Low LTV Doesn’t Have to Limit Your Ecommerce Growth

- Thank you.

“Nick put me first, some of the entire schedule”

depends on me today, so we're gonna jump right into this. In August, about a month ago, this story, what is going on? We're going too fast. There we go.

A news story came out about a former MLB player named Hazoo's Monterro that died two weeks following a motorcycle accident in Venezuela. And for most of you, this was probably nothing more than an ESPN notification that showed up

on your phone and disappeared. Because Hazoo's was not a superstar, was not LeBron James by any means. But for me, he was actually my friend. I knew Hazoo's from the time that he was 18 years old.

The tragic accident came with his wife one week away from giving birth to their first daughter. And I knew this guy from the time that he was a child and he was the most joyful, happy human I've ever met in my life. In 18 year old, who came to the US from Venezuela

and signed with the Yankees at 16 years old, we got to play together for the same season in Charleston, South Carolina. And I can tell you, the only people that loved Hazoo's more than I did were the women of Charleston, South Carolina. They were big fans of Hazoo's.

He was an absolute golden child. I don't know how familiar you are with baseball, but baseball works prospects get rated on this 20 to 80 scale. 20 is like a very below average player. An 80 would be like a once in a generation talent.

And every prospect gets graded on these across five different characteristics. Your power, power, you can hit for average, defense. And Hazoo's was by all accounts, a generational talent. He was the golden child of the Yankees organization.

He was 64, 240, had an 80 grade bat. And every attribute you would design into a ball player he had.

He was incredible to watch.

He would watch this kid take batting practice. And you were just certain that he was destined to play for the New York Yankees for a very long time. This episode is brought to you by Miracle Connect. When ads get more expensive growth,

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Find out what's possible at miracle.com/ctc. That's Miracle.com/ctc. To translate this for you, because most of you don't know baseball, Hazooce was the groans of baseball prospects. If you take 80 grade power and you're translated

to Massive LTV, that's what he had. If you take his 80 grade hit tool, that's equivalent to huge gross margin.

And the $1.6 million he signed for in age 16,

back in 2005, which is like $100 million in inflation adjusted dollars today, translates to being able to afford any cap that you could possibly need. That was who he was.

But the problem for me, playing with Hazooce, was that all he did was make me a cutely aware of how not Hazooce I was. I was 24 years old, playing on the same team as an 18 year old. I was 5'9", he was 6'4".

When he hit the ball, it went a lot further than what I did. And so studying Hazooce only did one thing for me. It made me realize that I didn't have what it takes. And my fear is, as we start this conference, is that our industry right now is doing the same thing

to some of you. We're propagated by a lot of stars. I even heard Nick say it on the stage. We can't help but elicit the names of groans and I am eight. And all these brands right now, because supplements are so invoked.

“It's as if it's the only way you could ever possibly win the game.”

It's to be running with a huge LTV and being able to pay whatever the cack is that metal wants from you and scaling to the moon. And every case study you're fed is a genetic outlier that only does one thing for you. And that's that if the players you study are golden children,

the lesson is you don't have it. That you might as well pack it up. Take your stuff with you right now and head home. Or come run an agency, right? I even, you know, Sean Frank's tweet yesterday was,

I felt like he was throwing in the talent rigid, but if you can't win there, whatever could we do. So I thought about this and I thought, you know,

my job as I open this conferences to give you all the most powerful thing in entrepreneurs has

as they go through their journey. It's hope. It's the sense of possibility that we just might be able to do it. We just might be able to win. So if you leave without then I've done my job.

And the way I'm going to do it is actually to lower the bar. I'm going to convince you that you can win with mediocre genetics. Taylor genetics, five nine white kids that are little too old genetics.

“That's what we're going to try and win with today.”

It's not going to be a pep talk. Going to be a data set. I'm going to give you three brands. And here's the rules. They're all growing 50% a year at north of eight figures.

But they have to have bad genetics. They have terrible LTV.

And they have to be first or not profitable with their meta-ad spend

or their dead. No. Cacket. Point two. And an LTV that pays back four years.

“No billion dollar debt vehicles from general catalyst.”

I'm talking about old school. You pay it. You get it back right from the start. And they're growing and winning. How?

