Stop Defending Brand Spend. Scale It with Proof.
The first statistical model connecting billions of brand engagements to billions in revenue. Validated with geo-incrementality holdout tests.
Get Your Free Brand Score →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.
- Branded Searches Up 71% in 30 Days A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Daily branded searches went from 497 to 851 in a single month. The year-over-year trend flipped from being down 50% to being up 70%. Measured via branded query data over a rolling 30-day analysis window.
- 2x Incremental ROAS on Brand Awareness Alone Another Food & Bev Brand That Keeps Winning A 6-month causal geo-holdout incrementality test isolating the impact of brand awareness campaigns. Test vs. control markets showed brand investment returning 2x in incremental revenue, measured at 95%+ statistical confidence.
- Branded Search Reversed from Negative to +40% YoY A Fitness Brand That Changed the Game Branded search volume was trending negative year-over-year for months. After implementing Marathon’s brand measurement framework, the trend reversed to +30–40% positive comps within the analysis period.
- 2.5x Causal Revenue Lift at Major Retail Partner An Outdoor Brand Built for the Backcountry Geo-holdout test measuring brand campaign impact on wholesale sell-through at a major retail partner. Excludes all direct-to-consumer channels (Shopify, Amazon) to isolate the brand halo effect on retail distribution.
- Contribution Margin Growth Accelerated from +15% to +60% YoY An Apparel Brand You Already Wear CM dollar year-over-year growth rate accelerated from +15% in January to +60% by March, improving every single week. Driven by a disciplined reallocation from DR prospecting to brand-building channels guided by Marathon’s Brand Value signal.
- 2.4x Causal Lift Across Three Sales Channels A Beauty Brand Your Friends Keep Recommending A 6-month causal geo-holdout incrementality test measuring brand impact across Shopify DTC, Amazon marketplace, and TikTok Shop simultaneously. 97% statistical confidence. Proves brand investment reverberates across every channel, not just the one you target.
- Follower Growth Multiplied 341x in Two Months A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Social follower acquisition went from approximately 2 new followers per day in January to 683 per day by March. Marathon’s Brand Value signal identified the inflection point before it showed up in revenue, giving the team time to double down.
- 2x Revenue Lift at Walmart from Brand Investment Another Food & Bev Brand That Keeps Winning Geo-holdout test showed brand awareness campaigns lifted Walmart sell-through at 2x the rate of Shopify and Amazon combined. Brand reverberates everywhere—the channels you don’t target still benefit.
- New Customer Revenue Up 20% YoY to $20.8M An Automotive Brand Going Viral Total new customer revenue and contribution margin dollars grew from $17.4M to $20.8M year-over-year. Brand investment expanded the top of funnel while maintaining efficiency—more customers acquired at a sustainable cost.
- Brand Value Doubled Year-Over-Year A Fitness Brand That Changed the Game Marathon-measured Brand Value grew from $29.9K to $62.8K year-over-year—a 110% increase. This leading indicator correlated with downstream revenue growth that appeared 4–8 weeks later, giving the team predictive visibility into future performance.
- Daily Social Shares Up 629% in Two Months A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Organic social shares jumped from 22 per day in January to 161 per day by March. Marathon tracks these micro-engagements as brand equity inputs, connecting each one to downstream branded search and baseline revenue impact.
- Contribution Margin Swung from -$39K to +$202K An Apparel Brand You Already Wear A swing from negative CM to an all-time high. Revenue grew +9% while paid media spend dropped 46%. Brand investment builds a baseline revenue floor that doesn’t require constant ad spend to sustain.
The Performance Marketing Treadmill Is Breaking Down—CAC Has More Than Tripled
DTC customer acquisition costs have risen over 200% in the last eight years. The playbook that got you here isn’t just slowing down—it’s actively eroding your margins.
Acquisition costs climbing 10–30% YoY
You’re paying more to acquire customers who should be coming to you directly. Every dollar of margin you lose to rising CPAs is a dollar that could’ve funded real growth.
