Press    NA Trevor Testwuide Explains How Measured Helps DTC Brands Get Better Results from their Media Tactics

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Trevor Testwuide Explains How Measured Helps DTC Brands Get Better Results from their Media Tactics

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Trevor Testwuide: Obviously, it’s been a stressful year for everyone, but we are doing relatively well. Considering the pain and suffering so many people are enduring, we don’t have anything to complain about.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Measured.

Trevor Testwuide: I have a long background in advertising technology, specifically attribution and analytics, to measure the effectiveness of advertising and marketing campaigns. We have seen a lot of evolution in these methods over the last decade. Initially, brands would simply track what a customer clicked on immediately before going to their website and making a purchase. That was known as last-click attribution, and its great flaw was that it didn’t give credit to any of the other steps a customer took before buying something. That evolved into multi-touch attribution and media mix modeling, which were supposed to account for that complex customer journey by breaking down credit for a sale to all the different online and offline elements such as email marketing, direct mail, social media ads, banner ads, etc.

After trying for years to make multi-touch attribution work, my co-founder Madan Bharadwaj and I started to realize that the entire premise was flawed. Limitations on data-sharing and data from offline channels, the complexity of the customer’s purchase decision, raising concerns about privacy, and other challenges all contributed to us seeing that we needed to find a better way. That led us to create Measured, which approaches marketing measurement from an entirely different perspective. We use carefully designed scientific experiments to measure the incremental benefit of each ad. Simply put, we create experiments that systematically withhold media channel exposure to a control group while maintaining normal media channel exposure to a test group. Then we compare the effect on a business outcome such as conversions, revenue, or profitability to determine how effective the media tactic was.

How does Measured innovate?

Trevor Testwuide: We are pioneering a new way to measure marketing tactics, so in a way, everything we’re doing is innovative. On a day-to-day basis, our innovation comes from how we design different experiments to get accurate and impactful results so that our clients can grow their businesses. We are regularly helping them uncover insights that save tens of thousands of dollars in ad budget that weren’t driving results and putting them toward channels that are more effective.

How has the coronavirus pandemic affected your business, and how are you coping?

Trevor Testwuide: It’s a tough time. Our clients are primarily retail brands, and many of them are struggling this year. Their sales are down. Many physical stores have been closed. At the same time, the pandemic has led to a boom in e-commerce and direct-to-consumer sales. For many of our clients, this represents a huge opportunity to reach new customers, and we can help them maximize the results they get from their marketing spend.

The other side of this is how the pandemic is affecting the people within our business. Our team is our most important asset, and I know a lot of our team are feeling anxious. They are having a hard time not being able to go out and interact with their friends and family. We’re all working remotely, which can make it difficult to turn off work mode and unwind. As a business leader, my most important job is to make sure my team feels supported to maintain work/life balance for the sake of their physical, mental, and emotional health.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Trevor Testwuide: Our biggest competitors are the legacy attribution providers. We’re seeing some other new entrants in the incrementality market, validating this is definitely the future of cross-channel attribution. These are very hard problems to solve, the barrier to entry is steep, and we feel confident in our leadership position and the product innovation we have built and continue to invest in. As long as we continue to produce great results for our clients, we will continue to see rapid growth and further solidify our market leadership.

Your final thoughts?

Trevor Testwuide: Our sweet spot is supporting brands with direct-to-consumer channels, driving their growth through paid media, and identifying efficiencies in their media mix by delivering ongoing actionable insights. The pandemic has shown brands just how important e-commerce is, but they need to make sure their ads are actually driving incremental contribution. We actually have more than doubled our revenue during Covid and added some big names to our roster, including TechStyle, P&G, Crocs, and Fetch Rewards. We’re also proud to work with such notable brands as AB InBev, Drizly, Faherty Brands, Lulus, and FabFitFun.