Jennie Kaylie

The biggest mistake I see brands make with their forecast is time to impact. As we round the year and 2026 budgets and forecasts are finalized, there's a prevailing "logic" that feels intuitive: • Put your money in your peak seasons • Capture the most demand you can in that time You might see something like a seasonality chart with revenue or new customer acquisition by day or by month, and then a similar curve following very closely with investments and promo calendar. Labor day is a big sale so there's a lot of revenue forecasted around it, there's a promo, there's product drops, and there's a lot of media spend. That "feels" right and kind of matches based on a cashflow model. We don't want a single period to be underwater in order to pay for the revenue, so you usually look at some kind of LTV:CAC or MER/COS model. The reality though is that: • Spend today does NOT make revenue today • Out of market customers are the majority of your opportunity • Building up demand takes time and significant reach Having done nearly two thousand incrementality experiments over the years across our clients and other platforms, we see often that: • "Performance" spend takes 4-6 weeks to hit peak incrementality • That same spend often has a 2-4 week cool down • "Brand" spend might take 16-24 weeks to hit peak incrementality • And last a similar length of time, sometimes 18+ months later So what usually happens is you have some kind of forecast or marketing plan that's put together that has something like: • Jan: $1m spend, $10m revenue • Feb: $1m spend, $10m revenue • Mar: $3m spend, $25m revenue But in this case, is the spend CAUSING the revenue to increase, or are we simply "allowing" the spend to occur while chasing revenue. Most of the time it's the latter. The revenue spike in March in this example has very little to do with the increased spend in March, and everything to do with: • Seasonality • Promo • Product drops • The preceding 8-12 weeks of marketing activity This is why we see all the time when people start to move into upper funnel, brand, or awareness media, that they expect some kind of short-term spike. Most of the time, you don't. But you do that with a pulse strategy over time, build up that reach and frequency, and you'll eventually notice your blended CAC/MER start to come down again. The very wise Preston 🩳 Rutherford talks about this all the time. So, my advice for the 2026 forecasters out there: • Factor in an ad spend latency model for your demand • Don't just push spend in a period because there's revenue • Understand that different channels have different time-to-value The brands that are forecasting accurately and growing right now are those that are leveraging scenario planners informed by marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to understand these latent effects. They know that if peak season is in March, they actually need to start spending in January, and so forth. #mmm #2026

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A new study from Suzy finds that 67% of consumers believe companies stereotype women through product design, falling back on outdated ideas like, “shrink it and pink it.” As one consumer put it: “They always assume we’ll buy something just because it’s pink.” What women really want? “Identity-aware design. Not demographic assumptions.” Build products with women in mind, and with women on the teams creating them. Because when women lead design, we get smarter, more innovative solutions that work for everyone. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gNh9g6AV

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