Brand Tracking That Matters and How Modern Teams Scale TV

Summary

Marketing Operators: "Brand Tracking That Matters and How Modern Teams Scale TV"

Date: December 5, 2025
Hosts: Connor Roland, Cody Plofker
Guests: Jonathan McKenzie (Turtlebox), Austin Santino (Tatari)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the evolving landscape of brand tracking, why it matters for modern marketing teams, and strategies for scaling TV advertising—especially for brands bridging the gap between performance and "brand" marketing. The conversation covers practical frameworks, real-world experiences scaling campaigns, measurement best practices, and a candid look inside Turtlebox's journey from bootstrapped DTC brand to multi-channel leader.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. The Addiction & Challenges of Offer-Driven DTC (00:20 – 01:54)

• The hosts open with reflections on recent Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotions, discussing the pressure to lengthen, reinvent, and layer offers.
  • “The low hanging growth plan in front of you is just to do more offers, longer sales.” – Connor Roland [01:00]
• Risks include degrading average unit revenue (AUR) and antagonizing retail partners, forcing brands to balance short-term revenue with long-term pricing discipline.

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2. Consumer Trends: Protein Maxing & Brand Culture (02:00 – 04:19)

• Fun sidebar about the “protein maxing” trend—Starbucks protein cold foam review, Sweetgreen’s 106g protein bowl.
  • “I’m so into the protein maxing trend... my 3 year old daughter was like, ‘I’m protein maxing.’ That’s how I know I’m saying it too much.” – Cody [02:13]
• This becomes an analogy for how brands latch on to viral consumer trends for relevance and growth.

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3. The Shift from Performance to Brand: Tracking What Actually Matters (07:06 – 11:32)

Cody’s Journey

• Cody discusses evolving from “click attribution” and traditional growth marketing to embracing incrementality and brand campaigns.
  • “Click attribution, you can only invest... we plateau’d where you can get with just click attribution and you have to do things to feed that beast.” [07:06]
• Early wins were from highly measurable, conversion-driven channels. As Jones Road matures, investment is shifting up the funnel.

The Dilemma of Brand Investment

• How to hold brand investment accountable without demanding direct ROAS.
  • “With brand marketing, it’s easy to just put money into it and not hold it accountable… You have to hold it to something, but not in the way you would performance media.” – Cody [09:37]

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4. Defining Brand Investment—Beauty vs DTC (10:17 – 12:35)

• In categories like beauty, “brand marketing” often means influencers, seeding, sampling, events.
  • “In beauty... it’s all influencer, all events, all sampling. Okay, so for a D2C brand, maybe, but I still think we’re underinvested in it.” – Cody [10:17]
• Performance marketing can drive revenue rapidly but without the buzz and “earned media value” (EMV) that drives long-term demand.

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5. How to Measure Brand: Tools and Philosophies (11:45 – 13:38)

Brand Tracking with Tracksuit

• Introduced as a way to longitudinally measure aided/unaided awareness, consideration, preference—across competitors and time.
  • “You can see your conversion rate from awareness to consideration... you can almost apply funnel diagnostics to these strategies.” – Cody [16:06]
• The objective: establish a baseline, target strategic investments (influencers, events, sampling), and measure incrementality over time.

Correlating Brand Health to Revenue

• “Ultimately if we can spike those numbers... is that a leading indicator towards revenue?” – Cody [18:24]
• New standard: Are more people searching for your brand? Is Google search going up with media/brand spend?

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6. Creative Diversity, AI Tagging, and the Future of Analysis (04:39 – 06:31)

• The hosts discuss “creative diversity”—producing lots of varied ad assets and the operational pain of analyzing them.
• Motion’s AI tagging is featured as a solution.
  • “It makes the comparative analytics just so much simpler... all these different breakdowns that we used to have to labor over to tag...” – Connor [05:40]

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7. Incrementality, Search Lift, and Upper Funnel Attribution (24:16 – 27:37)

• Discussion about running “brand lift” and “search lift” studies on Meta, YouTube, and via geo holdouts.
  • “You can use those DMAs you’re excluding... and pull them out of your Google search account, actually look at the lift on brand queries...” – Connor [24:42]
• Retargeting and sweepstakes can drive measurable gains in brand search. “Whenever we spend more money, queries go up.” – Connor [26:26]

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8. Brand vs Performance: A False Binary? (29:19 – 32:37)

• Many DTC leaders don’t split “brand” vs “performance” in practice.
  • “If you’re running performance marketing, you are generating brand value. The best way to generate brand is have a bunch of happy customers.” – Connor [29:41]
• There’s always a trade-off: short-term revenue vs future demand, but at scale, every brand must move up-funnel and invest in future awareness.

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9. Advice & Best Practices on Brand Measurement (33:28 – 35:26)

• Future: integrating baseline spend and search lift as core KPIs.
  • “As my baseline spend is going up—so TV, reach, awareness, spend—is my brand search going up? Trying to get a simple correlation.” – Cody [25:43]

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10. Featured Guest: Jonathan McKenzie of Turtlebox – Building a Brand by Community (35:55 – 44:55)

The Turtlebox Origin Story

• Four friends, a sailboat, and the unmet need for a rugged, outdoor speaker.
• Extensive R&D led to a commercial product in 2018, then rapid scale.

Differentiation by Audience and Product

• Simple “dumb speaker” design, beautiful ID, lean on community rather than mass-appeal.
  • “We want our grandmothers to be able to use this product... we’re just going to do a few things really, really well.” – Jonathan [42:43]
• Learning from the Yeti playbook: focus on core niche audiences (hunting, fishing) and grow outward.

Wholesale Strategy

• Entered first into “hook and bullet” stores—unique among competitors.

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11. TV Advertising: Creative, Community, and Measurement (49:00 – 66:25)

Community-Driven Content

• Turtlebox content is centered on actual community members (ambassadors, not “influencers”).
  • “If my creative director goes and films a commercial and doesn’t use an ambassador from our community team, he kind of didn’t do his job.” – Jonathan [51:58]

Scaling TV with Tatari: Context & Measurement

• Turtlebox runs golf ads during golf, baseball during MLB, and so on—contextual creative for cultural relevance.
• Tatari’s Austin Santino explains the testing approach: start with connected TV (measurable, digital-like), then expand to linear once audiences and context are validated.
  • “Streaming is a great way to validate the channel... as you grow, linear is a very cost-effective way to extend your audience.” – Austin [54:45]

Content Production Mix

• Combination of high-production shoots, agile internal teams, and organic “friends of the brand” UGC.
  • “There are two or three pieces of content... best performers... we paid $0 and told nobody to do them.” – Jonathan [62:10]
• “We always want people to see that Turtlebox has friends, not money.” – Jonathan [62:10]

Learnings & 2026 Strategy

• Goal: More intentional storytelling on TV, fewer but bigger creative swings.
  • “Performance investing is like day trading... on TV... I want us to be really, really intentional about the creative.” – Jonathan [59:47]
• Aim: “Maturation year”—hold creative longer, aspire to “Toyota with the jackhammer” strategy.

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12. Practical Advice for Brands Entering TV & Brand-Led Growth (65:54 – 70:36)

Austin (Tatari): How to Start

• “Validate it first, that it’s driving performance for the business... that’s what helps you really start to invest and take bigger swings.” [65:54]
• Control and transparency are key when venturing into new media channels.

Jonathan McKenzie’s Advice

1. Take small bets: Start small, “fail fast”, learn, iterate. Don’t overanalyze or get stuck in planning.
   • “Take small bets, learn something, do it again, change, pivot, course-correct.” – Jonathan [67:25]
2. Surround yourself with good people: Founders, advisors, people who disagree and challenge you will make the business healthier.
   • “If I was the only person running this company, it would have died a long time ago... wrestle with your co-founder. That wrestling is good and productive and it will lead to good places.” – Jonathan [70:02]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Brand Measurement Reality:
  “The hardest thing to track is brand awareness without conversion... You have to find correlations and be comfortable.” – Connor Roland [13:38]

• Value of Search as a KPI:
  “As I spend more on Meta, I need to make sure I’m reaching more people... as you spend more as a total business, are more people searching for your brand? That’s like the simplest way of brand health.” – Cody [11:48]

• Creative Attribution Challenge:
  “If you’re running performance marketing, you are generating brand value. The best way to generate brand is have a bunch of happy customers.” – Connor [29:41]

• TV Creative Philosophy:
  “Performance investing is like day trading... on TV, I want us to be really, really intentional about the creative that we send.” – Jonathan McKenzie [59:47]

• Outcome-Orientated Advice:
  “Take small bets…don’t be afraid to take risk, just take conservative risk... surround yourself with good people.” – Jonathan McKenzie [67:20-70:36]

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Timestamps for Key Sections

• DTC Discounting Culture: 00:20 – 01:54
• Protein Maxing Analogy: 02:00 – 04:19
• Brand Tracking Strategy: 07:06 – 18:24
• How to Structure Brand Campaigns & Tracking: 16:04 – 18:24
• Testing Brand Attribution (Brand/Search Lift): 24:16 – 27:37
• Brand vs Performance Debate: 29:19 – 32:37
• Guest Interview, Turtlebox Backstory: 35:55 – 44:55
• TV/Streaming Content & Measurement: 49:00 – 66:25
• Advice to Brands on Entering TV: 65:54 – 70:36

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Final Takeaways

• As brands mature, measurement must expand beyond short-term ROAS to include brand lift, search lift, and awareness tracking.
• The old binary between “performance” and “brand” is breaking down—incrementality and creative diversity are essential.
• TV/streaming can be a massive lever if approached with context-aware creative and tested for incremental results.
• The strongest brands invest in community, adaptability, and take risks in measured, iterative ways.

