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

back in like 2020-2021. It was a little bit of a novel concept that like Amazon could benefit from like meta-ads. We worked through multi-scenario plans to be able to say this isn't going to help you hit this quarter's goals, but like here's also the long-term effect of not doing this. There's so many brands. All they do is just like hardcore direct response. It'll last for as long as it'll last for, but the reason that like Ollie Pop and Bobby, whatever all these other brands, like actually made it to the distance that they made it is because they continue to invest in brand and alpha funnel and everything else. The reality is that there's a whole ecosystem that's influencing your marketing. Hello and welcome to the DitaC podcast. This is Harness the Halo, a six-part series with Keen on how better measurement earns you the right to make bigger bets. This is episode five and today we're hearing from the finance side. Drew Fallon is the former CFO of Mad Rabbit and is now CEO of Iris Finance, a finance platform for CPG and DitaC brands, also joined by Claudia Latur, VP of Client Services at Keen where her team works with brands on their plans that finance teams have to approve. So great to be mixing up with you. Drew, I've been following your financial analyses on both LinkedIn and Twitter for a long time. So it's great to have you here. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. So you went from being CFO of Mad Rabbit to seeing the books of a lot of brands through Iris. Is there something that you thought about marketing spend back then that you've changed your mind about now? That's a very provoking first question. So maybe not necessarily, but I do think the number one thing that I've kind of seen over time is that sort of people getting more and more accepting of like this halo effect. So like back in like 2020, 2021, which is like when I was running Mad Rabbit, it was a little bit of like a novel concept that like Amazon, like could benefit from like meta ads, right? And people like wanted to like look at things and they're in their very own halos. So I think I was always kind of interested in that. However, I guess if there was something that I think now that I didn't think back then, I thought back then that like it was probably like super measurable. And now I'm just kind of like I don't even know if there's like a right answer or if like anybody actually has you know a really good method. It's it's undeniably true. But I think like attribution and incrementality like all of these types of measuring tools like they're great and they're helpful, but they're yeses and the confidence intervals are not always very high. So I think I went from saying like hey like this is something that I kind of believe in to like I just don't even know honestly. Maybe that's like my evolution. How would you respond Claudia? Yeah, I mean I would say your position coming from a finance layer is a lot of what supports the conversations where a lot of our marketing teams come to us and work with us and are trying to really find a shared framework in terms of how do they speak to their CFOs? And like our recommendation from a keen layer is to bring them into the conversation really have them be a part of this and really show them not just what you're good and what all of your industry experiences is kind of coming into to play but really use the data that you have and actually start to talk through like a shared framework. So it's not really marketing versus finance, but really like how are you guys looking at the data and sort of the next layer of decisions that you're going to need to make together? I think that's that's totally right. Like the way that I think about it is like the it's the marketing people's job to kind of like prove that. And then as like CFO it's my job to just make sure that like whatever the plan is kind of works in the context of the rest of the business. So like I do think that like that's an important exercise and distinction that like a lot of marketing folks like should be very very focused on at the end of the day as long as like the MER and the marketing spend are the same. You know if it's from what we're planning then I think it's you know it's kind of up to the more smart marketing people to figure out the best like capital allocation for that actual budget line. Drief argued in in blog posts about ad spend living inside contribution margin and that gets tricky when you're doing something like CTV or other brand building exercises where as we've reported in this series on previous episode to can take months to see a return on like you guys are just saying you just need to have a shared language to talk about the the benchmarks you're looking for. But how do you like what are the benchmarks that that I guess you're looking for on the finance side when someone does come into pitch one of these these upper funnel longer payback period type exercises. So I think like really like I said it's everything goes down to like net income or like EBITDA whatever you want to like call it basically. The idea is that like contribution margin is kind of like the end of like the variable expenses and then your op X is obviously like everything under that and so you have to maintain a certain contribution margin. The op X says the same right so even even a moves it's because it's because contribution margin is moving. So I think you have to just be able to make the case like to some CFO that like hey this is going to either increase our MER and thus our contribution margin or it's a worthwhile risk to take to the point that like hey like if it does work then the ROI is you know significant. I think indeed to see specifically like marketing drives the complexion of the business model so significantly that like I do think that like the old school kind of like crunchy bean counter CFO is like not the right type of finance talent to be leading those businesses. I think they need to be like a little bit more progressive but they also need to kind of like hold