Low LTV Doesn’t Have to Limit Your Ecommerce Growth

Check, check, check. Cory, are we good? Thank you. Nick put me first on the entire schedule depends on me today. So we're going to jump right into this in August about a month ago. This story, what is going on? We're going too fast. There we go. A news story came out about a former MLB player named Jesus Montero that died two weeks following a motorcycle accident in Venezuela. And for most of you, this was probably nothing more than an ESPN notification that showed up on your phone and disappeared because Jesus was not a superstar was not LeBron James by any means. But for me, he was actually my friend. I knew Jesus from the time that he was 18 years old. The tragic accident came with his wife one week away from giving birth to their first daughter. And I knew this guy from the time that he was a child. And he was the most joyful, happy human I've ever met in my life. An 18 year old who came to the US from Venezuela and signed with the Yankees at 16 years old. We got to play together for the same season in Charleston, South Carolina. And I can tell you, the only people that loved Jesus more than I did were the women of Charleston, South Carolina. They were big fans of Jesus. He was an absolute golden child. I don't know how familiar you are with baseball, but baseball works prospects get rated on this 20 to 80 scale. 20 is like a very below average player and 80 would be like a once in a generation talent. And every prospect gets graded on these across five different characteristics, your arm, your power, power. You can hit for average defense. And Jesus was by all accounts. A generational talent. He was the golden child of the Yankees organization. He was 64 240 had an 80 grade bat. And every attribute you would design into a ball player he had. He was incredible to watch. You would watch this kid take batting practice and you were just certain that he was destined to play for the New York Yankees for a very long time. This episode is brought to you by Miracle Connect. When ads get more expensive growth can't depend on spending more for the same audience, Miracle Connect helps brands reach new shoppers through leading retail marketplaces with AI powered catalog tools more than 450 channels and one place to manage your catalog and orders. Find out what's possible at mIRakl.com. to translate this for you because most of you don't know baseball. Hey, Zeus was the grooms of baseball prospects. If you take 80 grade power in translated to massive LTV, that's what he had. If you take his 80 grade hit tool that's equivalent to huge gross margin. And the $1.6 million he signed for an age 16 back in 2005, which is like $100 million in inflation adjusted dollars today translates to being able to afford any cap that you could possibly need. That was who he was. But the problem for me playing with his Zeus was that all he did was make me acutely aware of how not Hey Zeus I was. I was 24 years old playing on the same team as an 18 year old. I was five nine. He was six four when he went to hit the ball it went a lot further than when I did. And so studying Hey Zeus only did one thing for me. It made me realize that I didn't have what to take. And my fear is as we start this conference is that our industry right now is doing the same thing to some of you. We're propagated by a lot of stories I even heard Nick say it on the stage. We can't help but elicit the names of grooms and I am eight and all these brands right now because supplements are so invoked. It's as if it's the only way you could ever possibly win the game is to be running with a huge LTV and being able to pay whatever the khak is that meta wants from you and scaling to the moon and every case study your fed is a genetic outlier that only does one thing for you. And that's that if the players you study are golden children the lesson is you don't have it. That you might as well pack it up take your stuff with you right now and head home or come run an agency right. I even you know Sean Frank's tweet yesterday was felt like he was throwing in the towel and rigid like if you can't win there whatever could we do. So I thought about this and I thought you know my job as I open this conference is to give you all the most powerful thing an entrepreneur has as they go through their journey. It's hope. It's the sense of possibility that we just might be able to do it. We just might be able to win. So if you leave with that then I've done my job and the way I'm going to do it is actually to lower the bar. I'm going to convince you that you can win with mediocre genetics Taylor genetics five nine white kid that are a little too old genetics. That's what we're going to try and win with today. It's not going to be a pep talk going to be a data set. I'm going to give you three brands and here's the rules. They're all growing 50% a year at north of eight figures. But they have to have bad genetics. They have terrible LTV. They have mediocre gross margins and they have to be first order profitable with their meta ad spend or their dead. No cacket 0.2 and an LTV that pays back four years. No billion dollar debt vehicles from general catalyst. I'm talking about old school. You pay it. You get it back right from the start and they're growing and winning. How? Well, if these three can do it any of you can. That's my promise. I know you're probably thinking we need a second Taylor. I've heard of some of these. You feel like maybe you're