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This episode is essential listening for DTC and omnichannel leaders grappling with brand-building, measurement, and unlocking new growth channels, especially TV and upper funnel.

Transcript

[Connor Roland]

All right, we are back with another episode of Marketing Operators. You've got just Cody and I for now. We're having Jonathan McKenzie on from totalbox later on. Cody, good morning. How's it going?

[Cody]

Good morning, dude. Doing well. We just launched our second part of our Black Friday sale today. So I probably should be working instead of doing this, but I'm excited to chat, hang out with you today.

[Connor Roland]

Amazing.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Connor Roland]

Second part of the Black Friday sale. So people will be getting this early December. So knock on wood. Hopefully we've had big, scalable, profitable Black Friday Cyber Monday weekends. What was the purpose of the second part of the sale?

[Cody]

Always trying new stuff and just seeing if we can kind of reignite some stuff and get, you know, more, more peaks going on. So we launched a sale earlier and now we launched the mini miracle bombs.

[Connor Roland]

Oh, right.

[Cody]

And a little new spin. So just, just, just a different offer during part of it.

[Connor Roland]

Okay, Totally, totally.

[Cody]

Do you guys change up your offers at all?

[Connor Roland]

We have, we have exclusive offers going live starting Wednesday next week.

Because I've said this before, I was joking about this with you on the last episode. Did you have a great. You have you. The low hanging growth plan in front of you is just to do more offers, longer sales.

[Cody]

That's so addicting.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. That's where we've been. Like, eventually your sale gets big enough and long enough that you get to start adding. Yeah. Additional peaks on top of it, layering in new stuff. Um, it is the, that's like the, the circle of life basically. And then you gotta worry about aur. You gotta cut it all back because you have a bunch of retail partners. Um, that's. Yeah, I feel like that's the, the natural path.

[Cody]

What's aur?

[Connor Roland]

Average unit revenue.

[Cody]

Got it.

[Connor Roland]

So like, yeah, if you're worried about your aur degrading because you're promoing too much, then you gotta roll back all the promos, do more gifts with purchases. You know, retailers don't like discounting price because then you gotta credit them on margin, all that stuff. So you just have all these additional stakeholders and it, it ruins your ability to run big long sales.

[Cody]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Connor Roland]

Definitely takes all the fun away. You know.

I was thinking this morning about how I really want to try the new protein Starbucks cold brew.

[Cody]

Have you seen this? Dude, it's good. I've had it.

[Connor Roland]

Oh, you had it. Okay, cool.

[Cody]

Delicious.

[Connor Roland]

Give it one one to ten scale.

[Cody]

Dude, I'm so into the protein maxing trend. Like I'm so into my 3 year old daughter the other day was like randomly was just like, I'm protein maxing. I'm like, all right, that's how I know I'm saying it too much. I just, I find the whole like, I find the whole maxing trend so funny when somebody's hilarious. Like, I love it. Yeah, it was good. And like, because the thing is, you know, you get bored of a nice coffee or whatever but like I don't do all that sugar stuff, so this was great. It was filling though. Like, it was, it was definitely a little heavier. But 8 out of 10 pleasantly surprised.

[Connor Roland]

8 out of 10 pleasantly surprised.

[Austin Santino]

All right, good.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, I'll have to try it. Between that and the sweet green 106 gram protein bowl. Did you see that?

[Cody]

I saw that.

[Connor Roland]

Protein max. We are protein maxed. We. It's gone, it's gone too far.

[Cody]

Yeah, we're probably, it's probably a bubble. I know, I saw that. I sent that to my wife. I'm like, we're getting sweet green today. So it was like a lot of people are get like that actually try to get protein. Are trying to get 100 grams a day. To get that in one meal is like wild.

[Connor Roland]

Oh dude, it's absurd. I mean like I'm £190 and like trying to get protein. I never have a meal that has over a hundred. It just doesn't.

[Cody]

No, that's.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, it doesn't really make any sense.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, if you're, even if you're trying to get you know, gram per body weight like 190, like that's still. You eat, you eat one and a half of those a day and you're good.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you put, you know, you got protein waffles, you got protein ice cream, there's protein water out. Now protein Starbucks protein sweet green. You gotta, you got a couple David bars a day. I mean you can easily hit 400, 500 grams.

[Cody]

That's probably not good for you. But yeah, I've seen like protein candy and I'm like curious about it. But I'm like, I think that would kill my insides.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, for sure.

[Cody]

No, it sounds, but I do, I do a lot. Like these are pretty good. These like breakfast most days is like 30 grams protein, 150 calories. Like grab it on a go, you know, Protein shake. So def. Definitely big protein maxing fan shake.

[Connor Roland]

All right, well, well keep us, keep us posted. I'll come back with my review of, of Starbucks cold foam, whatever it is. Cold brew.

[Cody]

Have You. Yeah, let me know. Let. Let us know what you think if you had any other bars. I know you're. You're loyal to David bars.

[Connor Roland]

Extremely loyal to David bars, dude.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, I know. Connor, Roland is not here. He's a big Ninja Creamy fan, so that's a good way to get a bunch of protein in.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

For sure.

[Connor Roland]

For sure.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Connor Roland]

If you. If you also really want ice cream too. Delicious treat. Before we get into talking about brand tracking, linear and connected TV strategies, and talking to Jonathan McKenzie from TurtleBox, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion Rich Panel, Prescient Aftercell and Revo.

[Cody]

Hey, Connor, I don't know if you know this, but there's a lot of talk about creative diversity right now on all platforms. We've been talking about it a lot. Andromeda. I don't know if you heard about that. It's apparently a. A Greek legend, a Greek myth, but I believe it is something that Meta has done that. Obviously. Obviously. I'm kidding. But everybody's talking about creative diversity. Everybody's talking about Andromeda and how the game has changed. We are all focused on it. I think there's not a D2C operator who does not know it at this point and how important it is. And being able to test, measure, do create a diversity, get a high volume of diverse assets is really the name of the game. And I'm super excited because Motion has just rolled out AI tagging, which helps to simplify as our volumes go. And diversity is going up. We have more different types of styles. I know you're a big naming convention guy. I know that you think they're the heart and soul of DTC brand. But another casualty of the AI era, Motion now has AI tagging, which simplifies all of your reporting. Automatically tag stuff just makes it easier to splice data. I know you were just saying actually you sent it to your team. I sent it to my team. What are your thoughts on AI tagging so far?

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, no, totally. And Motion's premier sponsor, we're supposed to say nice things, but legitimately, as soon as I got the video from them, because we got early access, sent it right to my team. I'm like, this is. This is the way to go. It makes the comparative analytics just so much simpler. I was just looking at it this morning. Bucketing between ugc, lifestyle photo with text, product photo with text, all these different breakdowns that we used to have to labor over to tag and automate and then. And then break down the reports by those dimensions. It's all kind of working out of the box. So you got it totally right. We were talking about creative diversity all the time. Producing that I think is a big challenge for brands right now. Analyzing that just as big of an issue. And AI's motions AI tagging system is a great solution for it. So if you want to check it out, go to motion app.com and let them know that the marketing operator sent you.

Like I said, we're having Jonathan McKenzie on in a bit from Turtle Box. We're going to talk about his TV media buying strategy. Austin will be on from Tatari too, which will be exciting. Before we get into that, I feel, I feel this will like segue nicely into the TV discussion. But Cody, I know you're beginning to lay out 2026 plans. We're going to have a 2026 prediction episode and planning episode. We'll do all that. We were posting about it and it seemed a big focus for brand tracking. So I'd love to hear you talk through.

