GoodRx’s Wild West Brand Marketing Bets Big On Audio

24:50They, at a minimum, create a set of questions or theories, hypotheses that probably warrant serious discussion about the integrity of the business in the long run, if these things grow past a certain point. I think some of the fundamental analysis and systems thinking is important whenever you see big, small, medium things on the horizon that could disrupt the way consumers engage with businesses. And I think with LOMs, the classic search first way of thinking of we're going to build this website or this app, we're going to work to make sure our site is thoroughly indexed so people can discover it when they're searching for relevant topics.

25:27And then we're going to capture that traffic or we're going to pay for that traffic in an auction versus our competition. And we're going to rely on that kind of fountain head or that fire hose of traffic. And then we're going to convert it. I think it's always kind of been at risk. It's not like that search itself has not changed in the last, certainly my career, almost 20 years, it's changed tremendously from 10 blue links to knowledge graph to a lot of other kind of quick answers and other formats that have led us down this path of what the industry would refer to as zero click searches. And so that's not a new thing.

25:59I think agentic tools are an acceleration of that phenomenon. So I would look at those things and where you're seeing traffic decline. You'd have to also decode why. What is the impact of that ultimately? Just because someone doesn't go to your website that day doesn't mean the effect of being prominently featured in an AI overview or in a result for ChatGPT or Claude or perplexity, something like that is not useful to your brand. Again, it goes back to the idea of traffic and the misnomers of traffic that somehow when I see an ad, if someone doesn't immediately go to my site and try to buy something that it was ineffective, that's just not how people work.

26:38Of course, you can pull sales forward and you can do things to swoop in and get somebody who's in the slipstream looking for a product quickly. But brand discovery is a longer term process. The reason someone is in market for a product is largely, we don't always know why. And it could be random. It could be for something totally out of our control. In fact, probably largely out of our control. And so AI technology is just another place where you got to lean into the things that are important for your business. So you can stay, be a brand that's discoverable in these new tools. But I wouldn't overemphasize short-term traffic implications for many brands, just out of the gate.

27:14I think that could lead you down certain paths where you're oversteering or doing things that may provide short-term band-aids, but not address the fundamental shift that's in the undercurrent of the evolution there. Have you all done anything different when it comes to thinking about discoverability? I mean, because I think especially for a brand like yours, like you said, it's just because I'm searching and I don't click through right away doesn't mean I'm not possibly a customer. Like this, you have a brand that probably just needs to stay in my mind for a while. So when I actually need it, I'm like, oh, I think I know of this company that might help in this situation.

27:49Like that's probably how most customers find a lot of things. It's just remembering it. So like how are you thinking about this discoverability piece going forward? Well, on that point, if I may add, that's a really important point you're making there that is missed in a lot of the newer marketing playbook. I think we trained a generation of marketers that marketing is open up your laptop, look at a dashboard of 100 metrics and make decisions four times a day to change everything. That's like a high frequency trading exercise. Sure, there's people on teams that do that and they're really good at it.

28:21And we want those people to be engaged in those elements of marketing to make sure that we're taking advantage of short cycle opportunity. But that's not marketing. That's not capital M marketing. That's not brand building. That's not creating a growth engine that's going to stand the test of time. And so for GoodRx, it's true that customers in our case are not, many are not in market for our solution the first time they encounter GoodRx. Prescriptions are unpredictable. We don't necessarily know when, we don't know when someone's going to have a new diagnosis, or they might be between refills, or maybe their insurance status changed, or their benefit with their plan design changed.

28:55A lot of those things are outside anyone's control, except the businesses that are at play to create pricing at the pharmacy. And so the best thing we can do is to consistently wear in a message that GoodRx can save you time and money on prescriptions and say that a lot to quite a broad range of people. Because again, we don't know who might need our services at any point in time and establish trust, credibility, and some sort of intention to use GoodRx or take it seriously when you have a prescription moment. And so we put a lot of attention on that. The second part of that is we do a lot of marketing pretty much from the doctor's office all the way to the pharmacy counter and in between digital and not to make it really easy to use GoodRx when you have a prescription that you need.