getting a little bit ahead start, but trust me as I go through these stories, but the goal is if these three can do it any of you can. So what you can take away from their journey is something that you can put in your pocket right down on your piece of paper and use to help your brand today. So I'm going to start with Skullcandy. Now, this is the one that you're going to hold on Taylor. Let me second. That's a global brand. You can't start with them as the thing I'm supposed to reference to is a startup founder. But let me tell you something about Skullcandy. Skullcandy was founded in 2003. So they've been around a long time, but they've gone through a tumultuous journey. And the most recent iteration of Skullcandy was one that was taken over by an entirely new leadership team coming off of massive decline where they had gone very much out of vogue. And when they came to CTC three years ago, their online revenue was smaller than yours. I promise. They had built a business or a distribution system that no longer applied. And if we were to grade them on a 20 to 80 scale, they have some of the worst LTV you could ever imagine. People don't need a hundred pairs of headphones. They're gross margin and consumer electronics with warranties and everything that exists is very poor. AOV is normal. And the brand heat had died. If you were to write a report, you'd say they're an organizational player, non-prospect. Don't invest the high pick in these guys. But what they didn't know is that they have Brian Garifalo. And Brian Garifalo here on our shops card took over a CEO of Skullcandy. And Brian understands maybe more than any leader I've ever interacted with about what is happening today and how product gets moved. And he's unconcerned with the genetic attributes of the business. He believes that his ability to influence demand and to influence culture can win regardless. And just to prove the point, this is an illustration of all the stores that are currently in our stateless database. And you can see this is Skullcandy's LTV. It's bad. You are not going to win the game off of lifetime customer value. It's not how you're going to win the game. You're going to have to do it with new customer acquisition efficiency over and over. And that's what they did. They stopped playing any genetics game and they deployed what I call the modern distribution playbook. For me, really, they wrote it. They wrote the modern distribution playbook in a way that opened my eyes to what was possible for a consumer brand pursuing distribution in many places to build a motor. Now Nick talked about that thing where you take out your phones, you take a screenshot. If you're going to do it, this next slide, I think is the most impactful because to me, it illustrates today what is the modern distribution playbook in two core areas, your media and your sales channel distribution. And this Luke raise your hand. Luke's the president's CTC. This is his creation. I don't take credit for it. But what I believe that it illustrates so perfectly. Okay. It's the relationship between demand creation and demand capture that happens in both media channels and sales channels. And what I really want you to focus on is I want you to look at this section here where we talk about each of these sales channels. So these are sales channels. These are media channels. And I want to think about the relationship between how much happens in demand creation and how much happens in demand capture. Okay, we have to understand some things about consumer purchasing generally. E-commerce is still a very small percentage of overall transactions that occur around 17 ish percent based on the latest data. That means the vast majority of demand capture for almost every category on earth will happen in retail for almost every category. Then from then about 40% of all the transactions online happen on Amazon. Then you have Shopify, which is growing its GMV very quickly. And then the fastest growing of all the channels is TikTok shops. But the amount of demand capture that occurs in these places is disproportionately small relative to the other locations. Now, what I watch brands do when they try to disassociate these channels, they build silos is they maybe start D to C. And then all of a sudden target comes knocking. And they're like, "Oh, wow. I have a friend right now that's running a supplement company." And he just got an offer for store-wide in target. And I said, "Don't you dare do that. Don't you dare? You do not have the demand creation to support that demand capture. You will die." And your job is ultimately to sell to not the buyer at target, but the end consumer. You have to move units. And if you don't have the engine you can't support that do. distribution. If your add costs are climbing and growth is getting harder, you need more than another campaign. You need more places for shoppers to discover your brand. Miracle Connect makes multi-channel growth simple with AI-powered catalog tools that turn your product catalog into optimized listings across more than 450 retail channels, while keeping your inventory pricing and orders in sync from one place. Expand beyond your own site without building a whole new operation. Find out what's possible at M-I-R-A-K-L dot com slash CTC. That's miracle dot com slash CTC. And so the relationship between these things is the critical thing that Skoll Candy understood. And what they were on a freight of is what most large legacy brands are