their ground and say hey like this is like how it this is like the amount of money that the business is trying to make and this is like the budget. So if you come to if you come to me and you say hey here is the case for how we could beat the budget and you have like a convincing argument like hey we can do this we can do that then there's a good chance that any reasonable CFO that understands what you're saying is probably true. You know can think about how that might fit into the plan. Yeah I would say from a keen layer what what you talked through the conversation of like upper versus lower funnel is probably like one of the core things that we see our clients kind of confide in us that they're struggling to justify. We've seen multiple brands almost panicking because they're like all of my upper funnel spend is getting cut and pursuit of hitting these short term goals. So part of the language that we also start to work through with our teens is justifying and really showing the numbers behind what does it mean to invest in something long term right like you need to have that conversation and that shared framework to say this isn't going to help you hit this quarter's goals but like here's also the cost of the long term effect of not doing this right so we work through multi scenario plans to be able to say cutting our upper funnel hits this goal for the next couple of quarters but where it's what it starts to also do is erode the brand right and so here's the trade off if we go this path versus this other path so again less instinct based even if your instincts are right but actually allows you to show the numbers behind it. I think like the bottom of the funnel sort of action like they they have to be good enough to support top of funnel investment like I think like so there's so many brands all they do it's just like hardcore direct response and it's like it'll last for as long as it'll last for but the reason that like Olli pop and Poppy and Cotary and whatever all these other brands like actually made it to the you know distance that they made it is because they continue to invest in in brand and top of funnel and everything else so I think like it's like it's a little bit of like a greedy like you have to have both kind of a thing and it's really hard to do but if you if you want to go the distance like your bottom of funnel has to be able to pull like a 3.0 MER and you got to put the other point of it back into top of funnel and brand and you still have to be you know having good margins after all that which is very hard to do. Can you put any more color Claudia on the kind of language or the actual metrics or conversations you know that you're having with maybe you know both the marketing heads included in the financial discussions where you are making the case for these longer term things what is what does that conversation actually look like? Yeah absolutely so one of the things that happens in the keen platform is that we're able to look at here is your base so everything in terms of volume that would have happened in the absence of your marketing efforts and what we're saying in our platform is and what we're trying to measure is the incremental impact of your marketing investment right so what we look at based off of leveraging your historical data the historical model really being the starting point to kind of fuel the scenario planning that we do is we're looking at how that base progresses over time so every tactic is marked as short term or long term and so we when you're running a scenario with us we look at what are the potential like tails across all of those investments over time how would your brand in theory move so again those upper funnel tactics are going to help to build that brand up versus your short term tactics are really going to drive those short term goals for you so we could look at a plan that starts up here's what let's say marketing wants to do maybe a more balanced plan that has a good mix of upper funnel versus lower funnel versus the their worst case scenario right that more short term focus plan and then we'll look at here's what your numbers look like year one what happens year two if we run the same two plans on top of this what are your outcomes look like what happens year three from there so really having that comparison of what's the long-term impact of making these two decisions instead of just fighting about what's at stake in this moment now but what is it due to the brand over time drew from your side what how do you how do you work with sit I guess as a CFO you are doing different kinds of scenario planning about rising costs or tariffs coming in. How do you work with scenario planning on your your side of the biz. So the conventional sort of like framework for this would be bare case, bull case, base case, right? So like at the beginning of the year or like during your annual planning cycle, your finance department should be producing at least three scenarios for you. Hey, what if we get into that target rollout or what if we keep CAC flat the whole year or what if CAC doubles? What if we get D listed from Amazon, you know, like all these different variables? You should always have like in my mind a plan to fall back on. And so it may not be fun and it could be like doomerish, but like you do have to have a bare case and you have to be ready, like, hey, like what if we miss our goals by 50%. Like we have to like, if the if the answer is if we miss our revenue goal by 50%, the answer is we run, we then run out of money. That cannot be a surprise. You have to be prepared, right? You have to be, you have to know what's going on. So I think in like the office of the CFO, what we would, what we would typically do is just like sensitize a base case model and we say, okay, like what if we beat it by 40% what if we miss it by 40% and then like at which point up and down does it start to like become untenable? Because oftentimes even if you beat it by 60%, you can still run out of money because we have that whole thing that we call inventory, right? And so you should never