Which marketing spend builds brand better: unconventional creative tactics or conventional paid channels?

Harry Stebbings · Apr 5, 2023

ButcherBox should operate as a media company doing spectacle content — cooking steaks in the world's strangest places — rather than conventional cooking content like a Gordon Ramsay masterclass

Stunt content in extreme locations captures the world's imagination in a way instructional cooking content does not

44:11 20VC: The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding, The Most In Detail Breakdown of Consumer Subscription Unit Economics & Why D2C and Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backable Model with Mike Salguero, Founder @ ButcherBox

Zaria Parvez · Jan 19, 2024

Founders skeptical of TikTok conversion should note that conventional brand social posts don't convert either, while TikTok is very low cost and reaches people where they are

Most of Duolingo's impressions are organic and cost roughly a costume and dinner; if you're making content anyway, make it entertaining

28:10 20VC: How Duolingo Scaled to 8M TikTok Followers, How to Create Viral Content, Why Most Companies Suck at Content Marketing and How to Change & Why You Should Not Work with Content Agencies with Zaria Parvez, Global Social Media Manager @ Duolingo

Sam Blond · Apr 12, 2024

At conferences, cheap creative tactics beat the default six-figure booth-and-pins sponsorship

At SaaStr, Brex used TaskRabbits handing out breakfast burritos, a magician doing card tricks with Brex cards, surrounding billboards, and Brex-card-branded hotel keys — each cheap per person but far more memorable

Scope: based on Brex's SaaStr sponsorship

54:00 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex

Harry Stebbings · Nov 15, 2024

Provocative, confrontational brand stunts can generate enormous incremental earned media

A portfolio recruitment startup put a billboard outside Goldman Sachs' London HQ mocking bankers and every newspaper in London covered it

37:01 20Growth: Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work | Why Paid Acquisition is a Drug and Brand Marketing is BS | The Good, Bad and Ugly of A/B Tests and Why Micro-Optimisations are Under-Rated with Raman Malik

Harry Stebbings · Apr 5, 2023

Companies lose their creativity and default to billboards and sponsorships when they could build a media operation delivering the same result at a quarter of the cost

A media strategy like the one he described would cost roughly $500K versus millions on brand channels

46:18 20VC: The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding, The Most In Detail Breakdown of Consumer Subscription Unit Economics & Why D2C and Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backable Model with Mike Salguero, Founder @ ButcherBox

Mike Salguero · Apr 5, 2023 · hedged

Out-of-home channels like billboards and bus wraps were ButcherBox's worst performing marketing channel

Scope: concedes they may not have given it a fair shot

50:06 20VC: The Memo: Scaling to $600M Revenues with No Venture Funding, The Most In Detail Breakdown of Consumer Subscription Unit Economics & Why D2C and Consumer Subscription is Not a VC Backable Model with Mike Salguero, Founder @ ButcherBox

Sam Blond · Apr 12, 2024

Opening the Brex Lounge and restaurant at sub-100 employees was the biggest mistake Brex made

Running a restaurant is hard, expensive and distracting; beyond the hundreds of thousands to low millions in hard costs, the opportunity cost of the people and management time was far higher than using those dollars to acquire customers and build the credit card product

Scope: judgment in hindsight; company was under 100 employees at the time

61:34 20Sales: The Biggest Sales Lessons Scaling Brex to $400M ARR, Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It & Why Demand Gen is the Bottleneck for all Startups and How to Solve it with Sam Blond, Former CRO @ Brex

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Growth people need to be loud across every channel and mobilise the whole company to amplify a launch on the day

You want a surround-sound effect that gets the core messaging across on launch day

25:39 20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries

Harry Stebbings · May 2, 2026

The best form of marketing is employee-led marketing.

53:19 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

Employees should publicly post about distinctive internal practices and their own learning; that is modern marketing.

Practices like being handed a Ramp card to try any AI tool with no approval process are things no other company does, and people rotting at approval-heavy companies see it and want in.

Scope: admits she should follow her own advice better; posts should carry some learning or training value

53:39 20VC: Inside Clay's Sales Playbook Scaling to $100M ARR | How to Set Sales Comp Plans | How to Read Sales Talent Linkedin Profiles | What Profiles to Hire & Fire | How to Increase Performance and Speed in Sales Teams with Becca Lindquist

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

SEM is effectively a cartel and most SEM spend has unconvincing ROI — it only works for the narrow set of keywords where you can capture specific intent and build a stitched path from ad to landing page to product

Each keyword is its own market with competitors bidding, making signal-to-noise very hard; at New Relic only 10-20 very specific keywords produced returns within the quarter or month

10:56 Sem only pays on narrow high intent keywords

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

Premium branding on the worst F1 team beats secondary branding on the number one team

You get more exposure and far more creative freedom, and you're making a bet — Audi has historically won every sports championship it entered within five years, and its from-scratch, technology-driven challenger mindset mirrors ElevenLabs' own narrative

49:45 Top billing on a lesser property beats secondary on a winner

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Brand campaigns are most effective when they reach net new audiences the product isn't otherwise touching

Their Jim Harbaugh TV ad got influencers and sports reporters resharing it, introducing Perplexity to sports fans who have exactly the niche in-game questions the product answers well