What do you guys do currently? Why is it becoming a priority? How do you expect to address it?

[Cody]

Yeah, so like I feel like my, my journey has been like, you know, click attribution. I'm like a recovering growth marketer. So like click attribution, you can only invest. Like I remember like the first time I met with a YouTube rep. This wasn't for Jones Road, but this is for a business before. And I'm like, why would I ever run this channel that I could get a one row Snargeting is a three, you know.

[Connor Roland]

Right.

[Cody]

Like why would every. And then obviously you, we plateau of where you can get with just click attribution and you have to do things to feed that beast a little bit. Right. And I think that's where, you know, incrementality has really been such a blessing for us where it's like, all right, you know, these things don't really look great on a click, but they're actually like very incremental. It's still what I would consider performance marketing meaning like we're still looking at incremental revenue within a two to four week time period. You know, but it's maybe it's just moving up funnel and, and, and, and moving kind of beyond a click. And so like YouTube podcasts, which is an S O G O but right, like podcast, you know, YouTube TV, which you can geo and not like those have been really, really strong, helpful channels for us to help grow it. But again we're able to see, you know, we can Run a, we can run a test with Tatari or we can do something like that and run a GEO and be like, all right, two, three weeks, here's our iroas, here's our incremental revenue, right? And it's like very performance driven. Um, but I, I do think by the way, like even of your mid funnel meta prospecting ads, like you are getting a lot of reach and getting a lot of awareness of that and you can run those tests with like a meta. I guess it's not a conversion lift but like a, like a brand lifted meta, you know, say like, are you lifting that even from conversion stuff? And, and you totally can. But I think just as the business matures and gets to different phases, we have, it's one of those things. Like the other day, you know, Conordal asked me like, are you, are you upset you didn't do sales until now? You know, like looking back, like, should you. And I'm like, no, I'm not really upset. And it's, it's same thing here. It's like we've underinvested in brand and like, am I upset that we didn't do it? Like, do I regret it or like, was it just not the right thing for us at the time? I don't know, I'm actually not sure on that. But I think we've, we've invested very heavily and part of the reason we've grown very quickly in performance media, performance marketing. And it's not to say I think it gets black and white. It's not to say like we're not going to do that. I'm not trying to like get off of meta or anything. I just think the, the next growth lever for us is really going to be a little bit more brand style. But I think my, my concern with doing a lot of that stuff is like totally transparently, like I'm really cheap. I care a lot about profitability.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Right.

[Cody]

Like, I'm not. And I think it's very easy with brand marketing to just put money into it, you know, and light it on fire and not hold it accountable stuff. So you have to like, I think the, the dilemma is like you have to hold it accountable to something, but you can't hold it accountable to things the same way you would of performance meteor. It just won't look good. And so I think that's been kind of my journey is to try to learn that stuff and it's very different, but I think I'm learning how to actually think about that and do that. And so we signed up for brand tracking, which is awesome. Which I'm excited to share about.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, totally. So I want to go back quickly because you say John Short hasn't invested in brand. That doesn't seem accurate to me.

[Cody]

Well, dude, compared to beauty. Compared to like, like, like the thing is in beauty, like most people are in Sephora, they're not really running performance media. It's like all influencer, all events, all sampling. Like, okay, so for a D2C brand, maybe, but I still think we're under invested in it.

[Connor Roland]

How would you define, could you define for me or like ju just like expand on what you think you haven't invested in? Is it that? Is it, is it sampling an influencer and things like that?

[Cody]

Influencer is a hard one. Yeah. So like influencer is probably just like organic, seeded, paid it paid influencer. But not like performance influencer is probably like the biggest thing in, in beauty. Right? It's like very correlated to success. Looking at like earned media value.

We have definitely, I think underinvested in that. Like I know that there are businesses that are similar size to us. If not we are bigger than them and their earned media value is just like off the charts higher. Okay. I think we've just done a better job of performance media. I think we just again, I had a hard time being like, okay, if I invested in that, you know, pretty significantly, like that would grow our business. I'm now at the point where I'm like, okay, that is, I think our lever, like our, our performance is outpacing our, our awareness and our buzz. And I think that's like our ceiling, if that makes sense.

[Connor Roland]

That makes total sense.

So when you say you haven't invested in brand, it's like awareness without. I mean there must be beauty brands that are the same size as you guys, but technically have more awareness.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, there are.

[Connor Roland]

It's like it's awareness decoupled from orders.

[Cody]

Yeah, I think so to some degree. Yeah. And I think I really like we signed up for Tracksuit and they, they call it future demand. I really like thinking about it in terms of future demand. And like I was talking to, I think Jake from Huckberry thinks about this stuff really well. But like just, you know, his goal is just are more people searching for your brand and like that's it. And it's like overall over, you know, over a. You just want to make sure as you're spending more. It's the same thing I talk about with like meta, like as I spend more on Meta. I need to make sure I'm reaching more people. Same thing. I think as you spend more as a total business, like, are more people searching for your brand. I think that's like the simplest way of like brand health. It's like, are you getting more people to search for it? Um, and I think yes, performance media can do that, but at a certain point I think there's better ways to do it. So things like events, you know, things like, you know, at home a little bit, but out of home paired with events. I mean, yes, you can even say organic social. Like a lot of even like, you know, it's performance. But like TikTok shop is like a great way to get more people searching for your brand with like viral social content. Like, whatever it is. We just haven't done a lot of that stuff. You know, brand campaigns which can, can be very successful if done right, but are hard to do. So yeah, we haven't done some of them. And so we want to do a lot of. A lot more influencer, a lot more organic social, a lot more events. I want to meet more people in person samples as well. Like, Grooms does such a good job with this. So we're going to like, really take a page out of their book, right, to just do a ton of sampling. But, like, we want to measure it. You know, I don't want to just do all this stuff and put, you know, six figures into. Because I think to have it be successful, like, you have to do a big enough investment. You can't just like dabble, right, to see an impact on a business of our size. But there has to be some measure. And I think to me, brand tracking is, you know, is, is really one of the main ones.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah. So I'm totally with you on this. And it's also just to make this distinction one more time because what we're talking about, the, the hardest thing to track is brand awareness without conversion. Because, like you can go viral on TikTok and you'll just see revenue go up and you'll see, you'll see Amazon sales go up and it's like not that hard to correlate. Like, hey, we are doing this strategy over here and we are seeing it impact our bottom line over here. And that's like, there are many businesses going back to your point around YouTube. There was like, there's been alpha for so long in channels that just attribution is harder, that you just have to like find correlations and be comfortable. I remember Hearing this from Dr. Squatch early on they were like, you just have to be comfortable with spending 80% of your budget on YouTube. None of the reporting is going to look good, but your business will be bigger and you're hitting your mer targets. It's like, okay, there is like a level of. There's just this disconnect in attribution that feels a little bit more like brand market E. Right. Like you're just, it doesn't feel as doctor you're not on a one day click basis. It's typically, I think those. That sort of content is just a little bit different for something like YouTube. You're often able to drive like more awareness, consideration, intent with these like longer form videos. And that's one of the things that creates a disconnect that people seem pretty comfortable wrapping their minds around. But we're talking about is not necessarily having the revenue correlated with that awareness. And how do you measure that? Because that's when it becomes way trickier. So what does.

[Cody]

Yeah, you go from like, like YouTube TV is like top of funnel but you still can get some performance data on it. And this is like legitimately brand stuff where you're like, you're almost not even talking about your product sometimes or something maybe.

[Connor Roland]

Totally, totally. And we've talked about this a bit before and I'm excited for like, you know, Connor Rowling does some of this. I'm excited for, for you guys. I'm gonna take all the best practices that you guys develop over the next year and this will be like a 2027 goal for Ridge.

[Cody]

Dude. I mean that's why we do the pod. Like you know, there's been so much that, that you guys have done that we've implemented. So that's why we do it.

[Connor Roland]

We'll, we'll get some more guests on, we'll farm the industry for the best information. Yeah, that's what, that's what we're here to do. I was going to say.

Tracksuit. Can you, can you remind me like the functionally what it does?

[Cody]

Yeah, so it does, it does brand tracking or brand surveys. Right. Which is essentially it does a few things but like aided and unaided awareness. Maybe it only does one. Like I don't want to misquote it but it's essentially they create a panel of people. Right. They have tools to create panels of, you know, people that are in research. You pick your category, any demographic graphics you want. And, and so awareness is just like, hey, which of these brands are you familiar with?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

And Right.

