How to Test Connected TV for a DTC Brand: $20K a Month for 60 Days | Harness the Halo 4/6

Let's say you have a $2 ROI and you spent a million dollars on any channel.

“The question is if I spent $1 extra dollar on top of that million, am I going to get $2 back?”

Probably not. So ROI can actually be a pretty misleading metric on which to make decisions over your next dollars. TikTok. We didn't see a media ROI in platform or in any of our tracking tools, but this was another channel that we wanted to continue to grow, both on the organic side and paid. We gave it some time.

It's taken about six months, but like we're starting to see the momentum there with our ads as well. You just have to put the systems in place and give things a bit of time to ramp up.

Hello and welcome to the D2C podcast. This is Harness the Halo a six-part series with

keen. Every episode ladders up to one main argument. Better measurement earns you the right to make bigger bets. This is episode four. Carve designs has spent years funding, direct mail, connected TV, and loyalty. None of which pay you back necessarily on the day you spend the money. Hanna Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve and was just on the show recently to talk about how they built retention in a really interesting way. Jessie Math is VP of strategic

partnerships at Keene. Today we're going to dive deep with Hanna about how some of the bets that she's been able to take looked wrong before they looked right and how she decides where the next dollar goes. Welcome back, Hanna. Welcome to the D2C podcast, Jessie. Let's just start with

“direct mail. Direct mail is something that Carve has run for, I think, for 10 years, but you've”

introduced some changes to the program. Maybe talk a little bit about the direct mail program at Carve.

Yeah, so first of all, thank you for having me back again. So at Carve, we have a few different

channels that we run. So we have your standard catalog, which we just have our fall catalog right here, where we break up those groups and prospectors and existing buyers. And we have five catalogs that we send out a year. We then layer on programmatic, direct mail with things like site abandonment, cart abandonment. And then our third layer that we layered on last year was a windback series that also is a postcard that's attached to the rest of our windback flow, your standard windback

in email and SMS. So it's a pretty standard retention, not standard, I guess, because a lot of brands don't run mail, but this is a retention play. How do you describe the halo that the direct mail program casts over the rest of the business? Yeah, so we're able to see the revenue pretty clearly. Every time a catalog is in the mail, we see those revenue spikes very consistently. And then we use a few different measurement tools in order to actually track that. One of which,

“I think I spoke about last time I was on, which is Pression and MMM tool. And basically,”

we track then the days that we're spending money on direct mail and then the correlated revenue spikes that happen on those days so that we can attach an actual ROI to our spend. And then we also do matchback data. So we have an awesome agency and they work to get us clear matchbacks of, okay, these customers were mailed a catalog during this time period, did they purchase during this time period, they factor in the other communication that we're also sending out at that time via

email, paid, et cetera, and we're able to attach an actual ROI there. Is direct mail exclusively for pre-existing customers? Are you mailing catalogs prospectively to people that you think would like the brand? Both. So we have a very large portion of the budget is prospecting as well, and that kind of changes throughout the year that percentage break down. But we absolutely look at it as a prospecting channel too. And then where do you see the halo? Obviously, it shows up in

last click in email purchases and things like that, but do you see it across other channels, whether that be meta Google or streaming or anything else? Yeah, so we actually haven't looked at the specific conversion rate across those other channels with direct mail. We look at it for some of our other marketing channels. But again, going back to that overall revenue lift, that's where we really see, you know, we see the lift there. I'd be curious of Jesse does track that with any

with any brands. If there, you know, there's a different way that you guys look at it, direct mail. Yeah, you know, I think a direct mail is a really great use case and a really great question because it tends to be attributed with a lot of the revenue, because it is so deterministic, right? You have names and addresses of people that you're sending mailers out to, and then you have names and addresses of people who buy, and that seems to be a one-to-one connection. The question

that keen is interesting and an interesting tackling is how many of those people have that bought would have bought anyway without the direct mail. And how much revenue is direct mail actually causing even understanding that the consumer journey is exposed to multiple channels. So that's

direct mail, TV, out of home, social, search all measured in the same way, which is what's the incremental

contribution that they're providing, understanding that there are interaction effects across channels and interaction effects between your channels and your other business strategies like price, promotion, distribution, because all of that matters. The one other thing I would add to it is not just what's the short-term impact of direct mail and other channels, but with the long-term value of direct mail. When you spend Anna sending mail out to a new customer and that direct mail

are like really influences a purchase, the investment that you made in today's activity deserves credit for incrementality for the future value of that customer also. So it's in one case ROI for direct mail can seem inflated because it's so deterministic. On the other hand,

it can be deflated if we don't understand the long-term impact of today's activity.

