Don't Go Dark: How DTC Brands Should Plan 2027 Marketing Budgets | Harness the Halo 6/6

Should a DTC brand cut its marketing budget for 2027? Greg Dolan, CEO of Keen Decision Systems, says cutting is the biggest mistake he expects to see, because a brand that goes dark pays more to get back to where it was.

Greg co-founded Keen 16 years ago after a decade as a CPG brand marketer, waiting six to eight months for a marketing mix PowerPoint that didn't help with the next decision. Keen's database now covers 450 brands and $48 billion in media spend. In the final episode of Harness the Halo, he explains how the loop of measuring, planning, buying and reconciling works, why he thinks a brand of any size should invest in top of funnel, and why he would never hand the marketing budget back to the CFO.

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WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE

• Tariffs are squeezing your margin and marketing looks like the easy cut. Greg's advice is to cut non-working dollars first and keep the lights on, because coming back from dark costs more than staying in market.
• You've been told to wait on brand marketing until you're bigger. Greg disagrees. He says top of funnel spend acts as cover fire that makes your middle and bottom of funnel more effective, and that a brand living on bottom of funnel spend pays more for the same result over time.
• You're scaling inside one platform. Greg's data favors spreading spend across channels that reinforce each other, like Meta and Amazon, and judging each one on what the next dollar returns in profit.
• Someone told you a channel doesn't work. Greg calls blanket channel verdicts a broad generalization. What matters is the brand's objective, where its customer is, whether you can buy the channel efficiently, and when you spend.
• You're relying on Google's or Meta's free marketing mix model. Greg calls them myopic, says they grade their own homework, and says they need a data science team and constant experiments to calibrate.
• Your business is seasonal and your budget piles into the peak. Greg's biggest client bet was a century-old seasonal brand that spent less during its peak season and more around it, and grew top line and profit.
• Your CFO only looks at CAC. Greg would show the CFO the net present value of marketing, so it gets judged as an investment the way any other capital spend is.
• Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Greg says the CMO should, as long as the CMO learns the CFO's language and is held to profit.
• You plan once a year. Keen starts from two years of data, updates the model as new data arrives, produces a week-by-week buying plan, and checks actuals against the forecast.
• You blame creative when results swing. Greg says only great creative shows up as a big effect in the model, and that where and when you spend usually matters more than people think creative does.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Greg Dolan is co-founder and CEO of Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. ⁠https://keends.com⁠

HARNESS THE HALO

Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is the final episode.

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SPONSOR

Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. ⁠https://keends.com⁠

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 AI-powered marketing measurement

06:00 Using AI to optimize marketing spend

09:00 Why top-of-funnel investment matters

19:00 Marketing budgets during economic pressure

26:00 The future of autonomous media buying