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Episode 113

When It's Time to Invest in "Brand"

Think of brand as a turbocharger for your paid ads. It warms people up before they meet your call to action or come into market. But when is the right time to start investing in brand building over pure performance marketing, especially as a digital-first company?

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob explore when performance marketing reaches diminishing returns and why it's so difficult for marketers to shift budget toward brand. Plus, they share real client examples of how brand investment transformed businesses, including Old Spice's reinvention that increased sales 125% in just three months, and outline metrics beyond traditional brand studies that prove brand's impact on your business.

Topics Covered

• [01:00] Research on brand equity's impact on ecommerce

• [03:30] Signs your performance marketing is reaching diminishing returns

• [09:00] How brand acts as a turbocharger for paid advertising

• [15:00] Client success stories from brand investment

• [20:00] Old Spice's brand reinvention that increased sales 125%

• [28:00] Better ways to measure brand impact beyond brand studies

Resources:

Mokha, Anupreet. (2021). Brand Equity, Brand Satisfaction, and Brand Loyalty: A Study of Select E-Commerce Industry. International Journal of Online Marketing.11. 34-50. 10.4018/IJOM.2021070103

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Transcript

Angela: Brand you should think of as a turbocharger of your paid ads, 'cause it really warms people up before they meet your call to action or before they come into market.

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.

Rob: Hey everybody.

Angela: Hello.

Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. Today we're talking about when and why performance marketers need to begin to invest in brand. We'll talk through some key indicators that a performance heavy strategy is reaching diminishing returns and how you can layer in and measure brand marketing.

But I'll kick us off as I always do with some research, and I think starting with academic research is especially important for this topic because it's one of those principles that gets thrown around a lot, invest in brand. To think about the long term is an easy stance to take and sometimes more of an emotional argument.

But I think we can look at research and what we know about successful companies to quote unquote make the brand case. So I chose a study. This was published in the International Journal of Online Marketing called Brand Equity, brand Satisfaction and Brand Loyalty, A study of Select e-Commerce Industry by Anup Pret Ker Mocha of the University of Delhi.

I chose e-commerce in particular because I think sometimes direct to consumer brands, D2C marketers can be especially driven by performance marketing. Since it's easier to track that impact when you're selling directly from your website. So this paper, it dives into how brand equity, things like your name, recognition, trust, perceived value affects how consumers behave.

In the online shopping world, the researchers surveyed 500 online shoppers and used data modeling, which was confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, if you're into that sort of thing, to dig into what really matters. And they found brand equity has a strong direct positive impact on consumer behavior in e-commerce.

The study showed that brand marketing improves the customer's overall satisfaction with just the shopping experience. So that means the emotional lift you get from having a strong brand, feeling confident in the product, trusting the company, remembering a positive experience that actually improves how they rate that experience itself.

This is especially critical in crowded e-commerce categories where differentiation might be hard. Because if your ad looks like every other ad, it's the brand memory, the feeling consumers already have about your company that helps you win. So the study sort of concludes by saying, invested in brand, it shouldn't be a trade off, it should be a multiplier.

And I know we've heard that before, so that's what the research tells us. And I know there's plenty of other research like that to back up why brand matters, but investing in it is probably easier said than done. And Ang, I know we work with a lot of brands who are new to TV, they might even consider television to be their first sort of entrance into brand marketing. So what are those usual signs that performance marketing is reaching diminishing returns, and it might be time to invest in brand.

Angela: They can't sleep at night. They hate their job.

Elena: Geez.

Angela: They're arguing with their spouse constantly. We've all had those moments in our professional careers. Right. When you are starting to see your performance ad hitting the wall. When the numbers that once we're climbing fast are starting to slow down, the cost to win each new customer rises what their value is staying the same in terms of lifetime value. So every dollar is buying less growth tests.

You run show smaller and smaller gains, meaning new spend is just stealing sales that you likely would've earned anyway. Your ads keep reaching the same people click through rates are dipping. Stronger brands are outbidding you for important keywords and at the same time searches for your brand name, direct visits to your site.

