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GoodRx’s Wild West Brand Marketing Bets Big On Audio
01:04:43
He became CMO of GoodRx in just five years, then started taking big swings: reviving nostalgic jingles, building an audio-first brand strategy, and proving that sound can punch through today’s visual overload.
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- [00:00]
A
I know. It's like a cowgirl.
- [00:01]
B
That's what I'm talking about.
- [00:02]
A
On a prairie dog. That's all I know. So I'd love to hear what is this campaign?
- [00:07]
B
This guy over here who we call Dusty Petas, the prairie dog, he's playing a guitar and he's singing stories of customers. I've seen a thing or two, but these prescription prices.
- [00:22]
A
You see a lot of CMOs coming into a company essentially doing a rebrand and throwing away all their brand equity. And we've been seeing it with a lot of pretty large companies lately. Jaguar was one where I think they took the Jaguar, Jaguar off of their name now. And I was like, oh, no, I like the little Jaguar.
- [00:36]
B
So many people know our colors. So many people know our logo. We've put more than a billion dollars into this brand. Goodrx is the leading US Destination for consumers to save money and time on their medication. I don't want to do anything to damage that credibility, but what I do want to do is I want to add elements that make it stand out more and build more elements so they see other things in addition to what we've already established.
- [00:59]
A
If I gave you a million dollars, what marketing campaign or strategy would you run?
- [01:04]
B
I would do more audio. We're overloaded from a sensory standpoint with visual stimulus. But with audio, you have one thing. The sound going out of a speaker into your ear. With agentic tools, what they can trust. Oftentimes they're in areas that brands don't control. Local news, local journalism, micro journalism, influencers, forums on the Internet. We've seen a lot of data on the power Reddit.
- [01:25]
A
You can't just do everything from under your brand account and everything on your website. You need to have outside sources saying, hey, Goodrx. This was actually helpful to me.
- [01:34]
B
When new technology comes around, you have to be mindful of where brand discovery.
- [01:37]
A
Might change in five years. Becoming cmo. I'm sure a lot of people listening are like, ooh, how do I become CMO in five years? What did it take to become CMO that quickly? Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Trends. This is your host as always, Stephanie Postols, founder and CEO of Mission.org today I'm really excited because we've got Ryan Sullivan joining the show. He's the CMO of GoodRx. Ryan, welcome.
- [02:04]
B
Stephanie. Thanks so much for having me. Delighted to be here.
- [02:07]
A
Yeah, I'm excited to have you. You know, when I first met you, I was like, man, he thinks very differently than a lot of other CMOs that I've had on, a lot more quantitative, just very differently and which we're going to get into all of that in the interview. But first I do want to hear about your background in five years becoming cmo. I'm sure a lot of people listening are like, ooh, how do I become CMO in five years? What did that look like? Like, how did you make sure that the team knew of you and they were very aware of what you were doing? And like, what did it take to become CMO that quickly?
- [02:35]
B
Yeah, it doesn't always seem that quick when you're in the day to day. So I'd have to say I appreciate a lot of the opportunity I've been given when I joined the company. Life happens kind of while you're making plans in some sense. So I'd never entered the role thinking or with an objective to be the CMO in five years. I. I have had goals in my life to, throughout my professional career to reach certain milestones. And it was something that I considered pursuing, assuming it was in a place where I really felt that the organization would be receptive to my way of doing business. I think that's something that's often overlooked for people professionally is it's not just find an opportunity, any opportunity, and continually gun for the top. You have to really find a place that, you know, there's an alignment, there's a natural rhythm between the way you view the craft and the work, what the organization needs and skills. Not everybody's skills are compatible with every organization. So I was fortunate and lucky in that regard that I landed in a place where in that time that I was there, I started in a classic growth marketing role, which was pretty straightforward considering my background was in performance marketing. The company had just IPO'd. They wanted someone to come in and really look at a lot of the marketing they'd done over about a decade, more than a decade or about a decade and and up, level some of the approaches on measurement, especially on the digital advertising side, and then fine tune some of the broader channel mix and get into some other areas the business wasn't pursuing. And so, you know, that all worked really well. And from there I was able to kind of build some new capabilities in teams. And my areas that I oversaw just naturally increased from there, culminating with the opportunity to step into the leadership role for the team at large.
- [04:12]
A
It feels like that would be a big shift from you coming in and then you've got this quantitative computer science background, growth marketer who probably thinks very differently, which we will talk about, like how it shifted. But what does it take to get that team on board and kind of following you into this new way of thinking about marketing?
- [04:28]
B
Yeah, the through line, I think in my career is that I spent a lot of time working on understanding the business. And Goodrx is a complicated one. It's not, you know, we're not selling a conventional consumer product on the Internet. And I'd done a lot of things in retail, I worked in financial services, I worked in telco, and I'd had a pretty wide array of different businesses I'd seen. But this type of business in healthcare is very unique. And so, you know, I invested a lot of time upfront to really understand the business. And I do think that helped me a lot in translating some of the aspirations of the organization into the field and the work and. And the results came along with that. And when you have results on your side and you work to make sure that you're aligning with the business objectives, it does help build trust. And trust is something that I continually reinforce with my team is a really important currency inside any organization. So I think establishing trust early on by understanding the business and investing time in that pursuit was. Was good. It's something I've always done, especially on the client side, working with so many businesses during that time. I would add that I did spend, and I know we'll get into this more, quite a bit of time on our measurements and how we viewed or established a common yardstick for judging marketing efficacy. That was not something that was well established when I came in. There was of course, many tools in use, but depending on who you asked and who the different channels that were being executed against, the approach was different and it made it a little bit more challenging to have a focused conversation around how much money should we spend, where should we spend those dollars, what do we think we're getting for it? And of course, I'm sure we'll get to this too. You can take that too far. And so I was always trying to make sure to strike a balance of not becoming a super quant that tried to take over marketing with a bunch of numbers right out of the gate. So, yeah, those things I think helped me get some footing and earn the opportunity to expand my remit over time.
- [06:25]
A
Yeah, we are going to have a whole piece of the measurement piece because I do think it's very fascinating how you think about it. But first, I think it would be good if you could talk about what is GoodRx for anyone who doesn't know, like, what do you all do? What is this company?
- [06:37]
B
Yeah. So Goodrx is the leading US Destination for consumers to save money and time on their medication. It was founded in 2011 under this kind of novel idea that you can save money if you often pay directly at the pharmacy instead of using your insurance, which of course is very useful to people that didn't have insurance or between jobs or on some sort of other plan with like a high deductible. But it also, over time, just given the rising cost of prescription medication, the United States is commonly used by people with insurance. In fact, 90% of our customers do have insurance. And we have a pretty good cross section of the US that use our service. So if you think about like an ota, like a kayak or Expedia or something like that, different mechanisms where the prices come from. But a consumer can go on our website or download our app. They can put in the name of a prescription they're taking, like atorvastatin, and they can see the price of that medication at different pharmacies in their area. And often if they present our, what we call a coupon to the pharmacist when they're going to pick up their prescription, they'll save money on that. Over time, GoodRx has had about 85 million customers, and we've saved people over 85 billion. And last year we've had about 30 million consumers use the platform. So it's, it's quite large and a lot of people know about it, and it's a great tool for anybody who wants to save.
