How to Get Your CFO to Approve a Bigger Marketing Budget: CAC, Meta and Brand Spend | Harness the Halo 5/6 

meta-eths. We work through multisinariot plans to be able to say, this isn't going to help you hit this quarter's goals, but like here's also the long term effect of not doing this. There's so many brands. All they do is just like hardcore director's bonds. It'll last for as long as it'll last for, but the reason that like Holly Hobbe, whatever all these other brands, like actually made it to the distance that they made it is because they tend you to invest in brand and top of funnel and

everything else. The reality is that there's a whole ecosystem that's influencing your marketing.

Hello and welcome to the D to C podcast. This is Harness the Halo, a six-part series with keen on how better measurement earns you the right to make bigger bets. This is episode five and today we're hearing from the finance side. Drew Fallen is the former CFO of Mad Rabbit and is now CEO of Iris Finance, a finance platform for CPG and D to C brands. Also joined by Claudia Latour, VP of Client Services at Keene, where her team works with brands on their plans. That

finance teams have to approve. So, great to be mixiting up with you. Drew, I've been following your financial analyses on both LinkedIn and Twitter for a long time, so it's great to have you here. Thank you, yeah, appreciate it. So you went from being CFO of Mad Rabbit to seeing the books of a lot of brands through Iris. Is there something that you thought about marketing spend back then that you've changed your mind about now? That's a very provoking first question. So

maybe not necessarily, but I do think the number one thing that I've kind of seen over time is that people are getting more and more accepting of this halo effect. So back in 2020, 2021, which is when I was running Mad Rabbit, it was a little bit of a novel concept that like Amazon could benefit from meta ads. People wanted to look at things and their very own halos.

So I think I was always interested in that. However, I guess if there was something that I

think now that I didn't think back then, I thought back then that it was probably super measurable. And now I'm just kind of like, I don't even know if there's a right answer or if anybody actually has a really good method. It's undeniably true, but I think attribution and mentality, like all of these types of measuring tools, they're great and they're helpful, but they're guesses and the confidence intervals are not always very high. So I think

I went from saying like, hey, this is something that I kind of believe in to like, I just don't

“even know honestly, or maybe that's like my evolution. How do you respond Claudia?”

Yeah, I mean, I would say your position coming from a finance layer is a lot of what supports the conversations where a lot of our marketing teams come to us and work with us and are trying to really find a shared framework in terms of how do they speak to their CFOs and like our recommendation from team layer is to bring them into the conversation, really have them be a part of this and really show them not just what you're good and what all your industry experiences

is kind of coming into play, but really use the data that you have and actually start to talk through like a shared framework so it's not really marketing versus finance, but really like how are you guys looking at the data and sort of the next layer of decisions that you're going to need to make together? I think that's totally right. Like the way that I think about it is like the it's the marketing people's job to kind of like prove that and then as like CFO, it's my job to just

make sure that like whatever the plan is kind of works in the context of the rest of the business. So like I do think that like that's an important exercise and distinction that like a lot of marketing folks like should be very very focused on. At the end of the day, as long as like the

“MER and the marketing spend are the same, you know, from what we're planning, then I think it's”

kind of up to the more smart marketing people to figure out the best like capital allocation for that actual budget line. Drieve argued in blog posts about ad spend living inside contribution margin and that gets tricky when you're doing something like CTV or other brand building exercises where as we've reported in this series on previous episodes, it can take months to see a return on. Like you guys are just saying you just need to have a shared language to talk about the

the benchmarks you're looking for, but how do you like what are the benchmarks that that I guess you're looking for on the finance side when someone does come into pitch one of these of these upper funnel longer payback period type exercises. So I think like really, like like like everything goes down to like net income or like EBITDA, whatever you want to like call it,

basically. The idea is that like contribution margin is kind of like the end of like the variable

“expenses and then your opx is obviously like everything under that and so you have to maintain”

a certain contribution margin. The opx says the same, right? So even even a move is because

to some CFO that like, hey, this is going to either increase or MER and thus our contribution

margin or it's a worthwhile risk to take to the point that like, hey, like if it does work,