Maybe chatter on social media falls off so the funnel isn't getting refilled, and so to keep sales coming, you lean harder on discounts. Proof that price versus preference is doing the work and market share stays flat even though you're still spending a lot. So if three or more of these signs stick around for six months, your performance engine is possibly flattening out.

And the fix to that is to shift a chunk of your budget into wide reach brand building campaigns that create fresh demand before these rising costs start to eat into profits. And I think the key piece here too, what maybe is eating at you in the middle of the night is that waiting only makes the problem worse, and it makes the price tag to solve it even bigger.

Elena: So Rob, even when all those signs are there, why do you think it's so hard for performance marketers to to make that leap into a brand investment?

Rob: I think there's still opportunity for them to be stuck in the honeymoon period. You know, you talk about what Angie is saying, which is the flip side, right? Okay, nothing's working anymore, but man, you remember that sweet, sweet nectar of immediate response and measurable results.

It's just so good. It's so seductive. When your bonus and your team's morale and tomorrow's dashboard, I'll hinge on short cycle wins. Anything that doesn't spike the graft by end the day feels risky. Right. Your CFO is more comfortable with attribution models that deliver certainty. I mean, that's always been the operating system that many marketers are trained on, right?

So at the end of the day, brand building, by contrast, I mean it pays out over quarters, sometimes years. Needing to wait for that compounding return is just hard. It's a hard thing to justify in the boardroom. It's a hard thing to justify to yourself sometimes.

Elena: When I suggested this topic for the podcast, those reasons were a big reason why is like marketers. This is a question that comes up a lot. Like, when is it time to do this? And part of me didn't wanna do it because the whole argument in itself is sort of annoying to me because what is brand like people start thinking about brand as only in the long term.

And that's not necessarily true. So sometimes the topic itself is hard, but so Ange, I was wondering, could some of this, like confusion or angst come from that issue with just how like brand is defined not only by marketers, but maybe also thought of by their C-suites?

Angela: Yeah, it feels like it means different things to different people. So then you get teams talking past each other. Maybe they think they're talking about the same thing, that they're not. So to pick on, I'll pick on Rob 'cause he comes from, please do. From a creative background. It's just easier than Elena. A designer might see a brand as the visible stuff, logo, colors, taglines, jingle.

If I've got a tidy style guide that feels like a quote unquote strong brand to them, finance folks treat brand as like money you're gonna earn in the future because shoppers prefer you. Profits. Something that you can value like any other asset marketing. It talks about brand is maybe the memories and the cues in people's heads that help them recall you when it's time to buy.

If I dare go down the brand purpose route, you know, then we're thinking about the feelings and values your company stands for and how those show up in the product in the story against your competitors. And then many performance marketers simply call anything that they can't track. I. Brand. We used to do that, like before, we were big proponents of brand.

Early in our days, like all the way back to radio, we were hardcore performance marketing. And it felt unaccountable for marketers to spend money on brand, just lumping together everything from TikTok awareness videos to top of page search ads, TV, you know, and so with so many meanings budget meetings get messy. People mix up logo projects with awareness media or confused building memories with funding charity work. And so the fix is to agree first on one shared definition, just give everyone a common language to work from. And then once everyone's aligned on that, you can match goals and metrics to the right spend and turn the brand versus performance, debate, fight, whatever we wanna call it, you know, into more of a clear and balanced plan.

Elena: Great. And there also seems to be important conversations that need to be had about what you're saying, defining brand, like how are we gonna think about it as a company and then applying it. Like we talk a lot about that, like the principles versus the application. Because I think maybe one other misconception is that when you invest in a channel like television that is traditionally a brand channel, it's gonna have brand effects. Mm-hmm. But we know that a lot of the channels that you might lump into the brand bucket are actually doing both. So if you're thinking about separating budget, 60 40 brand performance, it's actually not easy because TV is responsible for both.

