The DTC Podcast

How much of your Google Ads budget goes to your own brand name? Most DTC marketing teams cannot answer that, and the brands defending an ambiguous brand term are paying for customer acquisition they already had. Wildflower Cases is spending the large majority of roughly $3,500 a month on the single term "wildflower," according to SEMrush.

Pilothouse Senior Google Media Buyer Zav audits that account with Eric Dyck on the DTC Podcast. Brand clicks at twelve to fifteen cents, a 21,000 subscriber YouTube library with no connection to the ad account, and a word that belongs to Tom Petty, Billie Eilish, a 2022 film and every florist in the country. You walk away knowing your own brand versus generic split and what to move the money into.

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WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE
Your brand keyword is cheap and converts well, so you cannot tell if it is working. Zav explains the account math that makes a brand campaign look like your best performer.
You do not know your brand versus generic split. There is a ten minute check in the search terms report, and a percentage to keep it under.
Your budget is fixed and nobody will raise it. Zav reallocates $3,500 a month on air with no increase.
Your ROAS will fall when you cut brand spend and somebody will ask why. He gives you that answer before you need it.
Your collab partners drive search demand you are not bidding on. Charli XCX and Slushy Noobz fans are already looking.
Your generic ads all land on the homepage. Specific query, specific collection page.
You have a YouTube library doing nothing for paid. Performance Max and Demand Gen take those videos as they are.

ABOUT ZAV
Zav is a Senior Google Media Buyer at Pilothouse, the performance marketing team behind DTC, where he runs paid search and shopping for ecommerce brands. He wrote the Wildflower Cases search breakdown for the DTC Newsletter. If you want his team to look at your account, go to https://pilothouse.co and ask for Zav.

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00:00 Who Zav is and what he does at Pilothouse00:47 Why Wildflower Cases became the case study01:17 A brand name that means five other things02:21 Tom Petty, Billie Eilish, and a 2022 movie03:54 Searching "cool iPhone 17 case" live on air04:49 Why their sponsored result sits at the bottom of the page05:22 What decides where your ad places06:46 The case for reallocating a $3,500 monthly budget07:20 Where the money goes instead: shopping plus generic search08:40 Landing pages, and why every ad points at the homepage08:56 Turning collab partners into keyword coverage10:34 The "are they worth it" searches Reddit owns12:23 A 21,000 subscriber YouTube channel with no link to the ad account12:39 Feeding existing video into Performance Max and Demand Gen13:59 24 hours, no extra budget, what changes first14:29 Cutting 80% of the brand spend15:42 Why ROAS falls and revenue rises16:53 The one situation where brand defense earns its budget17:57 The metric agencies over report to clients18:56 Whether $3,500 a month is enough for a brand this size20:19 The brand versus generic diagnostic to run this week20:35 The 20% rule of thumb22:31 What to monitor after you make the cut23:26 How to get Pilothouse to look at your account

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A brand doing under $50 million a year is putting roughly half of its combined retail media, trade, and shopper marketing budget into retail media. At larger companies that share drops toward 30, 20, then 15 percent. Mike Chiasson works on Keen's models, which cover $45 billion in marketing investment, and his read on where that money comes from is the part worth sitting with. It is mostly net new, sourced out of trade rather than pulled from Meta and Google, which is why so much of it sits with sales teams and never gets measured the way media does.

If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what the retail media line in your budget is actually buying, and which part of it is buying customers you already had.

If you own the media budget: Chiasson makes the case that the untapped return in retail media is upper funnel, inside retailers where almost everyone is still only buying search.

What he gets into:
Where the money comes from, and why trade budgets rather than media budgets explain retail media's growth
The benchmark: about half the retail media, trade, and shopper marketing bucket at brands under $50M, versus 15 to 30 percent at large ones
Why small brands with a narrow distribution footprint default to bottom-funnel search, and what that costs them
The Amazon question: whether retail media spend compounds on a retailer's algorithm the way it does on a listing, and why brick and mortar has no real equivalent
Retail media ads that carry no visible association with the retailer at all, and why targeting is the actual product
Walmart, Vizio, and streaming video as the moment upper-funnel retail media became buyable
Retail media social, which he calls very small and rapidly growing, with returns he thinks reflect how early the curve is
The two flaws in ROAS, and why the return on your next dollar is the only version of the number that helps you plan
Bayesian priors, and how Keen gives a brand a response curve for a retailer it has never advertised with
Patience as a budgeting problem rather than a virtue, and why cash-strapped brands structurally cannot buy upper funnel

Who this is for: operators whose product is landing on shelves in more places every quarter, and whose retail media invoices are growing faster than their ability to explain them.

