contract at SheFit to "manage the chaos" for one marketing director. She never left. Years later she runs ecommerce and operations, and her actual job is stopping the company from lying to itself with its own data.

If you own the P&L, the dashboard, or the customer experience, this one is for you. Melissa sits in the finance meeting thinking about how a tax decision hits checkout, and in the marketing meeting thinking about which numbers are secretly inflated. She calls it being a puzzle person. Eric calls her a silo obliterator.

• Why TikTok Shop can quietly wreck your new-versus-returning customer math. Masked and missing emails on marketplace orders mean Shopify can count repeat buyers as new, so "we 2x'd new customers" can really mean you gave existing customers a discount.
• The attribution question to ask before anyone reports a ROAS or MER number, so two teams aren't arguing about goals while measuring different things.
• How SheFit found its best-selling ad hooks inside customer reviews and comments, and why phrases like "my boobs don't move" outperform copy the team writes.
• The Emerge Sports Bra story: how customer comments drove a custom-strap design (skinny straps on smaller sizes, wider straps on larger sizes) that sold out on launch.
• Why real women feeling the "aha moment" when they lift the straps is SheFit's top new-customer acquisition move, run through micro-influencers and ambassadors instead of a gym-only ad.
• Her honest read on TikTok Shop: better customer control than Amazon, but a margin eroder that can turn a premium brand into a "always on sale" brand.

Who this is for: Ecommerce and ops leaders, founders wearing five hats, CX and community managers, and anyone trying to get finance, marketing, and product to agree on what the numbers mean.

What to steal: Pull your own review and comment language and use it as ad copy verbatim. Before your next growth review, write down which attribution model each number is using. And check whether your marketplace orders are inflating your new-customer count.

Timestamps:

0:00 Why TikTok Shop metrics can be misleading

5:18 Breaking down silos across ecommerce teams

10:01 Why customer language beats marketing copy

15:09 Building products from customer feedback

23:21 Using AI and social listening for better decisions

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AppLovin just opened to everyone, and most DTC operators still do not know how it actually works. Jacob runs Meta at Pilothouse, which has spent on AppLovin for nearly two years, back when it was invite only.

He breaks down what he sees in real client accounts: the product price points that work, the creative volume it takes to scale, and the end card, a full-screen animated step between the ad and the product page that has no equivalent on Meta.

What you get:

• The $50 rule. Why products in the $30 to $150 range win, why below $20 gets tough on margin, and why $1,000 products are a bad fit for someone mid-game.
• The end card. What it is, why it acts like a second landing page, and the basketball-into-the-hoop trick for matching the ad to the app.
• Creative volume. Start with about 10 videos, add 10 to 20 a week, and what the ramp looks like at $50k/day.
• First-hour buying. Around 80% of purchases land in the first hour, and the other 20% almost always convert on a different video.
• The learning phase. Why you confirm tracking, then leave it alone for a week, sometimes two.

Who this is for: DTC operators and media buyers weighing AppLovin as a third channel next to Meta and Google.

What to steal: the creative-volume cadence, the end-card structure, and the measurement discipline to prove new-customer CPA instead of trusting platform ROAS.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:00 AppLovin vs Meta Performance

05:20 Best Products & Creative Strategy

11:10 Measuring Incrementality & New Customers

17:10 Scaling with Creative Volume

23:00 Halo Effect & Campaign Best Practices

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Most brands treat unauthorized sellers and copycats as a cost of doing business. Mario Simonyan treats them as your biggest untapped revenue source.

Mario is a former Amazon seller turned brand protection attorney. He started selling kitchenware and artificial turf doormats out of his driveway during law school, got ripped off, and discovered that not a single attorney he called understood how marketplaces actually work. So he built the firm he wished he'd had.

In this episode he breaks down how one eight-figure fitness brand walked away from 1.5M a year on Amazon after attorneys and enforcement agencies failed them, and how his team got them back to 95% control of their listings. He explains why cease and desist letters get burned in people's fireplaces, why sellers fear account suspension far more than lawsuits, and the three-pillar approach his firm uses to get marketplaces to do the enforcing.

He also goes into the dark side: the seller who allegedly flew a duffel bag of cash to Costa Rica to bribe an Amazon employee, the competitor who planted the word cocaine in a rival's backend keywords to trigger an automatic ban, and the copycat running a cloned website doing a million dollars a month off someone else's brand.

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What you'll learn:

• Why 15 to 25% of your revenue may be leaking to sellers you've never heard of
• The trademark material difference argument that removes sellers moving genuine product
• The three pillars: IP, marketplace policy, and regulatory compliance, and why using only one is why most enforcement fails
• Why an unauthorized seller priced higher than you is still an emergency
• How brand protection raises your multiple when you sell the business

Who this is for: Brand owners and operators doing 5M or more who sell on Amazon, Walmart, or any marketplace with a shared buy box.

What to steal: The 500% ROI framing, the material difference memorandum, and the free brand audit at esqgo.com to see what you're actually losing.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:53 How unauthorized sellers steal 15–25% of revenue

4:09 The Amazon strategy that actually removes unauthorized sellers

11:56 Why brand protection is a revenue driver, not a cost

17:47 The 3-pillar framework for Amazon brand protection

31:02 How to find marketplace revenue leakage

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Ari Murray runs DTC, Amazon and customer experience at Salt & Stone. She came from Sharma Brands, and before that worked on influencer and celebrity brands including a Kardashian line and Halsey's beauty brand. She started as a customer service agent.

In this episode she breaks down why the old brand-versus-performance argument is collapsing. Customers now shop with a chatbot in the loop. Those bots read your reviews, your Reddit threads, and your actual customer experience. You cannot hack that, which means product quality and brand protection have become growth levers.

She also gets specific on creative: what "socially native" really means, why she is chasing ads that don't look like ads, and the protein powder ad where the product is the seventh ingredient in someone's recipe.

For: DTC founders, growth leads, creative strategists, retention and CRO teams, brand marketers.