And I think it's also, that's comfortable for people too. Like you see a lot of brands, agencies talking about like performance branding, brand performance, because like we're just uncomfortable with that idea of brand alone. But we know that brand does help performance. It's not just like those effects are isolated on their own.

So when we say that, what do we mean by that? Like, how does a brand campaign make you maybe your paid search, your social, your other channels, perform better?

Angela: Brand you should think of as a turbocharger of your paid ads. 'cause it really warms people up before they meet your call to action or before they come into market. Right? So a wide reach campaign plants these clear signals. It is logo, colors, catchy line so that when someone later types a search or scrolls, a feed your name already fits the job they're trying to do.

And that built in familiarity, nudges more clicks, lifts your quality score, pushes click, or impression costs down. So the same budget buys more eyeballs and gets you more. Once visitors, land recognition lowers their sense of risk, so they buy more often and maybe spend a bit extra ad platforms, notice the better results and reward you with cheaper bids and better slots.

So you get this positivity loop going on as well. And then brand buzz also boosts free traffic, organic search, direct visits, word of mouth, which attribution tools partially credit to paid media, hiding even more upside in that performance, in that result. And then over time you have a bigger audience to retarget and better match rates in walled gardens. And so it allows you to stretch every dollar further.

Elena: Well, I actually have a question. You know, as a, as someone who's historically been a creative, I've never really been invited to the important meetings where you talk about budgets. It's usually Hey, monkey boy, do your dance and then leave.

So we can talk about the important things. So when you talk about trying to sell brand to the C-suite. Is part of it how you define, I mean, again, I'm going back to what you were saying Ange, about well, what is brand? If you were gonna say, well, television.

It isn't just a brand move. As to your point, Elena, I mean there's compound benefits both in the immediate and in the long term. So do we just have to start rethinking the vernacular of the channel and brand altogether? Because I think you just immediately go to brand when you think of television. But maybe we have to do a better job as marketers of defining what we're truly getting out of that particular channel.

Angela: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Elena, I'd love your thoughts on this too. You chat with a lot of folks on LinkedIn about marketing effectiveness and brand and so have that perspective, but I think absolutely, like it's the deep understanding of brand is tied to company growth and profit we should be having that conversation with creative teams about what the overall objective is ultimately gonna deliver upon company growth, investor return, that type of thing. Without that conversation, how could we possibly do this? Well, I. So that's something that we're focused on right now just across the agency, is giving people deep understanding of how marketing drives growth in the business. Of course we're going at it through the lens of television, but that's something that every company should be doing. If we don't ultimately have a common understanding of what drives growth, how do we do our jobs well?

Elena: I love this topic because I think there's two different parts of it. One is just like understanding the principles, and I think this is where work, like the multiplier effect I really like because that it's work from work. I know we've covered on the podcast before, and had their team on to discuss it, but it helps give proof and examples of how, it's not like brand plus performance.

It's brand times performance. So if you go looking for case studies, proof like reasons to invest in brand and TV and offline media, you're gonna find plenty. Like I guarantee any category you have B2B, B2C, like you're gonna find the proof and stuff like the multiplier effect gives you even more ammo to go to your board and say, it's not just that adding brand is gonna be like, help us a little bit.

It's gonna actually multiply what we can do. But then I think the harder part is it's like Rob, you're right. It's like getting people on the same page, but then, alright, how do you prove it? Because very few companies are gonna be brave enough to just go dump millions of dollars under the belief that something's gonna happen.

So that I think is the really fun part of our jobs as an agency that buys like a quote unquote brand media is working with marketing teams on, alright, well now we have the story. We believe that this can do this for our business, how we're gonna prove it. And how much can you invest to prove it? And that's where we've talked about like incrementality, and then we're gonna talk about measurement more.

But I think that's a really tough conversation, especially when you're a challenger brand, you're in a larger category. I. How do you prove it out and test it? That's where marketers are more like, I don't wanna call us scientists, but you have to think of it a little bit like that. Like how do you put together experiments?

