Why Q4 Discovery Now Starts In September

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1:03technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's a host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro. 58% 58% of shoppers plan to start their holiday shopping earlier than they did last year, according to Navar's 2026 Holiday Shopping Report. The holiday window is opening months ahead of schedule and even though we can all see Halloween decorations on the stores and shelves in September, brands are caught off guard by the holidays every year. The brands that win Q4 aren't the ones who spend the most. They're the ones who plant the most seeds in September and harvest them over the holidays. So how do you build a Q4 media plan that earns market share before your competitors even think of saying happy holidays? I'm Benjamin Shapiro. Enjoying me today is Damian Volta, principal campaign manager at AdRoll, a multi-channel advertising platform that helps mid-size brands run full-final campaigns across the open web. And today, Damian is going to explain

2:08how to optimize your media strategy for the holidays. Damian, welcome to the Martech podcast. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Excited to have you on the show. Rumor has it. This is your first time on a podcast you've chosen poorly. Rumor is true, although I would debate the second point. I think this is an excellent place to start. I was digging for a compliment. Thank you for filling all my hopes and dreams. Look, I got a bone to pick with you. You're the principal campaign manager at AdRoll, and I think you're the person that has decided that media buyers need to start their media buying for the holidays super early. My birthday is mid-September. Why is everybody already talking about Christmas? Why are the holidays starting in September? It's a great question. You've kind of brought it up right at the top there that there's data that shoppers are saying they're going to start early. So advertisers could kind of put their hands up and say, hey, the consumers are making us do this, but I would say it's kind of a chicken and egg thing. I think people are starting

3:08earlier and earlier because the advertising industry just keeps pushing back that window a little bit more. I could say more about what I think that is, but I'll pause there for a second. All right. So whether it's the advertisers, I can't imagine that people are thinking about their holiday shopping in early September. I think that this is the brand play, right? Like marketers realize that their highest ROI happens in late Q4. So they start to try to prime the pump there. One of the things that you can accomplish early on in September that are actually going to make an impact in late December. Well, part of the reason that I think the pressure comes to consumers and then advertisers are doing all this stuff, pushing it further back. There's a big incentive for advertisers to stretch out this big part of the year because when the demand all piles in for this limited time, it gets harder and harder for advertisers to capture. So if we only have say like a week or two of really intense holiday demand, I like to think about it as kind of going out into a rainstorm with a bucket and trying to catch as much rain as you can. So if you have this really

4:10concentrated period where there's a ton of rain, but you only catch, you know, a few buckets worth, what did it all mean at the end of the day? So advertisers are they really want to stretch out that time period because if we have the demand appearing across more months and weeks, it gives them a chance to kind of get in there and harvest and not have to kind of have this all or nothing play that happens right around Black Friday, cyber Monday. And that's why I think some of the pressure that consumers are responding to, although like I said, a little bit of a chicken and egg thing there, perhaps. So I want to talk a little bit about ROI. How should brands approach the ROI of their holiday spend and why not just spend more money at the peak as opposed to pushing it earlier? Yeah, there's really constraints when it comes to that talk that peak season. Like you can't just keep pouring money onto an audience because there really is a finite amount of demand to capture. And this is something that can kind of get lost when you start to chat with folks outside of paid media is there's kind of this understanding that if you're investing in paid advertising, you put

5:12in a dollar, you get maybe a dollar 50 back that relationship is linear. It's really not. When there's that concentrated demand, if you just keep pouring money onto it, it's going to drive up your costs. Yeah, when we're thinking about that that peak demand moment, you can only spend so much before it really starts to become inefficient. So the hope is that you don't just pour all that money in. You want to invest a little bit more in advance and buy investing more in advance. It does let you get more holiday return. But you're kind of trying to, like we were talking about before, you want to spread the demand creation out a little bit more so that you aren't caught just with that budget that you have around Black Friday, cyber and Monday. And you're like, this is it. This is my only chance. The more you can invest over a longer period of time, the hope is that you have a better ROI once the whole holiday season is wrapped up. What I'm inferring from what you're saying is that there's a demand creation phase for the holiday where you are doing more brand building product awareness, a different type of marketing. So you can create more demand that can be captured in peak season when everybody has their

6:17fingers glued to the buy button. So across a four month campaign, does your evaluation criteria stay the same through the whole campaign? Or you evaluating your September spend differently than your December spent? Yeah, there's you don't want to be looking for ro-as the whole time when you are trying to make that brand investment. That's, I could like to think about it as kind of like a three phase approach if you do have brand mixed into everything. So in the very near term, when you first get started, you have kind of like your platform metrics and that, you know, that might not tell you a lot about revenue. It tells you about like reach, click through rate, CPC, stuff like that. That's really helpful for kind of looking at your creative, your brand creative, especially relative to each other. Like, hey, we have three videos that are running. This one seems to have a better CTR as a lower CPM. That gives you a signal about what a creative is actually working. And then as you start to get to maybe like a month or two in market, you start to look for what I would call a halo metric. Branded search impressions is a favorite one of mine. So if you've

7:18been running brand ads for a little bit, the hope is that people might be seeing more of you and thinking about you enough to actually go do a search. And you can't say 100% hey, our brand ads cause the spike in brand searches and brand search impressions. But it's very interesting. We started here, look where we've come at this time. So that kind of helps you see, are we is brand making an impact outside of just those channels where we're actually launching and measuring it? In the last really, when you, as you're kind of wrapping up the season or maybe doing a retrospective, you want to really look at the whole environment of all the spend that you had. And especially if you have a comparison point from the previous year, what was our CPA? Were we able to lower our CPA or were we able to spend more and maintain our CPA? And that's a really good sign that your brand investment actually did pay off because it's not, it's never going to show up in the, the brand campaign itself, right? Like if you go into last click attribution, you're not going to see, hey, look how much money we made from it. The hope is it'll show up elsewhere. Yeah, I, I want a stereotype for a minute. So allow me to, you know, profile here a little bit.

