Why Brand Building Isn’t Just for CPG: Lessons From Wayfair and Chewy | ExperiMENTAL Ep. 7

Why Brand Building Isn’t Just for CPG: Lessons From Wayfair and Chewy

In this episode of ExperiMENTAL, host Sundar dives into the overlooked pivot from hypergrowth to brand building with Lauren Sutkowski, Head of Brand Marketing at Insurify and former marketing leader at Chewy and Wayfair. This isn't a fluffy chat. It’s a real, practical breakdown of what happens when the growth engine starts sputtering and brand finally takes the wheel. From internal education to channel strategy, Lauren shares what most marketers miss about timing, targeting, and team alignment. If you’ve ever struggled to prove the ROI of brand or wondered when to stop chasing paid search and start building unaided awareness, this one is for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Every consumer-facing team member should know your customer and how they buy
 • You can't build a flywheel by chasing only high-intent acquisition
 • Slow growth is often the trigger that forces brand investment
 • Retention requires deep cross-functional collaboration and clarity
 • Price is rarely enough of a differentiator, even with strong CX
 • Wayfair succeeded by tightening audience focus on high-LTV segments
 • You can’t be everything to everyone and expect retention to work
 • Internal brand education needs to touch finance, data, ops, and merch
 • YouTube and Meta may be more crutch than brand builders
 • Brand impact takes time, patience, and serious measurement commitment

Best Moments:

 00:03:18. “Isn't it just keep paying for those customers like you're not really...there's no way to build this strong flywheel.”
 00:05:07. “Growth had slowed...it felt like we had started to plateau.”
 00:09:10. “A bit more storytelling, a bit more just like, solving their problems.”
 00:12:27. “I want to feel like I'm aligning myself with a brand I fully believe in.”
 00:14:39. “This is how we retain them. It's not just price point.”
 00:17:00. “If you say too many things to your customers, it's a great way to tell them nothing.”
 00:19:19. “I think the biggest thing starts with internal education.”
 00:34:51. “You can hide not knowing who your audience is really well in those platforms.”

🎧 ExperiMENTAL is hosted by Sundar Swaminathan, Head of Data Science at Bounce and former Uber leader. This show is your behind-the-scenes look at how top marketers and data scientists make smarter decisions.

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Transcript

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every single person in consumer facing side of an organization, should be able to articulate who your customer is, what they care about. I also think it's very important to understand how they consume their media, how they make their purchasing decisions like It only goes so far if you only have a tight knit group of people that can speak to it. I think the biggest thing starts with internal education. brand is not immediate. It sounds obvious. The same struggle we all have with TV, like it's a deep channel brand matters like it's how you connect with your customers, but it's going to take a long time. So I think the other piece of the education often comes from Welcome to experimental, the podcast that cuts through the noise to bring you actionable insights in BDC growth, marketing and data science. I'm your host, Sunder, former head of brand data science at Uber and the mind behind the experimental newsletter. Join me as I talk with industry leaders who have driven growth at companies like Uber, Spotify and Netflix. We'll uncover the experiments, failures, and breakthroughs that lead to real results. Now let's get experimental. Hey, Lauren and Nala, thanks for joining me on the show today. Hi, slender. Thanks for having us. Sorry. We have a, an uninvited guest, who's a little bit clingy, but, thanks for having us. We're excited to be here. Yeah, no problem at all. And I mean, you've got I'm really excited to go into like seven different topics. I've got some really cool experience at Wayfair and now chewy, you know, hence you owning a dog makes a ton of sense for, you know, I think there's a lot of great stuff. We're going to be able to chat there. So, with that, I'd love to just chat about, you know, something you've brought up, which is how to pivot from growth, you know, hypergrowth into brand building. I think that's like a really great topic. You know, it's funny, both Wayfair and Chewy are organizations that really, I think, built themselves based on this ethos of, like, there is a functional need that we are going to sell for our customers. We are going to focus on, I want say, gross at all costs. I don't know that that entirely applies to both of those. But really like the focus is we want new customers, we want acquisitions. And like we want to be growing. You know, our brand is something that we'll figure out as we go. And I think with each of those organizations, like, I kind of get you in this trap of like, you know, initially you don't have to really do about my soul searching. You're kind of thinking, and there is a very functional need that I'm going to fill. A customer needs this specific product. I will spend gobs of money on, you know, product listing ads on Google. I will be highly relevant and present when they are in that moment. And, you know, both of those brands, I mean, they are referring to your household names at this point. I think, you know, I guess you don't have a pet. I can't count Ari as a pet. So I, you probably haven't talked to chewy, but if you're a pet owner, you likely have if you you know, Wayfair is pretty pervasive in the home space, but both of those organizations really came up strictly due to the fact that they were very good at capturing high intent audiences when, you know, those audiences were in shopping mode. And so shifting to brand building, I mean, yes, growth mode is great. It's exciting. It's fun to look at your kegger and feel like you're absolutely crushing it. But isn't it just keep paying for those customers like