be surprised by your cash position because you should have already planned out at least three scenarios. And that's like a very, that's very much like I've sort of like squishy strategic finance kind of like pie in the sky type stuff, like it's not super actionable or or like tactical. So I don't know that like it gets into the weeds so much as like, I mean, theoretically you could model like different like halo effects and like marketing mix and stuff like that. And maybe that that would be kind of like an interesting way to incorporate some like marketing plans and stuff. But I think usually that's kind of like CFO is just kind of figure out like what might happen. Clotty, that's what keen does, I guess, right? Yeah, you know, a lot of our clients come to us having worked with his you know, mmM providers that really just focused on report carding. And really that's the first step, but where the bulk of our clients spend their time is really in sort of the scenario planning phase and really work gaming. What are the different potential outcomes? So when a new client starts to work with us and we've sort of gotten your historical model underway, there are sort of three base scenarios that we start to talk through. With them to again, get them to think about what are the range of scenarios that I might see. So the first is like a status quo, which is what if I did the same thing that I did last year? What does that potential outcome look like versus a what is your current plan right now look like? So again, starting to measure the impact of your hopefully improved thinking based off of like what you've learned. And then we also start to look at like sort of your most rosy optimized scenario, right? And if you were able to just use the data to fully inform it, what is the high end of the potential and even just starting with those three scenarios, it's really interesting to see the range and the sort of conversations that come out of that. But from a day to day basis, it becomes a lot of what you just described through of here or sort of the three scenarios that I'm thinking of or my ideal versus what I'm trying to fight against a best case. And even beyond just, you know, conversations around budgets, what we also talk through are the external environments that could potentially impact that, right? What happens if your distribution increases versus decreases? How does that change your current plan? As well as a number of other, you know, scenarios that we see our clients face on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, that's interesting. We do, or like I recommend like about as far as like I've gone with it in the past, like just like elasticity around like CAQ for example. So it would be interesting to even go like drill down like one step further and try to understand like why would, like under what scenario like would CAQ change like if we move from channel mix or whatever, whatever other types of measurements, like there's probably is like a lot deeper that you can go. Again, I think that maybe is reserved for the marketing folks who are just a little bit smarter than I think some of us. Do you have any, are you sort of a tactic or strategy agnostic at this point? I know you came from the D to C world, but are there any, when people come to you and they're like, okay, we want to invest here, are there any things you just kind of roll your eyes at or any things you're like, okay, that's a red flag, you know, you shouldn't be doing that. Do you see a lot of that? Are you just sort of like anything can work under the right scenario if the numbers line up? I've never seen a brand scale app love and spend and make more money. Interesting. One time ever on the 200 brands that we have in the portfolio, never seen somebody make more money with app love and spend going up. That's interesting. That's not to say that it hasn't ever happened. Yeah. I've never seen it. And most of our brands are somewhere between 20 and 300 million. So sort of like middle market type folks and they're, and you know, they've been running meta and meta got them to 50 million and they're like, they're topping out so they look for another channel. And so as they start spending 200 grand a month on app love and then it's like, they're margins go away. So I'm a little bit of an app love and skeptic. Anything to add to that Claudia, do you have, do you have a app love and a case to counter this point? Or is there, can you think of, do you have pre built opinions at all on certain strategies or tactics? So I think for us, the difference that really happens is that we get our clients to stop thinking about one particular tactic as being the hero because the reality is that there's a whole ecosystem that's influencing your marketing, right? So we have general benchmarks for app love and or other vendors based off of like your industry, what we know about that individual business. But that changes from brand to brand, even brands that look very similar based off of what else you're running in tandem with it. So less about a hard conviction on a particular case and more about having our clients look at the holistic picture, what their overall marketing plan is going to be? Flipside drew to your question, is there anything that you, that's a green flag, anything that you think that people are under indexing on that you have seen the move, move the needle significantly? Oh, that's a good question. Um, I mean, I think like meta, typically, I mean, you can really ride meta as you guys know, like so far, like farther than you think, honestly, like you can probably ride it to 100 million, you know, like pretty much all the time. And so it's probably maybe it's not like an exciting answer, but like it's like the answer probably is meta, unless you're like doing like a couple hundred million, um, the answer is like probably meta. And then the one thing that's kind of come on my radar just in the past couple weeks, um, is within meta, are you working with a lot of clients that are working with tribe drew that are sort of. Actually, yeah. Like Lucas