Because it's not reasonable to just throw your toys outta the crib and complain that they won't let us invest in brand. It makes sense that there's gotta be some experimentation to prove out that something's happening. Totally. And it, it is nice when the company just buys into it.

Like for example investing in this podcast as an agency, investing in a podcast is something that you don't see returns on right away. Like it takes months, years. And there has to be like that element of belief. So I do feel for marketers where you just have teams that aren't willing to, I. Put anything out there because it's okay, there's no risk, then there's really no reward.

But speaking of examples, I thought that maybe we could share some with the audience 'cause that always helps. I was wondering if you each could share a client example where, you know, an investment in brand paid off. What was the approach, you know, what change and what was the outcome they experienced?

Angela: My example, I will keep the clients confidential, but they are a company operating the B2B space and they had been shelling out substantially for pricey, non-branded, searched terms everywhere. Elena's nodding. Rob's like, I know who you're talking about. And decided to layer in TV ads. We ended up doing overtime, both linear and streaming, powered by our AI platform. Annika. So first I'll talk about the brand awareness metrics. So I'll go right to the metrics that everyone expects to go up, and then get into a little more of the business performance.

But brand awareness did shoot up, 10% aided, 36% unaided, and I think crucially, far more buyers said that they first heard about the company on TV. Then as demand grew, this is where it gets exciting, the mix of search clicks tilted towards cheaper branded queries, letting them dial back generic keywords, letting them trim overall paid search substantially while still growing revenue.

And so they were able to, in addition to growing, new customer acquisition, they were able to turn that search bill from a pain point into a profit lever. One of the most exciting pieces is after being on air for at least a year, maybe it was close to a year and a half. This is a public company, a large public company, and their executive chairman was even quoted saying that, TV was what they were crediting the growth in the business too. So it's a super fun example.

Elena: One of my favorite parts of that, which I think, I think I know the one you're talking about. Mm-hmm. Is that, like you were saying, like they were able to reduce investments in paid search. I've heard that their overall web traffic actually dipped, but 'cause their conversion rates were going up. Yes. It's one of those like things where you have to, like, at first you're like, oh no, what's happening? But it was because more people were buying right away, like going direct to the site.

Angela: And you'll often see that not necessarily the dip in traffic, but when people come from TV they are generally more qualified. Your brand is on TV and so we'll often see that conversion rates out of TV traffic is higher and then they are more long-term customers as well.

Rob: Yeah, I've got an example that's near and dear to our hearts. Ang brought up a great point that we've spent so much of our early years at marketing architects chasing that, that short term response, I mean there was nothing sweeter than cost per calls and cost per clicks and looking at dashboards every freaking morning, just going, how are we doing today?

We've talked at nauseam about how we brought our own products to market. One of them being stuffies and, stuffies is a stuffed animal. Went viral. This was, gosh, 10, 15 years ago now. It started out as a direct to consumer approach. That was our idea. We're gonna just grind this sucker.

We're gonna use all that we knew in this space to create a successful product. But instead of going that route because we wanted to eat our own dog food and learn from this opportunity, instead of going huge discounts and crazy remarketing strategies. We actually went brand first and we invested heavily in a jingle, a jingle.

I know we've talked about on this show, and instead of creating ads that were all features, benefits, and really grinding out why this stuffed animal is so, so different, we went with this earworm.

How much stuff can you stuff in a stuffy till you're stuffy is stuffed enough stuff.

Elena: Nailed it. First try.

Rob: Fantastic. First try. But we went heavy national TV with this thing and, you know, we've talked about how it was sung by a guest on the Tonight Show. But here's the real aha about this, is we had done all of this investment in brand and we were doing direct to consumer. And then it came time for the Sweet Nirvana of going into retail and.

