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Brenden swore bidets were gross, until a wall of retargeting ads, a Jackass star's podcast confession, and one very persuasive peach changed his mind. In this episode of Marketing Made Me Buy It, host Travis sits down with Brenden Delarua to reverse-engineer exactly how TUSHY's ad campaign turned a lifelong single-ply skeptic into a customer.
What This Episode Covers
Every purchase has a marketing trigger, and this episode digs into Brenden's. From a decade of "caked on" toilet paper habits to a celebrity endorsement that cracked his resistance, Travis maps the full customer journey: the objection, the ad formats that broke through, the social proof that sealed it, and the moment his wife bought him a TUSHY bidet for Christmas. Along the way, they break down TUSHY's use of humor, UGC-style demos, and retargeting to turn a taboo product into a word-of-mouth brand — a case study anyone in D2C marketing or performance advertising can pull lessons from.
Timestamps
00:53 – Brenden's origin story: a lifetime of toilet paper and the "Nutella on shag carpet" analogy
03:19 – Brenden discovers TUSHY, the brand behind the bidet
03:46 – Ad breakdown #1: TUSHY's apple-and-peanut-butter demo
04:29 – Live re-creation: Brenden runs the peach test on camera
05:56 – Ad breakdown #2: the "poo particles" retargeting ad
06:13 – The social proof stat that stuck: 1 million butts (and counting)
06:57 – IRL proof: TUSHY billboards and trucks spotted in NYC's Times Square
07:26 – The Christmas gift that sealed the deal
08:00 – Life after TUSHY: why Brenden's never going back
08:33 – Why a "poop business" gets away with marketing no B2B SaaS company could
Brenden Delarua is co-founder of Stella | Growth Intelligence, a causal growth engine built for D2C and performance marketing teams. With 11+ years managing D2C ad campaigns, he's spent his career on the media-buying side of the exact kind of marketing this podcast exists to reverse-engineer.
Travis is a LinkedIn content strategist with 10+ years of B2B SaaS social and content experience, including scaling LinkedIn 17x at Motion and hosting a 100K+ download podcast at PandaDoc. On Marketing Made Me Buy It, he's the one asking the questions, digging into the ads, hooks, and campaigns that actually get people to buy.
Subscribe to Marketing Made Me Buy It so you never miss a breakdown of the ads, hooks, and campaigns that actually convert, and leave a review to help more marketers find the show. Want to see what's driving your own incremental revenue? Start free at stellaheystella.com.
– Brenden's origin story: a lifetime of toilet paper and the "Nutella on shag carpet" analogy
– Brenden discovers TUSHY, the brand behind the bidet
– Ad breakdown #1: TUSHY's apple-and-peanut-butter demo
– Live re-creation: Brenden runs the peach test on camera
– Ad breakdown #2: the "poo particles" retargeting ad
– The social proof stat that stuck: 1 million butts (and counting)
– IRL proof: TUSHY billboards and trucks spotted in NYC's Times Square
– The Christmas gift that sealed the deal
– Life after TUSHY: why Brenden's never going back
– Why a "poop business" gets away with marketing no B2B SaaS company could
I saw it, I liked it, and that made me Try it. Now Travis wants to know why marketing made me buy it. This is marketing. Made me buy it. Tushy bidets. Tell me, Travis, what do you think this is? There's no wrong answers. Don't be shy. The image that you have up on the presentation looks like this. Like, somebody's scalp, the top of their head. Good guess. Wrong. It was my butt. That's what my butt looks like. My father has blessed me with a thick Spaniard jeans, and now I bear the consequences. That's, concerning. But keep going. I've had a butt like that since I was a baby, dude. The doctors were amazed. I don't think people need to know that, but keep going. It's relevant. Anyways, this is what I'm working with. Like, if I was going to show a real picture, my wife told me not to. So this is basically a reenactment of Brendan's butt, you know, so this is basically one small opening surrounded by comical amount of hair, if you get what I'm saying. We definitely got it. You can keep going. Look. Yep. Yeah. And look how angry. Look at how angry the face is. We certainly understand. So this is the video my mom used to potty train me. She showed me a TikTok when I was being potty trained. It was actually not that long ago. Okay. And this was the video she showed how to get peanut butter out of your carpet. Scoop up excess, add a bit of soapy water, scrape that up, add a tiny bit of water, scrape it up. Finally soak up all the water out of the carpet, down. So. So that is, for the majority of my life, how I cleaned myself. Oh, okay. So you just dabbed it with some soapy water. I'm gonna be honest with you, Trav. It was caked on, okay? It was an incredible amount of cake. That's disgusting on my cake, if you know what I mean. Jesus Christ. But why is pooping such a taboo? I can see how uncomfortable you are. Your face is like a tomato right now, dude. Yeah, it's uncomfortable cause you're uncomfortable talking about poop. But this is a fact that I made up. People born without a butt, they still poop. That's literally not true. Literally everyone poops, dude. You can't not poop. But yet you get tickled pink when I'm talking about some poop. And you do it too. You literally just poop. Right before we filmed, he said, brendan, don't tell anyone that I just poop right before we filmed you literally. That was a conversation we had. It didn't say that, but. Okay, but the only option are bidets. And bidets are gross, right? Those things are disgusting. And in my opinion, I think that's why the Americans won the Civil War against the British. That, they. Yeah, well, what are you doing? Why are the States in Europe so short? That's a bidet. Get your hands out of there. Oh, my God. They're gross, right? That. Until I found out that my lifelong role model uses bidets. Nobel peace nominee, Nobel peace prize nominee Stevo from Jackass told on his podcast that he uses a bidet. And I was like, if he uses a bidet, maybe I could too, Butthole. You do, don't you? And sometimes you take big, sloppy poops. Oh, my God, dude. Well, when you do that, why would you do a favorite product that I've ever promoted on this podcast, Ladies and gentlemen, it is so refreshing. So Stevo introduced