Judge brand campaigns by brand-name searches and surveys, not cost per install

Larissa Morimoto… similar passions for you and your product. And that's something that you really can't get with a $5 CPI. And so PhotoRoom is a very data-driven company and it's been so hard to find the right measurement framework for it. Especially because traditionally if you're running a brand campaign, you're likely trying to tie it to the regular growth metrics that we follow. So whether it's installs, whether it's conversions, whether it's retention.

Larissa MorimotoAnd for us, I guess the moment really cracked when we stopped looking at brand from that perspective and we really looked at love and how can we really build this relationship with our potential users. And so the issue that we had before whenever we would try to do brand related campaigns is that we would always compare maybe CPAs to what we were spending on paid acquisition. And that was really impacting our creativity because we were always so limited in the channels that we would explore.

Larissa MorimotoSo we were very focused on influencers and cracking the infamous TikTok ambassador playbook, which did work for us for a while. But after a bit, you start seeing that everybody else is doing the same things and there's no innovation, there's no creativity. And for us, our creativity was unlocked when we decided to look at it from the perspective of love. Right now we measure brand uplift through branded search, we run brand awareness surveys, and we look at very qualitative ways of measuring instead of the traditional growth framework that we normally would look at it from.

David BarnardIt's tough because a lot of people listening will be like, "Well, that's nice for you." And it is a privileged position and a way to be at a company where you can spend marketing dollars where you're not tying as directly. But that's the thing, is that when you get to that point... And I think even smaller apps can find ways to do it on the cheap. It doesn't have to be super expensive. It doesn't have to cost a lot of time.