Confessions of a Reformed Performance Marketer with Ryan Sullivan, GoodRx CMO

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Confessions of a Reformed Performance Marketer"

Podcast: The Marketing Architects
Host: Marketing Architects (Alena Drasberg, Angela Voss, Rob DeMars)
Guest: Ryan Sullivan, CMO at GoodRx
Date: December 9, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features a deep-dive conversation with Ryan Sullivan, Chief Marketing Officer at GoodRx and the self-described "reformed performance marketer." The discussion explores Sullivan’s evolution from data-obsessed, bottom-funnel digital tactics to a holistic, creative, and customer-centric approach to marketing. Key topics include rethinking performance marketing, building brand salience, the challenge of upper vs. lower funnel strategies, measurement pitfalls, and the bold creative moves GoodRx made to break through the healthcare advertising “noise.” The conversation is candid, practical, and peppered with real-world examples and contrarian opinions on today’s hot marketing debates.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ryan Sullivan’s Career & Move to GoodRx

• Sullivan began in computer science and engineering, evolved through agency work (notably at Performics), and ultimately sought a brand where he could have “direct impact” and “benefit consumers in a literal way,” especially addressing healthcare’s cost challenges.
  • Quote: “I was really longing to get closer to the work and have more agency… for something that… directly benefited consumers in a very literal way for a challenged area of our… daily lives in the United States: the cost of healthcare.” (03:20)

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2. "Reformed" Performance Marketer: Evolving the Philosophy

• Initially, Sullivan’s approach was typified by the logic and measurable rigor of digital and search marketing—treating marketing as a solvable, programmatic problem.
• Over time, he recognized the limits and illusions of performance marketing: overconfidence in attribution, the murkiness of programmatic display spend, and inflated claims about “brand search” being a top performer.
  • Quote: “Brand search was our top performer... why does someone even search for a brand? They don’t just wake up in the morning and... intuit that we exist. It comes from somewhere else.” (05:42)
  • He highlights industry-wide overattribution and a general lack of critical thinking when it comes to data and targeting tech.
• Takeaway: Don't overestimate the science; real-world marketing is far messier, and overconfidence in targeting is misguided.

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3. The Flaws of "Performance Marketing" as a Term

• Sullivan critiques labeling some marketing as "performance" and others not, as if only some activities are accountable/results-driven.
  • Quote: “It’s lazy to say one [is] superior to the other... It smacks of: if I’m a performance marketer, I’m some brutal... quant-led person who stares at matrix-like screens all day and the customer needs don’t matter… And again, both of those things are silly.” (09:31)
• He believes healthy marketing integrates both quantification and creativity.

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4. Upper Funnel vs. Lower Funnel – Real-World Application

• Sullivan reframes the debate using “demand generation" (building intention/mental availability) and “demand capture" (being ready when a consumer acts).
  • For GoodRx, most consumers are “out of market” when they see an ad—the challenge is priming future recall and making the brand unmissable when the need appears.
  • Quote: “I’m trying to incept an idea that Goodrx is a brand that can help me when I have a prescription pricing need.” (13:31)
  • Importance of influencing not just consumers, but also word-of-mouth among doctors and pharmacists.

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5. Making GoodRx a Habit, Not Just a Helper

• GoodRx disrupts ingrained habits: decades of Americans assuming insurance is always cheapest and pharmacy shopping for price is pointless.
  • Quote: “You have to interrupt that—decades and decades of people assuming that health insurance is... the best way to do it. And... prices are different at different pharmacies. A lot of people didn't know that until GoodRx.” (16:31)
• Their mission is to make checking GoodRx as commonplace as searching for flights before booking travel.

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6. Creative Distinctiveness: The "Savings Wrangler" Campaign

• The team sought to build stronger “brand salience” through bold new creative: humorous, visually distinct, consistent (prairie dog mascot Dusty Pete, bright colors, the “Savings Wrangler”).
  • Quote (Angela Voss): “I do think it’s a masterclass in distinctive assets… You didn’t just double down. You like quadrupled down...” (18:43)
• Sullivan’s focus: adding “anchorage and continuity” to GoodRx’s brand assets.
  • Quote: “We wanted... brand salience, something else that could be an anchor... We didn’t start over... We just want to add to this.” (20:03)
• The campaign’s fearless-ally archetype combines “Robin Hood” rebellion with “Superman” heroism, aiming to break the staid, jargon-laden traditions of pharma ads with humor and engagement.

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7. Increasing “Surface Area” for Growth

• Sullivan’s concept: maximize the brand’s “surface area” (opportunities for contact or discovery) rather than over-constrain reach via hyper-targeting.
  • Quote: “My goal is... to make sure GoodRx is almost impossible to miss... And not just you, but like friends, families, loved ones.” (24:15)
• This applies both in media/channel planning and technical aspects like product feed optimization for search.

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8. Breaking Away from Flawed Measurement Models

• Critiques both “last click” and “multi-touch” attribution as deeply limited.
  • Last touch ignores all but the final interaction; multi-touch is riddled with data gaps and impractical model complexity.
  • Quote: “Why would I build my entire growth strategy around a set of data that is not telling the whole story?” (28:24)
• For GoodRx, real measurement relies on agreed-upon standards, triangulating three approaches:
  • Econometric modeling (MMM)
  • Holdout/Experimentation/lift-based measurement
  • Channel/last touch for tactical purchase-path insight
  • Quote: "We triangulate all three... when we make big decisions... The industry’s really rallied around this idea of three legs of a stool." (33:01)

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9. Marketers’ Overconfidence in Control ("Free Marketing")

• Sullivan warns against the delusion of microtargeting and centralized planning, evoking free-market economics to champion broader surface area over control.
  • Quote: “…There are more things outside our control or more variables we’re not considering than there are ones we are… We should really set ourselves up for all of these random events and win all these random opportunities...” (36:20)
• “Free marketing”: liberate the craft, escape digital era’s self-imposed constraints, and embrace the unpredictability of how people discover and act.
  • Inspired by Hayek’s "The Use of Knowledge in Society."

