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Episode 142

Confessions of a Reformed Performance Marketer with Ryan Sullivan, GoodRx CMO

Only 15% of brand assets are truly distinctive. GoodRx broke their industry’s mold with a prairie dog sidekick and singing cowgirl. But behind the bold creative lies a data-driven philosophy that challenges everything performance marketers think they know.

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob sit down with Ryan Sullivan, CMO of GoodRx. Ryan shares his evolution from hardcore performance marketer to someone who questions the very foundations of digital attribution. Learn why he's skeptical of multi-touch attribution, how GoodRx measures success through triangulation, and why increasing "surface area" matters more than hyper-targeting.

Topics Covered

• [05:00] Why brand search attribution is misleading

• [08:30] The hidden costs of programmatic display advertising

• [15:00] GoodRx's unique challenge of reaching out-of-market consumers

• [19:30] Creating distinctive brand assets with the Savings Wrangler

• [32:00] Building confidence through triangulated measurement

• [36:00] The concept of "free marketing" and reducing control

Resources:

2025 eMarketer Article

Ryan Sullivan’s LinkedIn

GoodRx Website

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Ryan Sullivan

CMO at GoodRx

Transcript

Ryan: It's important to not lose the customer and the fact that all the targeting and numbers and stuff in the world don't matter if what you're saying, selling, or offering is not interesting or well understood or distinct.

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-hosts Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product Architect of Misfits and Machines.

Rob: Hello?

Angela: Hi guys.

Elena: We're joined by a special guest, Ryan Sullivan. Ryan is the Chief Marketing Officer at GoodRx, the leading platform for medication savings in the U.S. He began his career at Intel and Google, then spent over a decade at Performance Publishers' performance marketing arm where he led a team of marketers across North America. Now at GoodRx, he's helping one of the biggest healthcare brands grow through effective marketing in both the short and the long. Thanks for joining us, Ryan.

Ryan: Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be here.

Rob: Now Ryan, my expansive research team tells me that you have a habit of quoting Jurassic Park in meetings. Does this mean that when you're presenting a marketing budget, you look at the CFO and say, "Hold onto your butts"?

Ryan: I'll try to keep it PG in the ones I quote, but yeah. It's a love for that movie that doesn't get old. So yeah, it's held up. So it's, I think, eminently quotable.

Angela: It's a great series. Yeah.

Elena: Now, I have only seen the Chris Pratt version. Is that gonna be a problem for you?

Rob: Oh my gosh.

Ryan: Oh, well, I think I need to leave.

Angela: I haven't seen the Star Wars trilogy.

Rob: Leave now. Yeah, add it.

Ryan: Yeah.

Elena: I'll add it.

Ryan: It's still, even in the world of modern technology, I think the practical effects and stuff still make it—I think it still holds up.

Rob: Have you watched Jurassic Punk?

Ryan: No, I have not.

Rob: It's about the gentleman who basically pioneered the animation for Jurassic Park's. Fantastic. Great story.

Ryan: I'll have to check that out. Yeah, no, I remember seeing it when they put it back in the theaters and I was like, "This is gonna be terrible." I was like, "Wow, this is as good as I remember it when I was a kid."

Elena: Gosh. Great. Okay. I'll add it to my long list of movies that Rob talks about on the show, and I need to see. Okay. We are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions in data, research, and what drives business results. I'll kick us off, as I always do with some research. This time, I chose an article by Chris Wood for eMarketer, and it's titled "GoodRx New Feel-Good Campaign Seeks to Break Through the Healthcare Advertising Noise." The article points out that healthcare advertising isn't exactly known for creativity. Most consumers see a lot of it and trust very little of it. That's why GoodRx recently took a bold new approach with a campaign designed to break through the noise. In a world of formulaic pharma ads, GoodRx introduced a surprising new face to tell its story, reminded the industry that sometimes the most effective marketing isn't just about the numbers, but also about character and creativity. But we are gonna talk about both the numbers and the creativity today with the CMO behind GoodRx and that campaign. Ryan, thanks again for being here. I wanted to start at the beginning. You had a background in computer science and engineering. Then you moved through different roles. You got into more of the marketing agency side, which eventually led you to this role at GoodRx. What led you to choose this brand?

Ryan: What led me to choose GoodRx overall was—I really liked having the variety, working at an agency, working with a lot of big companies, and cutting my teeth in marketing and in some of the early days of paid search and digital marketing. And over time, I was fortunate to be able to have a lot of influence over the direction of those companies, their programs, and ultimately their sales performance. But I was really longing to get closer to the work and stick with something for a longer period of time and have more agency than I did a step removed from partners, even though some of them I worked with for multiple years. And so that was one. And then the catalyst of wanting to find something that I felt directly benefited consumers in a very literal way for a challenged area of our just our daily lives in the United States was the cost of healthcare. And so I love the brand story. I love the brand mission. I love that people that use GoodRx are objectively better off for doing it in a non—we don't have to over-explain why. The magic of that plus that time and place in my career where I wanted to get closer to the work day to day led me to this company and I'm delighted to have joined.