In this episode:

• Why she left the agency side for Salt & Stone
• Why Salt & Stone has never acted like a deodorant brand
• AI visibility, Reddit indexing, and why you can't hide from real customer feedback
• The collapse of the middle of the funnel in agentic shopping
• Why she doesn't feel a desperate need to move spend out of Meta
• How they actually measure incrementality (holdouts, Status, Northbeam, Triple Whale, hunting for an MMM)
• Socially native creative, and why splitting a hook five ways is played out
• Why a brand with boundaries makes better ads
• What makes a brand feel cheap
• What makes a brand deserve to be iconic

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Jordan Gordon runs CRO and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast. He has audited somewhere in the range of 400 to 500 brands and been inside more Klaviyo accounts than almost anyone in DTC.

In this All Killer No Filler episode he breaks down why most email programs are structurally backwards. 85% of campaign revenue comes from people who have visited your site recently, and yet most campaigns are sent to anyone who opened an email in the last 180 days. You are risking your entire sending reputation to chase the 15%.

Then he gets to the good part: a flow he says he has basically never seen a brand run, and why it is the most valuable one you can build.

For: ecommerce founders, retention leads, email marketers, CRO teams, agency operators.

In this episode:

• Why free traffic is the "forever job" and paid is the spike
• Why small counts hide truths (nobody hits fold 10, but the people who do are your buyers)
• The 85/15 rule of campaign revenue

• How brands blow up a Klaviyo account: too many campaigns, too-broad segments, and the sunset flow that sends to ten years of dead addresses in one go
• Why recent repeat buyers are whales you should not over-message
• Campaigns are zero-intent messages, so they can only ever be about newness or offers

• The essentials core flow: triggered by site visit, not lifecycle, selling your hero SKU to people who came for something else
• Sending less in a margin-compressed Q4

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Most DTC brands put the bulk of their paid budget where attention is thinnest. Viewers spend about 99 minutes per session on Connected TV and 8 minutes per session on social, yet only 9% of standard marketing budgets go to CTV. This episode is about closing that gap on CTV with the same measurement & targeting you get on social (starting at $7 CPMs!)

Emily Huo built ad businesses at X (Twitter), Reddit, and Spotify, and now runs SMB advertising at Paramount. She walks through how a DTC brand actually gets onto Survivor, Landman, or RuPaul's Drag Race, what to spend, and how to know if it worked.

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This episode, we get into:

• The seasonal play: build awareness over the summer, retarget in the fall, convert in Q4
• Why you start broad on targeting and let the data tell you who is really watching, not the persona you imported from Meta
• The pixel setup that ties a TV impression to a site visit, a lead, or a purchase
• The geo holdout test for measuring halo effect with no third-party tools
• Why a 30-second unskippable spot changes how you tell a brand story when you are not a household name yet
• Budgeting: carve out 10% as experimental, expect a three-month ramp, scale from there

Who this is for: DTC founders and growth marketers who have maxed out social, anyone planning Q4 now, and operators curious whether CTV is real or just a hot label.

What to steal: the install-pixel-now, build-in-summer, convert-in-Q4 sequence, and the broad-then-narrow targeting approach.

Timestamps:

0:00 Emily Huo's Journey to Paramount

3:10 Why CTV Is Growing So Fast

8:07 CTV Targeting vs Meta Ads

12:14 CTV Budget & Testing Strategy

23:18 Measuring the Halo Effect

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Dan bootstrapped Unbound Merino from a Reddit-fueled obsession with merino wool into a brand approaching nine figures in lifetime revenue, with a warehouse sale, a growing women's line, and zero outside funding.

In his second appearance on the DTC Podcast, the Unbound co-founder gets specific about what actually moved the business over the last three years, why he almost lost 80% of his sales in a single day, and why he now cares more about the product and the friendships than any growth hack.

What you'll learn:

• Why the ads Dan loves flop and the cringe ones scale, and how he made peace with it
• The creative volume system that unlocked Meta scaling in 2023, and why Meta stopped working the same way
• How word of mouth (15% of new customers) and a 50/50 women's line changed the growth model
• The de minimis and tariff shock that nearly ended the company, and the scramble to open a Dallas warehouse before Liberation Day
• How Unbound uses a custom AI wired into Shopify, its ERP, Asana, Slack, and Drive to triangulate why products get returned
• Why 5% of sales now come from ChatGPT and Claude, and what that means for discovery

Who this is for: bootstrapped founders, DTC operators, and anyone selling a premium product who is tired of renting customers from Meta.

What to steal: the reorder-first mindset, the creative iteration loop, and the tariff survival playbook.

Timestamps:

00:00 Building a $90M travel apparel brand

02:12 Scaling Meta with creative volume

08:00 Why product quality beats acquisition tactics

16:00 How tariffs nearly killed the business

32:05 AI as a business advisor and data analyst

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This week on All Killer No Filler, we're giving you a preview of Agency Confidential, the new podcast from our co-founder Jeff, and this episode's is a truly killer.

Jeff sits down with Nick Shackelford, who's everywhere in DTC. Three agencies (Structured, Konstant, Lucid), an events business, and a decade of showing up on every feed, stage, and group chat. Jeff calls him the Coca-Cola of ecommerce. Eric calls him the Drake of DTC.

But halfway through, Nick stops and shares something he says he's never told publicly. Last July, cash got tight and he had to bridge the gap on one of his companies. Not with a loan or a raise, but by getting paid as a public agency owner to talk about SaaS products. Ten years of being a face turned into a cash-flow lever almost no other owner has.

Then it gets stranger. That same decade of posts and videos is now training data for every LLM on earth. Ask ChatGPT or Claude about DTC agencies and Nick, Structured, Konstant, and Geek Out all come up. A personal brand he built to win deal flow quietly became free distribution in a channel that didn't exist when he started.

They get into the real cost of being the face, why building a faceless brand (like DTC and Pilothouse) trades built-in pull for durability, AI in the agency space, and why Nick thinks the market's about to splinter back into specialists.