29:36And so the effect of that like longer term brand building and wearing an idea complemented by the pursuit of making sure we're easy to discover and use in and around prescription moments is kind of the one-two punch that makes our marketing effective at the end of the day. You're not only marketing to your future customer, but then you're also making sure that these pharmacies get it right? How much is your strategy focused on B2C versus B2B? Because my thought was like, if you get all the pharmacies on board, can't they just drive your entire business if they're just recommending this and showing people like, hey, you can either get this for cheaper or this?

30:09Isn't there some kind of way that they could just do the marketing for you? That's true. Early on in the company's history, there were some things done to make sure healthcare professionals knew about it. Healthcare professionals or HCPs, as we call them, is our kind of macro umbrella for pharmacists, doctors, PAs, nurses, really anyone in a healthcare setting. And they're our strongest advocates for sure. Word of mouth is one of the top ways people discover the GoodRx brand. And we've cultivated that first by having a great product that works as high efficacy, saves people time and money. Doctors love GoodRx because if they can see that there's a great price point available in GoodRx and they can just send someone to the pharmacy to say, look, don't bother with your insurance.

30:49It's a lot of paperwork. We need prior offs or step therapy. I'm going to be on the phone with your pharmacist for four hours and your insurance company arguing about whether this is covered or not. You can actually get it for less money than if you just pay cash. When you have a product like that, it delights a lot of the channel stakeholders. And so yes, we have great advocacy and word of mouth from doctors and doctors' offices to really advocate and build credibility. And then we do invest time and energy in building relationships with those groups. We go to those conferences, we do a lot of channel and field marketing for doctors and doctors offices.

31:24We've had people at different times wearing GoodRx apparel and going in and offering to put up cards or help train doctor's office staff that might have questions about how the product works. And so we put a lot of attention and time on that because they are such an important advocate for us. So we've talked a lot about brand building. And I know you and I had a side discussion about big brands, essentially doing a rebrand and throwing away all their brand equity. And we've been seeing it with a lot of pretty large companies lately. And I'd love to hear your perspective because you do see a lot of CMOs coming into a company, especially a legacy company.

31:56And their first thought is get rid of this, out with the old, time to bring in something new. And so I'd love to hear about how you thought about this coming into GoodRx or just in general when it comes to rebranding or not rebranding a company. I have a very strong opinion on this, but I'm sure there's exceptions and there's reasons why if I was in someone else's shoes, I might do something different. So I want to be sympathetic to the different leaders out there and their particular playbooks. In my opinion, I'm a steward of the GoodRx brand. I didn't create the brand. I am here to help maintain or ideally accelerate its inertia and momentum as a business.

32:34And I think I put a pretty big dent in it in a positive way since I've been here and plan to for the future. And when you have that responsibility, if you think of yourself as a steward of a brand, you'd have to really think long and hard about getting rid of anything that's sustained or gotten a brand of the way it is to the point it is today. And principally, things like the logo, the wordmark, the tagline, some of the iconic mascots or elements of the brand to decide to say, we're going to get rid of that. And we're going to replace it with something else. That's a big step. And I highly doubt that it's often warranted.

33:11It might feel good because you think, wow, our customers changed and they're totally different now and we're falling behind and we need a fresher brand that's going to appeal to a younger audience. I think it's a classic dilemma. But young people grow up within the same household as their parents or older siblings and grandparents, and they discover brands from a young age. And so it's not like they'd never seen these logos before. And the bigger question is, culturally, how do you appeal to a different audience? let's not change some of the key indicators that allow you to identify that brand on a shelf of other brands, or when you're driving down a highway and you see a sign, or when you see a commercial, those elements are so important.

33:55The colors, those what some people would call make a brand salient are so important. And there's sometimes billions and billions of dollars invested in them. So I don't really understand why you'd want to wipe all that out and start over, it seems like a needless exercise to me personally. And I'd caution anyone to make that their first priority when they enter into a role and really encourage them to think of this as a steward of a brand and wanting to build momentum, not start over. Yeah, I was just looking, I think there was a LinkedIn post showing all these historic brands that were just wiping out their logos.

