Happy Thursday!

TUSHY puts GPS trackers on their trucks and pings your phone to see if you looked at them. Then they check if you visited the site afterward. That’s how seriously they take measurement for a product most brands would just throw awareness dollars at and hope for the best.

Jerel Blades is their head of growth. He came on this week to talk about how TUSHY thinks about brand, performance, and Black Friday when you sell one durable product that people buy once and keep for years. His sharpest take: most brands overcomplicate BFCM. The fundamentals win every time. Know your unit economics, have a clear offer, and don’t change anything just because you’re nervous.

I pulled 5 of the biggest takeaways.

The average social media session is 8 minutes. The average TV session is 99. And even though TV ads are literally unskippable, most marketers put <10% of budget into CTV.

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TUSHY has a problem most DTC brands don’t talk about. They sell a durable product in a durable market. First-order LTV and total LTV are uncomfortably close together. So every dollar of acquisition has to work harder.

Their answer is threefold. Go wide on distribution. Half the business is on Amazon with minimal cannibalization of .com. Go long on brand equity. And measure everything at every layer so you actually know what’s working.

The measurement conversation was the best part of this episode. TUSHY runs trucks around New York City with GPS routes and RFID phone-pinging tech. Not perfect. But directional. If a device that pinged near a truck later visits the site, that’s a trackable event. They layer that with branded search volume, Amazon keyword trends, and Google search data to triangulate whether the campaign moved the needle. It’s not a clean one-to-one, but the signal is real.

On BFCM, Jerel’s playbook is more about mindset than tactics. Keep your evergreen winners running untouched because they’re still building signal. Adapt them with text overlays showing the offer as a second version. Stand up net new concepts. Diversify formats so the right content hits the right person. And measure shareability, not just ROAS. TUSHY actually tracks post shares per 1,000 impressions as a metric in their ads manager.

Their best-performing Black Friday ad last year? A comedian running out of her house with a bidet seat on her head, hopping into a car for a dinner date, refusing to go anywhere without it. No bathroom install. No product demo. Just a funny bit that communicated how much the product meant to someone. That’s the standard they’re building toward.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

• Stop fighting Amazon. Be where your customers actually shop: Half of TUSHY’s business is on Amazon. Measurement studies show virtually no cannibalization between Amazon and .com because they’re genuinely different shoppers. The Amazon customer is stacking a cart with paper towels and phone cases on Prime. The .com customer is a different person entirely. Meeting both where they are is the play. Not protecting one channel from the other.
  
  
• Out-of-home is measurable, just not perfectly: The trucks aren’t a brand faith exercise. They’re GPS-tracked, phone-pinging, site-pixeled, and cross-referenced against branded search volume on Google and Amazon. None of it gives a clean attribution number. But directional signal across multiple data sources compounds into a real read on whether something is working. If you can’t measure it precisely, triangulate.
  
  
• Shareability is an underrated ad metric: TUSHY tracks post shares per 1,000 impressions alongside ROAS and CPA. An ad with high shareability and low conversion still tells you something important about what story people are connecting with. That signal often predicts what will eventually scale. Most brands look right past it.
  
  
• BFCM fundamentals beat BFCM tactics: Jerel’s framework: nail your unit economics first so you know exactly what you can afford to offer. Make the offer clear enough that no one has to stop and think about it. Keep evergreen winners running. Add the offer via overlay rather than killing what’s working. Diversify formats. The brands that fail BFCM usually overcomplicated the offer or changed too much right before the event out of anxiety.
  
  
• Brand and performance need each other, not just tolerance for each other: Jerel’s tension with the brand team around the fruit-washing ads was real but productive. Pure performance thinking optimizes toward what converts today. Brand thinking protects the memory structure that makes conversion cheaper over time. The best relationship between the two isn’t compromise. It’s one informing the other continuously.

Jerel is coming back. We barely got through half the list. Good problem to have.

It’s Thursday, and it’s all downhill from here. Have a great weekend, stay hydrated, and I’ll see you Sunday.

Nik

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