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10. Contrarian Opinions & Caution About Data

• Sullivan’s “Contrarian Corner” take: Marketing is overrun by “technobabble”, and the modern data-driven age has sold markers a false promise, often to the advantage of vendors—not brands.
  • Quote: “Don’t take all the data you’re shown as fact... Sometimes it can impoverish the brands that embrace them without really taking a second look or thinking harder about it.” (39:54)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Bridging Brand and Performance:
  • “All the targeting and numbers in the world don’t matter if what you’re saying, selling, or offering is not interesting or well understood or distinct.” (00:00; repeated at 08:57)
• On GoodRx’s Mission:
  • “We really think of ourselves as saving people time and money on their medication. And that's what our role is and job.” (16:18)
• On Marketers’ Overconfidence:
  • “We trick ourselves into thinking we know a lot more and that we have got it all figured out. In reality… the work we’re doing is far less controllable than we’d like to think.” (38:51)
• Fun Moment:
  • Cast joking about fictional dinner guests (Bilbo Baggins, Darth Vader, MacGyver, Saul Goodman) (41:01–42:34)
  • Jurassic Park references: “My expansive research team tells me that you have a habit of quoting Jurassic Park in meetings. Does this mean that when you’re presenting a marketing budget, you look at the CFO and say, ‘Hold on to your butts?’” (01:01; recurring jokes)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00] – Defining Good Marketing: Numbers Matter, But Not Without Distinction
• [03:20] – Ryan Sullivan’s Career Path and Why He Joined GoodRx
• [04:50] – What Being a “Reformed” Performance Marketer Means
• [08:42] – Critique of “Performance Marketing” as a Term
• [11:35] – Upper vs. Lower Funnel: Demand Generation vs. Capture
• [15:18] – How GoodRx Battles Habit and Builds New Behaviors
• [18:43] – The Story Behind the Savings Wrangler Creative
• [23:43] – The Concept of Increasing “Surface Area”
• [26:04] – Measurement, Attribution, and Their Limitations
• [31:45] – Building Real Confidence in Marketing Results
• [34:35] – Overestimating Control & The “Free Marketing” Philosophy
• [39:46] – Contrarian Corner: Skepticism About Data-Driven Promises
• [41:01–42:34] – Lighthearted Fictional Dinner Guest Segment

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Conclusion

This episode provides a dynamic blend of practical wisdom and thought-provoking challenges to marketing orthodoxy. Ryan Sullivan’s journey from a “numbers-first” mindset to customer-centric, brand-building leadership models the growing recognition that both rigor and creativity are needed for effective marketing. Listeners will come away with frameworks to challenge their assumptions, gain fresh measurement techniques, and rethink how their brands show up—to both consumers and their own organizations.

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Where to follow Ryan & GoodRx:

• Website: goodrx.com
• LinkedIn: Connect with Ryan Sullivan

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“I feel like there’s an opportunity to liberate the craft and like just free us from some of the burdens we’ve put on ourselves through the digital era of advertising.”
—Ryan Sullivan (35:12)

Transcript

[Ryan Sullivan]

Important to not lose the customer and the fact that all the targeting and numbers and stuff in the world don't matter if what you're saying, selling or offering is not interesting or well understood or distinct.

[Alena Drasberg]

Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Alena Drasberg on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects. And I'm joined by my co hosts, Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects, and Rob DeMars, the chief product architect of misfits and machines.

[Angela Voss]

Hello.

[Rob DeMars]

Hi, guys.

[Alena Drasberg]

And we're joined by a special guest, Ryan Sullivan. Ryan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Goodrx, the leading platform for medication savings in the U.S. he began his career at intel and Google, then spent over a decade at Performics Publis performance marketing arm, where he led a team of marketers across North America. Now at Goodrx, he's helping one of the biggest health care brands grow through effective marketing in both the short and the long. So thanks for joining us, Ryan.

[Ryan Sullivan]

Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be here.

[Angela Voss]

Now, Ryan, my expansive research team tells me that you have a habit of quoting Jurassic park in meetings. Does this mean that when you're presenting a marketing budget, you look at the CFO and say, hold on to your butts?

[Ryan Sullivan]

I would. I'll try to keep it PG and the ones. And sometimes the ones I quote. But yeah, it's a. A love for that movie that doesn't get old. So, yeah, it's held up. So it's, I think, eminently quotable.

[Rob DeMars]

It's a great series.

[Alena Drasberg]

Yeah. Now, I have only seen the Chris Pratt version. Is that going to be a problem for you?

[Ryan Sullivan]

Oh, my gosh. Oh, well, I think. I think I need to leave.

[Rob DeMars]

Like someone saying they haven't seen the Star wars trilogy.

[Angela Voss]

Going to leave now.

[Ryan Sullivan]

Yeah.

[Alena Drasberg]

Okay, I'll add it. I'll add it to the list.

[Ryan Sullivan]

Still, even in the world of modern technology, I think the practical effects and stuff still make it. I think it still holds up.

[Angela Voss]

Have you watched Jurassic Punk?

[Ryan Sullivan]

No, I have not.

[Angela Voss]

It's about the gentleman who basically pioneered the animation for Jurassic Park.

[Ryan Sullivan]

It's fantastic.

[Angela Voss]

Great story.

[Ryan Sullivan]

I'll have to check that out. Yeah, no, I remember seeing it when they put it back in the theaters and I was like, this is going to be terrible. I was like, wow, this is as good as I remember it when I was a kid.