We were a known brand Target put us on the end cap at Target during Christmas, like the holy Grail, right? That would not have happened if we would've just stuck with a grinded out direct to consumer measure every last last. Click attribution, blah, blah, blah. Right? That happened because we had to take a long game approach, but we had to make money along the way. Don't get me wrong. So it's that balanced approach, right? We knew we had to generate a healthy response, but we had to build a big brand if we were gonna make it to that next level.

Elena: Yeah, those performance metrics are great, but there are a few things better than as a marketer, like that moment when you realize that brand is paying off. Those things that happen. You call up these retail partners and they wanna work with you and like they already know you.

Rob: Yeah. They wouldn't

Elena: show up in a dashboard. But those are some of my favorite things. When you realize oh, the work I'm doing is paying off. So Rob, I thought maybe we could have a little Rob history lesson because we just gave examples of Marketing Architects experience. But do you have a, you know, a favorite story of when a company made a bold brand investment that really changed the trajectory of their business?

Rob: Alright, you said history lesson. So I had to pick a historical campaign and you might go, wah, wah, wah. That one is talked about a lot, but this is a history lesson, so it needs to be historical. So circa 2010. Can you guys guess which brand I'm gonna talk about today?

Elena: A, a brand from 2010?

Rob: Yes. That really hit the fame meter in 2010 based on their advertising.

Elena: What was happening in 2010?

Angela: I have no clue. I.

Rob: Oh, you guys know this one? It's used so much circa 2010. Is this this brand Airbnb that was known? No. This brand that was sliding into grandpa's aftershave territory market share was melting. There is no buzz at all. Old Spice,

Angela: Old Spice said, Hey, we need to make a moonshot. P and G in particular, they hire Wieden+Kennedy and they said, okay, take over our TV and Digital War chest and go bake. But it became the obvious campaign that everyone adores, which is the man your man could smell like, right? So 60 seconds of Isaiah Mustafa teleporting from shower to sailboat to white stallion.

Zero product demos, but 100% swagger, right? The payoff body wash sales up 125% in three months. Category was 1 by summer and millions of earned impressions from 180 personalized response videos recorded in a 48 hour social media blitz. I mean, amazing, right? Dusty Legacy brand turned pop culture rocket because they bet on brand charisma instead of another coupon. That's the kind of bold brand swing that rewrites a PNL and why I'll never apologize for recommending a truly historic idea when the product deserves it.

Elena: That's a great story and I'd add to that. It's fun to like, look to the past, what's worked before, but there are stories every day about how brands today are doing this as well. We see it with clients. If you go to Adweek adage, you can read about it. I know that there might be more of a feeling today that this brand stuff doesn't work as well as it used to. These stories are still happening, if you're right Rob.

If you're making a bold enough move, a bold enough idea to bring it forward. So that's a great example. Ange, one thing I wanted to revisit was this idea of blending brand and performance. 'cause I mentioned earlier like it's not as simple as, it sounds like the principle is simple to understand 60 40, but when we actually start to apply it, it's not as easy. How do we recommend marketers think about that?

Angela: You know, we've talked about this before. I think thinking of the 60/40 rule as a handy rule of thumb is a good way to hold it in your brain versus a hard law. Bennet and Fields's newer research shows that the ideal mix changes with the situation. So established mostly offline brands maybe do fine around 55/45, online only companies maybe fighting heavy competition might meet up to 75% brand spend to keep those acquisition costs down. So maybe a couple of things to think about when you're trying to set a budget is how hard is it to close a sale?

Fast, low risk buys might be able to live with less brand, more sales activation. How long can we wait for a payback, a subscription app that earns payback spend in three months versus a cash hungry startup? We're in different states scenarios then, are we being drowned out if rivals advertise far more than we do?

Or our market share is sort of stuck. We might need to shift extra money into brand until growth picks up. And so, to pinpoint your own sweet spot. Maybe think about live AB testing. A way to go about it might be picking two or three match regions with similar sales history and run your usual performance budget unchanged.

