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Once Upon a Farm did $85.4 million in Q2, up 42% year over year, and reached 6.2% of US households against 5.0% a year earlier. Some of that growth traces back to a campaign that was never supposed to produce it. They were running lower-funnel media to their own site, a clean shop-now call to action, the kind of campaign you judge by tomorrow's site revenue. What moved was the retail business. Instacart got more efficient. Programs with accounts picked up momentum. Jennifer Berglund has spent the years since trying to see that effect properly instead of guessing at it, and now she is watching paid search at one retailer lift sales at another, and that's where Keen is worth its weight in premium baby food.
If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what happens to your job when the sale stops closing anywhere you can see it, and what you measure instead.
If you own the media budget: Jennifer walks through how a one month TV test in 2021 turned into always-on upper funnel, including the matched-market holdout testing she used to defend it before she had a model.
What they get into:
- The early signal: lower-funnel DTC media running, and the retail business taking off instead
- The finding out of Keen that surprised her most, paid search at Kroger or Target showing an effect on a different account entirely
- Why she treats ROAS as an education problem inside the company rather than a KPI
- The trap in "new to brand" at a retailer, and why she takes it with a grain of salt
- How she built the case for TV: 2021 test, then TV plus social plus out of home, then geo tests against comparable holdout markets, then always-on
- Streaming TV and YouTube, and Brad on buying top of funnel through retail media DSPs so the money still funnels to the retailer
- Why every retail media network's conversion methodology is different, and what she uses those platform numbers for instead
- The moment a brand should stop putting every dollar into working media and start paying for measurement
- Brad on awareness as the leading indicator of household penetration, and household penetration as the leading indicator of revenue
- Amoeba marketing, which Brad coined live on the recording and Jennifer immediately claimed for her LinkedIn
Who this is for: operators whose business has outgrown the channel their reporting was built for. DTC brands going into retail, retail brands building ecommerce, anyone whose media now shows up in someone else's numbers.
What to steal: the biweekly omnichannel meeting. Jennifer runs one across her media team and sales leadership. Sales says "I see this happening here," she says "we were running media during that time." That meeting found the halo before any model did.
Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 was the market read. This is the first brand.
Timestamps:
00:00 The Halo Effect of Digital Marketing
07:00 Measuring Growth Across DTC and Retail
15:00 How Marketing Channels Influence Each Other
21:00 Streaming TV and YouTube Opportunities
37:00 Why ROAS Can Be Misleading
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