afraid of, which is to understand that right now today, the core motor for demand creation across all of these channels is TikTok shops. And I don't mean it in the way that you're hearing it framed often right now, which is this idea that TikTok shops is exclusively about generating ad creative for meta. No, that's not the point. They each plan role in driving value across all of them. Now the problem with this as a demand creation engine is that if you work exclusively there, if you try and isolate the TikTok shops only, it is very difficult to capture as much of the demand as you create. Why? Because a lot of the demand is impression based, okay? And when you think about the relationship between an impression and the direct path to purchase, why does meta work so effectively on such a short attribution window like a seven day click? It's because every ad is optimized and driven towards a click based conversion, okay? And so what happens when you have that type of a funnel is that the halo effects are actually diminimous, meaning that you can still drive halo effects with meta advertising, but the purchase realization of those ads is so high that you actually diminute the value, whereas when you move into these items connected TV, even TikTok ads or impression based organic content, the satiation of that demand happens much more broadly. So as you grow your TikTok impression base, the value capture has happened at Amazon retail. And right now TikTok shops grew 12 to 20 X faster than the total USC commerce in 2025. And it's still growing about nine times faster in 2026, even as overall e-commerce has rebounded. So the fastest growing channel within all of e-commerce, which continues to grow, but it's growing at a faster pace. The shelf is very much now the feed. And for Skullcandy, this is true. And I'm going to tease a little bit of data that I shared with my friend, who I'm going to explain in a little bit in a second, about the growth and success that Skullcandy's have. But you can see that if we normalize their TikTok shops for January, the growth that they've had to August about 4.3 X, their e-commerce business has followed on top growing 2.7 times from January to August of this year. And the year over year growth has followed directly related to that spillover. And this all comes from a massive amount of impression volume. I'm going to let set you up to tell more about that story and later, but what Brian and Evan and the team at Skullcandy did so well as they understood that these tropes that we've been given, TikTok is for cheap widgets and not established brands. You have to have a low AOV, TikTok is for consumables. The channel can't be profitable. Are all tropes that don't have to be true. Those may be the natural genetic realities of the baseline expectation, but it doesn't have to be true for you. Now, I'm not going to go too much more into this because I'm not going to steal the spotlight from one of the smartest people in the world and not Evan Catlett. Evan is going to be speaking later this afternoon. She's the global VP of e-commerce and marketing at Skullcandy and she's going to give you a detailed playbook on exactly how they pulled this off and how it's affecting their retail business and the overall business in entirety. So if you have your schedule out, highlight that because I think that the job that Evan and the Skullcandy team have done is without a doubt the single best marketing effort I've seen from any brand in the space in the last 24 months in part because of the genetic attributes that they're dealing with as a business. So you do not want to miss her telling that story. And for me, when I watch this play out, I realize like there is no way the future of what we're building as an agency, as a provider, can happen without this capability. That the need to drive this engine is going to be so central to the process of everything that we're doing going forward that to not be able to deliver that scope to our customers would be a failure. So this is an announcement that as of today, CTC has acquired T-bar partners, a TikTok shop agency, Alex Tyler, where are you guys here? Here you are, hey, come here, walk in so they can see you. Bring your short shorts, wave. That's Alex right there, where's Tyler? Somewhere, oh, just selling, he's selling. He's doing a great job. These guys are the group that is behind building the TikTok shops playbook for most of the industry. Groans, Ridge, Hikes, Cloud, David, Vita Coco, create. And if we go back, they're everything you could imagine. 20-year-olds with the broccoli hair, they made this image for me. That's me as a 21-year-old with a textured fringe. They're everything you could want in TikTok shops, dropped out of their college baseball team to run it out of their college dorm. They work 9,000 hours a day, and all they want to do is help you grow your TikTok shops business. Okay, second, the stock brand. So one TikTok shops playbook, you're gonna get more of that from Evan later today. The second one is the stock brand. And this is an experience that I know somebody here is having right now. It's the brand that is D to C only exclusively has matured to the point of stalling out on growth. Somewhere between 20 and 70 million depending on the time of your product, every brand experiences the situation where their next incremental dollar into whatever primary acquisition channel they're running suddenly becomes unprofitable. And they ram their head