Happy Monday!

I had a bit of an accident with my Sunday process, and now this newsletter isn’t coming to you until Monday morning. If you’re reading this, and you’re a scaling performance marketer or a brand marketer who is frustrated that there’s not enough budget for you, today’s newsletter is a rant for YOU. It’s less tactical (though I left a couple nuggets in there for you), and I hope you can see how I think through today’s newsletter. 

Before we get into the age-old debate of which matters more, or where more dollars should be invested... let me tell you about a few upcoming events!

Vendor of the Week

RetailClub — Retail leaders, AI is reshaping the future of retail. Ready to navigate it?

RetailClub’s exclusive AI Deepdive Retreat (Sept 14-17, Huntington Beach, CA) is your ticket to unmatched insight, high-impact connections, and actionable strategies. Created by the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, this isn't your average industry gathering. Think intimate, curated sessions by the beach, designed to inspire bold moves in the era of AI.

You’ll learn alongside execs from iconic brands like Amazon, Target, Allbirds, CVS, Alo Yoga, The Home Depot, Walgreens, Walmart, Wayfair, and dozens more. Dive into practical workshops, cutting-edge demos, peer-driven case studies, and transformative keynotes; all while soaking up the California sun.

Retailers & Brands: Snag your free ticket plus up to $1,200+ in travel reimbursement (seriously!) and prepare for your AI-powered future.

Space is limited, so lock in your spot now: retailclub.com

Limited Supply

This past week on Limited Supply, I sat down with Miranda, who leads performance marketing at CubCoats. They are a brand that’s heavily driven by performance marketing and are also very keen to test new channels, like AppLovin.

We talked about everything from AI to her internal team makeup, to how they scaled AppLovin from $1k/day to $80k/day in 30 days, and what she’s excited to test next.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube!

Also, right now AppLovin is waiting to onboard new brand advertisers to the platform, but if you enter your information on this link, you’ll be the first to know when it opens up!

Q4 Summit

Last year, Harley Finklestein (President, Shopify), Keith Rabois (Co-Founder, PayPal), Sandra Campos (CEO of $PETS), Ryan Babenzien (Co-Founder, Jolie), Danny Winer (CEO of HexClad), among others, all joined us for the Q4 Summit. 

This year, on September 16th at Webster Hall in New York City, we’re bringing it back and dialing up the intensity. A full day of practical learning, strategies, insights, ACTUALLY SHOWING YOU WHAT THESE BRANDS ARE DOING RIGHT!

For the first 48 hours after this email, you can click this link and claim a FREE BRAND TICKET (must be a brand!). If you’d like to attend and you’re not a brand, email me to sponsor or purchase a non-brand ticket.

Claim your free Q4 Summit ticket!

Brand Vs Performance Budgets and Resources

For today’s email, I want to talk about something that’s always a constant battle, internally, at brands — brand VS performance. Which do we allocate extra budget to? Which supports me getting a promotion? Which is best for the company long-term? How much should we allocate to either lane?

These were the questions that arose during a dinner I had this week from leaders in Big Tech, but also with brands in the range of $40M to $250M/year in annual revenue. It’s something I’ve always said shows signal that there’s a sophisticated marketing team internally — when there’s a fight between who gets extra budget (brand or performance efforts), a fight for it means you have strong leaders in both spots.

At this particular dinner, the concept of pitching full-funnel advertising came up and why this company isn’t able to successfully compete with Meta ads... not on a number by number basis, but from a POV of simplicity and effortless marketing. When people think of customer acquisition, or even you... your first thought is Facebook and Instagram, right? 

So this company was just asking the table, “Why is it that brands don’t understand we are full-funnel?” We can never take a brand’s FB budget and put it toward a better test.” Well, today’s email I just want to spit out some thoughts and you can reply with yours too. 

The truth is... nothing works as well as Meta does for the first long stretch. You can hit $50m/year in revenue with just Meta as your primary driver. The concept of testing a TON of channels, versus finding a couple that you can master AND are also a good fit based on your product, audience demographic, price point, etc. You can’t just be “good” at that channel, it has to be conducive to your business. Selling a mattress on TikTok Shop? Waste of time, no matter how good your TikTok Shop skills are.

On the other hand, we all know how important BRAND is... in fact, with no other context, everyone would admit having a strong brand is better than just being good at performance marketing. But, chances are, if you’re reading this, you don’t have a choice... you’re likely growing the business and you’re wondering where to invest and how.

When any brands hit any soft of headwinds, the first roles to go are anything related to brand marketing, community marketing, organic social media, events, and all of their respective agencies and contractors. So... how can we say that we do value brand but then consciously put no effort into building or scaling it, the same way we would continue to improve our product as time goes on?!

However, if we look back at this year, the brands that are doing the best are the ones who deliberately invested in brand marketing (definitely) last year, but also the years prior. So how does this tie into the question of the ads platform who couldn’t convince marketers their full-funnel product works? 

Well, truth is, as a performance marketer myself, I can tell you what they are selling does work. The idea of generating top-of-funnel awareness and really filling the funnel with qualified prospects, only for them to later use a different ads product to convert at the bottom of the funnel. The problem is, unlike Facebook’s blackbox, to feel the full-funnel effects of this ad platform, you can’t continue to measure every channel on a 1-day or 7-day return, you have to invest in building awareness and converting them through a few different lower-funnel initiatives. 