Elena: Yeah, and we're gonna talk more about GoodRx later, and some of the things the brand has done. It's pretty cool. So you have this background, and when we talked, you mentioned you're a reformed performance marketer, and when you say that to someone who has a podcast, I can't help but latch onto that, so I'm sorry, you're gonna have to talk about it.

Ryan: Yeah. No, no.

Elena: Yeah, I'd love to know what does that mean and what were sort of those turning points that might have changed? I'm guessing by that you—the way you've approached marketing has maybe changed. So how did that happen?

Ryan: Definitely the way I approach marketing has changed. And going back to your prior question around my background, I came from a technical world. I sort of knew I didn't want to be a long-term programmer developer in my career. I did the technical background 'cause I felt it would be helpful 'cause I was curious about engineering, computer science, mathematics, those types of things. And so when I entered marketing, I thought of it in a very programmatic sort of way, or as a solvable problem. We know all the variables, we know the math, we can measure things. These new tools like search marketing or digital marketing, even some of the classic things in direct response, it seemed pretty tangible to me. And I worked in an agency that was called PerformX one, that I really still have a deep affinity for, and I think did a lot—it did and still does a lot of things very well in balancing these demands of performance. When you work in this discipline and digital marketing for a while, unless if you're actually looking at the data and not just looking past the numbers that come out and being overly confident in the logic of like, "Oh yeah, of course it's better to target this group of people. I can see them click on the thing, they go to the website, they take the happy path, they either check out or they don't. If they don't, I send them a follow-up email and then they come back or they don't." That's idealistic, but the actual world is a lot messier than that, and certain mediums and disciplines, when you're in them long enough, you have these aha moments where you go, "Well, something's not adding up here." So one would be like, I was pretty shocked at how overconfident, very early in my career, people were with saying things like, "Brand search was our top performer." And I was like, "What is—why does someone even search for a brand? Like where does that come from? They don't just wake up in the morning and be like, 'Oh, GoodRx is a brand. I'm gonna go search for that,' and intuit that we exist." It comes from somewhere else. So if you're being honest with yourself and you have applied critical thinking, you start asking questions and poking holes. And then when you start seeing the publisher community react to that and go, "No, no, don't look over here," and then take tools away and make measurement more complicated, or create incentive structures that disincentivize incrementality testing and things like that, you're like, "I am very suspicious now, and skeptical." So that's one example. Another one is, when I first started getting close to programmatic display as a medium, we were onboarding—I remember a client program from a managed service provider and I started looking at the waterfall of costs and I realized most of this money is never actually getting to a publisher or an ad. It's going to a lot of techno stuff, techno babble in the middle that's supposed to make it better. And it's like, "Okay, well if I'm gonna pay 80% more to use all this technology to try to find my ideal customer, I have to convert at least 80% or better for it to make sense." And it never really is that way, unless your measurement's probably pretty bad. The ends just don't justify the means. That's just the working side. The non-working side and the infrastructure investments and the people investments to go pursue some of these things, it just doesn't add up in a lot of cases. And it feels good 'cause it's a nice story we tell ourselves, but it doesn't actually add up. And if you're actually a practitioner actually following the data and not just getting hand-wavy about it, so all those reasons and more, I would think of myself as a reformed performance marketer. I find myself apologizing for perspectives that I might have had early in my career, more so than defending them.

Elena: Yeah. It shows that you're a learner and yeah, we've definitely seen and covered the stories and studies about the cost of third-party data and targeting and yeah, it's refreshing to hear a CMO talk about that. I was using the term performance marketing. You're using it too. We use it quite a bit on this podcast, but you've spoken about how that term is kind of flawed because it would imply that not all marketing performs or that some doesn't perform. Why do you feel strongly about that?

Ryan: I mean, I am at the risk of being kind of a pedant about this. So here's my defense of the—before I trash it, let me—here's my defense of the label. I think these shorthand labels can be helpful to define certain schools of thought. So, how someone's approaching the craft or the area of work. The problem space or the opportunities. It's fine I guess in that way to say, "Okay, I want to think about how we're gonna tackle this problem or pursue this marketing opportunity with a certain school of thought. Is it gonna be quick, fast? Are we in a hyper-growth mode? Are we a small company? Are we trying to find product-market fit? Are we gonna be testing a bunch of things?" Fine. It's a iterative, faster exercise, but to label the whole—one is superior to the other or to overuse those labels, I think is silly. 'Cause both performance marketing and non-performance marketer puts people—among brand marketing—those are overly reductive. They're, I think it's lazy to say one or the other. And like you said, when I start saying something is performance marketing and something's not, it's like, "Why would I do the thing that's not performance? What is that?" The other thing it smacks of is that if I'm a performance marketer, I'm some brutal MBA quant-led person who stares at Matrix-like screens all day and the customer needs and insights don't matter. That's what the opposite school would say. And then the performance people would say, "Well, the brand stuff is really indulgent. It rejects science and evidence and it may be poorly researched, it's intuition, it's gut, it's artistic." And again, both of those things are silly. I don't think we should eschew having goals and objectives to quantify and qualify our work. It's measurement, data. These things are very important, serious things to be taken seriously in companies and to have a productive conversation with anyone—boards of directors, other leaders of companies, other cross-functional peers—to be able to speak that language 'cause that's the language of business. I also think it's important to not lose the customer and the fact that all the targeting and numbers and stuff in the world don't matter if what you're saying, selling, or offering is not interesting or well understood or distinct. So you need both. And I think that's why I'm hesitant to even use the word performance marketing or say I'm a performance marketer or anything like that, because I just think it adds more confusion and puts people's guards up needlessly.

