The Playbook That Took Loop Earplugs From $100M to $250M With CMO Rob Weston

This year we'll hopefully get anywhere in the region of 242.50. The Golden Goose of Meta isn't necessarily going to keep like a delight today to be joined by us. I would say our most experienced marketer ever, Rob Weston. That came from larger brand backgrounds, so this was the hardest call DTC I ever did. Consumer marketers get bored of their message well before consumers get bored of the message. When I arrived at loop, the machine said the opposite. We need to look at the difference as possible. The way algorithms work is they can find the 70-year-old ornithologist who's going out in the woods hunting for birds. If you're running performance ads, everything's got to be purple. We looked, you know, like a patchwork wilting comparison to cabries. They've done this TV test, which I'm going to assume didn't work to. That trial was set up on a seven day attribution window. It was set up to fail. I had a strong instinct that TV was just the wrong channel for loop. I have probably sort of a slightly more growth-aggressive CFO and CEO than me. I was probably almost all on some trying to hold them back. We didn't know McLaren were going to win at the time. Literally, when we signed the deal, they started winning. The only partnerships you turned out, I'm assuming they must be. I shouldn't name names, but what's one of the first things you'd tell most of them to really think about and implement? Welcome back to another episode of DTC Diaries. Delight today to be probably joined by, I would say, our most experienced marketer, marketer ever in Rob Weston. Three years of chief commercial marketing officer of the loop air blogs and a whole host of huge companies from Unilever, McKinsey, John Lewis, M&S, Samsung. It's quite the name, quite the roster. But yeah, delighted to have you on today. Thank you for joining me. Thank you. Delighted to be here. I'm really excited to dig into this episode on your experience coming into Loop. I think most people watching will be privy to the loop air blogs journey. We've got a very DTC consumer-heavy audience and they were like one of the darlings of the industry, maybe alongside the Dr. Squatches and the Gruns more recently. You joined the business at around about 100 million a year, right? Yeah, so about 100 and then this year we'll hopefully get anywhere in the region of 242.50, hopefully. So over three years it's been a good growth journey. Some journey. Very few make it to 100, but even fewer go from like that 100 to sort of 200, 250 million even beyond that now. I feel like when you look at that from like a, we've seen a few of those businesses, probably not as many of yourself, but you have to make that junk from being good at a few things to sort of broadening out the mix, broadening out the approach to marketing and sustaining more initiatives and just being better at a wider range of disciplines, I guess. So really excited to dig into your journey on how you achieve that with Loop. But I pulled out a quote whilst doing this research went, obviously you went from those larger businesses into Loop and you mentioned this concept of spending enough time in oil tankers and you were looking for a rocket ship. That's right. How would you describe that rocket ship when you first joined? I've described it as a rocket ship or a kit car depending on the analogy I'm using. So it's either speedboats, world tanker or kit car to something articulated lorry. But no, look, it was great. The first week in, so yes, I looked to the Loop was a rocket ship. You know, it went 10 to 40 to 100 million in just the space of a few years, which is an incredible journey. It's fantastic. It's fantastic. More than anything, the product also just was designed to hit a number of consumer trends really well. So if you think about wellness and sleep, you think about the sort of neurodiversity, ADHD, you also think about people going out post-COVID. So I guess, you know, sort of in terms of the growth back to that first point, you have to have a great product and ideally one that's surfing a few trends and waves. But back to your question, what was it like on the first week? I went over to Antwerp, which is where head offices are, and it was the usual drinking out of the fire hydrant in terms of information, people activity. But I left the week thinking I'd made such a good decision culturally, culturally it felt like just a perfect fit for me to start with. And then, you know, as you go through and look under the bonnet, there are some really good things and there are a few little surprises too. What sort of problems were you actually brought into Solve? So it wasn't so much problems. I think, you know, the founder, the two founders at Lou, both terrific in their fields and one of them been running marketing in addition to everything else. And so I think, in part, he was just saying, I just desperately need someone to come and take this off my hands. Yeah, while I come, so there was just a look, both commercial and marketing within Lou, but it's a big team, you know, when I arrived, it's 100 people in total by the time you incorporate creative studios. Amazon Shopify or all of those sorts of things. But part of the job was just, you know, to create leadership and then it was clearly leadership through the next phase of growth. And within that, and again, you know, we can talk about the definition of the word brand forever, but there was a level of brand or sort of multiplicative compounding growth beyond just performance channels and couple of weeks before I arrived, the team had just experimented with TV and out of home. So it gives you the idea of the sorts of channels or the sort of ambition that they were looking for. Yeah, moving past the meta-dominated acquisition process and into, I guess, a broader, more sustainable business long, exactly right. So, quick one before we get into it, if you're growing a brand, you're probably trying to optimize everything, right? You test hooks, you're watching your performance metrics, you're trying to shave a few quid off your costs of goods. You're even hunting for a better rate on shipping, you're squeezing everything you can to improve your margins. But what if you could do the same on the money that's leaving your account every single month for the expenses that you're making? This episode's sponsor is Incada, a financial platform that's built for digital businesses. And essentially, it helps you get more out of what you're spending. Right now, they're giving you 2% cash back on your first year of ads, SaaS, travel and even everyday business spend. All uncapped. So, the money that you're already spending, it starts to pull its weight like everything else that you obsess over within your business. You also get multi-currency accounts, corporate cards and Shopify meta and zero connected all in one place, which, for me, is massive because having to go to all of these different places is a bit of an nightmare. Brands like Soul, Aloe, Paris, Azio Beauty and Que, they're already using Incada to save on their everyday expenses. Sign up for free, use the code SWU2K26 to unlock 2% cash back for a full year. Links in the description, back to the episode. When you walked in the diet, you built this concept of a four-pillar plan. Could you talk me through how you approach that process? Yeah, for sure. I've just got to go through tech. Yeah, so from the plan stakes, whenever I go into a business, it's a few things. First of all, you've got to ask lots of questions and talk to everyone before you make too many hypotheses. Although, what McKinsey would also teach you is to have a weak one hypothesis. So, you've got to balance the two, so you can try and validate it. That's right, and then to prove it. Exactly, by the date of disprove it. When I arrived, the one thing I inherited was a phenomenal team. A great team to grow from, as I said, 10 to 100, is incredible in itself. And they had a lot of insights already about what works, what didn't, et cetera, et cetera. You could see that from the outside looking in. They were on a lot of what we will be talking about on this podcast as best practice three years ago. I think you have to be so at the forefront of pushing the envelope and testing experimentation to get to that. It's 100% right, and they were phenomenal. There were obviously a number of things in terms of going around the business and talking to people. But there were two things that I'd pull out that we did. I guess that they were quite fun and maybe different. One was with my team, a couple of us had done business schools. We thought it would be quite funny to write the loop case. So with my team, we wrote literally five pages of where are we now and what are the big challenges. And A, it was quite fun. And for those of you who have been to business school, you'll know that it started with someone looking out for a window or a rain poured down. But what that did, and I actually used a version of it with the exec as well, is it got everyone on the same page of understanding where are we now. And I think that is absolutely critical for broader corporate strategy. To A, first of all, have everyone at the same starting point. Because often you've got people sort of, "I think this or I think that." And then the second piece is to make that a radically honest appraisal of where