So then the question comes... well, if the ad platforms aren’t really setup to let us invest in brand, how do we do it? All the platforms are really setup for a 7-day loopback window (if that). Your promotion is determined off the CPA or MER you were able to grow the business with. Your weekends are more peaceful (now) when investing in performance marketing vs brand. In fact, we saw what happened with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns... now everyone is going back to a manual setup.

Now, there’s a very official report coming soon from a “Big Tech” company talking about what the right balance and bifurcation of spend looks like to optimally nail brand and performance. When that’s available, I’ll share it you here. But until then, let me tell you what’s always worked for me and how I think about this. 

First off, it’s 2025. There are VERY FEW products/categories of products you can build a business using ONLY performance marketing. Here are a few of them:

  • Really high AOV products where you can afford to lose a lot of margin
  • Supplements that deliver on their promise
  • Celebrity and influencer brands with a VERY recognizable person (talking a globally-recognized person)
  • Mushroom coffee brands
  • Products that have very niche focuses (i.e. comfortable shoes made for nurses)
  • High AOV & high margin products that have a valuable subscription
  • Brands that sell highly-personalized, high-margin gift goods
  • Brands that already have a legacy built-in brand identity (Kate Spade, Quicksilver, Coach, Juicy Couture, etc.)

In almost all the bullet point examples above, visual hooks are the key. Whether it’s David Beckham’s face or Miakyla Nogiera’s face, OR it’s easily demonstrable to show why this product works (either the process or the before/after shots). 

With almost everything else, you need to constantly invest in brand marketing. The magic number I believe to be true? 15% of all ad spend, should be invested in brand marketing. The way I think of brand and performance marketing is, brand marketing gets your name-association out in the culture/in the world, in a good way. You may not have tried Summer Water, but you know it’s a reputable rose brand. You may not have tried the Eight Sleep, but you know it’s a great product and associated with elite sleep. You may not have taken an Uber Black, but you can imagine the AC blowing on your face in the back of a blacked out Escalade SUV. That is all brand. What comes to mind when people hear of it? 

The less positive things people have experienced or associate to your brand, the higher your CPM and CTR will be. It’s that simple. 

  • Celebrity makeup brand (AOV of $50) — $3-10 avg CPA
  • Non-celebrity makeup brand (AOV of $35) — $30-50 avg CPA
  • Well-known activewear brand (AOV of $120) — $12 CPA
  • 1-year-old activewear brand (AOV of $130) — $85 CPA

You can see immediately the difference in performance metrics when you have a brand that’s well recognized in the market. The initial awareness isn’t what drove these people to make a purchase, but it did the work to EARN your ads a shot at being seen, engaged with and clicked on. 

This is why when a client or portfolio company wants to hire a performance marketer from a brand that is a really well-known brand, I always tell them, “Well, sure this brand is a great brand, but how much getting-your-hands-dirty type of work can they do? Are they capable of solving problems rapidly — not can they, but do they know how to diagnose a high CPM, low CTR, low CVR, low UPT, etc. Me, personally, I like to hire performance marketers from brands that didn’t have much brand budget or investment into brand — they just know what works, what doesn’t, they understand measurement, and they (very quickly) know what to do when things aren’t working. 

If you’re scaling your performance marketing efforts, try to incorporate a concept I call Performance Branding. That is building your brand equity off the back of your working performance dollars. Trying things like:

  • Advertorial stories you run with Meta (letting people discover you).
  • Whitelist content with creators that are known to your audience (they don’t need ownership in your company, just some $).
  • Creator affiliate programs or TikTok affiliate network, to get an army of other people singing your praises.
  • Seeding product (if you can’t send to a bunch of people for free, pay 1 celebrity to gift all their friends).
  • If you have more budget, TV, podcast, livestream takeovers, sponsored placements, etc. are all great places to invest in brand.

My general thought with brand marketing is you should try to go where other brands aren’t, especially with the big CPG companies. Billboards, TV, retail slotting fees, can all be expensive. Reddit communities, events, influencer/celebrity dinners, hosting charity events, live streamers, TikTok Shop affiliate network, etc. are all places to easily (and cheaply) build brand. 

Last thought here, and then I encourage you to reply with any thoughts, is that any good brand only caters to 20% of the population, MAX. A good brand isn’t for everyone, and even though the last few years were about being inclusive to everyone, when you are, you’re not exclusive to anyone. 

Think about who your 20% is. Obsess over them. Then reverse-engineer how you can get involved in what they’re doing. Or, if your brand is naturally cool enough, then you can be the weird kid who turns out to be a famous popstar, and just DO YOU, but own it. 

How do you think about the balance of brand and performance marketing at your organization? Reply with your thoughts!

That's all for this week

I hope today’s newsletter was fun, although different. Please reply with how you think about it, or if it’s radically different than my thinking. Truth is, the path to brand building is different for everyone, so I always feel like observing it is an education in itself. 

Tonight’s Sunday and I’m currently on my way back to New York City for an incredible upcoming week. I hope you plan to get 9 hours of sleep tonight and crush this upcoming week. PS, I’m not affiliated, but if you haven’t tried leveling up your sleep with an Eight Sleep, a weighted blanket, a ceiling projector, a comfortable pillow and proper pre-sleep hydration... you’re missing out! Having good sleep will ensure your WORST day is at an 80% baseline. 

That’s all from me today, have an amazing upcoming week.