How Once Upon a Farm's DTC Ads Grew Its Retail Business | Harness the Halo 2/6

0:00When brands are D2C and they're emerging, a lot of the marketing efforts, like you can see them pretty short term. Well, a lot of that becomes masked when I now have 10 products in 10 aisles, all these retailers.

0:12Jennifer Berglund:Now at Akeen, we're seeing things like paid search at Kroger or Target might be actually having an effect on another account. There's a huge opportunity in connected streaming TV. You just have to get over the sticker shock of the CPM, like the price is high. But the effectiveness is there. It's a balance. It's not either or. It's that balance of the upper funnel and lower funnel and making sure everything is working synergistically.

0:47Hello and welcome to a special episode of the D2C podcast. This is Harness the Halo, a six-part series from D2C and Keen. The quick version, if you're just tuning in, growth used to have a cheat code. You'd put a dollar into Meta and you'd get a customer back the same day. This has gotten harder and building a brand that lasts now means spending money in places where you can't draw a straight line from the dollar to the sale. The bet of this series is that better measurement is what gives you room to make these moves because once you can see the payoff you couldn't trace before, you can spend into it.

1:18The halo is that payoff. It's the lift you get from the money you can't tie directly to a click. In the last episode, the first episode of the series, Keen's Justin Jefferson gave us a wide view of what's working across hundreds of brands at once. Today, we're going to go the other way, a deep dive into one business. And now here's the thing I want to get into. At a lot of companies, the money that builds the brand and the sale that the money eventually creates sit in two different places. One team spends to create the demand. The results often show up somewhere else entirely on a shelf in a marketplace in someone else's numbers.

1:48And every platform in between lines up to take the credit. Figuring out what actually drove the sale is the hard part. My guest today lives close to that problem. Jennifer Berglund runs digital and e-commerce at Once Upon a Farm, the organic kids' food brand you've probably seen in the cooler at the baby aisle. Her world is the D2C site, Amazon, and the marketplaces, the shopper marketing. Before, she also worked at Nestle, General Mills, and 3M, so she's seen how this works at big companies and at a growing one. We've also got returning podcast alumni, Keen's Bradley Kiefer. Brad is the chief revenue officer at Keen, and he can tell us how this tends to play out at the brands they model.

2:25Jennifer, Brad, welcome to Harness the Halo episode two. How are you doing?

2:30Jennifer Berglund:Good. Appreciate the opportunity. Jennifer, can you kind of give us the lay of the land? I'm super, I've been trying to actually get Once Upon a Farm on the podcast probably since I started here because you guys are such an incredible success story. Can you give me the lay of the land of what actually sits under you at Once Upon a Farm and what doesn't? Yeah. Yeah, so I am the VP of digital marketing and e-commerce at Once Upon a Farm. And on that desk, I oversee all of our media. So that's brand media, obviously heavy in digital, but also inclusive of TV, all of the retail media, and then performance marketing, digital comms, email lifecycle, etc.

3:06Jennifer Berglund:I also run our end-to-end e-commerce business, which is inclusive of direct-to-consumer and Amazon. So that's a bit more of that general management role, P &L, accountability, etc. How much of the budget is sort of dedicated to creating demand versus capturing it? That is an ever-evolving mix as our business grows and changes, right? And candidly, we're actually using Keen now, which is helping to inform that a bit. But overall, we're looking to have a healthy balance because you need that upper funnel. You need that awareness driving, but you also have to convert at the end of the day. And so those things obviously go hand in hand.

3:52Jennifer Berglund:I do oversee all of that media except for trade, which sits within our sales team. And that plays a very important role from a conversion perspective. But we're really continuing to balance against our business objectives and measure constantly, holistically along the way. So I know retail has become a huge piece of what happens at Once Upon a Farm. And I was reading about the Cooler Initiative. How do you think about your job on the digital side as it relates to driving people to retail? And how do you account for the impact that you have through all of your digital efforts on the retail side?

4:31Yeah.

4:32Jennifer Berglund:And you mentioned coolers. That's an interesting one because we have broad distribution across the country, across retail, and obviously a growing e-commerce presence as well. The coolers are growing. They're growing across accounts, but also across regions. So it's one where you have to deploy a little bit different objectives in terms of you might need to be more targeted with those coolers, more focused on retail media, paid search, etc. But we also use a lot of our organic channels as well, because one important thing as you look at retail is simply telling consumers where to find us in store.