- [07:58]
A
Amazing. Okay, so for Goodrx, I mean, they were a company that was known for direct marketing. Correct. Like, when they started, that was their strategy, and then now it's shifted. What kind of, what kind of strategy when it comes to marketing would you say the company is operating under or is focused on?
- [08:15]
B
When I came to Goodrx, I would say that there was a lot of principles of direct marketing and the way they built, you know, custom measurement tools for every channel that really kind of tried to identify early signs of signal. You know, are we getting a response from an ad we're buying? And then looking at LTV to CAC as a standard across all the channels, and then even starting to get into kind of what the marginal returns would look like based on the current investment levels. So, of course, every dollar you spend incrementally in a channel doesn't have the same return profile as you saturate a channel. Things tend to get less efficient, not more. They did have a very deep focus on that kind of thing. I wouldn't say they were a hundred percent do. I was delighted to work with somebody who was their chief brand officer at the time. So the company recognized that building a brand around what they'd done and really formalizing the reputation the company had built in the space was important for the business. So it wasn't a total quantitative doctor exercise. But I would say more in that direction. I'd say today the strategy is more balanced in the sense that we still apply a lot of the principles of understanding fundamental returns in channels. But we're not solely guided by one standard set of metrics per channel. We've adopted a measurement framework that's more holistic and looks at both the short term effects as well as the lagged effects of marketing. We've integrated, I'd say more marketing, conventional marketing, research theory and historical things that have proven to be efficient over time into our practice. So we don't just focus only on like, you know, what's the ROI of paid search and an LTV CAC formula versus that of streaming video. We are a little bit more balanced and we take a longer term look over the return of the, of the investment as well and we've leveled up the precision of that too. Also the type of campaigning and advertising we're doing itself is less instructional. Early on in the company's history we really had to because it's so unique. We had to introduce, you know, what is GoodRx? How does this work? You can compare price of prescriptions across at different pharmacies and that's not something that, you know, is household knowledge. It wasn't something common. So over time we've been able to kind of build out a broader creative platform. We actually just launched some new creative very recently here in early September. That in itself was a, is a big step and a new direction for the company overall. So I'd say we've evolved from being schooled and where you probably ought to be early in a startup's journey, being very mindful of your money in money out equation. And then we've taken a longer term view, a more holistic view of the funnel and more robust and broad creative messaging and adopting more classic brand building techniques. It's a complement a lot of the data driven ones.
- [10:56]
A
Yeah, amazing. So yeah, let's dive into the brand building piece because I think that's very fascinating for the campaign that you were just mentioning is that the savings wrangler.
- [11:04]
B
Campaign that Is the Savings Wrangler? Yes.
- [11:07]
A
Okay, so I want to talk about that one because one you did it. A lot of it was in house. Right. Like it wasn't some big agency that had the vision. Was it a lot of your in house marketing team and of course with some partners. But is that how you guys created this campaign?
- [11:21]
B
That's correct. Yeah. We in house means can be a lot of different things to different teams depending on, you know, the size of your enterprise, how long you've been doing marketing. But in our case, in house meant that, you know, the beating heart of the campaign, the, the skeletal structure, the brand strategy, the briefing, the project management, the partners we sign selected, some of the production work, even a lot of the extra things we've built around the world we developed in the Savings Wrangler came internally and then we handpicked partners in the space that we wanted to work with to bring the best to bear for those individual elements. The idea, the creative inspiration of the Savings Wrangler was from a company that we work with called AD Like Objects. They're fantastic. And we went through the process of briefing. We had many ideas, I think more than 20 or even more. And I only I'd seen 20 so I assumed there were many more before they got to me. But from that we winnowed things down to pick the one that we really liked and then we worked, you know, hand in hand with them throughout the entire process to bring it to fruition. So that was in housing in our, in our case. And I'm very proud of the team, our internal team. I knew we had the mettle to do it. I felt very strongly that a business like ours needed to be in that leadership role versus having a classic AOR responsibility relationship where we outsource a lot of the end to end components of that type of campaigning to a comp to another partner or company and agency. I'm glad we did. It's turned out fantastic and we've gotten great reception from it so far.
- [12:53]
A
If you could describe the campaign for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. I haven't seen it visually, just. I've only read about it. I know it's like a cowgirl and a prairie dog. And that's all I know. So I'd love to hear what is this campaign?
- [13:04]
B
This guy over here who we call Dusty Peters the prairie dog. Yeah. So, okay, there's a. We can get into too a lot of the nuance of the campaign and some of the decisions we made. But if you think about the process of getting a prescription in the United States, it's not something that you kind of look forward to. Most people, I'd say, wouldn't. It's fraught with a lot of confusion. Sometimes things are covered, sometimes they're not. The price seems sometimes random. You know, the drug that was covered three months ago for a kid's inhaler is now 250 bucks. You don't understand exactly what happened. And those extremes of highs and lows in health care, the uncertainty of healthcare, the unpredictability, plus just the inaffordability of a lot of medications leave about a billion prescriptions at the counter every year, which is a crazy number, literally. Prescriptions that don't get taken home and someone should be using, a doctor prescribed them, of course. And so in that we've talked to consumers in focus groups, we hear it. And just in conferences I've gone to or people I talked to in the channel, doctors would describe this landscape as kind of the Wild West. It's unpredictable. You don't know what's around the corner. And there's all sorts of interesting characters as well in landscape. And so we adopted that ecosystem for the campaign. We felt it was a really nice backdrop and world to kind of convey this idea that it is the Wild west out there. You need help to navigate it. And that is where we kind of insert ourselves as a brand. The savings wrangler herself we think of as a fearless ally. That's something that came from brand strategy work we did at the end of last year. That's kind of our Persona, our archetype as a brand, as a fearless ally. And so we really wanted to bring that distinct element of our brand to life, to put her in that setting, to really advocate on behalf of consumers that are trying to navigate this uncertain land. And we also wanted to make this engaging. The brand evolution of GoodRx. Like, I kind of talked about this a little earlier, but we started from a place where we really needed to explain in a very instructive way, what is GoodRx. We showed maps with price points and that they. They change depending on where you go to the pharmacy, that not all prices are the same. New ideas to consumers. The next evolution of advertising was very much about trust. We'd heard feedback that this sounds too good to be true, or how is it possible that a company can take a drug that costs $300 and drop it to 60? What's the catch? You know, those types of things. And so we wanted to show that real people use these real Doctors talk about it and we used a lot of consumer voices. And so this next era of advertising is really meant to open up our aperture as a brand and find new ways of adding to our distinctive brand elements to be even more resonant and memorable. And so using mascots like the Wrangler herself or her trusty sidekick Dusty Pete really allowed to break through, in our opinion, the noise in healthcare advertising, a lot of the monotony in healthcare advertising to stand out in a distinct, unique way. So there's a lot of intentional decision making there that's built on a strong heritage of a brand and adding to it over time. And this is the latest chapter of that.