is a customer of ours, um, the founder and we have a lot of TikTok brands and I feel like they all kind of jumped on tribe pretty early. Is that on your radio, Claudia? The, the tribe aspect of Metasped because basically it's, uh, it's created an amazing sort of network, uh, like a marketplace for, uh, creators who actually drive GMV and they actually reward, um, but I've heard that at scale, it can become unmanageable. It's like really good for brands in a certain band, but when you're pledging one to two percent of GMV based on winning creatives, it can, it can get really deadly on a line item as it, as it really scales. Do you see that as being a problem on the real high end drew? Um, yes, just administratively, like literally because it's like, it is crazy. Like some people have like hundreds and hundreds of, um, of creators. It was something that we like considered like tackling, honestly at one point, um, but it is like pretty unmanageable, but I don't, I don't know, honestly, the processing well enough to like say whether or not it like is legitimately unmanageable. I just know that like, it is a bunch, like, there's a lot to it. That was a challenge actually with our agency where we had this really performance heavy, where we were on the same skis as our clients, where we really wanted to focus on, okay, when we win, uh, or when you win, we win, we're able to make you win. That's, that's really where we'll make our profit. But it just led us to having these wildly uneven line items for our clients and, and then talking to CFOs like, okay, why did your agency cost you, you know, three times more than it did in the previous months? Well, they delivered three times as good results, but from a financial side, you don't always see it that way. Have you had situations like that? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the times that stuff just comes down to what's like the actual dollar figure, you know? So like, for example, like I met Rabbit, we had an Amazon agency, uh, that I very, very much enjoyed. I'm, you know, friends with the CEO still today, and we ended up letting them go at some point just because like we ended up, we were paying them like 60 grand a month or something. Um, and it was like, I don't really care like how good you are, you know, like I can, I can hire two full-time people for, you know, two thirds of that price. So I think like ultimately it like has a little bit less to do with like, what are the results that the agency's actually driving and more so like, what does it cost us to like do this in house? I mean, that's like usually well, where you'll see CFOs push back and it, it can be like a little bit short-sighted, um, a lot of the time because sometimes agencies have like true advantages and like that's why they're driving the results. But like when you're looking at it on the P and L and you're just like, I could hire five people for this price, you know, like how, how could you justify this? I think there is like, it's, there's, there's some friction in there for sure. Yeah. Claudio, you had a question for Drew basically when a marketing team walks into your office with a plan, what are you assuming before they've said anything? Maybe describe to me back in your, I guess if you're doing it now, Drew, uh, with, uh, with your clients, but previously we were doing it in the mad rabbit space. What are some of the assumptions that, that you and marketing share, I guess? Well, the big one is like CAC, right? So we have to be aligned on like a CAC goal, um, because the output of our CAC and our spend in our returning customer revenue is our contribution. which is sort of the North Star in terms of driving EBITDA. So everything else as far as I'm concerned is downstream. And whether that's like CPMs or CTRs or creative output or whatever else. As the CFO, I really don't care. Honestly, as long as you're hitting the cackle. And then once you're hitting the cackle, and if we're hitting our retention numbers and our LTV to cack is kind of shaking out how I have it in my model, then I don't care how much you're spending on anything. The Uniteconomics are working and the business model is working. And so it's up to the folks that are, like I keep saying, a little bit smarter than us finance folks to go and actually execute on some of that directive. Claudia, anything you'd want to dig in there with Drew on that question? I think that's really interesting perspective. And again, I think part of this comes down to the shared language. Where brands know what they believe, or sorry marketers know what they believe, they know what they want to invest in. But I think it comes down to how do I translate it back to you, Captain this instance, if that's all that you care about. And I think that's the layer of where they've struggled to actually explain that in a way that justifies the spend that they want to invest. It comes back to that layer of miscommunication almost. Yeah, there's a lot of different data sources that people will be looking at. To try to like answer that question. And they'll give you all different answers. And like people will try to like use like AI to do it. And like AI just lies to you and stuff. And so like there are like a number of like organizational, I think like hurdles that present a challenge that are maybe incremental to what Claudia is describing too. And especially when you're dealing with a traffic source where in, you know, previous episodes in the series we've talked about, for instance, like CTV having a 30% short term impact and then a 70% impact over the next, you know, three to six months. Have you found a successful way for allowing CMOs to pitch those like longer payback period windows? Or is it really just a matter of, you know, maybe not using AI, but using third party tools in order to kind of put a thumb on what it'll be in six months out? How do you deal with things like that? I think it kind of comes down to, I think we might as well just like a different question. But like your direct response efforts have to be effective enough to support