Today on Stacking Growth, we're featuring the first part of a recent live event featuring Matt Chanela and Dale Harrison on how to convince your CFO to invest in brand marketing. In this first part, they focus on measurement, particularly ROI. They cover some common problems with relying on ROI, including the huge difference between return versus revenue and how ROI can be misleading. And they offer multiple concrete ways to more effectively track brand marketing.
Hope you all enjoy. Thanks for sending me a break. Probably the single biggest objection is there's no clear ROI. So the ROI problems is without a doubt the biggest objection.
One of the things to say about this is that this does not come from finance. It's originated from marketing people. Finance is asking for the ROI because marketing has trained them to ask for it. If we go back 30 years ago, people in finance were not asking marketers for ROI.
And the reason that marketers fixated on ROI is in the era of digital marketing and digital attribution data, the dream was, and it hasn't proven to be true, but the dream was, that with all this data, we can now precisely track every individual customer's journey from end to end and be able to know exactly what it cost us to generate that sale for each and every individual customer. That's clearly proven not to be the case. But out of that came this marketers expectation that they could use ROI to prove that they were doing valuable stuff. Finance has basically picked up that queue and has used this now as the benchmark.
So again, finance asks for ROI because marketing has trained it to the age of digital attribution. And part of what we have to do is to retrain the finance people to think more broadly. I double-tapped on this and asked a quick question about why marketing, because to me, it goes back to the actualistic that marketers talk about where it's like everything must type act a revenue, right? And that's essentially what happens with this brand argument.
There's really well-known marketers on LinkedIn who espouse these kinds of things. There was even one, I saw recently where the Wellness CMO was talking about posting a product marketing position and having them tie their activities back to revenue. Is the cast so dyed on brand ROI that people just keep doing these mental gymnastics to make an ROI argument for things that shouldn't exist? I mean...
Again, I think there's two or three questions here. There's sort of a subtle one is should things tie back to revenue? Absolutely. We aren't doing art.
This is commerce. Businesses spend money because they expect to make a lot more money than the money they spend from having spent that money. So it doesn't matter if it's product development, if it's sales, if it's marketing. So it's not at all incorrect to say that we should tie back to revenue somehow.
The other thing is that clearly there is some sort of an ROI value that's out there. The question is, can you actually measure that value? And is the ways that we're measuring it in any way sensible? And the answer to both of those questions is generally no.
Generally you cannot measure the ROI value even though it exists. And absolutely the way that especially the MARTech platforms have trained marketers to calculate ROI is simply absurd. And the deal is that the finance people intuitively know it's absurd. We'll talk very quickly in a couple of slides about why it's so absurd.
But the way that it's being calculated is insanely wrong. What it's doing is it's massively over-attributing, short-term trackable marketing activities to immediate revenue generation. And there are cases where this makes sense. But there are many, many cases where it doesn't make sense.
So there are cases where marketing ROI is entirely suitable. If 100% of the spend occurs immediately before the purchase, there are no other related expenses tied to closing the sale. And the primary error for this works is in DTC. So if you're running an e-commerce site and you're hawking shoes and you're running Instagram ads and you're looking for someone to click on that ad and immediately buy a pair of shoes, ROI is a really good measure.
You don't have a sales team, you don't have a long decision cycle. There's a very, very short window between when the buyer has a need, when they discover you and when the purchase is made. And a lot of it is that there's very narrow side of time windows that you see in consumer-based, direct-to-consumer marketing. And B2B, especially, this is very different.
Even in a lot of FMCG stuff, you have very short cycles. Most people buy butter about once every 10 to 14 days. And they're buying it very consistently. So that doesn't give you a long time to forget the brand of butter that you like.
If you're buying some obscure data management SaaS and your average purchase cycle is, you're going to change vendors once every five to 10 years. Five to 10 years is a lot of time to forget. And this is why brand becomes increasingly important for long cycle purchases. And it's also why marketing ROI, at least as it's being calculated, is a really, really bad measure.
What it does is it pushes you toward the short-term measurable actions, which then creates highly distorted marketing organizations. So again, it does not work in B2B market in general because we have the time lags, the long purchase cycles, the long-sell cycles, and the involvement in cost of the sales team enclosing the deal. And the deal with CFOs is, when you go in and you want to claim 100% of revenue as the R in your ROI, I can promise you, everyone in finance is laughing. I'm not going to tell you, not necessarily in your face, they'll wait until you leave the room, but then they're going to laugh and make jokes about you because they're looking at the money they're spending on the sales team.