What they cover:

• The never-shared story of how Nick bridged a cash-flow gap in a rough month
• Why a personal brand is a lever most agency owners don't have
• How ten years of content became free distribution in AI search
• The real cost and risk of being the face of your agency
• Face vs. faceless: durability, transferability, and selling the business
• Where Nick thinks the agency market is heading in 2026

Who this is for: Agency owners, DTC operators, and founders weighing whether to build in public or build something that doesn't hinge on one person's face.

Catch the preview here, and if you like it, go subscribe to Agency Confidential for the full episode.

Timestamps:

00:00 Nick Shackelford on building agencies and personal brands

02:19 How Nick built three agencies and scaled operations

11:59 Why AI is changing agency work and client communication

27:56 How a personal brand became a business advantage

39:18 Why AI will bring back specialized agencies

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Gifting is one of the biggest reasons people buy online, and most brands never build for it on purpose.

Matt Heckathorn runs digital marketing at Wolfe, the company behind Gift Card Granny, PerfectGift.com, and GiftYa. His ICP is close to everyone, which kills the usual narrow-audience playbook and forces a different approach to growth.

What you will learn:

• How a bottom-of-funnel team moved into CTV, programmatic, and out-of-home without losing measurement
• Why CTV retargeting outperformed what Matt expected, and how scale made brand channels measurable
• How Wolfe uses second-tier DMAs to test incrementality before spending up
• How gift card fraud actually works at the physical retail level, and why it shapes the product
• Where Wolfe is drawing its AI line: creative and fulfillment yes, fully agentic media buying not yet
• The cost problem almost nobody is planning for as AI usage scales

Who this is for: DTC operators and growth leads working top of funnel, anyone selling into gifting, and marketers thinking through where AI fits in a real team.

What to steal: The second-tier DMA incrementality test, the recipient-first product framing, and the human checkpoint on agentic media buying.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Future of AI in Marketing

02:12 Reinventing the Gift Card Industry

09:00 How Card-Linked Gifting Works

15:12 Top of Funnel Messaging That Converts

23:12 Building an AI-First Marketing Team

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Meta used to let you pick your customer in the backend. Those days are over. Post-Andromeda, the creative itself carries the targeting signal, which means the old spray-and-pray playbook now works against you.

Rafael Gi spent a decade in traditional creative agencies, then led marketing at a nine-figure apparel brand, and now runs strategic growth and partnerships at Pilothouse. In this one he breaks down why the algorithm is forcing marketers to be good marketers again, and what that looks like in an ad account.

What he gets into:

• Why "creative is targeting" is now literal, not a slogan, and how Meta reads your creative for who to serve it to
• Salience and memory structures: how brands like Volvo, Red Bull, and AG1 got remembered, and how to build the same
• The spend discrepancy that caps scaling brands: 80 percent of budget chasing 20 percent of revenue
• Why structuring an ad account by product instead of by persona burns money and buries your message
• The shift from "all revenue is good revenue" to winning the customer instead of selling the product
• How to evolve one message into new occasions without breaking the memory you have already built

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators between eight and nine figures who are seeing diminishing returns on creative volume and cannot figure out why more ads are not buying more growth.

What to steal: the "one tank of gas, twelve cars" test for whether your budget is spread too thin, and the account-structure fix that lines your media budget up with where your revenue comes from.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Meta's Andromeda Changed Marketing

02:34 Creative Is the New Targeting

05:55 Building Brand Salience That Lasts

14:32 How to Fix Creative Strategy at Scale

24:42 Applying Salience to Better Meta Ads

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Most list-growth advice assumes you have a website people visit. Cove Soda doesn't. They sell zero sugar soda in roughly 7,000 retail doors with no real DTC store, which means no site traffic, no purchase pop-ups, and no easy email capture.

Zoe Kahn runs marketing for Cove as interim VP. In this episode she breaks down how a retail-first brand still builds a direct, owned channel, why she treats in-person events as the acquisition surface, and how she competes in a soda aisle that already has Olipop and Poppi running Super Bowl ads.

What you'll get:

• The event tactic that grows an email and SMS list without DTC: trade a full can for an opt-in
• How to segment by geography so US news goes to US fans and Canadian news goes to Canadian fans
• How she picks which events to sample at, and why marketing assets in a state change the math
• Using Amazon attribution links to test creative and copy when you have no DTC
• A clear take on why an oversaturated category is not a reason to quit
• The early-career mistake that shipped roughly 700 wrong orders, and what it taught her

Who this is for: retail-first and omnichannel operators, beverage and CPG founders, retention and lifecycle marketers, and anyone who has been told they can't build a list without DTC.

What to steal: the can-for-email swap at events, geographic list segmentation, and an event-selection checklist built on demographic fit and asset location.

0:00 Intro

3:16 Building a Canadian Brand in the US

7:55 How Cove Soda Stands Out in a Crowded Market

10:09 Using QR Codes to Grow Email and SMS Lists

17:50 Practical AI Workflows for Marketing Teams

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Google search is changing under everyone's feet. AI overviews are eating the top of the funnel, exact match stopped being exact years ago, and shoppers now type full paragraphs instead of two keywords. Doug, who leads Google at Pilothouse, breaks down what actually came out of Google Marketing Live 2026 and what DTC operators should do about it.

He runs the Google paid side for DTC brands at Pilothouse, so this is the operator read, not the press release.

What you get:

• Why transactional shopping queries still convert while top-of-funnel search moves into AI overviews
• What AI Max for Shopping means for how your products get matched to conversational queries
• Why your Merchant Center feed is the most undervalued performance lever you control
• How far Claude or Gemini can get you on a feed audit, and where you still need a human
• Why "keywordless" is the direction, and what targeting intent looks like now
• The measurement gap on YouTube and demand generation, and what Google is testing to close it
• Who this is for: DTC founders and operators running or buying Google Ads, plus anyone trying to understand AI's effect on Shopping and search.

What to steal: audit your product feed before you touch anything else. Most brands copy-paste their site into the feed or rely on an automated integration and leave half the attributes empty. That is the cheap win.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:47 Google Ads and AI Search Changes

5:30 Biggest Google Marketing Live 2026 Announcements

7:50 Why Google Shopping Feed Optimization Matters

12:04 Why the Future of Search Is Keywordless

15:45 Measuring Demand Generation on YouTube

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Most brands expand into the US and treat it like the same business with a different shipping label. Outway learned it is not.