8:19You're a performance marketer. You're breaking the rules, my man. You're supposed to be like, I got a dollar. I'm going to make you a dollar 50 and I could prove it and everything is connected to like these really hardcore metrics and like, what's this word brand about? That's for like the, you know, the creatives who just light money on fire. Like, hang on a second. You got to do brand advertising, even as a media buyer. This is breaking my brain. What's up? I'm a reformed performance media buyer. I did start my career all in on performance. But as with most things, people don't change their mind until they're left with absolutely any other way to go. And that, that's kind of my experience. I was in a, a former role and it was really interesting problem because there was so much money to spend on advertising that the company was not able to spend it efficiently. They would keep trying to put more money into paid search, put more money into these like, you know, lower funnel demand capture channels. And like we talked a little bit at the top, you just keep putting money in there. You just

9:20make everything more demand to capture. You're just paying for the clients. Exactly. Yeah. It's a very like kind of not short-sighted. That might be a little bit strong. But you're just going all in on one thing and at a certain point, you can't keep hammering that over and over again. And if you have the wonderful problem of having more money than you can spend, the experience that I had is that everyone starts to think, maybe we should diversify our media a little bit and try something different rather than just hammering these performance campaigns over and over again. There's two problems. Right. One is we got more money than we could spend and we don't know, you know, bird a hole in your pocket, I think. Thank you. And the other problem is, look, we've, we've got some money not unlimited. Are we better served doing an extended campaign where we're starting to do some brand stuff early and capture more demand at the end? Or should you just save, if you have limited powder, save it all for peak season. Help me make sense of this balance between brand investment early and demand capture late. Demand capture, if you had

10:23to pick just one, it's the one you would choose, right? And I think it's really important before you can make any decisions like that. And this might, this might be something that goes outside of marketing, but you need to understand what you're either CPA or Rhoaz. Whatever that number is, that kind of golden number where the CFO or the head of marketing or whoever says, hey, we can pay $50 per acquisition or we can get as low as a $1.50 Rhoaz and we'll be okay, but we can't go past that because it breaks the economics. And that number really determines what are we going to do? Because if you're spending all your money and you're still not hitting the efficiency threshold, I would say it's kind of hard to make an argument to invest in brand because you're leaving demand out on the table and not capturing it. But in my experience, it's much more common that there's a little bit more money than can be spent efficiently, even with small brands and especially with small brands sometimes because they have so little recognition. So you have extra dollars that go towards efficient capture. You have why I left over. I would argue it's much better to use that leftover money that's not going to be spent efficiently trying to invest in

11:25better results tomorrow, rather than getting, trying to, you know, we'll craft you about how you spend it today. But the problem is you don't know what's left over until the end and then it's too late to spend it. So you got to make the decision of what you're investing in the brand. So it does require either a little bit of judgment, you know, some hypotheses. Are there any benchmarks that you have or that you recommend some brands that are performing well that they're like, we always try to invest this much going into the holidays and then leave this percentage left for the demand capture piece. Have you heard the long and short of it by a less bonnet and Peter field? Not familiar. It's they came up with this 6040 rule after looking at a ton of campaigns, but that was they were kind of looking at CPG and retail sales, not strictly online. So that's the number that everyone, especially a fervent brand proponents lean into is 60% brand 40% demand. I think that's a very interesting number and the more scale you have, it could start to become more viable. But I'll give

12:26you the melee math answer and say it really depends because it depends. Yeah. If you only have $10,000 a month to spend and you're like I said before coming in under that goal, I personally, maybe you put a little bit towards brand just as an investment in the future, but you really don't want to leave today's demand on the table because that's what gets you fed and contrary to popular belief, brand awareness advertising isn't just about brand awareness. It is actually about fueling better conversions and sales and the health of revenue coming in long term. How does your creative change when you're splitting your campaign into brand and direct response? Are you video first and then flat imagery later? What's the difference in brand creative when you're putting this together? This is a fun one. So conversion ads, they're basically like a designer that I worked with called them little digital coupons. They pop up in your feed, they have look at this thing, buy two, get it for this price or get this amount off or buy in this limited

13:26amount of time. You're kind of making the heart sale, but it's you're really hammering the promotion. But brand ads have to go in a completely different direction because the goal is very different. So there's this three part framework that I like to reference when we're talking about brand ads. It's they need to be noticed, remembered and correctly attributed. If you give me a few moments here to go on a brief tangent, there's this study that kind of influenced my thinking here where they showed something like 140 ads on weeknight TV to a bunch of people in Australia. And then they called them on the weekend and they asked they describe the ads and they asked, did you remember this? And what they came back with was about 40% of the ads were remembered by the people they surveyed. 40% aided recall. Yeah, not terrible. But then they asked, do you remember what the brand was that actually ran the ad and it went down to another 40%. I was going to say what 20%. But yeah, go ahead. So 16% is what that comes out to of all the ads that were shown actually were attributed to the correct brand. So even if you get the first part right and this is where I've gotten