you're not really. There's no way to build this strong flywheel when every time you're meeting the customer in the moment when they're excuse me. And so for both of these brands, you know, we they're this started probably three ish years ago where we were kind of like, okay, this is great. Like we're going to be in this cycle forever where we're continuing to spend a lot of money on search, and we are really struggling to build unaided awareness, and we are struggling to differentiate ourselves relative to our competitors. And so for Wayfair, the shift really came from like we hadn't done enough of the like, introspective reflection, we hadn't done enough of the consumer insights work to really understand who our customer was, why we had the right to dominate in the home space. And so I think the other to say that shift, I think is, really hard to make because it's like all those foundations and principles that you started relying so heavily on, you kind of have to like, throw them away for a period and take some time to figure out what do I offer, what's out there in the market, what do my competitors offer? Not only what is my customer like? Who actually is my customer? Who's shopping in this space? Like, you have to do so much work to really understand your target audience. And then there's a whole piece on, like, how do you speak to them? What kind of messages do you put in front of them? So I think there's so much that goes into it and it's, you know, you look at a lot of CPG brands, for example, and that's an area where like the brand has to be there off the bat, like you have to have a brand that customers can believe in because it is a very crowded category. Often maybe you're trying to stick out on a grocery store shelf, like there has to be catch right away. And I think for so many of these e-commerce organizations, the realization that you have to have something like you have to have something, some reason for your customer to want to go to you. It's very easy to lose sight of that in the first ten plus years of an e-commerce organization, because, I mean, not to sound like a very out of touch person, but the internet makes it so easy to be, like, highly relevant when a customer needs it. And so all that to say, like, I think it's a really, really interesting space that e-commerce is kind of like cleared the way for this to be more of a convoluted transition that I think it maybe used to be. Yeah. And so, you know, kind of like you're saying though Chewy and Wayfair have just been growing really well like strong category do you have to slow down that category before like leadership realizes oh crap we should have invested in brand. Is there something else like where does that sort of motivation to build brand come from? Yeah. So I even with the Chewy and Wayfair examples, it's been different for each of those. I think in some cases, you hate to say it, but slow growth kind of causes a little bit of a reflection moment. But I think there's also an instance of chewy, for example, you know, we had historically been very focused on acquiring new customers, and it was kind of like, you know, existing customers. Great. They're in the door like, we have great customer service that we feel really good about our customer care will differentiate us once they're in the door. That's the hurdle. And I think we started to reach a point where it's like this gotten a lot of customers in the door, and we haven't really focused on churn all that much. And maybe there's a reason customers are churning like it's, you know, we can't just constantly focus on how do you find the next person. We kind of realize, like, there's a lot to be said about finding value in. past or present customers. And so for chewy, a lot of it came from the idea of like, it's a shrinking pool of untapped customers. And the end of the day, Chewy's aided awareness is very high. Our unaided awareness is decently high as well, but a lot of what we realized is like we were continuing to lag relative to some of those legacy brick and mortar kind of category giants. And so for chewy, it was really the way that we have to differentiate. Like we can't keep doing what we've been doing to differentiate versus those other brands. And we have to start to make a meaningful shift in to for chewy. And then we need to invest more in brand. We need to change how we think about who we're targeting on our marketing channels and platforms. For Wayfair, a lot of it really came from slow growth. It was, you know, it felt like we had started to plateau. And I think we realized and, you know, these two industries are very different in the sense that if you're not getting your pet food from chewy, you're you're getting your pet. Hopefully you're getting your pet food from somewhere. If you're not getting your couch from Wayfair, you might just not be purchasing a couch. You might be waiting until you have a little more cash in your pocket. And so I think the need to differentiate is a little different in each of those categories. But for Wayfair, growth had slowed. And that is like we were spending a lot of money to try to get people. It felt like not only to want to purchase major home products, but then it was like the next hurdle was getting them to want to purchase at Wayfair. And I think a lot of what we realized is we could save a heck of a lot of money if instead we told them all the reasons why Wayfair was going to be there for them through whatever life stage they were at, whatever their needs were like, we realized there's so much to be done and unlocked when you actually understand who your customer is and how you are best, how you are the best person to speak to them. Hey quick one. If you've ever questioned whether your marketing is actually driving growth, you're not alone. I wrote experimental, a weekly newsletter for B2C marketers to run smarter experiments and cut wasted spend. There's a free version to get you started and a paid tier if you want deeper case studies and behind the scenes breakdowns. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description to join. Now back to the show. Yeah. So I mean obviously a bit more storytelling, a bit more just like, you know, solving their problems than just just being like, hey, here's, here's our solution to it. There's a couple things that you brought up that I'm, super curious about, right. Like every founder is told, focus on retention, but it's continuously come up on so many conversations where they don't, until it's too late or growth is slowing, etc. like, where do you think that disconnect comes from? I mean, at its most basic, growth is really fun. I mean, every time you look at. So, you know, we look at active customer count and you see that number go up and it's hard not to get excited. You see a new acquisition. Like there's something I don't know if it's like very primal about growth. So even looking past that retention is also really hard. I sometimes think it's easier to I mean, again, you can focus on paid search and you can use these, you know, digitally native platforms and find very high intent audiences. So it feels like growth sometimes. I'm not saying it's cheaper, but I think sometimes it can be easier, whereas retention, I think it requires a lot of self-reflection to understand. There's so much that goes into a customer experience. Not only so, you know, I mentioned customer service and customer care for chewy. That is then a huge unlock for Chewy's retention. But it's convoluted. It comes down to not only your branding, not only the like brand ethos and why someone wants to or feels good about your brand. That's just part of it. Then there's the side experience piece. There is the ongoing customer Pond's, I mean, and then again, customer service and follow. Like there's so much that goes into retention that I think it's often easier to focus on growth. And then I think the other piece of retention that can be tough is like it can be really hard to quantify the impact of those efforts, which I know you are intimately familiar with. It's much easier to say, look, our active customer account grew. So, it is really hard to understand what contributes to churn prevention. You know, what contributes to higher lifetime value, like It gets more and more convoluted as you go. And so I think it's also it's easy to gravitate towards the things that we feel like we can get a handle on more easily. Yeah. Which I think is how you've made your whole career. Yeah. It's my fault. Yeah. No. It better, to another, like, just, you know, thought exercise. Right. So you've got some like chewy, you've got good branding or good advertising. Your customer comes in the like the product. You have good customer service. Like why isn't that enough? Because to me and to many founders, it's you know, that's again the have a great product experience like just continuously deliver on your promises. And yet that's not enough. And we see this time and time again like why is it not enough. I am going to give you, a consultant answer. It depends. But it does. You know, I some of it comes down to who the audience is. So, for example, like Gen Z. And I think you know this about me. I'm not Gen Z, but clinging to my youth as long as I can. I am someone who shops based on a brand's principles. I want to feel good about shopping at a brand do. I care about the customer service? Yes. Do I care about price point? Yes, to an extent. But the biggest thing that I care about is like, I want to feel like I'm aligning myself with a brand I fully believe in. That is very common for Gen Z and younger millennials. Growing older millennials. Many other generations don't really care about that. That's not how they shop customers might really only care about price point. Other customers might really only care about convenience. It's not as easy as saying why. Isn't it enough that I deliver on my promises? I think so much of it is understanding what promises matter the most to your target audience So one of the things that I thought was interesting at Wayfair, that I think we struggled with for a little while, and huge kudos to the current brand management lead, because she has done a ton of work to set a really good foundation fix this that we kind of said, like anyone with a home is our target audience. Anyone with a house or even a home, anyone with a condo, anywhere to put a couch. Maybe you have an office space. If you have room for furniture, you are our target demo. And in that I mean retention is really hard because you're trying to be everything to everyone. And in doing so, you're not really anything ING to anyone at that point. And so we did a lot of work to understand not only, you know, which categories have the highest Tam, you know, which, age, demographic, etc., like where is the biggest opportunity? But then the next piece is like, what do they care about? So we did a lot of work on this idea of like starter families, for example, spend a lot in home, not just immediately, but over the course of their lifetimes. You know, you look at having young kids and there's a crib, and then all of a sudden there's a toddler bed, and then you're moving them into a different room, and all of a sudden, the small Terry Buffer, I feel like you're smiling because you might be going through all of this right now. there are so many phases of life and your home has to evolve with that. And so we realized starter families, the lifetime value is very high. Also, what they care about is fundamentally very different than an established family start. A family wants convenience, something to serve functional needs. They don't necessarily need the highest quality because first off, kids are going to beat it up and it's not going to last forever. And so we were able to narrow in to say, if we're talking to starter families, this is what they care about. This is how we retain them. Like it's not just price point, it's that we lean into convenience and functionality, and we lean into the fact that you don't have to spend hours browsing because you don't have enough time. So much of that retention piece and the big unlock is you have to know what that audience cares about. Again, maybe your