Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Most brands are quietly killing themselves with growth hacks. Swapping button colors, chasing this week&#x27;s ROI, discounting to hit the number. Duncan, Strategy Lead at Pilothouse, makes the case that this is the worst creative strategy there is, and walks through what actually builds a brand that lasts. Duncan runs strategy at Pilothouse, where brand and performance are treated as one system instead of warring departments. He explains why Meta&#x27;s Andromeda shift is quietly ending the era of high-volume AI slop creative, and what replaces it. What you will learn: Why the growth-hack mentality leads to a discount death spiral and erodes brand value What Meta&#x27;s Andromeda infrastructure changed, and why it forces advertisers toward thoughtful creative over high-frequency iteration How to integrate brand and performance instead of picking one Why siloed agencies fight over attribution while the customer journey falls through the cracks The one question to ask any agency before you hire them: &quot;Where will growth come from this year?&quot; Who this is for: DTC founders, brand and growth leads, and anyone choosing between agencies or trying to make brand and performance work together. What to steal: the agency-selection test. If a partner can only answer with optimizations, they are a vendor. If they can tell you where growth comes from this year, they are a strategist. Timestamps: 00:00 Why Growth Hacking Is Breaking Brands 03:00 Meta Andromeda Changed Creative Strategy 06:00 The Problem With Optimizing Only for ROAS 12:00 Building Customer Journeys Beyond Attribution 20:00 Measuring Channels by Their Actual Job Subscribe to DTC Newsletter - https://dtcnews.link/signup Advertise on DTC - https://dtcnews.link/advertise Work with Pilothouse - https://www.pilothouse.co/?utm_source=AKNF619 Follow us on Instagram &amp; Twitter - @dtcnewsletter Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video

Ep 619: Stop Growth Hacking Your Brand to Death with Duncan From Pilothouse | AKNF

DTC Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** DTC Podcast

## Participants

- **Eric Dick** (DTC Newsletter and Podcast)
- **Duncan Ferguson** (Pilothouse)
- **Duncan Ferguson** (Pilothouse)

## Transcript

Before we jump into today's all killer, no filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The DTC Podcast is brought to you by Pilothouse, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing DTC brands in the world. Creative, media and customer journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade-off. Every Friday, we hand the mic to a Pilothouse operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilothouse. Head to pilothouse.co and now on with the show.

What it's done is it's completely undercut the growth hack mentality of iterating your way to success, which is I heard recently described as the worst creative strategy of all time. People have built a brand that actually means something to people. Maybe one of the most dangerous things they can do is go work with a performance marketing agency. They're measuring themselves on return on investment and when you're measuring yourself only on a return on investment, then you're going to do stuff that tries to drive up ROAS that will turn the lights green this year,

but next year your brand's going to mean less. How are you actually going to carry this person through the customer journey from never hearing about you to believing in you to being a person who buys not once, twice, but three times? That's the real battle. It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric and I'm here with Duncan Ferguson, Senior Strategist at Pilothouse.

We decided to come in and actually use this great studio that we have here in office that we use for clients all the time. Why don't we start using for our content? Welcome, Duncan. How are you doing? Great. How are you? Very good. Thank you for having me on the show. We kind of framed up a discussion today around the age-old canard of brand and performance. Canard! There's actually some truth to it, but we wanted to get in first with a discussion of Andromeda. I was having a conversation yesterday about Andromeda.

We always talk about Andromeda, and the way people talk about it is very interesting. And I'm curious, do you know why Meta created Andromeda? So my layman's outsider's take was just that, like, in my understanding of the way ad targeting worked before, there would all be these predefined segments and that would always be updating sort of based on Bayesian algorithms or something like that. And when you had an ad request, it would kind of be like a Plinko chip in this system.

And the algorithm would look at what it knows about the user and then look at all these predefined segments and make it find the right segment, look if it performed and update its segments based on that. Versus this LLM world where it's like, you can just put in a wall of data to these ...

Ep 619: Stop Growth Hacking Your Brand to Death with Duncan From Pilothouse | AKNF

Transcript

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Ep 619: Stop Growth Hacking Your Brand to Death with Duncan From Pilothouse | AKNF

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.