Taylor Fraser is the Chief Growth Officer at Outway, the Canadian performance sock brand. In this episode he breaks down why Outway now runs Canada and the US as two distinct businesses, why he dropped retargeting on Meta entirely, and why a sub eight-figure brand cannot optimize its website to growth.

What you'll learn:

• Why Outway swapped the CMO role for a Chief Growth Officer and split growth into performance, retention, and e-commerce
• Why Canadian and US customers buy so differently, and how Outway split the two businesses on the backend and frontend
• Why the team runs no retargeting and lets the algorithm handle it
• Why simple store-wide discounts beat clever BOGO offers, and why the mystery pair became a "golden handcuffs" attach
• Why you cannot CRO your way to growth under a certain revenue line, and what to do instead
• Why Outway rides external moments like Mother's Day and Prime Day instead of manufacturing its own sales
• How the team uses AI daily for reporting, data pulls, and custom dashboards

Who this is for: DTC operators, growth and performance marketers, and founders selling across more than one country.

What to steal: the two-businesses framework for cross-border selling, and the decision to stop manufacturing fake sales and ride moments customers already care about.

Timestamps:

00:00 Meta Doesn't Need Retargeting Campaigns

13:06 How Andromeda Changed Meta Ads

18:11 The Creative Volume Debate

21:08 Why Scaling in the U.S. Is Harder Than Canada

35:20 Why More Ads Beat CRO for Growth

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Braydon from Pilothouse joins for a fast AI check-in on what the team is actually shipping right now. Not theory. The exact tools, prompts, and workflows behind their current creative output.

If you run growth or creative at a DTC brand or agency, this is a look at how one team is collapsing production time on landing pages, video ads, and founder content using AI.

• The sub-agent "council" prompt: rewrite a landing page eight ways, with each sub-agent playing a role (copywriter, CEO, customer, CRO expert), then have the council rate the versions and a final decision maker pick the winner.
• How to keep Claude fast on long projects: ask the chat to summarize itself into a markdown file, then carry that into a fresh chat instead of letting one thread balloon.
• Higgsfield as a model aggregator: one place to run VO3, Kling, ElevenLabs, and image models, with one-click image-to-video and multiple aspect ratios.
• The founder avatar workflow: build a 30-second explainer with B-roll and slow zooms, clone the founder's voice in ElevenLabs, and ship it the same afternoon.
• Why Braydon leans into obviously-AI creative (claymation, Pixar-style) instead of trying to pass synthetic people as real.
• How Meta's Andromeda rewards ads that improve the scroll, and why social boosting organic winners is finding new scale.

Who this is for:

DTC operators, growth marketers, and agency creative leads who want a current, practical AI workflow rather than a hype reel.

What to steal:

The sub-agent council prompt, the Higgsfield image-to-video and voice-clone pipeline, and the social boosting approach to finding ad winners.

Timestamps:

00:29 Fable AI and One-Shot Development

06:54 Higgsfield for AI Creative Production

10:33 New AI Advertising Disclosure Rules

13:15 AI Search, SEO, and Answer Engines

14:33 How Andromeda Rewards Better Ad Experiences

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This episode, Kemberly Gong, VP of Marketing at Contentful, joins Eric to walk through what some marketing leaders are calling “The Great Content Collapse”, and what marketers can actually do about it.

The setup: 60% of Google searches now result in zero click-through, and replaced by GenAI models like AI overviews. LLMs already account for 5% of traffic and climbing. Marketing budgets are flat or shrinking. Companies are flooding consumers with AI slop to hit KPIs. And consumers can smell it. 50% lose trust in a brand when they think the content was written by AI.

Explore Contentful: https://www.contentful.com/?utm_source=dtc&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=fy27-q2-global-tl_awareness&utm_content=gcc

What you'll learn:

• What is the "great content collapse" and why traditional content strategy is breaking
• AEO vs SEO: where they overlap and where they diverge
• Why agentic agents prefer structured, query-aligned content with third-party validation
• How buyer behavior is changing and what marketing teams can do to stay ahead
• Where brands over-rely on AI and how to keep the human voice
• The 30-day content audit for the agentic web
• The Pets Deli case: 50% conversion lift from one personalization change
• The Ruggable BFCM case: 7x CTR and 25% conversion lift from personalized hero banners + homepages
• How Bossard scaled its content across 18 languages and 38 countries with AI workflows using personalization software
• What On Running does to drive 40% of sales online
• Plus: Kemberly Gong's 30-day content audit checklist for the agentic web.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Great Content Collapse

05:38 AEO vs SEO Explained

10:08 Why Personalization Wins in 2026

13:27 Where AI Actually Helps Marketing Teams

22:23 Building Brand Trust Across Channels

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Origin owns its entire supply chain. The thread, the brass, the leather, the denim, all of it made or sourced in America, in their own factories. That sounds like a constraint. Justin Parker explains why it is actually the brand's biggest growth lever.

Justin runs e-commerce at Origin, the American-made apparel brand born in jiu-jitsu gear and now backed in part by Jocko Willink. He sits at the intersection of marketing, ops, and manufacturing, and that vantage point is exactly what makes the AI stack so powerful for him.

What you will learn:

• How owning manufacturing let Origin pull a planned-for-June product into the line overnight when a hoodie went viral in January
• Why Origin uploaded its 20-page production tech packs into Moby, and how that turned a marketing tool into something that diagnoses manufacturing defects
• How they run 100% internal media buying through an agentic media buyer, and the one question Justin asks it: "what in your context made you decide to pause this ad?"
• Why branded search spend got flagged as non-incremental, and how goal-setting changes what the AI does
• How the e-commerce team stopped hiring internally while the rest of the business keeps net hiring
• Where Justin thinks the role is going next: agent orchestration and one centralized goal pushed down to every business unit

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators, e-commerce and growth leads, anyone figuring out how to actually deploy AI agents inside a real business.