Well, if these three can do it any of you can. That's my promise. I know you're probably thinking way to second Taylor. I've heard of some of these.

You're feeling like maybe you're getting a little bit of head start.

But trust me, it's like going through these stories. But the goal is if these three can do it, any of you can. So what you can take away from their journey is something that you can put in your pocket, write down on your piece of paper,

and use to help your brand today. So I'm going to start with school candy. Now, this is the one that you're going to hold on Taylor. But it's like, and that's a global brand. You can't start with them.

Is the thing I'm supposed to reference to is a start-up founder. But let me tell you something about school candy. School candy was started in 2003, so they've been around a long time, but they've gone through a tumultuous journey. And the most recent iteration of school candy was one that was taken

over by an entirely new leadership team, coming off of massive decline, where they had gone very much out of Vogue. And when they came to CDC three years ago, their online revenue was smaller than yours. I promise.

They had built a business or a distribution system that no longer applied. And if we were to grade them on a 20 to 80 scale, they have some of the worst LTV you could ever imagine. People don't need a hundred pairs of headphones. They're a gross margin in consumer electronics with warranties,

and everything that exists is very poor. A.O.V. is normal, and the brand heat had died. If you were to write a report, you'd say they're an organizational player, non-prospect, don't invest the high pick in these guys. But what they didn't know is that they have Brian Garifolo.

And Brian Garifolo here on our shop's card took over a CEO of school candy. And Brian understands, maybe more than any leader I've ever interacted with, about what is happening today and how product gets moved. And he's unconcerned with the genetic attributes of the business. He believes that his ability to influence demand and to influence culture can win regardless.

And just to prove the point, this is an illustration of all the stores that are currently in our stateless database. And you can see this is school candy's LTV. It's bad. You are not going to win the game off of lifetime customer value. It's not how you're going to win the game.

You're going to have to do it with new customer acquisition efficiency over and over.

“And that's what they did. They stopped playing any genetics game,”

and they deployed what I call the modern distribution playbook. For me, really, they wrote it. They wrote the modern distribution playbook in a way that opened my eyes to what was possible for a consumer brand pursuing distribution in many places to build a motor. Now, Nick talked about that thing where you take out your phones and you take a screenshot.

If you're going to do it, this next slide I think is the most impactful because to me, it illustrates today what is the modern distribution playbook in two core areas? Your media and your sales channel distribution. And this Luke Razer hand looks the president of CTC. This is his creation.

I don't take credit for it. But what I believe that it illustrates so perfectly, is the relationship between demand creation and demand capture that happens in both media channels and sales channels. And when I really want you to focus on, as I want you to look at this section here, where we talk about each of these sales channels.

So these are sales channels, these are media channels. And I want to think about the relationship between how much happens in demand creation and how much happens in demand capture. Okay, we have to understand some things about consumer purchasing generally. E-commerce is still a very small percentage of overall transactions that occur around 17-ish

percent, based on the latest data. That means the vast majority of demand capture for almost every category on Earth will happen in retail.

For almost every category, then from then about 40 percent of all the transactions online

happen on Amazon, then you have Shopify, which is growing its GMV very quickly. And then the fastest growing of all the channels is TikTok shops. But the amount of demand capture that occurs in these places is disproportionately small relative to the other locations. Now, when I watch brands do, when they try to disassociate these channels, they build silos,

is they maybe start D to C, and then all of a sudden target comes knocking. And they're like, oh, wow, I have a friend right now that's running a supplement company. And he just got an offer for store-wide in Target. And I said, don't you dare do that. Don't you dare? You do not have the demand creation to support that demand capture. You will die.

“And your job is ultimately to sell to not the buyer at Target, but the end consumer, you have to move”

units. And if you don't have the engine, you can't support that distribution. If your ad costs are climbing and growth is getting harder, you need more than another campaign.

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And so the relationship between these things is the critical thing

that Skull Candy understood. And what they were on a freight of is what most large legacy brands are afraid of, which is to understand that right now today, the core motor for demand creation across all of these channels is TikTok shops. And I don't mean it in the way that you're hearing it framed often right now, which is this idea that TikTok shops is exclusively about generating ad creative or meta. No, that's not the point. They each plan role in driving value

across all of them. Now the problem with this as a demand creation engine is that if you work exclusively there, if you try and isolate to TikTok shops only, it is very difficult to

“capture as much of the demand as you create. Why? Because a lot of the demand is impression-based.”

