Rising CAC Won’t Let You Scale. Brand Building Will.
Measure brand advertising like performance marketing — validated by billions in spend and geo-incrementality holdout tests.
See Your Brand Value →We don’t list our customers’ names. As operators, that’s what we would have wanted—to be protected from the endless calls that come from being on a vendor’s site. Just know that many of your favorite brands are already on Marathon.
The Performance Marketing Treadmill Is Breaking Down
The playbook that got you here is no longer working. More spend, less return. Sound familiar?
Acquisition costs climbing 10–30% YoY
You’re paying more to acquire customers who should be coming to you directly. Margins are eroding quarter over quarter.
Your most valuable revenue is shrinking
Baseline revenue—from direct traffic, branded search, and organic—is in decline. The foundation of your business is weakening.
Growth is costing more than it returns
You’re spending more and discounting more to hit the same numbers. Revenue might be flat, but profit is down.
The Evolution of Growth
Every brand follows the same arc. The playbook that built you will eventually stop working. The question is: do you recognize it, and do you know what comes next?
Stage 3: What You’re Feeling
- Growth is slowing, and questions abound about why
- Is it marketing? Product? Competition? The economy?
- Metrics that were improving are now clearly getting worse
- CAC is increasing. Multiple instances where Meta just stopped delivering.
- Realizing that measuring everything via 1-day click forces short-term behavior
- Marketing calendar built around discount events just to keep growing
Stage 4: Where You’re Going
- Finally able to define + measure brand’s impact on financial performance
- New customer acquisition from owned and organic traffic growing
- Resilient baseline revenue that keeps showing up—even if you slow promos
- Seeing how brand-building video content drives short-term KPIs and feeds the flywheel
- Contribution margin going up as you acquire more people via owned channels
- Confidently investing in brand actions and engagements that drive future revenue—not passive views and reach
The Problem Isn’t Your Ads. It’s What You Can’t Measure.
Without brand ROI data, you chronically underinvest in demand generation. Short-term tactics become less effective without a strong brand foundation. Connecting brand-building actions directly to revenue changes everything.
Vague proxies. No revenue connection.
Measurable. Actionable. Tied to outcomes.
A Strong Brand Delivers:
Paid Efficiency
Creates a sustainable customer pipeline that makes every ad dollar work harder
Margin Protection
Insulates margins from competitive pressure and rising CPMs
Organic Revenue
Shifts revenue from expensive paid clicks to high-margin organic traffic
Less Discounting
Reduces reliance on promotions and markdowns to hit growth targets
Compounding Asset
Builds a moat that compounds over time—one competitors can’t copy
True Measured Incrementality
Causal impact on total business revenue, delivered purely from top-of-funnel brand campaigns across 2–6 month geo-holdouts. Not model estimates—real markets, real spend, real lift.
You’re building your moat and paying off the costs from day one. The marginal DR dollars you redirect weren’t generating profitable return where they were. Shift them to brand and the payoff starts day one.
Geo-Holdout Test
Test markets receive brand spend. Control markets don’t. The gap is your causal lift.
Chart showing geo-holdout test results over 6 months. Test markets receiving top-of-funnel brand spend show significantly higher revenue growth compared to control markets with no brand spend. The gap between the two lines represents the causal lift attributable to brand investment.
Building Your Growth Moat
Each layer of brand investment compounds into a defensible asset.
Diagram showing concentric rings around "Your Brand" at the center. From inside out: Brand Searches, Organic Traffic, and Baseline Revenue. Each layer of brand investment compounds into a wider, more defensible moat.
New customer CAC has come down 30%.
After 2 months on the Marathon Playbook
Profit is up 4x. We just had our best day ever outside of BFCM.
After 6 weeks of brand-optimized spend
This ad has the lowest CAC of any ad I’ve run in 4 months—and it’s on my most expensive product.
