Profitably Scaling DTC Brands in a Post-Cookie World with Phoenix Ha, CEO of AdBeacon

Tim Rowe:
We've all heard the same before, or maybe even uttered it ourselves. I know half of my marketing works. I just don't know which half. And now with cookies gone away while gardens getting taller and the consistently rising cost to acquire customers, it's more important than ever to not just know which parts of your marketing mix are working, but how hard they're working for you and how they're working together to deliver new customers profitably. How do you balance that obsessive need to track and measure every marketing dollar with understanding the full funnel buyer's journey? How do you create exponential learnings from linear insights and how do you apply all of that newfound knowledge to predictably scale? Today, we are going to find, we're going to discover another piece of that puzzle. We're joined by AdBeacon CEO, Phoenix Ha . Phoenix, thanks so much for being here.

Phoenix Ha: That was beautiful. I'm blessed to be here. I'm grateful to even be asked. So it's good to see you, man.

Tim Rowe: Hi, welcome. Blessed and grateful to have you. It's a fun connection on the Twitterverse, which is such a dynamic place. And I think this episode is going to be nestled in between a bunch of great guests from Twitter. And we connected not too long ago, specifically because you're talking about measurement and marketing measurement, which is something that we talk about here a lot on the podcast. I'll be oftentimes about understanding how out of home and hard to measure channels show up in that marketing mix. So this is going to be a great conversation about that holistic marketing mix and really give us some good insight into the D2C e-commerce online digital marketing media buyers playbook and how AdBeacon is solving some of the challenges with measurement there. Phoenix, maybe a good place to start is origin stories. Like how did you get into this? Like how did you become a marketer? You've worked with brands like Oakley, RVCA, collaborations with Disney and all sorts of amazing folks. How'd you get started?

Phoenix Ha: Yeah, it's a crazy story. So I actually started my whole journey in modeling. And I was a model for many, many years since I was seven, actually. And I kind of learned the business from the back end from invoicing, you know, for as a fit model and looking at the warehouse and being on that side all the way out to print, runway. And as much as I loved doing that for so many years, I wanted more. And I knew that there was a business side to it. So I actually went to college to be a doctor. I was pre-med in the ShepPet program at CSUN. And a doctor pulled me aside when I was at a UCLA gifted program. And they were like, hey, you're great, but I don't think this is for you.

Tim Rowe: All right. Well, thank you for calling that out and keeping me from getting too far down that very long career path.

Phoenix Ha: It's funny now. And my life is crazy because my brother and sister, they're both doctors. My whole family, they're all doctors. But it's funny to look back at this now and The reason why this doctor said this was not because I wasn't smart or at least to help pad my ego, but he was saying it's like he's a Europe people person and you can communicate and do all these things and I just don't feel like this is the right lane for you, but you do with what you want. So I was like, okay, took his advice and I was aimlessly bopping around and I found this crazy internship. for this thing called an agency. And this is when the agency, the creative agency boom happened. So I was like 2000 2012 maybe, 2011, 2012. So I waltzed in. It was a one-year wait to even get an internship at this place. And I got in and I fought my way in and I was like, I'm going to work my ass off. And in that mix, I was able to work with Impossible Foods, RVCA, Calvin Klein, all these huge companies keen and rub elbows with the CEOs, learning on the experiential marketing side, PR side. And as much as I loved it, it just didn't have any measurement behind it either. I knew there was more. So I started working at Supra Footwear. They swooped me up, which is a skate brand. I love skate. So I was the interim marketing director there and did a lot of collaborations and have a lot of really cool, shiny accolades there. But again, no measurement. I was managing huge budgets for campaign strategy. However, none of it was tactical. It was very brand specific. And then from there, worked with small businesses and somehow, some way, a tragedy happened. I won't go super in depth with what that was, but my life got rocked and I was at rock bottom. I had no money and I just everything was in flames, which is why I have a podcast called Fail With Fire. I talk about failures because they are the catalyst to incredible things. That was my catalyst. I saw this LinkedIn posting for paid search. I was like, oh, they're paying me to be searching for stuff? Then when they interviewed me, I don't even know how I got the interview. They're like, you seem overqualified, but you also have no paid social or paid search background. We're going to put you in paid social. Again, I'm like, okay, I'm being paid to be social. But I dove in and I fell in love with data. I have the creativity side, I have the scrappy side, but the data side was just so overwhelming in the best way. So in a very short amount of time, I got obsessive, as we all do in this space, and I became the director of paid social and organic social at an agency called National Positions in Westlake, California. I fucking lost it. I just wanted to learn more. And in that timeline was when iOS 14.5 hit. And we lost 40% of our book. Yeah, it was crazy. Cataclysmic. Cataclysmic. I call it the adpocalypse. And It's just a series of events. I believe God just kind of rolled me into it in the right timing, but I lost 40% of my book. I lost two different teams. Nobody wanted to just have the grit to just figure it out. In the process, I was testing out loud, and a guy named Chad Wilton found me on AdLeaks and was like, would you speak about this at AdWorld? And I was just A-B testing and I was a nobody. And I'm like, and I still am. I'm like, whatever. Sure, I'll test out loud. And it ended up ranking really high with like Seth Godin, Molly Pittman, who I'm lucky to call my friend now on speed dial, like what? And it's wild. And then I was asked to speak in Dubai and that's where I met Nick Shackelford and Jason Akatiff and all these guys and built this network. And I speak nonstop about first party data now. I talk about how to pivot post iOS 14.5. It really made that my heartbeat and in that process built my own platform, you know, with my partner, because as much as I love the other platforms that were out there, I felt there was a different way. I felt there was a way great for agencies and tacticians. So it landed us here. It was a very long winded intro, but I felt like it was really necessary for you to understand like the evolution of how I even got here. It's crazy.