What to steal: Justin's approach to context loading. The output you get from any AI tool is capped by the context you feed it. He spent an afternoon uploading product blueprints one PDF at a time, and it changed what the tool could do.

Timestamps:

0:00 Origin's Unexpected Maduro Viral Moment

2:01 Building an American-Made Supply Chain

7:00 Pricing Premium Products in a Competitive Market

15:02 How Vertical Integration Creates a Growth Advantage

22:18 Inside Moby AI and Agentic Media Buying

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Most brands are quietly killing themselves with growth hacks. Swapping button colors, chasing this week's ROI, discounting to hit the number.

Duncan, Strategy Lead at Pilothouse, makes the case that this is the worst creative strategy there is, and walks through what actually builds a brand that lasts.

Duncan runs strategy at Pilothouse, where brand and performance are treated as one system instead of warring departments. He explains why Meta's Andromeda shift is quietly ending the era of high-volume AI slop creative, and what replaces it.

What you will learn:

• Why the growth-hack mentality leads to a discount death spiral and erodes brand value
• What Meta's Andromeda infrastructure changed, and why it forces advertisers toward thoughtful creative over high-frequency iteration
• How to integrate brand and performance instead of picking one
• Why siloed agencies fight over attribution while the customer journey falls through the cracks
• The one question to ask any agency before you hire them: "Where will growth come from this year?"

Who this is for: DTC founders, brand and growth leads, and anyone choosing between agencies or trying to make brand and performance work together.

What to steal: the agency-selection test. If a partner can only answer with optimizations, they are a vendor. If they can tell you where growth comes from this year, they are a strategist.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Growth Hacking Is Breaking Brands

03:00 Meta Andromeda Changed Creative Strategy

06:00 The Problem With Optimizing Only for ROAS

12:00 Building Customer Journeys Beyond Attribution

20:00 Measuring Channels by Their Actual Job

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Recorded live at The Whalies.

Enterprise brands are past the prompt-and-generate phase of AI. The conversation has moved to connected data, agentic media buying, personalization, attribution, and the quiet operational wins that actually move the P&L.

Eric Dyck sits down with Justin Parker (Origin), Ashley Kick (DÔEN), and Martha Ann Pavoni (Universal Ads) to unpack how leading ecommerce brands are embedding AI across the commerce stack — without losing trust, measurement, or human judgment.

This episode is brought to you by Triple Whale. Much of the panel centers on Moby 2, Triple Whale's agentic operator for insights and media buying — Justin Parker runs all but three of his Meta campaigns through it and has been in the beta since the start.

Learn more: Triple Whale

In this episode:

• Why business context — not the model — is the missing ingredient in most AI implementations
• How DÔEN rolls out AI one workflow at a time to measure real incremental lift
• What happens when AI runs all but three of your Meta campaigns
• Why connected TV and incrementality are eclipsing the click
• The retargeting decision where AI flatly contradicted itself a week later
• Where human oversight still matters most — and how to size it to risk

What to steal:

• Build a trusted source of truth before you layer AI on top
• Test AI one workflow at a time so you can actually attribute the lift
• Point AI at analysis and reporting first; hand it bigger decisions later
• Scale human-in-the-loop in proportion to dollars and customer exposure

For DTC operators managing multi-channel growth who need more output without adding headcount.

Timestamps:

0:00 AI Is Only As Good As The Data Behind It

2:03 How Enterprise Brands Roll Out AI Without Breaking Things

8:16 Why Some Brands Refuse To Use AI Creative

18:28 Inside Agentic Media Buying And AI-Powered Marketing Teams

30:03 The Biggest AI Opportunity Most Brands Are Missing

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Most founders want to be first in a category. Justin Soleimani and Zach Dannett did the opposite, and built Tumble into one of the standout washable rug brands without raising a dollar.

In this episode, the Tumble co-founders and Co-CEOs break down how they entered a category Ruggable created, fixed the product complaints they found buried in thousands of reviews, and validated the whole thing on Indiegogo before opening a Shopify store. Then they get into the part most founders never have to survive: moving their entire supply chain out of China in 30 days when tariffs went from 25% to 175%.

What's covered:

• Why they launched with 120 SKUs and used crowdfunding as a demand-forecasting tool, not just a fundraiser
• The lot-number QC system that let them kill 90%+ of product defects within two years
• How pre-orders and Shopify payouts gave them a negative cash conversion cycle while bootstrapping
• Why they didn't hire a single full-time employee until they were well past $20M in revenue
• The China-to-Thailand pivot and accidental Canada launch during the tariff crisis
• Their YouTube incrementality test that ran head-to-head against Meta, and tied
• Justin's contrarian take on vibe coding: automate manual tasks, don't rip out your tech stack

Who this is for: Bootstrapped DTC founders, operators obsessed with margin and cash flow, and anyone building a physical-product brand in a competitive category.

What to steal: The crowdfunding-as-validation playbook, the lot-tracking QC system, and the asset-light structure that let them move a supply chain overnight.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Great Competitors Make You Better

03:00 Launching 120 SKUs Through Crowdfunding

10:00 Product Feedback at Scale

18:00 Growing Past $20M With No Employees

23:00 Surviving Tariffs and Moving Manufacturing

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This Friday on AKNF we're handing over the feed for a special preview of The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast.

Your email account doesn't break all at once. It rots. Open rates slide, a quarter of your sends quietly route to spam, your list keeps growing while the people who actually click disappear. Jordan Gordon calls that a pooched account, and in this episode he lays out the full ten-step recovery his team runs when a brand hands them one.

If you own a DTC brand or run its email and retention, this is the playbook for the moment results go sluggish and your first instinct is to send more, the exact move that dug the hole.

What's inside:

• How to tell whether you're in spam or your audience has simply checked out
• Why opens are the weakest predictor of a future visit, and what to segment on instead
• The rewarm vs. soft rewarm decision, and how 5,000 addresses beat 150,000
• Why two campaigns a week plus real flows beats 22 sends a month
• The email-only promotion that rebuilds engagement and deliverability at once
• Treating SMS like a paid channel with a real cost per click
• The stale-repeat-buyer metric that tells you recovery is working

Who this is for: DTC founders, operators, and email marketers inheriting or rescuing an underperforming Klaviyo account.