[Alena Drasberg]

Great. Okay, I'll add it to my long list of movies that Rob talks about on the show that I need to see. Okay, we are back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. And I'll kick us off, as I always do, with some research. This time I chose an article by Chris Wood for Emarketer and it's titled GoodRx's new Feel Good Campaign Seeks to Break through the Healthcare Advertising Noise. The article points out that healthcare advertising isn't exactly known for creativity. Most consumers see a lot of it and trust very little of it. That's why GoodRx recently took a bold new approach with a campaign designed to break through the noise in a world of formulaic pharma ads. GoodRx introduced a surprising new face to tell its story and reminded the industry that sometimes the most effective marketing isn't just about the numbers, but also about character and creativity. But we are going to talk about both the numbers and the creativity today with the CMO behind GoodRx and that campaign. Ryan, thanks again for being here. I wanted to start at the beginning. You had a background in computer science and engineering. Then you moved to different roles. You got into more of like marketing agency side eventually led you to this role at GoodRx. What led you to choose this brand?

[Ryan Sullivan]

What led me to choose GoodRx overall was I really liked having the variety, working at an agency, working with a lot of big companies and cutting my teeth in marketing and some of the early days of paid search and digital marketing. And over time I was fortunate to be able to have a lot of influence over the direction of those companies, their programs and ultimately their sales performance. But I was really longing to get closer to the work and stick with something for a longer period of time and have more agency than I did a step removed from the from partners even though some of them I worked with for multiple years. And so that was one and then the catalyst of wanting to find something that I felt directly benefited consumers in a very literal way for a challenged area of our just our daily lives in the United States was the cost of health care. And so I love the brand story. I love the brand mission. I love that people that use GoodRx are objectively better off for doing it in a non kind of we don't have to over explain why the magic of that plus that time and place in my career where I wanted to get closer to the work day to day led me to this company and I'm delighted to have joined.

[Alena Drasberg]

Yeah. And we're going to Talk more about GoodRx later and some of the things the brand has done, it's pretty cool. So you have this background and when we talked you mentioned you're a reform performance marketer. And when you say that to someone who has a podcast, I can't help but grab onto that. So I'm sorry, you're gonna have to talk about it. Yeah, I'd love to know what does that mean and what were sort of those turning points that might have changed. I'm guessing by that you've approached marketing has maybe changed. So how did that happen?

[Ryan Sullivan]

Definitely the way I approach marketing has changed. And going back to your kind of prior question around my background, I came from a technical world. I sort of knew I didn't want to be a long term programmer developer in my career. I did the technical background because I felt it would be helpful because I was curious about engineering, computer science, mathematics, those types of things. And I like the structured problem solving and the system thinking that comes with that academic path. When I entered marketing, I thought of it like in a very programmatic sort of way or as a solvable problem. We know all the variables, we know the math, we can measure things. These new tools like search marketing or digital marketing, even some of the classic things and like direct response, it seemed pretty tangible to me. And I worked in a, an agency that was called Perform X. One that I really still have a deep affinity for and I think did a lot of, still does a lot of things very well in balancing these demands of performance. But when you work in this discipline and digital marketing for a while, unless if you're actually looking at the data and not just looking past the numbers that come out and being overly confident in the logic of like oh yeah, of course it's better to target this group of people. I can see them click on the thing, they go to the website, they take the happy path, they either check out or they don't. If they don't, I send them a follow up email and then they come back or they don't. That's idealistic. But the actual world is a lot messier than that. And you know certain mediums and disciplines, when you're in them long enough, you have these aha moments where you go, well something's not adding up here. So one would be like, I was pretty shocked at how overconfident and early in my, very early in my career people were with saying things like brand search was our top performer. I was like, what is, why does someone even search for a brand? Like where does that come from? They don't just wake up in the morning and be like, oh, goodrx is a brand. I'm going to go search for that and intuit that we exist. It comes from somewhere else else. So if you're being honest with yourself and you have applied critical thinking, you start asking questions and poking holes and then when you start seeing the publisher community kind of react to that and go, no, no, don't look over here. And then take tools away and make measurement more complicated or create incentive structures that decent advise incrementality testing and things like that. You're like, I am very suspicious now and skeptical. So that's one example. Another one is when I first started getting close to programmatic display as a medium and we were onboarding, I remember a client program from a managed service provider and I started looking at like the waterfall of costs and I realized like most of this money is never actually getting to a publisher or an ad. It's going to a lot of techno stuff, techno babble in the middle that's supposed to make it better. And it's like, okay, well if I'm going to pay 80% more to use all this technology to try to find my ideal customer, I have to convert at least 80% or better for it to make sense. And it never really is that way unless your measurement's probably pretty bad. The ends just don't justify the means. That's just the working side, the non working side and the infrastructure investments and the people investments to go pursue some of these things. It just doesn't add up in a lot of cases. And it feels good because it's a nice story we tell ourselves, but it doesn't actually add up. And if you're actually a practitioner, you're actually following the data and not just getting hand wavy about it. So for all those reasons and more, I would think of myself as a reform performance marketer, find myself apologizing for perspectives I might have had early in my career. More so than defending them.

[Alena Drasberg]

Yeah, well, shows that you're a learner. And yeah, we've definitely seen and covered the stories and studies about the cost of third party data and targeting. And yeah, it's refreshing to hear a CMO talk about that. I was using the term performance marketing. You're using it too. We use it quite a bit on this podcast. But you've spoken about how that term is kind of flawed because it would imply that not all marketing performs or that some doesn't perform. Why do you feel strongly about that?