Tim Rowe: It's a crazy story, but I think that's the beautiful thing is looking back, it makes sense. When we're in it in the moment, there's someone listening right now who's like, my life makes no sense and this is crazy. And then you get to the other side where there is a little bit of calm. And I know you're planning a wedding right now, so we can't say it's totally calm, but you get to a place where you can look back and go, oh, wow, that's how I got exactly to where I am now, which is the happiest, most fulfilled I've ever been, most aligned to purpose. I think that's the beautiful part is the journey and falling in love with the process, which, which you did early on. You fell in love with the process and perpetually curious and I've got to find more. I've got to find more. I've got to find more. And now you've got a platform that's, that, that is, that's helping a lot, probably a lot of brands who are kind of lost on that marketing side. Come back for a second that the 40% loss to the book of business. Where did they go? What did they do? What changed so significantly for those companies that they made such a significant shift in whatever their strategy was?

Phoenix Ha: Yeah, you know, let's let's take it back. I think a lot of people were like, Oh, the good old days in Facebook. And I think that is true to a certain extent. But I think we were also very shielded. And also, I would say, naive, in a sense, right? Like, we made a lot of money in Facebook prior, but what would happen and Mark Joyner, who is the inventor of the pixel, I was blessed to even sit in the same space with him. He has this really good saying of how you can't be a table with two legs or three legs. You need a table with a thousand legs. And what was happening is that the majority of these brands were putting all of their money into Facebook only. So then when Facebook had this break, right, when I mean break for those who aren't familiar with iOS 14, all the way to 14.5, because this was an evolution, a lot of things like missing data, delayed data. So you would get a sale today in Shopify, but it wouldn't arrive and showcase in Facebook for three days at one point. Or there would be missing data in campaigns, ad sets, and ads where it'll say, congratulations, you made five sales here, but it wouldn't tell you the revenue. So then you wouldn't even know where to go. Sure. Just kind of in the dark. Completely in the dark. So imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and aiming and shooting your shot with a target that keeps moving.

Tim Rowe: You can't even hear the basketball hit the rim. There's no earmuffs on and blinders. And you're just hoping. I guess you're hoping at the end of the month you've made more money than you spent.

Phoenix Ha: Right, which in their case did not. So it actually, I think there was this one brand that did a TikTok on it. I can't remember, recall exactly the name, but they went bankrupt and then they ended up suing Meta because they kept using the Meta data. And again, let me just clarify something. It's not Meta's fault, right? Sure. privacy and security laws in place in which you got that pop-up on your phone that says, do you want to be tracked? I guarantee 90% of the country said absolutely not because they think the government's listening to them. Right. But what ended up happening is it broke a lot of the targeting, it broke a lot of the tracking. And so like Meta's just trying to fill the gaps and it was just chaos. So a lot of the brands to answer your question pulled out because now the returns are diminishing, They're not getting what they thought they were getting. And again, to your point, you can't even hear the basketball hit the rim. I'm thinking of it as like you throw the basketball and then it goes black, like completely dark. Just into the ether. Yeah, just gone.

Tim Rowe: Gone. And you might get feedback at some future date that a sale was made, but you don't really know it was because you shot your shot. It might have just been by accident. And that's obviously not a way to build and scale a business. So now there becomes this huge visibility gap. And we've got cookies going away. By the time this comes out, cookies will have gone away for more than 30 million Google users. Right? So do you see a similar setup happening? Is this something that's likely to happen again with everything coming in 2024? Do you think that we're set up for a similar scenario?