5:18Jennifer Berglund:it varies by account and it varies also too you're talking about baby pouches versus our kid pouches so you go into Whole Foods and Kroger you'll find us in the dairy section but we also now have baby coolers in those accounts as well which sit in the baby aisle you go into Target you'll find us in produce and so it really varies by account we've also grown across the retail space so playing now within center of the store in shelf-stable products, both in the baby aisle as well as the bar aisle. We offer kids bars. So education actually with our brand and with our consumers is a really important thing, not just at the high level, what is the brand about, what does it stand for, but also down to the most tactical level of where are you actually going to go in retail to find us.

6:15Jennifer Berglund:We have a healthy digital e-commerce business. So thinking about online grocery. And so it becomes a little bit different dynamic online. But again, that's where our retail media efforts serve us well. Bradley, from your side, working with Once Upon a Farm, how are you seeing Keen interact with these challenges of kind of unraveling the halo effect of digital on retail. And when you have got such a cool form factor of something like these coolers where you're creating a new space in the retail store, it's also going to have a great impact, I assume, on what you're doing on the digital side. Just because it stands out so much, you're more likely to maybe react to an ad you see once you've seen one of these coolers.

6:56From your side, Brad, how do you see these kind of worlds interacting? I think there's kind of two different worlds that I would even highlight in that. One is There's the organizational world and two, there's the math and data world. So part of the evolution that we see with brands like Once Upon a Farm or just anybody who's like a fast growing, fast evolving company is the company who we were a year ago is not the company we're trying to be a year from now. And as we get bigger, we now have bigger data. And it's like, there's not a shortage of data. There's oftentimes a shortage of resources or a shortage of alignment or an understanding of how like this lever interacts with that lever.

7:35So there's just like organizational evolution or maturity that has to happen alongside of the model in and of itself. because a lot of times when brands are D to C and they're emerging and that's all they're doing. And I think Jennifer could talk about this too. A lot of the marketing efforts, like you can see them pretty short term. Like there's a lot, there's enough correlations that you can see early on that are like not as right as they could be, but they're not wrong. Well, a lot of that becomes masked now when all of a sudden it's like, well, I now have 10 products in 10 aisles and I've got all these retailers and I've got all this challenge that I have, it just adds organizational complexity.

8:13So both in how you measure, which is a native part of our solution when we think about portfolio and how we think about there's a P &L for a bar versus a P &L for a refrigerated product. They're very different P &Ls. There's different margins, but also there's different objectives for each of the teams because sitting now within it is not just the complexity of the organization between finance, sales, and marketing, there is also inside of that, it's like, yeah, but Target wants something different than Walmart wants, that wants something different from Amazon, that wants something different from Whole Foods, right?

8:46And now all of a sudden, you have just so many layers of competing priorities that it's like, every now and again, you just got to pause long enough to say, like, what is the data telling us? Do we even have the data to tell us a story? And do we have the organization lined up to actually make action and make improvement off of this, right? And that's part of the evolution that I think Once Upon a Farm has done a phenomenal job at it. And everybody goes through this growing pain of how do we get to where we're going, right? And that becomes one big challenge beside the data that I think organizations really need to think about as they grow.

9:22Jennifer, when you hear me kind of read that intro there about the halo and harnessing the halo, how do you think, again, there's so many different. halos present in the way you guys are operating the business. What stands out to you as the halo that's most maybe cognizant to you that you're creating on the digital side?

9:40Jennifer Berglund:Well, the fact is, is that it's very real. Consumers are not omni-channel. We've known that for a while. And the thing that has become increasingly noticeable for me and the business over time is that our marketing is not omni-channel as well. And we saw this early on. And Brad actually summed it up very nicely. And he's not even on the brand side. So kudos, Brad. But we really saw this early on. And it's sometimes easier to see those signals in the earlier days. Your budgets are smaller. Your programs are more tight. But we were doing a lot of retail media, shopper marketing, and then performance marketing.