14:31some scuffles with creative, like you can have a really cool vision that ad can be very fun and memorable on its own. But if people don't remember the brand that was attached to it, it's kind of useless, in my opinion. So the number one thing with brand creative isn't it has to be noticed remembered and attributed correctly. So that really requires you have to get more simple. Like, it's a very short window to get in front of people. We're not trying to sell something. We're just trying to build memory. So it's very important that the brand is immediately distinguishable. You stay really simple with the message, maybe one tagline, one product and focus more on comprehension and building memory over trying to get a bunch of like sales pitch type stuff in. I'll go on my own tangent. Did you see the show, the bear? No, I haven't seen it. Okay, it's one of my favorite shows ever. It's a, basically, it's a it's a fiction story, but it's about a chef, the cooking show. I've heard it's pretty intense. I've heard it's so great show. Honestly, like maybe my second favorite show of all time,

15:31I really loved it, but they because of we're streaming it would have the same ad for this chicken nugget brand all of the time. And my wife and I would be sitting there watching this show and then they'd be like, okay, all this like high dining food. And then there'd be this ad for chicken nuggets. And I look, those nuggets actually do look pretty good. And we went to Hawaii and didn't have our like standard grocery order there. So we went and grabbed some chicken nuggets because my son is a negatarian. And he exclusively eats nuggets on vacation. And we have, we've got this brand and then we had it and turns out the nuggets were great. And then after we came back from Hawaii and finished the show and we're like, oh, we tried those. We didn't have the brand recall. Even then we'd seen this ad and talked about it multiple times. If you don't get that actual brand impression where somebody remembers what the product is, it means nothing. And as we're starting to think about the holidays, even now in, you know, September, October, if you can't get your brand across, you can't get that brand recall your performance marketing suffers in the end as well.

16:37I have 100% agree. And I love the term, nuggetarian. We're raising one in this household as well. We have, we have two nuggetarians. I just one of them is almost exclusively a nugget eater. Okay. Damien, I want to move on to our next topic. How do buyers actually find brands in the holiday season? So when somebody goes looking for a product now, what's sitting between you and them? Well, the 800 pound gorilla or maybe white elephant room, either one is the LLM's, Chatchy PT, all that good stuff. And I think that's kind of maybe the question behind the question here is like, how is AI factory into all this? So we have some survey data saying that 65% of shoppers are planning to use AI for holiday shopping. And I think maybe the thing that people are getting a little caught up on is a living or dying by am I going to show up in the query when people are looking for something. I think that's a worthy thing to work towards. But in my mind, it reinforces

17:37if you're waiting to be discovered, you're not playing with a full a full deck of cards. That reinforces in my mind the idea that brand advertising you need to get out and proactively get in front of people because there's a good chance to search for you and you don't show up. And if you can still show up in their head when they're seeing the other brands, I would argue that's a bigger win than being a brand that they don't recognize that comes up and Chatchy PT or what have you. There's an AEO strategy component here, which is I think scaring a lot of brands because it is not something you can keyword optimize as much as you used to be able to when we were all focused on SEO. It's not pages and site structure and backlinks and all the stuff you can manufacture. It's airy pithy things like brand recognition, brand authority. Honestly, it's a topic that we think about a lot for I hear everything with our production. How do you build an authoritative brand that not only you make aware to your customers,

18:40but also to the LLMs? How does AI mediating, discovery change what brands actually get surfaced? There was a I talk to our team about this because it's something that they're thinking about a lot too when it comes to AI visibility and how to handle that. And they said something you were I take it you have some SEO chops from the way you were talking about it. And that's actually my first year and a half of the agency. I was running a lot of SEO audits for prospects and customers. I'll interrupt you for a second. I did host an SEO podcast for about five years as a marketing generalist. So I picked up some tricks, but I'm a total faker. Go on. Well, you're probably familiar with the idea of like backlinks and building authority that way. I've heard of them. I kind of think you know, SEO is dead. Yaday yaday yaday. But I also think what's old is new because I was as I was talking about this with our team. They were saying there's really no silver bullet in terms of like, Oh, you got to put this in this on your website. And

19:41that'll make the LLM surface you. What they were talking about is third party validation. And you know, kind of this is where brand maybe gets out of the world of just paid advertising, but PR and being surfaced, you know, when other people are talking about you, whether that's review side, it's maybe something like Reddit. And increasingly, you know, there's trees to the stuff. There was some freak out recently about Reddit is like not providing as many citations to Chad G PT. But in the same, it's kind of the holistic thing that the backlinks, the what that was working towards is like, we only trust you if other people are saying good things about you. And it seems like from what we're seeing so far on our end is that you kind of have to take the same approach with AI like or LLM's like, if you want to be found, you have to be showing up in other places and having people say positive things about you. So that is something really important to think about it's you're not going to be able to do it in a vacuum AI visibility is something that's going to you're going to have to bring other other voices and other people into the strategy with you. Before we turn the page back to the holidays, I just want to say

20:42there's a couple different things. A, getting other people talking about you, right? And it used to be backlinks. So there was a traceable link. But now it could be in the context of conversations. The channels where people are talking about you change all of the time. Reddit was super important to chat GPT, which is the biggest LLM traffic driver. And then it's been deprioritized. YouTube transcripts are incredibly important to chat GPT and a cloud, right? LinkedIn articles not LinkedIn posts. So it's like what format of content A, the LLM's can get access to because they're not behind a paywall or not being blocked from bots. And B, the important thing is actually having this sort of notion of Omni channel coverage. All of these brands across all of these channels are talking about this one source. Well, that one source then gets the authority. So it's who's talking about you? Where are they talking about you? How much are they talking about you? And what are they saying? That's really what generally is driving authority engineering. And it's squishy. It's messy.