Phoenix Ha: Oh, I mean, when I was at the agency side, which I'm no longer at the agency side, I told the Google team to prepare. They were laughing at it. I wouldn't say they were laughing at us, but they just couldn't understand how the paid social team was struggling so hard. And like I told you, I lost not only a big part of our book of business, I lost people. And they were scared. They didn't know what to do. Imagine going into a call with all of your brands and they're screaming at you because they don't know how else to express their frustration of loss in sales because they're responsible for feeding children, not only their own. And I get it. And then you have these people that are on my team, they're, they're mid twenties that are just getting screamed at and feeling the responsibility and the weight of everybody's income. That's not normal. Right.

Tim Rowe: Yeah. That's a great point.

Phoenix Ha: It's you have to be a good leader and you can only do your best. I thought I was great, but you can't be God either. And yeah, so to answer your question, I think that Google teams are feeling it now with GA4. GA4 is a pain in the ass. I think it's good for certain things and it's really tough because you have GAU, universal, that was reporting one way and then GA4 wasn't. Like for example, Sessions, I was just doing a year over year for one of my clients and half of my sessions, it looked like paid social completely tanked. But in reality, just GA4 wasn't tracking it accurately. Something was happening and it didn't fix until March. So it seemed like we had a 90% decline in sessions and clicks and it's not the case. So I think To be honest with you, like I said, the naivety, we heavily relied on these third-party apps. Let me just clarify, third-party is going to be like the Meta, the Google, the Pinterest, the Snapchat. And they're reporting to your Shopify store or whatever store you have and say, congratulations, you're making this. But they're not channel agnostic. They're biased for purposes of gaining your revenue retention. Correct. My point that I'm making is if we continue in this direction blindly going in without tracking independently, are you doing yourself a favor? No. I think you should just get ahead of it as much as you can, store as much of your data as possible, and move from there.

Tim Rowe: What advice would you give someone that's listening and maybe having to navigate challenging conversations about buzzy data with a client? Do you have like a one, two, three best practices playbook on like handling hard conversations about fuzzy data because out of home is generally all fuzzy data. It's mostly fuzzy. That's kind of our superpowers, you know, making everything else work better, but that ultimately leads to a fuzzy data story. How do you, how do you handle those types of conversations?

Phoenix Ha: I believe in pure honesty, even if it hurts. And it's a cultural thing for me to, I'm half Iranian, half Chinese, like we don't, we don't play. Right. So, and obviously in a polite way, but. I just dealt with this recently where I sit there and I go, would you rather be driving with no headlights, it's foggy, you're blind, or would you rather put some glasses on and maybe see a little bit better? Because there's no such thing as 100% accuracy across the board in any case. I always say, too, is a lot of people are going, well, I'm looking at GA4 data, GA4, or they're like, you know, Google Analytics. And I'm even a little bit more, I would say, avant-garde in the sense where I go, I don't even look at that in terms of conversion anymore. And they're like, how could you? And I'm like, What's the name of the platform? Google. It's biased. I cannot go after biased data because I suffered the consequences. I had to look you in the eye as a business owner and ethically tell you that that everything was fine for years. And then it wasn't. And then I was the one responsible for all the loss. So today I have to sit here and give you as clear data as I possibly can. You know, with AdBeacon, I can show you the full click journey. I can show you from start to finish definitively by a tangible click that somebody clicked this ad and it led to a sale versus all these other platforms. I can't do that. Which one am I going to rely on? And I think it's just common sense.

Tim Rowe: So thinking, thinking again about that, that distinction of third party data versus what AdBeacon does uses first party data. Maybe, maybe break those two things out apart. You used a great example there of like, that's the, the, the data that's being passed back from the apps. And how does that differ from a brand's first party data? What, what fits into that bucket? How do you define that?

