DTC Podcast

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Most DTC brands put the bulk of their paid budget where attention is thinnest. Viewers spend about 99 minutes per session on Connected TV and 8 minutes per session on social, yet only 9% of standard marketing budgets go to CTV. This episode is about closing that gap on CTV with the same measurement & targeting you get on social (starting at $7 CPMs!)

Emily Huo built ad businesses at X (Twitter), Reddit, and Spotify, and now runs SMB advertising at Paramount. She walks through how a DTC brand actually gets onto Survivor, Landman, or RuPaul's Drag Race, what to spend, and how to know if it worked.

Sign up for Paramount Ads Manager today. Get your brand on TV tomorrow.

This episode, we get into:
The seasonal play: build awareness over the summer, retarget in the fall, convert in Q4
Why you start broad on targeting and let the data tell you who is really watching, not the persona you imported from Meta
The pixel setup that ties a TV impression to a site visit, a lead, or a purchase
The geo holdout test for measuring halo effect with no third-party tools
Why a 30-second unskippable spot changes how you tell a brand story when you are not a household name yet
Budgeting: carve out 10% as experimental, expect a three-month ramp, scale from there

Who this is for: DTC founders and growth marketers who have maxed out social, anyone planning Q4 now, and operators curious whether CTV is real or just a hot label.

What to steal: the install-pixel-now, build-in-summer, convert-in-Q4 sequence, and the broad-then-narrow targeting approach.

Timestamps:
0:00 Emily Huo's Journey to Paramount
3:10 Why CTV Is Growing So Fast
8:07 CTV Targeting vs Meta Ads
12:14 CTV Budget & Testing Strategy
23:18 Measuring the Halo Effect

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Dan bootstrapped Unbound Merino from a Reddit-fueled obsession with merino wool into a brand approaching nine figures in lifetime revenue, with a warehouse sale, a growing women's line, and zero outside funding.

In his second appearance on the DTC Podcast, the Unbound co-founder gets specific about what actually moved the business over the last three years, why he almost lost 80% of his sales in a single day, and why he now cares more about the product and the friendships than any growth hack.

What you'll learn:
Why the ads Dan loves flop and the cringe ones scale, and how he made peace with it
The creative volume system that unlocked Meta scaling in 2023, and why Meta stopped working the same way
How word of mouth (15% of new customers) and a 50/50 women's line changed the growth model
The de minimis and tariff shock that nearly ended the company, and the scramble to open a Dallas warehouse before Liberation Day
How Unbound uses a custom AI wired into Shopify, its ERP, Asana, Slack, and Drive to triangulate why products get returned
Why 5% of sales now come from ChatGPT and Claude, and what that means for discovery

Who this is for: bootstrapped founders, DTC operators, and anyone selling a premium product who is tired of renting customers from Meta.

What to steal: the reorder-first mindset, the creative iteration loop, and the tariff survival playbook.

Timestamps:
00:00 Building a $90M travel apparel brand
02:12 Scaling Meta with creative volume
08:00 Why product quality beats acquisition tactics
16:00 How tariffs nearly killed the business
32:05 AI as a business advisor and data analyst

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This week on All Killer No Filler, we're giving you a preview of Agency Confidential, the new podcast from our co-founder Jeff, and this episode's is a truly killer.

Jeff sits down with Nick Shackelford, who's everywhere in DTC. Three agencies (Structured, Konstant, Lucid), an events business, and a decade of showing up on every feed, stage, and group chat. Jeff calls him the Coca-Cola of ecommerce. Eric calls him the Drake of DTC.

But halfway through, Nick stops and shares something he says he's never told publicly. Last July, cash got tight and he had to bridge the gap on one of his companies. Not with a loan or a raise, but by getting paid as a public agency owner to talk about SaaS products. Ten years of being a face turned into a cash-flow lever almost no other owner has.