[Cody]

Unaided is just giving people, you know, them and then. Or not giving them much and then. And then aided is like giving them a little bit more of a prompt. Then there's consideration, right? And it's like, I don't know exactly the question, but it's, you know, once they say you're aware, it's like, all right, have you considered purchasing with them? So you can kind of look at the full funnel and say, all right, this is, you know, you have 30% awareness in this category, right, of premium makeup and skincare. You can see your competitors as well as you can pick competitor sets and see how they're comparing. You can then see your conversion rate from awareness to consideration against your others. So maybe there's a brand that has much more awareness, but, you know, they don't do as good of a job moving them down funnel, right? Like, maybe that brand shouldn't focus on awareness. Like, same way we. We can kind of funnel diagnostics. I think that's why it's really cool and fun learning this. So it's like, you can almost apply funnel diagnostics to, like, these strategies. Then you can go to usage and then preference. And so it's. That's. Obviously, you're getting into more performance. And then, you know, once people try it, are they, you know, loyal to it? And so you can do that. You can see it across categories. You can filter it by demographics, which is really cool, right? And then this is a part. I kind of knew all that stuff, but I didn't do it because traditionally, like, brand tracking is really expensive, right? It's like Nielsen or somebody like that will do it. It's like, all right, I don't know, you know, you pay whatever it is, you know, a bunch of money one time, like, all right, fine. Like, what am I going to do with that? The really cool thing about it, however they automated, it's much cheaper and more affordable. You can actually get longitudinal data over time. And so I think that's where it's like, all right, great. Let's get a baseline. Let's figure out where we're at. Do we have an awareness problem or consideration problem? Right. With demos, let's then get really strategic. I think I'm just trying to get more strategic at this phase in our business. Let's get really strategic on who we want to reach. Go after. Let's do a bunch of stuff over the next quarter, right? And then are those numbers going up? It's like, that's your incrementality test kind of totally.

[Connor Roland]

And that makes a ton of sense because I Was also thinking there are ways right now to measure brand awareness, generating this like kind of non purchase brand awareness.

At almost like the channel or tactic level. Right. You can do a brand lift study on meta, but you don't have a way to track it for the entirety of your business, much less over time like you're describing. So that's like the real value for you guys is you more or less a single source of truth you have a pulse on. Where are we tracking for awareness and consideration?

[Cody]

Yeah, over time. And then ultimately if we can spike those numbers going up, is that a leading indicator towards revenue? Right, right. Does if we do it for a year and we see those numbers going the right direction, does the business kind of grow with that consistently? And maybe that's a more anecdotal thing, but that's at least our hypothesis that, you know, more awareness, more consideration is probably going to help us grow.

So I remember like right around Christmas time when most people should probably normal people were like off taking that, taking their time, chilling with family. I was like looking through our P and L, our budget for next year and I was like, how are we going to save money? And one of the things I did is I leaned on a lot of our partners and I remember slacking a meet from Rich panel and I was like, what can you do? How can you help us? We had just switched to Rich panel a few months before, went really well. And I told him jokingly, by the way, I want to throw it out there jokingly, that if he could help cut about 500k from our customer service costs, I'd get a Rich panel tattoo.

[Austin Santino]

Well, we did that.

[Cody]

You've probably seen a tweet. He did some AI thing of me with a neck, neck tattoo. I'm not gonna do it. Sorry Amit, but I will talk about how much I love Rich Mantle, how much Amit has helped us. So we had 18 support agents before. It was a lot and it just was not scalable. We had so many people. We had this like old legacy software. It was slow, it was broken, it was expensive and it just took too many people to operate. So we not only made the switch, but Amit and his team really helped us. Now we have eight people and we have a much better CSAT score. Our numbers are way better, our response times are way quicker. We're leveraging a lot of autom, a lot of AI, but again, it has not hurt customer experience. We track and I get a weekly report of our csat, of all of our stuff, of our nps and it's going up because we're actually able to get back to people, give people better answers. The automation learns from our best agents. So it's just continually. It's getting better. We switched to Rich Panel about two weeks before Black Friday. Might be a crazy thing to do, but it was super easy. We came out of Black Friday for the first time in three years with no ticket backlog. The software and support has blown us away. I highly recommend you switch. If you do it and they save you a lot of money, you should probably get a tattoo. But it's not something my wife would let me get away with. But yeah, if you're running an E commerce brand, I highly recommend you switch to Rich Panel. You'll be able to leverage their software, save money on software costs, which is great, while saving a significant amount of money on personal costs. So if you want to go into Q4 with a leaner, smarter support setup and come out of there without this crazy tech backlog, just make your team happier. Go to richpanel.com demo, tell them Cody from our credit operator sent you and tell me you're ready to get a tattoo.

[Connor Roland]

You know, we've had Ashton Wall on the show. It's been a long time. We should have her back on the former CMO of colourpop. She's a huge EMV maxi earned media value which is like for those unfamiliar people, Will, it's kind of, it's not my favorite metric. It's kind of a made up metric but they're tracking impressions, engagement from social posts so it's like quantifying like social buzz to a certain degree. She's a big max of that. She totally. She, she is, she is em. She's a EMV maxer in the same way that you're, you're a protein maxer.

Do you have a position on that? Is that a, is that a metric you guys care about at all or, or do you think your kind of key KPI will be this.

Brand tracking?

[Cody]

I think that Ashton is right and I'm wrong. I think that she's talked about it at the, the Creator IQ conference last year. They had somebody who was essentially this like Data guy from SD Lauder who builds MMMs, a custom MMs and, and show data on, you know, above across public beauty companies like EMV being essentially the strongest correlation with consideration increases, you know, for brands. And then Connor who used to be, he created Tribe Dynamics. I don't know if you've talked to him. Another, another cool. Connor now has his own beer. He used to like post a lot of content and he'd like buy public stocks based on their emv. Really was like, you know, it's like nice, nice little scheme there, but it's all publicly available stuff. Yeah, so. So I do think that that is leading indicator. I think we just haven't, I don't know, we haven't invested in it as much or like taken the plunge and so I think that'll be related to this.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, totally. And to your point, they seem highly correlated. Like if you can drive consideration, you're probably also driving EMV to some degree.

[Cody]

Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. This seems like, it seems like for some reason in beauty and like for me like interviewing like a high level marketing role for our team lately. Like everyone in beauty I talk to. Right. It's like what's your main thing? Emv? Everyone that's like in cpg, it's brand tracking. So it just seems like it's correlated. But yeah, a little different way to go about it.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. No, it's interesting. I think ridges focus for 2026, you and I are, are on similar, similar wavelengths here in terms of more tactics that are less.

Like incremental revenue driven at least on like a short term measurable basis. I think there is value in us creating additional brand awareness. We'll probably spend more time in 2026 focused on the tactic level. Like I'd love to do more brand lift studies. I'll give you an example. I'm putting together 2026 plan and I would love to be. We have these large seasonal color stories that come out quarterly. The one in January is called the Ocean Lights three wallets. It's got this like Hawaii inspiration. So the team was out there. We're gonna get this awesome brand video and in the past when we deliver things like that, there's a disconnect between the content that we've created and the story that we're telling and like what is working via paid media. And there must be some happy in between. I, I would like to think that there's some happy in between there where we can measure some sort of impact that that media can have. So I would love to figure out a playbook for these, these, these seasonal color stories and say hey, 5 to 8% of our meta budget is going to go to promoting this brand story video that like isn't going to drive direct ROI one day. Click's going to be crap. But we're going to measure it via brand Lift study and people are going to be more aware of Ridge afterwards. And then I think we'll just kind of build.

[Cody]

So you'll run it, you'll run a meta brand lift as meta brand. Yeah, totally love that. Or tons, tons of value in that by the way. Same YouTube, I'm sure. You're putting that on YouTube. You can run same studies there. You can get search lift as well. Super easy to set up like even in a demand gen campaign, but huge value there. Just tracking baseline too from like Jake. Same thing. It's like as I, if you, you, you go ahead and then I'll explain.

[Connor Roland]

I was going to say you said search lift. I brought this up on a podcast a couple weeks ago. But you can do, if you do a geolift holdout in house, you can use those DMAs that you're excluding and pull them out of your Google search account from your brand queries. And actually we've looked at the lift on brand queries, which I think is also a great one where it's like, I don't know, I, I could justify a percentage of my media mix. It'll be really small. But if I can, if I have proven that this is driving people to take action and search for Ridge Wallet, I think that's fantastic. So it's like building up more strategies there and then over time I think that'll become just a little bit more comprehensive. We'll effectively be building brand consideration. But we won't have it like that baseline tracking that you're talking about.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, I think that's like a perfect way to start and go by and we've definitely done a few like brand lifts and search lifts on both those platforms. I think it's great. I think there's, there's still a little bit of like all right, now what do I do with this? Like so I lifted, you know, so it's 30 cents per lifted, you know, consideration like.