“then the ROI is you know significant. I think indeed it's specifically like marketing drives”

the complexion of the business model so significantly that like, I do think that like the old school kind of like crunchy bean counters CFO is like not the right type of finance talent to be leading those businesses. I think they need to be like a little bit more progressive. But they also need to kind of like hold their ground and say, hey, like this is like how this is like the amount of money that the business is trying to make and this is like the budget. So if you come to me and

you say, hey, here is the case for how we could beat the budget and you have like a convincing

argument like, hey, we can do this. We can do that. Then there's a good chance that any reasonable CFO

that understands whether what you're saying is probably true, you know, can think about how that might fit into the plan. Yeah, I would say from a keen layer what what you talked through the conversation of like upper versus what we're funnel is probably like one of the core things that we see our clients kind of confide in us that they're struggling to justify. We've seen multiple brands almost panicking because they're like all of my upper funnel spend is getting cut in pursuit of

hitting these short-term goals. So part of the language that we also start to work through with our teams is justifying and really showing the numbers behind what does it mean to invest in something

“long-term, right? Like you need to have that conversation and that shared framework to say,”

this isn't going to help you hit this quarter's goals. But like here's also the cost of the long-term effect of not doing this, right? So we work through multi-scenario plans to be able to say cutting our upper funnel hits this goal for the next couple of quarters. But where it's what it starts to also do is erode the brand, right? And so here's the trade-off. If we go this path versus this other path. So again, less instinct-based even if your instincts are right,

but actually allows you to show the numbers behind it. And I think like the bottom of the funnel sort of action, like they have to be good enough to support top of funnel investment. Like I think like so many brands, all they do is just like hardcore direct response. And it's like it'll last for as long as it'll last for. But the reason that like Ali Pop and Poppy, Cotary and whatever all these other brands like actually made it to the, you know, distance that

they made it is because they tend you to invest in brand and top of funnel and everything else.

“So I think like it's like it's a little bit of like a greedy like you have to have both kind of a thing.”

And it's really hard to do, but if you want to go the distance, like your bottom of funnel has to be able to pull like a 3.0 MER and then you got to put the other point of it back into top of funnel and brand and you just have to be, you know, having good margins after all that, which is very hard to do. Can you put any more color Claudia on the kind of language or the actual metrics or conversations, you know, that you're having with maybe, you know, both the marketing

heads included in the financial discussions, where you are making the case for these longer-term things, what does that conversation actually look like? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that happens in the keen platform is that we're able to look at here is your base. So everything in terms of volume that would have happened in the absence of your marketing efforts and what we're saying in our platform is and what we're trying to measure is the incremental impact of your marketing

investment, right? So what we look at based off of leveraging your historical data, the historical model really being the starting point to kind of fuel the scenario planning that we do is we're looking at how that base progresses over time. So every tactic is marked as short-term or long-term. And so when you're running a scenario with us, we look at what are the potential like tails across all of those investments over time, how would your brand and theory move? So again,

those upper funnel tactics are going to help to build that brand up versus your short-term tactics are really going to drive those short-term goals for you. So we could look at a plan that

starts of, here's what let's say marketing wants to do, maybe a more balanced plan that has

a good mix of upper funnel versus lower funnel versus their worst-case scenario, right? That more short-term focus plan. And then we'll look at, here's what your numbers look like you're one. What happens year two if we run the same two plans on top of this? What are your outcomes look like? What happens year three from there? So really having that comparison of what's the long-term impact of making these two decisions instead of just fighting about what's at stake in this moment now,

but what does it do to the brand over time? Drew from your side, how do you work with, I guess as a as a CFL you are doing different kinds of scenario planning about rising costs or tariffs coming in, how do you work with scenario planning on your side of the base?

It's like at the beginning of the year or during your annual planning cycle, your finance department should be producing at least three scenarios for you. Hey, what if we get into that target rollout or what if we keep cack flat the whole year or what if cack doubles? What if we get delisted from Amazon, you know, like all these different

variables, you should always have like in my mind a plan to fall back on. And so it may not be fun

and it could be like doomerish, but like you do have to have a bear case and you have to be ready, like hey, like what if we miss our goals by 50%. Like we have like if the if the answer is if we miss our revenue goal by 50%, the answer is we run we then run out of money. That cannot be a surprise. You have to be prepared,

“right? You have to be if the no what's going on. So I think in like the office of the CFL,”

what we would what we would typically do is just like sensitize a base case model and say, okay, like what if we beat it by 40%. What if we miss it by 40? And then like at which point up and down, does it start to like become untenable? Because oftentimes even if you beat it by 60%, you can still run out of money because we have that whole thing that we call inventory, right?