And if they really believed you, they would just fire the entire sales team because what they know is that they're spending money on that sales team because a big part of that revenue comes from the activity that they're paying for that's being executed by the sales team. Market is one part of this. And the other thing in here about long-sell cycle, tell us to keep in mind, is that if you're doing, say, quarterly ROI, there's a very typical amount of market packages that calculate this for you, where you're looking at how much revenue came in this quarter divided by how much money was spent on marketing activities this quarter. In a typical B2B environment, especially for larger consideration purchases, nothing to get sold this quarter has been influenced by anything that marketing did this quarter.
Those leads came in the door a quarter ago. At least. Yeah, they've been worked by sales for three months to close those deals. Again, you have these long lag times between when someone comes in market, when they begin the process of engaging in a sales process and then when the deal closes at the end.
As a general rule, for most long-purchase cycle B2B with a complex sales process, nothing that marketing spends this quarter has any influence on this quarter's revenue because it's already in the can because it's already in that sales process and it's mostly being driven by what the sales team is doing. The first thing, and I've already brought this up, is that the R in ROI is not revenue. Return to the CFO is not revenue. Return is a term that most marketers probably have not heard before, but it's important to understand.
Return is incremental contribution margin. So it's the fraction of revenue remaining after deducting the variable cost associated with producing and selling a product that can be attributed to marketing. So let's break this down for a second. That thing you're selling, even if it's a piece of software, it didn't just materialize out of thin air for free.
If you're selling a gas turbine engine, that engine didn't just show up one day. You paid to have that made. So if you sell it for 100,000 and it costs you 50,000 to make it, you do not have 100,000 in return. You've got at most 50,000 in return because that's how much you already spent that money to make the thing that you're selling.
But then that thing isn't going to sell itself. It just sits in the warehouse. It's not dialing up people asking people to buy it. That's why you hire sales and marketing.
So there's some cost once you've made it to actually get it in the hands of a paying customer. And so the only part of that revenue that the company sees, the company has operational access to is the portion of revenue left over after you pay for the production of the thing that you're selling and then after you pay for whatever it costs to get that in the hands of a paying customer, which is sales and marketing. So contribution margin depends on the business. I mean, if you're in SAS where the cost of that next incremental unit is extremely low, it's essentially your server and delivery costs, your manufacturing costs can be, for SAS it's typically down in the five to 10, maybe 15% range because you're basically just covering the cost of supporting and delivering the software.
We're not looking at the cost of actually writing the software. But if you're selling something physical, that physical thing costs you something to make. It didn't just materialize. And so you guys have tracked out what it costs to make it and then you got to subtract out what it costs to get it from the warehouse into the hands of a paying customer.
What's left over is the contribution margin. It kind of cuts to the heart of the matter for industries outside of SAS. Why sales and marketing about just tend to be lower and even salaries outside of SAS can be lower as well, typically because you're able to spend more with software on sales and marketing costs because of manufacturing costs is just typically lower. Right.
And again, even if you're manufacturing a widget, contribution margin isn't the cost of building the factory. In the same way that if you're selling SAS, contribution margin doesn't include the cost of writing the software. It's the cost of making that next incremental unit, whether it's a gas turbine or whether it's a piece of software that you're delivering on a server. And so those manufacturing costs are extremely low in software.
They can be quite high in physical goods. And one of the things that you end up seeing is there's a balance between these. The less money you spend on the incremental cost of the manufacturer, the more money you can spend on sales marketing. So for instance, in B2B, broadly across all of B2B, you see marketing at about typically around 6% to 8% of top line revenue.
You see sales and marketing combined at around 15% of top line revenue. If you look at software, let's take Salesforce, for example, Salesforce spends 43% of the revenue on sales marketing. HubSpot spends 45% on sales marketing. So software companies, you spend a lot more on sales and marketing because you don't have to spend so much to make the next unit that's sold if it's software.
So essentially, contribution margin is the unit economics of profit. It's how much money left over in the bank after we pay our bills from selling one more unit of whatever it is we're selling. So it's a fraction of revenue the business gets to keep. After paying what it costs to build it and after paying what it costs to get a customer to buy it.
So this is the first thing is when marketers are delivering ROI numbers based on revenue, everybody in finance knows that you don't know what you're doing. And so this is a real credibility killer to try to walk in the door and make that case. So the other thing here is it's not just contribution. It's not just contribution margin.