Phoenix Ha: That's a good question. I like to think of it as like a bridge. AdBeacon is a bridge. It rebuilds itself once the purchase is made. First party data only tracks your purchases. We don't track your sessions. We don't track If someone added to cart or initiated checkout, that's the definition of a pixel most people think about when they look at like a Facebook, right? And what we do is, okay, for example, Phoenix Haw bought this yellow beanie, this mustard beanie from Brixton. Now I get to see all the clicks that led to this sale versus Meta is going, okay, someone clicked or viewed my ad, this is what happened. But they can't definitively tell you who that person is because of the law. And they can't tell you across all different channels who also click these things. So like you can't say from meta, okay, then they also clicked on Google, they also clicked on these, you know, different platforms to lead to the sale we can. So first party data is your purchase data. You have access to this data because you're customers opt in they give you their email address and sometimes they give you their phone number right whether it be at the purchase level or whether it be at the email SMS like sign up level right for your newsletter. We also track by IP address, which is already tracked on your site. So this is all legal. And as we go forward with Meta and Google, et cetera, all of these restrictions, data restrictions, security restrictions are going to limit what they can track. So do you remember back in the day you bought media on Meta, correct? Correct. Awesome. So there's a breakdown section and it used to tell you exactly definitively DMA or Um, someone bought from this device and someone bought from this area. Right. And I used to take a spreadsheet of it and then I used to take Shopify and I go, okay, this is the person. Think of it like that.

Tim Rowe: Cool. Yeah.

Phoenix Ha: Think of it like that. That's what we do. But unfortunately, Meta can't do that anymore. Breakdowns are gone and Google can't do that. And again, it's, it's not biased. So I hope that answers your question. I like to call it a bridge. We rebuild the bridge.

Tim Rowe: So once, once the purchase is made, kind of like that whole journey becomes unveiled. I'm thinking my son plays a lot of video games. Some video game effect that once he unlocks the thing, all the other things unlock. So now I can understand looking backwards, how the path to purchase was influenced. What first action led to a second action led to a third and then ultimately to a purchase. Is that a fair summation?

Phoenix Ha: Correct. And so much unlocks from that. That's only just one little portion of what unlocks with first party data, but that's probably the most impactful.

Tim Rowe: Yeah. Talk about what all unlocks because we went through the platform together a couple of weeks ago and I think my jaw just remained open. I probably looked like, you know, that mannequin challenge because it wasn't just, Oh, this ad channel is driving this sort of return. I mean, there's a ton of insights in this. The creative dashboard I thought was really impressive as well. Talk about some of the things that you can actually extract from a first party path to purchase.

Phoenix Ha: Yeah, I like to say the reason why Adbeacon is so cool is it's built by media buyers. So you already have a media buyer ahead. It's not just a platform. Like you start to think in a tactical way of next steps. So think about it like this, like Meta, for example, you get a purchase. It says, congratulations, one purchase. Purchase conversion value is $50, but you have no clue what that person purchased. With first party data, I can tell you definitively what people are purchasing. So imagine you're showcasing this beanie. We love this beanie, right? It's a picture of this beanie. I'm sending them to PDP, so product page of that beanie. There's no definitive way of knowing, well, prior to AdBeacon, whether or not people bought this beanie. They could have bought a different colorway, your snapback. They could have bought a sweatshirt, but we don't know. Now we know. So what if I told you that the majority of people who are looking at this and clicking from this beanie to your website are actually purchasing snapbacks? Then now that I have that information, Right, I can optimize the landing page to show this beanie, but the next three are going to be a snapback. And why don't we create a bundle, increase conversion, reduce the amount of clicks and increase AOV.

Tim Rowe: OK, that becomes pretty powerful stuff, and there's I mean. Not trying to show for you or for AdBeacon, but there was like literally no way to do that before. Was there? But those are insights that I think that's when you start to optimize the landing page. Think about how do we bundle these things versus it's just going into a black box. I'm seeing a sale register. I think it's going well, so let's just do more of it. What, what are some of the unique insights? I mean, you must see a ton. There's hundreds of brands and agencies using AdBeacon at this point. What are, what are some of the insights and how are you seeing brands apply the learnings?

Phoenix Ha: Yeah, like the new versus returning that we just launched is insane. So you can actually deduce down by campaign ad set and add how many new versus returning customers are coming from each of those. So again, like you have to relearn this life. We say, okay, re you know, past purchasers campaign is of course past purchasers. What if I've told you actually it's new customers are coming from this and all the uh, exclusions that you're putting weren't actually applicable. Um, because a lot of the time what we would do is you would see, you would create these meta campaigns or whatever campaigns that you had and go into your Shopify store and say, I'm not really getting a new customer rate the way that I want, even though I'm putting all these exclusions in. So if I'm able to do is deduce down which one is driving more new customers, wouldn't you go there at a lower cost for acquisition? That's insane. But we're actually able to show you by product now. what's driving more new customers versus returning. We're also able to show you a trend line if it peaked or didn't. So if there's fatigue by product, by channel, by campaign. We're also able to show you through a Pareto analysis, which is like the 80-20 rule. Right. Which campaigns are driving the most cumulative revenue campaign level versus others and where you can X ad spend that might just not be working. And we're also able to on the creative dashboard front. This is the one that kind of makes me laugh a lot with apparel brands is macro shots of products, still images. What does that mean? Uh, so for still image and macro shots is zoomed in. So men's specific men's apparel brands. I don't know what it is about you. Psychologically. It's the broad stroke, right? It's not, it's not applicable to every guy. Right. Like my fiance, for example, loves to go to TJ Maxx and go to like every single lane and just spend his time there. And I'm over here going, I want out, I want to leave.