And so you should never be surprised by your cash position because you should have already planned

out at least three scenarios. And that's like a very that's very much like a sort of like squishy strategic finance kind of like pie in the sky type stuff like it's not super actionable or or like tactical. So I don't know that like it gets into the weeds so much as like I mean, theoretically you could model like different like halo effects and like marketing mix and stuff like that and maybe that that would be kind of like an interesting way to incorporate some like

marketing plans and stuff. But I think usually that's kind of like CFLs just kind of figure out like

“what might happen. Claudia, that's what keen does I guess, right? Yeah, you know, a lot of our clients”

come to us having worked with his, you know, MMM providers that really just focused on report carding and really that's the first step. But we're the bulk of our clients spend their time is really in sort of the scenario planning phase and really we're gaming. What are the different potential outcomes? So when a new client starts to work with us and we've sort of gotten your historical model underway, there are sort of three base scenarios that we start to talk through

them to again get them to think about what are the range of scenarios that I might see. So the first is like a status quo, which is what if I did the same thing that I did last year? What does that potential outcome look like versus a? What is your current plan right now look like? So again, starting to measure the impact of your hopefully improved thinking based off of like what you've learned? And then we also start to look at like sort of your most rosy optimized scenario,

right? What if you were able to just use the data to fully inform it? What is the high end of the potential? And even just starting with those three scenarios, it's really interesting to see the range and the sort of conversations that come out of that. But from a data day basis, it becomes a lot of what you just described through of here sort of the the three scenarios that I'm thinking of or my ideal versus what I'm trying to fight against a best case. And even beyond just conversations

around budgets, what we also talked through are the external environments that could potentially impact that right? What happens if your distribution increases versus decreases? How does that change your current plan as well as a number of other scenarios that we see our clients face on a data day basis? Yeah, that's interesting. We do, I recommend about as far as I've gone with it in the past, it's just like the elasticity around like CAC for example. So it would be interesting

to even go like drill down like one step further and try to understand like why would like under what scenario like would CAC change like if we move from channel mix or whatever other types

“of measurements. Like there is probably is like a lot deeper that you can go. Again, I think that”

maybe maybe is reserved for the marketing folks who are just a little bit smarter than I think. Some of that. Do you have any are you are you sort of a tactic or strategy agnostic at this point? I know you came from from the D to C world. But are there any when people come to you and they're like okay we want to invest here? Are there any things you just kind of roll your eyes at or anything's like okay that's a red flag you know you shouldn't you shouldn't

be doing that. Do you see a lot of that or you just sort of like anything can work under the right

scenario if the numbers line up. I've never seen a brand scale app love and spend and make more

money. Interesting. Not one time ever on the 200 brands that we have in the portfolio. Never seen somebody make more money with app love and spend going up. That's interesting. That's not to say that it hasn't ever happened. Yeah. I've never seen it. So and every time and then most of our brands are somewhere between 20 and 300 million. So sort of like middle market type folks and they're and you know they've been running meta and meta got them to 50 million and they're like

they're topping out so they look for another channel and as soon as they start spending 200

app love and skeptic. Anything to add to that Claudia do you have do you have a app love and case to counter this point or is there? Can you think of do you have pre-built opinions at all

“on certain strategies or or tactics? So I think for us the difference that really happens is”

that we get our clients to stop thinking about one particular tactic as being the hero because

the reality is that there's a whole ecosystem that's influencing your marketing right? So we have

general benchmarks for app love and or other vendors based off of like your industry what we know about that individual business but that changes from brand to brand even brands that look very similar based off of what else you're running and tandem with it. So less about a hard conviction on a particular case and more about having our clients look at the holistic picture of what their overall marketing plan is going to be. Flipside drew your question is there is there anything

that you that's a green flag anything that you think that people are under indexing on that you have seen the move move the needle significantly? It's a good question. I mean I think like meta typically I mean you can really ride meta as you guys know like so far like farther than you think