And that's a great point and kind of going back air to your question. We do incrementality testing. That's like really at the core of the direct mail program. We are constantly doing holdout panels. We also, you know, we've done that with holding out two email and non-subscribers as well. So then we know these people are not getting emails during this time period either and also email. Yes, it is. So we've played around a lot with that and then also suppressing them across paid

social too. So we have played around with quite a few different incrementality tests over the years to show the incrementality of the channel for us. And so what does it show? Do people that receive the catalog on an annual or quarterly basis tend to have higher LTV? I would imagine yes. Yeah, clear. Stay clear. I was on with our direct mail agency this morning and, you know, we're starting to talk about how we want to test for 2027 and, you know, we reflect on, okay,

we've we've tested all of these different ways. It's it's clear that this channel works. How can we continue to make sure that we're testing to continue to show the incrementality and now we're really fine tuning. You know, we think about things like does a customer need five catalogs a year? Do they need four? What size of the catalog? How many

“pages? All of these different factors then can come into play once you show that the channel works?”

That's really interesting. And I think something else that's interesting is how do you plan media now in light of that direct mail schedule? Because direct mail is one of the foundational layers of the plan. The question is, like, well, how do you fill in? Like, what do you do the week that the mail is going out? What do you do in week two, week three, right? It's a fill in the gaps. And that's part of probably holistic media planning and business forecasting is like, well,

how do we expect these other channels to perform in light of what we think we're going to do from a volume perspective and direct mail? And then when we go back and review on the channel performance, it's like, well, then we actually send out all the pieces that we thought we were going to. And if we did great, and if we didn't have that impact, the performance of other channels around it. Exactly. Yep. Exactly. We factor it in. And then we, we tweak our spending

other channels around when the catalog is in home. And so with carve having done this for the past 10 years, you obviously don't need to make a big case for when you want to invest more. What is investment in direct mail look like? Is it one of those channels that sort of outsize like SMS for instance, where the return on your SMSes can can vastly outstrip the costs to send those SMSes?

“Is direct mail a similar thing? Or do you have to invest? Obviously, there's physical aspects”

to it. So there's more investment. But talk to me a little bit about the investment side of direct mail. And whether or not you've had to make serious cases to raise that investment. That's a great question. And because it is an established channel that we know, we've talked about the, you know, the I-row as that we've seen from it, when we think of if we want to scale it, we typically do like a tiered approach a bit. So it's more like, okay, if we were to invest this

much, this is the expected return there. It's less proving the viability of the channel. And then from an ROI perspective, it varies a bit based on the actual piece. There's a lot of factors, but we do look at the contribution per piece. That's one of our core KPIs that we're reviewing as far as if it was successful. Yeah, I could chime in on that. Because the way that I think what

keynads to our customers on top of that is like, you know, the truth is that ROI is an average

number across your full investment. Let's say you have a $2 ROI and you spent a million dollars on any channel. The question is if I spend a million in one dollar, one extra dollar on top of

“that million, am I going to get $2 back? And the truth is, like, probably not, right? Like the first”

dollars that you're investing are going to have a higher ROI than last dollars that you're investing.

dollars. The better question is one of the diminitional returns. And so the question that I'm

sure hand on her team really thinks about is, where is my next dollar going to make the maximum

“impact just because direct mail seems like it's working really well. Do we continue to lean in on that?”

Right? Doesn't mean that we're already doing four mailings a year and now we should do five, or will that fifth make it less profitable and less efficient because now we're overspending on the same audiences. So it's a really important frame to think about the diminishing returns even of successful channels. And I identify, hey, can we do we have room, do we have runway, indirect mail, or would our next dollar, are we like pretty well maxed out there and now our next dollar

would perform better somewhere else? When it comes to scaling that channel, Hannah, like what are your main levers? Is it sending to more, it's just sending the catalog to more people? It's sending more pieces to the same people? How do you think about scaling that?