Your most profitable revenue is shrinking
Research shows baseline revenue—from direct traffic, branded search, and organic—is declining year-over-year for most DTC brands. This is the revenue that doesn’t cost you a click. Data shows that when baseline shrinks, brands are forced to buy every customer through paid media at ever-higher CPAs—a proven recipe for margin erosion.
Growth is costing more than it returns
You’re spending more and discounting more to hit the same numbers. Revenue looks flat. Contribution margin is down. That’s the number that determines whether your business survives. The math breaks when every dollar of growth costs more than the last.
95% of Your Future Customers Aren’t Ready to Buy Today
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute proved it: at any given time, only about 5% of your market is actively in-market. The other 95% will buy later—from whichever brand they remember first.
Performance marketing only reaches the 5%. Brand building reaches the 95%.
Here’s the thing: performance-only strategies eventually hit a ceiling. You’re fighting over the same 5% with every competitor, bidding up costs, watching margins shrink. Sound familiar? The brands that invest in the 95%—building the memory structures that make people choose them first—are watching their CAC drop and their baseline revenue climb quarter after quarter. We discovered this pattern across hundreds of brands. Les Binet’s research across 1,000+ campaigns shows the optimal split is roughly 60% brand, 40% performance.
Marathon measures exactly how well you’re reaching the 95% today—and shows you which brand investments are actually moving the needle. No more guessing whether brand spend is “working.” See how your 95% stacks up—start your free Brand Value analysis.
6 Signs You’re Ready for Brand Measurement
We’ve talked to hundreds of DTC brands. At some point, these six patterns show up in almost every one. Research shows it’s not because anything is broken. Nobody gave you proven tools to see what’s really happening.
If you checked 3 or more, you’re exactly where Marathon customers were before they started. Every one of these is solvable—and measurable—within your first 30 days.
Every Brand Hits the Same Wall. Here’s What’s on the Other Side.
Every brand follows the same growth arc. The playbook that built you will eventually stop working—CAC climbs, margins shrink, and the algorithms get more expensive. The question isn’t if. It’s whether you recognize it before it’s too late.
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
Three Brand Myths Holding You Back
Picture this: you’re leaving millions on the table because of beliefs that sound reasonable but are dead wrong. Here’s the thing—the research has debunked all three. The smartest teams we discovered are already abandoning these assumptions in 2026.
Reality: Brand drives the highest-margin revenue you have—direct traffic, branded search, and organic typically deliver 3–5x the contribution margin of paid acquisition. One Marathon customer discovered 62% of their total revenue came from brand-driven channels they weren’t even tracking. That’s not awareness—that’s your most profitable growth engine.
Reality: You couldn’t—until now. Marathon’s Brand Mix Model connects hundreds of millions of brand engagements to downstream revenue using geo-holdout testing and causal inference at 95% confidence. Not surveys. Not proxies. The same methodology Procter & Gamble and Unilever use—now available to every brand.
Reality: Every company already has a brand—the question is whether you’re measuring and growing it intentionally. The brands that start measuring brand value early build compounding advantages their competitors can’t catch. Marathon brings enterprise-grade brand analytics to growth-stage companies—no $500K research budget required. See exactly where your brand stands in your first 30 days.
The Problem Isn’t Your Ads. It’s What You Can’t Measure.
Without brand ROI data, you’re chronically underinvesting in the thing that drives 60–80% of long-term growth (per Binet & Field research). Short-term tactics become less effective every quarter without a strong brand foundation. Connecting brand-building actions directly to revenue changes everything.
Vague proxies. No revenue connection.
Measurable. Actionable. Tied to outcomes.
What Exactly Is Brand Value?
Brand Value isn’t awareness, preference, or NPS. It’s the dollar amount of incremental revenue your brand-building activities will generate over the next 180 days—measured through real behavioral signals like branded searches, direct visits, organic engagement, and share of voice, validated by causal geo-holdout incrementality tests at 95%+ confidence.
Think of it as the leading indicator of your baseline revenue. When Brand Value goes up, baseline revenue follows. When it goes down, you know to act before the revenue impact shows up in your P&L. Ready to discover your Brand Value? Start your free analysis today.