“honestly like you can probably ride it's a 100 million you know like pretty much all the time”

and so it's probably maybe maybe it's not like an exciting answer but like it's like the answer

probably is meta unless you're like doing like a couple hundred million the answer is like probably

meta and then the one thing that's kind of come on my radar just in the past couple weeks is within meta are you working with a lot of clients that are working with tribe drew that are certainly yeah so like yeah like Lucas is a customer of ours the founder and we have a lot of TikTok brands and I feel like they all kind of jumped on tribe pretty early. Is that on your radiate Claudia the the tribe aspect of meta spends because basically it's it's it's created an

amazing sort of network like a marketplace for creators who actually drive GMV and they actually reward but I've heard that at scale it can become unmanageable it's like really good for brands in a certain band but when you're pledging one to two percent of GMV based on winning creatives it can it can get really deadly on a line item as it as it really scales do you see that as being a problem on the real high end group um yes just administratively like literally because it's like

it is crazy like some people have like hundreds and hundreds of creators it was something that we

“like considered like tackling honestly at one point um but it is like pretty unmanageable but I”

I don't know honestly the processing well enough to like say whether or not it like is legitimately unmanageable I just know that like it is a fun like there's a lot to it that was a challenge actually with our agency where we had this really performance heavy where we were on the same skis as our clients where we really wanted to focus on okay when we win or when you win we when we were able to make you win that's that's really where we'll make our profit but it just

led us to having these wildly uneven line items for our clients and and then talking to see if I was like okay why did your agency cost you you know three times more than it did in the previous months well they delivered three times as good results but from a financial side

you don't always see it that way have you had situations like that yeah I mean I think a lot of

the times that stuff just comes down to what's like the actual dollar figure you know so like for example like a mad rabbit we had an Amazon agency that I very very much enjoyed them you know friends with the CEO still today and we ended up letting them go at some point just because like we ended up we were paying them like 60 grand a month or something and it was like I don't really care like how good you are you know like I can I can hire two full-time people for you know two thirds of that

price so I think like ultimately it like has a little bit less to do with like what are the results that the agency's actually driving and more so like what does it cost us to like do this in house and that's like usually well where you'll see see if I was pushed back and it it can be like a little bit short-sighted a lot of the time because sometimes agencies have like true advantages and like that's why they're driving the results but like when you're looking at it on the P&L and you're just like

I can hire five people for this price you know like how could you justify this I think there is like it's there's there's some friction there for sure yeah Claudia you had a question for Drew basically when a marketing team walks into your office with a plan what are you assuming before they've said anything maybe describe to me back in your I guess if you're doing it now Drew with with your clients but previously we're doing it in the mad rabbit space what are some of the assumptions

that that you and marketing share I guess well the big one is like cac right so we have to be aligned on like a cac goal because the output of our cac and our spend and our returning customer revenues our contribution margin which is sort of the North Star in terms of like driving EBITDA so

creative output or like whatever else as the CFO like I I really don't care honestly like as long

as you're hitting the cac goal you know and then once you're hitting the cac goal and if we're hitting our retention numbers and our LTV to cac is kind of shaking out you know how I have it in my model then you know I I don't care how much you're spending on anything you know the unit economics or working in the business model is working and so you know it's up to the folks that are you know like I keep saying like a little bit smarter than than us finance folks to like go and actually

execute on some of that directive clud anything you'd want to dig in there with with Drew on that

“question I think that's really that's really interesting perspective and again I think part of this”

comes down to like the share language right where brands know what they believe or sorry marketers know what they believe they know what they want to invest in but I think it comes down to how do I translate it back to captain this instance if that's all that you care about and I think that's the layer of like where where they've struggled to actually explain that in a way that justifies the spend that they that they want to invest right it comes back to that layer of like miscommunication

almost yeah there's a lot of like different data sources that people will be looking at to try to like answer that question and they'll give you all different answers and like people will try to like use like AI to do it and like AI just lies to you and stuff and so like there are like a number of like organizational I think like hurdles that present a challenge that are maybe incremental to what Claudia is describing to and especially when you're dealing with a traffic

source where in you know previous episodes in the series we've talked about for instance like CTV having a 30% short-term impact and then a 70% impact over the next you know three to six months have you found a successful way for allowing CMOs to pitch those like longer payback period windows or is it really just a matter of you know maybe not using AI but using using third-party tools in order to kind of put a thumb on on what it'll be and in six months out how do you deal with

with things like that I think it kind of comes down I think why is this like a different question but like your director's sponsor efforts have to be effective enough to support those other sort of like less measurable initiatives right so like if your MER is like 2.0 you know you're doing only director's sponsor like you don't have a ton of room to now lay or in like some brand or like longer term initiatives