Elena: Speaking of terms that marketers sometimes argue about, let's talk about upper funnel and lower funnel. I know that whole—that can be a debate too, just how do you describe what goes through the funnel, but everything you're talking about, you evolved your belief system from very bottom of the funnel, you could say performance-driven, targeted marketing towards more branding, thinking about the long term. You clearly have belief systems that are similar to ours, that side of marketing matters and that impacts the rest of your channels as well. I love when people share beliefs, and I would love to know what that looks like in practice for you as a CMO of a very large consumer-facing company. How does that belief come to life?

Ryan: I don't think it's ultimately different from the idea of mental and physical availability or those types of ways of viewing it. Marketing—we love putting different labels or words on similar concepts 'cause we're people and sometimes it's easier for us to understand certain things to describe one way versus another. I think it's helpful from practically—for folks that have leaned maybe one way or the other in their career, the funnels are useful 'cause you can point and say, "This channel is an upper funnel channel. This one's a lower." I don't think that's exactly accurate. I think some naturally sort out to be used that way typically. And I think there's intelligent reasoning behind that. But I try to use this idea of demand generation and demand capture for me, and I think it's resonant for people that are systems thinkers on the performance side and also people that think of it as—what's my role if I'm telling stories and trying to create visual distinctiveness or interesting and engaging messaging, creative? And so if one person's job or one side of the fence is to generate interest, intent, intention to take a brand seriously, build a goal to have a buying moment in the future, raise mental availability or just awareness of a brand, then that's great. Now, if those folks turn and try to go find it and use it at the last mile, they may not 'cause we forget things or we get distracted or our needs are constantly changing. And the criteria of simple product availability on a shelf—all those things could disrupt the purchase intent. And so that would be the lower funnel side. Just making sure you have a large catcher's mitt so that any—it's really difficult for someone to miss you along the journey as you're closer to a purchase moment. So that's how I think of upper and lower and what we do at GoodRx is—in some ways it's more important to think about demand generation and demand capture. Our business is one where you can't use our product. Most people can't use our product the minute they see an advertisement because we're really only relevant to people that take prescription medication. By and large, there's some exceptions to that, or need a prescription or contemplating a therapy soon. And so when you see an ad for GoodRx and you're like, "Oh wow, that's interesting," you might have just picked up a prescription and it might be 90 days until you have a refill. So it—I—unlike an apparel brand, there's no impulse purchasing here. We do have a care—telemedicine business is a little bit different and we think about that in that case 'cause we actually can provide prescriptions and services or care. But in general, I'm trying to incept an idea that GoodRx is a brand that can help me when I have a prescription pricing need. And it's so pronounced for us that we can't—we have to look at the effect of our advertising and the upper funnel—air quotes here for those listening—that we prime them and make them ready to take a series or remember to go, "Oh, I should check GoodRx before I go to the pharmacy." And then when you do and you turn to Google and go, "What was that yellow company that can save me money on prescriptions?" We do all the things you'd expect us to be doing to make sure that we don't lose that moment. We do a lot of things around the point of care, like at the doctor's office and building word-of-mouth referral around among doctors and pharmacists so that they can be helpful and encourage patients to use GoodRx. And so that's how we think about upper and lower funnel. Not dissimilar from mental, physical or just building intention and making sure that when someone needs us, that they can find us. We're really difficult to miss along the journey.

Elena: So you're one of those brands where when someone sees a spot, an ad, most of them are gonna be out of market when they see it. And then I also think you have a double challenge, which is you are not necessarily part of a natural habit when you get a prescription at the moment. So that's like an added challenge. So if somebody did all of a sudden need a prescription, the chance of them looking for GoodRx without already knowing the brand? Yeah. Zero. So how are you trying to make GoodRx more of a part of our daily habits?