into that wall and cannot figure out the threshold. And for these guys, these are the San Sony brothers. They're a family out of Missouri that run this incredible brand. Again, mediocre LTV, menswear. We don't buy clothes quite as often as the women do. Gross margins, okay, these are right category. Heat is incredibly difficult. Wildly saturated, complex category. They're a nice or a guy, maybe a fourth, I'll filter. The category eats prospects like this for breakfast though. And this was true for them. At the end of this quarter, they were stuck. You can see that January year over your spend had stalled. February installed. March, we reached this dilemma, which is what every brand reaches where you have a choice. Do I keep my cat profitable and watch the business slowly decline in acquisition? Or do I try and increase my cat to maintain growth and watch profits decrease? This tension exists everywhere in every brand that comes to us. And so March, we went for it. We said, we're gonna try and produce scale. And what happened was our efficiency declined. Every scale attempt broke first order profitability. It wasn't for a lock of trying though. These guys and our team, they were throwing everything they could at it. 1,199 new ads in a quarter, 400 in January, 240 in February, 524 as we scaled up in March. We could not figure out how to produce it. And then the real problem and where we got in detention with the customer is that as you're trying to do this and you're increasing your creative output, the problem is you're also increasing your production cost because every ad is paid for up front and it was getting expensive. There was a growing frustration paying for a pile of ads that weren't getting them where they wanted to go. Specifically, every ad that we launched, we looked at their 60 day value to the business. And we define that value as the conversion value times the incrementality factor, times the 60 day LTV, times the gross margin minus ad spend. So in other words, every time you launch an ad, how many contribution dollars does it generate for the business in 60 days? Every ad, you put it in the ad account, what happens? And for them, the median ad was worth about negative $2 and the average ad was $24. So the typical ad lost money, 85% of them did and a few winners carried the average. Now, if you think to yourself right now, what does it cost me to make an ad? Just think about it for a second. Are you clear? Do you know how much does it cost you to make an ad? I'd be willing to bet it's more than 24 bucks. So before we get to the production cost of producing the asset, they were already losing money on the median ad and the average ad was only producing 24 bucks. That is a negative return on invested capital, over and over and over. So it wasn't just frustration. It was logical management of capital to turn around and go, guys, we can't keep doing this. This isn't working. And before we get into this, I wanted to give some context that this is not just a normal brand anomaly. These metrics are the reality for most brands. I'm gonna show you a study. So we looked at and analyzed 1.339 million ads that we launched over the last two years, okay? And we said, we wanna understand what is the median value of those ads, the brands that created them over that time period? It's a huge sample of ads. Here's what we found. The median ad launched by a brand is worth negative $3.20. That means you launch it, the return on investment, incrementality adjusted, minus the ad spend times the gross margin is negative. Negative. You build an ad, you spend all this time and money and you're creating negative value for the business. And this isn't just true at the median. This is true for 133 of the 158 brands we looked at in the sample. So not just on a one measure of central tendency, but for most. Brands it is true and go do this math right into yourself go check this math is Taylor lying You will find that the ads that you are producing to create create negative value But here's where the hope exists the average though is worth about five hundred and seven dollars So if the median is negative, but the average is five oh seven math people. What does it mean? It means that the tail of Disproportionate value creation of ads lifts the average value to a place that works Um, and here's some number so of the 1.339 million ads that we've created 631,000 of them lost money 246,000 of them made money and 11,000 of the 1.3 million made big money But here's the beauty of this is that meta is actually a system that optimizes for this reality It kills your losers for free and this is where a game that is probably amongst the most controversial opinions that we possess that lots of people love to argue with us about it But the reality is is that meta is incredibly good at isolating spend on a per ad level to understand where to allocate your budget And the graph of this looks like this so if we take those ads and we were to map them and we say okay What do all the ads look like that we launch this is a scatter plot looking back across those two years And you can see the vast majority of ads accumulate around basically zero But the median is negative But here's why the system still works It's because the outliers of distribution are capped on the downside Because most of us will kill things or the system itself will kill things But the upside is disproportionately. It's right skewed if you were to look at a distribution sample To