It's incremental contribution margin. So if we come back up here, manufacturing costs is easy to calculate. Finance has that number tattooed on the forehead. Then you've got the sales and marketing costs, but it sells and marketing.
And finance at a high level, finance people look at sales and marketing as you know, Simon's twins joined at the head. They don't see this as a separable thing. They see this as a giant black hole that they pour money down, hoping to get customers out the other side. And they don't necessarily know or care what portions of this is marketing and what portions of this is sales that's generating the money.
What they care about is that they pour money on the top of the box, they turn the crank and then some money falls out the bottom of the box and hopefully more money falls out the bottom than they put in the top. And so if you're trying to then split this down to marketing, you've got to be able to come up with some mechanism to separate out the portion of that revenue that represents marketing's effort versus sales effort. This gets very hard. And again, finance people know this.
So again, contribution margin is still not marketing's return. Some fraction of that revenue would have come in even if marketing did nothing. And you see this in a lot of early stage companies. You will see early stage companies hire a sales team one, two years before they bring on a marketing team.
So they may outsource building a website, but that's about it. And so a lot of companies, all their sales for the first two, three, four years are coming entirely from the sales team going out prospecting. And again, the finance people watch that and they know this. And so they know that marketing can't claim credit for all the revenue or even all of the contribution margin.
So return is marketing's incremental contribution margin, the portion of revenue purely for marketing effort. Again, this is part of why an accurate, defensible ROI number, marketing ROI number is difficult to come up with. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means that it's not easy to calculate.
And you simply cannot deliver the number that falls out of HubSpot or Salesforce or Meta or LinkedIn or anywhere else. And here's an example from a specific example of looking at taking some real numbers and calculating ROI through different mechanisms. So the first is kind of the naive marketing ROI using customer lifetime value. So this is how HubSpot and Salesforce does it.
And in this example, we run the numbers and we got a 12x ROI. So every dollar spent by marketing supposedly produces $12 of revenue. If you do marketing ROI based on total contribution margin, that drops to 9x. If you do it based on incremental contribution margin, it drops even more to 2.7x.
But then as you start to bring in things like brand marketing's effect, which is going to continue to have an effect over a long period of time. So again, if you think about performance marketing, performance marketing is not going to have any impact over more than about one cell cycle because its job is to get someone to come into the sales process. Once they're in that sales process, one cell cycle later, they will have made a decision to either buy or not to buy. And then they're not going to be making that decision again for likely years to come.
So if you look just at incremental contribution margin without taking into account the longer term lag effects of the brand marketing, it looks very bad. I mean, 2.7x down from 12. So we were 444% high if we delivered the number that dropped out of HubSpot or Salesforce. So yeah, but if we start to layer in these time lags, it actually goes up.
And then the other thing with brand marketing, we'll talk about in a second, is that it also feeds back into your performance marketing, your short term performance marketing, and it takes that more effective. So it goes up again when you take into account these cross effects. But what you can see here is that the typical number that gets reported is massively incorrect, 3 to 4 times higher than it really is once you start to try to get closer to correct number. And the deal is the CFO is not going to be these facts, which is why they don't believe your numbers.
Yeah, and the challenge is how do we come up with a more defensible approach to justifying what we're doing? That will actually be believable by those in finance. So marketing RI can be estimated. There are ways to come up with what I call defensible estimates.
They're not precise numbers, they're estimates, but they are a lot closer to the true number. But more importantly, you can systematically defend how you arrive to this number in front of the CFO in a way that they will walk away believing the number. But you have to account for the incremental contribution margin just for marketing, the time lags for brand marketing influence on future buyers, and then account for brands cross effects with performance marketing. So one of the things about the time lag is, and we'll get into this a few slides later, but there's also this huge misbelief that somehow brand marketing takes quote, takes a long time to work.
And the fact is, brand marketing works instantly. And I've got an example, a couple of examples coming up where I can show precisely brand marketing. If your brand ad gets in front of someone who is actively in market today, it will absolutely influence them. The problem is most people are not in market today.
Maybe 5% of your ICP is currently in market. The deal with brand marketing is it's reaching those people in the 95% who are not in market, some portion of which will still remember that brand ad weeks or months later when they do come in market. So the deal with brand marketing, and this is an important point, especially when you're talking with finance or senior leadership, it's not that brand marketing takes a long time to work. It works immediately on those who are currently in market, but it keeps working.
