Once Upon a Farm did $85.4 million in Q2, up 42 percent year over year, and reached 6.2 percent of US households against 5.0 percent a year earlier. Some of that growth traces back to a campaign that was never supposed to produce it.
They were running lower funnel media to their own site. A clean shop now call to action, the kind of campaign you judge by tomorrow’s site revenue. What moved was the retail business. Instacart got more efficient. Programs with accounts picked up momentum. Jennifer Berglund has spent the years since trying to see that effect properly instead of guessing at it, and with Keen she is now watching paid search at one retailer show an effect on sales at another.
That is the halo. It is the lift you get from money you cannot tie to a click, and for a brand selling across ten aisles and a dozen accounts it is most of the story.
Two ways into this episode
If you run growth at a brand moving into retail: this is the episode about what happens to your job when the sale stops closing anywhere you can see it, and what you measure instead.
If you own the media budget: Jennifer walks through how a one month TV test in 2021 turned into always on upper funnel, including the matched market holdout testing she used to defend it before she had a model.
What Jennifer and Brad get into
- The early signal: lower funnel DTC media running, and the retail business taking off instead
- The finding out of Keen that surprised her most, paid search at Kroger or Target showing an effect on a different account entirely
- Why she treats ROAS as an education problem inside the company rather than a KPI
- The trap in new to brand at a retailer, and why she takes it with a grain of salt
- How she built the case for TV: a 2021 test, then TV plus social plus out of home, then geo tests against comparable holdout markets, then always on
- Streaming TV and YouTube, and Brad on buying top of funnel through retail media DSPs so the money still funnels to the retailer
- Why every retail media network’s conversion methodology is different, and what she uses those platform numbers for instead
- The moment a brand should stop putting every dollar into working media and start paying for measurement
- Brad on awareness as the leading indicator of household penetration, and household penetration as the leading indicator of revenue
- Amoeba marketing, which Brad coined live on the recording and Jennifer immediately claimed for her LinkedIn
Who this is for
Operators whose business has outgrown the channel their reporting was built for. DTC brands going into retail, retail brands building ecommerce, anyone whose media now shows up in someone else’s numbers.
What to steal
The biweekly omnichannel meeting. Jennifer runs one across her media team and sales leadership. Sales says “I see this happening here,” she says “we were running media during that time.” That meeting found the halo before any model did.
About the series
Harness the Halo is a six part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn’t pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it anyway. Episode 1 was the market read across 450 brands and $45 billion in media investment. This is the first brand.