Ryan: It's important to know here that—I'll take a moment here to just describe what GoodRx is since we got into the last question about funnels. But GoodRx is a prescription savings company. So what we do is we help people save time and money when they are prescribed a medication. In the United States, you have two primary ways of paying for your medication. One is out of pocket, so you're just—it's a normal transaction. Or the second way is another party is paying for all or some of your prescription. That would be your employer through your health insurance. Maybe it's a government insurance program like Medicare or Medicaid. But those are predominantly the two ways in which you'd get medicine unless it's charitable or something like that. Your price is something that you don't necessarily know because somebody has to do this calculation on your behalf of, "Is my insurance gonna pay for this, yes or no? If so, how much?" And then you're left with the rest. What most people don't know is that oftentimes on many medications, you actually can save more money if you just pay without using your insurance. So you can do the cash price, as we would call it in the industry. Sometimes it's lower than the price you'd have with a deductible or a copay. And then of course there are times that maybe it's the cash price is not the lowest, but it would be familiar to many people that are listening in the United States that when your doctor prescribes something, you don't know if it's gonna be covered. And then you have to do these things called step therapies or prior authorizations. And it seems like there's this constant back and forth between your doctor's office, the insurance company, and the pharmacy to figure out is this gonna be covered or not? And you go through all that rigmarole and you might find that with insurance, it's $5 less than if you just pay it out of pocket and you save yourself all that time. So we really think of ourselves as saving people time and money on their medication. And that's what our role is. And so when we think about making this part of daily habit, one of the big challenges we have to overcome in the United States is that everyone here that grows up here follows parents, grandparents, or authority figures in their lives to pharmacies. And before the digital era, your doctor wrote something on a script pad. You took the piece of paper to the pharmacist, and you didn't really think about comparison shopping or looking and checking a price before you go. And so we have to interrupt that—decades and decades of people assuming that health insurance is this panacea, it's gonna cover—that's the best way to do it. And that also, by the way, prices are different at different pharmacies. So the CVS on First and Main, and the CVS at Third and State might have different prices for the same exact medication. Same form, same quantity, same dose. Typically not more so between two different pharmacy brands and chains. But you don't know that. And a lot of people didn't know that until GoodRx started really making people aware of that idea. So think of us as incepting this idea that you make a plan when you book an airline ticket. You wouldn't just go—many people unless you had a need, wouldn't buy a ticket at the counter, at the airport. Plan ahead, they'd use an OTA to do that. And so we're trying to make it clear that GoodRx is a common-sense utility for everybody. Whether you have insurance or not, there really is not a reason for you not to take a couple seconds to check GoodRx before you go to the pharmacy. And that's why "Check GoodRx" is our tagline at the end of a lot of our video ads and other ads that we have in market. And it's why we have to do this upper funnel, lower funnel combo that we are—in this idea—'cause it is not the default habit many of us have. And we're able to change that and it is changing for the better, and that's why our business has been successful.

Rob: We are definitely not holding back in terms of telling this story. I have to congratulate you guys on the "Savings Wrangler." For all the listeners who haven't checked it out yet, go to YouTube, watch the 62-second spot. 'Cause I do think it's a masterclass in distinctive assets. You didn't just double down. You quadrupled down between the Savings Wrangler, your Dusty Pete, the color schemes that you guys use are very unique and unusual. The sound, but the biggest thing for me is you didn't hide the value proposition the entire time. Oftentimes, even those distinctive assets separate you from the real true story. And you guys just blended it all perfectly. What was the impetus for this whole new narrative that you guys put out there with your creative and was it hard to sell internally?