It keeps working for weeks and months to come where the money that we're spending on performance marketing, it is one and done within one cell cycle. So if it's going to influence someone who's in market to enter the sales process with us, that sales process will conclude within one cell cycle. So if you've got a 90 day sales cycle on average, then 90 days after that performance ad ran, it is absolutely having zero influence forever afterwards, where the brand ad can continue to influence people that come in market next month, the month after the month after, if they remember you. And we'll go into a much more detailed step by step calculation of marketing ROI using this approach coming up in the August brand marketing session.
So the other issue in here is that even if we can magically come up with the perfect marketing ROI number, it's still a poor metric. And this is also something that I think a lot of finance people don't have a good handle on, because again, normally if you're in finance and you're using ROI as a metric, you're looking at very precise investments with a very precise return window and a very clear return. So you think about if you're buying stocks, I buy a stock today, six months later I sell the stock. So I know exactly what it cost me to buy that stock.
I know exactly what I sold it for. And I know exactly how long it was between the time I purchased it and the time I sold it. That sort of precision simply doesn't exist in sales and marketing. We just don't have that kind of hard boundaries around both the investment and the return and the time periods.
And if you don't have that sort of precision ROI becomes a very poor metric. So the biggest issue is that it's not a good metric of whether or not marketing is being effective, whether or not marketing is doing a good job at marketing. An example I always like to give is the highest ROI campaign is the hostess at the restaurant giving away 50% off coupons to every guest who arrives that already had a reservation. So you got almost zero cost for the campaign, 100% conversion, thousands in quote marketing influence revenue and near infinite ROI.
And the point is that if I can give you one example of how ROI is completely misleading you as to whether or not we're doing a good job, how do I know that? The other things we're doing is somehow working better. And this is the problem with ROI in that it is ultimately a measure of how efficient you are with spending money. But it doesn't tell you anything about how effective you are at producing revenue that would not have occurred otherwise.
And there's a close corollary to this as well, which is every additional dollar you spend on marketing is going to be less effective than the last dollar you spent. So if you suddenly, if the CFO comes in tomorrow and says your budget is now 10 times bigger, chances are when you have to try to spend that 10 times more budget, it's going to be less effective on a per dollar basis than what you were spending before. Simply because presumably if you're doing your job, you're already spending your limited budget as effectively as you possibly can. And every time you expand to new channels, broader targeting, you're going to be less and less effective with each marginal dollar.
So if you flip that in reverse, what that says is that the highest ROI is if your budget is zero. The next highest, the next best ROI is if your budget is $1. Every additional dollar they add to the budget is going to make your ROI worse. And so this is not an argument for setting budgets.
And again, the fastest way to increase marketing ROI is to catch a budget in half. Because now what's left, you're going to be spending on things that are on average more effective than what you were spending with a larger budget. So this is why ROI as a tool within marketing is, or to try to describe marketing is iffy. The other example I give is what's the ROI of a factory building?
Why are factories even housed in buildings? The building costs us up front to build and it just keeps costing forever through ongoing maintenance costs. So why aren't all factories just built out in the open and the middle of a field? And the answer is because CFOs aren't idiots.
That CFOs have a wide range, and finance people in general have a wide range of tools from measuring value creation with their investments. ROI is simply one very narrow, special use case tool for understanding value creation. And the example here is, the second question here that maybe is not as obvious is why are factory buildings so basic? Why do you not hire top-named architects to build your factory building?
Why are they all like a big 10 bucks? And the reason why is that they're making a valuation, they're making a judgment on how that building is creating value. The building is creating value because it keeps the rain off of the equipment, it keeps the factory line running when the weather is bad out. So they can calculate exactly how much longer the individual pieces of equipment will last before it has to be replaced if it's not rained down.
What fraction of time the workers are actually being productive versus they're not going to be productive if it's raining and the factory is just out in the middle of a field? How often do you have to do maintenance on the pieces of equipment? How many pieces of equipment can you fit within the building? And the deal is I've actually run these models.
There are very precise ways to calculate the value of that building. And then what you want is what is the minimum investment in the building that will accomplish these goals. And that's why factory buildings look like giant sheet metal boxes. They're not very fancy and they're not designed by expensive architects.
This isn't an accident. And marketing is very much the same way. Marketing in many ways is like the factory building that houses the sales process. The sales process is what's out there actually extracting dollars out of the pockets of customers.