10:19Jennifer Berglund:We saw it early and most tactically on our DTC business. So we would be running very lower funnel media, driving to the site, a very clear shop now call to action. And we saw our retail business take off. Or we saw other efforts, Instacart or other programs with accounts start working more efficiently and gain more momentum. So it was kind of clear in the signals that something more is happening here and that there really is this cross-channel, cross-account, but also cross-tactic effect. We're starting to look at that more deeply now having Keenon as a formal partner. So it's been really interesting to start to dig into more of the details of that.

11:11So when the upper funnel brand marketing works, awareness, PR, streaming, TV, things like that, where does it tend to show up in the numbers first that you watch?

11:22Jennifer Berglund:So first and foremost, I would say that we look at proxies, signals. So we're looking at site traffic, organic site traffic, as well as paid, branded search demand, all of those things. We look at conversion on our site because that's an immediate opportunity for sale. But then also more holistically where we're seeing it is in awareness, household penetration, because that's really at the end of the day what that upper funnel media is intended to serve. And we do see the effect there. Can you articulate a little bit about the effect? Like awareness is, I guess I don't talk to as many brands that are at the scale you guys are at where you're really looking at those household penetration and awareness numbers.

12:06Tell me the story, maybe a little bit of how awareness and household penetration has increased at Once Upon a Farm.

12:11Jennifer Berglund:So first and foremost, we are a very data-driven company. So understand that maybe these aren't things that smaller brands look at, but it's something that we have been looking at over time. And as we turn media on or as we increase that media, particularly the upper funnel, we have started to see those numbers accelerate month over month. So it's been an interesting effect. But I guess even beyond that, we see, like I mentioned, these other signals in terms of some of our other efforts working harder for us, working more efficiently, more effectively. That might be a trade program or even within our retail media efforts.

12:56Jennifer Berglund:So we're really, and I would say more formally now with Keen, teasing out the deeper elements of this effect, the effect that Amazon performance media might have on our retail business is starting to become very clear. How does it work internally at the business where you've got all these different teams working on different things and each team is in some sense, you know, they're focused on what they're focused on, but their impacts resonate across the whole business. I'm sure this is something you're kind of, as you say, unraveling right now, but give me maybe a sense of how it works internally at Once Upon a Farm with how you communicate about the halo across the company.

13:34Yeah.

13:35Jennifer Berglund:So this is one thing and not to discredit or disavow my prior jobs or life, but this is one thing that I really appreciate about working at a smaller company. There just naturally are less silos. So we've made a big effort. I actually lead a bi-weekly meeting. It's an omni-channel marketing team. It's across key members of my team, key members of sales, sales leadership. That has helped facilitate insights, conversations. They might say, hey, I see this happening here. And I can say, well, we were doing media during that time or things like that. So that was kind of our initial step. The other thing is just organizationally within the marketing department, all of media sits on my team.

14:26Jennifer Berglund:So it's brand media, it's retail media, it's performance marketing. And of course, they have distinct budgets. And they plan and execute against those budgets. But at the end of the day, it's one team and not a lot of silos. So they do plan collaboratively. They do optimize. They do share data. And I think that also helps facilitate against these bigger business objectives. And then I guess, like I've kind of said before, we are starting to formalize this more, having the Keen platform on board. And there's been some interesting things from that. So like the DTC example I gave, like that's very real.

15:10Jennifer Berglund:And it was very obvious back in the early days. But now at Akeen, we're seeing things like paid search at Kroger or Target might be actually having an effect on another account. And that's such lower funnel, you wouldn't necessarily think that. But it's been an interesting insight and unlock for us and something that we plan to lean into further as we continue to optimize our media mix and our budget allocations. And I think it's because of something we mentioned earlier, right? That's usually a shocking learning for a lot of folks is the halo that comes from like bottom of funnel activations.

15:49But yet, like you kind of said earlier why that's true and why it makes sense, which is like, there is no linear path or a very singular minded shopper anymore. they're shopping all over the place when there's convenience factor, when there's, you know what I mean? It's like, you don't know if those impressions that you're gaining on target search are driving them to go buy somewhere when they're on vacation, when they're going to go buy. And now all of a sudden it's like that, that impression mattered and it mattered differently than they came here to buy. And therefore the conversion was, it was going to be there.

16:20And that's where like, I think we under credit sometimes it's like the impact of an impression and how it could lead to awareness and how awareness leads to a conversion later on, right? It's being able to understand all those signals because it's not as every two weeks, I go to the same grocery store and I buy the same cart full. Like that shopper, that's not real anymore, right? Like that's what we all built for was this very linear path or this very linear funnel. And now marketing is more like an amoeba, right? It's just like, it's stuff everywhere because the customer is everywhere. So it's amoeba marketing now at this point.