Ryan: Well, thank you for all the great things you said about that. Most of the credit goes to the team and the partners we work with on this to make this a successful campaign for us. We're really happy with the results we've seen from the work we're doing. I'll pass that along. So thank you for that. Why did we start this? Was it hard to sell internally? No. I didn't go in saying, "Hey, buy this idea of a prairie dog and a fish-out-of-water cowgirl singing ballads about prescription savings." That wasn't the pitch. The pitch was, "We've been doing this a really long time. We've created an enormous amount of goodwill and reputational influence of our name and people having good stories and families and friends and doctors and pharmacists—all these people singing our praises. The thing we lacked was a common anchor to link all of these things under a banner other than our name and our color and our wordmark logo and color." And that's okay. Because when we've done TV for quite some time, but as you pointed out, maybe the only thing that really made it clearly a GoodRx ad is us saying the word GoodRx and a GoodRx watermark being there, and then on the end card. So we wanted to create more opportunity for brand salience, something else that could be an anchor and an element of continuity that we can build over time. And so this was a platform choice to say, "Hey, we're gonna do something for the long haul here to really enrich the brand assets that make us distinct and memorable today and add to them. We didn't start over, we didn't rebrand or change our logo or colors. We just—to add to this." And so that was easier or much easier for people to go, "Oh, that sounds like a good idea." "Yeah, let's do that." So we started with a comprehensive brand strategy exercise. We wanted to get our language correct. For example, I mentioned we save people time and money on prescriptions. Formerly we might say we're a discount prescription company, or we save you money. And we really wanted to have clarity in the language. One of the things that came out of that exercise was this idea of what our archetype is as a brand, that we're a fearless ally. It's a combination of a rebel, like a Robin Hood type personality, but also a heroic one, like a Superman. So we are there to save the day, and we fight against the system, but we're really trying to bring everyone along and create some sort of win for everybody without over-emphasizing one of those two personalities. So we call that the fearless ally. It's really to be an advocate and be a leader in driving change and creating opportunity for consumers that are looking to make their medication more affordable. Once we landed on that, we go, "Okay, cool. How do we bring that to life?" And we had a pretty strong idea that we wanted to think about using mascots and humor because healthcare advertising in general is fairly anodyne, not to be critical. There are many brands that are successful. I think we could, in our mind, say a pharma ad usually opens with a wide panning shot of somebody that's unhappy or they're happy and they're in a dark place or a light place. And then there's this buildup and then the brand shows up and then everything's better. Then it's got a lot of jargon and other things in it. So we wanted to stand out from that and by using humor, which creates clearly a better response and ability to remember something if it's compelling and useful. That was one of the things we wanted to do. And then to bring the fearless ally to life, we wanted to cast that person literally, which we cast as a Savings Wrangler herself, this fish-out-of-water cowgirl who's got no-nonsense frontier wisdom and is really trying to disrupt the normal malaise of the process of getting a prescription, going to the counter and having a lot of uncertainty on what you're gonna pay. And then we doubled down and we added a sidekick because—we call him Dusty Pete. And Dusty Pete's an American prairie dog who goes with the Savings Wrangler 'cause they're a tag team. And the intentional choice with Dusty Pete was that we wanted to be able to use him more online and on digital surfaces where just that unique idea of a prairie dog with a GoodRx scarf talking to me about something when I'm scrolling through social channels or something, it just felt like it would jump out more and we'd have more opportunity to address that. I'll pause there. There's a lot more I can get into if you have more questions on it, but those are some of the things that guided our hand in making these decisions. I'm very happy with the results and very proud of the amazing work on this.

Angela: Well, unquestionably bold. Just love what you've done there. And especially without having to rebrand, I think sometimes the boldest move is just consistency, in what we do and how we show up and being memorable for our consumers. Ryan, we've heard you speak of marketing's job as needing to increase surface area for the brand. And to your point earlier, as consumers, we don't wake up and search for a brand without knowing what that brand is. So I would love to hear you explain what does that mean to you? Increasing surface area—air quotes again for the audio listeners—and how do you put that into practice?

Ryan: This could also be something that's unique to the way I just think about the problem, but if you think about biologically, surface area just means that the movement of things between two surfaces can go faster 'cause you just have more areas for things to go through. Think of a concert venue and you're going to a concert somewhere. And if everyone has to go through one door, it's gonna take a long time for them to get in and out. Now if you have multiple doors, you can move the crowds in and out more quickly. And so if you take that just simple concept of having a bigger surface area just gives you more opportunity for movement. Then in the marketing world, I think of it as giving me a bigger net to catch people who would benefit from our products and services. And my goal is really to maximize our opportunity to pick up people or be there when someone is in a moment of need versus trying to overly constrain my opportunities to win by targeting specific groups of people or stalking my existing customers or other things like that. And so I think of my role as increasing the odds that we're successful. And to me that means making sure that GoodRx is almost impossible to miss on a day-to-day basis, especially if you're in a need state where prescription medication pricing is gonna be relevant to you now or in the future. And not just you, by the way, but friends, families, loved ones, and others in your life that maybe you don't have a medical need, but they may. And so I just—when I say I want to increase surface area, I think it's important for brands to increase surface area. It's really a—don't be overly—don't densify our value proposition in the places we show up. Really try to maximize the range of coverage we can get with the resources, people, budget, et cetera that we have, to increase our odds that we're successful and found when someone's in a brand discovery moment or needs something we provide.

Angela: Well, and I think doing just that—increasing surface area makes a ton of sense from a growth perspective. Just in what instances—category entry points, right? Can we get consumers to think of GoodRx? It also complicates potentially, due to the customer journey, the measurement. And you've pushed back on both, I think, last click and multi-touch attribution. Why is that, and how can marketers break out of that cycle when they think about measurement?

Elena: And we've heard of last click before, but I'm very interested in Ryan—like multi-touch is—I wanna talk about both, but I'm just saying our ears perked up when we heard about the second one. Yeah.