And when you think about the relationship between an impression and the direct path to purchase,

why does meta work so effectively on such a short attribution when they're like a seven-day click it? Because every ad is optimized and driven towards a click-based conversion, okay? And so what happens when you have that type of a funnel is that the halo effects are actually demenemists, meaning that you can still drive halo effects with meta advertising, but the purchase realization of those ads is so high that you actually demonstrate it to value, whereas when you move

into these items connected to TV, even TikTok ads, or impression-based organic content, the situation of that demand happens much more broadly. So as you grow your TikTok TikTok impression-based, the value captures happens at Amazon retail. And right now TikTok shops grew 12 to 20x faster than the total U.S. e. commerce in 2025, and it's still growing about nine times faster than 2026, even as overall e-commerce has rebounded. So the fastest growing channel

within all of e-commerce, which continues to grow, but it's growing at a faster pace. The shelf is very much now the feed. And for school candy, this is true. And I'm going to tease a little bit

of data that I shared with my friend, who I'm going to explain in a little bit in a second, about

the growth and success that school candies have. But you can see that if we normalize their TikTok shops for January, the growth that they've had to August about 4.3x, their e-commerce business has followed on top, growing 2.7x from January to August of this year, and the year over year growth has followed directly related to that spillover. And this all comes from a massive amount of impression volume. I'm going to let set you up to tell more about that story later,

but what Brian and Evan and the team at school candy did so well as they understood that these

“tropes that we've been given, TikTok is for cheap widgets and not established brands. You have to”

have a low-AOV, TikTokish work consumables, the channel can't be profitable, are all tropes that don't have to be true. Those may be the natural genetic realities of the baseline expectation, but it doesn't have to be true for you. Now, I'm not going to go too much more into this, because I'm not going to steal this spotlight from one of the smartest people in the world, and not Evan Catlett. Evan is going to be speaking later this afternoon. She's the global VP of

e-commerce and marketing at school candy, and she's going to give you a detailed playbook on exactly how they pulled this off and how it's affecting their retail business and the overall business in entirety. So if you have your schedule out, highlight that, because I think that the job that Evan and the school candy team have done is without a doubt, these single best marketing effort I've seen from any brand in the space in the last 24 months, in part because of the genetic attributes

that they're dealing with as a business. So you do not want to miss her telling that story. And for me, when I watch this play out, I realize there is no way the future of what we're building as an agency, as a provider, can happen without this capability. That the need to drive this engine is going to be so central to the process of everything that we're doing going forward that to not be able to deliver that scope to our customers would be a failure. So this is an

announcement that as of today, CTC has acquired T-bar partners, a TikTok shop to see Alex Tyler, where are you guys here? He's there. Hey, come here walk in so they can see you bring your short shorts. Wave, that's Alex right there. Where's Tyler? Some are just selling. He's selling. He's doing a great job. These guys are the group that is behind building the TikTok shops playbook for most of the industry. Groans, Rich, Hakes, Cloud, David, Vynecoco, Create. And if we go back,

they're everything you could imagine. 20 year olds with the broccoli hair. They made this image for me. That's me as a 21 year old with a textured fringe. They're everything you could want.

dorm. They work 9,000 hours a day and all they want to do is help you grow your TikTok shops

“business. Okay. Second, the stock brand. So one TikTok shop's playbook. You're going to get more of”

that from Evan later today. The second one is the stock brand. And this is an experience that I know somebody here is having right now. It's the brand that is D to C only exclusively has matured to the

point of stalling out on growth. Somewhere between 20 and 70 million depending on the

Tam of your product, every brand experiences the situation where their next incremental dollar into whatever primary acquisition channel they're running suddenly becomes unprofitable. And they ram their head into that wall and cannot figure out the threshold. And for these guys, these are the San Sony brothers. They're a family out of Missouri that run this incredible brand. Again, mediocre healthy V men's wear. We don't buy clothes quite as often as the women do. Gross margins okay.