- [16:02]
A
So fun. So how, I mean, you said you think it's going well so far. It is going well so far. What are you looking at to gauge the success of this campaign?
- [16:10]
B
We are looking at a lot of different things to gauge the success of the campaign. In fact, I would give this advice to anyone who is launching new creative or kind of thinking about the platform or their brand and having a big moment for them, their team, the broader company and of course the leadership team or investors that are being kind of curious about what what's on the other end of this work. We set up expectations over kind of a short to long term time horizon. I've said this to the company in our all hands when we launched this work that we're not going to judge this success of this work in days and weeks. We're going to do it in months and years. It's a big commitment for us. It's something that our last creative platform exercise we'd done about three years ago. So we got a lot of value out of that. And so this will be with us for some time. And so in that architecture we're looking in the short term at things like what's just the creative response rate, what's the engagement look like? Are we seeing traffic throughput that we'd expect with that? That's not necessarily to judge. Like is the Wrangler campaign as a whole good or bad? It's really just to say is the creative treatment on the unit the way we brought that to life for that particular channel, resonating or working versus some of our benchmarks and those are useful short term metrics. We developed measurement and we can get into this about in specific areas like channels like video, we look at just response rates. When we air a commercial, do we see spikes in traffic on the website, in our app? Those are good short term signals. They don't you know, I wouldn't say those alone judge the efficacy of something, but again, those are short term signals that let us know when we've run similar commercials in the past for the same program, same time of year, what kind of response rates are we getting? So we have some comparables to in the midterm we're looking at things like sales, you know, short term sales pull through or midterm sales pull through in a quarter. Are we seeing the models we've established econometrically? Are we seeing performance that we'd expect to see with this new creative in market or is there divergence? And then over the long run we'll look at just macro sales lift awareness, aided and unaided and some of the other things that come with just studying a brand more qualitatively in the long run. So we're really a cornucopia of numbers and no one on its own is, will be used to make a macro decision on whether this is working for, you know, how well this is working for us. It will be different measurements at different times and place to really help us calibrate a campaign that we're deeply committed to.
- [18:32]
A
Yeah, that's very fascinating. Thinking about putting metrics into different buckets of time horizon. I'm assuming like some of them it's like, yes, we'll track this and we're not going to use it to make any decisions. Like we're not going to change anything. This is just one we're tracking over the next couple years versus these. If we see these not going well, we might want to look into a different channel or a different way of doing things, which ones are for the longer term horizon Because I don't hear as many marketers focused on that. It's much more focused on what can we do in 90 days, what can I see in 30 days. I hear this from some clients where they're like, what can I see in 30 days? And I'm like, whoa, that's very rapid to try and see something in 30 days. So what are these metrics that you're looking at for like three years that you're keeping tabs on?
- [19:13]
B
It's surprising. This might and I promise it's not a cop out answer. I do think many of the, many of the metrics have both short and long term horizons. Some you can't reliably say, did awareness grow aided and undated awareness? You're not going to know that within 30 days. You might be able to take a survey or get something quickly as a Pulse. You might be able to focus on a specific group of people in a test scenario, but I wouldn't read too much into that. The noise on that, the error bars and those methodologies are going to be quite large and so there's really not a lot to infer there. Conversely, I wouldn't necessarily look at, you know, the engagement rate of a Facebook ad three years out from the, from the launch date of the campaign and say, you know, so there's some sense of. I would say there's some sensible time boxing there. But I do think sales lift is something that you can look at in mid to long term and you should look at those things. Are you seeing the expected return in growth? Ultimately, you know, the goal, the reason we're doing this is because we want the business to grow. We want more customers to come in, we want more new people. We want folks that haven't used us in a while to raise, activate and not forget to use us with a new prescription or bring other people from the household into the mix. And so those are all things that we can see, you know, an acceleration of those of performance in those areas over time. Classically, the things that we'd want to study in a six months, you know, three, six months, probably more like six months out, plus is aided and unaided awareness. And then other things we do qualitatively within specific audience groups. We do a lot of work to bring in partners on the B2B side. And a central part of our business is to work with pharmacies in the United States and pharmaceutical manufacturers to help establish novel pricing for different pharmaceuticals, different medications that would. You'd pick up at a pharmacy. We love when we hear anecdotal feedback in the field. Someone saying, oh, I saw your commercial. Or they come up to us at a booth and they, they talk about the savings rate that they want. You know, one of these Dusty Pete plushies. Those are all really important signals that sometimes get lost in the sea of staring at numbers every day. So the feels on a campaign matter over time as well. Yeah, so I do, I think if I recap that in the summary, it's really. You can use a number of metrics, short, medium and long term. I don't think there's ones that are literally only useful in the long term. It's just some are more reliable, I'd say, in the long run, and some are more reliable in the short run. It's a, it's a continuum, not a discrete kind of binning of numbers.
- [21:39]
A
Are there any metrics that either you used to rely on, that you've just thrown out or that you see a lot of marketers relying on that you're like, that's not even a good number to look at anymore.
- [21:52]
B
I mean I have to probably say last touch attribution or last touch sales. But you know, the reality is that's a good metric for some things too. It's hard because metrics are like a double edged sword. There's a sharp one in facing in one direction that's really useful and powerful when it's, when it's being used in that, in that vector. But it has another side too and you got to be really careful. It's some of the same adage about your strengths. Your greatest strengths are also the rooting of some of your biggest weaknesses. So last touch sales, I would say probably because it's at the root of billions and billions of dollars of wasted money. Since we've been really, we've really kind of been driven by a digital evolution of advertising in the last two to three decades, I'd say it's probably most, it's at the root of most challenges I've seen. Working with clients or even within a company like GoodRx is really an over reliance on the immediate response of the happy path of a customer. Seeing, you know, searching something on Google and clicking on the ad and going to the website and you know, transacting or getting something, doing, taking the next step during the journey. And we say, well that's all the, that's where all the results are are. I think that's a classic challenge. Another one that frustrates me. It's more often than I find it helpful is just traffic to a website or an app For a myriad of reasons. The benchmarking data and the historical data on traffic. I've never encountered an organization either internally or externally where I'm confident that the traffic data from the start of the website being created to, or the app to the current present day has been consistent and used the same methodology. You find out you double counted something or there's been some sort of unique definition you've put on traffic. We only count visitors that haven't been on the website in the last 30 days. And then someone changes their mind three years later and it's someone who hasn't been on the website in 45 days and you lose that context. And so the signal quality of traffic as a metric becomes very unreliable and it's easy to oversteer and try to goose that number in the short term when you might be comping bad data or you might not be thinking about how to use traffic or in a more realistic and I think stable way for the long term. So I think that's another one that is tricky to use effectively.
