DTC830: AI Trends 2025, Customer Cohort Profiles, and Burt Bee x Mike’s Hot Honey Partnership

Good morning, 

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:
 

📧 Cohort Retention Made Easy
Using customer profiles to drive email & SMS.

💡 Mary Meeker Drops Top AI Insights
We dive into the in-depth 340-page report. 

📦 Daily Tariff Update
Breaking news.

🌶️ Burt’s Bees x Mike’s Hot Honey A spicy new collab. 

🌟 Want Your Marketing to Stick? You Need The Right Story...

Why the right story?...

Because people don’t just buy products — they buy into the stories they believe. 🥹

Luckily, Acoustic's next Fwd: Thinking session on June 17 at 2PM ET/11AM PT is all about uncovering the stories that make your brand unforgettable. 🤩

👏 Join them to hear from Kindra Hall, Wall Street Journal bestselling author and award-winning storyteller, as she shares how to find the brand stories hiding in plain sight, shape them for emotional impact, and share them across the moments that matter most. ⚡

If you’re ready to stop chasing attention and start creating deeper customer connections, this session is for you. 🎟️

🎧 Email Retention Tactics for Every Cohort in Your DTC Brand

In this episode, Jordan shares insights on cohort-based retention strategies—how to align your email and SMS efforts with your customer profiles to drive sustainable revenue.

In this episode, we unpack the four customer cohort profiles: Acquisition, Balanced, Classic Retention, and Subscription.

In this episode, we dive into:

📈 How to tailor your email flows to customer behavior

💡 Why campaigns need to balance engagement & deliverability

💬 The value of building iteratively & testing segmentation

 👉 Listen to the full episode with Jordan here. 

The DTC Landscape Is Shifting. Are You 100% Confident In Your Brand's Growth Strategy?

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Almost every brand is looking to scale profitably, but in todays market, that’s getting more difficult than ever. 

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You’re not alone - roughly 75% of all brands that join DTC are saying the same thing. Pilothouse can help. If you: 

• Aren’t hitting the numbers you want to hit 
• Aren’t hitting the ROAS you need to be profitable
• Aren’t 100% sure which channels you should really be focusing on
• Or are just looking for a second opinion….

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We should chat…

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Pilothouse (DTC’s sister company) has a few spots open and we’re looking for 3 brands we can sink our teeth into. We’re hungry problem solvers, ROAS generators, and partners in your growth, right down to your bottom line.

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🤔 Sound interesting?

‍Chat with someone on our team now - no obligation. We make money when you do.

💡 Key Stats From Meeker’s 340-Page AI Report 

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Investor and tech analyst Mary Meeker, best known for her Internet Trends reports, dropped a data-driven deep dive into AI and its unprecedented growth over the past few years.

And she’s surprisingly optimistic about it all.

Here are some of the main takeaways from the hefty 340 report:

The AI stats: 

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• Explosive Traffic: OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly active users in just 17 months. 
  
  • For context, ChatGPT accumulated 365 billion annual searches in just under 2 years (It took Google 11 years to achieve this milestone!)

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• Big Investments: Large U.S. tech companies like Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet spent $212 billion on capital expenditures in 2024.

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• Costs Are Coming Down: The costs of using AI have plummeted by 99% in just two years.
  
  
  
  • However, training AI models is still costly. 

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• Quick Innovation: AI has become fiercely competitive, and countries have entered in a heated “race” to become leaders in the space.
  
  
  
  • Companies are quickly developing new AI features, working at a breakneck pace, but the global competition is fierce.
    
    
  • China shocked the world earlier this year when they released DeepSeek, a cost-effective AI model with first-rate capabilities.
    
    

• Human or ChatGPT? AI is quickly approaching human-level abilities.
  
  
  
  • 73% of outputs from GPT 4.5 were mistaken for human writing.
    
    
• Demand for AI Roles: There is a huge demand for prompt engineers, data scientists, and leaders who understand how to use AI to increase productivity.
  
  
  
  • Job postings for AI-related roles have increased 448% since 2018.

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Surprisingly, Meeker's detailed report doesn’t dive deeply into AI ethics or the need for stricter regulation.

The takeaway?

Meeker praises the speed of AI advancement and credits OpenAI for being willing to launch an imperfect product.

AI’s rapid adoption rate worldwide is unprecedented and creates a huge money-making opportunity, but competition is fierce.

🌶️ Burt’s Bees Partners with Mike’s Hot Honey 

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No, this is not a late April Fool’s joke. 

Burt’s Bees has partnered with Mike’s Hot Honey to offer a new spicy lip balm.

For a limited time, fans can purchase the hot honey lip balm inspired by Mike's Hot Honey signature blend of sweet and spicy. 

The product is now available on Burtsbees.com and their TikTok Shop.

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📥 Got a B2B Biz? 

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Join dozens of B2B companies finding demand-gen success through our niche community of 150k brand leaders and founders this year. Talk to our team to learn more.

Have you heard our latest podcasts?

• 💦 How CharCharms Scaled Hydration Accessories to Nationwide
• ⚡ AKNF 512: Q4 Playbook: Meta, Mother’s Day and Creative Strat
• ✏️ Ad-venturous 4: For Those Who Can't Write Copy Good
• 🤔 TWBERP 35: Which Ad Beliefs Still Hold Up? 
• 🍫 IQBAR’s CPG Playbook: Product Market Fit to Omnichannel Scale
• ⚡ AKNF 512: Q4 Playbook: Meta, Mother’s Day and Creative Strat

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Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.