A brand cuts $11 million from Q1 marketing. Bottom line improves by $620,000. Looks like a win, until the rest of the year plays out: an additional $3 million in lost revenue from the missing long-tail effect, and by December, every dollar of that Q1 profit gain is gone.
This is the kind of number Keen surfaces by modeling marketing investment across its client base, informed by 15 years and $45 billion in analyzed marketing spend. As brands head into 2027 planning, Keen’s Mike Chiasson and Cabot Creamery’s Sean Thompson walk through what separates brands that grow from brands that stall, using real output from Keen’s platform and Cabot’s own five-year measurement journey.
Two ways into this session
If you’re building next year’s plan: this is the episode about why average ROI tells you almost nothing about where your next dollar should go.
If you’re defending that plan to finance: Sean explains how Cabot moved its organization onto profit ROI and diminishing-returns curves as the shared language with senior leadership.
What the numbers say
What the numbers say
- Cabot saw a 41 percent increase in profit ROI coming out of its first modeling engagement, driven mainly by shifting investment from lower-funnel to upper-funnel tactics
- Media spend intentions show a 5.6 percentage-point shift from lower-funnel to upper-funnel tactics across nearly all revenue bands for 2026, the sub-$50 million tier is the outlier
- The $100M–$500M revenue band is increasing media investment even as larger and smaller brands pull back
- Trade spend is declining across all revenue tiers, with brands broadly reallocating that budget toward media, except among billion-dollar-plus brands, where mix stays comparatively fixed
- For a typical media investment, the first eight weeks capture only about 40 percent of total contribution, the rest shows up as long-tail effect in the following year
Other topics covered by Mike and Sean
- Why marginal ROI, not blended ROI, should determine next-dollar allocation: in one client example, social and streaming video had the best headline ROI but a marginal return of just 80–90 cents, while search, the weaker-looking channel, was returning over a dollar on the next dollar spent
- How flighting pattern alone, without changing total spend or channel mix, took one beverage brand from a $1.24 ROI to $1.60, a 6 percent revenue lift and a 158 percent lift in marketing-driven volume
- Cabot’s shift away from in-store sampling toward large-scale branded events (a 20,000-person concert activation, MLB stadium sponsorships) as its best-performing upper-funnel tactic
- A pullback in linear TV and search spend broadly, with budget moving into streaming video, display, and, less predictably, Snapchat
- Why household penetration and lifetime value are gaining traction as planning metrics for brands where same-year payback doesn’t tell the full story
- Cabot’s current push into geographic growth markets outside its historic East Coast stronghold, and the case for spending ahead of distribution rather than after it
Who is this session for:
Marketing and finance leaders at small-to-mid-cap CPG brands heading into 2027 planning who need a framework for defending upper-funnel and long-payback investment to a P&L-focused organization.
What to steal
Pair every ROI number you report with its marginal ROI. A strong average can still mean the next dollar is losing you money, and a weak-looking average can mean the next dollar is your best opportunity.