“V's are right category heat is incredibly difficult. wildly saturated complex category.”

They're a nice or a guy. Maybe a fourth I'll filter the category eats prospects like this for breakfast though. And this was true for them. At the end of this quarter, they were stuck. You could see that January year over year spend had stalled. February it's stalled. March we did we reach this dilemma which is what every brand reaches where you have a choice. Do I heat my cat profitable and watch the business slowly decline in acquisition? Or do I try and increase my

cat to maintain growth and watch profits decrease? This tension exists everywhere in every brand that comes to us. And so March we went for it. We're saying we're going to try and produce scale. And what happened was our efficiency decline. Every scale attempt broke first order profitability.

“It wasn't for a lack of trying though. These guys in our team, they were throwing everything they”

could at it. 1,199 new ads in a quarter, 400 in January, 240 in February, 524 as we scaled up in March. We could not figure out how to produce it. And then the real problem and where we got into tension with the customer is that as you're trying to do this and you're increasing your creative output,

the problem is you're also increasing your production cost because every ad is paid for up front.

And it was getting expensive. There was a growing frustration paying for a pile of ads that weren't getting them where they wanted to go. Specifically, every ad that we launched, we looked at their 60 day value to the business. When we defined that value as the conversion value times the incrementality factor, times the 60 day LTV times the gross margin minus ad spend. So in other words, every time you launch an ad, how many contribution dollars does it generate for the business

in 60 days? Every ad you put it in the out account, what happens? And for them, the median ad was worth about negative $2. And the average ad was $24. So the typical ad lost money, 85% of them did, and a few winners carried the average. Now, if you think to yourself right now, what did it cost me to make an ad? Just think about it for a second. Are you clear? Do you know how much does it cost you to make an ad? I'd be willing to bet it's more than 24 bucks. So before we get to the

production costs of producing the asset, they were already losing money on the median ad, and the average ad was only producing $24. That is a negative return on an invested capital, over and over and over. So it wasn't just frustration. It was logical management of capital to turn around and go, guys, we can't keep doing this. This isn't working. And before we get into this, I wanted to give some context. This is not just a normal brand anomaly. These metrics are the

reality for most brands. I'm going to show you a study. So we looked at and analyzed 1.339 million ads that we launched over the last two years. Okay. And we said, we want to understand, what is the median value of those ads, the brands that created them over that time period to huge sample of

ads? Here's what we found. The median ad launched by a brand is worth negative $3.20. That means you

launch it, the return on investment, incrementality adjusted, minus the ad spend times the gross margin is negative. Negative. You build an ad. You spend all this time in money and you're creating negative value for the business. And this isn't just true at a median. This is true for 133 of the 158 brands we looked out in the sample. So not just on a one measure of central tendency, but for most brands, it is true and go do this math. Right and go to yourself, go check this math is Taylor

here's where the hope exists. The average though is worth about $577. So if the median is negative,

“but the average is 507 math people, what does it mean? It means that the tail of disproportionate”

value creation of ads lifts the average value to a place that works. And here's some number. So of the 1.339 million ads that we created, 631,000 of them lost money, 240,000 of them made money, and 11,000 of the 1.3 million made big money. But here's the beauty of this. Is that meta's actually a system that optimizes for this reality? It kills your losers for free. And this is where a game that is probably amongst the most controversial opinions that we possess,

that lots of people love to argue with us about it. But the reality is, is that meta is incredibly

good at isolating spend on a per ad level to understand where to allocate your budget. And the graph of this looks like this. So if we take those ads and we were to map them. And we're saying, okay, we're all the ads look like that we launch. This is a scatter plot looking back across

“those two years. And you can see the vast majority of ads accumulate around basically zero,”

but the median is negative. But here's why the system still works. It's because the outliers of distribution are capped on the downside, because most of us will kill things or the system itself will kill things. But the upside is this proportionally, it's right skewed if you were to look in a distribution sample to massive outlier value creation. The tail, the species, the top 1% of ads produce 41% of all the value. The next 4% produce 32% of the value. Everything else is 27%.