“right so you have to be driving like a certain amount of efficiency I think to actually like say hey”

now we can afford to invest in brand and that's why like you don't see a lot of companies start to

even do brand style stuff until 30 40 50 plus million in revenue because they just they just

literally don't have like the dollars coming in to actually justify it like that every you know every day is like a fight of like getting the next purchase and so until like that problem like really goes away I don't know that you should be doing a ton of brand stuff anyways you know like if you're like a 10 million dollar company like do you need to like go spend a bunch of money on top of funnel sort of brands things that aren't you know like continue to grow the business

then I don't really think so to be honest especially in if in your opinion you can get to nine figures with really good a really good metafunnel how do you react to that Claudia when you with all the brands that you work with of the different phases when do you see it becoming

“really relevant that they look to invest more in in that brand story yeah I mean I think this is”

probably one of the most consistent struggles that we see amongst our client base of like what is that balance between upper versus lower funnel spend and how do I again make that case and justify that investment when we're very focused on shorter term goals and it really does come down to you a layer of balance right because there is the the need to hit again those quarterly yearly targets but when you're not investing in brand you also have to look at that

longer term impact in that potential erosion that happens so the way that we work through it is making sure that we're aligned on if this is the decision that we're making what is it look like in the short term but then we're also looking at scenarios on a two or three year basis to also say you know if we're totally stripping all brand spend as an example what is that impact look like three years from now versus just are we hitting today's goal and that I think just

facilitates a much deeper conversation in terms of why you're driving for that more balanced mix of the investment and I do think just to jump in it's a really people say like oh you don't need to raise money for like a D to see brands I think that's like a really good argument against that stance where it's like like like ruins is like a great example of like they raised

like a shit ton of money you know basically from day one because why because like they were building

a brand you know and like in and they wanted to make those investments early and often so I think there is like you know a big difference between like building a brand and like building like a D to see store and it's expensive I'm curious on your take Drew I'd probably wrote about

70% of the investment was going towards active customer acquisition I don't always hear that

as something people aspire to is having their customer acquisition funded by investment any comments

“on the way that deal shook out um yeah I mean it's not terribly uncommon honestly like usually”

it's referred to as like revenue financing um and so like you like way fly or fake up like there's all of these like sort of like MCAs it's not it's just like an it's the same thing as an MCA it's just like a much more like enterprise-grade version and so I think like they are taking what I just said like to a little bit of like you know a crazy extreme in terms of like you know I'm friends with those guys like they're they're crazy like they're just spending as much as they possibly can on

customer acquisition and they're they're convinced and I believe them honestly that um you know that they have the economics to back it up and to support that from a business perspective so it was it was a little bit like I texted Brian to CFO when they announced it and I was like this is like kind of like community adjusting the bedock kind of a thing but like yeah they just got a giant

“MCA and I think you know it is a photo confidence though because general catalyst is a highly”

sophisticated investor um typically those instruments are reserved for like truly recurring revenue businesses um so like lemonade was kind of like one of those success stories of of using that that vehicle which is like lemonade is like a you know consumer SaaS basically they're it's like an insurance company so yeah that they definitely like took that to a the extreme but it's it's not it's not like as unique as like I think they maybe wanted it to like appear the size of it was crazy the size of it was unique

yeah that's not the first like revenue financing uh low number no of course Claudia you mentioned in your previous answer there just about the idea of like maybe cutting up her funnel to hit a quarter do you have an example of you know without giving names of a client who maybe did that and then what the numbers looked like a year later this is like the reverse halo effect I guess right have you ever seen the reverse of the halo effect happen with with a client we absolutely do so when we

talk through um multi-year planning or even just looking at the impact of your investments right we're we're looking at that tail right where your lower funnel investments the bulk are coming through in that first like about three months through the through the first year and the reverse is happening with those longer tail investments so that's one of the things that we're able to break down within the platform is how is that contribution from your marketing um investment happening over time and then