me to a brand called Tushy, and if it's good enough for Stevo, it's good enough for me. It's a compelling argument. I can't, however, I was like, nah, I'm good. I'm a keep caking on this. Onto my hairy ass. Go. Because I'm, I'm, I'm hard headed. And so then I started seeing them everywhere. Okay. Oh, I've seen this ad before. Yeah, it's a good visual. Using the apple and the peanut butter. Yeah, I thought it was, too. So for those that are listening, it's a woman holding up, an apple and how toilet paper versus a bidet demo. Yeah. How much cleaner it, gets. Nice. And it's just about match 5%. All right, we get it. It didn't make sense. However, there's a lot of speculation on this specific video of if it's fake. If Tushy paid for them to fake this video, that is incredibly high production quality, and it makes a lot of sense as to why someone would fake it. So I actually have right here a peach. And I'm going to test this philosophy out right now. This theory out right now. Wait, are you really going to. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. So while he's getting this ready, I'll describe to our listeners. He has a jar of Nutella and he bought a peach or a nectarine. Is it fuzzy? Okay, then it's a peach. Okay. And now he's wiping the Nutella onto the peach, which actually sounds kind of yummy. And he's holding it up to the camera for folks to see. Yep, we got it. We can see that it's pretty dirty. And are you gonna try to clean this like you would with toilet paper? So he's got some on his hand already. Don't lick it off. Oh, yummy. He's got a roll of single ply. Might you add this? Looks like he took this from a 711 and he's unraveling it. It's getting all torn up. See? Like, who even wants to deal with this? And he's going to try to wipe the Nutella out of the peach. And it's probably. We can assume it's not going to go that great. All right, are you a front to back or back to front kind of guy? See, you got me warmed up now. This is a live demonstration not sponsored by Tushy. Oh, my God, there's so much left over. Dude, to me, this is where I'd stop. So that's where you're just one wipe kind of guy is where you'd stop. Okay, okay. So back to the presentation now. Delicious. Just like mine. So then I started seeing the ads everywhere. It wasn't just social media. Are you a person who's with tp Then you're full of poo particles. Stay on your hands. Body foam for up to seven days, even if you wash your hands. Meet Tushy, the modern bidet that washes. You're getting retargeted after you poop. Tushy removes over 99 of poo particles, cut out TP to save money and the planet. Quick and easy install. See why 1 million butts love 1 million butts. Love Tushy. That's a crazy statistic, and not many brands can actually say that. But when you start going down the tushy rabbit hole, or the hole, if you know what I mean, you start to see ads everywhere. So now I'm starting to think, you know what? Maybe bidets aren't gross. Maybe the reason why we beat the British in the Civil War wasn't because they had bidets, you know, and that, we all had caked on poop on our butts. Think about it. Back then, dude, they didn't even have normal toilets. You really got me thinking here. And then even to my trip to New York City, where I had to visit my favorite underground local pizza restaurant, Sbarro, in Times Square. I could not escape the tushy. So now you're getting some irl ads. If you couldn't see that that truck said was only a dirty word if you wipe. I love their puns on poopy. It's fun. It's fun. I like it. Finally my wife had enough of my stinky butt. Seriously, it was like Nutella in a thick shag carpet for the majority of my life. God, these visuals are terrible. So she got me one for Christmas. What is it? What did you give me? A tushy bidet. No way. I didn't know I was gonna do that. And ever since, my life has changed and I'm never going back. Every toilet I've ever had has now been stocked with a tushy bidet. Shout out to Bonnie, by the way. That was great. That was great. That was my wife in that video. She did great. I also love with the poop business, we can make a lot of poop puns like, thank you for your business and your business, if you know what we mean. Boop. We're talking about poop here. What other company can you do that with? What B2B SaaS company do you work with that can say stuff like that? None. None. You lucky. But we got your order. Hold onto your butts. Your order's out for delivery. Coming to a butt near you. Look how fun this is. I spy with my brown eye something that yours needs your. You're gonna wanna, do a double take. Cause you missed some. Good. And then this one that I'm covering. Hey, you dropped something bigger than a deuce. I doubt it. So my butt's cleaner than yours. And that's why I love tushy bidets. And that's why marketing made you buy it. And that is why their marketing. That is how tushy's marketing made me buy a tushy bidet. This part's an ad and it's for my own company. So brace yourself people. I've spent 11 years managing D2C ads and here's the thing nobody says out loud. The goal post always moves. You start on roas, then mer, then contribution margin, then someone in finance says the word profit and everybody loses their minds. But we're still optimizing campaigns in Meta and Google for a purchase event, which seems a little backwards, not profit for a purchase. And the platform will happily find you people who are going to purchase anyways. Stella is a causal growth engine. It pulls together multi touch attribution, post purchase surveys and real lift measurement like holdouts, media mix models, etc. And passes an incremental contribution margin value back to every touch point. So Meta, Google, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, everything else are optimizing towards what actually made you money. Incremental profit. We call it the continuous causal optimization loop. You may call it confusing, but Stella makes it easy. Start completely for free at Stella. Hey Stella dot com. That's Stella. Hey Stella dot com. Look to the camera and say back to the show. Hey, you weren't supposed to say that part, dude. Oh, that's probably why the brackets were there. I came up with the jingle for you though. What is it? Stella, hey Stella, make some money, don't it? I love that. It just. It was just off the cuff. I. You just came up with that? Yeah man, I love that.