And it's what makes that sales process more efficient and more effective. Yeah, I had a quick question. I wanted to bring it up here. I don't know if you do you know what lift analysis as a tool?
Do you do you know what lift analysis is as a tool for characterizing market effectiveness? Don asked this question. I wanted to. I mean, is the name of a tool or is this a technique?
I believe it's a technique from how the question is being asked. Yeah, I mean, this is basically how you establish not only marketing effectiveness, but it's also how you end up establishing what's the efficiency of the next dollar of marketing spend. Because typically you're going to be following some kind of an S curve where you've got some minimum threshold level of spend before you start to see an effect. They have a linear period of the curve where the more you spend, the more you get.
And then there's a point to where if you keep spending beyond some limit, you get less and the last reach of individual dollars. So you end up with these S curves. Gotcha. So he's talking about in terms of media experimentation like like geo-lips testing or things like that.
He had it all caps. I thought it was an acronym. So that's why I was asking the question. And that sort of incrementality testing, lift testing, there's different terms for it, is how you actually go about measuring incremental contribution margin.
You calculate contribution margin and then you're trying to figure out what portion of this came from what portion of the spend we attributed to marketing. And so this is very central to being able to calculate a defensible marketing ROI number. And it's also really the only mechanism for being able to measure are you actually being effective or are you simply being efficient? And efficiency doesn't mean you're producing anything.
It just means that you're getting the maximum number of responses for a given number of dollars. So how many clicks I got per dollar on my search campaign is an efficiency metric. It doesn't tell us whether or not we were attracting people who are actually going to buy with those clicks. Either we could be attracting people who are never going to buy or we could be attracting people who had already decided to buy and they're going to buy from us anyway, but we're paying for the clicks for them to come to us.
You see this, for instance, in branded search campaigns. Most of those clicks are people who are already on their way to buy from you. You do not need to pay Google to have them do that. They would have done it anyway.
And so this goes into this distinction between are we being efficient versus being effective? So the other key thing here is the brand marketing creates value as a non-linear multiplier of other linear functions in the business. So one of the things is it measurably increases the efficiency and the effectiveness of your performance of lead generation marketing. And it's going to improve sales efficiency on a number of fronts.
One is you're going to typically see higher consideration rates, meaning a larger number of buyers who are coming in market are going to put you in their day one consideration set, which means you're going to see generally an increase in overall lead flow, somebody goes, there are more people who want to talk to you. And you're going to see higher close rates because, again, if all of those buyers that are in the sales process where you were in their day one consideration set, you're going to be about three times more likely to see them close than those buyers that came into the sales process that discovered you at the last moment and had never heard of you before. But it expands the range of buyers that sales has the opportunity to speak to. And so this is this notion of brand cross effects.
And I'll give a very specific example here. So if you want to billboard or TV ad or trade show booth, these are essentially pure marketing, our pure brand. Trade show booth, granted you're talking to people, but for every person that someone talks to, there are typically 20 to 50 people who will see your booth and potentially remember it that you never talked to. So a lot of the value of trade show booth is really in its function as a brand, as a piece of brand marketing, because most of the people who will see it are going to be likely buyers because you chose to show up at the right conference.
And there are going to be people who never talked to you, but they saw you. And so each of these is going to generate immediate measurable changes in brand to wear search traffic volume. You're going to see increased click through rates for category generic searches and increase click through rates for social media posts. So when there are brand memories inside the head of a buyer, your performance marketing, it's a boost by being able to trigger recall of those memories.
So you're going to get much better performance out of the performance marketing. You know, if the performance piece begins by simply triggering a recall of the brand, even if they don't remember you before they saw the performance piece, the fact that it triggers a recall means that you're a familiar quantity and you don't have to go through that process of explaining who you are and why they've never heard of you before. So I'll give you a specific example. So I run both Billboard and Radio Campaigns in highly, highly knit to be to be categories.
And I'll give you the specifics on it. So one example was running Billboard campaigns on key traffic arteries leading into major medical research facilities, selling a very niche biotech product. So the sort of thing that you would never see on a billboard. But we knew that we had a very, very large number of high likelihood buyers that were going to be going down one or two traffic arteries every single day in and out of this research facility.
We put up a billboard. I could immediately see changes in both brand to wear search volume. And so I was seeing 20 or 30% increase in brand to research volume because the deal is nobody can click on a billboard. All they can do is to stuff that in their head.