also what does that look like against your base so this is one of the things that we see with a lot with a lot of our clients that come in is that like their base over time is declining which is one of the things that is really difficult to balance because again they're very focused on that short-term goal to help sustain the business but also when you have a base that's eroding not investing in it kind of compounds the issue so we continue to see that trendline continue rather than it's starting

to like level off and reverse essentially. Drew in it organization in it's a 20 to 40 50 million

dollar organization who actually owns the marketing budget is it is it a situation where the CFO is sort of dictating what's what's available and then a CMO is kind of going in and and determining what investments are made within there how does that process look um so there's a difference between

“who does and who should um in my opinion so um I think like more often than not it's probably the”

marketing leader that's driving the budget the reason that I believe that to be suboptimal is because there it's it's like a multi-variant equation right and so like like their like these businesses have working capital right they have operating expenses right and so to ask a CMO or or VP of marketing or whatever level to be able to like contemplate a marketing budget in the context of the broader financial model is like a very tall that that's like a CEO level like asked right

and so I think on on the flip side of the coin it's very very rare that you find a that a then CFO who understands like digital marketing and e-commerce and LTV to cac you can actually then take it and do that marketing part and understand the broader context of like the cash conversion cycle and the operating expense the capital structure etc and so the sort of like perfect CFO speaking of I am eight like Brian like if you ever I have a podcast with Brian Rosen the CFO I

made like he's like an example of somebody who's a very very rare individual who actually like understands like e-commerce, unit economics, growth marketing and can go out and raise you a billion dollar

facility right so like I think it's it's no it's nobody's fault that this has never done that well

it's just that like it's so so so rare because e-commerce specifically is so unique in the standpoint of like handedly like marketing and finance are the same thing in this part of business

like would never be able to like you know help you do that but on the other hand the you know typical

sort of like CMO is never going to be able to like tell you hey this cactarget is tolerable or not like given our like inventory lead times you know so it's it's it's um it's really really hard

“conversation but I think like my answer would be it should be the CFO with the caveat of like they”

need to be able to understand growth marketing which is like pretty rare. What do you think of that Claudia and then I guess how does keen help bridge that gap? Yeah so I'd say that the the dynamic that you described is super common um in our client set and I think that's a bit of the struggle that we try and help again more often than not we're working with the marketing teams so we're trying to help them find a shared language like coming to the table as a team because I think the

reality is that based off of exactly what you described like no one side is fully equipped to own it without the others input and at the end of the day you are actually on the same team so the way that we work through clients is that like we invite people to bring their CFOs into the conversation right we invite you to bring your broader team because we understand all the battling dynamics that kind of come into play and for us we don't necessarily have like skin in the game

in terms of what output looks a certain way we're looking to be sort of just the truth later to help facilitate you all making the best decision for your business overall right and and the other layer of it as well is that you know depending on the decisions that you come to for any given period of time part of our process is also to refresh on a consistent basis to be able to say last quarter or last month we believed that these decisions would lead to ex-result and then what

we're all so measuring is like did that happen why or why not and then how do we pivot based off of that because even if you are perfectly forecasting the outside world is changing your goals are changing so we're also just needing to consistently have that conversation even if there isn't like this adversarial dynamic and then Drew how does that land with you I think I think you when it comes to marketing measurement tools like how deep do you go in with tools like keen in

order to justify marketing spent um i i i i i i honestly personally have never been inside one of those

tools i mean besides like the triple whales or like north beams like the attribution style so i think i i don't know keen very well it sounds like a little bit more like enterprise of a tool but i i think again like the the attitude that i would take into a conversation like that would just

“be like hey like what is cack and if you want to prove to me that like what you're doing is driving”

cack in a certain way then like bring all the data that you can't um and let's have that conversation and i would love to see all that um but at the end of the day it's it's basically coming down to to that one number uh which is cack so i think the goals for a different for various brands might vary but part of our engagement is also understanding like what deep what is your business is goal right what do you need to do to justify the actions that you're choosing to take like what does

success actually mean for you so i agree with that fully in the realm of if there's cfo doesn't believe the outputs or isn't understanding like what we're showing that means that we need to change again like what we're driving towards to be able to continue to hit your goals otherwise you know we're just a platform versus like 14 can leverage the example that i gave earlier of like the old school being counter cfo like those are the those are the folks where it's like you need to cut