[Ryan Sullivan]

I am the risk of being kind of a pet ant about this. So before I trash it, let me. Here's my defense of the label. I think these shorthand labels can be helpful to define certain schools of thought so you know how someone's approaching the craft or the area of work, the problem space of the opportunities. It's fine, I guess in that way to say, okay, I want to think about how we're going to tackle this problem or pursue this marketing opportunity with a certain school of thought. Is it going to be quick, fast? Are we in a hyper growth mode? Are we a small company? Are we trying to find product market fit? Are we going to be testing a bunch of things? Fine, like it's an iterative faster exercise. But to label the whole like one superior to the other or to overuse those labels I think is silly because both performance marketing and non performance marketer puts people more brand marketing. Those are overly reductive. I think it's lazy to say one or the other. And like you said, when I start saying something is performance marketing and something's not, it's like why would I do the thing that's not performance marketing? Then what's what is that? The other thing it smacks of is that okay, if I'm a performance marketer, I'm some brutal MBA quant led person who stares at matrix like screens all day and the customer needs and insights don't matter. That's what the opposite school would say. And then the performance people would say, well the brand stuff is really indulgent, it rejects science and evidence and it may be poorly researched. It's intuition, it's guide, it's artistic. And again, both of those things are silly. I don't think we should eschew having goals and objectives to quantify and qualify our work. It's measurement data. These things are very important, serious things to be taken seriously in companies and to have a productive conversation with anyone, boards of directors, other leaders of companies, other cross functional peers to have to be able to speak that language because the language of business. I also think it's important to not lose the customer. And the fact that all the targeting and numbers and stuff in the world don't matter if what you're saying, selling or offering is not interesting or well understood or distinct. So you need both. And I think that's kind of why I'm hesitant to even use the word performance marketing or say myself, I'm performance market or anything like that because I just think it adds more confusion and puts people's guards up needlessly.

[Alena Drasberg]

Well Speaking of terms that marketers sometimes argue about, let's talk about upper funnel and lower funnel. That can be a debate too. Just like how do you describe what goes through the funnel but everything you're talking about, you had evolved your belief system from very bottom of the funnel. You could say performance driven targeted marketing towards more branding. Thinking about the long term, you clearly have belief systems that are similar to ours. That side of marketing matters and that impacts the rest of your channels as well. I love when people share beliefs and I would love to know what that looks like in practice for you as a CMO of a very large consumer facing company. How does that belief come to life?

[Ryan Sullivan]

I don't think it's ultimately different from the idea of mental and physical availability or those types of ways of viewing it. In marketing we love putting different labels or words on similar concepts because it's we're people and sometimes it's easier for us to understand certain things described one way versus another. I think it's helpful practically for folks that have leaned maybe one way or the other in their career. The funnels are useful because you can say this channel is a upper funnel channel, this one's a lower. I don't think that's exactly accurate. I think some naturally sort out to be used that way typically and I think that there's intelligent reasoning behind that. But I try to use like as a bridge this idea of demand generation and demand capture for me and I think it's resonant for people that are systems thinkers on the performance side and also people that think of it as what's my role if I'm telling stories and trying to create visual distinctiveness or interesting and engaging messaging and creative and so if one person's job or one side of the fence is to generate interest, intention to take a brand seriously, build a goal to have a buying moment in the future, raise mental availability or just awareness of a brand, then that's great. Now if those folks turn and try to go find it and use it at the last mile, they may not because we forget things or we get distracted or our needs are constantly changing and the criteria of simple product availability on a shelf, all those things could disrupt the purchase intent. And so that would be the lower funnel side. Just making sure you have a large catcher's mitt so that it's really difficult for someone to miss you along the journey as you're closer to a purchase moment. So that's kind of how I think of upper and lower. Now what we do at Goodrx in some ways is even more important to think about demand generation and demand capture because our business is one where most people can't use our product the minute they see an advertisement. Because we're really only relevant to people that take prescription medication. By and large, there's some exceptions to that or need a prescription or contemplating a therapy, you know, soon. And so when you see an advocate Rx and you're like, oh wow, that's interesting, you might have just picked up a prescription and it might be 90 days until you have a refill. So unlike an apparel brand, there's no impulse purchasing here. We do have a carrot telemedicine business is a little bit different. We think about that in that case because we actually can provide prescriptions and services or care. But in general, I'm trying to incept an idea that Goodrx is a brand that can help me when I have a prescription pricing need. And it's so pronounced for us that we have to look at like the effect of our advertising and the upper funnel air quotes here for those listening that we prime them and make them ready to take a series or remember to go, oh, I should check Gutter X before I go to the pharmacy. And then when you do and you turn to Google and go, what's that yellow company that can save me money on prescriptions, we do all the things you'd expect us to be doing to make sure that we don't lose that moment. We do a lot of things around the point of care, like at the doctor's office and building word of mouth referral among doctors and pharmacists so that they can be helpful and encourage patients to use Goodrx. And so that's how we think about upper and lower funnel. Not dissimilar from mental physical availability or just building intention and making sure that when someone needs us that they can find us. We're really difficult to miss along the journey.

[Alena Drasberg]

So you're one of those brands where when someone sees a spot and ad, most of them are going to be out of market the time they see it. And then I also think you have a double challenge, which is you are not necessarily part of a natural habit when you get a prescription at the moment. So that's like an added challenge. So if somebody did also need a prescription, the chance of them looking for good or any knowing of you. Yeah, zero. So how are you trying to make Goodrx more of a part of our daily habits?

[Ryan Sullivan]