those other sort of like less measurable initiatives, right? So like if your MER is like 2.0, you know, and you're doing only direct response, like you don't have a ton of room to now layer in like some brand or like longer term initiatives, right? So you have to be driving like a certain amount of efficiency, I think, to actually like say, hey, now we can afford to invest in brand. And that's why like you don't see a lot of companies start to even do brand style stuff until 30, 40, 50 plus million in revenue, because they just literally don't have like the dollars coming in to actually justify it. Like every day is like a fight of like getting the next purchase. And so until like that problem, like really goes away, I don't know that you should be doing a ton of brand stuff anyways. You know, like if you're like a 10 million dollar company, like do you need to like go spend a bunch of money on top of funnel sort of brands, things that aren't going to like continue to grow the business, and I don't really think so to be honest. - Especially if in your opinion, you can get to nine figures with really good, a really good metafunnel. How do you react to that Claudio? Will all brands that you work with at the different phases? When do you see it becoming really relevant that they look to invest more in that brand story? - Yeah, I mean, I think this is probably one of the most consistent struggles that we see amongst our client base of like, what is that balance between upper versus lower funnel spend? And how do I, again, make that case and justify that investment when we're very focused on shorter term goals? And it really does come down to a layer of balance, right? Because there is the need to hit again, those quarterly yearly targets. But when you're not investing in brand, you also have to look at that longer term impact than that potential erosion that happens. So the way that we work through it is a, making sure that we're aligned on, if this is the decision that we're making, what does it look like in the short term? But then we're also looking at scenarios on a two or three-year basis to also say, you know, if we're totally stripping all brand spend as an example, what does that impact look like three years from now versus just, are we hitting today's goal? And that, I think, just facilitates a much deeper conversation in terms of why you're driving for that more balanced mix of investment. And I do think just to jump in, it's a really, people say like, oh, you don't need to raise money for like a D to C brand. I think that's like a really good argument against. That stands where it's like, like, grooms is like a great example of like, they raised like a shit ton of money. You know, basically from day one, because why? Because like, they were building a brand, you know, and like, and they wanted to make those investments early and often. So I think there is like, you know, a big difference between like building a brand and like building like a D to C store. And it's expensive. I'm curious on your take Drew. I probably wrote about it. I don't know if I read it on the, the IMA investment story that just sort of happened, where 70% of the investment was going towards active customer acquisition. I don't always hear that as something people aspire to is having their customer acquisition funded by investment. Any comments on the way that deal shook out? Um, yeah. I mean, it's not terribly uncommon. And honestly, like usually it's referred to as like revenue financing. Um, and so like, way flyer, figure, but like there's all of these, like sort of like MCAs. It's not, it's just like an M, it's the same thing as an MCA. It's just like a much more like enterprise-grade, uh, version. And so I think like they are taking what I just said, like to a little bit of like, you know, a crazy extreme, um, in terms of like, you know, I'm friends with those guys. Um, like they're, they're crazy. Like they're just spending as much as they possibly can on on customer acquisition and they're, they're convinced and I believe them. Honestly, that, um, you know, that they have the economics to, to back it up and to support that from a, from a business perspective. So it was, it was a little bit like, I texted Brian the CFO when they announced it. And I was like, this is like kind of like, community-adjusted EBITDA kind of a thing. Um, but like, yeah, they just got a giant MCA. And I think, you know, it is a vote of confidence though, because General Catalyst is a highly sophisticated investor. Um, typically those instruments are reserved for, like truly recurring revenue businesses. Um, so like lemonade was kind of like one of the success stories of, of using that, that vehicle, which is like lemonade is like a, you know, consumers ass, basically. They're, it's like an insurance company. So yeah, they definitely like took that to the extreme. But it's, it's not, it's not like as unique as like, I think they maybe wanted it to like, up here. The size of it was crazy. The size of it was unique. Yes, that's what that was. That was not the first like, revenue financing, uh, of course, Claudia, you mentioned in your previous answer. They're just about the idea of like, maybe cutting up or funnel to hit a quarter. Do you have an example of, you know, without giving names of a client who maybe did that? And then what the numbers look like a year later? This is like the reverse halo effect, I guess, right? Have you ever seen the reverse of the halo effect happen with, with a client? We absolutely do. So when we talk through, um, multi-year planning, the impact of your investments, right? We're, we're looking at that tail, right? Where your lower funnel investments, the bulk are coming through in that first like, about three months through the, through the first year. And the reverse is happening with those longer tail investments. So that's one of the things that we're able to break down within the platform is, how is that contribution from your marketing, um, investment happening over time? And then also, what does that look like against your