And are you at the upper end of how much you can scale it? Yeah, so I'll tackle that the first part

“of that question. So as far as what levers we have to pull, there are additional audiences that”

you can tap it into. And then we also segment our audience. So we look at zero to 12 month and then 13 to 24. And we can play around with the waiting between those two. Certainly also factoring and diminishing returns there. And we look at our own internal prospecting file too. So there's all these different audiences that we can kind of tweak and weigh depending on the season as well. So for us, we used to be a really swim heavy brand. We are now a peril focused or a peril

lot I should say. And as we continue to try and get more summer buyers into fall, for example, that's going to tweak what that mix looks like in fall, where we potentially want to bring back a spring buyer in fall. So we might change our audiences there. So that's a lever. And then another, there's the size of the catalog. So like a physical, the physical size of it is it smaller, how many pages aren't it? Those are a few of the factors. And then the holdout tests, of course,

are also when we're looking at the overall marketing cost. That's a factor and a lever that we have to play with. And then of course, the in-home dates too. Just kind of going through all the different factors. There's so many here. And then an interesting one is also how catalog plays with other direct mail channels. And this might be a little bit too in the weeds. But we do factor that in because do I want to be sending a boomerang and a winback postcard to somebody who's also

getting a catalog during the same time period. Because then it actually is harder to track the incremental return return on that piece as well. So we really try and factor in the whole ecosystem when we're thinking through expanding any channel. On to streaming. We talked a little bit about streaming on your interview that came out this this past week or coming out soon. And so that may be represents a channel that you kind of pioneered a little bit more. Like we say, the

carbs been doing mailouts for 10 years or so. Talk to me about your decision to jump into streaming. What were you seeing maybe in your other acquisition channels meta that made you realize, okay, it's time to get more omnichannel. It's time to focus more on something like streaming. Yeah. So I'll definitely give huge credit to the rest of the team that that also helped pioneer our or connect to TV activations. But we were at a point where we were ready to

to move up the funnel. And really connected to TV was was the channel that we were interested in. We, you know, had seen success from other peers. And certainly as acquisition costs rose on meta, you know, there was also a timing consideration there of like, okay, what else can we test to grow brand awareness. So that was really what led us to the conversation. And then it became an exploratory like anything we start with a test. And, you know, we have really set time window for our

test clear objectives that we think, you know, objectives going in and clear targets. And then we run the test and kind of see what the outcome is there. But for us, I was more so like we wanted to grow our brand awareness and this felt like a great chain all to do so. What was the

approximate size of the test? And then I guess where did you see its impact first? We did a 60

“day test. And for us, it was a 20K minimum per month. So I think that's pretty standard. Maybe”

we can go a little bit smaller or some platforms allow that. And we saw the impact in direct. So, direct traffic to say as well as search. And then all of the KPIs that we track through the program were right on target or slightly beating target. But when we think of like the halo effect that this is a channel where you do really see it, we also were using our MMM tool at the

did you see it mainly in, did you see it in retention? Do you see it in meta? Do you see it everywhere? The way that we're looking at it. I mean, when we look at just where's the revenue, we can we can kind of see it in our MMM tool there. We also see, um, so that's one place. We see that our conversion rate is up across the board for customers who have viewed both a, a connected TV, um, streaming ad as well as clicked on an email or, um, click through

paid social. We do look at that through GA4. Jessie from your end, where are you seeing it, uh, show what where is streaming showing up in your, in your clients, uh, ad stacks? Yeah, it's certainly a growing segment across our clients, which, you know, extend across, you know, retail in the parallel brands as well as like CPD brands. Um, we're seeing the investment rise both in terms of just