[Connor Roland]

Right, right, right.

[Cody]

It's like what, how do I value that number for, for my business? Like I don't know, maybe it's directional, but yeah, no, I love that. And then I think the other thing, and I guess this is more revenue but maybe not is like you know, Jake from Huck Bear talking about baseline revenue. But it's like that's baseline spend which is essentially non performance, non like paid social. But anything that like you would consider upper funnel. And it's just like, all right, as my tracking trends, you build a dashboard for it. As my baseline spend is going up. So TV reach Awareness, spend, you know, is my brand search going up and just like trying to get a simple correlation on those, I think is something we're also tracking as well. When you guys run sweepstakes, do you see searches go up?

[Connor Roland]

Totally. Yeah. I mean, whenever. Whenever.

So I don't know if they, if, if queries disproportionately go up. Whenever we spend more money, queries go up. That's like, there's pretty. And, and actually, I mean, there have been times in the past where that's an indicator that our media is not being well spent. Is if we're spending more in. Queries are not going up. Right. Or for spending 100.

[Cody]

Agreed.

[Connor Roland]

You know what I mean? So we report every single week on brand queries for wallet products, rings products and lug. It's like a very key KPI for us. So during sweepstakes, does it go up? Yes, but it also goes up because we're able to spend more because of the sweepstakes. I'd have to look at like.

[Cody]

Yeah, proportionally.

[Connor Roland]

One interesting thing about sweepstakes, we, we launched it in Canada and the UK this year. And, and that's interesting because we have four international markets. They more or less trend very similarly, but Canada and UK has had a significant lift over the other two markets post sweepstakes.

[Cody]

I love that. That's so great. Yeah, that's part of the thing is, is we are just so poorly trained as growth marketers to allow for this really latent, you know, demand capture and we're looking at things on such a short period of time and there's a time and a place for that. But like, that's actually like such. You. You did a post treatment window. You did a. You did a Geo. Hold on. With a post treatment window.

[Connor Roland]

Totally. And it, I mean, I think it's pretty, pretty convincing.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. We are, we are not trained to think about that latent revenue. One thing. But the thing is, is like a lot of the best marketing. It ha. Like I think the best doctor market or the. Let me say it this way. The brands that have done the best. That's also a funny way of putting it. The brands that have done well. Brands that have done well. This isn't the only way to do it. But like someone like Ridge has been doctor focused where we are running our business on like a short term profitable sort of objective and not considering the longer term latent demand. But it is there, right? It's like. And Ben from True Classic has said this on a couple of podcasts, but he talks about ad spend being almost like something you can hold on your balance sheet. And that's getting at the same idea where it's like, look, if you can spend today and, and generate the cash flow that you need to continue running the business, like that is in your best interest. Because you have latent demand that those impressions that you served and those clicks that you drove and those emails that you captured have longer term value that you're not calculating. So it's almost like something that you should consider as being a part of your balance sheet. And I think that's a very similar idea.

[Cody]

Yes and no. And I was actually thinking about this the other day because I, I think Ridge and Jones Road are probably similar sized businesses. I think we're thinking more about brand stuff. I feel like you guys just think like marketing. You don't necessarily think like brand versus performance. I think, I think by nature I was thinking about it. Why, like why you guys don't necessarily have to. I do think you guys have maybe the nature of your category. You've had to create your own demand, right? You haven't been able to chase demand. So I think that probably made you get certain skill sets that we didn't have to develop as much where like there's a lot of existing beauty demand. And I think maybe that's like the channel mix, right?

[Connor Roland]

Sure.

[Cody]

You guys used to do a ton of YouTube integrations and like is that performance? Is it brand? Like there's a ton of demand creation as part of that. And I wonder if, you know, maybe it's sweepstakes. Like I wonder if it's something about the channel or just like the way that you guys have done your performance marketing that has done a really good job of creating that you haven't really had to like buy furificate.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, I think that's totally true. I, I also really don't make any, any distinction between brand and performance. Or at least like what I was acknowledging earlier is that if you're running performance marketing, you are generating brand value. I've also always said the best way to generate brand is have a bunch of happy customers. Do you gotta acquire a bunch of customers, keep them happy, like your brand will build over time and that's actually about like affinity to the brand versus, you know, I don't know, I don't disagree.

[Cody]

But I also think, and I'm trying to use the right definition but like I do think at a certain point performance marketing over indexes on short term Value, yes. Which is a smaller part of the market and funnel and, and does choke future growth of you know, demand creation and creating future demand of a much wider part of the funnel that people are just not ready to buy now. And I think that's what I'm trying to prove out. But where we feel like we've gotten to is I don't want to say plateaued but you know, we need to kind of move up funnel and create future demand. But again it's one of those things where it's like what I don't want brand to become for us and what I don't want it to be is like devoid of accountability. It's not. I'm just gonna go and do a bunch of this stuff at the same. So you have to be able to prove it which is I think where brand tracking helps and there's other ways as well. Brand search, you know, you can still test incrementality in some ways. But I like it should all be tied to business objectives. But, but you know, on the other end of that you also can't hold it to the same accountability. Like it might not be a ROI metric, it might be, you know, something else that's less, I don't know, I don't want to say subjective but you.

[Connor Roland]

Know what I mean, it's a softer science for sure. Yeah. Like we're typically talking about driving incremental profitable return on ad spend and it's going to be really hard on any even medium term time frame to like prove out that brand marketing does that. And that's why it's your point. It's like, yeah, okay, it's $0.30 per incremental move to consideration or whatever. Right. Like that's so you don't know when that turns into revenue over time. But does it help you justify, hey, 8% of my budget is going to go to channels that do this and I'm gonna have confidence that that's building brand or that's that's actually generating latent revenue over time in our stores and on.com and like in all these ways that are going to be harder to attribute. I think that seems extre, extremely reasonable and at some point I think brands hit that where they, they, there's no way around it. Ridge is in the same bucket where it's like as we expand in retail, as more of our business moves to Amazon, we are naturally gonna have to move upper funnel and we want the people who are in Best Buys to already be aware of us when they're shopping for their gifts for dad. And that that sort of marketing is just going to look way different. Oh, totally.

[Cody]

And that's why most, again, most of beauty is in Sephora and wholesale. And that's why most of beauty is influencer and brand stuff. Because there is no direct click purchase, you know.

[Connor Roland]

Right.

[Cody]

And so as, yeah, we're, we're, you know, hopefully we'll have 25 to 30 stores by the end of next year. Like, yeah, that, that stuff just becomes even more important.

[Connor Roland]

Okay, perfect.

[Cody]

One thing on that I do know, and this is kind of cool for us. I do know and I'm working with it with House. Hopefully I can say it and Olivia won't get me in trouble, won't be mad at me, but that they are starting to work on actually running, being able to run GEO holdouts based on adding more upper funnel stuff. Because right now you get, and it's obviously super valuable and you need it, but you get revenue. You get, you know, you get, you know, incremental customers, incremental new customers. But how cool would it be to be able to do the same things and use the same methodology across YouTube and Google and TV to say, like, hey, this was my cost per search, my cost per incremental search. And I guess you could even back that out into a, you know, what is a search worth to you? And then you could be like, all right, cool. Like our upper funnel spend maybe should be more on TV than on YouTube because, you know, we get more efficient incremental searches there.

[Connor Roland]

Like, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it'll be a, it'll be a super interesting time. Well, I feel like that's a pretty good jam and it'll be a good segue. So Jonathan McKenzie's coming on. We're going to talk TV. They've got an extremely cool brand. They're across a bunch of retailers and on Amazon. And I think they'll have a lot of cool stuff to say about brand marketing and how it's helped the Turtlebox. So we'll go there. I don't know how to transition here.

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All right, we've got a special guest. Two special guests here today. This next segment is sponsored by Tatari. We've got Austin Santino, client development manager at Tatari, returning guest. Austin, thank you for coming on.

[Austin Santino]

Thanks for having me back on, guys. I'm excited.

[Connor Roland]

100% awesome. And two, I'm super stoked. One of, one of my, I'd call it a newly favorite brand. They are top of mind for me pretty frequently. We've got Jonathan McKenzie, co founder of Turtle Box Audio. Jonathan, thanks for coming.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Thanks for having me. I'm excited 100%.