21:48It's not one sort of like volume of links times page rank, you know, like what SEO used to be. It is very hard to actually pin down what is driving authority engineering. Let's go back to the holidays. So which channel should marketers actually rely on to get in front of when you can't necessarily control the LLMs and you definitely can't make this big fundamental change in your AEO quickly. So what do you do to get in front of your buyers during the holiday? So a lot of brands are really leaning into kind of four main channels that they build their strategy around. So that's going to be paid search, paid social retail media, and then their own own audiences through email or SMS. And those, there are some really good branding options on those channels, especially paid social for instance. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do. But I would argue some of those are very demand capture focused. And so the what I would say is you don't want to replace any of that. That's a very solid foundation to build on and ultimately how you make your money

22:50at the end of the day. But layering other channels on top of that that are maybe more suited for brand advertising, which would mean maybe more visual, broader reach, but also just getting out of that same concentrated battle that you're fighting with other brands and those main four channels. That's where everybody else is. They're all dumping money into Google and Facebook and we've been doing it for a decade now. And there's a lot of data showing that it's just getting more and more expensive. And I think that as the pressure increases on marketers, they devalde to those channels. Like these little explorations into other areas get killed so early because leadership or whoever is anxious about the amount of volume that's coming in. And so everyone just piles in there. And so I would say the answer if you want to think more about branding is open web channels for sure. Some of that looks different. Some have been around for a really long time. Like display, something that AdWords really well known for. But other channels like CTV in particular is a huge one. That's a big opportunity. And the interesting thing about CTV is no one really owns it yet. Like you don't have a meta or Google controlling the CTV landscape. So tapping into

23:55those open web channels like CTV, native display audio even on podcasts, that starts to get you out into these other channels where you're not competing so much. But you're also diversifying the people that you're bumping into. There's a lot of people on those big four channels that I mentioned. But it's not everybody. There's more people out there. There's overlap. And you really can kind of tap into new audiences and new means of communicating with people. Like CTV is a very different medium from some of those performance channels. I'm going to put you on the spot. I don't expect you to have accurate data. But how do you think about the difference between the CPMs and the payoffs for those channels? And by those channels, I'm thinking CTV, getting yourself on television, audio, display, your paid social, your paid search. Like where are you paying the most for an impression? And what generally has the highest return when you're thinking about this notion of just getting awareness, authority, like the the pre-demand capture stuff? Yeah. You're saying CPM is strictly for pre-demand capture. I just want to be prepared. Which ones are the most efficient

24:59when you're just trying to get known? I would say it's hard to, like you said, without exact numbers. But as you go up into those higher funnel objectives, you will notice that things are getting significantly less expensive. Just to kind of do the performance comparison. If you looked at, say, meta, paid social, you have your conversion campaign, you could be up to $50 or something like that sometimes because they're really trying to get that high intent person. Whereas you go up to a reach campaign, I've seen as low as $2 sometimes. It's been a while. I don't know if it ever gets that low still. But I would definitely say when you're looking at your upper funnel channels if you're comparing them together, I would want everything to fall at least under $5. In a lot of cases, unless it was some very targeted channel for a very specific use case. But I would look at them all together and how many people are being reached. And also look at the creative too. Do you feel like you're getting signals at the creative? Is that the people are engaging with it? And then

25:59if you look at those channels side by side, it's going to be a competitive set. I think it's hard to have an exact number. But if you have three or four upper funnel channels that are in that sub $5 range and you have one that's over that, I guess the way I would kind of put a bow on all that is I'd want to know a really compelling reason why we continue to invest in that more expensive channel. And I would kind of put the burden to understand that because I think they're generally going to fall lower and be comparable. Your musician, I think that's a banjo behind you. That's a mandolin, but I am. That's a mandolin. All right. We're running a K-PO clip company. For anybody that's not a musician, that's the little thing you put on the neck of a guitar that changes the tone of the guitar. And anybody that's watching on the video, Damien's holding what up now. Obviously a niche audience, they have to be people that play a specific instrument. And we're we've got a new style of K-PO clip. Nobody's ever seen it before. They don't know the brand. And we're just starting to build awareness in the beginning of the holidays. Give me the percentage of spend that you're allocating

27:03to the big four or five channels. I would start with at least 75% just as a baseline to figure out where we're coming in against that CPA or whatever our benchmark number is. And then I would start to dial up or dial down depending on how inefficient or efficient we can be. 75% going into brand, 25% going into demand. Opposite. I would at first start and want to invest and understand what does capture even look like. Because if you if you struck gold, if the product is so amazing, it's just flying off the shelves, it might not be the time to put a ton of money into brand. What I suspect will happen is that you'll probably have to modulate maybe closer down to 50% of your budget or something to stay within your economics. And then as we were talking about earlier that left over money. Why just keep pouring it in? Let's start investing tomorrow with that money. You're keeping a lot of your powder driver to mangen. And actually what I was looking for is I'd do a lot of CTV. I'd spend 75% on television because people need to see the pro or something

28:05like that. When you're thinking about just the awareness part that 25% that you're saving for or that you're allocating to just building the brand building awareness. How are you allocating your budget across the different channels? When I would start there, I would think about in your capture channels too, like say you're using paid social, you want to get a nice little waterfall going in there. So I would do a little bit of brand awareness there too. But for a product like a capo, something that's visual, you know, you want to hold it or you would like to hold it and see it and kind of hear it in action. I would steer away from just static. That could be a good brand awareness builder static ads, but it's easy to get lost in the noise. Video really becomes valuable at this stage. And I think just the effort of creating video keeps a lot of people from investing in it as much. But I would really want to look at CTV, YouTube, options on paid social from whether it's TikTok or meta, maybe not a channel like Reddit as much as they don't really have a video placement. And then also thinking about just open web video too, like I'm sure you've