- [24:13]
A
So when thinking about traffic, I mean, I'm sure you've seen all the posts around marketing and search Traffic coming from LLMs and AI overviews and all that. How do you think about letting those metrics influence marketing strategy right now? Like, do you actually think it's a big deal of these LLMs coming in and sending traffic in a new way, or is it not a big enough deal yet? Should you not even look at those numbers?
- [24:36]
B
What do you think you should look at those numbers? Anyone who wants to kind of stay up to date on what's happening in the way consumers are engaging with technology and the way they discover brands, businesses, how they transact, all those things are very important. They at a minimum create a set of questions or theories, hypotheses that probably warrant serious discussion about the integrity of the business in the long run if these things grow past a certain point. I think some of that fundamental analysis and systems thinking is important whenever you see big, small, medium things on the horizon that could disrupt the way consumers engage with businesses. And I think with LLMs, you know, the classic search first way of thinking of we're going to build this website, we're going to or this app, we're going to work to make sure our site is thoroughly indexed so people can discover it when they're searching for relevant topics. And then we're going to capture that traffic or we're going to pay for that traffic in an auction versus our competition and we're going to rely on that kind of fountain head or that fire hose of traffic and then we're going to convert it is, I think it's always kind of been at risk. It's not like that search itself has not changed in the last, certainly in my career, almost 20 years, it's changed tremendously from 10 blue links to knowledge Graph to a lot of other kind of quick answers and other formats that have led us down this path of what the industry would refer to as zero click searches. And so that's not a new thing. I think agentic tools are an acceleration of, of that phenomenon. So I would look at those things and where you're seeing traffic decline, you'd have to also decode why, what is the impact of that. Ultimately, just because someone doesn't go to your website that day doesn't mean the effect of being prominently Featured in an AI overview or in a result for ChatGPT or Claude or perplexity. Something like that is not useful to your brand. Again, it goes back to the idea of traffic than the misnomers of traffic that somehow when I see an ad, if I don't immediate, if someone doesn't immediately go to my site and try to buy something that it was ineffective. That's just not how people work. You know, of course you can pull sales forward and you can do things to kind of swoop in and get somebody who's in the slipstream looking for a prop quickly. But brand discovery is a longer term process. The reason someone is in market for a product is largely we can't, we don't always know why and it could be random, it could be for something totally out of our control. In fact probably largely out of our control. And so I Technology is just another place where you gotta lean into the things that are important for your business so you can stay be a brand that's discoverable in these new tools. But I wouldn't overemphasize like short term traffic implications for, for many brands just out of the gate I think that could be, that could lead you down certain paths where you're over steering or doing things that may provide short term band aids but not address the fundamental shift that's in the undercurrent of the evolution there.
- [27:27]
A
Have you all done anything different when it comes to thinking about discoverability? I mean because I think especially for a brand like yours, like you said, it's just because I'm searching and I don't click through right away doesn't mean I'm not possibly a customer like this. You have a brand that probably just needs to stay in my mind for a while. So when I actually need it I'm like oh, I think I know of this company that might help in this situation. Like that's probably how most customers find a lot of things. It's just remembering it. So like how. How are you thinking about this discoverability piece going forward?
- [27:57]
B
Well on that point, if I may add, I, you know that's a really important point you're making there that is missed in a lot of the newer marketing playbook. I think we trained a generation of marketers that marketing is open up your laptop, look at a dashboard of 100 metrics and make decisions four times a day to change everything. That's like a high frequency trading exercise. Sure. There's people on teams that do that and they're really good at it. And we want those people to be engaged in those elements of marketing to make sure that we're taking advantage of short cycle opportunity. But that's not marketing, that's not capital M marketing, that's not brand building, that's not creating a growth engine that's going to stand the test of time. And so for Goodrx, it's true that customers in our case are not many are not in market for our solution the first time they encounter Goodrx. Prescriptions are unpredictable. We don't necessarily know when, we don't know when someone's going to have a new diagnosis or they might be between refills or maybe their insurance status changed or their benefit with their plan design changed. A lot of those things are outside anyone's control except the businesses that are at play to create pricing at the pharmacy. And so the best thing we can do is to consistently wear in a message that Goodrx can save you time and money on prescriptions and say that a lot to quite a broad range of people because again, we don't know who might need our services at any point in time and establish trust, credibility and some sort of intention to use Goodrx or take it seriously when you have a prescription moment. And so we put a lot of attention on that. The second part of that is we do a lot of marketing, pretty much from the doctor's office all the way to the pharmacy counter and in between digital and not to make it really easy to use Goodrx when you have a prescription that you need. And so the effect of that, like longer term brand building and wearing an idea, complemented by the pursuit of making sure we're easy to discover and use in and around prescription moments is kind of the one, two punch that makes our marketing effective. At the end of the day, you're.
- [29:51]
A
Not only marketing to your future customer, but then you're also making sure that these pharmacies get it right. How much is your strategy focused on B2C versus B2B? Because my thought was like, if you get all the pharmacies on board, can't they just drive your entire business if they're just recommending this and showing people like, hey, you can either get this for cheaper or this, like, isn't there some kind of way that they could just do the marketing for you?
- [30:13]
B
That's true. Early on in the company's history, there were some things done to make sure healthcare professionals knew about it. Healthcare professionals, or HCPs as we call them, is Our kind of macro umbrella for pharmacists, doctors, PAs, nurses, really anyone in a health care setting. And they're our strongest advocates for sure. Word of mouth is one of the top ways people discover the Goodrx brand and we've cultivated that first by having a great product that works as high efficacy, saves people time and money. You know, doctors love Goodrx because if they can see that there's a great price point available in Goodrx and they can just send someone to the pharmacy to say look, don't bother with your insurance, it's a lot of paperwork. We need prior auths or step therapy. I'm going to be on the phone with your pharmacist for four hours and your insurance company arguing about whether this is covered or not. You can actually get it for less money than just if you just pay cash. When you have a product like that, it really, it delights a lot of the channel stakeholders. And so yes, we have great advocacy and word of mouth from doctors and doctors offices to really advocate and build credibility. And then we, we do invest time and energy in building relationships with those groups. You know, we go to those conferences, we do a lot of channel and field marketing for doctors and doctor's offices. We have, we've had people at different times wearing Goodrx, you know, apparel and going in and offering to put up cards or help train doctors office staff that might have question about how the product works. And so we put a lot of attention and time on that because they are such an important advocate for us.