And then in the test sales layer on incremental brand spend. Say 15% maybe of the total outlay. Keeping creative offers performance, tactics identical across those cells. Let the test run for at least a full purchase cycle, I would say. So brand impressions have a little time to, to work their quote unquote magic and then start looking at blended CAC.

Share of search of your brand terms, incremental revenue or penetration versus control markets. And if these test cells show falling CAC and rising share of search without hurting that short term ROAS, you might be able to shift another five to 10 points of budget and rerun it and if not, dial back. So it's a way to try to hone in on what that ideal, practical equilibrium is for your brand.

Elena: And when marketers talk to us about investing in brand investing in TV, I think that something that comes up that marketers have different opinions on is when I'm running these tests that you're talking about, how much do I need to reduce my performance expectations?

Like I know you're talking about different ways we can measure it, but a lot of brands have very clear performance targets and sometimes when they invest in a quote brand test, they'll say, alright, I'm gonna have a lower expectation of ROAS or like what this is gonna deliver immediately because I am focused on those long-term results. I Do you think that's a good thing? Is it possible to layer in brand without sacrificing performance? Or is that a best practice to kinda reduce those expectations?

Angela: I mean, I think the example that Rob just gave showcases, old Spice grew, what did you say? A hundred percent in three months or so? Hundred

Rob: 25%.

Angela: So we wouldn't have a business if it wasn't possible. We only operate in TV. And I think this comes back to as well, how are you thinking about top of funnel marketing? How are you thinking about brand? 'cause brand does drive sales, but like how is your brand working together across all your channels?

So absolutely. I mean, every time we test television. We don't get to continue the campaign if we have to go back to the client and say, sorry, we hurt your business. Do you want to keep working together? It's all in the approach and thinking about both brand and sales activation with a channel like television, ensuring that distinctive assets are there. We've got our marketing working together, we start to see shifts in, in share of search, but it's not a, Hey, Mr. Or Mrs. CFO, you know, I need us to not care about profit and growth for the next year while we invest in brand. That's not the scenario.

Elena: Well, let's talk about measuring brand. Mm-hmm. Because sometimes it feels like you had mentioned before the how you can test and like different things you can look at. But as far as like long-term brand measurement, sometimes I think marketers, they think of that as a brand study. They don't go any further than that. How do you think marketers should measure brand?

Angela: Yeah, I think every brand is unique of course. And so establishing baselines in terms of what does your search traffic look like? Branded search versus non-branded search, what does your direct traffic look like? What does your organic traffic look like is really important. And that's a deep analysis to do is just getting baselines in place.

What's the performance of the performance marketing that you're doing, your other channels, your direct mail, your, even top of funnel channels like radio, et cetera, is important. And then starting with signals that you can grab from the tools that you use every day. So watch that branded search volume and Google trends or your search console.

If more people are typing in your name, then brand demand is growing. Maybe in GA track direct visits and returning visitor share steady claims mean that buyers are skipping ads and coming straight to you. Inside Google ads maybe, or meta. Keep an eye on your quality score, your relevance diagnostics, your average cost per click, your fixed ad rank.

Are important things to look at. And when brand strength rises, click through, rates improve and the platforms charge you less. Layer in social listening is a great way to look too as another kind of quick pulse. So there are a lot of ways to go about it Ultimately. We're looking for that to return in terms of revenue and it's an exercise to tie that back, but the idea that brand can only be measured by a brand study that you run every six months or or year, is a false thought.

Elena: Yeah, that's gonna prevent you from seeing some of the bigger gains if all you're focused on is those brand results. Well, I, that was a fun episode. I think that, hopefully this will be helpful for marketers that are trying to make the case for brand or just thinking about how they're investing in more long-term marketing channels.

I have a game to wrap us up with. It's a bit of a guessing game, and I picked this game because I wanted to sort of make a point that. It seems like it's best always best practice, quote unquote to start with performance, but there are examples of big famous brands that started more with brand and that doesn't necessarily mean a big TV investment.