you're starting from. Because if you're brutally honest with yourselves, so for instance, you know, we're over a line-to-matter or we're wildly over a line-to-matter, then that changes the, obviously, the strategic decisions are the how about. So I think the more honest and the better you are in your diagnosis of where you are, the easier the strategy becomes out. So that was the first thing, sort of, right, the business case. And it doesn't have to be a business case, but I was inspired by you in the Jeff Bezos' "Just Get It On Paper." Because it makes you tell a story. Yeah. And then, The other thing going back to all my Unilever days is understand the consumer problem at the heart. And it's very tenting to think, you know, performance marketing is sometimes just all about numbers and the quantitative creative and that sort of stuff. But it's not. There is obviously a little bit of that. But ultimately it's the same influencing dynamic as any other marketing channel, which is consumers think feel and do something now. And what you serve them, ideally, has to make them think feel and do something different. So really analyzing what would change consumers' minds in the most efficient way was the second piece of the puzzle. Yeah, make sense. Make sense. I think interested to dig into the outcome of that four-pillar plan over the course of this the next hour. You mentioned the consumer use cases or problems or those different reasons that someone would interrupt for the business and ultimately purchase the products. And that I feel that's a nice segue into maybe spending a bit of time on the backbone of the business, the meta engine, the creative engine because I feel like loop was a brand that we certainly look out. We actually did a really big funnel breakdown of loop about two years ago when we mapped all of the creative and gave it away and all of the funnels. And they were doing a lot of what I'd say the top 1% of businesses are doing now back then. And you could see within that process the depth of understanding of use cases, angles, personas, and then the diversity that sort of sat behind that. Like, could you talk me through a bit of the foundational work stream and approach that was built within the business and how they built that competency out and maybe how you then maybe took that fall with that. Yeah, absolutely. Remind me, we should also talk about what those four pillars were in case anyone's listening. I'm curious about what they might be, but one of them, when we can start with that was find the next gear or meta because you know you can't grow without making sure your foundations of where you are remains stable and it was also about saying, okay, are there any other performance channels that we can build on? So if we go direct to your question, I think again, it just comes back to a phenomenon, well, I think at the heart there were two things going on. One is that the business was started in 2016. It started in the music space with a little bit of motorcycle on the side, but the two founders founded the company because largely through partying possibly too hard. They got tinnitus from standing next to speakers too much. And the barrier that they found the reason that they hadn't worn earplugs was one for thinking that you know, a foam earplug would just destroy the experience in the sound. And secondly, you'd look like a bit of a dork. And so they created the product that again looked very cool and was an acoustic filter rather than earplug. And that was great until COVID came. And then COVID obviously no one was going out and I was going to music venues. So the company sort of got very close to closing its doors. And what the team then did was they essentially looked at the technology and the solution space they had and they said, "How can we apply this to as many other different opportunities as possible?" And so out of that they came up with a product called Engage, which takes decibels down certain frequencies. So it's a block out sort of extraneous noise, you know, the background noise. And this would be a great product for the audio sensitive populates of people who just find the world just too loud. The music product existed as well, moved into sleep, so a sort of slightly high noise blocking piece. So you can see what COVID forced the organization to do was already think about use cases and need states and broaden what the company had. And as I said, they did that based on some really fast moving trends in the world. So that was number one. And the second thing was just a phenomenal team that learned really quickly how the algorithm worked and that diversity was the key. And it wasn't diversity in terms of changing blue to red to yellow on an asset that performed. And it was finding something radically different in a new hook, a new angle, a new use case, as you said. So then the machine ever since has really just think about how can we create diversity in every aspect of this. But back to the point is not diversity in quantity of creative just for the sake of it. It is actually, as you've seen, as a really thinking about the consumer need and building off that. Highly intentional. Is that highly intentional? Yeah, you got this concept of blue red green and there's an ad for everybody. Right. Could you talk through that? Yeah, so I guess the what you're talking about is a slider presented a little bit of a while ago, which I borrowed from a friend called Alex, which talked about. And again, we were just illustrating through three colors, which is essentially three personas and one person reacting to a short form, her 15 cent video about whatever. And then another person leading, needing a slightly longer form story, maybe with a harder CTA, the principal being that there is personalization at scale available. And ultimately that's what we ended up trying and the way I said simplified it to myself, because I came from larger brand background. And this was the hardest call D to C I ever did. So the couple of the first weeks were amazing learning curve for me as well, understanding how the how the machine ran. And yeah, I think, and then I think the biggest point was that someone explained it really nicely to me, which is about five, 10 years ago, if you were selling baseball hats, you'd have probably said, OK, who's my biggest, most likely market for baseball hats? I'd be 24 to 20 year old male, probably a sports fan. So then you'd create lots of images with men at sports events and then you'd try and buy an audience and I don't know GQ or wherever. And you sell it whereas the way algorithms work is they can find the 70 year old ornithologist, who's going out in the woods hunting for birds, they can find the 20 year old yoga instructor. And as long as you can as a creative strategist or a marketer, as long as your imagination can go as far as how many possible use cases are there for my product, these algorithms can go and find them because the world's an incredibly big place. So I think having that explained to me in really simple terms, help me concrete, OK, sort of why have we been so successful, but also where do we need to go next? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I think they're also getting more sophisticated in that time, even thinking about two or three years ago, it's like the fragmentation of that delivery and the ability for the long tail of your assets to take up more spend as they find small pockets is really fascinating. And what the end state of that's going to be, how good can it get? If only I knew. Yeah, just I don't spend too much time on this because we've again, we've drilled, we've drilled down into these areas so much on previous episodes, I really want to focus on some of the other things you did next beyond matter. But what, what, how did the team evolve? Because I think that's something that many runs are struggling with right now is like how to actually back this process with, with resource and people and evolve that as the business grows. Oh my goodness, that's a great shout. I mean, so again, the first things first was to make sure we kept the existing engine running. So you look after the fantastic people we had there. And then to go back to those four pillars, what the four pillars were was having looked at where the businesses we wanted to make sure we could keep it growing, but make sure it ultimately sort of had more legs to the stool. So it was more stable than just a couple of products sold on one channel essentially or matter or you know what I mean, obviously we had Amazon as well. So there was, there was an idea of making sure that we kept the growth going, but built a more stable engine around it. And the four pillars were obviously for matter. And then within that channel looking at probably YouTube and TikTok and see if we can build that out the second when you product. So again, you know, sort of boosting a V potentially LTV. The third was brand and thinking about OK, how do we move away from linear scaling to compounding scaling and the fourth was retail and looking at not just digital availability, but physical availability. And to answer your question, organization always follows strategy, not the other way around. So once you've got those pillars in place, you then say, OK, right, well, how do I make sure I've got the right people in place. So build a retail team and you start small and we used a