I'll take a moment here to just describe what Goodrx is since we got into the last question about funnels. But Goodrx is a prescription savings company. So what we do is we help people save time and money when they are prescribed a medication. In the United States, you have two primary ways of paying for your medication. One is out of pocket, so you're just it's a normal transaction. Or the second way is another party is paying for all or some of your prescription that would be your like, employer through your health insurance. Maybe it's a government insurance program like Medicare or Medicaid. But those are predominantly the two ways in which you get medicine. Unless it's charitable or something like that. Your price is something that you don't necessarily know because somebody has to do this calculation on your behalf of is my insurance going to pay for this? Yes or no? If so, how much? And then you're left with the rest. What most people don't know is that oftentimes on many medications, you actually can save more money if you just pay without using your insurance. So you can do the cash price for, as we would call in the industry is sometimes it makes them lower than the price you'd have with a deductible or a copay. And then of course, there are times that maybe the cash price is not the lowest, but it would be familiar to many people that are listening in the United States that when your doctor prescribes something, you don't know if it's going to be covered. And then you have to do these things called step therapies or prior authorizations. And it seems like there's this constant back and forth between your doctor's office, the insurance company and the pharmacy to figure out is this going to be covered or not. You go through all that rigmarole and you might find that like with insurance, it's $5 less than if you just paid out of pocket and you save yourself all that time. So we really think of ourselves as saving people time and money on their medication. And that's what our role is and job. And so when we think about making this part of daily habit, one of the big challenges we have to overcome in the United States is that everyone here that grows up here follows parents, grandparents, or authority figures in their lives to pharmacies. And before the digital era, your doctor wrote something on a script pad, he took the piece of paper to the pharmacist, and he didn't really think about comparison shopping. Probably not the best way of describing it, but looking and checking a price before you go. And so we have to interrupt that. Like decades and decades of people assuming that health insurance is this panacea, that's the best way to do it. And that also, by the way, prices are different at different pharmacies. So the CVS first in Maine and the CVS at third and state might have different prices for the same exact medication. Same form, same quantity, same dose, typically not more so between two different pharmacy brands and chains. But you don't know that. And a lot of people didn't know that until Goodrx started really making people aware of that idea. So think of us as incepting this idea that you make a plan when you book an airline ticket. Many people, unless you had a need, wouldn't buy a ticket at the counter at the airport. They plan ahead. They'd use an OTA to do that. And so we're trying to make it clear that Good Arts is a common sense utility for everybody. Whether you have insurance or not. There really is not a reason for you not to take a couple seconds to check goodrx before you go to the pharmacy. And that's kind of why I check. GoodRx is our tagline at the end of a lot of our video ads and other ads that we have in market. And it's why we have to do this upper funnel, lower funnel combo that we're in this idea because it is not the default habit many of us have and we're out to change that. And it is changing for the better. And. And that's why our business has been successful.

[Angela Voss]

We are definitely not holding back in terms of telling this incredible story. I have to congratulate you guys on the Savings Wrangler and for all the listeners who haven't checked it out yet, go to YouTube, watch the 60 second because I do think it's a masterclass in distinctive assets. You didn't just double down. You like quadrupled down between the Savings wrangler, your Dusty Pete. The color schemes that you guys use are very unique and unusual. The sound. But the biggest thing for me is you didn't hide the value proposition the entire time. Like oftentimes even those distinctive assets can. Can really separate you from this. The real true story. And you guys just blended it all perfectly. What was the impetus for this, this whole kind of new narrative that you guys put out there with your creative and was it hard to sell through?

[Ryan Sullivan]

Thank you for all the great things you said about that. Most of the credit reserve goes to the team and the partners you work with on this to make this a Successful campaign for us. We're really happy with the results we've seen from the work we're doing. I'll pass that along, so thank you for that. Why did we. So was it hard to sell internally? No. I didn't go in saying, hey, buy this idea of a prairie dog and a kind of fish out of water cowgirl singing ballads about prescription savings. That wasn't the pitch. The pitch was, we've been doing this a really long time. We've created an enormous amount of goodwill and reputational influence of our name and people having good stories and families and friends and doctors and pharmacists, all these people singing our praises. The thing we lacked was a common anchorage to link all of these things under a banner other than our wordmark logo and color. And that's okay because we've done TV for quite some time. But as you pointed out, maybe the only thing that really made it clearly a GoodRx ad is us saying the word GoodRx and the GoodRx watermark being there and then on the end card. So we wanted to create more opportunity for brand salience, something else that could be an anchor and an element of continuity that we can build over time. And so this was a platform choice to say, hey, we're going to do something for the long haul here to really enrich the brand assets that make us distinct and memorable today and add to them. We didn't start over. We didn't rebrand or change our logo or colors. We just want to add to this. And so that was easier or much easier for people to go like, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Yeah, let's do that. So we started with a comprehensive brand strategy exercise. We wanted to get our language correct. For example, I mentioned we save people time and money on prescriptions. Formally, we might say we're a prescription discount company or we save you money. And we really wanted to have clarity in the language. One of the things that came out of that exercise was this idea of what our archetype is as a brand, that we're a fearless ally. It's a combination of a rebel, like a Robin Hood type personality, but also a heroic one like a Superman. So we are there to save the day and we fight against the system, but we're really trying to bring everyone along and create some sort of win for everybody without overemphasizing one of those two personalities. So we call that the fearless ally. It's really to be an advocate for the right thing and be a leader in driving change and creating opportunity for consumers that are looking to make their medication more affordable. Once we landed on that, we go, okay, cool. How do we bring that to life? And we had a pretty strong idea that we wanted to think about using mascots and humor because healthcare advertising in general is fairly missable. Not to be critical, there are many brands that are successful, but I think we could in our minds, say, like a pharma ad usually opens with a wide panning shot of somebody that's unhappy or they're happy and they're in a dark place or a light place, and then there's this buildup and then the brand shows up and then everything's better and it's got a lot of jargon and other things in it. So we wanted to stand out from that. And by using humor, which creates clearly a better response and ability to remember something if it's compelling and useful, that was one of the things we wanted to do. And then to bring the fearless ally to life, we wanted to cast that person literally, which we cast as a safe strangler herself, this fish out of water cowgirl who's got no nonsense frontier wisdom and is really trying to kind of disrupt the normal malaise of the process of getting a prescription, going to the counter and having a lot of uncertainty on what you're going to pay. And then we doubled down and we added a sidekick because we call Dusty Pete. And Dusty Pete's a prayer American prairie dog who goes with the savings wrangler because they're a tag team. And the intentional choice with Dusty Pete was that we wanted to be able to use him more online and in digital surfaces where just that unique idea of a prairie dog with a Goodrx scarf talking to me about something when I'm scrolling through social channels or something, it just felt like it would jump out more and we'd have more opportunity to address that. I'll pause there. There's a lot more I can get into if you have more questions on it. But those are some of the things that kind of guided our hand in making these decisions. I'm very happy with the results and very proud of the team for all their amazing work on this.