audience is young, maybe your audience is like me, and you're like, I haven't shopped at certain brands for decades because I don't believe in, you know, X, Y, z about them. You have to know that to be able to stick by that promise. And I think price alone is often not enough of the promise, because anyone can undercut that at any time. And so this. This everything for everyone. I was just having another conversation with someone Who's basically saying that's like what founders promise to investors. And it's always in their pitch decks and their vision, and then they forget that customers are not investors and investors are not customers. And so this idea of, you know, everything for everyone, like you said, for all homes we want to be in every home is literally probably in Wayfair's pitch deck at somewhere. But or, you know, Chewy's is, you know, every pat for, you know, every need etc.. And that disconnect, I think, shows up quite often. So it's interesting to hear you have another example of that because. Yeah, again, really consultants know it the riches are in the niches or in inches. Right. And so funny that again shows up time and time again in marketing to. Yeah. And I think it's, like a really great brand strategist knows how to take the whoever your target audience is. They know how to focus in on them without alienating anyone else. And I think that's where, like, the real to somebody, because that's where the magic happens. When you can figure out, how do I speak really effectively to this target audience? I don't alienate anyone in those more like peripheral, maybe not as high priority audiences for, you know, whatever brand. I don't alienate them in any way. And then it's like once you figure it out, once you have that target locked in, maybe then you can expand and you figure out how to be something else to someone else, but you can't do it all at once. It's like it ends up too convoluted. And then the other thing that we've seen time and time and time again is, if you say too many things to your customers, it's a great way to tell them nothing like Whether you're running too many messages in your brand channels and someone is, you know, you're trying to tell someone that you sell all these categories. But I'll say you have fast free shipping. Also, don't worry, you have very low prices and also your customer service is the best. Like if someone sees all of those ads, they're going to walk away and be like, I'm overloaded and I don't know anything that that brand does. And so it's also like it just goes back to that fundamental of like start simple, start clean, get really tight, and then you can figure out how to build on that, but you can't start building it all at. Yeah. Let's go a little bit deeper on. Just like the nuts and bolts of what happens at a company as they go through this transition. Right. Like what are the new capabilities. What are the new rituals. Well, you know what happens Yeah. tactically when a company wants to go from hypergrowth to, to more of this brand building. I think the biggest piece that has to start first is internal education. And I say internal because, you know, everyone maybe not everyone, but it's very easy to look at these brands that are huge and they have become so successful and have such loyal followings, the targets of the world, if you're not picking the brands that I absolutely love, you look at these brands and I think it's very easy to think, well, okay, I want to be like that major brand. I want to be like The Athletic is and another brand that I deeply admire. I want to be like, Athleta. Why can't I get there? Like, let's just run against it and it takes so much internal advocacy to get everyone, like swimming in the same direction at first. So, I talked about that work that wonderful woman named Yelena did for a brand strategy at Wayfair. And in so many meetings where we were constantly trying to evangelize not only why it's important that we have a truly buttoned up brand strategy, but also so much internal education on like what that is. So every single person in an organization, in a consumer facing side of an organization, should be able to articulate who your customer is. It shouldn't be anyone with a house. It shouldn't be anyone with a pet who your customer is, what they care about. I also think it's very important to understand how they consume their media, how they make their purchasing decisions like that. It only goes so far if you only have a tight knit group of people that can speak to it. And so I think the biggest thing starts with internal education. think the other thing that in multiple organizations I've been at, a big focus has been brand is not immediate. It sounds obvious. The same struggle we all have with TV, like it's a deep channel brand matters like it's how you connect with your customers, but it's going to take a long time. So I think the other piece of the education often comes from patients like, we are going to have to be patient and we are going to have to commit to something, commit to change, and we're going to have to see it through for I feel like I've been in so many conversations where we say, we're going to have to stick to this for a long time before we really understand whether or not it's working. And if you ask, you know, some performance marketers are in finance are like, so like two weeks like no, no, no, no, no. Like two weeks is not a long time. So I think it also takes a lot of education with stakeholders in finance. I feel like, finance is often a hurdle in these conversations. But, other thing that we did a lot of at Wayfair to really enable the change was around. So we Wayfair spends lot in marketing. And one thing that is really effective about Wayfair marketing is Wayfair has basically taken this approach of, you know, there's this big focus on incrementality. They basically take this approach of every marketing channel has an efficiency target. If you are over efficient, you're leaving valuable scale on the table, like spend up to hit that threshold. If you are inefficient, you're spending too much to get