fantastic retail consultant over in the US to help us get going. And within the brand team, I had a strong instinct that TV was just the wrong channel for loop. And that brand partnerships was a much better plus sort of influence. So essentially, if you look at the barriers to ear plug, what stops people using them? And you've got ultimately sort of for music, I thought ringing ears was really cool. And actually was kind of a good night out. So I didn't know it was a problem. I didn't know acoustic filters existed. I didn't know there's a stigma attached. I didn't know loop existed. And I don't know whether loops any good. And a partnership with the likes of a Harry Styles and McLaren can help you tell that whole story from you need ear plugs. This is why loops good and there's no stigma because look at the great partner. got really efficiently. So we built the brand team around partnerships rather than TV. We built the retail team. We made sure that we had, and again, one area loop is excellent at his analytics. So making sure that the analytics team was well stocks for insight purposes. So to answer your question, organization follows strategy, and that's how we did it. Makes sense. I want to go for each of those pillars that we've mentioned. We touched on metaphorically, but want to spend a bit more time on each of the others. Maybe starting with channel expansion, because I think that probably naturally flows. We're trying to make the business less reliant on Facebook. They've done this TV test, which I'm going to assume didn't work too well. Wow. If you're not going to do it again, I mean, I think, you know, well, a couple of things with TV is, well, first of all, I think that trial was set up on a seven day attribution window. And the thing we don't have much repeat business on our core product. So therefore, we always had, we had to be first order profitable. And TV would never really allow it. The impact is over a much, much longer period attribution window, and it's expensive to get there. So that, that's why it's not to say the channel wouldn't work eventually. And I think the, the, the, the time, the total addressable market for our sleep products, everyone sleeps. So actually that's pretty huge. So I could justify using broad cast media for something like that. Yeah. I think it's like trying to find the next, the next most incremental. Exactly right. It probably was work, but it's probably going to work better if you've got some other things that bridge the gap between what I think is really top of all those TV. 100%. It's next best on that. But next best within your business model and next best within your units economics, next best in terms of what is going to convince your consumers most efficiently. Yeah. So it's all of those things. And for us, because of the first order profitability, it was next best in terms of really quick measurement signals. Yeah. Which I think is very different for every business. Exactly. It's very different. Yeah. So where did you end up looking at that next best? So the next best. So the, the, the team ran trials. We, we were very interested in top of final, because we did a lot of middle and bottom certainly with, with Meta and that was successful. We did. So we were curious about what you might call top or, you know, within the YouTube world, that sort of from demand gen up to VVC. So we, we first of all trialled a slight tweak on how we used Meta, YouTube, mountain, which is connected to TV and Amazon Prime. And we ran incrementality tests for each of those within either different data errors enabled just to see. And the phrase we used was signs of life. So we didn't have to see, you know, well above break even row as in the first instance, but we wanted to see something happening. Yeah. And the, we went through those things and of all of the channels for us, and it might be different for other brands, YouTube was the one that showed the most signs of life early on. So that's the one we decided to progress. I guess signs of life, because you're going to assume you're going to get better at the time. So you're going to improve efficiency before it decreases again. 100%. And you know, look, that's the massive challenge for any D to C business that scaled on one. 100%. Channel is that, you know, and I walk in and you know, you face that challenge with, you know, do you spend the extra dollar on matter or would you put it somewhere else? And because you've become so good at matter. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't look like a sensible place to put it unless you know, or you're pretty sure at some point, you're going to saturate that market. And then it's too late. I think methods created really unrealistic expectations of how good advertising channels can be. And then some of the other ones kind of suffer off the back of it. Like people walk into TikTok shop as an example right now. And they're like, we want to launch TikTok shop, we want it to be hit in the same row as an end cock in two months as Facebook. It just doesn't work like that. It's like a six month. It's a lot of the time. It's like you need to get good at it first and then it'll work. It's exactly right. And I guess the benefit I had going in is that either through the bigger brands I've worked with or some consulting I've done around is I'd seen businesses fail or by friends or whatever it is or try and migrate their channels too late. Right. Yeah. And so when you run out of road on a matter of what have you, it is too late. So you're much better saying, okay, can I grow just slightly slower? An experiment with one or two of these other channels. So I get another leg to my stool as it was. Yeah. Because when you needed it's too late. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. How did you approach just of interest, the incrementality test? And did you do that by region? I guess you had the benefit of having multiple markets. The benefit of multiple markets. And then even within the US, in the multiple regions, we used house, which is a phenomenal tool, great tool. And again, when we went through YouTube, we have the benefit of them being linked into the YouTube, the Google ecosystem too. So it was a great measurement tool. Makes sense. I think our house is great as well for those that are maybe less technical because they do a lot of these set up and test structure for you, which I think is a really unrated part of their offering. And it's a help with that education gap on how to actually structure. So when you neither of us have an affiliate code for house, no, we don't. I just really like them. Really good, really good products. So you did those tests. You found YouTube to be the one that you wanted to run with, explain how you then maybe made that more of a mainstay within the channel mix. What did the next sort of three six months? Yeah. So we just, we created a great partnership with the YouTube team and I have, you know, my hats off to them. And I spoke to them with kind of semi deal, which was, you know, we're prepared to be a case study for them. So I said to Google, look, I'm prepared to do what you tell me. Is it serious? If. But I'm only going to keep spending if I see the results. And like I said, just to get everyone's skin in the name, I asked, you know, could it be a live case study? So the, and I'm, so we have anyway, what, what that enabled us to do is Google then opened up and said, right, they gave us some really great coaching. And we started with them on Jen. So sort of a middle ish, ish funnel with videos of a 30 second explainer, that kind of stuff. And Google were fantastic as a creative partner. And they have their ABCD measurements and you can put everything through there. We talked to their creative studio, my creative director, I think he actually, he did actually say that he'd never worked with a more collaborative partner, which was really impressive. And anyway, through that, we managed to get a number of assets out into the market to test. And then with my CEO and CFO, we'd also agreed that we wanted to be quite aggressive in how we measured and scaled. So rather than just waiting for a 12 and we elongated our attributions and no longer were we working on seven, we were working on minimum of 12 and then, then on. But we said, as long as we see the leading indicators moving in the right direction. So we're not going to wait for 12 weeks and say, okay, we had our break even worse, we're not going to wait for 16. We're going to say based on traffic, attributed brand search, brand lifting conversion lift from Google, are we moving in the right direction? And if so, we're going to keep spending. And that was, and again, you know, I'm very lucky in that I have probably sort of a slightly more growth aggressive CFO and C, than me, I was probably almost one sort of trying to hold them back as the other around, which is rare. So you know, you're very lucky in that sense that you have a great team around and a team that understands the dynamics of the channels. That's another thing which you don't always get in other companies. And look, luckily, we managed to find a way to keep scaling and you know, these channels aren't perfect because it's not like, you know, we've got a pass break even. So we've melded it in. And then you know that you're not optimized. So you haven't optimized the creator, there's always much, much further to