Tim Rowe: That is a very guy shopping behavior at TJ Maxx. That's exactly what we do.

Phoenix Ha: I don't do that. I am like the complete opposite. I go in. So buying behavior varies. Exceptions to the rule, right? But what I've noticed is that if you would do zoomed in product shots with just the logo and the material, it entices men to buy. And I have seen this time and time again. And I'm looking at these creative reports going, wow, that's so interesting. And for a specific client that I have, because I still buy media, I want to stay fresh in the know. So then we continue to build a great product. For this specific like client, I'm able to see which female model is driving the most revenue. Holy moly. That even helps the high level branding team understand that this is your demo. People are buying because they feel like they relate to her.

Tim Rowe: That's incredible. Not just a hunch that, Hey, I like this model's look and feel, or they have a sphere of influence, like actual How are people responding to this individual in your creative? Are they driving more sales or are they not? That's incredible insight to have. I heard a stat from brand folder that 68% of brand content goes unused and that the cost to create content is up 20 to 40%. So it sounds like just having the ability to glean insights, put it, deploy everything. Yeah. And then at least get some insights back to your point, kill the red, grow the green. Those are interesting learnings that, yeah, you probably never had access to before, unless you had bajillions of dollars and expensive teams to go out and survey people about how do you feel about this model and things like that. These are learnings that are now available. Just plug it. I mean, how hard is it to get onboarded? Is this like a complicated technological thing?

Phoenix Ha: It's so simple. It's so simple. You put the pixel on your site. If you have a Shopify site, we have an app. It's so simple. And then you just put UTM parameters at the end of every single one of your ads, which again, you can bulk edit. And if you have post ID, there's a way to go about it. And we are like white gloves. So I don't charge you for 7 days until you're integrated correctly. I want to make sure you're using… There's no reason to pay for something that you can't use, right? But it's simple. Yeah. I always call it the great divide with the creative team versus the paid team because the creative team wants to build what? Community. And the paid team wants to build what? Profitable revenue. Well, some want profitable revenue. Some people just want revenue. But these insights are a great way to merge the teams to have a better understanding. Look, this is the data it's showing you here. We batched the image, so it's just the image, not even the targeting, not even anything. It's all together across the entire ad account. There's 15 variations of this exact image, and it is the highest producing revenue driver. I just want to let you know, we need to double down on this because the number one question I always got with brands, because I've worked on both on the creative side, brand side, and also the paid side, is they're just going at it where the brand and creative side is like, well, this isn't really our vibe. We can't just keep pushing macro shots of our product. And the paid team's going, well, it's producing revenue. And the other team's like, well, show me the data. I don't understand it. The paid team shows data that is hard to understand, or I would say digest if you're not a media buyer. This is just a very simplistic way to have a conversation amongst teams.

Tim Rowe: It's qualitative and it's quantitative. It's another bridge. AdBeacon is just building bridges everywhere. Phoenix, where do folks get in touch with you? Where are you most active on socials? Give them, we use real world, we use Latin long, but, but how do they find you and get in touch if they want to learn more about AdBeacon and kind of what you're up to?

Phoenix Ha: Twitter is the best. I just started Twitter a year ago and it's been such a beautiful journey. Twitter is great. You can find me at PhoenixHaw and that's where I really talk about data and then maybe some snarky weird personality tweets come out every once in a while. If you want to know my insane life and like the weird dumb shit that I do, you can follow me on Instagram. Same thing. I'm on LinkedIn if you want to be a little more profesh. And then if you want to see some virality moments of the dumbest shit possible, go on my TikTok. So again, Phoenix, I'm everywhere. You can always find me, shoot me a DM, shoot me an email. And if you just need help, I'm here.

Tim Rowe: Incredible. I encourage you to do all of those things. Check out AdBeacon. Everything will be linked in the show notes below. Phoenix, I can't thank you enough for being here.

Phoenix Ha: Can't thank you enough for inviting me.

Tim Rowe: Thank you. Absolutely. If you found this to be helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit. As always, make sure to smash that subscribe button and wherever you're listening, leave the podcast review. That's how you help us grow. See y'all next time.

Phoenix Ha: I'm glad.

Tim Rowe: Oh no! Bye.