[Connor Roland]

So we want to talk TV, we want to talk creative. I'd love to get a brief overview. So Jonathan, I don't know if everybody's going to be familiar with Turtlebox. Can you give us a brief, you know, the brief history of the company, what sparked the idea for Turtlebox and where are you guys at today?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah, absolutely. I'll keep it brief, but I'm one of four founders. My partners and I are best friends. We've been friends for, I don't know, 20 years. And if you go back in time to 2011, we all moved in together. We were roommates Shortly after we moved in together, one of my partners, Will Bradley, he convinced all of us to buy an old sailboat together. And so we.

We. We bought this old 1972 Ranger 29 foot sailboat. I think it cost us like $9,000 and split it four ways. And we thought we were kings. I mean, you know, we were weekend warriors. We all had good corporate jobs back then. And. And so Friday afternoon, roll around, and we'd bug out and head down to Galveston Bay and go sailing. And the one thing our old boat did not have was a stereo. And if you kind of rewind in your minds to 2011, 2012, the portable speaker business mostly didn't exist back then. There was a few things out there. None of them were engineered specifically for the outdoors, specifically, you know, kind of a waterborne environment. And so we had kind of bought and broken everything that existed, and nothing was cutting it. And so back to Will, the guy who convinced us to buy the boat. He is kind of the quintessential, like, I gotta have music with me everywhere. And he had kind of been dreaming up this little speaker. We've got the original one in the front of our office. I actually wish I had it here with me. That would have been a good prop. And he kind of tells the three of us like, hey, guys, I think. I think we can build this little speaker, and we'll put this thing here and this thing here, and it'll be waterproof, rugged, and loud. And we're like, man, that sounds great. Let's build it so we can have music on our boat. Like, that sounds super fun. So the four of us build it. The question we get asked all the time is, which one of y' all is the engineer? And we say, none of us, and we kind of laugh that, like, all four of us kind of make one engineer. It's proof that you don't have to be wicked smart to start a company. And.

And so we build this thing, and it works. And it works, like, really, really well. And we take it everywhere with us. And, you know, again, if I had the original one in here, you would notice something about it. And it doesn't say turbo portal box. And you were on it. And that's because the idea for the business came about a year after we built the speaker. So truly born out of portional need and desire. And we took it with us everywhere for about a year. And after that year, the four of us are kind of hanging out in our backyard drinking beer one night, and I'm. I'm I had been thinking about our speaker a lot and its possibility as a business. And I pitched the guys on, hey guys. What? I think this speaker might be a business. Would y' all want to start a company together? And we were all, you know, youngish and single at the time and had good corporate jobs and, and it was kind of a no brainer. We were like, oh man, that sounds like a blast. Let's do it. So, you know, cheers. And we're going to start a business together and it's going to be great.

About 30 seconds later, you know, somebody's like, well, what are we going to call it? You know, and, and Reagan, one of my other partners, I mean like, without missing a beat, he goes, let's call it Turtlebox. And we were all like, dang, that's pretty good. Like, let's call it Turtlebox. We kind of cheers again and the rest is history. And you know, look, we didn't quit our jobs. You know, that really kicked off about a six year period of time where we got our masters in, in kind of product development, engineering, supply chain, all of these things. And it took us a long time to get to a commercially viable product which we launched in 2018. So you know, really inception of the business is kind of 2011, 2012, and then product that was ready for the market came out in July of 2018. That was our first generation speaker. And that's kind of where we started to learn about digital marketing, advertising in general, content creation, all of this stuff. Right, that we're now pretty good at.

And it wasn't until 2020 that we all started to transition and come to work for the business. We were the first four employees of the business and it was quite amazing what happened when the business received full time leadership and stewardship. By 2022 we launched our second generation speaker. So still a one product company, but now we're onto our second generation product which was significantly better, more rugged, durable layout, waterproof, all the things.

And so 2022 is a big needle mover and that's where a lot of our growth really started to kick in. And so over the last few years we have just seen truly like legitimately hyperbolic growth in a way that's pretty humbling. And so, you know, now we've got about 80 people on the team and you know, we're a very, very healthy business and very thankful and just trying to do the next best thing. Oh, and, and we're a three product company now. I'm sorry. Like this past year we launched Our second and third products, which was a big thing for us, kind of Moving from a one product company to a three product company was.

Literally not three times more complicated. It was like 50 times more complicated for us.

[Connor Roland]

So totally love, love the backstory. I feel one of the reasons I like you guys, I do feel Ridge and Turtlebox are like kindred spirits a little bit. Yeah, yeah, there's, there's some best friend origin stories. Our, our CEO and I were living together for a bit, so we don't have nearly as cool of a story as the, the sailboat. So you guys got us beat there. But, but still pretty good. So one of the things. And then this will transition nicely into like, the content approach for tv. But you guys are obviously very differentiated. You're built for a very specific audience. The speaker space is relatively crowded. I feel like you guys took a very novel approach to like, audio equipment. So maybe you could talk a little bit about when you realized, like, you're, how did you find the content approach to like, meta ads that worked and like, what did that look like over time? And then when did you begin, you know, testing into tv?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah, good question. And yeah, it is a crowded space at this point. You know, it wasn't when we started and you know, I think it, it does start with the product for us. And it was, it was like, hey, look, because we are not geniuses and because we are not engineers and because we do not come from a consumer products background.

It was really our philosophy to, hey, like, we just want to find the lowest common denominator for all things that make this product great. And so for us, that was just, let's keep it simple. Like, this is not going to be a smart speaker. This is going to be a dumb speaker. We want to make it. And we say this a lot like, like we want our grandmothers to be able to use this product, you know, and so this just needs to be very simple. And we're going to do very simple things extraordinarily well. We're going to create a reliable, high quality product. We're going to attach it to a great id, a good design, something that's aesthetically pleasing, and then we're going to attach a great brand to that. And so that's kind of our, like, ultra simple strategy for what allows us to now go create great content and differentiate ourselves. So I think by the product alone, we have already found differentiation because most, most portable speakers are designed around, you know, how complicated something could be and how new and, and, you know, technologically you know, mind blowing. It could be. And we're like, no, no, no. We're just going to do a few things really, really well. And so that starts out some of our differentiation. Then you bolt on kind of. It starts with who we are, you know, like. And I think somebody told me a long time ago, like, you know, in the consumer product space, never build a product that you are not first and foremost, the core consumer of that product. And so the four of us are the consumer of our product, and we are all different, but all similar in a lot of ways. And so when we started out, we were like, well, what do we like to do? You know? And we were like, well, we're just some good old boys from Texas. Like, we like to hunt and fish and be outside, so let's start there, you know? And we received some advice and some wisdom from. From Ryan and Roy Cedars, the guys who started yeti, and they become great friends of ours. And so they. They supported that. They were like, yeah, that's a good strategy. That's basically what we did. So, you know, probably work. And so that was, again, a way for us to just be different, you know, and.

It goes all the way, even into our dealers, not to bypass content, but it was like, hey, if we're going to focus on a core consumer that is mostly interested in getting outside and hunting and fishing, where, quite frankly, like, you really don't need to listen to music when you're hunting. And so there's kind of an interesting, like, almost provocative nature to that. You can. When you're fishing a lot of times when you're on the boat, it makes a whole lot of sense. But there's kind of like a. We get asked the question a lot like, why hunt like wife? And we were like, man, because there's community that exists around those. Those pursuits. And so, yeah, I don't need a speaker when I'm sitting in a tree stand looking for whitetail. But, man, after that, when I'm back at hunt camp, sitting around a campfire, drinking coffee with my buddies, like, oh, man, fire it up, you know? Totally. And so then that translates into the sales component, which would be, you know, we built our. We started as a D2C brand, but, you know, we. When we got into wholesale, it was like, hey, we're gonna build our wholesale book of business on the backs of, like, mom and pop specialty boutique big doors. We're not building it on the backs of big box retail. And our first retailers were what we call hook and bullet stores. Like they were guys selling ammo and fishing lures. And so there was no competition in those stores. It was like you'd walk into your favorite hunting and fishing store and it'd be like, I'm here to buy some fishing lures. What is that? Oh, that's a turtle box. It'll make your life better when you're at hunting or fishing camp, you know. And so there wasn't 14 other speakers on their shelf. It was just us kind of out of place in a way. And that's a huge part of our success story that did set us apart. Does that answer your question?

[Connor Roland]

100 yeah. Yeah. No, that. That point of differentiation, both at the product level, I think is a good point. And then like who you're speaking to and how you're speaking to them, I think is what sets Turtlebox apart and what makes like, you know, the meta ads compelling or whatever else.