A Strong Brand Delivers:
Paid Efficiency
Creates a sustainable customer pipeline—Marathon customers have seen paid media efficiency improve by 2x or more
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: 2–6 Month Geo-Holdout Proof That Won’t Lie
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
From Connected Data to Measurable Brand Revenue in 4 Steps
Here’s the thing: most brands spend months wondering whether their marketing is working. Sound familiar? Marathon connects every campaign, post, and engagement to its downstream revenue impact—using causal geo-holdout rigor, not attribution guesswork. We discovered that in 4 steps, you go from guessing to knowing.
Connect
We ingest your ad platform data, organic social, and revenue from Shopify, Meta, Google, TikTok, and more. No pixel. No engineering. Most customers are connected within 48 hours.
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 a statistically significant leading indicator of Baseline Revenue growth—typically 4–8 weeks ahead. When Brand Value goes up, Baseline Revenue follows. More baseline revenue means more profit, which funds more brand building. It compounds quarter over quarter—and it starts the moment you connect. Ready to see your flywheel in motion?
Connects to 10+ Platforms You Already Use. Zero Engineering Required.
Imagine getting your first Brand Value Score within 48 hours—no pixel installation, no developer tickets, no 6-month implementation. Marathon ingests data from the 10+ platforms you’re already running. The truth is, while other analytics tools are still in onboarding, you’re already making better decisions. We discovered that the fastest path to brand insight starts with the data you already have. Every integration is validated and proven through geo-holdout testing across hundreds of brands.
- Shopify
- Meta Ads
- Google Ads
- TikTok Ads
- GA4
- Klaviyo
- YouTube
- X / Twitter
- + More
Works alongside your existing tools—it’s not a replacement. Keep Triple Whale, Northbeam, or RockerBox for direct-response attribution. Keep GA4 for site analytics. Marathon adds the brand measurement layer none of them provide—the one that shows which marketing builds long-term baseline revenue vs. which just rents short-term clicks. Brands using Marathon alongside their attribution stack report finding 20–40% of revenue was being misattributed to paid channels. Ready to see what you’re missing?
Brand Value Leads. Baseline Revenue Follows 4–8 Weeks Later.
When you push Brand Value up, Baseline Revenue responds—predictably, measurably, and with 95%+ statistical confidence. It’s not a hunch. It’s a proven leading indicator validated across every Marathon customer.
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.
Here’s what this means for you: You now have a measurable lever for 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. One customer saw Brand Value double year-over-year ($29.9K to $62.8K), predicting the revenue surge 4–8 weeks before it hit.
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 that doesn’t require bidding wars with your competitors.
Hundreds of Millions of Brand Signals. One Proven Model.
Every day, your audience is signaling intent—branded searches, social mentions, shares, follows, site visits. Marathon’s Brand Mix Model tracks these signals and maps them to baseline revenue impact—validated by causal geo-holdout tests across 30+ brands.
Before Marathon, you were making million-dollar brand decisions on gut feel. After Marathon, you’ll see exactly which brand investments are driving real revenue—not clicks, not impressions, but incremental dollars you can trace back to specific campaigns. That’s the difference between hoping it works and proving it to your CFO.
This kind of causal brand measurement used to require a Fortune 500 budget and a dedicated data science team. Marathon’s model improves with every customer on the platform—which means you get enterprise-grade incrementality measurement at a fraction of the cost, validated by geo-holdout tests across 30+ brands. See what your brand is really worth. Connect your data and start your free trial today.
Your Brand Is the 1 Thing Competitors Can’t Copy—And It Compounds
The truth is, competitors can match your bids, copy your creatives, and undercut your prices tomorrow. But here’s the thing: they can’t replicate 10 years of trust you’ve built with your audience. We discovered that trust is a measurable financial asset—one that compounds every quarter you invest in it. Imagine a moat no amount of ad spend can buy. That’s your brand.
More Efficient Paid Media
A stronger brand means lower CPAs, higher click-through rates, and better conversion on every dollar you spend. Marathon customers have seen contribution margin swing from –$39K to +$202K in a single quarter—that’s what brand efficiency looks like.
Less Reliance on Algorithms
Stop renting attention from Meta and Google. Build owned demand through branded search, direct traffic, and organic—revenue that comes to you without paying per click. One customer reversed their branded search trend from –50% to +70% year-over-year.