Ryan: Yeah, I'm gonna, if you don't mind, one thing I'll say too about surface area before I go to the measurement question, I promise I'll come back to it, is I think there's a technical way of looking at this and a non-technical way of looking at surface area. And I think the technical area was always important in the digital discovery era, but is even gonna be more important, given the rise of agentic technology, LLMs, AI, however you wanna say it. The non-technical view is pretty much what I said, which is that people will discover brands, consider them for purchase. And then we have a large tool set and we wanna get a greater share of attention and win more tickets to this somewhat intractable large lottery for consumer attention. The technical view on this—and bear with me on this example—is if I have a website and I sell products, let's say I sell T-shirts, I have an obligation to make sure that all the facets and the way people may search for that product or be interested in my product and its permutations is maximized as much as possible. So let's say in this T-shirt example we have five permutations on how you could search for it: size, color, fabric, style, brand. That would be over 30 plus ways in which you could combo those things. I could search by size plus color. I could search by fabric and style and brand. If I have 30 plus ways in which I could be discovered, that's 30 opportunities that I could be discovered when someone's looking for those pairings. Technically, if I do that wrong, if I have those five options, but I somehow encode that on my website incorrectly, or my product feed data is bad or something like that, and only four of those criteria are known to Google, like on a product listing ad, I take my 30 chances and I make it less than half—12 to 14 in terms of combinations. So that's quite a fall. I've decreased my surface area by half simply through lack of technical optimization and rigor. And going back to the idea of performance marketing or technical marketing and brand marketing, I think this is why that's dangerous to have these labels because that brutal technical honesty is a very important reality to get right so that you don't decrease your surface area or don't maximize your surface area as a business. Now take that example and multiply it by millions of SKUs and 20 different colors and all the other things. It becomes an impossibly large data set that could be used to your advantage or possibly your detriment. So I think that's the technical jargon. I will get more technical that maybe we'll see on the measurement thing, but I do think that's an important distinction in what we're talking about. Surface area—there's a very technical reality to marketing that you can't escape. So last touch and multi-touch. If we just think about the word last touch, you're basically conceding that it's not all the touches that led to a sale. So again, we're just using basic logic here to say, "Why would I build my entire growth strategy around a set of data that is not telling the whole story?" It's much more likely that you're gonna get it wrong when you're pursuing something like that than right. Now, that doesn't mean last touch is not a useful measure. It is actually a really important measure. It can be very helpful in understanding if you have funnel issues in your product experience, or maybe there's a mismatch between the expectations you're setting in your ads, and the product experience doesn't align to it. So you see performance issues very quickly. And you buy sometimes in platforms to these types of measures because they're faster cycle. You can—I can tell Google very quickly, "Yeah, that click led to somebody putting something in a cart," than I can if I'm purely doing this based on lift and holdout experimentation or even econometrics, which are longer-term measures. So you still need these. Multi-touch is problematic simply 'cause it's not real. I've never seen—and I grew up in marketing in an era where there were a lot of companies that came up, grew or bought out, and then quietly swept under the rug of some big companies like Google or Oracle or others. And the problem is the idea of multi-touch sounds great. Like "I'm gonna get all the time, all the ad at-bats, I've had, all the impressions, all the clicks in one big technical database, and I'm gonna then assign credit based on this really complicated math." Then you go, "Well, Meta won't give us the data, Google won't give us impression data." So then you start modeling and then before you even start doing the analysis, you start making all these exceptions to the measurement idea. And so you're eroding the entire premise before you get started. Where multi-touch is, I think, maybe more realistic and practical is in a single platform or ecosystem. Maybe Google can give us some good insights, especially important with some of the evolution of things like Performance Max and some things they're doing there of how are customers ping-ponging around the different Google ecosystems. Google knows a lot about their—has a good identity graph. They know all their customers on all their devices, so you might be able to tease some insights out of that, but I wouldn't over-leverage that insight when it comes to creating the quality of my marketing overall or doing budget setting for future years. So yeah, that's how I think about those two concepts.

Angela: Yeah. So all that said, we as marketers have to build confidence in what we do. We need to bring a case to the CFO, the CEO. And so how do you break out of that? How does GoodRx build confidence in the marketing results today? What tools or approaches do you rely on most? What advice do you have?

Ryan: I think the key question there is, "How do we build confidence or how do we create some sort of mutual understanding of what our contributions to the business are?" And if I start there, marketing measurement can be challenged, I think, for different reasons. This is not exhaustive, but maybe there's three ones that come to mind. One is you have the wrong tool. We just talked about last touch, multi-touch. You might just be using the wrong tools to measure success. Second is just bad statistical methods. Poor measurement design. Not looking at incrementality, not using—even if you're running an econometric model or an MMM as it's typically described, you're not doing things to make sure that your predictive power in the model is stable and you're hard-coding variables and making things problematic before you even use it. But the third one I think is probably the most important, which is bad standards. No alignment before we start measuring things on how we're judging success. And I think it's super important. I've used this example before, which is if I attempt to measure something with a ruler and you use a yardstick and it's a curvy, wavy thing, like a border of a country or something, you're gonna end up with two different measures simply 'cause I'm using a more precise one of 12 inches and you're using one that's closer to three feet. And so we might both have good answers, but we're not gonna have the same answer. So who's right? And so if you align—this is called the Coastline Paradox. By the way, I'm not making this example up. I didn't come up with this idea. But an application to marketing is that I need to align with the other leaders of the company, the CFO, the CEO, on how we're gonna judge success. In our case, it's working costs per incremental dollar or return on ad spend, a model that's rooted in incrementality. And so in that case, we aligned on those standards and in order for us to actually measure what we do at GoodRx is we use three different tools. We use econometrics or MMM, we use experimentation, a lift-based measurement to one, validate the econometrics, but also to gain faster insight in shorter spurts for new experiments and ideas that we have. And then we do use things like last touch or channel measures for buying or for short-cycle optimization and insight. And we triangulate all three of those when we make big decisions on how much money we wanna spend for the year, how we wanna lay down dollars across channels, and then how we optimize within channels. So which TV programs should we pick is not gonna be answered by an econometric model. But TV modeling like spike attribution or spike modeling might be more helpful for something like that, which is closer to a last-touch concept. So that's how we do it. There are a lot of different ways to do this, but I think the industry's really rallied around this idea of three legs of the stool, which are the ones I've mentioned, and that's been very helpful for us. And so far, so good.