So that means the top 5% of ads produce 73% of all the value of every ad you will ever run. Across 1.3 million ads, 160 brands, 5% of the ads produce almost all of the value.

And here's what I want you to internalize. And again, you can wrestle with this. I'd love to

tonight. We can have a drink. We can sit at the bar. We can scream at each other about this principle if you want. But you cannot alter the odds of this lottery. I've never seen anyone do it. I've never seen anyone do it. I've never seen any brand that comes to us that can consistently and repeatedly alter this reality. The system is designed for it. Meta is incredibly good at allocation towards the highest likelihood production of return.

But what you can do in what brands are evolving to understand today is that you can change the price of the ticket. When you think about an expected value calculation, there's two sides. There's the numerator and there's the denominator. If the numerator is the value that we're going to create and we know that it's $500 on average, negative $3 on a median basis, then the cost that we pay to create that asset is everything. If everything, it's the whole game. And this is intuitive to you all.

You care a lot about your supply chain and the cost of goods that you produce. Your cost of creative production is the hidden number that is destroying your ad economics. But this is what's happening right now. And our business is so good. Last year I talked about evolution, the way that I watch brands naturally evolve in a capitalist system towards the attributes that allow them to drive profit. And it's happening again with this. This became the hidden thing where everyone's talked about

creative volume. And all of a sudden it became too expensive to produce creative volume. And so the industry more and more if you met a more facade into a solution to the problem. And this is what it looks like. It looks like tribe. How many of you are on tribe? Lucas, where are you? Are you here? There he is. Where are you? I don't know if I can see him when you find Lucas. And what tribe is done and what people are doing

“with TikTok shops is they're inverting the cash conversion site. And that's what it does.”

It just allows you to play the game to bet at the casino with no risk. And that mechanism completely inverse the dynamics of possibility. So as an example, if we want to take the assumption of this data, which is that one $10,000 winner, one of those outliers, happens every 80 launches. And we were looking at an old model. We did some analysis about the average cost that we're paying for video ads or ads. It's around $300 an ad. And you were to assume that okay,

in order to produce one winner were $10,000. You would have to generate $26,400 of so cost. It doesn't work. It doesn't pencil. You can't pay that price and make money.

The vast majority of you will never make money paying that much for creative production.

I'm sorry, it's just a map. It doesn't work. But if you invert it, the creative supply chain, and you make the channel that produces the assets pay for the asset, then all of a sudden you're only paying for the winners. You're not paying up front for the cost of the asset.

and others have created. It's the ability to prefer the risk to someone else.

“What has happened is just the creator started absorbing your risk. And their risk”

and their cost on it is actually lower than yours. It's just their own time. And they get really efficient at doing it really, really fast. And this idea that you only pay for the winners is the way that the economics get inverted. It's like selling your product on being able to put it in the store and only paying, having the store owner only pay if it sells, consign it. That's the word I'm looking for.

So the old cash conversion cycle is you pay cash up front for production. You pay the cash out for media and then maybe 90 days later you get some cash back in a cash intensive business. That's a really bad model. All day long you listen to guys like Roman Khan and Maytab talk about negotiating with your suppliers just ruthlessly refusing to pay them up front for cash and negotiating it. It's the fame thing. You're paying up front for production. Then you're paying

up front to meta and then maybe you will realize the revenue. This inverts the economics. The inverted cycle is the creator submit. The cash comes in. The ad sells on meta. Then you pay the commission out to the founder. So you see the product you take the asset you pay for the revenue. Pretty straightforward. Creators join the program. Creators make the video. You push the meta. Ad's wireless did commission on attribute itself. So you guys get it. It's pretty straightforward.

“But understanding why it's happening is the key. Because what's gonna happen, right?”

Is that all we've done is we've switched the exploitation of the economics to the creator. And I was reading today even and you know what? Creators. Why's up to this? They suddenly start going full minute second. I'm I'm not getting anything. And I only get it if it works. And they're eventually the market will move to what I call the terminal price of creative. It'll move to this point at which both sides are absorbing an appropriate amount of risk relative

to their upside. And it'll concentrate down to this. This happens in every service that we provide including creative. And so this will happen. It'll normalize. But for the moment, if you can get people to absorb all the risk to your own benefit, it is an absolute arbitrage that is a wonder of the world. And it's perfectly capitalistic. Every party is paid from the value it creates.

