The DTC Podcast

Should DTC brands cut ad spend after Cyber Monday? Jacob says no. Black Friday customers often come back to buy gifts, the big retailers pull back so CPMs tend to dip, and the first two weeks of December can outperform the end of November.

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

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

WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE
Your Meta costs keep climbing. Meta CPMs are running higher than last year, with Q4 and the US midterms both pushing prices up. Brands that fed the pixel with cold traffic earlier in the year are the ones seeing it pay off now.
Meta just put a shopping page between your ad and your site. Jacob explains why Pilothouse will test product browsing before opting out, including what opting out could do to your opportunity score.
You can't decide between the offer and the creative. Abby keeps the offer front and center in every Black Friday ad and wins on how she says it. One cookware brand in her portfolio saw CPMs go down this year after a flood of new video content.
You run the same ads to everyone. Jacob hammers the offer to retargeting audiences and leads with variety and messaging for cold traffic, then narrows to what works three or four days into the sale.
Thanksgiving is late and your window is short. Launch early to mid November, then stack an extra 5% or add countdown timers if the promo starts to fizzle.
Your ads say 20% off and the sale is pacing behind. Abby leaves the creative alone and lets shoppers find 25% on the site, a happy surprise that helps them pull the trigger.
Your discount isn't deep enough. A jewellery brand moved from 30% off sitewide to "up to 50%" by adding more products to its clearance section.
You plan to pull back on December 2nd. Keep your Black Friday ads running through Cyber Week, have gifting ready to go, and push until your shipping cutoff.
Your gifting ads launch with no learnings. Abby launches evergreen gifting ads during Black Friday so they already have data when the sale ends.
Your shipping cutoff has passed. Gift cards, discounted gift cards and expedited shipping keep the last days of December selling.
Your brand doesn't fit gifting. Use a self-gifting angle: you did your holiday shopping, now it's your turn.
You're not planning Q5. Health brands can ride new year resolutions, and jewelry brands should build their Valentine's Day creative before January ends.
You skipped top of funnel in October. Abby explains how she fills the funnel in October with brand-building video, then drains it in November with heavy Black Friday messaging.
Your founder wants to fire the agency on November 15th. Jacob would ride it out unless the agency has checked out, and Abby lists the red flags that make switching worth the risk.

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

STAY CONNECTED
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YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer
Want to be on the Rundown? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Black Friday creative strategy
03:00 Rising Meta CPMs
07:00 BFCM offers vs. creative
18:00 Why you should keep spending after Cyber Monday
30:00 When to fire your marketing agency

Should a DTC brand cut its marketing budget for 2027? Greg Dolan, CEO of Keen Decision Systems, says cutting is the biggest mistake he expects to see, because a brand that goes dark pays more to get back to where it was.

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

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

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

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

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

STAY CONNECTED
DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer

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

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 AI-powered marketing measurement
06:00 Using AI to optimize marketing spend
09:00 Why top-of-funnel investment matters
19:00 Marketing budgets during economic pressure
26:00 The future of autonomous media buying

What do investors look for in a DTC brand before they fund it?

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

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

Key takeaways:
- Know which of the 10 attributes your brand is weak on before you raise, so you fix the reds instead of pitching around them.
- Avoid funding a consumer brand like a tech company. Too much capital at rising valuations buys mercenary customers and forces you to chase targets your unit economics can't support.
- Be first-ish instead of first. The later mattress-in-a-box brands drafted off the category education the early, venture-funded players paid for.
- Build clinical proof into the brand from day one. Science washing (adding a dermatologist, a survey, and a claim once you notice the trend) is something customers can sense.
- Cut acquisition costs with a distribution advantage others haven't found yet, like a trusted clinical voice whose audience includes other creators who look up to them.
- Make paid acquisition work by pairing it with strong retention. Natural replenishment categories let lifetime value cover what you spend to acquire.
- Price for the premiumization of mass, and keep investing in brand, because a cheaper competitor is always coming.
- Protect gross margin early so wholesale and retail stay open without a reformulation later.
- Choose a category acquirers want to buy. A $100M brand at five times revenue sells for $500M. At one times, it sells for $100M.
- Win with one product first, then expand into adjacent products where the customer already trusts you.

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

Stay connected:
The DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co
Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

Timestamps:
02:10 Why Health and Wellness Is Booming
08:45 How Ritual Built Consumer Trust
14:05 10 Attributes of Breakout Consumer Brands
24:05 Building a Distribution Advantage
40:55 Consumer Trends Investors Are Watching

How should DTC brands prep for Black Friday on Amazon? This year's Prime Day events show where ecommerce growth is coming from: shoppers stocked up on consumables while big-ticket categories lagged.

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

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

Key takeaways:
- Know which shoppers are waiting on you. Paper products, household cleaning, personal hygiene and pet food jumped on deal days, while headphones, tablets, wearable tech and TVs lagged.
- Sell on value. Shoppers want the product they already like at a better price, so make your differentiator easy to find and quick to understand on the listing.
- Build awareness before the deal day. Shoppers do their research ahead of the sale, so get in front of them in the weeks before Black Friday and retarget them on the day.
- Test your listing images with care. Amazon once required white backgrounds, and lifestyle and annotated images exist because sellers kept pushing. Deal-day hints in images are a gray area, and a removed listing means missing the event entirely.
- Be available where your customer shops. More shoppers compared Walmart, Target and DTC sites during deal days, and if your competitor is listed there and you are not, they get the sale.
- Plan a review push after Black Friday. Amazon's new Review Requests ads let you pay per click to ask recent buyers for a review. A click does not guarantee a review.
- Start ranking for your Black Friday keywords now. Put the keyword in your title, highlights, bullets and description, give it its own campaign, and use placement modifiers to hold top of search into the deal day.

About the guest:
Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse, a full-funnel performance marketing agency for DTC brands.
https://pilothouse.co

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

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

Timestamps:
00:03:36 Amazon Prime Day trends
00:05:00 Consumables surge during deal days
00:07:40 How shoppers define value
00:12:30 Positioning premium products for BFCM
00:16:40 Omnichannel holiday shopping behavior

Do influencer partnership ads lower customer acquisition costs for DTC brands, or just move them?

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

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

Key takeaways:
- Work out whether partnership ads are cutting your CAC or relocating it, using Yash's worked example of an $80 CAC dropping to $68 while creator and platform fees add $9.20 back.
- See why creator payouts tied to GMV grow as a variable cost when you scale ad spend, and how capping the payout on any single ad stops one viral video from costing you $10,000.
- Build a creator pyramid: seed creators who already post in your niche, turn the ones who post into affiliates, give the top sellers bigger deals, and run the top performers by views as partnership ads.
- Let organic performance choose your ad creative, with rules like boosting a reel on Meta once it passes a view threshold inside 48 hours.
- Raise your affiliate activity rate by rewarding the steps before the sale, like a free product when a creator joins and a small cash reward when they post.
- Catch leaked codes, leaked affiliate links, and affiliates bidding on your brand keywords before you pay commission on those sales.
- Plan a creator push in mid October that can still produce ad creative and affiliate revenue before Black Friday.

About the guest:
Yash Chavan is the founder and CEO of Saral, an influencer marketing platform for ecommerce brands. Before Saral he ran an influencer marketing agency. His team also built Sathi, an affiliate platform for creator-led brands with fraud protection and gamified rewards.
Saral: https://getsaral.com/
Sathi: https://www.mysathi.io

Stay connected:
Website and newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co
Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

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