- [31:39]
A
So we've talked a lot about brand building and I know you and I had a side discussion about big brands essentially doing a rebrand and throwing away all their brand equity. And we've been seeing it with a lot of pretty large companies lately. And I'd love to hear your perspective because you do see a lot of CMOs coming into a company, especially a legacy company, and their first thought is get rid of this out with the old time to bring in something new. And so I'd love to hear about how you thought about this coming into Goodrx or just in general when it comes to rebranding or not rebranding a company.
- [32:09]
B
I have a very strong opinion on this. But I'm sure there's exceptions and there's reasons why if I was in someone else's shoes, I might do something different. So I want to be sympathetic to the different leaders out there and their particular playbooks. In my opinion, I'm a steward of the Goodrx brand. I didn't create the brand. I am here to help maintain or ideally accelerate its inertia and momentum as a business. And I think I put a pretty big dent in it in a positive way since I've been here and plan to for the future. And when you have that responsibility, if you think of yourself as a steward of a brand, you'd have to really think long and hard about getting rid of anything that's sustained or gotten a brand of the way it is to the point it has today. And principally things like the logo, the word mark, the tagline, some of the iconic mascots or elements of the brand. To decide to say we're going to get rid of that and we're going to replace it with something else. That's a, that's a big step and I highly doubt that it's often warranted. It might feel good because you think, wow, we have a different. Our customers changed and they're totally different now and we're falling behind and we need a fresher brand that's going to appeal to a younger audience, I think is a classic dilemma. But young people grow up within the same household as their parents or older siblings and grandparents, and they discover brands from a young age. And so it's not like they'd never seen these logos before. And the bigger question is culturally, how do you appeal to a different audience? Let's not change some of the key indicators that allow you to identify that brand on a shelf of other brands or when you're driving down a highway and you see a sign or when you see a commercial, those, those elements are so important, the colors, those what, what some people would call make a brand salient are so important and there's sometimes billions and billions of dollars invested in them. So I don't really understand why you'd want to wipe all that out and start over. It. It seems like a needless exercise to me personally. And I, I'd caution anyone to make that their first priority when they enter into a role and really encourage them to think of this almost as a steward of a brand new and wanting to build momentum, not start over.
- [34:22]
A
Yeah, I was just looking, I think There was a LinkedIn post showing all these historic brands that were just wiping out their logos. I mean, I think like Jaguar was one where I think they took the Jaguar off of their name now and I was like, oh no, that, that's like what I would associate with the car. And I like the little Jaguar. So it was interesting just looking at all these screenshots of brands that are just throwing away like the history that's kind of built them and got them here.
- [34:48]
B
Yeah, I again, I don't want to comment on anyone else's decisions because I'm not in their seat and I don't know why they would have done the things they do. And I don't want to assume to know anything. I can only say from my perspective, if I was given, as I've been given, the responsibility to have a direct hand literally in what the brand looks like when it comes out the other end. I always think of, wow, we have this incredible asset. So many people know our colors, so many people know our logo, some people, so many people know the name of our business or some of the other elements that we've established over time. We put more than a billion dollars into this brand. I don't want to do anything to damage that credibility, but what I do want to do is I want to add elements tastefully to it that make it more resonant, stand out more and build more elements that, that are distinct and useful to consumers to resonate so they see, they know to look for other things in addition to what we've already established is important. So that's how I think about it. A lot of the data, because I am a data driven person, the academic research on this is pretty definitive that when you start moving the cheese on people, it often disrupts things, sometimes immediately, but more often than not over the mid to long term, you're starting over. And that's not to say that you shouldn't think, like I said, about evolving certain elements or maybe making certain types of modifications over time if it's not clear or some other things. But I would be really careful about doing those things because again, these are very, these are biological signals, things, colors, fonts, the way something feels, it's aesthetic. All of those things kind of resonate in ways that we understand and maybe don't. And so I wouldn't necessarily want to go change a bunch of variables just because it feels expedient or like a good thing to do because of modern flair or taste.
- [36:38]
A
Love it. So I want to get a little bit into the weeds and have like talk a bit about things that someone could be listening right now and experiment or try in their own world after listening to this. And so the first thing I want to ask you about is around channels or bets that you're making right now, like what are things that you're betting on? Maybe contrarian bets or places that you're looking into you know, having a marketing strategy at play that is not something everyone would be doing or things that you're seeing results in that you're like, this is pretty impressive and more people should know or be thinking like this.
- [37:11]
B
I'd like to think we're making a lot of bets or trying things even in stuff that we know works and is maybe considered to be old hat. But two things come to mind that I would specifically call out. One is audio. In our new work, the Savings Wrangler, we do actually have this guy over here, Dusty Pete. He's playing a guitar and he's singing stories of customers and their savings. And, you know, as a kid, I remember so many great ad campaigns. I grew up in the Midwest, so, you know, anybody who's a Midwesterner would know probably if I say Empire Carpet Luna or Victory Auto Records, like, there's certain sounds and I know the phone number. It's just like in my head, it's been an earworm that's gotten in there for decades. And I. Audio is such an interesting way to build nostalgia, recall and bring people to a different place. Especially since everything that's visual is. We're overloaded from a sensory standpoint with visual stimulus that I'm very interested in the effect of audio. So we're going to be doing more of that and I couldn't be more excited by some of the great work the team has done. So we're leaning into creating some compelling sounds and audio, some tagline that I. Well, we know works really well, and I'm really interested to see how that continues to mature for us in a portfolio. Audio. In another sense, we get a lot of latitude and great signal out of audio as an advertising medium, too. So traditional radio podcasting, these are things that you don't have to just rattle off a discount code like go to something, something, something.com podcast. And that's the only way you can determine that a podcast is valuable to an audience. That goes back to a point I made earlier, which is if you're studying the immediate effect of everything, you're probably going to be. You're probably only. You're probably not going to get the story right in the mid to long run on, like, its efficacy. We've seen a lot of good signal on audio, and I think we've weathered a lot of the inflationary effects of media better in audio than other areas. So I think that's another area we're leaning into.
- [39:09]
A
I want to apologize before you go to your next one, because I think this is a very interesting one to circle around because 1. I mean, only a couple CMOs have touched on this piece. But I do think I was just thinking about this the other day of like the in between moments when your buyers are listening and tuning in and they're like in the kids school pickup line, they're walking their dog, they're wiping down the counters at nighttime. Like they've got AirPods in, they're listening to podcasts, they're listening maybe to radio. Like, it's literally this audio format that is doing the incepting of messages and products and you know, hopefully in a storytelling capacity. And I think it's such an undervalued channel right now that like you said, video, I know video, obviously people love it. It is a very highly consumed format. But audio is one that I just don't think enough people are thinking about strategically and how to place messaging and stories with inside, you know, whether it be a podcast or radio, whatever it might be in a way that resonates but also sticks with that customer for a long time afterwards. Like, if it's done in a story, instead of just here's my ad, go to this website, like thinking of it like long term, how do I make sure that they know my brand and it's part of something that's interesting that they're listening to already.