the marginal customers in the door like cuts, then essentially and react in real time and while that's absolutely great, that's really hard to do when you want to shift to focusing on brand, where it's very hard to see the impacts in real time. And so we did a lot of work around understanding customers that were influenced through those more brand rich channels. So customers that saw ads on TV, how long did it take them to come to say we? I say we are wonderful data science. We did a lot of, analytics and a lot of modeling to understand how long did it take those customers to come to site to convert after seeing a TV ad? We also did things like which channels do they come through after they see TV ads? And it took us a long time to build up enough ammunition to make the case for these. Like TV has a very big impact. These channels are not immediate. And from there, we kind of started to build a toolset to understand the impact of brand building. So I won't even get into the attribution side of things. But we also started to build the capabilities around consumer insights. Like we built a monthly tracker to understand, you recognize our ads that you see on TV? Can you connect them to Wayfair? How? You know, if I ask you which brands you recall advertising from in the past month, on a scale of 1 to 10, where does Wayfair fall in that we laid so much groundwork to be able to try to measure the impact and the movement that we were making even before we were going to be able to see it in a lot of places, like our total unaided awareness, or before we were going to be able to see real lifts to direct traffic revenue from direct traffic. So a lot of it is like it's not just capability building, but for an organization like Wayfair or Chewy, these places that have been so deeply committed to following the data in organizations like that, it requires a whole new way of thinking. And within Wayfair. Like when you say evangelize, like, is it just within marketing or are you doing across product ops. Like what are the teams involved that you had to really go sell this vision to. marketing is the most obvious one, but I think the other touchpoints that really matter are like category and merchandizing. Even the idea of, again, we're talking about how starter families care about highly functional furniture, something that is maybe multi-functional or multi-purpose. All of that has to creep through a trickle down to the merchants that are actually working on what products we sell on site. So merchandizing is a big part of it. data science and all the technology teams, that one initially, I think my take was it doesn't, you know, like why does a data engineer need to understand how this is shifting? But at the end of the day, it should be a fundamental change in how we are measuring our performance and our success. We should be looking at different data to understand whether or not we're successful. And so it also involves a lot of collaboration and education with our tech stakeholders. And partners. And then and the other piece is like, does someone in operations need to be deeply familiar with the brand? Maybe not everyone, but someone more senior in operations? Yes. Like every single person that hits a certain level of seniority should be able to be a brand evangelist and should be able to speak to this. yeah. That's awesome. And so, like, I think as part of the conversations when you're evangelizing brand. Right. Like, I think you've mentioned marketing is both art and science. Like, did you find different strategies that resonated with different groups, like, you know, as a way to be like, hey, look, we are also going to prove the ROI of this. It is, you know, it might just take longer. Like, how did you approach actually just different strategies of selling within. Art and science is, like, my favorite. I know it's so buzzy. Especially for anyone in the like, brand world and e-commerce brand, but that's my my favorite topic. It's funny, there are some organizations I think, that so deeply believe and brands again, take some of the old CPG organizations like some categories overall, some deeply believe in brand. Then I think it's maybe a little bit easier for them to say brand matters and whatever it takes for you accomplish it like it is. Like this is going to be core to us, and it is what it is. In an organization that doesn't have that, I think so much of being effective is hinges on, I mean, as with everything, it hinges on your ability to sell it to the right or different audience. And so, you know, when I look at and both Wayfair and Chewy have gone through this same transition of trying to understand which metrics and which is which ways to quantify this like will resonate the most with different stakeholders. But I'll speak to the Wayfair side because that's where I was heavily involved in leading this. And I think chewy went through a lot of this right before I joined. So on the Wayfair side, I mean, when we communicated this to merchants like it is. I mean, it's far more of a creative discussion than I am qualified to have or that I should be having. So my brand strategist counterpart was often the one speaking to the merchants on this is what the brand is. This is who we're talking to for the performance oriented or the finance oriented folks on the team. That was often like my sweet spot because I like I said, I love the art, science balance, and so a lot of how we were able to lobby them was really getting creative and how we think about the impact of brand. So I mentioned that we had done, and again, I say we are a bunch of very smart people on data science. Did a really deep analysis. You know, we essentially had subset of smart TVs. We were able to see, you know, we had IP addresses for those that had seen our ads and those that hadn't. And so our data science team did a really big deep dive on basically everything analyzing those exposed versus that unexposed group to understanding and traffic revenue left, which channels they were visiting through. And so a huge data point that was able to be really effective with a lot of