When they get to the office, if they have an interest, they can type your name in because it's still in their head. And so my peer performance marketing, you know, those, those, well, I mean, here it wasn't even ads. It was simply prior SEO that made a show up when they, you know, when they either search their brand name or when they search the category and they saw our brand name in the result list. Yeah.
And these effects were immediate. I would literally see it within an hour of a billboard going up because we were doing electronic billboards. We knew exactly when it went up. You know, within the hour that the billboard went up, I could immediately see changes in search traffic.
And the other thing was these effects continued for up to two to three months after the billboard of the radio campaign went down. So we were still, we still had memories in people's heads. Many of those people were not in market, but over the next few months before that, you know, at some point they will have forgotten, you know, if you wait long enough, they will, they will no longer remember. But during that period when they're still remembering or some fraction of this, they're remembering and they're coming in market, you're still getting the benefit of those memories being in their head.
And this is very measurable. So that's this idea of cross effects between brand and performance. And again, this is part of a financial argument because the idea is we're already spending a lot of money on the performance stuff. We can get a lot more bang for the buck, you know, if we can also do the brand marketing so that when someone sees that performance ad, they recognize who we are or better yet, they don't even have to see a performance ad.
They just remember who we are and they Google our name. So, you know, so there are direct financial consequences here. So, so again, I mean, one of the arguments is brand is not trackable. And the fact is there are multiple ways to try brand marketing.
So one of the things is we can look at changes in share of search. Share of search maybe is not quite the right term. More importantly is what you want to look for are two factors. One is increase in the volume of brand aware search and increase in the click through rates of category generic searches where they're clicking on your name, you know, clicking on you and the search results because both of those represent that you represent evidence that whatever you've done with the brand marketing, you've been you have successfully implanted memories in the heads of people who are now coming in market and, you know, enter either looking up your name or recognizing your name when they're doing a generic category search and preferentially clicking on you because they remember you versus someone that they've never heard up before.
And again, look at your own search behavior. You'll see your own behavior here where you are significantly more likely to click on brands that you have, you know, that you that trigger some recognition when you do a category generic search, then you are to click on brands that you've never heard up before. You know, so there's a real sort of almost like blindness to search results, you know, where on a first scan down a search result page what your what your brain is seeing are things that are triggering recall. And you're basically your brain is basically ignoring all the things in between.
They're just noise. You know, the other thing is, and this is a page out of the B2C world, but is at completely applicable for me to be is looking at changes in brand awareness through buyer panels. So things go longitudinal by your panels where you're tracking what percentage of people in your ICP via surveys that, you know, that have some recall of the brand. And there are very structured ways of doing this.
This is a very, very established technique that goes back almost a century now in B2C. And there are companies that specialize in helping B2B companies do this. I mean, companies like Winter that you can turn to very inexpensively get these sort of buyer panel surveys done. You know, the other thing is the increased rate of being in the day one consideration set.
This is something that is often not tracked by the sales team, but could be in the sense of having the salespeople try to find out at what point you were, you know, became a consideration for the buyer. You know, was it immediately when they first came in market or did they discover you at the last minute after they were already in market and doing research? These were not hard things for salespeople to figure out. Unfortunately, they tend not to be recorded in the CRM.
But it's an extremely easy thing to add to a CRM that can give you very hard data. And what you're looking for here over time is an is an increased rate of the fraction of deals where you're in the day one consideration set as a function of the spend you have on brand marketing. And then the other thing is to measure these direct changes in performance marketing campaigns. And I'll give you another specific example here.
There's a very interesting New York advertising and research agency called EDO. And EDO is primarily focused on large consumer brands. But what they do is they do real time tracking of category and brand search terms as a particular company's TV ads are running. So they're actually doing real time like second by second tracking for when the ad comes on in the local market.
And then they have integrations directly to Google to be able to pull real time search data. They can see when that 30 second ad starts running, they can see second by second as more and more people are pulling their phones out and searching the, you know, either the product category or specifically the brand name. And again, this is a great example of how, you know, this entire company is built on the fact that brand marketing works immediately and you can measure it. And so, you know, so most of these arguments about it takes a long time.
We can't measure it. We don't know if it's working. These are really false arguments. And again, unfortunately, these are not arguments that are typically originated with people in finance.
These are arguments that originated with performance marketers who want more budget. And so, you know, you really have to kind of restructure the way marketing thinks about what it's doing and how marketing explains what it's doing to, you know, not just the CFO, but the CEO and the board.