base? So this is one of the things that we see with a lot, with a lot of our clients that come in, that like their base over time is declining, which is one of the things that is really difficult to balance, because again, they're very focused on that short-term goal to help sustain the business. But also, when you have a base that's eroding, not investing in it, kind of compounds the issue. So we continue to see that trend line continue, rather than it's starting to like, level off in reverse essentially. Drew, in an organization, in a, in a 20 to 40, 50 million dollar organization, who actually owns the marketing budget? Is it, is it a situation where the CFO is sort of dictating what's, what's available, and then a CMO is kind of going in and, and determining what investments are made within there? How does that process look? Um, so there's a difference between who does and who should, um, in my opinion. So, um, I think like more often than not, it's probably the marketing leader that's driving the budget. The reason that I believe that to be suboptimal, um, is because they're, it's like a multi-variant equation, right? And so like, like, like these businesses have working capital, right? They have operating expenses, right? And so, to ask a CMO, or, or BP of marketing, or whatever level, to be able to like, contemplate a marketing budget in the context of the broader financial model, is like a very tall, CMO level, like, ask, right? Um, and so I think, the, on the flip side of the coin, it's very, very rare that you find a, that, a, then, CFO, um, who understands, like, digital marketing and e-commerce, and LTV to CAC, who can actually then take it and do that marketing part and understand the broader context of, like, the cash conversion cycle, and the operating expense, the capital structure, etc. Um, and so, this sort of, like, perfect CFO, um, speaking of IMA, like, Brian, like, if you ever, asked with Brian Rosen, the CFO, IMA, like, he's like, an example of somebody, who's a very, very rare individual, who actually, like, understands, like, e-commerce, unit economics, growth marketing, and can go out and raise you a billion-dollar facility, right? So, like, I think it's, it's, no, it's nobody's fault that this has never done that. Well, it's just that like it's so, so, so rare because e-commerce specifically is so unique in the standpoint of like handedly like marketing and finance are the same thing in this part of business and so like there's like a spectrum and the CFO like the sort of old school like bean counting CFO like would never be able to like you know help you do that but on the other hand the you know typical sort of like CMO is never going to be able to like tell you hey this cact target is tolerable or not like given our like inventory lead times you know so it's it's it's um it's a really really hard conversation but I think like my answer would be it should be the CFO with a caveat of like they need to be able to understand growth marketing which is like pretty rare what do you think of that Claudia and then I guess how does keen help bridge that gap yeah so I'd say that the the dynamic that you described is super common in our client set and I think that's a bit of the struggle that we try and help again more often than not we're working with the marketing team so we're trying to help them find a shared language like coming to the table as a team because I think the reality is that based off of exactly what you described like no one side is fully equipped to own it without the other's input and at the end of the day you are actually on the same team so the way that we work through clients is that like we invite people to bring their CFOs into the conversation right we invite you to bring your broader team because we understand all the battling dynamics that kind of come into play um and for us we don't necessarily have like skin in the game in terms of what output looks a certain way we're looking to be sort of just the truth layer to help facilitate you all making the best decision for your business overall right and and the other layer of it as well as that you know depending on the decisions that you come to for any given period of time part of our process is also to refresh on a consistent basis to be able to say last quarter or last month we believed that these decisions would lead to x result and then what we're also measuring is like did that happen why or why not and then how do we pivot based off of that because even if you are perfectly forecasting the outside world is changing your goals are changing so we're also just needing to consistently have that conversation even if there isn't like this adversarial dynamic and then drew how does that land with you I think I think you when it comes to marketing measurement tools like how deep do you go in with tools like keen in order to justify marketing spend um I I honestly have personally have never been inside one of those tools I mean that besides like the triple oils or like north beams like the attribution style stuff I think I don't know keen very well it sounds like a little bit more like enterprise of a tool but I think again like the attitude that I would take into a conversation like that would just be like hey like what is cack um and if you want to prove to me that like what you're doing is driving cack in a certain way then like bring all the data that you can and let's have that conversation and I would love to see all that um but at the end of the day it's it's basically coming down to to that one number uh which is cack so I think the goals for a different for various brands might vary but part of our engagement is also understanding like what do what is your business's goal right what do you need to do to justify the actions that you're choosing to take like what does success actually mean for you so I agree with that fully in the realm of if your cfo doesn't believe the outputs or isn't understanding like what we're showing that means that we need to change again like what we're driving towards to be able to continue to hit