my search counterparts was this idea that kind of the vast majority of people exposed by our TV ads were actually visiting through other paid channels, the vast majority, the biggest share of that came from play. And when someone sees our ad on TV, maybe they legitimately need to see that TV ad so that when they see that product listing out on Google, all of a sudden they are able to say, oh, Wayfair, I've heard of that brand. Great. I'll click this ad. Maybe they need that. But Wayfair has mature enough brand and an established enough brand that probably don't actually need both of those touch points. And so we spent a lot of time trying to understand, like, are we just double paying for these people? We're reaching them on TV and then we're paying again to get them through our search channels. So that argument and that analysis was very compelling for our search counterparts, because we were able to say, look like we are hitting the same people and one of these channels can be highly targeted. The other is not like we can better balance this. And so that was a really compelling data point for the performance side. Another data point that I think my performance counterparts probably didn't care that much about. But I know a lot of the, brand management side cared about was awareness and recall gains. So the more consistent we were with our brand advertising, the more we put in kind of brand non-negotiables and fundamentals across every touchpoint. The more we saw things like brand recall, advertising recall, ad linkage, like, the more we saw those dimensions increase. So those are the data points that we're often taking to our, you know, brand strategy and brand management counterparts. And so it's so much of it is being able to identify what actually matters to the audience and then linking it back and then finance of course nothing against finance, but I feel like finance and marketing often. All right. Ads it seems, although I think we have the same end goals, just different views of how to get there. So with finance, the big thing was they were kind of like, this is great. You have traffic coming through paid channels. I don't really know what to do with that. I can quantify paid search much easier than I can quantify it. So why don't we just lean more heavily into paid search with finance? A big push that we made was we actually That wonderful data science team used that data set that we had for exposed and unexposed audiences to understand the actual revenue that they were driving over 60 days and over 365 days. And so for finance, that's what we use the lobby of was you cameras. The bottom line. So I'm going to show you the revenue impact of these brand changes and brand channels. And so, so much of it, I think is like you have to be able to be fluent across all of these different dimensions. And again, I think all of these measurement systems are hard to stand up like. Not even hard. They're expensive to stand up like. We again, Wayfair had some of the smartest data scientists. I like really, really capable and smart people, and it took them a lot of time to build the tools that we could understand again, where our visitors were coming from, so we could understand the incremental revenue driven by TVs that we could understand, the like lifetime value lift from these channels. And we also had to work with the consumer insights and research vendor to stand up ongoing consumer insights studies. And it is a huge commitment. And so I also don't want to understate that. But you kind of need you need so many different touchpoints to be able to effectively lobby people throughout the organization. I mean, it's awesome that you've shared, you know, 3 or 4 different functions in your strategies for them. And like I said, it all makes sense. It's an intuitive on the things that they would be, know, focused on. But, that's really great. I wanted to go a little bit deeper on a spicy take that you have, which is meta and YouTuber overrated with a context that you are a like TV genius, like a TV marketing expert. Right. So there's two things I want to, I don't think anyone's ever called me a genius before, so thank you. But yeah. two things. I want to hear a little bit more about what surprised you about TV, because, I mean, you've been doing TV for the past few years, but before that, that was not your background. Yeah. how did you pick that up? What did you learn? And then also your take on why are YouTube and meta overrated? mean, you mentioned I haven't been doing this forever. I started my career in operations, which I learned, I think very quickly was not for me long term. Hence the world's most expensive career pivot with an MBA. It's. We'll be paying off for quite a while. Thank you. MIT. But for me, I think TV, this is might seem like a little bit of a copout answer, but, you know, starting my marketing career at Wayfair, Wayfair was a very performance oriented organization. And so I think for me, TV was always through the lens of what are the outcomes that we're driving? Like, what are the specific tangible results that we're seeing? And again, like, how how do we get more efficient? How do we get better at our attribution? How do we get better at actually quantifying the impact? And so I feel like I grew up know, because I started my marketing journey at Wayfair, where we were so performance focused. I think for me, it was so surprising is I was so used to working so closely with data science to refine our attribution models. I feel like a constant thread was if I wanted to spend more on TV, I had to make a very clear case for exactly what revenue we were going to drive, what extra visits we were going to drive. Like everything was very performance oriented. And so for me, I think what was most surprising is the longer I was in the TV space and the more contacts I made in other companies doing TV, the more closely I worked with networks. Because we did everything in-house, we didn't suffer an agency. I feel like I was absolutely floored and how unique that approach is, or how unique it is for an advertiser of their size to