[Rob DeMars]

Well, unquestionably bold. Just love what you've done there, and especially without having to rebrand. I think sometimes the boldest move is just consistency right in what we do and how we show up and be memorable for our consumers. Ryan, we've heard you speak of marketing's job as needing to increase surface area for the brand and to your point earlier. As consumers we don't wake up and search for a brand without knowing what that brand is. So I would love to hear you explain what does that mean to you? Increasing surface area air quality quotes again for the audio listeners and how do you put that into practice?

[Ryan Sullivan]

This could also be something that's unique to the way I just think about the problem. If you think about like biologically surface area just means that the movement of things between two surfaces can go faster because you just have more areas for things to go through. Think of a concert venue and you're going to a concert somewhere and if everyone has to go through one door it's going to take a long time for them to get in and out. Now if you have multiple doors you can move the crowds in and out more quickly. And so if you take that just simple concept of having a bigger surface area just gives you more opportunity for movement then in the marketing world I think of it as giving me a bigger net to catch people who would benefit from our products and services. And my goal is really to maximize our opportunity to pick up people or be there when someone is in a moment of need versus trying to overly constrain my opportunities to win by targeting specific groups of people or stalking my existing customers or other things like that. And so I think of my role as increasing the odds that we're successful. And to me that means making sure that Goodrx is almost impossible to miss on a day to day basis. Especially if you're in a need state where prescription medication pricing is going to be relevant to you now or in the future. And not just you by the way, but like friends, families, loved ones and others in your life that maybe you don't have a medical need but they may. And so I just, I'm really when I say I want to increase surface area I think it's important for brands to increase surface area. It's really don't densify our value proposition in the places we show up. Really try to maximize the range of coverage we can get with the resources, people, budget, etc that we have to increase our odds that we're successful. And found when someone's in a brand discovery moment or needs something from us.

[Rob DeMars]

Well and I think doing just that increasing surface area makes a ton of sense from a growth perspective. Just in what instances category entry points. Right can we get consumers to think of GoodRx? It also complicates potentially just due to the customer journey, the measurement and you've pushed back on both I think last click and Multi Touch attribution. Why is that? And how can marketers break out of that cycle when they think about measurement?

[Alena Drasberg]

And we've heard of Last Click before but I'm very interested in Ryan and like multi touch is, I want to talk about both, but I'm just saying our ears perked up.

[Ryan Sullivan]

More than happy to. Yeah, I'm going to if you don't mind. One thing I'll say too about surface area before I go to the measurement question. I promise I'll come back to it is I think there's a technical way of looking at this and a non technical way of looking at surface area and I think the technical areas was always important in the digital discovery era, but is even going to be more important giving the rise of agentic technology LLMs to AI however you want to say it. The non technical view is pretty much what I said, which is that people will discover brands, consider them in purchase and then we have a large tool set and we want to get a greater share of attention and win more tickets to this somewhat intractably large lottery for consumer attention. The technical view on this, and bear with me on this example, is that if I have a website and I sell products, let's say I sell T shirts and I have an obligation to make sure that all the facets and the way people may search for that product or be interested in my product and its permutations is maximized as much as possible. So let's say in this T shirt example we have five permutations on how you could search for it. Size, color, fabric, style, brand. That would be it would be over like let's say 30 plus ways in which you could combo those things. I could search by size plus color, I could search by fabric and style and brand and if I have 30 plus ways in which I could discover, that's 30 opportunities that I could be discovered when someone's looking for those pairings. Technically if I do that wrong, if I have those five options but I somehow encode that on my website incorrectly or my product feed data is bad or something like that and only four of those criteria are known to a Google like on product listing ad I take my 30 chances and I make it less than half 12 to 14 in terms of combinations. So that's quite a fall. Like I've decreased increase my surface area by half simply through lack of technical optimization and rigor and going back to the idea of performance marketing or technical marketing and brand marketing, I think this is why that's dangerous to have these labels because that brutal technical honesty is a very important reality to get right so that you don't decrease your surface area or don't maximize your surface area as a business. Now take that example and multiply it by millions of SKUs and 20 different colors and all the other things. It becomes an impossibly large data set that could be used to your advantage or possibly to your detriment. So I think that's the technical jargon. I won't get more technical that maybe we'll see on the measurement thing. But I do think that's an important kind of distinction when we're talking about surface areas. There's a very technical reality to marketing that you can't escape. So Last touch and multitouch. If we just think about the word last touch, you're basically conceding that it's not all the touches that led to a sale. So again, just like use basic logic here to say why would I build my entire growth strategy around a set of data that is not telling the whole story? It's much more likely that you're going to get it wrong when you're pursuing something like that than right now. That doesn't mean Last touch is not a useful measure. It is actually a really important measure. It can be very helpful in understanding if you have funnel issues in your product experience or maybe there's a mismatch between the expectations you're setting in your ads and the product experience doesn't align to it. So you see performance issues very quickly and you buy sometimes in platforms to these types of measures because they're faster cycle. You can, I can tell Google very quickly, yeah, that click led to somebody putting something in a cart than I can. If I'm purely doing this based on lift and hold out experimentation or even econometrics, which are longer term measures. So you still need these. Multitouch is problematic simply because it's not real. And I grew up in marketing in an era where there were a lot of companies that came up, grew or bought out and then quietly swept under the rug drug of some big companies like Google or Oracle or others. The problem is the idea of multi touch is. Sounds great, like I'm going to get all the time, all the ad at bats. I've had all the impressions, all the clicks in one big technical database and I'm going to then assign credit based on this really complicated math. Then you go meta won't give us the data, Google won't give us impression data. So then you start modeling and then you before you even start doing the analysis, you start making all these exceptions to the measurement idea and so you're kind of eroding the entire premise before you get started. Where multi touch is I think maybe more realistic and practical is in a single platforms or ecosystems. Maybe Google can give us some good insights. Especially important with some of the evolution of like things like pmax and some things they're doing there of how are customers ping ponging around the different Google ecosystems. Google has a good identity graph. They know all their customers on all their devices. So you might be able to tease some insights out of that. I wouldn't over leverage that insight when it comes to creating the quality of my marketing overall or doing budget setting for quarters and years. So yeah, that's how I think about those two things.