What to steal: find out which budget your retail media is actually coming from. If it is trade, the people approving it are measuring a retailer relationship and the people spending it are measuring sales. Those are different jobs and almost nobody has reconciled them.

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. Episode 1 was the market read. Episode 2 was the first brand. This one maps the fastest-growing line in the budget.

Timestamps:
00:00 Why retail media is becoming a major growth channel
04:00 Where retail media investment is growing
08:00 Why retail media ROI is outperforming other tactics
13:00 The upper-funnel opportunity in retail media
17:00 Why marginal ROI matters more than ROAS

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Most ecommerce brands are paying for every contact in the database, including the tens of thousands they have not mailed in a year. Then they mail them anyway, because they are paying for them. Channing Ferrer argues both halves of that are costing you money, and he has his own company's data to back the second half.

Brevo studied its customer base and found the brands sending the least email posted the highest conversion and click-through rates. The heaviest senders were worse on conversion, worse on click-through and worse on opens. Brevo bills by the message sent, so telling customers to send less costs them revenue. They say it anyway.

For a retention lead, a lifecycle marketer, or a founder still building the sends themselves, this is a conversation about where the money actually goes in a retention program. Channing spent six years at HubSpot running sales strategy through the run from $200 million to $1.5 billion in revenue, then ran sales at Semrush and led Brandwatch back to growth.

Discover More: https://www.brevo.com/solutions/enterprise/?utm_medium=partnership&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast&utm_term=enterprise&utm_content=dtc-podcast-0926

What you get in 38 minutes:
What changes when you stop paying for stored contacts and start paying for messages sent
The mobile wallet as a retention channel, including how a loyalty card gets pushed a new offer and changes appearance on the lock screen
Salomon's use of a wallet pass, and how the same mechanic works for a brand with no physical stores
What Channing puts on a dashboard for a $20M ecommerce brand, and why send volume belongs near the bottom of it
How Brevo customers run campaigns through Claude and ChatGPT over an MCP connection without opening Brevo at all
The three ways a customer outgrows a pricing tier, and how Brevo handles each one
Why loyalty points should reward a social post and not only a repeat purchase

Who this is for: retention leads, ecommerce founders, lifecycle marketers, and anyone weighing a move off Klaviyo or Mailchimp.

What to steal: pull volume off your primary dashboard and replace it with open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate and revenue per send. Then look at what your platform charges you for and ask whether it is charging for the list or for the work.

Timestamps:
00:00 Why personalized messaging converts better
05:00 How Brevo is using AI agents
07:00 Turning mobile wallets into a loyalty channel
14:00 Why sending fewer emails can drive better results
25:00 Building loyalty through customer advocacy

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npdigital.com

Eric told Neil Patel that Pilothouse is now getting about 30% of its inbound from ChatGPT, with higher close rates and bigger deals. Neil's response: "I guarantee your leads are down overall. Would you confirm or disagree with me?"

Down about 40%. Revenue up.

Neil explains why that pattern is showing up everywhere. Someone used to run a Google search, click six blue links, fill out four forms, sit through screening calls, then pick. Now they ask an LLM, filter down inside the conversation with follow-ups, and go to one website with their mind already made up. Same intent, same buyer, one visit instead of seven.

The rest of the episode is what to do about it.

