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A brand doing $10 to $15 million a year puts 15 to 20 percent of revenue back into marketing. At $100 to $500 million it drops to roughly 8 to 10 percent. Past a billion it is 2 to 3 percent. Justin Jefferson has a view across 450 brands and $45 billion in media investment, and those numbers are the opening for a harder conversation about where the money should go.

If you run growth: this is the episode about defending a slow-payback bet to a finance team that closes books quarterly.

If you sit closer to the P&L: Justin explains discounting future marketing revenue back to present value, so marketing and finance can argue about the same number.

What Justin gets into:

Spend-to-revenue benchmarks at $10 to 15M, $100 to 500M, $500M to $1B, and past $1B
Marginal ROI against blended ROI, and why a 1.4 return can hide a next dollar worth 60 cents
The brand that went zero to a hundred on top of funnel, lost sales volume in year one, cut budget in response, and then had nothing left to capture the demand it had created
The golf apparel brand that moved deliberately into CTV, linear, and audio: roughly flat in year one, about 23 percent growth in year two
Why Amazon search is often the most overspent line in a budget, and where he sees real incrementality on Amazon instead
The gap he sees between top and bottom of funnel returns: roughly 180 against 120 to 140
Why brands growing 5 percent or more changed their channel mix significantly more year over year than flat ones

Who this is for: operators between $10M and $500M who have squeezed Meta and Google as far as they go and need a defensible case for spending where the attribution is fuzzy.

What to steal: report return on the next dollar by channel alongside blended ROI. Most teams have only ever seen the second number.

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. Episode 1 sets the state of the market. The next five are the bets themselves, told by the operators who made them and the people who signed off.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Marketing Mix Modeling Is Changing

03:00 Why Meta and Google Are Getting Harder to Scale

07:00 When Brands Should Invest in Top-of-Funnel

13:00 How to Measure and Predict Marketing Performance

19:00 How the Marketing Halo Drives Growth

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What Brands Really Spend on Marketing: 15% at $10M, 2% at $1B | Harness the Halo 1/6

DTC Podcast

What Brands Really Spend on Marketing: 15% at $10M, 2% at $1B | Harness the Halo 1/6