What to steal: the open-rate floor, the two-campaigns-a-week cadence, and the stale-repeat-buyer segment you can build in Klaviyo this afternoon.

Liked the preview? Subscribe to The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast.

Timestamps:

00:00 Fixing a Pooched Email Account

03:02 Set Realistic Expectations for Recovery

07:43 When to Rewarm Your Email List

11:47 Why Opens Are a Bad Metric

18:36 Email-Only Promotions to Boost Engagement

24:25 The Stale Repeat Buyer Metric

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Recorded live at True Classic HQ in Calabasas the day before the Whalies, this episode brings together two of the leaders most aggressively reshaping how ecommerce gets built.

Ben Diamond is the CEO and co-founder of True Classic, the apparel brand that went from zero to over a billion in revenue in seven years and now ships to 190 countries. Maxx Blank is the co-founder and COO of Triple Whale, the AI operating system for ecommerce that he started with co-founder AJ Orbach, now running parts of media buying, creative, and conversion testing for over 60,000 brands.

The conversation gets into the move that's reshaping the category: True Classic now runs 100 percent of its Meta spend through an autonomous media buyer, Moby 2, with AI agents acting as a CMO and creative strategist, reallocating budget daily based on whether the brand needs profit, inventory clearance, or launch defense.

Maxx walks through what changed between Moby 1 and Moby 2, why the SaaS apocalypse doesn't touch infrastructure businesses, and the bigger industry shift from Software as a Service to Results as a Service. Ben talks about cutting millions in production costs by replacing in-office product photography with AI, the cultural mandate at True Classic to embrace AI, and where human judgment still belongs.

If you're an operator wondering how far to push agentic into your business, or a founder wondering what the next decade of ecommerce actually looks like, this is the conversation for you.

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Timestamps:

00:00 AI Is Transforming Ecommerce Faster Than Ever

02:14 What Moby 2 Actually Does for Brands

11:20 Why True Classic Went All-In on AI

16:10 Cutting Millions in Creative Production Costs

24:38 The Future of One-to-One Marketing at Scale

43:20 Predictions for the Future of Ecommerce and AI

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Neuro didn't fight for checkout shelf space first. They built a nine-figure online business through TikTok Shop, creator marketing, Amazon, and DTC, then used that momentum to walk into Walmart, Costco, CVS, and 7-Eleven with demand already proven.

In this episode of the DTC Podcast, Eric talks with Brian Evangelista, Chief Commercial Officer at Neuro, about creating a category that didn't exist, running an affiliate program with tens of thousands of creators, and what actually changes when a digitally native brand wakes up as a real retail business.

Built for DTC founders scaling from $5M–$100M who are trying to turn ecom momentum into retail distribution.

We also get into:

• Why TikTok Shop worked so well early on, and what changed when it got pay-to-play
• How creator incentives shifted once GMV Max rolled out
• The retail launch strategy behind Walmart, Costco, CVS, and 7-Eleven
• Why retail completely reshapes your P&L, ops, and marketing stack
• The hidden operational tax of moving from DTC into omnichannel
• How Neuro frames category creation vs stealing share
• The strategy behind the "Your Gum Is Dumb" sloth campaign
• Why brand marketing started making sense only after retail expansion

Who this episode is for: DTC founders, retail operators, consumer brand marketers, TikTok Shop teams, and brands considering omnichannel expansion.

What to steal:

• Build demand digitally before asking retail to believe in your category
• Use creator momentum as proof for retail buyers
• Treat retail launches like media moments, not inventory placement

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The consideration phase is collapsing thanks to LLM shopping.

Awareness still happens on Meta. Conversion still happens on a PDP. But the comparison and research middle, the part brands have spent a decade optimizing, is increasingly happening inside an LLM the customer already trusts.

20% of holiday shoppers used an LLM in their purchase path last Q4. Google I/O just demoed one-tap concert tickets from a photo. Amazon folded Rufus into Alexa for Shopping. The behavior is moving fast enough that operators need to start preparing for Q4 now.

Eric sits down with Aves and Daniel from Pilothouse to unpack what's actually happening and the work brands can start this quarter.

Inside the episode:

• Why customers trust their LLM more than your ad
• Daniel on why he stopped going to Amazon to compare vitamins
• The persona mismatch that hurts brands more than it used to
• Why reviews and earned media matter more than your landing page
• What changes for abandon cart and retargeting
• Two operator-tested audits to see if your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
• For founders and operators who want to be recommended when the customer asks.

What to Steal:

• Three things you can do this week.
• Run the prompt audit. Take your top five Google queries, run them through ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Track who gets recommended, who gets cited, and whether you show up at all. Daniel uses this as his baseline before any other AI-visibility work.
• Pick one brand truth and repeat it everywhere. Scattershot positioning loses to consistent positioning. If every ad pitches a different angle to a different persona, an LLM has nothing coherent to summarize about you.
• Add dates to your blog posts and PR pages. Recency factors into LLM citation. Old content gets de-prioritized even when it's accurate.

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Charlie Cole watched FTD go from a $1.8 billion publicly traded company to a $60 million bankruptcy auction in eight months. His first day as CEO was March 23, 2020, the first day of national lockdown.

Before that he ran digital at Tumi, Samsonite, Lucky Brand, and Shift Nutrition. Today he's interim Chief Digital Officer at Thuma.

This episode is a tactical sit-down on what actually drives growth right now in a Meta + AI world.

In this episode:

• Why "creative is the new targeting" is only half the answer
• The exact death spiral most DTC brands follow on the way to margin collapse (no sale, semi-annual sale, sale page, sitewide 20%, Amazon, done)
• How Charlie engineered personas at FTD across customer, consumer, and event
• The florist's choice insight: highest NPS in the category, by 20-40%
• The 2011 Dr. Oz campaign that nailed funnel congruency before anyone called it that
• Why personalization was a misnomer until about two years ago
• The three "swimsuit for vacation" shoppers who should never see the same page
• Why YouTube is still massively underutilized, and why most brands run it wrong
• The product question that decides whether any of this matters

Who it's for: DTC founders and operators scaling from $10M to $250M who want to grow without turning their brand into a discount machine.