[Rob DeMars]

So all that said, we as marketers have to build confidence in what we do. We need to bring a case to the cfo, the CEO. And so how do you break out of that? How does GoodRx build confidence in the marketing results today? What tools or approaches do you rely on most? What advice do you have?

[Ryan Sullivan]

I think the key question there is like how do we build confidence or how do we create some sort of mutual understanding of what our contributions at look the business are and if I start there marketing measurement can be challenged in I think for different reasons. This is not exhaustive but maybe there's three ones that come to mind. One is you have the wrong tool. We just talked about last touch Multi touch. You might just be using the wrong tools to measure success. Second is just bad statistical methods, poor measurement design, not looking at incrementality, not using even if you're running an econometric model or M as it's typically described, you're not doing things to make sure that your predictive power in the model is stable and you're hard coding variables and making things problematic before you even use it. But the third one I think is probably the most important which is bad standards like no alignment before we start measuring things on how we're judging success. And I think that's super important. I've used this example before which is if I attempt to measure something with a ruler and you use a yardstick and it's like a curvy wavy thing, a border of a country or something, you're going to end up with two different measures simply because I'm using a more precise one of 12 inches and you're using one that's closer to three feet. And so we might both have good answers. But we're not going to have the same answer. So who's right? And so if you align, this is called the coastline paradox. By the way. I'm not making this exam, I didn't come up with this idea. But application of marketing is that I need to align with the other leaders of the company, the cfo, the CEO, on how we're going to judge success. In our case, it's working costs per incremental dollar or return on ad spend model that's rooted in incrementality. And so in that case we aligned on those standards. And in order for us to actually measure what we do at GoodRx is we use three different tools. We use econometrics or we use experimentation, a lift based measurement to one, validate the econometrics, but also to gain faster insight in shorter spurts for new experiments and ideas that we have. And then we do use things like last touch or channel measures for buying or for short cycle optimization and insight. And we triangulate all three of those when we make big decisions on how much money we want to spend for the year, how we want to lay down dollars across channels, and then how we optimize within channels. So which TV programs should we pick is not going to be answered by an econometric model, but TV modeling, like spike attribution or spike modeling might be more helpful for something like that, which is closer to like a last touch sort of framework. So that's how we do it. There are a lot of different ways to do this, but I think the industry's really rallied around this idea of three legs of a stool, which are the ones I mentioned. And that's been very helpful for us. And so far so good.

[Rob DeMars]

All models are wrong, some are useful. I know you're a listener of the podcast, so you probably heard us say that before we say it at nauseam.

[Ryan Sullivan]

That's also the trick with data is data can tell you anything you want. And we'll get maybe get into this, but we think we have all the data we need. But in most cases we have a very small part of the data that actually matters at any given point in time.

[Rob DeMars]

We agree that triangulation approach makes sense how we look at tv. You know, I'd always like to think that we're all operating as marketers with the best intent, feel we're doing the best with the info we have. Sometimes that data is wrong, some more. Sometimes we're using the wrong model or to your point, we have bad assumptions. Sometimes I feel we're missing as marketers, just new perspectives. And you've said that you think marketers overestimate how much control they actually have. So what do you mean by that when you say that? How is it related to the idea of free marketing?

[Ryan Sullivan]

You've said another air quotes moment.

[Alena Drasberg]

Yeah. We want to make free marketing a thing.

[Rob DeMars]

A thing for everyone.

[Alena Drasberg]

I really like it.

[Ryan Sullivan]

Let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah. T shirt. Yeah. Dusty Pete. And then free marketing. Yeah. I love the idea of free marketing. I feel like there's an opportunity to liberate the craft and like just free us from some of the burdens we've put on ourselves through the digital era of advertising. Secondarily, it's free advice. So it's literally free marketing advice from me in this case. And then third is where I think the root of this is. It's kind of grounded in the same concepts of free market economics. And I'm saying this apolitically. I'm not trying to insinuate one way or the other on the different economic models out there or the way you think of political economy. But it's been helpful to me just to borrow from some of the economic thinking of the last century and how I think about marketing. And so when I say people over estimate the control they have, we know. We say, okay, let's. A typical situation is we want to find more people that are going to buy our running shoes. So what do we want to do? Well, first thing is let's just find all the people that like running as a hobby. That's our target segment. Then we go, okay, well is this for like super athletes or is this the casual runner? And then we start asking ourselves all these questions and assembling the data and trying to find this ideal Persona. And then we try to assign like targeting criteria. We use models or first party data or third party data and we stitch this profile together and it's all based on a very narrow set of variables that may, may be more right than wrong for more people than slightly more than average. But it's not like 100% of our opportunity set. You all have talked about this a lot more than I have with many of your guests on this kind of false idea of over targeting or hyper targeting and the infrequent buyer, the loyalty trap, all these things are like cuts of the same cloth. There are more things outside our control or more variables we're not modeling or considering than there are ones we are even the most minute ones. Common ones are like the weather. We don't normally plan for that. Some businesses do seasonal planning like it's Christmas time. Now that's something that they take into. But we're not taking into consideration the fact that someone might run out of gas on their way to work. Someone like all these micro moments, it's impossible to have all the information. That's the kind of false overconfidence that can come from picking data that seems right or is logically powerful. But you're neglecting most of the data in your decision making. And so that's the idea of why I think people fool themselves and I think they have more control. They do.

[Rob DeMars]

Everyone listening is trying to figure out how to do free marketing.

[Angela Voss]

I didn't know marketing was in jail.