Resilient Baseline Revenue
Baseline revenue—from direct traffic, branded search, and organic—is your most profitable revenue. It doesn’t disappear when you pause ads. Marathon grows it systematically and proves exactly which actions drove it, validated by causal holdout tests. Start measuring your moat today.
Need More Than Measurement? We’ll Run the Playbook With You.
The truth is, most brands know their measurement isn’t working—but they don’t have the team to fix it. Marathon is a platform, but for brands that want a hands-on partner, we also execute. Picture this: our founding team managed hundreds of millions in ad spend at Chubbies and knows what moves the needle beyond platform ROAS. We measure what actually works.
Brand-Optimized Paid Media
We manage your paid media with one difference: we optimize for contribution margin, not just platform ROAS. The result? One customer saw spend drop 46% while revenue grew 9%—because we measure the brand impact others can’t see.
Web Merchandising Intelligence
Daily AI-powered audits of your site experience—product placement, hero content, navigation flow. Data shows exactly what’s working and what’s leaving revenue on the table. Measured and validated daily.
Creative Performance Analysis
Which creatives build brand and which just drive clicks? We tag, score, and analyze every asset so you know what to make more of—and what to stop.
All services are optional add-ons—Marathon’s core measurement platform works standalone. Start with the data, add services when you’re ready. Most customers begin seeing actionable insights within the first week.
Meet the Marathon Team: 6 AI Agents That Never Sleep
Imagine having six specialist analysts who never sleep. They never miss a signal. They get smarter with every brand they study. Marathon’s AI team processes millions of data points daily. They validate each other’s findings. You get insights in hours that used to take consultancies weeks. That means faster decisions, lower costs, and better outcomes for your brand.
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 a brand because we had to. We had no money and no budget for paid media. So we got scrappy, got creative, and built one of the most recognizable DTC brands of the 2010s—growing from a garage to 9-figure revenue in under 5 years.
Then we made the mistake every scaling brand makes: we convinced ourselves that paid media was the source of our growth. We poured more into performance. CACs doubled. Margins collapsed. We watched our most profitable revenue shrink while desperately pumping money into channels that were eating us alive. We were wrong—and we almost lost everything because of it.
Here’s the thing: we discovered that the brand we’d built was driving the majority of our revenue all along. We righted the ship by going back to brand-first fundamentals—and built, brick by brick, to a >$100M exit culminating in a >$1B IPO. We learned the hard way. You shouldn’t have to.
We looked around and realized there wasn’t a single tool on the market that connected brand-building actions to actual revenue outcomes. Nothing that gave you validated, measured data to justify brand spend to your CFO with real numbers—not surveys, not sentiment scores, not vibes. Research shows most brands fly blind on brand ROI. So that’s exactly what we built. If this story sounds familiar, Marathon was built for you. See what your brand is really worth—start your free onboarding today.
Preston Rutherford
Co-founded Chubbies Shorts. Scaled from a garage to a >$100M exit and >$1B IPO over 10 years. Proven track record building brands that last. Learned through experience that performance marketing alone nearly killed the business. Brand measurement was the missing piece that turned it around. That’s when we built Marathon.
Tom Montgomery
Co-founded Chubbies alongside Preston. Led media strategy and budget optimization through the brand’s turnaround. Now applies those hard-won lessons to every Marathon customer.
Your First 30 Days With Marathon
Here's the thing: most analytics platforms take 3–6 months to implement. Marathon connects in minutes, delivers your first proven Brand Value Score in a week, and reaches full measured insights by day 30—no engineering resources required. Data shows that brands using Marathon see validated results before most platforms finish onboarding.
Stop Guessing. Start Measuring Your Brand’s Real Dollar Impact.
Imagine discovering that 62% of your revenue is brand-driven—revenue you weren’t even tracking. That’s what one Marathon customer found within 7 days, using geo-holdout causal tests at 95%+ confidence. Another saw contribution margin swing from –$39K to +$202K. The truth is, the answers are already in your data. No contracts. No risk. Just connect and see.
Get Your Free Brand Score →