Angela: All models are wrong. Some are useful. I know you're a listener of the podcast, so you've probably heard us say that before. It gets—we say it ad nauseum.

Ryan: That's also the trick with data—data can tell you anything you want. And maybe we'll get into this, but we think we have all the data we need, but in most cases we have a very small part of the data that actually matters at any given point in time.

Angela: We agree that triangulation approach makes sense. How we look at TV. I'd always like to think that we're all operating as marketers with the best intent. We feel we're doing the best with the info we have. Sometimes that data is wrong. Sometimes we're using the wrong model, or to your point, we have bad assumptions. Sometimes I feel we're missing as marketers, just new perspectives. You've said that you think marketers overestimate how much control they actually have, so what do you mean by that? When you say that, how is it related to the idea of free marketing you've said?

Ryan: Another air quotes moment.

Elena: Yeah, we wanna make free marketing a thing.

Angela: A thing for sure.

Elena: I really like it.

Ryan: Let's do it. Let's do it.

Rob: Get a T-shirt.

Ryan: Yeah. Dusty Pete, and then free marketing. Yeah. So I love the idea of free marketing just because it's—I'm giving—it is like, I feel like there's an opportunity to liberate the craft and just free us from some of the burdens we've put on ourselves through the digital era of advertising. Secondarily, it's free advice. So it's literally free marketing advice from me in this case. And then third is where I think the root of this is—it's grounded in the same concepts of free-market economics. And I'm saying this apolitically. I'm not trying to insinuate one way or the other on the different economic models out there or the way you think of political economy, but it has been helpful to me just to borrow from some of the economic thinking of the last century and how I think about marketing. And so when I say people overestimate the control they have, we know we say, "Okay, let's—typical situation is we wanna find more people that are gonna buy our running shoes. So what do we wanna do? Well, first thing is, let's just find all the people that like running as a hobby, as a craft." That's our target segment. Then we go, "Okay, well is this for super athletes or is this the casual runner?" And then we start asking ourselves all these questions, assembling the data and trying to find this ideal persona. And then we try to assign targeting criteria. We use models or first-party data or third-party data, and we stitch this profile together and it's all based on a very narrow set of variables. May be more right than wrong for more people than slightly more than average, but it's not 100% of our opportunity set. You all have talked about this a lot more than I have with many of your guests on this false idea of over-targeting or hyper-targeting, and the infrequent buyer, the loyalty trap. All these things are cuts of the same cloth. The real answer is that we don't know a lot. There are way many—there are more things outside our control or more variables we're not modeling or considering than there are ones we are. Even the most minute—common ones are like the weather. We don't normally plan for that. Some businesses do seasonal planning, like it's Christmas time now. That's something that they take into account, but we're not taking into consideration the fact that someone might run out of gas on their way to work. Someone—all these micro moments, it's impossible to have all the information. And so that's the false overconfidence that can come from picking data that seems right or is logically powerful, but you're neglecting most of the data in your decision-making. And so that's the idea of why I think people fool themselves and I think they have more control than they do. I'll pause there before I get into the ideas of free marketing itself, or how it aligns to some economic thinking in the last century, in case anyone else has other comments on that. But that's the implication—that we know—we take advantage of a far smaller set of data than we think we are actually using in our decisions.

Angela: Everyone listening is trying to figure out how to do free marketing, so let's do it.