34:28I mean, I think like Jaguar was one where I think they took the Jaguar off of their name now. And I was like, oh, no, that's like what I would associate with the car. And I liked a little Jaguar. So it was interesting just looking at all these screenshots of brands that are just throwing away like the history that's kind of built them and got them here. Yeah. Again, I don't want to comment on anyone else's decisions because I'm not in their seat. I don't know why they would have done the things they do. And I don't want to assume to know anything. I can only just say from my perspective, if I was given as I've been given the responsibility to have a direct hand literally in what the brand looks like when it comes out the other end, I always think of, wow, we have this incredible asset.

35:08So many people know our colors. So many people know our logo. So many people know the name of our business or some of the other elements that we've established over time. We've put more than a billion dollars into this brand. I don't want to do anything to damage that credibility. But what I do want to do is I want to add elements tastefully to it that make it more resonant, stand out more and build more elements that are distinct and useful to consumers to resonate. So they know to look for other things in addition to what we've already established is important. So that's how I think about it.

35:44A lot of the data, because I am a data-driven person, the academic research on this is pretty definitive that when you start moving the cheese on people, it often disrupts things and sometimes immediately, but more often than not over the mid to long term. It just, you're starting over. And that's not to say that you shouldn't think, like I said, about evolving certain elements or maybe making certain types of modifications over time if it's not clear or some other things, but I would be really careful about doing those things because again, these are very, these are biological signals, things, colors, fonts, the way something feels, it Does it, it's aesthetic, all of those things kind of resonate in ways that we understand and maybe don't.

36:30And so I wouldn't necessarily want to go change a bunch of variables just cause it feels expedient or like a good thing to do because of modern flair or taste. Love it. So I want to get a little bit into the weeds and have like, talk a bit about things that someone could be listening right now and experiment or try in their own world after listening to this. And so the first thing I want to ask you about is around channels or bets that you're making right now. What are things that you're betting on, maybe contrarian bets or places that you're looking into having a marketing strategy at play that is not something everyone would be doing or things that you're seeing results in that you're like, this is pretty impressive and more people should know or be thinking like this?

37:11I'd like to think we're making a lot of bets or trying things, even in stuff that we know works and is maybe considered to be old hat. But do you think it's come to mind that I would specifically call out? One is audio. In our new work, Savings Wrangler, we do actually have this guy over here, Dusty Pete. He's playing a guitar and he's singing stories of customers and their savings. And as a kid, I remember so many great ad campaigns. I grew up in the Midwest. So anybody who's a Midwesterner would know probably if I say Empire Carpet, Luna, or Victory Auto Wreckers, there's certain sounds. And I know the phone number.

37:48It's just like in my head, it's been an earworm that's gotten in there for decades. And audio is such an interesting way to build nostalgia, recall, and bring people to a different place, especially since everything that's visual is we're overloaded from a sensory standpoint with visual stimulus that I'm very interested in the effect of audio. So we're going to be doing more of that. And I couldn't be more excited by some of the great work the team has done. So we're leaning into creating some compelling sounds and audio, some tagline that we know works really well. And I'm really interested to see how that continues to mature for us in a portfolio.

38:24Audio in another sense, we get a lot of latitude and great signal out of audio as an advertising medium too. So traditional radio, podcasting, these are things that you don't have to just rattle off a discount code, like go to somethingsomethingsomething.com forward slash podcast. And that's the only way you can determine that a podcast is valuable to an audience. That goes back to a point I made earlier, which is if you're studying the immediate effect of everything, you're probably not going to get the story right in the mid to long run on its efficacy. to see. We've seen a lot of good signal in audio.

39:00And I think we've weathered a lot of the inflationary effects of media better in audio than other areas. So I think that's another area we're leaning into. I want to apologize before you go to your next one, because I think this is a very interesting one to circle around. Because one, I mean, only a couple CMOs have touched on this piece. But I do think, I was just thinking about this the other day of the in-between moments when your buyers are listening and tuning in and they're like in the kids' school pickup line, they're walking their dog, they're wiping down the counters at nighttime. Like they've got AirPods in, they're listening to podcasts, they're listening maybe to radio.