go. And then we looked at VVC, you haven't perfected that yet. But again, you know, it's the start of a new pillar or as well to keep my analogy going, leg to the stool. And yeah, and I feel lucky that we manage that jump. And like I said, the Google ecosystem has been a good complement to me. So this isn't about just changing. It's about making sure you can sort of run both. Yeah, it makes sense. And you carved out that experimentation budget and almost treated it off, removed it from your efficiency, removed it from your targeting until it was proven and then molded it back in exactly the right to the overall part. We did that for both the brand spent. And that's, that's a really good question. I think it's the absolute key to so much of this stuff is we said, okay, for brand and for this, we're going to have experimentation. We're going to carve it out for planning purposes. We said a rather one because you know, we really didn't know you've got to expect that it's going to bring something back. Okay, over what attribution window, you don't necessarily know either. Yeah. But you know, and that is a big deal for any exact team deciding, you know, sort of how quickly do we go because it, if all of a sudden you carve, I don't know, 10% is what we did, 10% of your budget out and you say, okay, rather than a race of, I don't know, three, two point five, whatever, we're going to attribute one. Your growth, you know, it's a meaningful change. Okay, It's not, you know, crazy crazy numbers, but it's a. meaningful change, especially when that is experimentation. There's no guarantee and you know that some of it will fail. And then you're just trying to do that. You've just got to remember that, you know, the golden goose of matter isn't necessarily going to keep paying that forever and therefore it's a change. You're absolutely right. It's an insurance bet. It's only 10%. You are on lock the future. Exactly, 200. Exactly. I think that's a really logical and intentional way to do it. It's also like a, it creates the level of discipline. It's also creates a bit of like mental space to not doubt. And I'd be sweating the numbers on like a really short term, time horizon. If it doesn't start to perform, maybe as you'd hoped, enough spoken to quite a few other founders who do the same with brand spend. They just put a percentage of OPEX or percentage of total revenue through his brand and kind of just don't think about it too much and just have it as something to invest. Persona, I think that's really healthy. Now, you still need a brand team worth their salt. You need a brand team that is commercial. You need to measure it in someone. Yeah, you have to be able to measure it because otherwise, you know, if you just carve it out, you know, people can just go and do something on a whim and it doesn't really count. So you still need to be investing it very carefully and people still need to be held accountable. But it doesn't have to be a very strict warehouse target. Yeah, just to assume that it's going to have that long term benefit. That's exactly. And I think, you know, one of the things I learned over the course of the three years and the part of the reason, not part of the reason, a small part of the reason I went to loop from going from these very big companies is just to see if marketing works. I'm going to be saying that at the top. And what was really satisfying, and especially with the E-Com team as well, and I got some lovely messages after year three, which was, and you know, it's a bumpy ride to get there. But when you get a few of these other channels working, or when you get the brand effects beginning to turn the flywheel again, it's an amazing feeling. And then you can see the scale coming. So part of me, you know, it now just knows in some ways to trust the process. But the effects can take 18 months, I think, rather than, you know, just tomorrow. And that's a very, very difficult thing for any marketing team to balance when you've got VC investors or product investors or obviously ambitious founders. I think it's a maturity curve as well. So I knew and locked that me multiple, it's like a multiplier effect, isn't it, rather than like linear growth, which are things that we've been interested in. So quick one before we get into it. If you're growing a brand, you're probably trying to optimize everything, right? This episode sponsor is in card of financial platform that's built for digital businesses. Right now, they're giving you 2% cash back on your first year of ads, SaaS, travel and even everyday business spend all uncapped. So the money that you're already spending, it starts to pull its way like everything else that you obsess over within your business. You also get multi currency accounts, corporate cards and Shopify meta and zero connected all in one place, which for me is massive because having to go to all of these different places is a bit of a nightmare. Brands like Soul, Aloparis, Azio Beauty and Quay, they're already using in-card to save on their everyday expenses. You mentioned that partnership with the CFO. I do think it's worth just touching on that because like I saw a start when preparing for this, the 80% of CEOs don't trust or unimpressed with their CMOs. I think maybe you did you put that on your slide? I think I've had that. I've certainly used and known of that for quite some time. I know the shortest tenure in a sea level team, isn't it? But it was up until last year, I think, then C00 took over, but yeah, marketing's always been very precarious. That moved towards technology, I guess, and that needs to be moving at ridiculous speed. Speaking about that relationship, what made it so productive and what maybe it's a contrast to all those that you've seen or maybe more normal setup would look like that limits growth? Well, if I break it down into a few pieces, one is lucky to have a founder who knows how the engine runs. That's a big piece of the puzzle. Then secondly, a CFO who is bright as hell, who comes in and knows some of that already and can pick the rest of it up really quickly. The third piece of the puzzle goes back to where we started, which is, remember that business case we talked about? I had written down my understanding of where we were starting from. I had written down the challenges we had, so I was able to brief him and say, look, this is my understanding. And again, I also run on the principle of best idea, when surf, anyone was reading that and can critique it and say, actually, no, I disagree. This is how it works. I'm all ears. But luckily, we were able to quite quickly all agree on where we're starting from. When you all agree that you need to be doing these experiments, almost for the not quite existential, but you can't run a metaphor ever, then it really, really helps because it becomes a team effort. And then, like I say, it also helps that everyone knows how aggressive they want to be on growth targets. And then they can say, no, leading indicators rather this. We're going to push hard. We're going to trust the process. So all of those factors, you know, people understanding it, really good minds in general and the common understanding of where you're starting from. Yeah, real alignment with the current state and where you want to get to make sense. I mean, I'm sure that's a contrast to all those experiences at times when they're asking you to pull back meta budget every week. Switching gaze towards brand, because you mentioned brand a few times, and you come from a brand marketing background. I'd probably say the most experienced brand marketer we've had on the podcast, not just even more so than general marketer. And you moved into a very performance driven business loop, at least when you came in. What was the, how did you approach brand within loop? How did you turn that into like a process that could create growth? Yeah, I mean, I see if I can remember. I think brand and performance can mean so many different things, and it's helpful to disaggregate it, because you can talk about attribution time frame. So it's influencing techniques that work on a longer term versus in the shorter term. You can talk about it in terms of targeting. One is broadcast, one is narrow. You can talk about it in terms of something that converts quickly or something that builds equity in meaning over time. So it even talked about it from visual consistency, which is yes, interesting. One at the moment when you've got diversity of creative and then visual consistency, so that natural tension that we come across like every week. That's a really, really good example as well. And that's probably one of the first observations as a brand marketer walking in, who's been trained and taught visual consistency brand assets that stand out. So simple stories repeated over time, consumer marketers get bored of their message well before consumers get bored of the message. So again, consistent, repeating. All of those things. So when I arrived at loop, the machine said the opposite. The machine was like, no, no, no, no, we need to look at the difference as possible. We need to have as many stories out there as possible. And my instinct, I guess, said one thing just because I seen it, but the proof was somewhere else. And I really enjoyed the fast learning curve that was D2C. And like I said, understanding how the whole thing works. And that baseball story was a very helpful