29:06spent some time on ultimate guitar as I have looking up tabs. That's a site that I'd love to show up even if it is kind of like just your classic banner at or if they had some type of video placement or anything music related targeted display video to show the capabilities and have people understand what the product is. And then you're doing paid social as well for a little added demand capture. Okay, I want to move on to our next topic. So you're sitting down with your CFO and you're talking about your investments and you're saying, look, we need to start investing our paid budget into something that's not going to drive revenue immediately in September. We have to do brand, we have to think of top of funnel and the attributions of mess. How do you get your CFO to buy in? There's a place that I would start and I think to zoom out a little bit more is you don't want to start the brand conversation from a defensive point of view because that you're on the back foot already and that kind of I feel as where the conversation naturally goes. You want to frame it more is what are we trying to achieve? What obstacles are we trying to overcome by advertising

30:08with brand? The thing I would I would start with is that most media programs run into one of two constraints. So the first is that they run out of money before they're able to capture all the demand that's out there. Or like I talked about earlier, you have a budget but you're having a hard time spending it efficiently. So the way I would open up the conversation with the CFO is I assume that one of those two things have happened in the past or are happening and brand is our way of getting around that. So what we like I mentioned earlier, we're not just doing brand awareness for the sake of awareness. It's to improve the CPA or Rho as or whatever that number is that's holding us to efficiency. So basically I guess just to wrap that all up, I would just think about how we're going to overcome this problem that a lot of media teams run into. I want to do this because I think it's going to improve our future performance. We want to get around these constraints and continue improving. We don't want to be stuck at this plateau and that's why we want to invest in brand or why we did invest in brand. I'll play your CFO for a second. That sounds hello risky.

31:15We're just going to do a bunch of ads that are not necessarily meant to drive conversions and they're kind of in the time frame when we really need to nail Q4. So how do I rationalize that there will be a positive return on my investment when the media isn't necessarily trying to drive conversions? We would want to understand if we have year over year data, this is really good, but if we think about Q4 last year, let's say our CPA was $50. And we had trouble spending all of our budget. Yeah, exactly. And we had a finite amount of budget that we were able to spend. Let's say we had $100,000 to spend. The goal is that with these brand awareness ads, again, we're not going to be able to go into the brand platform and see, hey, this campaign drove this amount. But let's say this Q4 comes around, we have another $100,000 to spend. The goal with that brand spend is that we could potentially bring that CPA down to $40 and with the same amount of money, get more conversions. Or if we have more budget to spend that we are able to actually

32:19spend and get the demand capture. So, you know, the hard part is that there isn't that, hey, look, it's right here in Tableau or Google Data Studio. Yeah. All right. So as your pretend CFO, all right, I can rationalize that a brand investment lowers my CAC. But I don't really know how to measure that. And like, I look at spreadsheets and count dollars. So help me figure out the conversions. Like, what am I measuring to figure out of what you're doing is working? The thing we're going to be looking at really is, and hopefully I'm not repeating myself too much, but did we, were we able to spend the same amount of money and drive a bigger result? Or could we spend more money? And I would say rather than splitting hairs and trying to look at the individual channels, the campaigns, which just there's tons of value in that. But I would really ask if there was, you know, if we could meet in the middle, my dear CFO, can we think about what the holistic measurement of the program looks like? If you just have this blanket $100,000 to spend, I want to make sure as the media program manager that we are spending that as effectively

33:24as possible. And so if you could give me permission to increase that bigger number with a little bit more flexibility on where the individual parts go, that's what I'm really trying to accomplish with this brand initiative that we're stacking on top of performance. Isn't there like MMM or some sort of other measurement technique where like you're getting some sort of a view through metric or some sort of an indication that whatever stuff you marketing people are doing, putting your fancy ads on TV and can't I see that that actually impacted the buyer down the road? Isn't there some sort of measurement? Well, media mix modeling is pretty cool, but the devil's right there in the name. It's modeling. It's not perfect. It's not actual attribution. And I've been in rooms where really interesting media mix modeling reports came back. And people just sat back and said, I don't buy it. So that's okay. We spent how much did we spend for this MMM? You know, I'm sure it's a range of prices, but it can't get quite expensive to

34:26bring someone in and feed them all your data and have them look at everything and build this for you. I would say that MMM could be really interesting as one data point, but it's not a perfect solution. And if we're going to do it, we have to all agree to kind of abide by the results, right? Because it could bring back some really interesting things that's still just like spending on brand as an always feel intuitive. In the case that I was looking at, there was a webinars where ranked really highly as something that was driving engagement. This isn't a B2B setting. And people were, oh, that's really interesting, but no webinar program to bring back even though it'd been gone for a quarter and apparently contributed. So I would say MMM view through last click. Those are all very useful data points, but ultimately they should inform a bigger picture and none of them are going to be perfect. I think fundamentally when you're thinking about having the finance conversation, you're talking to your CFO, there are some bets that you have to place. And not everything is countable and trackable. Marketing is both an art and a science. And I think that

