Academy
I’ve spent most of my career at ad agencies. The hours were long and the clients demanding, but the intimate nature of the agency-brand relationship gave me a unique vantage point into how brands function at an organizational level. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with companies of all stripes, from disruptive startups to dominant incumbents.
One lesson has been constant: a brand’s impediments to growth are often more structural than tactical. Marketing teams normally know what they need to do. But over time, organizations can develop silos across business functions that produce bottlenecks. Those bottlenecks often come at the expense of speed and agility, qualities greatly rewarded in today's primarily algorithmic media ecosystem.
As one of the leaders on the Business Development team for Axon’s consumer business, I now see those same bottlenecks manifest in how brands use our platform today.
Three silos in particular create missed opportunities.
What if you could increase your marketing budget by 15x in 6 weeks with little to no decay in performance?
Every marketer I know would say great, when can we start? That kind of growth on Axon is not uncommon. Here’s a consumer brand that recently launched on the platform:
The more interesting question: would finance let you do it?
Finance teams demand predictability. Marketing is a cost line item that needs to tie back to a revenue goal. Most marketing teams get fixed monthly budgets, often paired with daily revenue targets. That rigidity is meant to protect the downside, but it often leaves growth on the table.
Algorithmically driven ad platforms don’t operate on fixed schedules. The pools of demand available in the market ebb and flow daily. When performance is strong, spend should scale aggressively. When it’s weak, save dry powder for another day.
The brands that scale fastest on Axon treat finance as a partner, not a gatekeeper. They educate their finance teams on how the platform works and build the organizational flexibility to press when the demand is there to convert.
In my agency days, brand leadership would routinely push the marketing teams to diversify their media mix. Channel concentration makes a business less resilient, and a broader mix pushes out the efficient frontier curve across the entire portfolio.
New channels though can take time and investment to crack - items in short supply when leadership wants quick results with minimal upfront cost. New channel tests are often underfunded, and if the new channel ROAS doesn’t quickly exceed performance on existing platforms, the test is paused in short order.
Leadership would be well served to not conflate average vs. marginal returns when evaluating the performance of a new channel. A brand spending $100M a year on their incumbent channel doesn’t get the same leverage on dollar one as they do on dollar one hundred million. The ROAS blends to a single number, but the marginal return decreases as spend scales.
Take an illustrative example below:
Now, assume this brand tested a new channel at a $20M run rate and saw a 250% ROAS. The average ROAS for the incumbent channel is 300%. Leadership sees these numbers and makes what feels like an easy call: new channel is less efficient, pause it . But the marginal returns tell a different story. The first $20M into the new channel outperforms the last $20M into the incumbent. The ROAS-optimal decision is to reallocate the least efficient $20M tranche of the incumbent channel to the new one:
The result: $30M more in revenue at the same budget. Marketing and leadership teams benefit from being in sync not only on budgets and goals but in a shared understanding of how modern advertising platforms function.
Media and creative feel like the easiest functions to integrate inside of a brand. Media needs assets to run in channels; creative needs performance data to produce better concepts. Yet at too many brands, these teams operate in parallel without integrated workflows.
This disconnect is especially costly on algorithmically driven platforms like Axon, where little to no manual targeting exists by design. Our models match the right user to the right ad relative to the conversion event the brand wants to achieve.
Media buyers still want to ensure they’re reaching new and diverse audiences and that their reach is expanding over time. On Axon, creative is the primary lever to do this.
We encourage creative teams on our platform to think like media buyers. They control the targeting more than the media team does. Want to reach women? Make ads for women. Want to reach millennials? Make content that resonates with them. The model will find the right audience for whatever the creative team produces.
None of these silos are unique to Axon. They exist across every marketing channel. But because Axon is algorithmically driven and performance-based, the cost of these organizational gaps shows up faster and more visibly in the data.
The flip side is also true. Brands that break down these silos and successfully integrate business functions allow their teams to operate more effectively in a way that drives real business impact. The platform rewards organizational agility in the same way it rewards great creative.
That’s the part of the job I find most rewarding. The product is built to perform. Our job on the BD team is to help brands build the internal muscle to let it.