one for me landing it. Okay, right. You know, so this is this is the piece of the puzzle. And I think, you know, Marissa famously talks about bothism, the idea of, you know, that you need to be able to run brand and performance. I think that depends on the stage of your business. When you're really, really early, you probably can't afford to be doing anything other than just something that you can measure and pay back tomorrow. But over time, I think, you know, you need to be talking to people who are going to take slightly longer to convert. You need to be building frames of reference. You need to be owning what I call category entry points, which might for us be music or whatever. So yeah, you need to be running both at the same time. You, the pipe event reason that you talked about the analogy of cubries and how that understanding of brand would be super limiting in today's, I guess, a landscape of how the marketing ecosystem is matured. I'd love to just go here, here that analogy again, because I think it was a really, I've struggled to really articulate what brand is right now within this, because I think it's in a state of flux, like the understanding of what makes a great brand today is probably very different to 20 years ago in some ways. Yeah, we can come back, I haven't thought that one through, but I think yes and no, I think the means to create the brand are probably different or the channels you have, what a great brand is, I think is still probably starting. The tools you use, I think, can be very different. In the room, and again, I didn't mean to pick on caprices. They were a small client of mine, wasn't McKinsey. But the only reason is, the only reason I thought of them actually is because they have such strong brand asset in their color purple. And I imagined myself as brand manager of dairy milk. And I would imagine, and again, I can't say for sure, but that person had been told, if you're running performance ads, everything's got to be purple. And that is the least effective way to run a growth D2C. Because if you look at the diversity of creative that we had, we looked like a patchwork quilting comparison to Gabri's. But that's what the medium required. I think it wasn't that we just let it be freefall. Because we were lucky, not lucky. But we had a very distinct looking product. And in my mind, that is what held all of those various different assets together. Orlando System One talks about these as, I think, coherence in a brand, rather than consistency. That's how I think about constraints of things we can't do less so about the limitations. Things were definitely not-- boundaries were definitely not going to cross rather than things we will do, or maybe a great way of explaining it. And I think then you just end up for those D2C channels. You end up, what I ended up casting my, what can we do? What should we do? Much wider than my initial instinct probably started. But you're also right. You must have a flaw below which we don't touch. And so look and feel and brand. An aspirational tenders, whatever it might be, an understanding of the equity of your brand as well. I think it's really important that brand is thought about. Because it creates enterprise value. So you have to, I think, it's silly not to think that not thinking about brand at all is the right outcome. What I was trying to allude to earlier is I think what builds a relationship with the brand I feel has changed so much over the last 24 months, you've gone from every piece of content that you see from a business being delivered by the business to this landscape where now it's all creators and it's all these different identities, it's experts, it's just, it's, I feel like it's quite fluid right now. I think what the, one of the things that has changed quite, as you say, the fluidity comes from sort of how you reach people. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, if people are watching less TV and it depends on, you know, whether it's, some people say they're not, some people say they are. I think the answer lies somewhere in between. But you, you can reach people through totally different channels. The way I think about creators, for example, is also you've got to think about who is best to tell which part of your story. Yeah. And I, again, see some quite big brands getting really hung up about handing over some level of that their brand to creators where I'm, well, today a little bit more relaxed, but admittedly, I'm not running a public limited company brand where you know, you've got to be a little bit more careful about who's, who you're dealing with. But nonetheless, if the story is coming from someone else about you, that's very different to you telling the story to them. And I think that the two work really well 'cause I can tell you, I don't know, we've got to say a lot or we just could launch a new product. And then someone else can say, the product's really good. All this is how you use it and this is how it works. So they're very, very complimentary, but I believe that the brand is allowed to enter the creator's space and take on the creator's brand and then that you should mix. I don't think you should be too restrictive. - Yeah, I think the worst case scenario is where they work with the creator, but then tell them what to say. - Exactly, no, and I've seen that so many times. - You're going to deliver the scripts. - Exactly. - To your audience that we have no idea what they're interested in or what they really resonate with. And you've built this huge rapport with these people is like so frustrating to see. But I definitely agree. I'd love to dig into that partnerships as another topic. - Well, come to create a second, you mentioned category entry points. That was a really intentional strategy you had through partnerships that Luke could dig into that a little bit 'cause I think it's really fascinating. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we said, okay, so what do we, in terms of the salience of the brand when you come to mind, which occasions do we want to own first, as it were? And the sort of three biggest trend there is, for one, which is audio sensitivity, so you know, just people moving out and loud. The other music and concerts and clubs, number two. And then again, you know, noise at night, which can be either traveling or the rest. And you know, that's already being a bit greedy for a brand having three. And then within that, we then said, okay, we're initially going to prioritize largely speaking the music pillar. There were a few opportunities that came to us, which we decided we'd actually jump on top of as well, so Soroski, for instance, came to us because they were celebrating their 140th birthday and they'd identified 10 brands they want to collaborate with. And for me, that was a fantastic opportunity to challenge people's perceptions of what an earplug can be. But other than that, we said, okay, within the music world, we want to partnership with the apex predators of the festival world. So, you know, tomorrow, and being the leader in EDM, fun on all, Coachella being, you know, probably the most iconic festival in the US. I didn't mean to say it down, 'cause there are some amazing other festivals which we would also like to collaborate with. But it was a good sort of foothold and landing party there. Then in terms of touring music, you know, what was the biggest or one of the biggest tours of the year, well, Harry Styles this year, record, sell out for Wembley, record, sell out for Madison Square Gardens. So, like I said, we want to tie ourselves to the biggest and baddest news stories, the biggest and baddest predators, and ones that we felt reflected the brand either from a fashion sense or from a performance sense. So, you know, Harry, for instance, is, you know, sort of renowned for a set of fashion trends and setting those sorts of things. And then on the side, we also had moving to Formula One on McLaren, which was more just a principle of, okay, what's glamorous and loud? Simple brief. And, you know, we loved the driver profile of Lando and Oscar, Young, Hip. We didn't know McLaren were gonna win at the time. Literally, when we signed the deal, they started winning, so we got a lucky, a lucky break. But anyway, so we were very intentional about who we chose and why we chose those partnerships, and a lot of it was A about the category entry points we wanted to run and then B, what, it's the build borrow of a partnership. So, what do you borrow from the other brand and what do they sort of work for you? So, they were all very conscious in that regard. - What would be the things you borrow from the business? - Well, so, I mean, I think for most of it, it's actually the anti-stigma. So, that idea-- - So, reducing stigma. - Yeah, so seeing as it, yeah, you say, okay, well, hang on, if Lando and Oris, or if Harry Styles, or if these guys are endorsing Loop as a solid brand and they're actually saying, you know, what's a good idea to wear them? And we knew that Harry had won them already on his, for the last year, we saw him wearing the McClaston Bridge before we even partnered with him. So, all are, I think we've also seen Lando wearing them on the back, 'cause he obviously sort of likes his music and I think he'd been to Tomorrowland as well. So, they were very authentic collaborations in that regard. We weren't asking people to suddenly