What to steal:

• Build acquisition around your highest-LTV segments, not your lowest CAC
• Treat creative and landing pages as one system, not two teams
• Stop letting platforms grade their own homework on attribution
• Audit where you sit on the discount death spiral before it owns you

Timestamps:

0:00 Career Journey Into Ecommerce

2:48 Inside the FTD Turnaround

14:20 How Customer Behavior Changed During COVID

23:18 Creative Is The New Targeting

36:05 AI’s Biggest Ecommerce Unlock

43:02 Why Most Brands Test Creative Wrong

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Braydon's back on AKNF with the most tactical AI-for-agencies episode we've recorded.

Eric opens with a Jeff Shannon line worth the whole listen: AI right now is a giant stack of two-by-fours that everyone got handed for free. By itself, it's not a chair, it's not a house, it's not a sofa. The value shows up when someone actually builds something with it.

Then Braydon walks through what he's been building.

Inside: connecting Claude to Motion to audit ad-to-landing-page mismatches, then having Claude vibe-code a new PDP in HTML in 6 hours instead of a week in Instapage. The Microsoft Clarity connector that nobody's talking about (free heatmaps, free recordings, API access). The Higgsfield connector for generating raw 4K assets through Claude with Nano Banana Pro and Seedance. Why Claude Design is worth experimenting with for brand-sensitive clients. And a peek behind the curtain at Gary and Blanche, the AI media buyer and creative strategist Jeff is running on DTC's own Meta account.

Plus: why the em-dash is dead, the semicolon problem nobody's solved, and the actual reason Claude reads cleaner than ChatGPT for enterprise work.

If you've been "playing with AI" and want to actually build something with it, this is the episode.

Catch the DTC and Pilothouse crew at The Whalies May 19 in LA.

Timestamps:

00:00 AI Is Raw Material

02:36 Why AI Needs Human Builders

04:18 Claude Building Landing Pages

10:02 AI-Powered Heatmap Analysis

16:36 Higgsfield + Claude Creative Workflow

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Katie Sturino built Megababe with 60,000 followers, two co-founders who'd never had chafe, and an MOQ of 20,000 units stacked in her parents' garage. Eight years later it's profitable, in Target, Walmart, CVS, Nordstrom, Anthropologie, and on Amazon. Never raised a dollar. Never grew less than 33% year over year.

In this episode Katie walks through how she built a category that didn't exist. Manufacturers didn't know what chafe was. Press didn't know what chafe was. The Today Show hit on June 30, 2017 and they sold out every unit by July 1. Then the real work started.

Inside: why retail is when the grind begins (not when you've made it), why she still ranks "people just dealing with it" as her biggest competitor, the husband-given marketing fix that solved deodorant aisle confusion in one sticker, the accidental Amazon Super Bowl ad placement, why their hemorrhoid product is a top seller on Amazon, and the moment her sister convinced her soap was worth doing.

Plus the new "I'm Not Fine Index" campaign, why NYC taxi ads outperform every digital channel they run, and the one piece of advice Katie has for anyone shipping a product in 2026.

Catch the DTC and Pilothouse crew at The Whalies May 19 in LA.

Timestamps:

0:00 Building a brand around chafe

2:58 How Megababe started

11:00 Selling out after the Today Show

14:10 Retail growth at Target and Walmart

20:05 Why Megababe started advertising

27:10 Building a real brand voice

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Abby and Taylor from Pilothouse settle the loudest debate in media buying right now: does velocity equal strategy?

Short answer: no. Long answer: this whole episode.

Inside, Abby (art) and Taylor (science) break down what a real creative system looks like under Andromeda, how to spot AI slop in an ad library at a glance, and why the squint test is still the fastest way to audit your output. They get into the frequency spike that hit when one apparel brand over-segmented celebrity drops, why Taylor still runs legacy Advantage+ Shopping campaigns three years later, and how a Nick DiGiovanni partnership ran at 0.5 ROAS on platform but pulled a 6 ROAS once Northbeam's 60-day window kicked in.

Plus: why gifting ads should still target women, three exercises to run on your ad account before Q4, and the difference between feeding the algorithm and spamming the button.

If you're making 50 ads a week and not sure any of them are doing a job, this one's for you.

Catch the Pilothouse and DTC crew at The Whalies May 19 in LA, and our DTC operator dinner May 20.

Timestamps:

0:00 Why velocity isn’t strategy

2:38 The problem with endless ad variations

5:12 Best Meta account structures today

8:07 How to audit creative quality

14:08 Building a real creative system

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Full Glass Wine Co.

Neha Kumar joins the podcast to break down how Full Glass Wine Co. acquired 7 DTC wine companies, integrated them under one operating system, and scaled to a $200M platform in under two years.

This wasn’t a “buy brands and hope” strategy. Neha explains how COVID-era DTC brands overbought inventory, ignored unit economics, and optimized for growth over profitability — creating one of the biggest acquisition opportunities in modern ecommerce.

For DTC founders scaling from $5M–$50M who want to improve retention, fix unit economics, and build operational leverage across brands.

Inside the episode:

• Why subscription models quietly broke a lot of DTC wine businesses
• The exact operational changes Full Glass uses to make acquisitions profitable in 60–120 days
• How they centralized shipping, finance, SMS, and retention while preserving each brand’s identity
• Why retention, not acquisition, became the core growth engine
• The hidden downside of emailing subscription customers too often
• How Wink’s 7M-email quiz funnel became a massive acquisition asset
• Why customer segmentation matters more than product assortment in brand acquisitions
• The “three legs of the tripod” framework for building durable DTC companies: marketing, finance, and operations
• Neha’s “Year of Yes” mindset shift inspired by Willy Wonka that changed how she built companies

Who this is for:

Operators, retention marketers, DTC founders, PE-backed ecommerce brands, acquisition entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to scale profitably after the cheap-CAC era ended.