“you need to bring your key data um and you need to shove it in their face and rub it around until they”

understand it because like those types of folks are gonna have a very difficult time understanding like i forget that the like the 70% lift on ctv or something over time like that's real you know

like like those old school guys those cfo's like they're not they like would never be able to like

comprehend so i think that's like a a really good use case for certain types of platforms to come in and and start to prove that out because you do need it for the actual like long term health of the i agree with that as well and that's where you know we we are our clients with the data but we also are there to back them up in that conversation as well to explain you know the nuts and bolts of how we're measuring and again making sure that there's like confidence across the board when you say

based off of the plans that i ran in keen i feel super confident that x decision is how we want to proceed last question uh of acid of of everyone in the series so far what's a number that you have stopped trusting in this in this process you'll start with you do any numbers you've just really stopped trusting basically just like anything that's inside of like an in-clap like an advertising platform basically why cause when you add them all up there it's all higher than what you get on your

that i got the third party to i'm just like yeah what what what do you say Claudia i'm a little bias

but i'm gonna agree with you in that sense um because from that layer where we work with our clients is like there's layers of truth in it but if you're asking anyone to grade their own homework everyone's gonna give themselves an A yeah let's take as much credit as possible uh and you know if that was the case uh there would really be room for tools like us because you wouldn't need that third party like of truth real last question we are in the in the in the heat of

of q4 really uh heating up here we talked a little bit about it in on on off-camera their Claudia

but what are what are some things that that are maybe different about this year's q4

then uh previous year's is there anything you're saying are there more conversations being had is there more trepidation what what is different about this q4 than previous q4 start with you Drew that's a good question uh i feel like this year we we've actually seen like more people

“kind of pull back on certain channels like tiktok for example like i think last year people”

this is like purely anecdotal i don't have any data with me to back this up but like people were like i think a little bit more willing to lose money on tiktok last year and like see like the halo benefit kind of around the rest of the channels which i think is like still like very very real but again just anecdotally speaking like i think i'm here a little bit more about people saying like hey like we're not just gonna like spam views on tiktok this year because we lost a bunch of money last

year or at least we think that we did and so maybe we should just focus on like a little bit more like the core channels and also um we do a lot of work with supplements businesses and i think in supplements people are kind of realizing that like q4 like isn't isn't like the right time to like spend that much um and so i weren't nearly near you right yeah but like people would still like like go as hard as they could in q and q uh and q4 only to realize that like the returns are like higher

than normal and the churn is crazy and everybody's just like discount shopping and all that um so i've talked to like more than a couple of founders and supplements that are like yeah we're just i don't care about q4 like we're waiting for January kind of a thing interesting what about you from you cloudy i'd say right now a lot of our clients are being conservative um just kind of trying to hedge their bets against um you know what the economy might hold um layers that are sort of outside

of their control so yes a layer of going you know trying to lean into those like core um this sort of like core tactics that are tried and true but also wanting to balance that without like

“leaving dollars on the table in other places so i think those conversations about how can i put”

my best plans forward and then also you know not over promise in this regard thank you both for

coming on the podcast through tell me first of all i got to say uh my daughter's name is iris

who's the most beautiful name in the world oh no how how did you pick this for your finance company um iris is meant to like give you visibility into your business and so the platform was meant to give you visibility into your business past and future um and so iris was like kind of a net like it's like the eye right so the eye not the flower is why it also means rainbow apparently and it's also a great google del song so great song um great song i found that song after i named the company

and i was like wow this is great song it's beautiful i like your tagline iris finance your

“p&l is lying to you so go to irisfinance.co if you want to work more of the true”

especially if you're in that supplement space and then uh how would people find you Claudia? yeah so i'd say um our sales team is you know out in the market at various um events but also keen ds um is where you can find us can learn you know initial information about our platform and then also receive like a demo and find out a lot more about what we do thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you're not a subscriber to our newsletter

you can do that right now at direct to consumer all one word dot co i'm eric dick and this has been the ddc podcast we'll see you next time