35:28you're right in the sense that when you're thinking about the evaluation of a brand campaign, A, it's not immediate. And B, it is what's the water level at the end. It has to be more retrospective than it is monitoring the campaign. Sure, there are leading indicators. Is there view through metrics? Are you getting more direct response? Or, you know, there's ways that you could track with or brand campaign is working, but tying it down to the bottom of the funnel is just not what the purpose of the campaign is for. You fundamentally have to have some belief that brand lowers CAC over time. And I think that's really the point to get across with your CFO. Yeah, it's a great point. There's a great chapter in a book I read about fields of uncertainty, various fields of certainty, like physics is a field of certainty. You just, you know, X plus Y equals Z 99% of the time. Marketing is a field of uncertainty and it's probabilistic. So there's not guarantees on all the things that we're doing. But as you said, brand really is a bet. If we could take some part of our budget and say, Hey, this might have ended up getting wasted

36:31on inefficient spend. Otherwise, we don't know if this is going to work, but, you know, come on, can't we make some type of wager on improving our performance was with some part of our budget. As the CFO, I'd ask, could you give me 5% just to try and improve our performance? Is that something you'd be willing to wager to just make the company look better overall at the end of Q4 at the end of the year? Hopefully your CFO understands, understands strategic risk. Okay, I want to move on to our last segment for today. We're going to talk a little bit about building your holiday plan. So we're going to do a little role play here. I've got a million bucks and an unknown brand selling selling beginner guitars to parents. This is actually was my first guitar startup ever or my first startup ever. Where do I allocate my budget first? Help me build my media plan for this guitars to parents company. Well, the first thing like we talked about earlier is you want to understand what does demand capture look like. So at the very beginning, we want to put some portion of budget, I would say,

37:32you know, if we have that money across a quarter, I would put maybe like $50,000 in the first month towards pure demand capture and just see what that looks like. If that isn't performing very well early, we would not just let that spend the whole 50k. We want to set an amount that we're going to use as kind of the experimental amount to set the baseline. And from there, that kind of helps to lay the groundwork from everything else. So once you have that capture baseline, say that is, you know, like 25% or 50% of your monthly budget, that's going to go towards, you know, paid search, paid social, I imagine, be very important in case like this. And then we have that leftover budget. That's where we can really start to invest in brand. So I would take that remaining amount and again, not just dump it all into our brand channels. We're probably going to have like rather than, hey, we have this much every month. We're going to spend it no matter what. It's more like a big pile of money that we're going to. So before the holiday season, we're running a demand campaign to set a baseline, right? And understand if we can spend, are we going to get

38:33some sort of a return on, you know, do we get a positive row as? And you're looking at the standard demand capture channels, your paid search and your paid social because that's where people are looking and clicking and buying. Great. So what's a decent row as? What's a, you know, we're selling $100 guitars. I'm making a 20% return, you know, it costs us 10 bucks to advertise to get a conversion. And I'm a 50% row as am I doing the math, right? You might be better at on the fly math than I am. Look, that's I'm making $20 on a sale and I'm spending 10. So I'm spending 50% of my money. Great. It's a decent return and I can, you know, get a couple of customers, but we're having trouble getting enough demand. What do I do next? That's where to maintain that row as number, which you'll once that's established, we can kind of use that. That could be, I would say, that probably falls as much outside of marketing as within marketing to get direction on that.

39:34But once we know that number, that's where we really do want to start building. A mental availability is the, I think, the most accurate term to use is you want to get the brand out in front of people and start, you know, they have to know it before they can buy it. So you want to get in front of people and establish that memory. And that's where the branch channels would come in very usefully. Okay, we got a segmenting and a targeting problem now. I did some ads and I'm making some money. I can't sell enough of my products. I need to start doing brand. I'm coming up on the holidays. It's September. My target are parents whose kids want to learn how to play the guitar. How am I thinking about what channels to go to? We did a little paid search for demand, Jen, just putting the brand out and, you know, had some sort of an offer. Now I got to build the brand. I got to do some actual marketing. Where do I go? What do I do? What is the creative look like? Who do I target? Targeting. So there's a few different ways to approach that. So demographic is probably the easiest and, you know, this stuff varies from one platform to another. But demographic and behavioral is where the marketer can go away and kind of put their

40:37touch on things. And then as a starter brand, you're probably not going to have access to look alike targeting where you have enough first party data. It's kind of extrapolating new audiences. But I would say the there's a temptation to get super niche like, you know, down to certain locations. And this very narrow age range or trying to get a little clever with, oh, there are new parents. So they must be interested in XYZ with the behavioral type of targeting. The recommendation that I would give, and this is a, I think it sounds maybe not appealing to some people when you talk about it. But the platforms are getting so good at targeting these days that you want to really give them a wide range to go out and find people. So set enough targeting to get started. But most platforms, they will figure out who is engaging and they'll go find more people who look like that. And I've actually in the past even run experiments. Sometimes you tell a campaign to go after a certain audience and it won't listen to you because it's looking for the people who engage. So it, they will go outside of what you actually tell them to do for your robot overlords. But basically to put a,

41:41to put a bow on that, start very broad and allow the channels to optimize with time. That's the benefit of having that longer runway. And the last thing I'd say on that too is when it comes to creative design your creative as if it's getting in front of if you had the hack to put into the platform. And so this is the perfect audience member. We're going to serve them. I found this is, you know, anecdotal. And I don't know the science behind this. But the better your ad is designed for the person that's actually supposed to get in front of the more likely it seems that the channels serve it to those people. I don't know what type of black magic is going from the, those black boxes where all that happens. But it just designed the creative as if the targeting was laid out perfectly. And that'll probably do more work than going in and fiddling with the targeting every single day and trying to get it just right. There's probably some like yes or no boxes to check off. If it's a brand that's specifically made for parents to buy guitars for their kids, you probably want parents that have kids. Absolutely. And the kids have to be a certain age, right? So targeting kids that