[Ryan Sullivan]

So I'm curious to.

So and again this, maybe this label is not helpful for most people. It's just the way I think about it. So if anything it's more personal opinion. But this idea like that, the problem of centralized planning, like we're going to plan a marketing campaign and we're going to, we're going to do all the segmentation and we're going to pick these customers and we're going to build these ads and we're going to put them in these channels. We're going to do all these things, we're going to optimize that. And that's where all of our buyers are going to come from. Is a bit of a misnomer there. There is more that's outside our control. And in this kind of idea there's a famous article by an economist, last name is Hayek, that's called the use of knowledge in society. And the whole principle is that individuals and this idea that growth can come from reasons we don't understand or we don't know the person that ran out of gas or the person that was late on their way to work or had to go pick up their kids and then they needed a last minute, they had a last minute need for dinner and they go pick something up. We're not going to know all those things. So our job is to actually move away from the idea of trying to control every variable and create these really micro campaigns or high of target. And instead our job is to increase our surface area, give ourselves greater odds to reach the largest pool of people we can. And then through doing that we're going to end up with actually a more productive system, a more optimized system for reasons that we can't exactly explain than if we try to control every variable. So that's really it. At the end of the day, I probably erred on the side of over explaining it or anchoring too much on this idea of free marketing, but that's really what it is. We don't know as much as we think we do. We trick ourselves into thinking we know a lot more and that we have got it all figured out in reality, where the work we're doing is far less controllable than we'd like to think. And so we should really set ourselves up for all of these random events and win all these random opportunities versus trying to focus on a narrow view that we think we can control.

[Angela Voss]

It's smart and it's. It's a bit spicy. Kind of like using a prairie dog to defy the pharmaceutical category. So you are a fellow contrarian thinker. What is your most contrarian marketing opinion?

[Ryan Sullivan]

I think it's time for a contrarian corner.

My most contrarian marketing opinion I would say that it's probably been evident through our conversation, which is don't take all the data you're shown as fact. I realize a lot of what people are being sold as modern and accountable marketing is sometimes technobabble or wasteful or is really meant to just help you buy a new service or pursue a new idea. I think in a lot of cases, some of the data that we are sold or talked talk about in marketing is really something that enriches a lot of the purveyors of those ideas and sometimes can impoverish the brands that embrace them without really taking a second look or thinking harder about it. So I'd say that's probably my biggest contrarian opinion is I'm skeptical more than I'm not when I hear big promises on applications of data, personalization at scale. That kind of stuff.

[Alena Drasberg]

Love it. You're definitely on the right podcast, Ryan.

[Ryan Sullivan]

I know.

[Angela Voss]

I've seen Anne just grinning over there.

[Alena Drasberg]

All right, this has been amazing. I've learned a lot through this conversation. Let's wrap up with something probably less helpful for people, but kind of a fun question. If you could have dinner with any fictional character, excluding the Savings wrangler and your prairie dog, it's not included. Who would it be and why?

[Ryan Sullivan]

I was going to say John Hammond from Jurassic park maybe, but we already talked about Jurassic park at the top of the hour, so I would say probably like Bilbo Baggins, maybe from the Lord of the Rings. It sounds like a really peaceful evening, eating some great food by a fire and listening to some crazy stories about dragons. So not a bad way to spend an evening.

[Alena Drasberg]

Love it. Ryan, I hate to tell you, I've also never seen Lord of the Rings.

[Ryan Sullivan]

Oh, gosh. That's okay.

You got a lot of good opportunities to go see new things. That should be exciting.

[Angela Voss]

Elena, have you ever watched an episode of MacGyver? Because that's my pick. My seventh grade heart loves MacGyver. And I would love to have dinner with MacGyver and watch all of his amazing ways to use a fork, because that's what he was good at. Elena's. I don't know who you're talking. Does anybody know who I'm talking about?

[Ryan Sullivan]

Yeah, MacGyver.

[Angela Voss]

I should pick a different.

[Alena Drasberg]

No, it's mine. I'm sure people will know.

[Ryan Sullivan]

You need a mullet, though, if you're going to pick MacGyver.

[Angela Voss]

Absolutely. Richard Dean Anderson. MacGyver drove around the Jeep. He had his bomber jacket. Love that guy.

[Rob DeMars]

I think I'm gonna have to go with. I mean, I think you exposed at one point that you also have not seen the Star wars trilogy.

[Alena Drasberg]

No, I have now. My husband watched that. Yes. Okay, good.

[Rob DeMars]

I'm going with Darth Vader. Like I want to. A complex individual over dinner. Yeah.

[Angela Voss]

Yes, absolutely.

[Alena Drasberg]

I don't know. He could. He could eat. My husband's trying to have me watch a lot of these things. We just watch Breaking Bad now we're watching Better Call Saul, so it's top of mind. I'd love to have dinner with Saul Goodman. He just seems like a lot of good stor.

[Angela Voss]

I don't think he'd pick up the check.

[Alena Drasberg]

No, probably not. He'd scam me at the end, but that'd be part of the experience, honestly, and I would fall for it. Thank you so much for joining us today. You're very, very impressive, and I think people are going to really enjoy this episode. So thank you for taking the time. Where can people follow you and learn more about your journey at GoodRx.

[Ryan Sullivan]

Follow GoodRx. I mean, everyone should be taking advantage of GoodRx's capabilities and ability to save you time and money on your prescriptions. So go to goodrx.com, get our app and check us out. And for me, I'm on LinkedIn occasionally. I'm not a prolific networker, but drop me a line if you have any questions. I'm always happy to help a fellow marketer or somebody who's just curious about the craft.

[Alena Drasberg]

Love it. Thanks again, Ryan.

[Rob DeMars]

Thanks, Ryan.

[Ryan Sullivan]

You're very welcome. Enjoyed the time today.

[Alena Drasberg]

That's it for this episode of the marketing architects. We'd like to thank Taylor de Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and if you like, to the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing.