Daniel Wallock

What it looks like to be a great Executive in DTC brands is not talked about enough. I've been an Executive in 2x different Private Equity exits and in successful DTC Turnarounds: As an Executive your role can be massive. You need to be able to inspire your team, agencies, partners, and affiliates. You need to be able to work with leadership to set the yearly forecast for your business unit (and each channel) and own it. I've found it helpful to have understanding of asymmetric bets. I've found it helpful to constantly be looking for opportunities where you can have small but compounding advantages: slight edges. You need to be open, interested, excited, while also being able to discern what opportunities are going to be worth putting resources into. At times your role is going to be to protect your team's time. Other times your role is going to be to create plans that are so ambitious they will tell you it's not possible. You are going to hear a ton of ideas and suggestions from the CEO, ownership, investors, board members, and agencies or ad platforms. Your role is to have enough experience, data, intuition, and maintain such a deep network of other brand executives and media buyers you keep up with that you are able to make great choices. While you are able to advocate what you see as the most optimal direction you also need to be open to sometimes the company may choose another direction to go in. Your role is to be endlessly learning and on the look out for upcoming changes with Meta, Google, SaaS, regulation, and the entire DTC space. At times your role will be to represent your area of the business to bankers, potential investors, or buyers. While you may know your business deeper than anyone… you need to understand how to focus on what matters. You need to know how to make the complex simple. These Executive roles can be incredibly dynamic, highly cross-functional, and require exceptional people skills. My belief is these roles can be so much larger than any job description gives them credit for. They can take an exceptional balance of skills.

The compensation ask of an extraordinary growth marketing executive is so much more than most brands are expecting to pay. I believe most brands are not going to get the opportunity to hire this person because these individuals can be highly selective about what they work on. These people who are absolutely cracked at driving performance are out there. They are relentless in their drive to win and operate at a speed that literally could transform the entire culture of your business overnight.

What ads are at risk of being paused but doing so will impact TOF growth.

Generative dashboard usage will still probably 100x from here. Many of the docs or slides I would use on a day-to-day basis have become HTML dashboards More visual, dynamic, easy to edit; a huge improvement over previous mediums for sharing info.