37:34 Net new audience reach not existing users measures brand campaign success

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

Community — arming your power users to spread the product inside their own small communities — is the most underappreciated growth channel

Power users on a small campus can build local density fast with just budget and swag, and once density exists word-of-mouth takes over

40:17 Community arming power users in their own networks is the most underappreciated channel

Martin Gontovnikas · Feb 14, 2024

Sponsoring several YouTubers to quietly use your product while building an app, with the sponsorship disclosed only at the end, works far better than paying one big YouTuber for a dedicated video about your product

The quiet usage reads as organic and creates curiosity, so viewers go investigate and are more likely to try the product because they don't feel they were sold to

66:33 Quiet multi influencer seeding beats one big sponsored video

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

Having engineers build quasi-products as demand-gen assets works especially well when selling to technical audiences

He saw it work at an IT security consulting firm — technical buyers respond to something product-like rather than to campaigns

4:54 Engineer built quasi products are effective demand gen for technical audiences

Sam Blond · Apr 12, 2024

Rippling's tactic of paying new hires $25–50 to post about their onboarding experience is far more effective per dollar than spending the same money on LinkedIn ads

Job-change posts get enormous organic engagement because everyone likes and congratulates a new-job announcement, so a $50 incentive buys hundreds of likes on a quasi-organic post rather than one served ad impression

56:56 Incentivized organic posts beat paid ads

Harry Stebbings · Apr 12, 2024

Life-event posts — I'm moving, new fund, big round — are the highest-engagement, most valuable posts on social, and everything else is just activity

Those are the needle movers in brand building; the rest is nice but doesn't move anything

59:14 Life event content is the only needle mover

Sam Blond · Apr 12, 2024

Brex's ~$300k San Francisco billboard campaign was its most successful paid campaign, taking the company from near-zero mind share to famous

Brex launched from stealth with no website or PR, so the billboards created brand awareness that made outbound responses, customer acquisition and even fundraising dramatically easier

59:44 Concentrated brand awareness bet at launch pays off

Ilir Sela · Aug 4, 2023

A brand nobody has heard of can be legitimized hyperlocally by manufacturing a sense of scale through visible physical presence

Two branded Nissan Cubes parked outside pizza shops made merchants believe they were seeing the brand everywhere, when there were only two cars

37:31 Manufacturing visible physical presence creates a false sense of scale that legitimizes a brand

Harry Stebbings · Jul 22, 2024

Attention is the most competitive economy today and founders don't think enough about how to generate macro headlines

Getting attention is extremely hard now, making distribution via headlines undervalued

39:56 Generating macro headlines is the most underused attention strategy

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

Clipper/UGC content is a game companies now have to play, given how attention works on social platforms

Attention on today's social platforms is distributed through clipped content

33:53 Clipper and ugc content is now a mandatory channel

Harry Stebbings · Jun 27, 2026

Brand marketing spend should be directed at 'immortal assets' — placements that keep delivering exposure for years — rather than transient ones

A sponsored podcast episode still gets thousands of plays years later and football shirts carry logos for a decade, whereas a billboard disappears in two weeks

37:26 Durable immortal placements over transient ones

Matt Pohlson · Jun 6, 2025

Storytelling content, not paid distribution, is what took Omaze campaigns from $18k to $300k and beyond

They seeded the opportunity in a Reddit AMA and made short viral videos on Facebook and Twitter at a time when paid advertising barely existed there; the content promoted the show, which pulled AMC and Netflix in as partners and amplified reach

9:00 Storytelling content not paid distribution drove breakout growth

Luke Harries · May 23, 2025

Brian Johnson runs the best growth strategy of the last 12-18 months

He combines deliberate controversy (unusual dress, blood transfusions with his son) that gets people talking, dialled-in catchy messaging and brand-building around 'Don't Die' with a real community, and relentless distribution by showing up in comments whenever anyone mentions poor health habits — and it reads as genuinely authentic care about longevity

70:06 Deliberate controversy plus catchy messaging and community drives relentless distribution

Omer Shai · Jan 31, 2026

Lovable's Anton has done an excellent job building brand through his personal social presence, and it is the area where Wix and Omer himself are weakest

He is better at watching numbers and telling stories in commercials; he has not invested in his own personal brand

45:12 Founder personal social presence builds brand

Harry Stebbings · May 11, 2026

In traditional tech, being a brand logo on viral podcast clips has replaced conference banners as the most valuable marketing spend

There's been a realization that nobody really wants to go to the conference where the banner is

44:45 Podcast clip sponsorship beats conference banners

Mike Cessario · Jan 20, 2023

Over 90% of people hate marketing, and Liquid Death's marketing works because it makes fun of marketing itself

People pay a premium for ad-free services and mute commercials; if you find the skull and the name funny as a parody of marketing bullshit, you can identify with the brand without liking heavy metal

21:35 Parody of marketing itself earns attention

Harry Stebbings · Jan 20, 2023 · hedged

People misunderstand how important amplification by third-party outlets like Forbes or BuzzFeed is; that outside reinforcement is what makes a marketing move matter.

External reinforcement is what actually makes the campaign matter

39:21 Third party media amplification is what makes campaigns matter