“CTV as a channel in and of itself. Also has a really important part of retail media investment”

today. And, you know, it's a channel that different brands buy very differently. Some do view it like Hannah talked about it as is like an upper funnel channel. Uh, others are buying it truly as a performance channel. And there's not one right answer there. It's like they're different different mechanisms and different approaches. They stop from the role that it plays in your media mix. Um, so the way that we measure again is based off of the incremental impact that it's

having at the level of a brand's P&L sales revenue profit. And we see it's impact both on short-term time horizons. So for brands that are buying it from more of an up-of-funnel perspective, we see the incremental impacts on sales revenue profit. We see about 30% of it in a short-term duration, just after activation. But then we see about 70% of it over time, right? So it's really a channel that compounds its value and really works hard so not just generate awareness,

but the kind of awareness that actually converts to sales revenue in the future. Does that check out with what you're seeing as well, Hannah, that you kind of you did it as a awareness generation sort of play, but that it has real benefits just on the performance and, uh, you know, short-term benefits as well? Yeah, definitely. So we look at cost per site visit. That's one of

“our key metrics, but then we also do track ROI. And again, sometimes you have to take ROI with”

grain of salt, but it does show positive returns directly. And then again, going back to that conversion rate lift that we see across all channels. It really does have a halo. So you started with this, you know, the minimum of of 20k. And so after you, we per month, and then you, you know, you see these, these KPI go in the right direction. Is it something, if you guys really doubled down on it since that test? Yeah, so we've continued to scale. We now have a few different pieces of creative that

we can swap out throughout the year. We have really summer focused and then fall focused creative. It's still a small part of our overall mix, but a very important part for us. You know, as we continue

to grow, having that brand awareness lever is, is critical. So we've continued to scale. And then

also a part of it are the companion ads as well. So I often talk about CTV just the streaming. But there is, you know, a retargeting component to with your, with your standard companion ads as well. Was there any time during the, the connected TV tests where things really looked upside down and you were kind of stressed? It takes a little bit of time to gain some momentum. But I will say the team felt pretty confident that, you know, this, this was worthwhile for us to

test into. And, and we've really, we were hopeful that it would work out for us. And then Jesse on your side is when, when brands come to you with an idea, okay, I'm ready to jump into connected. What are some of the things that you look at to help them gain confidence before they make that

investment? I'll answer that in one second, Eric. But where I also see just here last question with

the US, Hannah, you know, I think a lot of brands come to us because their CTV attribution looks too good to be true. And, you know, I think we here, it's not that thing, it doesn't look enough. It's that it looks too good. It's like, oh, like my CTV attribution says that I'm driving all these conversions, but my CFO doesn't say that our business moves what's going on. Right? And so that's again, like the importance of parsing out incrementality and causality and, like, you know,

“I think it's a really important question to ask oneself when getting into the streaming world.”

It's like, are we optimizing for new conversions? Or do we just like find inventory sources that are audience launches? And so now we're reaching our audiences where they watch, but not necessarily acquiring more revenue. So, I think that's, that's important. And now I'm going to totally blank on what you actually asked me. Oh, yes, I'm going to forecast and go ahead

ask me that if you want to. Yeah, just basically, like, how are you helping brands, you know,

what they wanted it to do. What are the conversations that you're having with brand to come to you

“with similar convictions or hunches? How do you help them model out? How, how it might work for them?”

Yeah, this is, this is a core value prop of key citizen systems. And what keen is a unified platform for measurement planning and forecasting? Our secret sauce, if you will, is that we have

a database of $45 billion of our clients spend. And the measurement of the impact of that spend

has on their sales revenue and profit, both on short-term and long-term results. We're able to then wait that database to predictively forecast the impact of channels even before our brand ever spends a dollar in that channel, right? Because we've seen other brands that aren't necessarily of the same category, but probably category is just one weight. Other brands of similar revenue sizes of spend levels of mixed strategies of, and so we can use that to create essentially an

ingoing assumption of when you spend on CTV. Here's the performance that we would expect for your brand, not just in CTV, but when you launch CTV, how's that going to impact your brand search performance in your direct mail performance? And so must they allow a cross? So all of that is forecasted

and once you actually launch or we're going to, in real time, bring in actual data,

which is going to give us a sharper and sharper picture of how CTV is performing for you.

“So then now in the next planning period, we could say, should you spend more? Should you spend less?”

What should your overall mix be? Where should, like, should CTV all come from new budget? Or should we be pulling from a different area? And if so, which area? Or areas more likely? So your question, Eric, is again exactly like the purpose of our platform for brands like Hannah? And Hannah, back to my question, I think about the direct mail, is where do you actually, I think you talked about this in our previous podcast? I think Amazon is one of the main answers,

but where do you see the main halo show up? Where do the purchase show, because people aren't buying

on their TVs? Yes. You know, whatever two B wants us to do, or I think there's another company that

had, you know, think Amazon doesn't now, to you can actually buy on screen. But where do you actually see the purchase show up most for your connected TV spend? For connected TV, we say it

“direct with a, with a small portion also on Amazon. There's some limitation, I think, around”

reporting and like, where are you able to fully track that, but for us, we see a direct on connected. Have you had any swings, you know, like, so direct mail and postcards have worked really well. CTV has worked great. Can you, can you think of an example of an initiative that you kind of championed or pioneered that didn't have the result you wanted it to and and how that those results showed up? Yeah, I think an interesting one that is also doing a discovery channel for us,

or what I think people consider as a discovery channel as Pinterest. So for women's apparel brand, Pinterest, I think off the top of your head seems to make sense, right? Like, it's where people are going to discover new products and we've tried it a few times and we just haven't quite cracked the code there. Some of it could be a timing issue, but that's one example where where it hasn't worked out for us. There's been a few other channels that we've had similar issues where, you know,

maybe it worked for a few months and then we started to see the returns not quite as strong. But Pinterest is one that stands out because especially for our category, I think like inherently you would think it makes sense. Just any any data from keen about what you see on platforms like Pinterest? Much love to our friends that Pinterest, I mean for sure, like, there are brands that that it's a very strong performer for, for a share. I think the takeaway is that, you know, the best

strategy is only as good as the best measurement plan and it's possible that something that appears to not be performing, you know, the way that many brands measure in GA and, you know, multi-touch and things like that, that's something that actually is having a positive impact and may appear not to, right? And maybe that impact is more of a long-term impact and we're measuring it in, you know, 14-day or 30-day look back windows or whatever, right? So the definition of

performance really matters in terms of how we talk about what worked and what didn't work. In keen system, you know, we bring visibility into, you know, almost every investment has some positive impact, assuming that creative is good and targeting is good and things like that. The question is, is like, well, could we have had a bigger impact if we put those dollars somewhere else? It's a relative question, right? Like, you know, we spent this 50k on this channel,

could that 50k or could 30 of that K really been more impactful if we spent it somewhere else. And so again, it's really about really looking at your media plan dollar by dollar and even

to my division returns of, you know, of sale revenue profit? I think one more additional thing

to add on there from a brand perspective is there's also a bit of tolerance, right? Like, so to Jesse's point, you might not see the return in maybe like then anticipated or then anticipated return immediately, but maybe it has longer term effects on the brand and every brand can have to make that decision for themselves. Like, how long are we willing to invest in something before we see that return and depending on the growth stage that you're at, that answer could be

completely different, right? So it just depends on also how much extra funds you have, or how

“much are you willing to spend when you don't see that immediate impact? So I think that's a really”

important distinction too, because a much larger brand, you know, might be I want to keep spending whereas we're really taxable with our dollars. Yeah, I agree. And I think a lot of brands really approached this question in a very binary way, right? Did it work or didn't it work? And I think maybe the more advanced question is like, well maybe seven, like maybe 30% of it worked really well and 70% didn't. So let's pair it back, but that doesn't mean that we have to cut it completely.

What's the longest, I've, from doing this podcast, I think podcasts are one of the, can, can have the longest latency. I've talked with a lot of brands who found out that the podcast

advertising means that they made, you know, a year ago or six months ago, are finally paying

dividends like now. Is that something that you see in the data Jesse that podcasts can have a really a, a long latency? Yeah, absolutely podcast. And, and also even channels like out of home, and even like traditional TV, you know, we do like to say it's hard to have a long term impact. If you don't first have a short term impact, the question is is just degrees of that impact and for sure, it's like the bulk of, you know, brand awareness and brand preference are really

leading indicators. Like why do you want brand awareness? It's because you want future sales and future revenue, right? In our experience, many CFOs don't really care if you go with them and say, look, like we drove brand awareness and they're like, I'm looking at my bottom line, I don't care.

