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Good morning! Eric here, founder of DTC Media. We revamped this newsletter for our own short attention spans: one email a day, ruthlessly curated, to keep you on top of the DTC world.
âđŹ Itâs not just you, Meta had a baaad week last week
If your account felt broken last week, it probably wasn't you. It was Meta. Friday's outage (FB, IG, and Ads Manager down for hours while your campaigns kept charging on zero impressions) capped a rough week of bugs, weird CTR swings, and reporting bugs. So take last week's numbers with a grain of salt. Lean on Shopify and blended CAC, and hold off on big budget changes until things settle down.
đ Fable came, Fable left
You've probably heard by now, but Anthropic released its new Claude Fable 5 model early last week, and people were loving it (and burning through credits fast). Then on Friday, Anthropic disabled it globally to comply with a US export-control order citing national security, with no warning and no migration path. Officially access was removed to comply with a US export-control order citing national security, but lots of speculation as the US Government and Anthropic don't have the rosiest of relationships.
đ˘ The Strait of Hormuz isâŚopen?
After weeks of tension, a preliminary US-Iran deal reopened the Strait of Hormuz, and oil prices dropped about 5%. For ecom, that might mean real relief on the stuff that's been eating your margin: lower fuel surcharges on Asia-sourced freight, and air freight rates (maybe) easing after a 41% year-over-year spike in May. Consumer sentiment ticked up too, off a four-month low. Just remember the deal isn't signed yet, so treat this as a tailwind to plan around, not bank on.
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âď¸ Meta aged your best audiences to two years
On May 18, Meta raised the max retention on purchase-based custom audiences from 180 to 730 days, and existing 180-day audiences auto-expanded unless you opted out. Almost nobody did. Two ways it bites: your "last 180 days" retargeting pool now reaches back two years (colder buyers, drifting ROAS), and past-purchaser exclusions now span two years, so prospecting reach shrank without you touching a setting. If CAC crept up last month with no other change, open your purchase-based audiences today and reset each window on purpose: short for suppression and retargeting, long only for high-ticket, long-repurchase categories like furniture and appliances. @PhilKiel has a good thread on it here.
đş Fox-Roku $22B deal reshapes streaming ad landscape for DTC
Fox Corporation is acquiring Roku in a stock-and-cash deal worth about $22 billion, including Roku's namesake streaming channel. Roku is the biggest connected-TV platform in the US, controlling roughly a third of the market: about 36% of CTV device share, well ahead of Amazon Fire TV and Samsung. For anyone whoâs been expanding into CTV ads, inventory and audience data are consolidating under fewer, bigger players. Worth watching how ad pricing and targeting shift once it closes.
đ¤ AI traffic converts better than search
Neil Patel and his team did a study and compared AI-referred visitors vs. traditional search visitors across 60 campaigns (both B2B and B2C). The headline finding is that visitors arriving from AI tools (ChatGPT, Google AI answers, etc.) are simply better traffic than classic organic search clicks, they convert at a higher rate, convert faster, and spend more per visit. Might be time to start putting some real focus behind AEO/GEO. Read the full tweet thread here.
Creator outreach is one of the hardest parts of running an affiliate program.
Most brands aren't short on potential partners, but theyâre desperate for the right words to get and hold their attention. đ
Sometimes, the outreach doesnât happen. Or it does, and the creator never responds.
And an affiliate remains on the âwe should invest list.â
đ Levanta built a swipe file to fix that.
Six fill-in-the-blank templates for every stage: cold recruitment, welcome messages, activation offers, newsletters and re-engagement.
Stop leaving partnerships on the to-do list.
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When paid audiences age and CPMs drift, the worst move is building brand-new campaigns to outrun it. Lean on the channel you control: email.
You have a winner from last year that crushed, and most of your list never saw it. Nate Lagos (@natelagos on X) calls resending it resend-maxxing, and the math is forgiving: best case a quarter of your list ever saw that email, and almost none remember it. So instead of three hours on a new build, spend five minutes resending a proven one. Danavir Sarria (@danavirsarria on X) did exactly that for Memorial Day, re-sending last year's campaign untouched, and logged his biggest email-revenue day of the year.
How to run it:
Jordan Gordon, Head of Retention and CRO at Pilothouse and host of TWBERP (The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast), takes it further: don't just resend, automate it. Turn the winner into an automated send that hits every new lead for two years, so your best email runs itself.
Forward this to whoever owns your email calendar. It's a five-minute win. (Nate's original thread)
Most founders never ask this. Duncan, Strategy Lead at Pilothouse, names one question that tells you fast whether an agency will build your brand or discount it to death. He gets to it at [31:40], right after his case that Meta's Andromeda rewards thoughtful creative over constant iteration, which is the same discipline growth-hacking trains you out of.
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