It could, but I think this is maybe fun for marketers to think about if you're early on in your growth stage. It, yes, it's best practice to have all your performance channels hum in working together, but sometimes way bigger moves can be made through quote unquote brand. So I'm gonna describe one and then we'll see.

If you can't guess who this is, it might, the concept is tough for me, so hopefully you can, hopefully guess who they are. Alright. First one, arm and Hammer, which brand gained significant attention through a viral, funny video in 2012, which served as their primary, Dollar Shave Club, correct.

Angela: Nice. Good

Elena: job. Rob. Which shoe brand became a household name By giving sneakers to Olympic athletes before they were famous, Nike. Yeah.

Which food delivery company's first big growth strategy involved actively engaging with college campuses, offering students discounts and integrating campus dining features.

Angela: Oh, was that DoorDash or Uber?

Elena: GrubHub.

Rob: Blue Apron.

Angela: Oh, GrubHub. Oh, it's

Rob: Oh, oh I, oh, okay. oh. Meal Delivery. Got it, got it. Sorry.

Elena: Blue Apron. Rob said that So much confidence too.

Rob: I just said didn't wanna lose my streak. Right.

Elena: Which Luggage brand launched a podcast series about modern travel as one of their first Mark Samsonite? No. As one of their first marketing efforts Samsonite,

Rob: It's the only one I

Elena: they around, uh, I love Samsonite.

Angela: No, I'm blank on the name of the brand. They were the disruptor. I only, I

Rob: only know

Elena: Sam Elena. Yeah. You're thinking the right one. An yeah.

Rob: oh, is that a qualify as an answer if she thinks it? No, it?

Elena: I just know it's on the tip of her tongue. Yeah. She's describing the right brand.

Angela: It's away. Thank you. Yeah. Geez. Away. Are you on TV? If not it, it needs to come to the tip of the tongue world. You, because I haven't heard it. Little quicker. Yeah. I haven't

Rob: heard yet. haven't away. way So what,

Angela: Rob,

Rob: better. Better dial it up. You're no Samsonite away.

Elena: You don't need to talk trash about the brands we're using as examples. Okay. Which beverage brand went viral with ads comparing their product to death? Metal and office Water.

Angela: Liquid Death. Liquid death.

Elena: Which D2C brand spent $4.5 million on a Superbowl ad before most people had heard of them. Coin hint. singing involved. Oh, wait. Say again? Singing. Singing was involved with this ad.

Angela: D2C brand was singing.

This is

Elena: GBT, Rob,

Rob: Singing,

Angela: you said it's a retail brand as well?

Elena: Yeah, it's, I think of it more as a retail brand. I'll say people had like big reactions to this ad, if I remember correctly, so people did not, this

Angela: is gonna be one of these that it's just gonna kill us once we hear it.

Rob: I'm thinking it. Elena, does that count?

Elena: It's a, it's a CPG brand. It's something you drink

Rob: and a singing. This might have been a bad example.

Elena: Did I just tell you? Yeah.

Rob: Ly Old Spice.

Elena: What is it? Rob

Angela: O Ley.

Elena: Shut up. Ly. Oatley.

Angela: Oh, ley, okay. I

Rob: like it. Oh, was that was, Oh yeah. You

Angela: remember the singing? Actually, Rob, you gave

Elena: that example. I loved

Rob: that. I loved that one. One. I like that

Elena: ad too. Yeah. But wow. There are type of people just launch your business on the sheet. I should think of them

Rob: as D2C. The D2C didn't,

Elena: yeah, the D2C thing. I, that's why I was like, oh, for retail. That kind of, that wasn't a good description of it, but

Angela: Fun.

Elena: Nice to remember. Like there's so many examples of how brands have of helping answer that.

Angela: Yeah. It's a turbo,

Elena: Hmm.

Angela: a

Elena: turor,

Angela: turbo, a turor. You guys know what turbos are, right?

Elena: It's a new, it's a new word for branded performance. We I bought tur, I bought one of those,

Rob: I, I bought one of those this weekend on Amazon. It's great.