your goals otherwise you know we're just a platform versus like the whole team can leverage the example that I gave earlier of like the old school bean counter cfo like those are the those are the folks where it's like you need to cut you need to bring your keen data um and you need to shove it in their face and rub it around until they understand it because like those types of folks are going to have a very difficult time understanding like I forget that the like the 70% lift on ctv or something over time like that's real you know um but like like those old school guys those cfos like they're not they like would never be able to like comprehend that so I think that's like a a really good use case for um certain types of of platforms to come in and and start to prove that out because you do need it for the actual like long-term health of the business I agree with that as well and that's where you know we we are our clients with the data but we also um are there to back them up in that conversation as well to explain you know the nuts and bolts of how we're measuring and again making making sure that there's like confidence across the board when you say based off of the plans that I ran in keen I feel super confident that x decision is how we want to proceed last question uh I've asked it of of everyone in this series so far what's a number that you have stopped trusting in this in this process to start with you do any any numbers you've just really stopped trusting basically just like anything that's inside of like an in-platform like an advertising platform basically why because when you add them all up there it's all higher than what you get on your pnl and it's like well you're all lying so um I think that's like a really good use case for like a third party too honestly yeah what what do you say Claudia I'm a little biased but I'm gonna agree with you in that sense um because from that layer where we work with our clients is like there's layers of truth in it but if you are asking anyone to grade their own homework everyone's gonna give themselves an a yeah I'm gonna take as much credit as possible uh then you know if that was the case uh there would it really be room for tools like us because you wouldn't need that third party layer of truth real last question we are in the heat of of q4 really heating up here we talked a little bit about it in on off camera there Claudia but what are what are some things that that are maybe different about this year's q4 uh then uh previous years is there anything you say are there more conversations being had is there more trepidation what what is different about this q4 than previous q4 start with you Drew that's a good question uh I feel like this year we we've actually seen like more people um kind of all back on certain channels like tiktok for example like I think last year people this is like purely anecdotal I don't have any data with me to back this up but like people were like I think a little bit more willing to lose money on tiktok last year and like see like the halo benefit kind of around the rest of the channels but I think it's like still like very very real but again just anecdotally speaking like I think I'm I'm hearing a little bit more about people saying like hey like we're not just gonna like spam views on tiktok this year because we lost a bunch of money last year or at least we think that we did and so maybe we should just focus on like a little bit more like the core channels and also um we do a lot of work with supplements businesses and I think in supplements people are kind of realizing that like q4 like isn't isn't like the right time to like spend that much um and so i want new year new year right yeah but like people would still like like go as hard as they could in q in q uh in q4 only to realize that like the returns are like higher than normal and the churn is crazy and everybody's just like discount shopping and all that um so i've talked to like more than a couple founders and supplements that are like yeah we're just i don't care about q4 like we're waiting for January kind of a thing interesting what about you from you Claudia i'd say right now a lot of our clients are being conservative um just kind of trying to hedge their bets against um you know what the economy might hold layers that are sort of outside of their control so yes a layer of going you know trying to lean into those like core um this sort of like core tactics that are tried and true but also wanting to balance that without like leaving dollars on the table and other places so i think those conversations about how can i put my best plans forward and then also you know not over promise in this regard thank you both for coming on the podcast do tell me i first of all i got to say uh my daughter's name is iris is the most beautiful name in the world oh no how did you pick this for your finance company um iris is meant to like give you visibility into your business and so the platform was meant to give you visibility in your business past and future um and so iris was like kind of a like it's like the eye right so beautiful the eye not the flower is why i think it also means rainbow apparently um and it's also a great gougou del song so great song uh great great i actually found i found that song after i named the company and i was like wow this is a great song it's beautiful i like your tagline iris finance your pnl is lying to you so go to irisfinance.co if you want to work more with drew especially if you're in that supplement space and then uh how would people find you Claudia yeah so i'd say um our sales team is you know out in the market at various um events but also keen ds um is where you can find us you can learn uh you know initial information about our platform and then also receive like a demo and find out a lot more about what we do thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you're not a subscriber to our newsletter you can do that right now at direct to consumer all one word dot co i'm eric dick and this has been the ddc podcast we'll see you next time