Happy Sunday! 

If you’re reading this, I hope you can give me 60 seconds for today’s newsletter. I know what you’re thinking, it’s a long weekend, it’s Sunday night... I know! That’s why today’s newsletter will be 60 seconds or less — a quick rant on something I hate seeing: wasted money on fake awareness marketing.

But, before we get into that...

Vendor of the Week

Most “TV ads” still have the same fatal flaw for DTC: you’re paying for a ton of attention… and then asking someone to remember a URL. Well, thanks to Roku, TV is not just a standalone upper funnel channel, it’s now a full-funnel experience.

Roku Ads Manager has a format that fixes the bifurcated experience problem: Action Ads. These are interactive CTV ads that let viewers take action with their remote. Instead of passively watching a commercial, they can literally press “OK” to:

  • Send the link to their Phone (get a text/email with a direct link to your PDP)
  • Buy directly on the TV without remembering your site

And it’s not a complex setup. This is all done through a simple Shopify app integration (to connect your catalog), and you can watch me set one up here in under 5 minutes. Fatty15 used Roku’s Shopify integration to add shoppable overlays and drove 25%+ conversion rate from cart adds, while keeping the setup simple for a lean team (upload existing creative → launch).

Get your hands on Roku’s Action Ads before it’s too late to run a test on this special link.

Limited Supply

This past week on Limited Supply, I had Ben Soffer (aka @boywithnojob from Instagram), the founder of Spritz Society, and a genius marketer, join the show. We talked about the strategies he’s used to grow Spritz Society, but also what brands can do with creators and HOW!


Check it out, wherever you get your podcasts — Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

Stop falling for fake “Awareness” marketing.

Over the years, no matter how many times it happens in this industry, one thing I will always be a hater of is sales people and companies that trick founders who don’t know any better, into buying things that don’t work. One of those things — upper funnel marketing tactics/strategies, top of funnel “support” or awareness boosting. 99% of the time, it’s complete smoke and mirrors.

Everyone’s favorite example... the iHeartRadio sales reps. Other examples? Running awareness ads on Meta. Spending on PR / influencer dinners as an early stage brand. Sponsoring an NBA team inside the arena as a beverage brand that has no retail distribution. In all these examples, these brands get preyed on by sales people, but it’s because internally they don’t understand they just need to get the basics right.

Upper funnel: Focus on how you get people to first become aware of who you are. Do they hear your name from an influencer, from an Instagram ad, at a music festival booth, from going viral with founder content, etc.

Upper funnel doesn’t immediately mean you have to PAY to fill that funnel — that’s usually what big brands do (generating >$250M/year) to justify that in their marketing mix... OR smaller brands do it thinking it will help, but it just lights money on fire. Why? If you don’t have distribution, small bets / random one-off awareness media buys will never be strong enough to push people down the funnel properly.

Middle funnel: This is where most brands, especially $10M to $30M get “lost” and don’t find their way. This is the consumer’s own research... they are going to YouTube, Reddit, TikTok, ChatGPT, reading articles they find on Google, etc. to figure out if they want your product or not. 

“Does Eight Sleep actually help sleep?” as a ChatGPT question or TikTok search term is what you need to solve for your brand, in every channel your consumer would go and look. The last part here is important — think about where your customer is looking for social proof and validation, and make sure you are there. If you sell to an old demographic (70+), don’t waste time on TikTok, find out where they are, and be present there.

Lower funnel: This is most of the stuff we always talk about here: the website, the ads, the landing page, the email follow-ups, the pop-up on the website. Optimizing this entire journey is super important and cannot be neglected, however, if you have no proper ability to fill the top of the funnel, you will have an incredibly optimized website with no traffic flowing through it.

Are there exceptions where brands have been built solely off the back of performance marketing? Yes... but they are tough to replicate unless you have advantages in proprietary technology (top 1%), pricing power, or you may be first to market with that product. And even then, you have to be operating like a top 1% company. It’s safe to assume that to successfully continue scaling a brand, you need to figure out how to build top of funnel.

Going into the new year, building the top of the funnel is going to be key for Q1 and Q2. There’s no question about the brands who perform the best in Q4, especially when there are those quiet sales weeks, between holidays. It’s always the brands who did the best job putting out content, building awareness, being omni-present, and fitting into culture without forcing it.

It’s worth spending time, brainstorming with your team, about how your brand can find ways to immerse itself in the culture of your customer demographic. You’d be surprised what a 45 minute lunch and brainstorm session can bring when thinking about this. For some brands, this has been clipping, for others it’s been producing their own high-fidelity vertical video content series. 

Just whatever you do, as you build top of funnel this year for your brand, do not get suckered by sales people who claim they can make your upper funnel awareness explode. They are mostly selling a scam — not because their product doesn’t do what it says, but because it’s likely not going to move the needle for you, they know it, but they use other case studies to convince you otherwise.

That’s the end of my rant for today. A quick minute of what’s been on my mind.

That's all for this week

I hope you have some extra sleep built into the long weekend for yourself. It’s been nice to see all the eCommerce folks get some relief after a grueling Q4 last year. Soak it in, because Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and then it only gets busier until January 2027!

It’s Sunday night, so make sure you clock those 9 hours of sleep tonight and have an amazing upcoming week.