39:35Like it's literally this audio format that is doing the incepting of messages and products and, you know, hopefully in a storytelling capacity. And I think it's such an undervalued channel right now that like you said, And video, I know video, obviously people love it. It is a very highly consumed format, but audio is one I just don't think enough people are thinking about strategically and how to place messaging and stories with inside, whether it be a podcast or radio, whatever it might be in a way that resonates, but also sticks with that customer for a long time afterwards. Like if it's done in a story, instead of just, here's my ad, go to this website, like thinking of it like long-term, how do I make sure that they know my brand?

40:15And it's part of something that's interesting that they're listening to already. I wholeheartedly agree. If you think about this in terms of, again, confessions of a former engineer here, but if you think about a video asset, there's a couple of different things going on there. Someone could say, well, what I'm seeing is not appealing to me and kind of tune out immediately. Or before they know it, they're like, I've seen this commercial before. And they're now like, you might've gotten some benefit of just the wear-in of the logo and brand. If you've done it well, you might, you know, that matters.

40:43It's not a throwaway thing. But with audio, you have one thing, the sound going out of a speaker into your ear. And so if you can do that in a way, especially if you're cognizant of the type of programming you're integrating with, so it feels like a more natural integration, it feels right for the setting, you have a lot of variability. And in my opinion, it's important to end with something strong and consistent so that you have that hook. The thing that makes me remember the Empire Carpet phone number growing up in the Chicagoland area. that's the thing that really kind of seals it together and creates a memory structure that can be really useful for a brand.

41:19So we're very excited about what we've done. I would encourage everyone to go look at these audio ballads. They're awesome. And I'm excited to do a lot more of it. So good. Okay, tell me more. That was a great part. Now I want to know, what else are you all doing? So we talked about AI earlier and I don't want to turn this into like probably yet another really long kind of AI theory discussion necessarily. I'm sure there's plenty of people that have a lot more insight on that than I do or deeply working in that area as professionals. But when new technology comes around, you have to be mindful of how brand discovery might change.

41:54And with agentic tools and my understanding of how they work and process information and really absorb and figure out how to give answers, how to cite a brand, what they can trust as to be authoritative or worthy of including in some sort of overview or answer to consumer, a lot of that rests on kind of a network of signals, fingerprints of brands that exist all over the place. And oftentimes, they're in areas that brands don't control. Forums on the internet, we've seen a lot of data on our Reddit and that curated content. Whether it's right or not, it's a different thing. But it's there and it's perceived to be authoritative.

42:32Also, the network effect of news, local news, local journalism, microjournalism, influencers, and even national mainstream media as well. All of those things are signal sources. And so we're putting a lot of attention into our PR and comms work as an integrated part of marketing, not just integrated in the sense that we're trying to tell consistent stories to consumers and the business community at large about our business or the rhythms of our business, but really looking at our proprietary data. doing custom research, finding interesting ways of studying the challenges of prescription affordability and access in America, unique instances or data on certain areas of therapies or efficacy guides, even for people like what's some tips to avoid food allergies at a restaurant, stuff, everything you can think of involving content to really get that out more and not just put it on our website and make hopes for it from an SEO perspective, people read the article, but syndicating that stuff and trying to get attention and coverage on it so that we can propagate that and get more of these signals out there to help further our ambitions of being highly discoverable in these forums.

43:39I do hope it turns into a visit. If it does turn into a visit in terms of someone's like, oh, where did the source of this information come from? They come to our website. Great. If they don't and they just see GoodRx as a great source and trustworthy source of information about prescription savings for time and money, that's great too. And so we're really focused on integrated comms and PR into our marketing engine. And we're going to be doing a key lean in there and push harder. Yeah, this is something I've talked a lot about is like the power of having content everywhere in different forms.

44:09Like you kind of need to be showing up everywhere and having other people talking about you. Like you can't just do everything from under your brand account and everything on your website. You need to have outside sources saying, hey, good Rx, this was actually helpful to me. or here's an experience I just had and it needs to be authentic and give these LLMs a chance to find information in a bunch of different sources because they're scraping the transcripts of YouTube. They're looking at podcasts. They're looking on Reddit, looking at like very specific questions people are asking about their prescriptions and yeah, just like how do you show up as a brand in all these different formats and measure it and find the white space of where should I be showing up because I'm sure where you should be showing up is very different than a B2B SaaS company versus a CPG company.