put something that they hadn't used or didn't know about. So, by bringing that story to life, which is, okay, if these guys know what they're doing, and they're prepared to use Lupea plugs, it kind of says, okay, you know, that removes a bit of the stigma. - It's like states has trust credibility kind of vibes and different-- - Exactly. - For different brands listening. Interesting that they were already wearing. I think that's a really under leveraged tool for those brands that are in that scale up phrase. It's looking at who's famous, who already buys your product? - 100%. Like, really trying to build around those authentic partnerships before you go and just build a relationship. - Exactly. - Exactly. And sometimes, you know that they're often surprising. We've just done a collaboration with Paris Hilton, who, again, was a fan before we went to her, and, you know, she's a DJ and-- - A DJ. - A DJ. - She's very fairly steady, that's right. Yes, that was a big funny. So, again, it was very natural there as well, but sometimes those stories, people are like, "Oh, I had no idea." - Yeah, really interesting. How did you approach the commercial side, like CFO conversation, measurement, like what made those partnerships a success? - Well, the thing I liked about the partnership approach, the most, was when we were able to do a joint, a collaborative product. So, you'd ask, you see, you'd agree a minimum fee to whoever, but then after that, it's revenue share. And so then what I could say to anyone in the business was, as long as we sell this many of this collaboration, we break even. Then, kind of everything else is a bonus. The PR we get is a bonus. The anything it does to our flywheel in terms of performance is a bonus. So, obviously, we measure things like awareness, which scores on the rest, but I don't have to worry about going to the business, going, "Look, look, look, it worked, "because awareness went from extra-while, "we got this many likes on this post." I could just point to, well, actually, you know what, we've covered our costs. This is great. And it's so important for, like I said, our business because first order profitability was so important. And that takes me back to why I think TV was the wrong tool at that time, because I think we would have seen quite a drain on the money before we saw anything coming back to us. Makes sense. Interesting. That whole, that is how we think about TikTok shop for these mature brands again. It's like break even and then you get this halo effect and it's just a nice to have. But it's also really significant often and can really drive significant growth. It is. And the other thing about, you know, the brand pieces is you don't really understand on where the returns are going to come from. And a good example of that is one of the retailers in the US that we ended up going into. The buyer was at Coachella and she saw our product. And that, you know, that they actually came to us and said, you know, we want a list and we want to use that product. And never in a million years had we anticipated that, you know, a retail listing would come from that. But obviously that paid five times over a month, but that's the thing you've just got to trust ultimately with those brand pieces that you'll never quite sure how the money's coming back. And that was a, an outsize return as opposed to a linear return. And ultimately that's why you do brand, but you can never guarantee it. And that's what scares so many, just calculates interest rate. It is calculated. You can possibly make it with the data points you've got there. It is. And you know, if you're an investor, you understand you need a pension fund and you'll put it further here, you need a few bankers and then you can probably have a few VC bets as well. Yeah. Brand probably sits somewhere at the upper end of the risk profile. Makes. It's a good analogy. How did you make sure, just touching the final point on this is that, how did you make sure there's brand partnerships like connected with the wider market in strategy to ensure that it maximized the impact of them on just the actual activations, did you do much online and really amplified that? We did. And I think, you know, right at the start, we took a few learnings, which was trying to sell the McLaren range through a conversion campaign or meta and assuming that, you know, you were going to get all the benefit from that was tough because it's a much more precise product. And you know, it's not like just selling some air plugs. So we learned actually that as part of some of that experimentation budget, we needed to just put that into top of funnel for that product, try and take the halo and then work on that. The first learning was for what we did digitally, we need to amend our model or the way we thought about our model ever so slightly. The second thing was we needed or we created, I think, where the channels worked much better together. So within my leadership team, we talked about, and we got better and better and better at this. So when it came to launching Harry Styles this year, we were really well set up in terms of what brand we're going to do at the start, what influence are going to start, the broader performance channels we're going to do and it was all coordinated. And you could suddenly see how when you launch the PR and you, I don't know, put the fly posters up just outside Wembley, the ads in the matter or whatever start working better. Did you have like influencers going to the event where in the event we did, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, a huge credit to my team because it was just so well planned out, but the collaboration between the channels was the key and that I think is more akin to what you'd seen one of the much, much bigger, you know, when I was running Christmas ads for the bigger retailers, you know, you have a launch date and you make sure all your channels start working. Exactly. Trickles don't work. So it's more akin to that way of working and then for a D to see when you're running those brand campaigns, you'll have an always on layer and then you will have these sort of fireworks of campaigns that go up and you need to make sure that you're, you are working as a full multi channel omnichannel approach because there's a multiplier effect between the number of channels you use. Makes sense. Any partnerships you turned on? I'm assuming they must be. Well, I mean, we're very lucky. There are so many brands that have come to us that actually I would have really loved to work with. There were, I shouldn't name names, but football soccer was one of the biggest ones and there were some credible brands that came to us, which to be honest, we sort of still toy up and down with. The reason we haven't gone yet is because I just think there's still a job to do in music and some of the other is where we can go further, whether it's in heavy metal, whether it's in different geographies or different genres of music, where I think the return will be better. I'm not quite sure a football venue is quite loud enough. Problem's not big. No, that's exactly right. I think you can't think about like value of a segment through how big is the problem sometimes. Exactly, and always. And this was a debate we had which was, you know, how distinct is the need, and it's the whole pill versus misdemeanor debate, and it's not, you know, and also, I think the majority of football fans are probably less likely to purchase for whatever reason. It's probably a sub cohort of a very broad base rather than maybe the majority. That said, there were some incredible global brands that literally just by sharing, you know, the stage with them could amplify the brands, it's absolutely a never say never. Such an interesting market and category football. I feel like the marketing, the becoming lifestyle runs, those, you know, very quickly. Exactly. And so like I said, for that reason, absolutely never say never. And again, you know, we looked at fandom within sports in the US as well, and actually basketball stadiums are a lot louder than a football stadium because it's enclosed. So all of a sudden, then maybe you've got a better angle into sports there. So I mean, the truth is there were probably, I don't know, a list of 100s that I could have gone after. And it wasn't because we didn't love them. It was just that there were strategically better options to choose from right from the start. Makes a lot of sense. Super interesting. Switching to more like individual level partnerships or creators, you've obviously done a lot with creators from a performance perspective, performance marketing content, and then partnership ads, but also through a product and influencer lens. Like, could you speak to a bit around how you approached the strategy behind loops, engagement with creators and build a, build a program out over time? Yeah. And we had, and again, you know, so ongoing discussions even within the executive team about certainly the, the more performance affiliate code style influencer. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, my fancy year was isn't desperately comfortable with that model. And I kind of agree because it's sort of quite salesy, it's a little bit more bottom of funnel. It's not great for the brand. And I do have a lot of sympathy with that angle. It's again quite hard because when it's a significant part of your business and you can measure the returns so well from the commercial side of things, it's actually quite a useful tool, but that creates a little bit of a dichotomy. So seeing some runs absolutely fly with that model, like wild, being a good, a good example of someone who's built a huge business off that. And again, you know, a lot of it comes down to the how again, because I think, you know, it can be done tastefully, it can be done on an on-brand way, it can also be done like, it looks like there's a fire sale, same goes for TikTok shop, by the way. Yeah, yeah. So once a new business is going to shut down, it's a big problem now. We genuinely had a few ads where, you know, some creators have just taken it and decided to control it. You lose control. And so that just simply wasn't acceptable. And yeah, and then, you know, we've had a lot more fun with less, I'd say, immediate performance-oriented creators. When we've done something like Harry Styles, for instance, was a good example, you know, using between his team plus YouTube plus us, okay, actually, who's influential in which pockets of the ecosystem, who can we work with, and that doesn't have to be crazy, crazy performance-oriented, because we allowed ourselves to spend that money from our experimentation pot rather than from our performance pot, knowing that it was going to amplify the impact of the brand activity, or hoping that it would, and therefore you get that return. So again, you know, how you break down your budget and the expectations you set for that, freed us up to, I think, do some slightly more interesting work with creators than we might have done otherwise. You spoke to two examples when I last saw you around. One was like, almost like leveraging a partnership with a news network known in an narrative, and like experts own in a specific narrative, and the other was accessing a very high-per-specific audience through an individual and through a product collaboration. Yeah. Maybe start with the second. Yeah, so this was, and this, one of the things happened actually before my time, which was, again, an exceptional performance team looking at communities saying, you know, there's, we have real potential with the audio sense of community, which we absolutely did, because it would make sense. Yeah. But, you know, if you look at it, you know, this is a community that's never really had its needs now. it's met. It's never had an earplug that also looks closer to jewelry or that you can be proud to wear out. And so therefore the team knew that and then used the number of creators and then we just saw one literally catch fire and I think could have predicted who or how but just in running that the number one had sort of enormous outsized returns that then kicked off the community. And so once you know once enough people know then they spread the word on your behalf. So that's what happened there and again it's where strategically in my mind you know playing a community card especially with a product like ours. So you know you can do formula one fans you can do like I said audio sensitive you can do so many of them you can get more granular and granular granular heavy metal I think is a really interesting place for us to play because you know that those fans use earplugs already but a lot of them are actually the the foamies. So yeah that that was the community piece the news networks the piece was really just you don't have much control over that this was more again PR responding to PR but it's about making sure that you know I think Tinnitus Awareness Week make sure the news networks have your full story have all your assets the medical issues that run with you know hearing loss that those aren't messages that we desperately want to be banging people over the head with on matter because it's a little bit nanny stays in place. Yeah it is but it's also like it's big is probably it is and it's crazy important and once you know you know and it's always been a balance for us as well because it's probably the most influential influencing technique actually because whenever I give the Luke talk to audiences what have you and when you say okay you know so ringing is a sign of permanent hearing damage that and hearing damage is cumulative so it's not like it goes right then everyone sort of just sits up on the edge of their chair and goes oh yeah okay it's one point should be a two maybe maybe I should and I went with my daughter to um concert at the oh two kentish town and there were about three thousand four thousand people in there it was fray sky and it was so it's 14-year-old girls for essentially lots with their moms and I and they hit 110 decibels which is you know 15 minutes before permanent hearing damage and I was looking around going if only everyone knew yeah yeah because certainly mums I mean there's no way you'd take your 14-year-old daughter yeah you know there's no way you do that knowing what's happening there is just no education around yeah around that out in the in the education system all the media like there's no room really banging that drum and I think you know it is building and yeah and look at air pods of beginning to sort of give you hearing tests and you know and you look at the concert goes and I think this year at Coachella not quite a tipping point but close to three years ago when I went no one was wearing anything this year when I went I could sort of put a 360 in the crowd and I'd see at least one or two pairs yeah yeah you seen it yeah absolutely that's what and it so I think the wave is that the wave is coming and it's a bit like skiing helmets you know it's at some point you realize you the idiot yeah for not wearing there's seen many people not doing that exactly yeah yeah it makes makes sense I thought I was just a I think that level of intention behind that that like not wanting to own that narrative is that is just it struck me the intention behind the strategy and the thought that's gone into yeah it's easy to do it because it's lost it's fear yes fear just crushes more so than anything as a message that it's absolutely right and it's not letting it's not letting go of the message just being very clear on who who tells it yeah that that's that that was just like a that level of intention I hadn't heard before like still doing it but doing it through a medium that's better place to yeah do it without doing decaying the the brand image I think I'm sure people can take some inspiration from that and think of their own way to do that with maybe some messages they aren't leveraging in their business right now I was reading method we just touched quite a lot on creators and I feel like that since you joined loop to now it's probably one of the the areas of the mix that's that's become that's just grown yeah so so quickly and I was reading methods white paper they put out this week on on creators and how they think creators are going to define the next decade what your thoughts on that landscape yeah I think I went to the good the YouTube event recently and obviously that was the the one number one I think there are a couple of things I I'm a buyer in terms of the principle I think you've got a lot of people who talk and trust the way to fragmented audiences and you can read lots of different audiences so I and I think they can be quite influential and from a brand they can also tell your story so you know for earplugs you know a creator can going back to what I said right to the start if there are five barriers I didn't know I needed these things all the way through to his loop any good in 30 seconds or as a segment to create it can tell that whole story for you way more efficiently than I could on TV probably I've seen that show up in data as well like sometimes we could welcome to a business that's really creator orientated and their conversion rate will be really high despite their customer journey in position of the product being really poor and then you'll try and get them going on meta with the same setup and the conversion rate from that channel will be so poor relative to the creator it's like that there's something about the relationship kind of like making up for all of these other things that may not be perfect and overcompensating but you know it's really just an evolution of the marketing world which is sort of where's but where are people's attention who are they paying attention to do they trust them and therefore if that trusted but person is telling the story then great but there is one challenge I still have with creators and where I to go back to a bigger business at some point or actually you know sort of even within the small segment just using the old creator here all there is very hard to measure yeah yeah um I saw a piece on LinkedIn the other day someone was doing a review of amp of how Vaseline just ran a creator campaign and it looked very very clever but I think you know at one point they used 450 right at the go yeah yeah and and I I think that's a very clever strategy to make an impact which is you know use multiple at the same time create a proper wave um and I think that can feed in itself so again where are working for a bigger brand I'd look at how can I coordinate multiple messages at once smaller brands I think you could probably do the same within smaller communities um so because you know there's an amazing you whenever you feel like everyone's talking about a