take that approach. when you're scrappy and you don't have a lot of money for a TV. Of course you're looking at what you can quantify, but I think for a lot of brands, let's say hit scale, it's like you've ventured over to what at the time at Wayfair felt like the dark side of like it's a big channel, it matters. Like we can't afford to not spend a lot here like we have to be very present. feel like it shocked me how different the rest of the TV world was with your TV in a very different way, which I still look back at and realize for me, you know, supply chain operations, almost technical function, but it's more on the analytical side. And so for me, I felt like the fact that Wayfair was very performance oriented about it, I think is part of why I really enjoyed it, because it was I think it was an easier transition for me. So that I would say is not surprising, which again, maybe a little bit of a cop out, but I'm going to run with it. And then my thoughts on YouTube about it, and I'm just going to say, you can act like this is a controversial hot take, but I've seen you're like the post and I think you might agree. So I'm just going to drop that. my frustration with both YouTube and meta is that I don't know if it's that, just that they have been very effective at branding and communicating or if it's that like marketers and people in finance, like really just want a silver bullet. But I feel like there is this somewhat pervasive belief that they are like the foil to traditional linear TV as traditional brand channels. They feel like there's this undercurrent of like these channels, they are rich touchpoints. You can run video assets, and we know that video assets have a longer if we know they have longer consideration cycles and I don't buy it from everything that I've seen. Yes, YouTube and meta serve a purpose, but do they serve a key role in building a brand? I don't see it. I think that they are effective at finding high intent audiences. Yes, but I also think that they allow for and this is one that I feel like it's the most controversial take or the most, inflammatory take on this. I feel like it's really easy to lean on those platforms as an absolute crutch for not knowing. Like, you can hide not knowing who your audience is really well in those platforms. And you cannot convince me or I shouldn't say like that. I challenge you to convince me that meta or Google knows my target audience better than like they shouldn't. And if they do, then I'm doing something wrong. I don't dispute that they can find someone that is likely to convert. But when I think about the fact that these channels, again, I think have tried to position themselves as deeper, richer, creative touch points, like I think they're trying to venture further and further into that brand building territory. And to build my brand. I don't want you to find me someone that's likely to convert immediately or within 24 hours, like I want to find a mechanism to convey my brand message. I want a storytelling vehicle, and I, I don't think that these channels for that. I would agree. I don't think that's, controversial at all. I think like part of it Move are killing me. I was so excited for a controversial take. controversial and that like, I don't think a lot of people say it out loud, but I think you're totally right. Like your logic behind it. It makes complete sense, right? Like one, you know, you're going to know your audience better or you should. And you're just using Facebook and and YouTube as a crutch because you're just, you know, uploading a bunch of creatives and you're saying, oh, let the algorithm figure it out. kind of a poor excuse. And to like you said, it's it's not the medium to brand build. Even though companies still try I agree. Like, you know, at Uber, it was the first performance marketing channel we cut was Facebook. You know, because we were so oversaturated. We're like done. And so now we're so big on on TV, but we're also big across YouTube. YouTube is a little bit, I think more brand focused, I would say than than meta for sure. But, yeah, I mean, I agree completely. First off, I have the meaning to tell you, Uber Eats their TV campaign through football season has been like an absolute masterclass. The idea that, like, football is trying to sell you food. I just want to say I absolutely love those ads. So just like that. And but I think the other piece of this is like YouTube. Yes, I think it's more brands forward. And I think part of why a lot of organizations or a lot of brands lean on these channels is because, like, well, digital channels are easier to measure. But I think that when you introduce, like, I understand why Meta and Google have done this, but when you look at how they operate in like these walled garden environments, all of a sudden make it very, very hard to truly understand the impact in aggregate, like I that's great. I can see what Google is telling me that YouTube is thriving. I don't want to know what Google is telling me YouTube is driving. I want to know what YouTube is driving in the greater moments. Like I. I don't want to know every touchpoint or every conversion that YouTube might have had a small hand in. I want to know what would not have happened without that touchpoint. and I know that this is the way that things are headed, and I know that there are privacy considerations at play, but I think that with the like this walled garden, proprietary clean room environment, I guess I just feel like these organizations have made it very all of a sudden, the measurement piece that feels like this is why we're so much more excited about this than linear TV, for example. Often that measurement piece feels like it's rendered irrelevant because most brands cannot afford to do clean room integration and get the tech capabilities set up to then incorporate that into their in-house attribution model. Like that is incredibly expensive and time consuming, so I think all of a sudden, those advantages that a lot of the times we associate with those channels, I don't think they're actually that feasible for most