44:54And so it feels kind of like the Wild West, like similar to your new brand campaign, but for LOMs. There's something in what you're saying there and just the journey of thinking about these new technologies. I'm actually excited because I do think it's going to force a lot of return to some of the more traditional playbooks in advertising and marketing. I do think we've lost our way a bit in the digital era. And again, someone with me, I worked at a company called Performix for 12 years. So performance marketing is deep, deep, deep in there. I think I've gone so far into it that I've come out the other end and I'm now maybe apologizing for some of the things I might have aped or pushed in the past.

45:35But we've been lulled into this idea that we have as marketing leaders a lot of control over how people interact with our brands, that there's some primrose path we create, a happy path of build a really compelling ad. Does it have a hook? get a click through, go to the website, download the thing or transact, put something in a shopping cart. You don't buy it, re-engage the person and try to create this almost like factory assembly line way of looking at the business. But in that, I think we're being dishonest that there's a lot of things that happen for reasons that give us the illusion of control, that it's really luck or timing or other forces that are at play.

46:09And we use correlation as some sort of causal signal to say, oh, this is what marketing is. If we believe that discoverability in the future is going to be a lot of automated agents scraping things online and on and offline for us and building a knowledge graph of what is true, who's strong in a certain area, who has the best of this. And then for each individual, it's going to be different because I'm going to have a dialogue with a tool for over a period of time where it ostensibly will know me and filter things based on my likes and preferences, we're definitely not going to have the level of control that we've come to think we do.

46:50And so we have to believe more in this idea of emergent order or an invisible hand or things just developing around us. And the goal there is to then position yourself so you have a huge surface area as a business that what your business does is well understood. And the structure of where you play and where you don't, what you're really good at, what you may not be, who ideally should consider using you when. Those things are really important to get right in the messaging and the fundamentals. And then you just have to kind of wear those things in over time and do them consistently enough that there's enough of these signals out there that the odds are in your favor that when someone is in a state of need or they're taking something seriously, that you will be discovered.

47:32And that hopefully returns us to a simpler time where there was a more focused pursuit of advertising in a macro sense and not this like fidgety digital dogfight every day that I think people misconstrue as modern marketing. Yeah, it is interesting. You talk about like humans wanting control and probably just adding more dashboards, more metrics, more everything, like the more that I can control. And now this idea of just kind of surrendering it a bit. And I've had actually a couple of people I just had on someone, Harmony Anderson, she leads growth marketing or marketing at Superhuman. And she was like, I'm just doing good things and investing in all these things.

48:04And I just I'm assuming good things will come. And as long as revenue is growing, like I'm not going to sit there and try and tie to every single activity and every single influencer and every podcast sponsorship. Like I'm just going to invest in what I think is best right now and then just watch revenue and not be caught up too much in the numbers because that's where I think a lot of teams right now, you see the divide between become super quantitative and everything has to be tracked. And now we've got, you know, we have to be in a very different world versus the other half the leaders I talked to are more around intuition and gut feeling.

48:34And how do we make decisions in that space, in this new world that we're heading into? Because it's not one that you can actually control like you could before. So it feels like two balancing acts of too much analytics and then relying a lot on intuition and trying to find a medium, like happy medium is probably the goal going forward. I think that that balance of art and science or however you want to say that is really important. I think, you know, I think of myself sometimes maybe, and this is like maybe a stretch, but, you know, meteorology has a certain amount of pursuit, but there's a lot of metrics that like, I'm sure that those scientists look at every day to kind of approximate what they think.

49:12And there's models and things for the weather, but the predictive power of those things decays is the further out you get. It's supposed to rain two days from now, it doesn't, you know, is that, and so if you, if you think about using the data to triangulate or kind of confirm some suspicions you have, and you use intuition and experience and the power of a human brain to really intuit and be creative and discover new things or new ways of communicating ideas. Data can complement the natural drive. And we've seen play out well over more than 100 years of advertising. It doesn't have to be the end all be all for every single thing.

