About Us

Hi!


We’re DTC Media, creators of DTC Newsletter and Podcast, as well as sister company to Pilothouse Digital.


We’re obsessed with developing and sharing knowledge and actionable advice about how to grow your business and your ongoing marketing skill set (in a fun way you’ll actually look forward to reading). 


We see the DTC space as a rising tide of almost limitless opportunity to help connect brands with their customers by helping them navigate the ever changing waters of creative trends, traffic platforms and tech partners. 


We hope that by reading our newsletter, filled to the brim with the exact customer acquisition strategies being used by the world’s fastest growing DTC brands and agencies, we enrich your career and your life in a way that sees you create even more value in your own life, your own companies, and communities.


The Story of DTC

Back in 2009...


Strap in, here comes a history lesson about “performance marketing.” 


2009 is when Eric, co-founder of DTC met Jeff Shannon (co-founder of DTC and Pilothouse), Kyle Hitchcox (co-founder of Pilothouse) and Andrew Stern (COO of Pilothouse) started working together at a fast-growing affiliate marketing startup in Victoria BC. 


This company promoted affiliate products on a pay per conversion model and gave us nearly free reign to drive conversions through digital media buying as long as we made more money driving conversions than we spent on the traffic to acquire them.


Agencies at that time were fully focused on charging a percent of your ad spend, but as performance marketers we didn’t make anything until the conversions started flowing, so we became interested in the full funnel very quickly. 


This concept of “performance marketing” has become the core of Pilothouse’s business and the focus of our newsletter and podcast, but at that time the vast majority of ad spend was still using the “spray and pray” model that the big agencies were using as a holdover from the Mad Men days.


Jeff, Kyle, Dave Steele (CEO of Pilothouse), and Andrew went on to build the core principle they learned as performance marketers into a new kind of ecommerce growth partner for with a new kind of model  -- Pilothouse was born.


After a seven year affiliate marketing career, working on every traffic platform under the sun, in 2017 Eric Dyck co-founded a digital marketing training company, a podcast, and began building a community of entrepreneurs and marketers who were taking advantage of ecommerce’s low barriers to entry to build fast scaling businesses. 


Eric hosted live training events all around the world to sold out 500+ person audiences, in Berlin, Bangkok, Barcelona, and San Diego.


In May 2020 the stars aligned and Eric had a chance to join Pilothouse as Content Director, along with the promise of an “intrapreneurial” opportunity to build DTC Media into its own company. (Eric joined as employee 20 -- Pilothouse is now over 120).


Eric had hosted podcasts in previous parts of his career and knew how forthcoming entrepreneurs are about the exact tactical choices they make to drive great results, and he knew that just by writing down the top knowledge bombs featured in every podcast, that we’d also have more than enough content for a newsletter.


Within a week the DTC Podcast was born, and a few months later, we launched our newsletter to an audience of just over thirty marketers. 

About Our Content

Along with our podcast pipeline to DTC founders and their best practices, every issue is packed with tactical, often technical insights about how to improve your digital marketing campaigns across platforms like Facebook and Instagram Ads, Google Ads, TikTok, Email and SMS, Amazon and more. These insights are generated on each platform, tested over millions of dollars of ad spend, and continually optimized by the Pilothouse team of performance marketers. 


Where DTC differs from newsletters who summarize the news is by providing actionable education you can implement to your campaigns to see improvements in your key metrics almost right away. We’re not just trying to make you sound smarter -- if you read DTC regularly you will become a smarter marketer.


Our favorite reader comments are from amazing brands, telling us how much our content is helping them achieve their targets, like this one from Sarmad. 

Reading the DTC Newsletter is part of our marketing team's weekly workflow. There are so many valuable insights in every one, that we actually schedule a weekly team meeting to go over them all to make sure we don't miss anything

Sarmad Saghir

VP Growth - Dropps


As of this writing, we’ve written 800,000+ words across 400+ issues and earned MILLIONS of opens. We’ve conducted 350+ podcast interviews and earned over 670,000+ plays. 


Ultimately what matters is you, our 160K and growing audience, and that’s what we’re most confident about so far. We know that our audience represents the highest level marketers and entrepreneurs in the world. 


With subscribers from almost half of the world’s biggest CPG companies, as well as readers from every high growth startup we encounter, we love to muse about the collective ad spend our readers represent. It’s easily in the billions of dollars which is wild.