- [40:18]
B
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. If you think about this in terms of again, confessions of a former engineer here. But if you think about a video asset, there's a couple different things going on there. You know, someone could say, well, what I'm seeing is not appealing to me and kind of tune out immediately. Or they, or before they know it, they're like, I've seen this commercial before and they're now like, you might have gotten some benefit of just the wear end of the logo and brand. If you've done it well, you might, you know, that's a, that's that matters. It's not a throwaway thing. But with audio you have one thing, the sound going out of a speaker into your ear. And so if you can do that in a way, especially if you're cognizant of the type of programming you're integrating with. So it feels like a more natural integration. It feels right for the setting. You have a lot of variability. And in my opinion, it's important to replace end with something strong and consistent so that you have that hook. The thing that makes me remember the Empire Carpet phone number growing up in the Chicagoland area, that's that's the thing that really kind of seals it together and creates a memory structure that can be really useful for a brand. So we're very excited about what we've done. I would encourage everyone to go look at these, these audio ballads. They're. They're awesome and I can't Excited to do a lot more of it.
- [41:29]
A
So good. Okay, tell me more. That was a great part. Now I want to know what else are you all doing?
- [41:33]
B
So we talked about AI earlier and I don't want to turn this into like probably yet another really long kind of AI theory discussion necessarily. I'm sure there's plenty of people more that have a lot more insight on that than I do or deeply working in that area as professionals. But when new technology comes around, you have to be mindful of how brand discovery might change and with agentic tools and my understanding of how they work and process information and really absorb and figure out how to give answers, how to cite a brand, what they can trust as to be authoritative or worthy of including in some sort of overview or answer to consumer A lot of that rests on kind of a network of signals, fingerprints of brands that exist all over the place and oftentimes they're in areas that brands don't control. Forums on the Internet we've seen a lot of data on the power of Reddit and that curated content. Whether it's right or not, it's a different thing, but it's there and it's perceived to be authoritative. Also the network effect of news, local news, local journalism, micro journalism, influencers, and even national mainstream media as well. All of those things are signal sources. And so we're putting a lot of attention into our PR and comms work. Is it as an integrated part of marketing? Not just integrated in the sense that we're trying to tell consistent stories to consumers and the business community at large about our business or the rhythms of our business. But really looking at our proprietary data, doing custom research, finding interesting ways of studying the challenges of prescription affordability and access in America. Unique instances or data on certain areas of therapies or efficacy guides even for people like what's some tips to avoid food allergies at a restaurant Stuff everything you can think of involving content to really get that out more and not just put it on our website and make hopes for it from an SEO perspective, people read the article, but syndicating that stuff and trying to get attention and coverage on it so that we can propagate that and get more of these signals out there to help further our ambitions of being highly discoverable in these forums. I do hope it turns into a visit. You know, if it does turn into a visit in terms of someone's like, oh, where did the source of this information come from? They come to our website, great. If they don't, and they just see GoodRx as a great source of and trustworthy source information about prescription savings for time and money, that's great too. And so we're, we're really focused on integrated comms and PR in our marketing engine and we're going to be doing all. Can you lean in there and push harder?
- [44:03]
A
Yeah. This is something I've talked about, talked a lot about, is like, the power of having content everywhere in different forms. Like, you kind of need to be showing up everywhere and having other people talking about you. Like, you can't just do everything from under your brand account and everything on your website. You need to have outside sources saying, hey, Goodrx, this was actually helpful to me. Or here's an experience I just had and it needs to be authentic and give these LLMs a chance to find information in a bunch of different sources. Because they're, they're scraping the transcripts of YouTube, they're looking at podcasts, they're looking on Reddit, looking at, like, very specific questions people are asking about, you know, their prescriptions. And yeah, just like, how do you show up as a brand in all these different formats and measure it and find the white space of, you know, where should I be showing up? Because I'm sure where you should be showing up is very different than a B2B SaaS company versus, you know, a CPG company. And so it feels kind of like the Wild west, like, similar to your new brand campaign.
- [45:02]
B
There's something in what you're saying there. And just the journey of thinking about these new technologies, I'm actually excited because I do think it's going to force a lot of return to some of the more traditional playbooks in advertising and marketing. I do think we've lost our way a bit in the digital era. And again, someone with me, I worked at a company called performics for 12 years. So performance marketing is deep, deep, deep in there. I think I've gone so far into it that I've come out the other end and I'm now maybe apologizing for some of the things I might have aped or pushed in the past. But we've been lulled into this idea that we have as marketing leaders a lot of control over how people Interact with our brands, that there's some primrose path. We create a happy path of build a really compelling ad. Does it have a hook, get a click through, go to the website, download the thing or transact, put something in shopping cart, you don't buy it. Re engage the person and, and try to create this almost like factory assembly line way of looking at the business. But in that I think we're being dishonest, that there's a lot of things that happen for reasons that give us the illusion of control, that it's really luck or timing or other forces that are at play. And we use correlation as some sort of causal signal to say, oh, this is what marketing is. If we believe that discoverability in the future is going to be a lot of automated agents scraping things online and on and offline for us and building kind of a knowledge graph of what is true, who's strong in a certain area, who has the best of this. And then for each individual it's going to be different because I'm going to have a dialogue with a tool for over a period of time where it ostensibly will know me and filter things based on my likes and preferences. We're definitely not going to have the level of control that, that we've come to think we do. And so we have to believe more in this idea of emergent order or an invisible hand or things just kind of developing around us. And the goal there is to then position yourself so you have a huge surface area as a business that what your business does is well understood and the structure of where you play and where you don't, what you're really good at and what you might not be, who, who ideally should consider using you when those things are really important to get right in the messaging and the fundamentals. And then you just have to kind of wear those things in over time and do them consistently enough that there's enough of these signals out there that the odds are in your favor that when someone is in a state of need or they're taking something seriously that you will be discovered. And that hopefully returns us to a simpler time where there was a more focused pursuit of advertising and in like a macro sense and not this like fidgety digital dog fight every day that I think people misconstrue as modern marketing.
- [47:44]
A
Yeah, it is interesting. You talk about like humans wanting control and probably just adding more dashboards, more metrics, more everything. Like the more that I can control and now this idea of just kind of surrendering it a bit and I've had actually a couple people I just had on someone. Harmony Anderson. She leads growth marketing or marketing at Superhuman. And she was like, I'm just doing good things and investing in all these things. And I just am assuming good things will come. And as long as revenue's growing, like, I'm not going to sit there and try and tie to every single activity and every single influencer and every podcast sponsorship. Like, I'm just going to invest in what I think is best right now and then just watch revenue and not be caught up too much in the numbers, because that's where I think a lot of teams right now. You see the divide between become super quantitative and everything has to be tracked. And now we've got, you know, we have to be in a very different world versus the other half. The leaders I talk to are more around intuition and gut feeling and how do we make decisions in that space in this new world that we're heading into, because it's not one that you can actually control like you could before. So it feels like two balancing acts of too much analytics and then relying a lot on intuition and trying to find a medium like happy, happy medium is probably the goal going forward.