massive outlier value creation The tail be the species the top 1% of ads produce 41% of all the value the next 4% produce 32% of the value Everything else is 27% so that means the top 5% of ads produce 73% of all the value of every ad you will ever run Across 1.3 million ads 160 brands 5% of the ads produce almost all of the value And here's what I want you to internalize and again you can wrestle with this I'd love to we tonight we can have a drink and we can sit at the bar We can scream at each other about this principle if you want But you cannot alter the odds of this lottery. I've never seen anyone do it I've never seen anyone do it. I've never seen any brand that comes to us that can consistently and repeatedly alter this reality The system is designed for it Meta is incredibly good at allocation towards the highest likelihood production of returns But what you can do and what brands are evolving to understand today is that you can change the price of the ticket When you think about an expected value calculation there's two sides. There's the numerator and there's the denominator If the numerator is the value that we're going to create and we know that it's $500 on average negative $3 on a median basis Then the cost that we pay to create that asset is everything If everything it's the whole game and this is intuitive to you all you care a lot about your supply chain And the cost of goods that you produce Your cost of creative production is the hidden number that it's destroying your ad economics But this is what's happening right now and our business is so good. Last year I talked about evolution The way that I watch brands naturally evolve in a capitalistic system towards the attributes that allow them to drive profit And it's happening again with this This became the hidden thing where everyone talked about creative volume and all of a sudden it became too expensive to produce creative volume And so the industry more and more of can met a more of a size into a solution to the problem And this is what it looks like it looks like tribe right how many of you are on tribe Lucas where are you are you here? There he is where are you I don't know if I can see him when you find Lucas and what correct what tribe is done and what people are doing with TikTok shops is they're inverting the cash conversion site And that's what it does it just allows you to play the game to bet at the casino with no risk And that mechanism completely inverts the dynamics of possibility So as an example if we want to take the assumption of this data which is that one $10,000 winner where those outliers happens every 80 launches And we were looking at an old model it we just analysis about the average cost that we're paying for video ads or ads It's around $300 an ad and you were to assume that okay in order to produce One winner where $10,000 you would have to generate $26,400 of so cost It doesn't work. It doesn't pencil. You can't pay that price and make money The vast majority of you will never make money paying that much for creative production I'm sorry. It's just the map. It doesn't work But if you invert it the creative supply chain and you make the channel that produces the assets paying for the asset Then all of a sudden you're only paying for the winners. You're not paying up front for the cost of the asset And this is what has been unlocked in this mechanism that tribe and others like them refundal and others Have created it the ability to defer the risk to someone else What has happened is just the creator started absorbing your risk And their risk and their cost on it is actually lower than yours It's just their own time and they get really efficient at doing it really really fast And this idea that you only pay for the winners is the way that the economics get inverted. It's like selling Your product on being able to put it in the store and only paying Having the store owner only pay if it sells consignment. That's the word I'm looking for So the old cash conversion cycle is you pay cash up front for production You pay the cash out for media and then maybe 90 days later you get some cash back In a cash intensive business. That's a really bad model All day long you listen to guys like Roman Khan and Maytab talk about negotiating with your suppliers Just ruthlessly refusing to pay them up front for cash and negotiating it. It's the same thing You're paying up front for production then you're paying up front to meta And then maybe you will realize the revenue This inverts the economics the inverted cycles is the creator submit the cash comes in the ad sells on meta Then you pay the commission out To the founder so you see the product you take the asset you pay for the revenue pretty straightforward creators join the program creators Make the video you push the meta ads. Why listed commission on attribute itself. So you guys get it It's pretty straightforward, but understanding why it's happening is the key because what's gonna happen right? Is that all we've done is we've switched the exploitation of the economics to the creator and I was reading today even and you know what creators Why's up to this they suddenly start going for a second? I I'm not getting anything and I only get it if it works and they're eventually The market will move to what I call the terminal price of creative It'll move to this point at which both sides are absorbing an appropriate amount of risk relative to their upside And it'll concentrate down to