What's inside:
The real search market: Google at 5 trillion searches a year and 27% share, Instagram at 6.5 billion a day, Amazon and YouTube at 3 billion each. Neil's point is that 73% of search is not Google.
Whether Google's ad revenue is actually getting hit by AI Overviews (his answer is more specific than the headlines)
GEO and SEO are two different scores. Domain authority carries SEO and means nothing to GEO. GEO looks at the last 30 to 60 days.
The single highest-leverage GEO tactic he's seeing for ecom, and it isn't Reddit
Why he'd skip Reddit if he ran an ecom brand, and what he'd do instead
His five-step visibility audit: where you rank now, technical SEO and content freshness, the questions people actually type, review recency, and monthly mention volume
The trust study across 100 eight-figure businesses, and the gap between what those operators thought built trust and what buyers actually weighed
Discounts versus bundles, and what discounting does to LTV
Why he reversed his position on personal brand after building one of the biggest in marketing
The Zappos story about a guy named Jason, a first date, and a shoe pun that got him two-day shipping
His most expensive mistake, on air, with numbers

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators watching organic traffic fall while close rates climb, and anyone trying to work out where GEO actually fits next to their SEO budget.

What to steal: audit your review recency this week. If your best reviews are five years old, the LLMs are reading a version of your brand that no longer exists, and a smaller competitor with fresh coverage will get recommended over you.

Timestamps:
00:00 How AI is changing product discovery
04:00 Why ChatGPT leads convert better
07:00 Search has multiplied beyond Google
15:00 How brands can rank in AI recommendations
25:00 SEO vs. GEO for AI visibility

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pilothouse.co

"There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing five to ten million in revenue."

That was Codie Sanchez, and the post went wide enough that DTC marketers spent a week arguing about whether they should be doing their jobs at all. Eric came back from vacation, saw it, and used it to launch a format he has wanted to make since the beginning of this show.

The Rundown is Pardon the Interruption for DTC. A few topics off the week, three people, everyone gives a take. First panel is Jordan Gordon, who runs post-click and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, and Rafael Gi, who works partnerships and client strategy.

What you get:
Both sides of the Codie Sanchez take. Jordan defends the free traffic position: if twenty percent of your traffic is organic and your total margin is twenty percent, that organic traffic is your profit. Rafael's counter is that paid media is a muscle, and a brand that waits until $10M to build it has to relearn its culture, team, and workflows at exactly the wrong moment.
What paid media does: accelerate. Good product grows faster. Bad product fails quicker.
The wastage Rafael sees most across ten to fifteen audits a week. Brands paying to reach customers who were buying regardless, the platform taking view-through credit for purchases with no click, and that false signal then deciding which creative gets scaled.
Marketing is downstream from business, and business is downstream from markets. Jordan on why your marketing mix is often not your decision to make.
Why "evergreen versus campaigns" is the wrong framing past seven figures, and what demand creation looks like next to demand capture.
"Shift our thinking from tests to bets." Rafael on what changes once you have proof, and why the change is philosophical before it is tactical.
Audience hygiene as the precondition for everything. Until existing, engaged, and net new are defined across every channel, none of your tests are valid.
Advertising is vertical, email is horizontal. Jordan on campaigns for launches, flows for evergreen, and why someone who re-enters your world nine months later still needs to be sold your core product.
Acute versus routine entry points in supplements and beauty, and the cross-sell each one opens.
How to spot a brand that has the ratio wrong: growth decelerating quarter over quarter while the new-to-returning revenue ratio inverts. On the email side, campaign-heavy, flow-light, with Klaviyo revenue low against Shopify.
Unique opens are brand impressions. The argument for email as an advertising layer sitting just below reach.
The IKEA tote bag, and campaigns that exist to buy eyeballs rather than revenue.
The car category rule that applies everywhere. If you are not one of the three brands already in someone's consideration set, your revenue and your fame do not matter.

Who this is for: founders and operators between seven and nine figures, media buyers, and anyone who owns both the acquisition and retention number.

What to steal: the audience definition audit, the growth-versus-new-customer-ratio chart, and the absolutes-not-rates rule for judging new customer work.

Timestamps:
00:00 Should brands wait until $5M to run paid media?
05:00 Building organic traffic alongside paid growth
10:00 The hidden problem with scaling paid acquisition
13:00 Evergreen marketing vs. campaign moments
22:00 Audience targeting and wasted media spend

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