The engine funds its own execution. And here's what it did to the normal brain going back to them.

So they did this. We came to them and we said, okay, we get it. You're tired of paying us up front for ads. There's this thing called tribe will manage and grow your program there and see what we can do. This was the result. Three months later. April. 126% spend year over year at the same loss may 140% increase in spend June 100% increase in spend absolutely exploded. And here's why.

“Okay, this is really important. This is really, really important. The number of new ads that we were”

able to launch went from an average of like, let's call it 380 to an average of almost 1200. So we were able to double our shots on goal at no production cost to ourselves. And so what began to happen is that the ads that we launched from tribe began to consume the out of count. And so you can see how many ads were from tribe in each of the subsequent months and how much increase in impact that happened as we went and how much of the spend the account began to absorb

over time 78% of the lie that 81 and a half percent of the spend in June. During that time, we doubled the spend at the same hot loss. This is the same incremental return on ad spend and not the dream, right, that we're all after. And you can see this incremental return on ad spend. It's up 0.6. It's not 0.4. This is real efficiency at scale, suddenly and consequently as the result of a change in creative volume. So here we sit 62% year of a year 100% in June.

I Ross is holding as we go. The ceiling wasn't demand. It was creative supply.

And here's what I want to illustrate to you. During that time, the average ad got 5.4x more

profitable. So for them specifically, June through March every ad was generating $24. Again, paying almost 300 for it, very negative. Then all of a sudden the average ad in these time periods increases dramatically. But again, doesn't clear that $300 threshold. So if the cost was still the same, the economic still wouldn't work. But it works because the cost went to zero. That's the only reason the denominator matters. But here's the other thing.

The median didn't change. Because I know there's the quality people out there and I love you. I love you quality people. The ones that tell me, yeah, but I still create a volume. It's quality. I love you. I appreciate your craftsmanship. But here's the reality. The median outcome didn't change. The ad's weren't better, generally. But when you have more ads, what you do is you unlock the upper tails of the distribution. By having more ads, we simply covered a broader spectrum

of the same distribution. Which means you get more winners. It's a hits business. Every 80 ads produces a $10,000 winner. Launch more ads. And in doing so, we unlocked massive upside.

If you just use the $10,000 threshold, now I'll show you specifically. Did the typical ad change?

Oh, the median first 60 days spend in each of these periods. January through March 9, 2020.

April through June 10, 53. April through June, tri-bad 9, 24. Almost exactly the same median result. The difference, though, the 99% tile increased from 3300 to 6800. The distribution moves slightly up the tail. Ads clearing 10k. We didn't have five. We had 16 and tri-made 12 of them. That's it. That's the whole game. How many hits can you find? That's the game. And the answer you can you can try and breathe it for them better. You can do

the data in all those things. And I'm not saying to not try. By all means, if you are in the business of making better ads all the time, please, whatever your definition of quality is, I can see to it, just hold that constant and scale the volume up against your bow. Because if you make more ads

“work more often, then you can always start even better in your favor. Then you should increase”

volume even more because you make better ads. You'll hit the distribution tail more anyways. Third example. The zero employee brand spiral Bible. This is a business with literally zero employees. They're a publisher. A Bible is not a subscription. You don't need to buy hundreds of them. These are their genetic attributes. Terrible LTV. Very low gross margin or very low LV. Better gross margin. No employees. There's no roster spot for a team with no players. But Alex,

here featured in our shops edition of the baseball card. One of the, another one of these just sneaky entrepreneurs that just get to it. He just understands the game that he is playing and how to do it. And he had a wild experience. About a year ago, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And one of the cool things about being in an agency is that you get to see