this this happens in every service that we provide Including creative and so this will happen it'll normalize but for the moment if you can get people to absorb all the risk to your own benefit It is an absolute arbitrage that is a wonder of the world And it's perfectly capitalistic every party is paid from the value it creates the engine funds its own execution and here's what it did to the normal brand going back to them So they did this we came to them. We said okay, we get it You're tired of paying us up front for ads. There's this thing called tribe will manage and grow your program there and see what we can do This was the result three months later April 126 percent spend year over year at the same Ross may 140 percent increase in spend June 100 percent increase in spend absolutely exploded And here's why okay, this is really important Is really really important the number of new ads that we were able to launch Went from an average of like let's call it 380 to an average of almost 1200 So we were able to double our shots on goal At no production cost to ourselves And so what began to happen is that the ads that we launched from tribe began to consume the ad account And you so you can see how many ads were from tribe in each of the subsequent months And how much increase and impact that happened as we went and how much of the spend the account began to absorb over time 78 percent of the live ads 81 and a half percent of the spend in June During that time we doubled the spend at the same high Ross is the same incremental return on ad spend And that's the dream right that we're all after and you can see this is incremental return on ad spend It's up 0.6. It's not 0.4. This is real efficiency at the scale suddenly and consequently as the result of a change in creative volume So here we sit 62 percent year over year 100 percent in June I Ross is holding as we go the ceiling wasn't demand. It was creative supply And here's what I want to illustrate to you during that time the average ad got 5.4x more profitable So for them specifically June through March every ad was generating $24 again paying almost 300 for it very negative Then all of a sudden the average ad in these time periods increases dramatically But again doesn't clear that $300 threshold So if the cost was still the same the economics still wouldn't work But it works because the cost went to zero death thing only reason the denominator matters But here's the other thing The median didn't change because I know there's the quality people out there and I love you I love you quality people the ones that tell me yeah, but they it's not creative volume. It's quality I love you. I appreciate your craftsmanship, but here's the reality the median outcome didn't change The ads weren't better Generally But when you have more ads what you do is you unlock the upper tails of the distribution By having more ads we simply covered a broader spectrum of the same distribution, which means you get more winners. It's a hits business. Every 80 ads produces a $10,000 winner launch more ads. And in doing so, we unlocked massive upside. You can see the distribution of the tri-bads and how many of them reach that threshold in each period. If you just use the $10,000 threshold, and I'll show you specifically, did the typical ad change? No, the median first 60 day spend in each of these periods, January through March 9-20, April through June 10-53, April through June tri-bad 9-24, almost exactly the same median result. The difference now? The 99 percentile increased from 3,300 to 6,800. The distribution moves slightly up the tail, ads clearing 10K. We didn't have 5, we had 16, and tri-bade 12 of them. That's it. That's the whole game. How many hits can you find? That's the game. And the answer, you can try and breathe them better. You can do that in all those things. And I'm not saying to not try. By all means, if you are in the business of making better ads all the time, please, whatever your definition of quality is, I can see to it, just hold that constant and scale the volume up against your bar. Because if you make more ads work more often, think it can always start even better in your favor, then you should increase volume even more, because you make better ads. You'll hit the distribution tail more. Anyways, third example. The zero employee brand, Spiral Bible. This is a business with literally zero employees. They're a publisher. A Bible is not a subscription. You don't need to buy hundreds of them. These are their genetic attributes. Terrible LTV. Very low gross margin, or very low AOV, better gross margin. No employees. There's no roster spot for a team with no players. But Alex here featured in our shop's edition of the baseball card. One of the, another one of these just sneaky entrepreneurs that just get it. He just understands the game that he is playing and how to do it. And he had a wild experience. About a year ago, Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And one of the cool things about being in an agency is that you get to see how commerce and culture come together in these really wild ways. We work with Sunday Red and every time Tiger Woods gets into a car accident. For some reason, people love to shop. It's just a big driver for shopping. And so was this. This was crazy that during that time, there was a massive massive spike in Bible sales in any religious related items when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. And it caused this