An organic post they never would have used as an ad without Marathon
Measure Brand Advertising Like Performance Marketing
Marathon connects every campaign, post, and engagement to its downstream revenue impact. Measure it. Optimize it. Scale what works.
Connect
We ingest your ad platform data, organic social, and revenue. No pixel. No engineering. Setup takes minutes.
Measure
Our model isolates the true causal relationship between your marketing activities and baseline revenue growth over 180 days.
Optimize
See which campaigns, creatives, and channels drive the most Brand Value per dollar. Reallocate to what compounds.
Scale
Watch baseline revenue grow—often within days. See exactly where each dollar creates the most lift.
The flywheel effect: Brand Value is the statistically significant leading indicator of Baseline Revenue growth. When Brand Value goes up, Baseline Revenue follows. More baseline revenue means more profit, which funds more brand building. It compounds.
Brand Value Leads. Baseline Revenue Follows.
When you push Brand Value up, Baseline Revenue responds. It’s a statistically significant leading indicator we measure in every account.
Line chart showing Brand Value (Marathon's proprietary metric) and Baseline Revenue over time. Brand Value spikes first with volatile upward movements, and Baseline Revenue follows with a smooth, monotonically increasing curve. This demonstrates that Brand Value is a statistically significant leading indicator of Baseline Revenue growth.
The unlock: You now have a new place to invest to find incremental growth. When you push Brand Value, you create net new demand that flows through your entire business—lowering CAC, raising margins, and scaling spend profitably.
The Reverberation Effect
One investment cascades through every metric you care about.
This is how you scale past your plateau. A new source of incremental, profitable growth.
The Brand Mix Model
Every day, your target audience is taking action toward your brand—searches, mentions, comments, shares, likes, follows, visits. The volume and intensity of these behaviors vary widely over time.
Our model maps hundreds of millions of digital brand engagements to billions of dollars of baseline revenue across industries to find the strongest, most statistically sound relationships—and brings them to you as real dollar impact on your business.
Previously, a model of this magnitude was only available to Fortune 500 companies with dedicated data science teams. Because we use a digital measure of brand—and because our model gets better with every customer we add to the platform—we can bring it to you at a fraction of that cost.
Your Brand Is Your Only Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Competitors can copy your ads, match your bids, and undercut your prices. They can’t copy your brand. Marathon turns that moat into a measurable, growing financial asset.
More Efficient Paid Media
A stronger brand means lower CPAs, higher click-through rates, and better conversion on every dollar you spend on performance. Brand makes the whole machine run better.
Less Reliance on Algorithms
Stop renting attention from Meta. Build owned demand through branded search, direct traffic, and organic. Revenue that comes to you without paying per click.
Resilient Baseline Revenue
Baseline revenue is your most profitable revenue. It doesn’t disappear when you pause ads. Marathon grows it systematically—and proves exactly which actions drove it.
Meet the Marathon Team
Six AI agents powering the engine behind the scenes. Every insight one finds, the others use. They learn together, work together, and never sleep—and they’re coming to the forefront soon.
Carl
Brand Model
Signature Move: The Brand Signal
Quantifies your brand's revenue impact
Sally
Paid Media
Signature Move: Brand ROAS
Runs ads to brand ROI, not just clicks
Otto
Social Revenue
Signature Move: The Revenue Post
Measures the $ behind every organic post
Isabel
Influencer ROI
Signature Move: The Creator Signal
Tracks revenue lift from every creator post
Max
Creative Intel
Signature Move: The Split
What's working for brand vs. performance
Gus
Incrementality
Signature Move: The Proof
Geo-holdout tests that prove causation
“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.”
Jenni Romaniuk — Ehrenberg–Bass Institute
We Almost Went Out of Business Because of This Problem
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. We’ve seen the same cycle happen to nearly every other brand out there.
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 built.
Build Your Growth Moat.
The performance playbook is changing. Sustainable growth belongs to brands that can measure and build their most valuable asset.
See Your Brand Value →