Then it gets stranger. That same decade of posts and videos is now training data for every LLM on earth. Ask ChatGPT or Claude about DTC agencies and Nick, Structured, Konstant, and Geek Out all come up. A personal brand he built to win deal flow quietly became free distribution in a channel that didn't exist when he started.

They get into the real cost of being the face, why building a faceless brand (like DTC and Pilothouse) trades built-in pull for durability, AI in the agency space, and why Nick thinks the market's about to splinter back into specialists.

What they cover:
The never-shared story of how Nick bridged a cash-flow gap in a rough month
Why a personal brand is a lever most agency owners don't have
How ten years of content became free distribution in AI search
The real cost and risk of being the face of your agency
Face vs. faceless: durability, transferability, and selling the business
Where Nick thinks the agency market is heading in 2026

Who this is for: Agency owners, DTC operators, and founders weighing whether to build in public or build something that doesn't hinge on one person's face.

Catch the preview here, and if you like it, go subscribe to Agency Confidential for the full episode.

Timestamps:
00:00 Nick Shackelford on building agencies and personal brands
02:19 How Nick built three agencies and scaled operations
11:59 Why AI is changing agency work and client communication
27:56 How a personal brand became a business advantage
39:18 Why AI will bring back specialized agencies

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Gifting is one of the biggest reasons people buy online, and most brands never build for it on purpose.

Matt Heckathorn runs digital marketing at Wolfe, the company behind Gift Card Granny, PerfectGift.com, and GiftYa. His ICP is close to everyone, which kills the usual narrow-audience playbook and forces a different approach to growth.

What you will learn:
How a bottom-of-funnel team moved into CTV, programmatic, and out-of-home without losing measurement
Why CTV retargeting outperformed what Matt expected, and how scale made brand channels measurable
How Wolfe uses second-tier DMAs to test incrementality before spending up
How gift card fraud actually works at the physical retail level, and why it shapes the product
Where Wolfe is drawing its AI line: creative and fulfillment yes, fully agentic media buying not yet
The cost problem almost nobody is planning for as AI usage scales

Who this is for: DTC operators and growth leads working top of funnel, anyone selling into gifting, and marketers thinking through where AI fits in a real team.

What to steal: The second-tier DMA incrementality test, the recipient-first product framing, and the human checkpoint on agentic media buying.

Timestamps:
00:00 The Future of AI in Marketing
02:12 Reinventing the Gift Card Industry
09:00 How Card-Linked Gifting Works
15:12 Top of Funnel Messaging That Converts
23:12 Building an AI-First Marketing Team

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Meta used to let you pick your customer in the backend. Those days are over. Post-Andromeda, the creative itself carries the targeting signal, which means the old spray-and-pray playbook now works against you.

Rafael Gi spent a decade in traditional creative agencies, then led marketing at a nine-figure apparel brand, and now runs strategic growth and partnerships at Pilothouse. In this one he breaks down why the algorithm is forcing marketers to be good marketers again, and what that looks like in an ad account.

What he gets into:
Why "creative is targeting" is now literal, not a slogan, and how Meta reads your creative for who to serve it to
Salience and memory structures: how brands like Volvo, Red Bull, and AG1 got remembered, and how to build the same
The spend discrepancy that caps scaling brands: 80 percent of budget chasing 20 percent of revenue
Why structuring an ad account by product instead of by persona burns money and buries your message
The shift from "all revenue is good revenue" to winning the customer instead of selling the product
How to evolve one message into new occasions without breaking the memory you have already built

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators between eight and nine figures who are seeing diminishing returns on creative volume and cannot figure out why more ads are not buying more growth.

What to steal: the "one tank of gas, twelve cars" test for whether your budget is spread too thin, and the account-structure fix that lines your media budget up with where your revenue comes from.

Timestamps:
00:00 Why Meta's Andromeda Changed Marketing
02:34 Creative Is the New Targeting
05:55 Building Brand Salience That Lasts
14:32 How to Fix Creative Strategy at Scale
24:42 Applying Salience to Better Meta Ads

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