Ryan: And again, this—maybe this label's not helpful for most people. It's just the way I think about it. So if anything, it's more personal opinion, but this idea that the problem with centralized planning—we're gonna plan a marketing campaign and we're going to do all the segmentation and we're going to pick these customers and we're gonna build these ads and we're gonna put them in these channels and we're gonna do all these things, we're gonna optimize that, and that's where all of our buyers are gonna come from—is a bit of a misnomer. There is more that's outside our control. And in this idea, there's a famous article by an economist, last name's Hayek, that's called "The Use of Knowledge in Society." And the whole principle is that individuals and this idea that growth can come from reasons we don't understand or we don't know—the person that ran out of gas or the person that was late on their way to work or had to go pick up their kids and then they needed a last-minute—they had a last-minute need for dinner and they go pick something up. We're not gonna know all those things. So our job is to actually move away from the idea of trying to control every variable and create these really micro campaigns or highly targeted. And instead, our job is to increase our surface area, give ourselves greater odds to reach the largest pool of people we can. And then through doing that, we're gonna end up with actually a more productive system, a more optimized system for reasons that we can't exactly explain, than if we try to control every variable. So that's really it. At the end of the day, I probably erred on the side of over-explaining it or anchoring too much on this idea of free marketing. But that's really what it is. We don't know as much as we think we do, we trick ourselves into thinking we know a lot more, and that we have got it all figured out. In reality, the work we're doing is far less controllable than we'd like to think, and so we should really set ourselves up for all of these random events and win all these random opportunities versus trying to focus on a market that we think we control. So yeah, that's the idea.

Rob: It's smart and it's a bit spicy, kinda like using a prairie dog to defy the pharmaceutical category. So you are a fellow contrarian thinker. What is your most contrarian marketing opinion?

Ryan: My most contrarian marketing opinion. I would say that it's probably been evident through our conversation, which is don't take all the data you're shown as fact. Realize a lot of what people are being sold as modern and accountable marketing is sometimes techno babble or wasteful or is really meant to just help you buy a new service or pursue a new idea. I think in a lot of cases, some of the data we are sold or talk about in marketing is really something that enriches a lot of the purveyors of those ideas and sometimes can impoverish the brands that embrace them without really taking a second look or thinking harder about it. So I'd say that's probably my biggest contrarian opinion—I'm skeptical more than I'm not when I hear big promises on applications of data, personalization at scale, that kind of thing.

Elena: Love it. You're definitely on the right podcast, Ryan.

Rob: I know. I've seen Ann just grinning over there.

Elena: Alright. This has been amazing. I've learned a lot through this conversation. Let's wrap up with something probably less helpful for people, but kind of a fun question. If you could have dinner with any fictional character excluding the Savings Wrangler and your prairie dog—they're not included—who would it be and why?

Ryan: I like the Lord of the Rings. I was gonna say something—John Hammond from Jurassic Park, maybe, but we already talked about Jurassic Park at the top of the hour, so I would say probably Bilbo Baggins, maybe from the Lord of the Rings. It sounds like a really peaceful evening, eating some great food by a fire and listening to some crazy stories about dragons. So not a bad way to spend an evening.

Elena: Ryan, I hate to tell you, I've also never seen Lord of the Rings.

Angela: Oh.

Rob: Oh gosh.

Ryan: Okay. That's okay. Yeah, you've got a lot of good opportunities to go see new things. That should be exciting.

Rob: Elena, have you ever watched an episode of MacGyver? Because that's my pick. My seventh-grade heart loves MacGyver and I would love to have dinner with MacGyver and watch all of his amazing ways to—'cause that's what he was good at. Elena's like, "I don't know who you're talking about." Does anybody know who I'm talking about?

Ryan: Yeah. MacGyver, of course.

Angela: Yeah.

Rob: I should pick a different one.

Elena: No, it's fine. It's—yeah, I'm sure people will know him.

Ryan: You need a mullet though.

Rob: Absolutely. Richard Dean Anderson, MacGyver drove around in a Jeep. He had his bomber jacket. Loved that guy.

Angela: Well, I think I'm gonna have to go with—I mean I think you exposed at one point that you also have not seen the Star Wars trilogy.

Elena: I have now. My husband had me watch that. Okay.

Angela: Good. I'm going with Darth Vader. I wanna unpack a complex individual over dinner.

Rob: Yeah, absolutely.

Elena: I didn't know he could eat. He could eat, right? My husband's trying to have me watch a lot of these things. We just watched Breaking Bad, now we're watching Better Call Saul. So it's top of mind. I'd love to have dinner with Saul Goodman. He just seems like he's got a lot of good stories.

Rob: I don't think he'd pick up the check.

Elena: No, probably not. He'd scam me at the end, but that'd be part of the experience honestly. And I would fall for it. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us today. You're very impressive. And I think people are gonna really enjoy this episode, so thank you for taking the time. Where can people follow you and learn more about your journey at GoodRx?

Ryan: Follow GoodRx. Everyone should be taking advantage of GoodRx's capabilities and ability to save you time and money on your prescriptions. So go to GoodRx.com, get our app, and check us out. And for me, I'm on LinkedIn occasionally. I'm not a prolific networker, but drop me a line if you have any questions. I'm always happy to help a fellow marketer or somebody who's just curious about the craft.

Elena: Love it. Thanks again, Ryan.

Angela: Thanks Ryan.

Ryan: You're very welcome. Enjoyed the time today.