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I'm curious. Jump into the the TV portion now. Not the portion, but Austin. I'm curious. When you see a brand like Turtle Box, I clear intended audience that they're speaking to. There's a lot of context, there's a lot of community Like Jonathan mentioned, what do you think makes them such a strong fit for TV as a channel?

[Austin Santino]

Yeah, great question. I think, number one, it's, it's a specific customer, but like Jonathan said, it's very different. And one of the, you know, greatest things that Jonathan and his team do is put together creative that really builds around community and it tells a story. Right. And TV's the best place to tell a story, in my opinion. And so the chance to just kind of use some modern technology to go out and put these really diverse creative assets out in front of the right type of people.

Makes it a very natural fit.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Awesome.

[Connor Roland]

So I'm, I'm curious on the community point. You guys run golf focused ads on golf programming, you run baseball ads on baseball, network football creatives during college football, things like that. We've got bowl season coming up. Jonathan, what's your guys's approach to just content creation? I'd love to know, like, are you guys doing a number of productions? How does this, like, volume of content get produced to be running across all these networks in a context that is going to be familiar to the audience?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah, man, great question. And I'd be lying if I didn't tell you it is an ever evolving process. You know, for a company like us that's, you know, this. We're about to close our fifth year.

With over 200% growth annually. It's like there is nothing here that is constant, you know, so it is always changing, we're always learning. I think that's a big part of our team. And what I encourage, particularly on the marketing and creative side, where I spend a lot of my time is just, you know, we've got to stay flexible and adaptable. So on the content creation side, it does start with community. I know we're using that word a lot, but for us, what started as two communities, Hunt and Fish, has grown into, you know, probably closer to like 10 communities that we really want to speak to. And by speaking to those people, we're both telling them that, like, hey, our product inserts well into who you people are. We think it's going to elevate your pursuits and the things that you love. And so, and, and we love seeing people gather. Like a big, a big part of kind of the ethos of Turtlebox and why we feel like we deserve to exist is because we think that TurtleBox unites two things that all people universally enjoy. Being outside and listening to music. And if we can get more people off the couch and, you know, outside doing fun things with Their friends or family and music can be a part of that. Man, that's like, we succeeded, you know. And so as community has grown as our community teams, and we have a community manager over all of these verticals that we call them. And so we use those communities, the ambassadors that fall within those communities, and we really refer to them as ambassadors rather than simply influencers because we treat them as a relationship. A lot of these people are not natural content creators, but they are what we would consider to be like experts in their field or the tip of the spear and in their sphere of influence in a very real and authentic. I hate that word now because it's just such a buzzword. I, I need to get a thesaurus out and find a better word. But. And so we use our community team as a driver for our content. And we, we like to talk about what we call here is circular investments. And so if, if my creative director goes and films a commercial and doesn't use an ambassador from our community team, like, he kind of didn't do his job. Right. Right. And so if we're like, hey, Jason, who's our, who's our creative director? Hey, we, we, we need a, we need a new piece or, you know, whatever, like fishing season and, and in spring, like, like his first job is to go talk to our fishing community manager and say, hey, we've got a need. Who are we featuring? Where are we doing it geographically? Where do we need to grow fish? You know, hey, we've got the Gulf coast fairly well saturated. What are we doing with like, inland, you know, freshwater bass fishing? You know, and him and our creative, him and our community team will work together to highlight a person of interest and a geography. And, and that's kind of how that starts, if that makes sense.

[Connor Roland]

It makes total sense. And we talk about that a lot on the show. I think it's a super interesting way of creating content, kind of like a bottoms up approach. So, Austin, I'm curious, how does Tatari approach kind of like the media planning for, for a brand like Turtlebox that wants to be shown across a different. A bunch of different sports? You're creating a bunch of different.

Pieces of content. They want to be appealing to all these different people. What's Atari's role in that?

[Austin Santino]

Yeah, absolutely. So I think our job is really to use high signal channels like connected tv, to go out and test across different types of content, whether it be sports, outdoor, et cetera, at a lower budget entry point. Right. And because connected TV is so measurable, we test across we can give a specific example even. Right. So if we test across connected TV on MLB programming or targeting MLB viewers, if we measure it and it works, that's what's really going to give companies like turtlebox the confidence to go out and take a bigger swing.

[Cody]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

So maybe a live MLB playoff game or college football, etc. So it's really about finding a way to test conservatively, validate things and then really help give them the confidence to go out and tell the story to.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

A wider group of people. Awesome. And they've done a good job of that.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah. You know, we at Ridge I this very self serving question because like we just saw a bunch of success with MLB and I think one of our biggest opportunities for next year is. Exactly. And I was just talking about this with my team. One of our biggest opportunities next year is doing more sports and then also doing more like context aware spots. Like we were just running our evergreen stuff during the MLB playoffs. I'm like, oh, if we could just like make that much more of a connection between like the baseball lifestyle and you know, the Ridge Wallet or some of our other complimentary products. I just think there's like a lot of meat on the bone. There's there. And that's why, Jonathan, I asked you about the content production because we have to figure out how to do that. How are we building that out in a, in a thoughtful way across all these different sporting events?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah, I agree.

[Connor Roland]

Okay, Austin, I've got one more for you, a little more tactical.

What would your strategic recommendation be for brands who are trying to figure out how to budget between streaming and linear?

[Austin Santino]

Absolutely. So I think when you're first starting out, streaming is a great way to validate the channel, whether it's content audience, publisher or creative, et cetera.

[Connor Roland]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

It's very measurable. It's going to look and feel more like digital to a standard marketer.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

For one of your listeners. And then as you grow, linear is a very cost effective way to extend your audience. Right. So as you start to expand past, you know, very niche targeting types start to lean into bigger moments, that's what's really going to help you speak to audiences that, that maybe you don't really get a chance to speak to on digital. And then over time as you're thinking about how to really divvy up the budget between both, we always guide brands to maybe not even think about segmentation.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

It's find the most efficient way to reach your audience and then just optimize within them because they're both video.

[Connor Roland]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

When you when I'm at home, I don't say let's watch linear, let's watch streaming. It's just it's big screen and it gives brands like Jonathan a chance to tell the great story.

[Connor Roland]

Yeah, so so I'm curious about this too. Ridge, longtime Tatari customer We almost exclusively spend on Linear, but for brands onboarding today your recommendation is to your point earlier, starting with TTV for the measurement for the clarity you're identifying what sort of programming works, what are the audiences you want to speak to and then you can kind of get scale and cost effectiveness via Linear.

[Austin Santino]

Absolutely. And you know it's oftentimes brands will start with streaming because it gives us more more chances to play with targeting.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

Carry over some learnings from other channels. But they'll still include linear early on if it's contextually relevant.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

Like a lot of Jonathan's creatives lend very well to things like the outdoor channel, etc.

[Connor Roland]

Totally.

[Austin Santino]

So linear might make make sense as well.

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[Connor Roland]

Jonathan for. For 2026. I'm sure you guys are thinking a lot about it. Do you have any iterations on the strategy or places where you'd like to go with your linear and. And streaming channel?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah, I mean, you know, like I said, I mean, things are always changing here.

You know, fundamentally, I don't think there's anything massive that's changing. Like, you know, I think the platforms we're on are good. And, you know, the way that we're executing on those platforms is really good.

Where I see, like, we're learning, you know, particularly when it comes to tv. And I think we have done well on tv, but we've also made some mistakes in that. Like, there's been plenty of times where all of a sudden we feel like, wait, are we kind of using TV like, performance? Like, are we feeding it too much creative or, you know, like, you know, like, I always make the example of, like, like, you know, you. You take Toyota for somebody, right? And Toyota will run the same commercial on TV for like a year. You know, like, they're not constantly changing their creative. Like, they are driving home a message with a freaking jackhammer for 12 to 18 months. And they spent, you know, $5 million on that content or whatever, right? So they got to get their money back.

I want to see us get better at that. Like, that's. That's a real goal of mine. And, and, you know, the way that I'm leading our. Our team is in the way that we think about creative is because historically, right, like, we haven't been TV investors, we've been performance investors. And so performance investing is like day trading, you know, and it's like, hey, we got this new piece. Like, throw it in the algorithm. Let's see what it does. Oh, it did good. Okay, great. Feed it. Oh, it didn't do good. Kill it.

[Cody]

Okay.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

You know, and it's like, you know, it's. That's. That's fine in that space, but it. That's not the right way to do tv. So, like, that's one thing that I want us to see us do a lot better is be really, really intentional about the creative that we send to tv. And to Tatari, you know, I'm famous around here for, like, I love, you know, shooting for the moon. So, like, literally, when I was in la, I don't know, a couple months ago, meeting with Tatari, I was like, okay, guys, how much is that 20, 27 Super bowl commercial going to be?