16:54I don't know. I should probably trademark that. I like that. I just thought of that in the moment, but it feels very real. Amoeba marketing. It's just a blob of chaos, right? But it's structured chaos, I guess. Yeah. It reminds me of Shireen O 'Bears. She came on the podcast and talked about that. The funnel is dead and now it's a tornado because you've got all these different. But I like Amoeba even more. Does that resonate with you, Jennifer?

17:15Jennifer Berglund:I love it. I add into my LinkedIn right now. Nice. All right. Right. In episode one, Justin Jefferson argued that when you own the top of the Amazon results page, another dollar of search spend is most likely buying customers you'd have gotten anyway. So I'm curious, is this is something that's on your mind as you spend into marketplaces? So the halo works for growth, but it also works for efficiency and understanding where you have to spend and where you don't. I'm curious, is that sort of kind of efficiency something that's really on your mind as well, making sure that you're not spending money to acquire customers who would have bought you anyway?

17:51Jennifer Berglund:Most certainly. I mean, obviously, there's always a little bit of protection and defense you need to do, especially against a brand like ours, because we have a lot of branded search share. so you know competitors will come after you but yes we've actually it's interesting that you say that because if i had my amazon business manager on this call he's done a lot of optimizations within that media plan specifically one to really maximize the budget that he has and put it reasonably against driving new customers awareness where he can while still defending our brand defending our space. So I do think it is a bit of a balance, but that has been much of our mindset as well.

18:44Take me to a time on the digital side where you've maybe taken a bigger, you guys are operating at such a high level, but are there times where you've sort of taken a big swing top of funnel that you had to either have a lot of data to back up or the faith of your executives in order to back up that ended up really paying off? Is there an aspect to what you're doing top of funnel that has really worked better than you thought? And was it hard to justify it when you let into it, I guess?

19:13Jennifer Berglund:Yeah, so from the very early days, we kind of instilled this test and learn mindset. And I think that it served us very well. So our first TV test was back in 2021. and it was small. It was very small, isolated. Maybe it was like a month long test, but we built from there. So then we started layering in more of an integrated campaign. We did TV plus social plus out of home. We did a lot of geo testing before we went national. So we were looking at, and this was also before we had Keen. So we were trying to measure as best as possible, but we were looking at like market mix and what we did in a particular market relative to a comparable holdout market, measuring lift that way.

20:05Jennifer Berglund:We were, of course, continuing to look at all these digital proxy metrics like the branded search demand, site visits, et cetera. So there wasn't necessarily a single point per se, but it was a build upon build. And all of that testing and learning and just that entrepreneurial mindset gave us the confidence, the data and the confidence to go forward with a larger always on TV campaign and upper funnel media campaign. It was broader than TV, but to start doing that more rigorously and consistently probably two or three years ago now. So it was iterative, but we built into it and it has served us well.

20:54Are there any of these channels that are sort of like your pet favorites? I know you're not supposed to choose your favorite children, but are there like looking at the Keen reports, are there any of these channels that you see punch above their weight, maybe more than others?

21:07Jennifer Berglund:Streaming TV. We have an opportunity to continue there and we are leaning in. Also, personally, this isn't necessarily out of Keen or even out of our business, but I'm very bullish about YouTube. I think there's a lot of opportunity on YouTube from a consumer demand perspective, usage relative to available ad inventory. And then also, too, it's the one platform that truly transcends screens. It's on the TV in your pocket. It's on your iPad. It's on all your devices. It's on your TV in your home. And I just think that that's a really interesting and smart play by them, but powerful opportunity for marketers.

22:00Does that hold up with you, Brad, across the brands that you work with? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a huge opportunity in connected streaming TV. Oftentimes, the question is like, for the large legacy enterprise brands, it's like, do I make the switch from linear to streaming? Is that the choice that I'm making? Or oftentimes, it's emerging challenger brands who are asking the question of like, well, how do I gain top of funnel? And it's like, I think I need to be on TV. but there's still a lot of this like legacy, like linear TV bias of like old marketers who are like, my TV play equals linear.