business to go through the roof in particular on TikTok. And so suddenly, this business that had been plotting along had this moment where the demand went through the root. I mean, just an insane volume as a result of this. So again, just this fascinating way in which these cultural elements drive demand changes in the market. But the problem is the surge didn't last long. Now I didn't fully receive the new baseline was 70% higher for a brand that was ready to spend into it, but it did fade. The religious enthusiasm time like it does with most things calmed it. And the TikTok shops took off and then it took them for a ride and then you try and build your business around it. And then it drops off. They were down about 93% from the peak trying to figure out what to do. And if when a channel collapses, if you don't restructure, you have to evolve. You have to figure out how to change. And so Alex was at this point where he couldn't remanufacture that moment. He couldn't inject into all of culture a sudden increase in demand for the pipeline. That's really hard as a marketing agency. I'll tell you we don't got that in our playbook either. But what we did say is, okay, what was the idea though? What's the principle there? It's the idea that there are in culture. These moments that if we cap into our product can find a place that allows us to ride the tailwind of demand. And so this idea that the calendar holds the key to creative volume and demand became obvious to spiral Bible. And so what we were able to do is to take this principle. And I'm going to start with the end here. We got to 4.4x to spend from May to August. So this is again, these are sudden acute changes in mature businesses where we both massively increased the media spend and the performance. And I'm going to explain how we did it. So that's been growth 339%. Platform Ross went from 163 at the bottom to 191, scaling associated to break efficiency. We did that holy grail of combining both volume and efficiency. And at CTC, we have this thing. It's called the Canon. And it is our attempt at building sort of an internal soul and directory of our methodology that is infused into our LLMS and informs all of our method. And in the Canon, our meta-specific Canon, we have this principle, which is that your best Ross day is never never green at. It's a moment of urgent purchase demand. So if you were to just think like what the most efficient day that you have all year, I think pretty easily we would all identify it as Black Friday. And then from that principle, you could back out to maybe it's your once a year annual sale or it's your new product launch. It's the moment when you drive an imperative for purchase now. Okay. So when we talk to people about building demand and growth into the ad account, we talk about starting with your marketing calendar. If I could offer you anything about meta creative strategy, it would be to please build your creative strategy around offer design and evergreen testing ideation, all of that as an organization collectively at the marketing calendar level, not at the ad level. Please, please, please, unify the efforts that your marketing organization makes towards the impact on the ad account. And we do this by every account. This is our default meta account structure. We have four campaigns that start every ad account. There's evergreen acquisition volume optimized on raw school seven day click. We have evergreen retention. We have a marketing moments acquisition campaign value optimized raw school on a one day click. A marketing moments retention campaign. That's it for campaigns. Every ad set ads are just numbered one through one 50 if we have some campaigns can hold more than that. We'll do that dab is included. And the idea of the distinction between these two things is simple marketing moments have a start and end date. They have a beginning. They have an end. They have an end. And that's the decision evergreen runs all the time marketing moments have a beginning and end. And what I'll say is that I believe in our industry 98% of the energy of scaling your ad account lives in this bucket. But almost the vast majority of unlock potential liars in that one. It's to ask the question what is the story that we could tell that fits into the zeitgeist of culture that overlaps with the organization where the whole brand could pull together on the same end of the rope to create incremental demand. And this is what we did for spiral Bob. We learned from the lesson of Charlie Kirk and we went and said, okay, what could we do? And this is what we watched happen. We combined the tribe playbook the one we already talked about with this idea of marketing moments and we said, okay, how much incremental spend could we get out of those opportunities? And you'll see that it actually was more impactful even than try. In this case, the plan marketing moments by August have absorbed over 34% of the spend in the ad account that has grown 4.4x. So by taking a step back and going, what stories could we tell collectively as a business? We altered the dynamics of the ad account. And then what it also allows you to do is now when I go to the creators, I can say, hey, back to school this week. Here's the bundle. Here's what I want you to talk about. Email team. We're going to launch this landing page team. We've got this organic social. We're going to do this. Hey, influencer friend, talk about this and the whole organization pulls on the rope at the