What to steal:

• Move from monthly shipments to higher-AOV quarterly bundles to fix shipping economics
• Centralize infrastructure, not brand voice
• Treat retention like the business engine, not an afterthought

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro to Full Glass Wine Co

2:18 Why DTC wine brands struggled after COVID

6:12 How Winc collapsed from inventory overload

8:05 The 3-part formula for profitable DTC brands

10:05 What Full Glass looks for in acquisitions

13:05 Centralizing customer service across wine brands

15:02 Building brands around customer identity

17:42 The Willy Wonka “year of yes” mindset

21:58 What happens after acquiring a company

24:45 Why subscription models don’t work for wine

29:12 Storytelling vs transactional retention emails

32:18 How Full Glass approaches retention marketing

35:05 Managing inventory and cash flow in wine

37:15 Trusting intuition as an operator

40:18 How Full Glass is using AI internally

42:05 Are the next generation of entrepreneurs ready?

45:00 What’s next for Full Glass Wine Co

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Meta attribution has changed, and most brands are still reading performance the same way they were a year ago.

Jacob, Head of Socials at Pilothouse, walks through what’s different now. Click-only attribution, incremental measurement, and how those shifts affect the way conversions show up in your dashboard.

If you’ve noticed numbers feeling off lately, this will help you understand why and what to actually pay attention to.

For DTC founders and marketers spending $50K–$500K/month on Meta who want to understand what’s actually driving conversions.

• What click-only attribution removes from reporting
• How incremental attribution works in practice (without the fluff)
• Why conversion numbers feel different even when performance hasn’t changed much
• Where Meta data and third-party tools start to diverge
• How Pilothouse is thinking about reporting and decision-making now

Who this is for:

DTC operators, performance marketers, founders scaling paid social

What to steal:

• Check incremental conversions alongside total before making changes
• Look at channel performance in context of total revenue, not in isolation
• Use Meta data as one input, not the final answer

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:28 Meta’s New Attribution Shift

05:03 How Incremental Attribution Works

08:11 Conversion Windows and Optimization

10:15 Why Better Signals Improve Meta Performance

13:02 Agentic Ads Explained

16:02 AI Business Agents and Customer Conversations

18:05 Setting Up Meta’s AI Agents

19:28 AI Ad Automation and Testing Strategies

21:14 Q2 Meta Performance Trends

23:02 Why Meta Reduced Over-Attribution

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We surveyed 540+ DTC operators on how they plan and forecast. This episode, we break down the data and see why most brands are stuck reacting. We’re joined by Laura Thompson, co-founder of Three Ships Beauty, one of the few who's figured out how to run a tight, fast, 8-figure brand without drifting into chaos, and Mike Chiasson, Senior Solutions Engineer from Keen Decision Systems, to pressure-test the Three Ships Beauty playbook against the data.

Grab your free copy of the report here: https://www.directtoconsumer.co/thereactiveloopreport

In this episode:

• The biggest gaps in how DTC brands plan
• Why "revenue is a lagging indicator"
• The bottom-up forecasting Three Ships uses
• The KPI ownership system across the whole team
• When scenario planning is worth the time, and when it's just noise

If you’re a DTC operator past $5M who wants to stop reacting and start running a solid plan, this episode is a must listen.

Timestamps

0:00 Planning vs reacting in ecommerce

2:03 Why most brands only plan 1–6 months ahead

4:02 Bottom-up forecasting vs top-down forecasting

6:06 Scenario planning and external market risks

9:02 When media spend actually works harder

11:01 The reactive loop hurting DTC brands

14:03 Why brands over-invest in bottom funnel

15:06 Weekly KPI reviews and forecasting systems

18:02 The danger of reacting to noisy data

20:04 Leading vs lagging indicators in ecommerce

23:02 How talent impacts business performance

24:58 Product launch delays and forecasting pivots

26:53 Scenario planning for tariffs and supply chain risk

31:55 Should brands worry about oil shocks?

35:34 The biggest gap between planning and execution

38:02 KPI systems that drive accountability

42:16 The right way to plan for growth

44:02 Why reactive brands fall behind

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Helen Smith built Roo & You from hand-sewn mask lanyards in 2020 into a 100,000+ customer brand, and didn't touch paid ads for the first 3.5 years. In this episode she walks through the Facebook community that became her growth engine, how she landed Warner Bros and Harry Potter as a licensing partner without a media buyer, and what scaling through a tariff war actually looks like behind the scenes.

For DTC founders scaling from $1M to $10M who want to lower CAC and build a real retention moat.

What we cover:

• The mask lanyard side hustle that funded her first container of play couches
• How a private Facebook group became Roo & You's primary growth engine
• The one-strike kindness rule that keeps the community alive
• Cold-DMing Warner Bros on LinkedIn (and getting a yes)
• Why licensing is a marketing channel, not a revenue play
• Adding tariffs as a line item instead of a stealth price hike
• Launching an affiliate program in November for existing customers

Who this is for: Founders leaning too hard on paid, or operators who want to build a community moat before they scale spend.

What to steal:

• Show up in other people's communities for months before launching your own
• Set strict community rules on day one, not after things go sideways
• Make tariffs a visible line item to keep customer trust intact
• Hand affiliate codes to existing customers before paying creators who've never used the product

Timestamps:

00:00 Building a brand through community

02:00 Using data to make better decisions

04:00 Handling tariffs and margin pressure

06:00 Launching through Facebook groups

08:00 Early demand and product expansion

10:00 Finding manufacturers and testing products

12:00 Pricing, value, and product longevity

14:00 Organic growth without paid ads

16:00 Transitioning into paid advertising

18:00 Leveraging community for content and growth

20:00 Licensing deals and brand partnerships

24:00 Structuring better partnership agreements

27:00 Challenges with licensing approvals

29:00 Why partnerships are for marketing not growth

30:00 Founder confidence and building in public

37:00 Expanding into the US market

40:00 Choosing the right marketing agency

42:00 Turning customers into advocates

47:00 Advice for founders building a brand

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