49:45And that's also to say that I try to avoid going too far the other direction of maybe where some advertising gets criticized as it seems indulgent. We're doing it just because it feels like the right thing to do. And I try to make sure I never say that. I think of it more like because of my background, I really try to start with an appeal to logic. It seems likely to me that, or if based on what we know to be true in the past, this seems like the right thing today. And I think logic can cut through a lot of things quickly. And then second to that, I'd say, well, the research says, or there's a lot of data out there that would suggest that this is probably the right way to think about this problem.

50:27And then I would go to like our data says, specifically, this is what we should probably do in this situation, how we should react to this. And by the way, I probably wouldn't just cite one number unless it's a very nuanced question. I'd say there's a couple different data points that if you triangulate them, say we're on the right direction. And when you think about triangulating using data, and you use that kind of logic, like theory to the actual qualitative fact, as much as it is fact, or at least consistent fact in your organization, the yardsticks you've developed, it does give, it helps build more trust that we're not just kind of like shooting from the hip every day and making it up as we go, that there is a plan, that we are measuring these things with integrity, that we're keeping our business partners informed along for the ride.

51:12And they feel like they have a vested interest in what we're doing and can be supportive of us. And the way we built our measurement internally here and the way we built relationships with our finance team and other business leaders have really given us that footing inside the company. And I'm very proud of that. Okay, so you've talked a lot now about measurement. And I'd love to hear what system have you built up internally for this measurement capability that we've kind of discussed all throughout the interview? Thanks for asking. We've put a lot of time and energy into this. is something when I came to the company, again, I started in a growth marketing role.

51:42And one of my first tasks or areas that I really wanted to focus on was up-leveling the way we are... Or kind of consolidating the way we looked at measurement. We started with a number of purpose-built tools for every single channel. For TV or video, it was a spike model. For other channels, it was a last-touch kind of model. We had different tools for different channels. And so what I'd seen be effective in my career was coming up with three distinct different approaches to measurement that can be effective in triangulating the impact of marketing for a business. Any one of these on its own can be overused or lead you astray.

52:20So I think three different things as elements together really are the poly trinity there. One is econometrics. So econometrics are pulling in a lot of variables and looking at their correlation in small increments when data changes over time so that you can kind of build a model that is reasonably predictive of what we think the future business is going to look like based on the current inputs. And those inputs could be the dollars we're spending, the number of impressions we might have in a certain channel, and a whole other set of inputs. They could be macroeconomic data on unemployment or other sorts of things.

52:54So you put all that into a model and you're given a lot of interesting insights to correlate the rhythms of those metrics with the outputs that you care most about, the dependent variables like sales or traffic or new customers or reactivated customers, whatever's important for the organization. So that tool is really useful in making longer term budget planning decisions. How much money should we invest in marketing and paid media? When do we think the dollars that are associated with those investments will hit in the business? How much of it is going to be in a quarter versus in a half of a year versus two years out?

53:30We've put a lot of time and energy into that. It takes a long time to do, but it's an important tool. The second thing we do is incrementality testing or lift-based measurement. Experimentation is another way of saying this, where we run experiments in as much a controlled setting as one can get in the modern era. And that could be a market test for some, like you find two markets that behave similarly, and you affect one and not the other, and you look at the difference in performance. So we do that. And that helps as a really useful tool in calibrating what that econometric output looks like.

54:01You can use those two data points to really help complement one another and fine tune your models on the econometric side. And there's some channels like a display, I think in programmatic, that lend themselves to some sort of perpetual incrementality study that you can use incrementality-based methodologies to kind of measure and optimize the program more real time. So that's another important thing we do. And we test pretty much every medium at some point in some way from an incrementality perspective. Then the third is, you know, base response measurement. This is where a last touch would be, or, you know, pseudo multi-touch models specific within certain platforms like the whole Google ecosystem.