organizations. mean you could also just look at it from, you know proof is in the pudding of, every big consumer tech company that has decided to focus on brand goes to TV, Yeah. Yeah. I know, I saw that, I saw that post up. Airbnb Uber Eats like they're all shifting. I mean, Expedia, all of all these companies for a long time have known this. So part of it might be also just like a budget thing. But I mean, I agree, I think you can't do storytelling in the modern age. I without TV at some point. I totally agree with you on it. Still controversial take so don't Okay. last thing I want to chatty about was this really interesting quote that you said when we were chatting before. So the longer you've been in the workplace, you've realized it's just the more you want to do is just to do right by your team and like the people around you versus moving up the career ladder. I think it's a really interesting career take. Tell me a little bit more about, you know, what you're expressing there. I was trying to think of when this kind of started because I, you know, there's a point, especially I mentioned going back to this in school and taking out a lot of loans for that. And So I mentioned going to business school and taking not a lot of loans. And I think, you know, part of the reason you do that is you're like, I want to, you know, raise my earning potential and I want to climb. And I feel like five years ago, I was so excited for, like, I want to climb the corporate ladder, I want to go as high as I can. And not that I don't want to do that, to be clear. Like, would still say, you know, I have career ambitions. But, one of the things and I think this perspective came largely as a result of being at Wayfair through multiple rounds of layoffs, the first, I think six I survived and then the next one, I was impacted in and I was laid off. And I think through each of those layoffs, you look around and you realize, like, do I care about what I do? Absolutely. But this is a job. And like, we're all human beings at the end of the day. And so I feel like I would see people that I maybe felt like were wrong. They're treated fairly through the process. And I guess that this is a corporation. And like we are here to make money. I am under no illusion that, like the company I work at, is here to be a family like I, I get that, but at the same time, I think with each of those I realized like what I care about, what I care about and like I am able to influence how the people around me are treated. I, I, I feel like it's slowly change where I think like the biggest priority for me is I want the people around me to feel valued. I want to give them opportunities for growth. I want to treat them like decent human beings. and then, especially after being laid off myself, I a big takeaway was you look back and I'm proud of the work accomplishments I had, but I feel like what I cared the most about was like the connections that I made and the people that were around me and the mentors that I was able to develop relationships with, the mentees that I was able to guide in their career, like the feel like the people aspect has become so much more important to me. And I think, you know, I understand that the more I climb, the harder it is to prioritize the people side of things. And so I think I just have realized how much it means to me that I am able to balance that and do right by the people around me. I think that's so important to figure that out slightly earlier in your career because I, you know, there's points where all of us I think have to make that trade off. It feels weird to say that but Yeah. and knowing like what matters and what you want to prioritize, I think makes it easier when you don't do the XYZ because that'll, you know, it'll push, push you and get promoted, but decide you decide to go the other route because Yeah. better for for the people around you. So that's that's really great. I think so many people figure that out too late. Yeah. Yeah. with the the memories. And so, yeah, it's it's very cool that you found that out relatively early. after being laid off, it was like, you know, of course a layoff requires a lot of self-reflection, and you kind of work through. I feel like, you know, is there something I should have done differently so that it wouldn't have been me? And I think one of the things that I found a lot of solace in is that I looked around and kind of thought like, I would do this the same way for my like, I would you know, if surviving the layoff would have meant being a little more cutthroat or ruthless in places like I wouldn't have done it, you know, I wouldn't like, I appreciated, or I was glad that I could feel like I stood by how things went down, or how I treated my team, or how I didn't try to, like, trample other people and yes, I feel like, I again, I think that like, forced that revelation was a little bit forced via the climate with all the layoffs. But grateful for the. Yeah. Well, that's such an awesome perspective. Thank you for sharing that, Lauren. Yeah, I just wanted to thank you for all of your insights. I think there's a lot of really great stuff. Right. Like the just especially, like, going deep on, like, how companies go from growth to brand building is really cool. I love the matter. YouTube. Take I think it's like a really interesting perspective on how hard it is to build a brand just through those channels. So yeah, you share a lot. It's been really fun chatting. So just. Yeah, thank you for coming on. Center. Thank you so much for having me. I was so excited when you said you were going to start a podcast, because I feel like I've been a loyal follower of your content online. And so, I appreciate being able to chat with you. And, always a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to experimental. If today's insights spark new ideas or made you feel like a smarter marketer. Consider leaving a review on your preferred podcast platform. It really helps support the show. For more in-depth discussions and resources, visit Experimental beehive.com. Until next time, be curious and stay experimental.