“So the more important thing I think is getting into this, like how much value for the, like”

financial value for the brand that we create. And what is that going to be realized? And I think that's really the promise of what's unlocked with betterment and analytics technology and creating better plans because of it. I have an example of kind of the opposite where another channel for us TikTok, which is probably a bit controversial, but we, we didn't see, you know, immediate ROI, let's just speak to ROI. We didn't see immediate ROI in platform or in any of our tracking tools,

but this wasn't another channel that we wanted to continue to grow both on the organic side and paid for a lot of the reasons that I've already spoken to and we gave it some time and it's taken about six months. But like we're starting to see the momentum there with our ads as well. So I think that there's also, there is a degree of like you just have to put the systems in place and give things a bit of time to ramp up. White listing is another great example that I have

noted, which took us almost, I would say like 18 months for that to really start working for us. And now white listed ads are a top performer. So there are some things that, you know, like fundamentally are going to work and you just need to tweak things, try different creative, targeting until you can find the formula that works for your brand. That's such a good point

“because I think in both podcasting and streaming, there's so many smoke and mirrors and there's”

so many different ways of buying it and like transparency into what you're even buying can be a challenge. And so it's like doing the challenge, doing the channel isn't necessarily the question, like figuring out tweaking your approach to the channel and figuring out how you're going to buy and exactly what you're buying can really be important to success. 100%. And you mentioned Tik Tok and earlier in the pre interview, we were talking really about your move into affiliate for Q4.

That's the approach I hear again and again with Tik Tok is less about just sort of like hammering it with ads and more about like building an army of affiliates and influencers who are going to talk about your brand. Is that the approach that you guys have taken that's paying dividends or maybe

maybe you just talk about what you're doing on Tik Tok that is finally working? Yeah, so for us,

we are it's been a combination of really ramping up our organic channel so posting very consistently that's one layer of it. Another as we've grown our overall influencer program across Instagram and Tik Tok this year. So certainly that helps as well. And then the third is the paid paid component with paid ads. We haven't actually focused a ton on affiliate, but I've spoken to many

to in the future. It's not in our immediate plan, but definitely we're going to consider for 27. And also live shopping. I was just six months ago or so I was at the True Classic office and they would just hired someone to do their full-time live shopping aspect. I feel for a peril, it's a potential low-hanging fruit. I've heard that as well and I've heard of people having full studios now and their office is to go live 24 hours a day if they want to. I was just in a

conference and that was a big talk of was all about the live Tik Tok shopping. Is that hold up with

what you're seeing Jesse as well? It is. Affiliate is a powerful part of the mix influencer and the

creator economy in general as part of that affiliate strategy, a huge area of focus. But again, the way that we see the world is that marketing is the primary lever that a brand has to drive

“profitable growth. I believe that and I believe that marketing should drive profit. So it can also”

be a trap to just something that we work with our clients a lot on is the right balance between brands and promotion because an overall alliance on promotion can make media our ally look very strong but maybe make profit our ally a road. And so I think a brand should really be focused on winning brands and not continuously winning on price and promotion. Speaking of price and promotion

and Q4 prep, are there any big bets that your that Carv is looking to make this Q4, is it sort of

more running with a played book that you know that you've ran with last year? Are there any exciting bets that you that you could tell us about? Yeah, I'd say that we continue to evolve our playbook. We certainly look a lot at historical though and what the market is doing to help inform on Jesse's topic of you know this this sweet spot of price and promotion we try and be a little bit more conservative on promotion in general. I will say that one thing that we've added

to our promotion mix the past few years are gift with purchases and we try and do something unique that's not an item available on site the rest of the year and that is going to continue to be a part

“of our promotion strategy. We just released a report moving beyond the discount so I think a lot”

of brands are feeling as though you know they're hooked on having to discount and being squeezed

on all sides their margin in other areas. So obviously I think yeah gift gift with purchases is a good answer to that. I think you guys just expanding your product catalog is just such a big deal for you as well. We talked a lot about that in the in the pre-interview but maybe just talk a little bit about what opening up to all seasons and just general apparel from swimwear has done to the to your marketing mix. I bet I'm sure it's had a few headaches just sort of the bread of what your

marketing has to cover now has changed so much. Yeah so we just to give the followers a brief synopsis so so car really started as a core outdoors swim swim brand and kind of slowly over the last 25