- [48:55]
B
I think that that balance of art and science, or however you want to say that, is really important. I think I think of myself sometimes maybe, and this is like, like, maybe a stretch, but, you know, meteorology has a certain amount of precision, but there's a lot of metrics that, like, I'm sure that those scientists look at every day to kind of approximate what they think. And there's models and things predict whether. But the predictive power of those things decay is just the further out you get. Supposed to rain two days from now. It doesn't, you know, is that. And so if you. If you think about using the data to triangulate or kind of confirm some suspicions you have, and you use intuition and experience and the power of a human brain to really intuit and be creative and discover new things or new ways of communicating ideas. Data can complement the. The natural drive. And we've seen play out well over more than a hundred years of advertising. It doesn't have to be the end all, be all for every single thing. And that's also to say that I do. I try to avoid going too far the other direction of maybe where some advertising gets criticized as it seems indulgent. We're doing it just because it feels like the right thing to do. And I try to make sure I never say that I think of it more like, because of my background, I really try to start with an appeal to logic. It seems likely to me that, or if based on what we know to be true in the past, this seems like the right thing today. And I think logic can cut through a lot of things quickly. And then second to that, I'd say, well, the research says, or there's a lot of data out there that would suggest that this is probably the right way to think about this problem. And then I would go to like our data says specifically, this is what we should probably do in this situation, how we should react to this. And by the way, I probably wouldn't just cite one number unless it's a very nuanced question. I'd say there's a couple different data points that if you triangulate them, say we're on the right direction. And when you think about triangulating using data and you use that kind of logic like theory to the actual quantitative fact, as much as it is fact, or at least consistent fact in your organization for the yardsticks you've developed, it does give. It helps build more trust that we're not just kind of like shooting from the hip every day and making it up as we go, that there is a plan, that we are measuring these things with integrity, that we're keeping our business partners informed along for the ride and they feel like they have a vested interest in what we're doing and can be supportive of us. And the way we build our measurement internally here and the, the way we built relationships with our finance team and other business leaders have really given us that footing inside the company and I'm very proud of that.
- [51:26]
A
Okay, so you've talked a lot now about measurement and I'd love to hear what system have you built up internally for this measurement capability that we've kind of discussed all throughout the interview?
- [51:36]
B
Thanks for asking. We've put a lot of time and energy into this. This is something. When I came to the company again, I started in a growth marketing role and one of my first tasks or areas that I really wanted to focus on was up leveling the way we are or kind of consolidating the way we looked at measurement. We started with a number of purpose built tools for every single channel for TV or video, as a spike model for other channels. It was a last touch kind of model. We had different tools for different channels. And so what I'd seen be effective in my, in my career was coming up with three distinct, different approaches to measurement that can be effective in triangulating the impact of marketing for a business, any one of these on its own can be overused or lead you astray. So I think three different things as elements together really are the pulley trinity there. One is econometrics. So econometrics are pulling in a lot of variables and looking at their correlation in small increments when data changes over time. So that you can kind of build a model that is reasonably predictive of what we think the future business is going to look like based on the current inputs. And those inputs could be, you know, the dollars we're spending, the number of impressions we might have in a certain channel and a whole other set of inputs. They could be macroeconomic data on unemployment or other sorts of things. So you put all that into a model and you're given a lot of interesting insights to correlate the rhythms of those metrics with the outputs that you care most about. The dependent variables like sales or traffic or new customers or reactivated customers, whatever's important for the organization. So that tool's really useful in making longer term budget planning decisions. How much money should we invest in marketing as a, in paid media? When do we think the dollars that are associated with those investments will hit in the business? How much of it's going to be in a quarter versus in a half of a year versus two years out? We've, we put a lot of time and energy into that. Takes a long time to do, but it's an important tool. The second thing we do is incrementality testing or lift based measurement. Experimentation is another way of saying this, where we run experiments in as much a controlled setting as one can get in the modern era. And that could be a market test for some. Like you find two markets that behave similarly and you, you affect one and not the other and you look at the difference in performance. So we do that and that helps as a really useful tool in calibrating what we, what that econometric output looks like. You can use those two data points to really help complement one another and fine tune your models on the econometric side. And there's some channels like Display, I think in Programmatic that lend themselves to some sort perpetual incrementality study that you can use incrementality based methodologies to kind of measure and optimize the program more real time. So that's another important thing we do. And we test pretty much every medium at some point in some way from an incrementality perspective. Then the third is, you know, base response Measurement this is where last touch would be or you know if pseudo multi touch models specific within certain platforms like the whole Google ecosystem, we use these last touch signals for buying in market. It's difficult to you know, buy based on a econometric signals because those are slower, they take a longer time to come out. So if you want to make budget changes and optimizations multiple times a day, the data is not useful, it wouldn't really help you. Same thing with incrementality based data. You need to study that effect over some period of time. You can't make a decision intraday. So we use last touch data or channel data to make buying decisions and really optimize for short term signals that we have heuristics that help us translate what like a short term response rate or visit rate or click through rate might translate to in terms of mid to long term sales. And so those three things together, no one on its own is powerful enough I think to give you the right insight you need as a business leader to make decisions for the company. And so the three together is how we triangulate signal and make day to day decisions and month to month decisions and how we annually or plan biannually as a company. It's also how we stay accountable to our finance partners and others so they understand what the decisions we're making every day lead to in terms of expected sales impact. Wow.
- [55:50]
A
Okay. So I've never, I mean I worked in finance at Google and I would have a lot of marketing teams pitching me what budget they wanted and I haven't ever heard of a team doing it at this level of like having a model that helps make decisions and all of that. Who at the company gets access to this? Because it seems like it depends on the question you're asking. You would want to maybe weight pieces of this model differently. If you're asking a more three year plan question then you might want the econometrics to be heavily weighted in that versus if you're like I just need to know what I can spend this month, then probably the channel based data more so like who gets access to this within the company to use it for maybe their decision making?