54:38We use these last touch signals for buying in market. It's difficult to buy based on econometric signals because those are slower. They take a longer time to come out. So if you want to make budget changes and optimizations multiple times a day, the data is not useful. It wouldn't really help you. Same thing with incrementality-based data. You need to study that effect over some period of time. You can't make a decision in your day. So we use last touch data or channel data to make buying decisions and really optimize for short-term signals that we have heuristics that help us translate what a short-term response rate or visit rate or click-through rate might translate to in terms of mid to long-term sales.

55:21And so those three things together, no one on its own is powerful enough, I think, to give you the right insight you need as a business leader to make decisions for the company. And so the three together is how we triangulate signal and make day-to-day decisions and month-to-month decisions and how we annually are planned biannually as a company. It's also how we stay accountable to our finance partners and others so they understand what the decisions we're making every day lead to in terms of expected sales impact. Wow. Okay. So I've never... I mean, I worked in finance at Google and I would have a lot of marketing teams pitching me what budget they wanted.

55:56And I haven't ever heard of a team doing it at this level of like having a model that helps make decisions and all of that. Who at the company gets access to this? Because it seems like it depends on the question you're asking. You would want to maybe weight pieces of this model differently. If you're asking a more three-year plan question, then you might want the econometrics to be heavily weighted in that. Versus if you're like, I just need to know what I can spend this month, then probably the channel based data more. So like who gets access to this within the company to use it for maybe their decision making.

56:27Yeah. And it's not to withhold any information, but we generally don't share channel level data outside the marketing team because I found it's more a distraction than it is actually helping ask questions. If we're at a point where other partners in the company are wanting to see and audit all of our data, we've missed the mark to establish trust and something else didn't go right. And of course, there's times and periods where you need to demonstrate that what you've built is trustworthy. And sometimes that's necessary. So we tend not to overshare channel data, not to hold anything back, or unless it's a specific focus study on a certain campaign, like a win back campaign or a new product launch, we might give more detail there for that particular team working on it because it's helpful.

57:10So everyone knows what's going on. And again, none of this is meant to mask or hide anything. It's just, I don't think folks, sometimes people grab onto something that isn't really useful for the decision they're trying to make. And they wouldn't necessarily know that because they haven't worked in marketing for 15 or 20 years. And so better to not do this. Like I wouldn't necessarily know what to do with stuff that our finance or HR teams use day to day. Same thing. So who gets access to the econometrics? The way you described how to use that data is right. We've built a set of dashboards and tools that take input from all of these different metrics.

57:43And we've agreed on a common yardstick with our finance teams principally and some of our strategy teams and the rest of the leadership team on how we're going to stay accountable for the goals we're responsible for in the organization. And that set of dashboarding is kind of our Bible. And we review that with Finance Weekly so they know what's our plan for investment for the foreseeable future this week, this month, this quarter, this year? Are we on track or off track? What kind of shifts we might want to make? And what do we think is coming on the other end? And so we use that composite set of data as our yardstick and our common currency or language between our teams.

58:21And we agreed on that framework. They understood how we built all of that, what goes into some of the assumptions, the MAPE on the models themselves and how the predictive power of our econometric views. And we track and periodically calibrate those things in open air with those leaders so that they feel very invested and bought into this shared yardstick that we use to judge success. And that's primarily what we use when we converse with teams outside marketing directly. And then the media team uses a bunch of other things day to day, you know, within their channel, incrementality testing, other things to make sure that those, the predictive power of those models are true, that we, those things are not going to just happen on our own.

58:58We have to actually make the results happen. So that's where the other data comes in. Amazing. Thank you for getting into the nitty gritty with me. I appreciate being able to go there with you. No problem. I could talk about this. I could talk about this for years. And one other interesting anecdote I'd say, because I've used this idea of yardsticks, and it's funny to me because I try to look at a lot of things outside business for inspiration for my work day to day, rather than reading a lot of consolidated information on business topics themselves. And one thing I stumbled upon recently was this idea of, I think it's called the coastal paradox.

59:30basically it's depending on how you choose to measure like the national borders of an island nation like ireland for example you can get like an infinitely large number and it depends on how small you want to measure that if you want to use like a little inch ruler or a string to measure you're going to get a different number than if you use a you know three foot stick or or you estimate using satellite imagery and i i think in that i i learned that portugal and spain share a border. And even though they share a border, they have two different numbers for the length of the border, which I think goes to show you that if you don't start having an open air conversation about what yardstick or how we're going to view success as a company, you're almost destined to come to different conclusions and have tension.