brand at the same time it really it accelerates yeah as opposed to just oh I hear it here and then a couple of months later I hear it here so again from a strategic point of view that's something I'd have in the back of my mind um but attribution again you know it's the golden goose well it's the what is it that you grab yeah I'm not good I think about as a sales team I really think you can sort of take creative and if you're in a brand and flip it to like how do I build a sales team through people who have distribution that's very true and create an incentive structure that moves people through that model over time based on the output the drive that's true and someone else was telling uh talking the other day about actually how creators can save or at least it were in the return you need to look at if they're filming in their own studio they're doing that actually there's a production element that is saved in using them as well so when you're surrounding out the team you need the size of creative studio that there are benefits there too uh so overall I'm a buyer of the creator economy um but I think because it's so fragmented it's you've got to find a way of putting it together with attribution and brand impact makes a lot of sense couple of final questions if you what's one thing you'd wish you'd done sooner uh you achieved a lot in a relatively short time period so yeah it's anything that starts out on all of on all of these things I think you know for for the not knowing how the we've seen the brand effects and the other channels begin to multiply you kind of always wants to start that journey sooner because then you get the effects earlier whether we could have done that right from the get goes another question because you need to take everyone on the business with you you need to make sure you can allocate 10% of your budget you you need to do all of those things so I think I would a bias for real action hit the ground running very very fast even faster we we did hit the ground running fast but like I said that is with the benefit of hindsight and again I just don't know I think we probably had to go through the influencing process and the learning process in order to do it and then build momentum and look we certainly in partnership the momentum's built really quickly from you know sort of the relatively small to some mega mega stars just be just just maybe think like just give me a view of what's what meta was 90 80% of the budget when you walked into the business it was a little bit left well we obviously had sort of lower funnel Google we also had some TV sort of eight well I went into TV with Mike Mike during that stage and also you spend on on Amazon as well but again you know that's this is keywords yeah yeah so in terms of actual demand generation meta was a significant amount of the budget and where would you say that's got to be I think you know though it's we're we're sharing it meta is still an incredibly important It is. You look at the reach of the algorithm, so I really don't want this to be a matter bashing either. I mean, I think you know, totally set a question about the ethics of the channel and what we've uncovered recently, or you know, about, you know, addiction. I think that's a very, very different discussion in general. And I guess I'm counting the fact that there are many DTC brands out there that just don't have the choice to play an ethical decision not to advertise on a channel because it was a creating addiction. And the rest, it's an unfortunate truth, which we need to leave to legislators. So I'm, like I said, I'm switching two modes here. One is just as a pure advertising channel. The other is the ethics surrounding. And I need to park the second debate for now, but it's a really important one. So where have we got to? I think it's still, you know, reliant on the channel, but in a better, you know, the combats, the analogy, just a, you know, there still has more legs and actually physical retail should not be underestimated as a channel in its own right. That's a, you know, in terms of awareness build, in terms of giving people confidence that this is a brand that actually they can buy because, you know, if target or boots or whoever have said this is legit, then I'm prepared to go. Whereas, you know, if you just see this random add on your feed, you don't know whether to trust it or not. So physical is incredibly important. I wanted to add in retail, but I thought we would have ended up going over time. Well, I guess final question before we wrap is what do you think? If you, you've obviously seen the inside of a loop, which is like a top 1% DC business, you've, you've, you've done some work as I understand it with some other DC runs like what? What's the, what's one of the first things you'd tell most of them to really think about and implement if you were to walk into those DC businesses, knowing your experience? Yeah. So I, the, it would be too going back to where we started this conversation, which is one is right down on paper exactly where you are as a business, understand your unit economics, understand your customer clarity, and have everyone starting from the same page because the, the the playbook we came up with loop is not going to be the same for everyone. So understand your own specific challenges and based on your size, based on your spend, some businesses have incredible repeat, others have none. So that, that's the first piece, which, but I go through a really good exercise, ideally putting it on paper, have people prod and poke. And then the second piece is, again, back to marketing is about understanding consumers, ideally designing products that meet their needs and then finding the most efficient way of coming over the obstacles that stop them buying. Yep. So in the same way that we looked at the music ones and said there are five barriers, we've got to come across. What are those, is it three, is it five, is it whatever for your category for your product and then challenge yourself to think about the most efficient and effective way. So then that takes you, even if we're just going back to standard DC performance channels, it's not about just saying let's just create lots of assets and throw them at the wall. It's about saying let's create quality assets that build on emotional or rational decisions and it's, so it's diversity and quality of assets that will influence that that, that I think is the key. So the marketing fundamentals remain the same. I like that because that's what I think a lot of the businesses we come across struggle with the most is how they do messaging. Yeah. The agnostic of where they serve it, like really depth of understanding of pain points of customer of emotions, of outcomes of fears, of biases, of objections. A hundred percent. If you do that well, things usually work. Yeah, and I think you know that is one of the reasons I honestly fascinated by human behavior in general and that's one of the things that made me think, you know, I've had a really, I've been lucky to do the job I have. I don't think I could ever have been on the counter until, you know, but, but it gives you if you've got a real curiosity about people and influence and you then get people in your team. So creative strategists at the moment, you know, what an important role until AI can be trained to, you know, sort of read us like books and hopefully, you know, sort of beyond that even when it can, the human dimension of a creative strategist or someone just being able to, yeah, you know, a computer can only take you so far in really understanding of human trends. And this is it. Yeah. There's so many things that I just think it's going to struggle to really capture data on because it's fluid by nature creativity. Yeah. But also a lot of what works is imperfect. So how do you even capture that? Yeah, the scripts that work are often grammatically imperfect. I thought, do you know, can you build that anything as a whole in the podcast? Yeah. So anyway, so I, to answer your question, great, I take it to the fundamentals of ask yourself what's really going on here and build your strategy out of that and ideally write it down. And a sub segment of that understand the precise customer opportunities and barriers and use them to feed your entire marketing mix. Amazing. Well, yeah, you stepped into DC, wanting to prove the marketing still works. So I hope you've left believing it really does. And again, no, I certainly as of this point in time, I am a strong believer. Look, it makes sense. If people didn't know about your product, they've got to know about it and they've got to believe it before they buy it. But yeah, no, I am perfect. Well, I really appreciate you joining me, Rob. Where can people find you to keep up with? What's next? Oh, I'm on LinkedIn. Just don't approach me as an agency asking for business. I get too many of those. You'll just unfortunately not get a response. But yeah, I post occasionally on LinkedIn to follow and I'm always happy to help small businesses if I have the time. Perfect. Well, I'll pop the links in the description, but I appreciate everyone watching. I really enjoyed the conversation. If you have to stick around, drop us a like, drop us a subscription, subscribe. I don't know. I'm not very good at this. And then we'll catch you on the next episode. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Cheers.