42:43are mature enough or big enough to hold the guitar. So I'm looking for households with children, children above six years old as my just baseline targeting. I noticed you didn't say anything about well, you got to put your ads on the guitar sites because the people that have guitars are going to teach their kids to play guitar. And you didn't get like that granular with what sites you're targeting. Does it make sense to try to be granular in terms of where your ad placements are or you know, when you're doing things like your digital display, how picky should you be? I think you shouldn't be picky. I was thinking about something you just said about like household with young children in them. It's like, well, what if Uncle Ben wants to you know buy for his nephew a guitar because he wants to foster a musician ship even though the kids parents aren't musicians. You can't actually box yourself into a corner a little bit if you start to get to narrow. So I would say if you're DSP that you're working with, if there's a way to specify yes, we absolutely

43:45want to show up on this site, that's a great thing to do. But there's so many times where brands think that they know their audience super well. And then the data starts to come in or you start to peel apart what's actually performing on the ads and it ends up not being what you thought it was. So I would say, especially if there's like an opportunity to do it direct by like if you could go right to you know ultimate guitar like we talked about earlier and say, hey, I want to buy from you not through a DSP this placement. That would be a pretty good investment. But when it comes to anything that's served programmatically, I really do think. And again, it sounds like kind of a cop out answer. But the machines are getting so smart and they have been for a long time before anyone was talking about LLM's or AI or any of that stuff. The platform AI is the reason that like Meta and Google are two of the most valuable companies in the world because they're really good at serving ads to the right fair. Okay, so we've been running, let's say we've been doing CTV ads and they've been effective. People are starting to talk about the brand. We feel the buzz, you know, we're seeing more traffic on this site. But now it's like December 20th and it's the drop dead date for shipping.

44:50Should we still be running our TV ads or do we change our mix, you know, at the end when we're close to the finish line? I would adjust the sliders a little bit. I wouldn't turn brand off completely. But hopefully if everything is gone, right? Like you said, there's lots of visitors to the site. It's not just holistic brand awareness. You actually have some of these digital breadcrumbs. People who visited the site engaged on social media maybe added something to cart. Those audiences are hopefully getting bigger and bigger as you're approaching this drop dead, December 20th, date, whatever that is. And that's where you really want to, if you could use the slider analogy again, push the spend on something like a retargeting campaign that is conversion optimized. And it doesn't, it's the opposite of the brand ad we talked about earlier. We assume you know the brand is here's the thing. It's on sale for 25% off by it right now before this runs out. You really want to start to push a little bit more on that side of things. And maybe even if there's one time to just break your your CPA or your row as just a little bit past where it should be, this is the time because I would say that's better than understanding by maybe 25% of the demand that you could have

45:53captured. Yeah. I think this files in the don't be stupid bucket in the sense of like when you're doing brand marketing and it's prime demand capture season, you might be misallocating your resources. And as much as we all as marketers care about brand and believe that it lowers cost per acquisition, it is also a delayed return. And sometimes you don't want to delay that return. So, you know, yes, let's all be cautious and be careful and not over index on performance marketing. But when it comes down to December 20th, don't be an idiot and push your demand capture campaigns. That's what it was all for, right? Like I said before, like brand awareness, it doesn't exist for the sake of brand awareness. It's for being able to really push on those people who are in market and ready to buy and know about your brand. And it could come down to just a, you know, weird game time decision about who they actually choose. Yes, then turn those retargeting ads up, let the frequencies go higher within reason, of course, and don't break, you know, the economics of your row ads or CPA. But yeah, all that brand work is to get the beautiful cash in at the end of

46:58the year, whenever your peak buying season is. All right, Damien, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple questions related to Martek and some stuff that's a little outside, maybe a little related year career. Are you ready? I'm ready. All right, here we go. What is step two between telling the team to use AI and generating a profit? I argued, I believe you're referring to a LinkedIn post that I made, which also references a wonderful South Park episode about Nomes stealing underwear. I believe the Nomes haven't figured out what to do with the underwear to profit. But I when I put that, when I posted that, I was thinking if leadership is going to tell the team use AI, you need to be a little bit more specific than that, because if you don't have a vision of what that should look like or what an effective outcome would be, how do you expect all the people to work for you to take time from what they're already doing and go experiment and figure this out? I think the point there is what is the point when you ask people to use AI? If you're going to ask them, hey, I need you to produce X more things or we need to do this faster,

48:02that would be a really good start other than just telling it. We need to be using AI all the time. I think that's going to get had nods in the media. I was like, yeah, okay, cool. And then nothing's going to happen probably. Yeah, use AI. The missing part is to do this. And I think that we would all be better served if we replace the term AI with automating. But you're using AI to automate a process which makes your business more efficient. You're not using AI for the sake of using AI other than I guess last year if you said AI in your quarterly filings, your stock went up. But I think we're past that point now and we can actually have a reason to use it to actually make our businesses better. One little thing I don't have that too is if you aren't specific and you tell people to use AI, how many knowledge workers are using AI to get something done in one hour that used to take three and then just working two less hours in a day? I don't know the numbers on that or I don't know how I would prove it. But if you're asking people to use AI and not getting specific about it, it might just be shortening their day. All right. I want to move on to a different