“how commerce and culture come together in these really wild ways. We work with Sunday red and”

every time Tiger Woods gets into a car accident. For some reason people love to shop. It's just a big driver for shopping. And so was this. This was crazy that during that time there was a massive, massive spike in Bible sales. And any religious related items when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And it caused this business go through the roof in particular on TikTok. And so suddenly this business that had been plotting along had this moment where the demand went

through the roof. I mean, just an insane volume as a result of this. So again, just this fascinating

way in which these cultural elements drive demand changes in the market. But the problem is the surge

didn't last long. Now, I didn't fully receive the new baseline was 70% higher for a brand that was ready to spend into it. But it did fade. The religious enthusiasm time like it does with most things calmed it. And the TikTok shops took off and then it took them for a ride and then you try and build your business around it and then it drops off. They were down about 93% from the peak trying to figure out what to do. And if when a channel collapses, if you don't restructure,

“you have to evolve. You have to figure out how to change. And so Alex was at this point where he”

couldn't re-manufacture that moment. He couldn't inject into all of culture a sudden increase in demand for the viable. That's really hard as a marketing agency. I'll tell you, we don't got that in our playbook either. But what we did say is, okay, what was the idea, though? What's the principle there? It's the idea that there are in culture these moments that if we cap into our product can find a place that allows us to ride the tailwind of demand. And so this idea that the calendar holds the key

to create a volume and demand became obvious to spiral by bone. And so what we were able to do is to take this principle. And I'm going to start with the end here. We got to 4.4 act the spend from May to August. So this is again, these are sudden acute changes in mature businesses where we both massively increase the media spend and the performance. And I'm going to explain how we did it. So that's been growth, 339%. Platform Ross went from 163 at the bottom

to 191, scaling it so as to break efficiency. Didn't we did that Holy Grail of combining both volume and efficiency? And at CDC, we have this thing that's called the canon. And it is our attempt to be building sort of an internal soul and directory of arm methodology that is infused into our alums and informs all of our method. And in the canon, our meta-specific canon, we have this principle,

which is that your best Ross Day is never in evergreen ad. It's a moment of urgent purchase demand.

I think pretty easily we would all identify it as Black Friday. And then from that principle,

“you could back out to maybe it's your once a year annual sale or it's your new product launch.”

It's the moment when you drive an imperative for purchase now. So when we talk to people about building demand and growth into the ad account, we talk about starting with your marketing calendar. If I could offer you anything about meta-creative strategy, it would be to please build your creative strategy around offer design and evergreen testing ideation, all of that, as an organization collectively at the marketing calendar level, not at the ad level. Please, please, please,

unify the efforts that your marketing organization makes towards the impact on the ad account. And we do this by every account, this is our default meta-account structure. We have four

campaigns that start every ad account. There's evergreen acquisition, volume optimized on Ross

goal of seven day click. We have evergreen retention. We have a marketing moment's acquisition campaign, value optimized Ross goal on a one day click, a marketing moment's retention campaign. That's it, four campaigns. Every ad set ads are just numbered one through one, 50 if we have some campaign that can hold more than that. We'll do that, dab is included. And the idea of the distinction between these two things is simple, marketing moments have a start and end date. They have a beginning,

they have an end, they have a beginning, they have an end. And that's the decision, evergreen,

“runs all the time, marketing moments have a beginning and an end. And what I'll say is that I believe”

in our industry 98% of the energy of scaling your ad account lives in this bucket, but almost the vast majority of unlock potential lias in that one. It's to ask the question, what is the story that we could tell that fits into the zeitgeist of culture that overlaps with the organization where the whole brand could pull together on the same end of the rope to create incremental demand. And this is what we did for Spiral Bob. We learned from the lesson of Charlie

Kirk and we went and said, "Okay, what could we do?" And this is what we watched happen. We combined the tribe playbook the one we already talked about with this idea of marketing moments. And we said, "Okay, how much incremental spend could we get out of those opportunities?" And you'll see that it actually was more impactful even than tribe. In this case, the plan marketing moments by August have absorbed over 34% of the spend in the ad account that has grown for

0.4x. So by taking this step back and going, "What stories could we tell?" Collectively is a business. We altered the dynamics of the ad account. And then what it also allows you to do is, now when I go to the creators, I can say, "Hey, back to school this week. Here's the bundle. Here's what I want you to talk about." Email team. We're going to launch this, landing page team. We've got this organic social. We're going to do this. Hey, influencer friend, talk about this.

