Build yourmoat.

Marathon is built for brands ready to grow beyond the limits of performance marketing.

It’s a predictive measurement and action platform powered by the only constantly learning ML platform to accurately predict future incremental baseline revenue from brand building, supported by a proven playbook of unconventional strategies, expert guidance from proven founders, and the ultimate skepticism-silencer: long–term geo holdout testing.

‍The goal is to help you grow faster by doing what actually drives business results — not just what looks good in ad dashboards.
Welcome to growth that’s bold, validated, and free from vanity metrics.

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brand lifecycle

We're building Marathon for companies that realize they need to change

Stage 1 🚀

Everything is working effortlessly

Growth is strong, ROAS is high, and new customers keep coming in with minimal effort. Customer acquisition costs stay low, contribution margins are healthy, and revenue from discounting is minimal. The biggest challenge is simply keeping up with demand while scaling without losing quality.

Stage 2 🌊

Riding the Wave

The brand is still growing, but small cracks begin to show. Sales remain strong, yet acquisition costs are starting to creep upward. Margins dip slightly, and discounting becomes a bit more frequent. The focus shifts to sustaining momentum while preventing over–reliance on promotions and protecting profitability.

Stage 3 😐

The Plateau

Growth slows and acquiring customers becomes expensive. Marketing spend rises sharply while revenue growth flattens. Margins drop, and a significant portion of sales now depends on discounts. The goal is to reduce discount dependency, improve contribution margins, and strike a better balance between paid and owned media channels.

Stage 4 🏆

Sustainable Growth

Acquisition costs come back under control, margins improve, and discounting stabilizes at a healthy level. The brand can now grow profitably without leaning too heavily on promotions. The ongoing challenge is maintaining financial discipline and continuing to scale without sacrificing brand integrity or long–term profitability.

our story / manifesto

Chubbies almost went out of business because of the exact problem we're trying to solve at Marathon.

In the early days at Chubbies we built Brand because we had to. We had no money. We were scrappy, creative, dynamic. And we built an awesome Brand.

Then we monetized that Brand with performance DR. We convinced ourselves that that was the source of our growth. We almost went out of business.

We righted the ship and built, brick by brick, to a >$100m exit, culminating in a >$1B IPO, but to do that we had to overcome the overwhelming pressure to take a short–termist approach.

As we've seen this direct–to–consumer brand market evolve over the years, we've seen the same cycle happen to nearly every other business out there: Starting hot, pushing performance marketing, then stalling out and never getting to long-term sustainable growth.

This was the problem we felt absolutely compelled to solve because we felt for these brand builders and entrepreneurs. We were in their shoes. And but for a whole lotta luck and a gritty–a** team, it would have sunk us.

Then we looked around and realized there just isn't anything on the market that helps companies do this — this most important thing imaginable.

So that's what we're working towards, would love your feedback.

Tom

CEO @ Marathon
Co–founder @ Chubbies

Preston

President @ Marathon
Co–founder @ Chubbies

WHY BRAND?

Brands are moats. What we're trying to do is find a business with a wide and long–lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle. In essence, that's what business is all about.

Warren Buffett

American Investor

A great brand, meaningful to consumers will outlast the marketing spend.

Dave Powers

CEO of Deckers Brands, owner of HOKA and UGG

Brand and activation work in synergy, each enhancing the other. Brand communications create enduring memory structures that increase the base level of demand and reduce price sensitivity.

Les Binet

Author of The Long and the Short of it

People largely use their memories when buying, rather than searching. Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought

John Dawes

Ehrenberg–Bass Institute

I think probably our most important piece of intellectual property is our brand name

Jeff Bezos

Founder of Amazon

Our goal is to increase the probability that the brand comes to mind when the buyer goes in–market, not to persuade the buyer to go in market. You can’t push buyers down a funnel, but you can catch buyers as they fall

Jenni Romaniuk

Ehrenberg–Bass Institute

With 10x Better Brand Measurement, You Can

Build Real Asset Value

Sustainable growth comes from reliable, compounding revenue — not short–term promo spikes or endless ad spend

*Data shown is representative only

A daily measure of Brand that links digital engagements directly to bottom–line growth

Our Brand measure is behavioral (not surveyed), real–time (not months old), based on engagements you already optimize, and tied directly to bottom–line growth

*Data shown is representative only

Quantify the $$ your organic social channels are driving — per post

Your organic channels become performance drivers without constant discounting gimmicks

*Data shown is representative only

See the full impact of your advertising

Every ad you run drives value — today and for the long term. Beyond the limits of 1- or 7-day click models, we now show how your campaigns build both immediate revenue and lasting brand growth

*Data shown is representative only

our model

How Marathon model works

By tapping in the most talented data scientists in the world to work on this problem, that's just what we've done. Our model maps hundreds of millions of digital brand behaviors to billions of dollars of baseline revenue to find the strongest, most statistically sound relationships and bring them to you in the form of real baseline dollars to your business.

Ordinarily, a model of this magnitude would cost a Fortune 500 company on the order of $50m+, but because we are using a digital measure of brand, and because our model gets better with every single customer we add to the platform, we can bring it to you for effectively 0% of that cost.

Just like your business, the volume of these behaviors varies widely over time. And when you look across many businesses across many different industries, you can start to build a very sophisticated model for the relationship between changes in the volumes and degree of digital brand behaviors and growth in the resilient revenue of any given business.

Brand Measurement: The Traditional Approach vs. Marathon

Methodology 📊

Marathon

Behavioral — directly representative of memory–driving actions users take towards your business

Traditional

Survey–based = survey bias, dirty data, misaligned incentives of survey takers

Scale 📊

Hundreds of millions of brand–oriented behaviors tracked and counting

Survey sample size — typically in the thousands, extrapolated to populations 300m+

Speed 📊

Daily results for 2y+ historical

Quarterly, Semi–Annual, or Annual survey results most common — no historical record

optimizable 📊

Daily/Weekly/Monthly results give you new top–level metric to optimize in real–time. Connection to digital behaviors gives accountability to specific marketing tactics and creative.

Test for 6 months, hope you moved the survey results — no accountability to any tactic

Accountable 📊

Based in ROI on your business and verified across our entire Marathon dataset — Billions of dollars of baseline revenue and hundreds of millions of brand behaviors

No accountability to speak of except at the highest echelons of Fortune 500 with price tags in the $Millions

Testable 📊

We start with a Marathon–financed 6–month incrementality study to ensure growth in the metrics that matter

Not at all

Build yourmoat.

Brands are moats. What we're trying to do is find a business with a wide and long–lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle. In essence, that's what business is all about.

A great brand, meaningful to consumers will outlast the marketing spend.

Brand and activation work in synergy, each enhancing the other. Brand communications create enduring memory structures that increase the base level of demand and reduce price sensitivity.

People largely use their memories when buying, rather than searching. Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought

I think probably our most important piece of intellectual property is our brand name

Our goal is to increase the probability that the brand comes to mind when the buyer goes in–market, not to persuade the buyer to go in market. You can’t push buyers down a funnel, but you can catch buyers as they fall

Marathon is brought to you by the best data scientists, engineers, PHD's, and the scrappiest entrepreneurs from

Build Real Asset Value

A daily measure of Brand that links digital engagements directly to bottom–line growth

Quantify the $$ your organic social channels are driving — per post

See the full impact of your advertising

free your brand from the shackles of substandard measurement