1:00:16And so I really made a point, and I encourage my team to do this too, is the first thing we should do is get on the same page of how we're going to judge success, how we're going to measure stuff, even before we get into the science of it. because if we start off on the wrong footing, we're just destined to have two different numbers and have a confusion. Man, know your yardstick. That's so good. I have seen that issue come up with many, many teams I've worked with and especially when it's different executive teams coming together and everyone's just speaking different languages and looking at different numbers and metrics.

1:00:48And yeah, that's really good. Yeah, or someone throws out a metric, you're like, I don't even know we cared about that. Where did that come from? Yeah, I love it. Okay, let's quickly shift over to the last part of the episode. It's the lightning round. This is where I throw a question your way. You have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Brian? I am totally ready. Okay. First up, if I gave you a million dollars, no strings attached, what marketing campaign or strategy would you run? I would do more audio. I would do more of these Dusty Pete ballads. I already kind of chipped my hand on that one.

1:01:19So yeah, I'm leaning into Dusty Pete singing to customers. Okay. I love it. I love it. Next up, you are on a deserted island and you're allowed to bring one executive with you, not from GoodRx, like someone you just admire. You don't even have to know them or they can be your friend, whoever you want. So one executive, one piece of software tool, something you're like, I need this. And then one book. Oh man. Well, so book, I've been trying to read this book by Robert Caro. It's very long. So I think that would give me finally some time to actually get through to read it. It's a good book. So it's an awesome book, but I just haven't had the time.

1:01:53It's called The Power Broker. It's about Robert Moses and this guy who helps kind of have a pretty big role in planning New York City to be the city it is today. The good and the bad. The tool, maybe this is cheating a bit, but I'd bring Google Ads so that I could buy advertising to let people know where I am, that I'm missing and I'm well. That's good. Yeah, so that somebody can come find me. And then an executive I want to bring with me, boy, you know, Yvonne Chouinard is the founder of Patagonia. And not only he's got a not only an amazing story as an individual, but he's also an incredible outdoors person.

1:02:30So I'm sure he could help us like build something out of bamboo and figure out how to eat coconuts and fish until we got rescued. So, yeah, that's good. That's probably my favorite answer so far. Very smart. I like it. OK, what is one marketing buzzword that you just wish would disappear off the face of the forever? forever? One is hard. Probably learnings. It just, it hurts my ears when I hear the word learnings. Learnings? Learnings. Yeah. I don't think it's a real word and it's just like a filler. I would rather, I also call my team out when they share it. I would rather people say insights or results or something else that is more in the English language, not just a made up business word.

1:03:14Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it sounds like a more personal pet peeve. We may have to work on this to get past this one. Yeah, yeah. Learnings is hard. I mean, other one is, I would say maybe another one is growth hacking. I just think it conveys a certain indifference to how you get to the results, which if you're just running to like get a result or some sort of signal, that's not necessarily hard. We talked about all the challenges of data. So I think that one usually puts me on guard when I hear someone say they're a growth hacker. Yep, yep. Okay, what is a hobby or like a skill that you have that most people don't know about?

1:03:49I do a lot of camping. I really like outdoors and hiking, camping. And so I'm pretty good at, you know, building a fire, getting a campsite set up, doing the quartermaster work needed to make sure you can survive on a backpacking trip. So yeah, that's something that I don't talk a lot about. But it's a necessary break from the world of computers that I'm in and have been in for most of my life. Yes, love it. All right, Ryan. Well, thank you for joining Marketing Trends. It was super fun. I love getting into the nitty gritty with you and thinking high level of the industry and marketing in general.

1:04:23Where can people find out more about you and GoodRx? You can go to GoodRx.com or download our app. Everybody in the United States should be using this app. There's no reason not to. So get after it. And you can also check us out in our advertising on our social channels and everywhere else. So thank you so much for having me, Stephanie. This was a joy. Thank you.