same time. And because it's time bound, you created an imperative for purchase now. Not, oh, that's a cool product. I'll save it and maybe come back. This is scarcity. It is novelty. It is the opportunity to drive incremental demand. So the moment campaign, 34%, the moments Ross in comparison of the Evergreen Ross was about 26% more efficient. So you're getting more spend at a better efficiency than what the moment buys you. And so when we do this, we think about the entire year, you may have seen me talk about the idea of four peaks content, the idea that your marketing calendar should have four critical built in moments to it. But more than that, really, what I want you to do is that if you right now don't have, what is today? It's the middle of September. Ask yourself, do I have for the month of October, every single email, every single SMS, every single website change, every single organic social post on a calendar somewhere. I'm willing to bet that 95% of you do not, because I am your agency partner and I know you do not. You don't have one month from now, an idea of what you're going to say as an organization, but you are ramming endless amounts of hours into this idea of like, what new Evergreen ad could we create? Meanwhile, all around you, the world is happening. There are things in culture that are being talked about that your brand could relate and connect to and drive imperative for virtual. I'll give you an example. This is September or spiral Bible. Okay. So we go, all right. Well, we're going to build a media plan. We're going to design the marketing moments for every section of the campaign. What are we going to say? Well, you know what's happening this week? I don't know if any of you grew up in Christian culture, but see you at the poll. People go pray at school early in the morning. It's a week of September, September 17th, October 23rd. So I said, Alex, get on the phone. Call the founder. I'll see you at the poll. See if they'll take donations if we drive demand for them. It's just some kid. Hey, oh, what are you want to do? Yeah, man, that sounds cool. Here's here's our 501 C3. You're cool if we use your logo and talk about it and donate a portion of the proceeds to you. Yeah, man, that'd be really cool. It's kind of faded over the years, but we're doing what we can. Thanks. Cool. Go. 17 through the 23rd. Here's the promotion. We're going to give 10% back to this thing. We're going to talk about it, blah, blah. Now we have a campaign. It's a structure. It's an email. It's a website change. We're going to plant 29 emails throughout the month. This is a brand with no LTV. The heck are we sending so many emails for? Because email is not a retention channel because you know how many people sign up on the email pop up and are waiting for a reason to buy. They're waiting for an imperative to purchase something that is their reason for participating. We have multiple Labor Day sales. We have a flash show. We have the Brave Faith Week. We created this whole story about how much courage it takes to show up and how we want to encourage these people that are showing up to pray, whatever it is. And so these are all the SMS email. Every one of them planned. Every email has an expectation of revenue. Every campaign has an expectation of efficiency and dollars. And the end result is that it works. And it doesn't just work on the out of count. When we started moving into the strategy, we went from sending 20, our 18 email campaigns in June to 27 in August. We generated 2.8 acts time. The campaign revenue three acts the campaign conversions and 28% of the revenue in September for a brand with no LTV, no LTV on a very narrow seven day click attributed clavio number is going to be 28% of their overall revenue nearly half as many sends as previously nearly three times more revenue every send tied to a moment in the calendar. And we're just going to build these over and over in July. Is this a Bible in a year is the main product? How the hell do you sell Bible in a year in July? Like it's very much a January year commitment product. So we just made some shit up. It's the half time sale. You don't need 52 weeks. You need 90 days. Here's a plan to accelerate getting back on path. blah, blah, blah. Just make it up. It's July though. The story's different. The narrative of your product matters relative to the calendar. It matters with happening in culture. It matters in a way that your brands need to connect into a story that has a window with an imperative. These are three normal brands or all the pun that are struggling in many ways just like you all. They don't have the genetic attributes of groves. They don't have the LTV of I am eight. They don't have the funding. They have to drive profitable cash. They don't have the capacity to do it. But they're all winning because great brands aren't just born. They're built. They're built through finding ways to evolve and win the game. None of these are generic. Every single one of them is learned and your brand is not disqualified. You are here today to commerce round table that I hope you pick up something you put it in your pocket and you have somewhere to go that allows you to go back with some hope, some encouragement, some possibility of why it might be and to go and make it happen. Thank you. And thanks for letting me share about my friend, Jesus. He was an awesome guy. I don't think he ever thought he was going to be on a knee-converse event, but appreciate you all.