And the whole organization pulls on the rope at the same time. And because it's time bound, you create an imperative for purchase now. Not, oh, that's a cool product. I'll save it. Maybe come back. This is scarcity. It is novelty. It is the opportunity to drive incremental demand. So the moment campaign, 34%, the moment's loss in comparison to the evergreen loss was about 26% more efficient. So you're getting more spent at a better efficiency than what the moment buys you.

And so when we do this, we think about the entire year. You may have seen me talk about the idea

of four peaks content. The idea that your marketing calendar should have four critical built-in moments

to it. But more than that, really what I want you to do is that if you right now don't have, what is today? It's the middle of September. Ask yourself, "Do I have for the month of October?" Every single email, every single SMS, every single website change, every single organic social post, on a calendar somewhere. I'm willing to bet that 95% of you do not. Because I am your agency partner, and I know you do not. You don't have one month from now. An idea of what you're

going to say as an organization, but you are ramming endless amounts of hours into this idea of like, what new evergreen ad could we create? Meanwhile, all around you, the world is happening. There are things in culture that are being talked about that your brand could relate and connect to and drive imperative for virtual. I'll give you an example. This is September, more spiral by ball. Okay, so we go, all right, well, we're going to build a media plan. We're going to design the

marketing moments for every section of the campaign. What are we going to say? Well, you know what's happening this week? I don't know if any of you grew up in Christian culture, but see you at the poll. Can't people go pray at school early in the morning? It's a week of September 17th, so the 23rd. So I said, Alex, get on the phone. Call the founder of see you at the poll. See if they'll take

“donations if we drive demand for them. It's just some kid. Hey, we get, oh, what do you want to do?”

Yeah, man, that sounds cool. Here's here's our 501c3. You're cool if we use your logo and talk about it and donate a portion of the proceeds to you. Yeah, man, that'd be really cool. It kind of faded over the years, but we're doing what we can. Thanks. Cool. Go 17th through the 23rd. Here's the

now we have a campaign. It's a structure. It's an email. It's a website change. We're going to plant

“29 emails throughout the month. This is a brand with no LTV. The heck are we sending so many emails”

for? Because the email is not a retention channel. Because you know, many people sign up on the email pop up and are waiting for a reason to buy. They're waiting for an imperative to purchase something that is their reason for participating. We have multiple Labor Day sales. We have a fly share. We have

the brave faith weekly created this whole story about how much courage it takes to show up and how

we want to encourage these people that are showing up to pray, whatever it is. And so these are all

“the SMS email. Every one of them planned. Every email has an expectation of revenue. Every campaign”

has an expectation of efficiency and dollars. And the end result is that it works. And it doesn't just work on the out of count. When we started moving into the strategy, we went from sending

20, our 18 email campaigns in June to 27 in August. We generated 2.8x time to campaign revenue,

3x the campaign conversions, and 28% of the revenue in September for a brand with no LTV, no LTV, on a very narrow 7 day click attributed clavio number is going to be 28% of their overall revenue.

“Nearly half as many cents as previously nearly 3x more revenue every cent I do a moment in the calendar.”

And we're just going to build these over and over in July. This is a Bible in a year is the main product. How the hell do you sell Bible in a year in July? Like it's very much a January year commitment products. So we just made some shit up. It's the half time sale. You don't need 52 weeks. You need 90 days. Here's a plan to accelerate, getting back on path, blah, blah, blah, just make it up. It July though, the story is different. The narrative of your product matters relative to the

calendar and matters with happening culture and matters in a way that your brand needs to connect into a story that has a window with an imperative. These are three normal brands or all the pun that are struggling in many ways just like you all. They don't have the genetic attributes of grooms. They don't have the LTV of IM8. They don't have the funding. They have to drive profitable cact. They don't have the capacity to do it.

But they're all winning. Because great brands aren't just born. They're built. They're built through finding ways to evolve and win the game. None of these are jack. Every single one of them is learned and your brand is not disqualified. You are here today to commerce round table that I hope you pick up something you put in your pocket and you have somewhere to go that allows you to go back with some hope, some encouragement, some possibility of why might be

and to go and make it happen. Thank you. And thanks for letting me share about my friend Jesus. He was an awesome guy. I don't think he ever thought he was going to be at any commerce event. But appreciate it you all.