[Connor Roland]

You know, I was just gonna make that joke. I'm like, when are we getting the turtle box? Super Bo had?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

And my president was sitting across the table, and he was like, I literally opened the meeting with that. And he was like, I cannot believe that that was your first question. You know, that's gonna derail the whole meeting, you know, And I was like, well, that's what I'm here to talk about. So, you know, so, yeah, I. I just see us doing things at a higher level. You know, we're constantly maturing. I think because of our growth, it's like, we have some maturing to do. We have some growing up to do. And So I see 26 being a big maturation year, executing at a higher level, being far more intentional about our storytelling and the type of creative that we are putting on tv.

[Cody]

Yeah, I was gonna ask about that. Like, I mean, I'm so impressed with you guys creative and the ambassador stuff. Like, it seems like you guys are shooting a decent amount. How often are you producing new concepts? Are you producing for just like, hey, we're gonna. We're gonna do a shoot with this ambassador. We're gonna get stuff across paid social, E comm. Social TV in one shot. Are you specifically going for tv? And how often are you, like, producing Thankful?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah. Great question again. It's evolving. I would say, like, historically, our content production model is very, like, highly collaborative. And what. What I would say Turtlebox has done a tremendous job of. And this is kind of a. I think y' all will get it when I say this. Like, we always want people to see that Turtlebox has friends, not money.

And, like, we have a lot of friends. Okay. And I'm just going to shoot you straight here. There are like two or three pieces of content over the last year or two that were some of the best pieces of content that we have. They were some of the best performers in our whole library. And we paid zero dollars for them, and we told nobody to do them. And, like, you know, how do I.

[Cody]

Get friends like that?

[Connor Roland]

Any of those friends?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

It's unbelievable. It's like, literally, like, we've had college kids that are wildly talented literally produce things and like, email it to us as, like, hey, I Think you guys are cool. And I made this. And we're like, like, we're talking about it in a executive leadership meeting. We're like, did y' all see this? Like, this kid made this and sent it to us. We. Nobody told him to do this. And we're like, like, throw it up on the tv, you know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And now. So that's like one end of the spectrum. I don't want y' all to think that that's 100% of what we do. I'm just acknowledging that, like, that happens. And so on the other end, like, yeah, we have plenty of structured, professional, high production, you know, shoots. We probably do six of those a year, I would say, you know, where there's like massive deliverables, big creative team, and so you, you kind of put those as the bookends and then there's a bunch of stuff that happens in between. And so we, we like to consider ourselves to be very fast and light. Typically, like, like, I've been a part of some really high production stuff.

Not with us, like, with other companies. Like Amazon did a feature on us and no disrespect to Amazon, like, oh my God, I hated every second of it. Like, like, you know, it was like literally 50 people on set for a 15 second commercial. It was the most inefficient process I've ever been a part of. And so we don't like doing that. We, we typically never do that. We like to be fast and light. So we have a lot, like, we have a really great internal creative team that does accomplish a lot of, of content. And then we just have, we have a lot of friends like we were talking about. And then we have a lot of, with like an army of contractors of really, really, really great photo and video people that also edit a lot of their own stuff and they're constantly on jobs for us. So it's a mixed, mixed bag.

[Cody]

Connor, I feel like you guys are kind of similar. I feel like you guys have a team and then do a lot of shooting, but it seems like you can kind of like put, put a crew together if you, if you have an event or something like that you guys need to shoot. Is that right?

[Connor Roland]

I, I think we do an okay job of that. I, I'm, I'm envious of what Jonathan described. I think. Yeah, the, like, what we, we talk about tip of the spear a lot. I like that phrase. And I, I don't know, Jonathan, if you'd agree, but it feels like the six high production Shoots can kind of be tip of the spear content, really like aspirational stuff, high quality, cinematic, etc and then you have the, you can kind of build the universe around that. And I think that's a great approach. And Turtle Box comes to mind to Covas comes to mind. YETI comes to mind. These like fantastic outdoor brands that take that approach. And I don't feel, I feel Ridge can improve quite a bit there.

[Cody]

Yeah, we're, we're, we're trying to kind of like put together a crew. Like we have internal crew as well. We can do a bunch. And like even now that like I don't even have a shoot plan for, for TV or video, it's just like trying to assemble, you know, different freelancers, different agencies just for like have it ready for, for whenever it is. So I love that. I think that's, that's inspiration for both of us, 100%.

[Connor Roland]

Okay, cool. I've got, I've got one more for us and then one more for Jonathan Austin. For brands who see themselves in the Turtle Box story, strong product, loyal users. What's the first step in exploring tv?

[Austin Santino]

Yeah, it's a great question. I think Jonathan almost, when he was saying he was doing something wrong, I think he actually just made it a natural progression of starting to growing the channel.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

When brands first come to us, it really is about, we have to prove that it works.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

And if you can validate it first, that it's driving performance for the business. I think long term that's what helps you really start to invest and take bigger swings and think about the channel maybe a little bit more maturely like his, his team's starting to do now.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Right.

[Austin Santino]

I think the other thing is really focusing on control, transparency, et cetera, over, you know, and sometimes just convenience. They're very specific in some cases about the types of buys they're moving into and that's what allows them to get that really strong product fit within the program, et cetera.

[Connor Roland]

Right, Totally. All right. Yeah, I'll be taking notes from that too. Jonathan, you're ending us out here. You're going to close us out with this one high level question. We've got a bunch of brands that listen to the show. What's a single piece of advice that you'd have from the Turtle Box playbook that, that people should be considering or putting into action?

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah, man.

Excellent question. We could do a whole nother pod on that. We made a lot of mistakes.

You know, there's probably two things that I would want to leave people with.

The first is take small bets.

You know, when we started advertising in 2018, we kind of looked at each other and we were like, like, we don't know anything about this. So what amount of money can we lose today? You know, and it was like a hundred bucks, right? And so, all right, well, let's, let's, let's go spend a hundred dollars on meta and all right, we did that. Okay. We, we made 10 cents. All right, let's do it again, you know, and do it again. And do it again. And do it again. Right. And so I think that what we've done well, and what I do genuinely encourage other people to do is, is, is take small bets. Like, you can, you can overanalyze a lot of things to the point of never doing them, or you can assess whether, you know, I can do this. It aligns with a fail fast mentality, quite frankly, you know, where it's like, hey, look. And I love advertising from the perspective of what you can learn from it, like the data that you get back from it. So like, take a small bet, learn something, do it again. Take a small bet, learn something, do it again, change pivot, you know, course correct. Like when you take small bets, you always leave yourself margin to adjust and learn and do something different. And all of a sudden, you know, what started out as hundred dollar bets becomes, you know, much larger bets, you know, years later. And.

When we started doing Tatari, like, seriously, it was like, you know.

[Cody]

Those.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Money we were willing to lose and that was not small amounts of money, it was real dollars. But we were like, well, I remember when I got pitched on it, when my team pitched me on it, I was like, what are we going to learn if I spend this money and it fails? What are we going to learn? And they were like, here's what we think we're going to learn. I'm like, let's go do it. And we learned and it wasn't a total failure, it was a great success. Validated the brand in new ways that performance marketing can't, because anybody with a credit card can go performance marketing. So take small bets. Don't be afraid to take risk. Just take conservative risk. You know, don't take risk that runs you bankrupt. The second piece of advice is like, man, surround yourself with good people. You know, we have the benefit of. I'm one of four founders. You know, a, a partnership is the hardest ship to sail, no doubt about it. But if I was the only person running this company, it would have died a long time ago. And a massive part of our success is the fact that there are four people at the helm. We are all four very different.

We have made mostly every meaningful decision in the history of this company through unanimous decision of four. And while that has been inefficient and slow at times, it has resulted in us making almost zero poor choices. And if I'm in control, I promise you, I will make some poor choices. So if you are a soul founder, man, get yourself some advisors, get yourself some wise people around you. If you're a co founder, man, wrestle with your co founder. You know, like that wrestling is good and productive and it will lead you to good places.

[Cody]

Love it.

[Connor Roland]

I think that's sage advice. All right, well, Jonathan, Austin, thank you guys for coming on.

[Jonathan McKenzie]

Yeah, man, thank you very much.

[Cody]

Thank you, guys.

[Connor Roland]

All right, that is a wrap on our linear and streaming segment sponsored by Tatari. Thank you again for Austin and Jonathan for coming on. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Prescient after Cell and Revo. Make sure to, like, subscribe, share with your friends and family and we will see you again next week.

[Cody]

Thank you.