- [56:27]
B
Yeah, and it's not to withhold any information, but we generally don't share channel level data outside the marketing team because I found it's more a distraction than it is actually helping helping ask questions. That's if we're at a point where other partners in the company are wanting to see and audit all of our data. We've we've missed the mark to, to establish trust and something else didn't go right. And of course there's times and periods where you need to demonstrate that what you've built is trustworthy and sometimes that's necessary. So we tend not to overshare channel data, not to hold anything back and or unless it's a specific focus study on a certain campaign like a win back campaign or a new product launch, we might give more detail there for particular team working on it because it's helpful so everyone knows what's going on. And again none of this is meant to mask or hide anything. It's just I don't think folks, sometimes people grab onto something that isn't really useful for the decision they're trying to make and they wouldn't necessarily know that because they haven't worked in marketing for 15 or 20 years. And so better to not do just like I wouldn't necessarily know what to do with stuff that our finance or HR teams use day to day. Same thing. So who gets access to the econometrics? The way you described how to use that data is right. We, we've built a set of dashboards and tools that take input from all of these different metrics. And we've agreed on a common yardstick with our finance teams principally and some of our strategy teams and the rest of the leadership team on how we're going to stay accountable for the goals we're responsible for in the organization. And that set of dashboarding is kind of our bible. And we review that with Finance Weekly so they know how much what's our plan for investment for the foreseeable future? This week, this month, this quarter, this year, Are we on track or off track? What kind of shifts do we might want, we might want to make and what do we think is coming on the other end? And so we use that composite set of data as our yardstick and our common currency or language between our teams. And we agreed on that framework. They understood how we built all of that, what goes into some of the assumptions, the map on the models themselves and how the predictive power of our econometric views. And we track and periodically calibrate those things in open air with those leaders so that they feel very invested and bought into this shared yardstick that we use to judge success. And that's primarily what we use when we converse with teams outside the outside marketing directly. And then the media team uses a bunch of other things day to day, you know, within their channel, incrementality testing other things to make sure that those, the predictive power of those models are true. That we, we, those things are not going to just happen on their own. We have to actually make the results happen. So that's where the other data comes in.
- [59:03]
A
Amazing. Thank you for getting into the nitty gritty with me. I appreciate being able to go there with you.
- [59:07]
B
No problem. I could talk about this. I could talk about this for years. And one other interesting anec. Anecdote, I'd say, because I've used this idea of yardsticks and it's funny to me because I try to look at a lot of things outside business for inspiration for my work day to day, rather than reading a lot of consolidated information on business topics themselves. And one thing I stumbled upon recently was this idea of, I think it's called the coastal paradox. Basically it's depending on how you choose to measure the national borders of an island nation like Ireland, for example, you can get like an infinitely large number and it depends on how small you want to measure that. If you want to use a little inch ruler or a string to measure it, you're going to get a different number than if you use a three foot stick or you estimate using satellite imagery. And I think in that I learned that Portugal and Spain share a border. And even though they share a border, they have two different numbers for the length of the border, which I think goes to show you that. But if you don't start having an open air conversation about what yardstick or how we're going to view success as a company, you're almost destined to come to different conclusions and have tension. And so I really made a point and I encourage my team to do this too, is like the first thing we should do is get on the same page of how we're going to judge success, how we're going to measure stuff even before we get into the science of it. Because if we start off on the wrong footing, we're just destined to have two different numbers and have confusion.
- [60:34]
A
Man, know your yardstick. That's.
- [60:35]
B
Know your yardstick.
- [60:36]
A
I have seen that issue come up with many, many teams I've worked with. And especially when it's different executive teams coming together and everyone's just speaking different languages and looking at different numbers and metrics and yeah, that's really good.
- [60:50]
B
Yeah. Or someone throws out a metric, you're like, I didn't even know we cared about that. Where did that come from? You know? Yeah, so, yeah, I love it.
- [60:56]
A
Okay, let's quickly shift over to the last part of the episode. It's the lightning round. This is where I throw a question your way. You have a minute or less us to answer. Are you ready, Brian?
- [61:05]
B
I am totally ready.
- [61:06]
A
Okay, first up, if I gave you a million dollars, no strings attached, what marketing campaign or strategy would you run?
- [61:13]
B
I would do more audio. I would do more of these Dusty Pete ballads. I would. We. I. I already kind of, I think, tip my hand on that one. So, yeah, I'm leaning into Dusty Pete singing to customers.
- [61:22]
A
Okay. I love it. I love it. Next up, you are on a deserted island, and you're allowed to bring one executive with you. Not from Goodrx, like someone you just admire. You don't even have to know them, or they can be your friend, whoever you want. So one executive, one piece of software tool, something you're like, I need this. And then one book.
- [61:40]
B
Oh, man. Well, so book. I've been trying to read this book by Robert Caro. It's very long. So I think that would give me finally some time to actually get through to read it. It's a good book. So it's an awesome book, but I just haven't had the time. It's called the Power Broke. It's about Robert Ziss and this guy who helps kind of have a pretty big role in planning New York City to be the city it is today. The good and the bad. The tool. Maybe this is cheating a bit, but I'd bring Google Ads so that I could buy advertising to let people know where I am that I'm missing and I'm.
- [62:12]
A
Well, that's good.
- [62:13]
B
Yeah. So that somebody could come find me. And then an executive I want to bring with me. Boy, you know, Yvonne Chouinard is the founder of Patagonia. And not only he's got not only an amazing story as an individual, but he's also an incredible outdoors person. So I'm sure he could help us, like, build something out of bamboo and figure out how to eat coconuts and fish until we got rescued.
- [62:37]
A
So, yeah, that's good. That's probably my favorite answer so far. Very smart. I like it. Okay. What is one marketing buzzword that you just wish would disappear off the face.
- [62:47]
B
Of the earth forever? One is hard, probably learnings. It just. It hurts my ears when I hear the word learnings.
- [62:53]
A
Learnings.
- [62:54]
B
Learnings. Yeah, I think. I don't think it's a real word. And it's. It's just like a filler. I would rather I also call my team out when they share it. I would rather people say Insights or results or something else that is more in the English language, not just a made up business word. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [63:16]
A
It sounds like a more personal pet peeve. We may have to work on this to get, get past this one.
- [63:21]
B
Yeah, yeah. Learnings is hard. I mean, other one is, I would say maybe another one is growth hacking. I just think it conveys a certain indifference to how you get to the results, which if you're just running to like get a result or some sort of signal, that's not necessarily hard. We talked about all the challenges of data, so I think that one usually puts my ear, puts me on guard when I hear someone say they're a growth hack.
- [63:43]
A
Yep. Yep. Okay. What is a hobby or like a skill that you have that most people don't know about?
- [63:50]
B
I do a lot of camping. I really like outdoors and hiking. Camping. And so I'm, I'm pretty good at, you know, building a fire, getting a campsite set up, doing the quartermaster work needed to make sure you can survive on a backpacking trip. So yeah, that's something that I don't talk a lot about, but it's, it's a necessary break from the world of computers that I'm in and have been in for most of my life.
- [64:13]
A
Yes. Love it. All right, Ryan, well, thank you for joining Marketing Trends. This is super fun. I love getting into the nitty gritty with you and thinking high level of the industry and marketing in general. Where can people find out more about you and Goodrx?
- [64:27]
B
You can go to goodrx.com or download our app. Everybody in the United States should be using this app. There's no reason not to, so get after it. And you can also check us out in our advertising, on our social channels and everywhere else. So thank you so much for having me, Stephanie. This was a joy.
- [64:41]
A
Thank you.