“years has expanded into that coastal lifestyle apparel and we've really found that our customer loves”

it and we want to continue to give them more of it. So you know what that looks like for fall is a really beautiful collection and it gives us an exciting opportunity to continue to give our customers more product of course throughout the whole year and as far as our marketing mix goes I might have spoken about this on the last episode what we've we've been really conscientious of how we are merchandising swim with apparel throughout the year so that then our customers really used to

seeing of course the apparel in the fall and it's it's just exciting to expand into a new season and reach those customers put a new product. Yeah. Very cool. I have a question for Anna if that's okay. The question is if for brands who are in similar positions as you in expanding their product catalog and new seasonality what are challenging yet awesome positions to be in where it's like how does that impact your media budget and how do you know how much more you could spend the

hour right because you know more new new selling seasons more sales capacity with a broader capacity to sell so that's going to impact how much you can spend and market those products how you're approaching like planning and light of that uncertainty. Yeah so it's grown a bit over the past few years so I would say it's not like we're like hey here's an entire new category that you guys don't really have a larger budget to sell like the team has been working towards us and we're

now in this in this place. When we think about the overall mix we we certainly continue to lead

potentially have to overinvest a bit so we are strategic about I think influencer is a good example

“of seeding more product getting more of this new product out there and then we look at our”

existing customers quite a bit to see okay who was already buying these categories that we are expanding into or what are the comparable categories that we think that they would be able to expand into and we use our own channels quite a bit to really craft that messaging as much as we can instead of just completely expanding our overall you know paid media budget that's come naturally over the years but there's certainly a little bit of overinvesting that needs to happen and also

some overinvesting a key moments in the front and half of the year where we know if we acquire a customer during key months they actually have the highest LTV and they'll come back in the fall so we want to acquire more of those types of customers. The long-winded way of saying there's a lot of different factors happening but we're trying to really be strategic as much as we can about how we approach it without just spending a ton of money with no return. Nice Erica

I guess the answer to your question is the solidest season I'm excited about Hannah's capacity to

“spend. Yeah just to open up. Hannah any questions for Jesse before we sign off here?”

I'd say I mean this is really broad but what are some trends that you guys are seeing with the channel mix? We have so many emerging channels coming up just high level like are there any really standout trends that you guys are seeing? Yeah we have a really awesome insights report that's available on our website that tracks some of this and certainly like I was talking about the growth opportunity in retail media both for endemic and non-indemic brands. We see a lot of runway and out of

home as a channel that where there's like a lot of underinvestment but without speaking too

specifically I think that the bigger trend is not a new one which is that brands are always

struggling to find the balance between upper funnel and lower funnel and you know the trend is really thinking about the full funnel has a performance vehicle that works together and just the ability to now measure plan and drive organizational alignment around making full funnel decisions to ensure that brands are hitting short-term and long-term growth goals but the technology that's coming out and the speed at which those decisions and insights are available now for

for marketers is a true game changer and enabling much more full funnel investment. Love that. Anything to add there, Hannah? I was gonna ask one more question. Are there any really standout AI tools that your team is using to support what you just spoke to? It's called keen decision systems. We're in AI. We are in the AI native tool. The core of our technology.

“I think that's one of the things that differentiates us is like for a lot of the MMM space the”

technology is that it's software for us the technology is not software. The technology is called Keynes AI Cortex and it just makes MMM much more real-time, fast, priced more efficiently and the

name holds for real-time decision making. Yeah, we built it in house and it's powerful stuff.

Thanks for doing my job for me, Hannah. Amazing. I really teach you up on that one. That was great. We're at an end for today. So go to keenDS.com, check out some of the resources that Jesse has mentioned here and if you want a sweet set of coastal apparel go to carvedesigns.com and order yourself a catalog. I might be doing the same. Thank you both for coming on to this. It was awesome. We could make it work. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me.

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 consumeralloneword.co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DSC podcast. We'll see you next time.