49:06subject. What did 20 years as an intermediate rhythm guitarist teach you about marketing? Learn to love the fundamentals and the basics to be able to play in time, to play with a metronome, to know the notes on the neck of the guitar. It can be very, I'm guilty of this. You can't see all of my guitars on the background, but it can be really easy as a guitarist to get sucked into the newest piece of gear or even software recently. There's like all these amp modellers. I think marketers sometimes get sucked into, oh, I need the new piece of gear. I need the new thing that I'm going to add to my stack. I need to do this new tactic that I heard about, which is can be helpful. But if you're not practicing your scales, playing with the metronome, doing your warm-ups and kind of doing some of those fundamentals, you know, lipstick on a peg might be a little bit harsh, but hey, we need to have the baseline stuff correct before we start stacking all these extra complicated things on top of it. You and I see eye to eye on this and the history lesson for me was I had a great career. I was

50:08working in business development at eBay and was on the corporate track to get promoted and decided I was going to, because I loved playing guitar and I wasn't very good at it, I was going to start a guitar lesson, start up, strumschool.com, rest in peace. And I was going to teach people how to play guitar and use my technology experience to do that. And all of this was because I wasn't that good of a guitar player because I was so busy worrying about what tools and all this other stuff I should use at every bother to learn really had to be a great guitar player. And somehow it led me into being a podcast host and that's a story for another time. Which marketing fad did you fall for that taught you to question the next one? I and early in my career was a paid social hands on keyboard execution person and pre-IOS 14 when the privacy stuff got really intense. When I learned there was a specific way you could set up your campaigns in terms of, you know, we're doing prospecting to this group or targeting to this group,

51:09you know, testing these different types of targeting for prospecting. Building the machine became the focus and I thought way less about creative, copy, copy, like underpaid social ads on your actual ads themselves. And I kind of had this attitude of, send me whatever creative you've got, I'll find a way to hack it into this machine and make sure we get the result we need. Like, I don't, you know, I'm not really interested in which ad did best. It's just the one that drove the most and I'm going to keep piling money into that one. But that all got upended overnight once Apple introduced iOS 14, which has since created this Ask App not to track thing that pops up anytime a new app opens up, which most people obviously do. And that really turned everything upside down targeting wasn't as effective as it used to be and meta has since adapted. And I mentioned creative kind of leading the charger a little bit more, but that was a good lesson for me in that you might think you've got this thing figured out and that the technology is really the linchpin of it all technology changes so fast there can be updates overnight and whole strategies can just be deleted basically. So I think again, going back to that point about fundamentals,

52:13that's the point where I really started to think about what does good creative look like. And I should probably spend more time talking to designers and learning from them and hopefully teaching them about what I'm seeing too. Yeah, I think the other lesson that I would add from my experiences don't be dependent on one platform because they just right. And you know, hey, Facebook is great. And I can target everybody and it doesn't matter with the creative and it's working cool. Apple put a bullet in that relatively quickly and then all of a sudden, whether you had to get better at creative or you had to change your platform mix, nothing is forever. The tech companies do love to undermine each other every chance that they get even if it's just purely out of spite, it seems sometimes. So you can definitely get caught in that crossfire when one of them makes a big change. One of my favorite questions ever answered on this podcast was when I asked the Facebook CMO what his reaction was to Apple's privacy update. And I think his response was something like you brilliant cynical bastards or something like that. But personal highlight for

53:14me. Okay, last question for you. Which taught you more agency or in house? I'm going to have to give this one to agency. It's not a place I would want to spend an entire career, but it is such a good trial by fire for getting into advertising because it pops you into environments you never imagined, customers and industries that you never thought of in your whole life. And it does go back again to talk about fundamentals. It kind of gets you to start thinking about, okay, what if I was going to look at this not as just a digital marketer and add buyer, what's the right approach for this company? What might I need to change? It forces you to do that exercise so many times over and over. I do think that there's a little bit of a trap as an in-house marketer as you start to identify a little bit more with the brand you work on. And your attachment to them is your identity versus your identity as a marketer. And my humble opinion, I think the best marketing work comes from people who really view themselves first and foremost as marketers. And then they approach the brand and think about how can I apply this whole toolkit that I have and do the best thing for this brand? Maybe this isn't answering the question.

54:17But when I worked in house at eBay, I walked around like my shit didn't stink. And like because I had this big fancy logo on my chest, on my polo and the nice eBay, you know, like card, it meant that I had money to spend and I knew everything. And that didn't carry over when I left the big enterprise, you know, brand and then had to actually figure out how to be a marketer and didn't get to work off of the brand cashier that was given to me. Sometimes it's easy to operate with, you know, it's easy to win football games when you have a big lead in the first quarter. And you become a better practitioner and a better marketer by seeing different companies and getting more reps. I learned a ton in consulting agency, whatever not being in house is. I probably learned much more just like you said, you did being outhouse as opposed to in house. That's a great way to put it. Yeah. All right. Damien, I appreciate you coming on the podcast. It was great to have you as my guest. I learned a lot and congratulations on finishing your first

55:20podcast. Now, I very much appreciate it was great to do it. I'd love to come back again sometime. All right. That wraps up this episode of the Martek podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Damien Voita, the principal campaign manager at AdRoll. If you'd like to get in touch with Damien, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile on our show notes or on his company's website, which is adroll.com, the sponsor of the Martek podcast. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a weekly stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube. And we'll be back in your feed next week. All right. That's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy. Thanks for listening to the Martek podcast and I hear everything production. Looking to

56:30launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand, then visit I hear everything dot com.