Brand + performance media agency
Marathon is a brand + performance media agency powered by Marathon Data, the measurement software platform. Senior media operators quantify Brand Value, revenue lift, and contribution before scaling spend.
We help brands move beyond DR-only growth.
Marathon was founded by the founders of Chubbies, a multi-9-figure consumer brand.
We lived the transition from direct response alone to a healthier balance of brand and performance, and proved that brand investment can create more profit when it is measured correctly.
Measurement software is the difference.
Marathon Data is the measurement software platform behind the agency.
It starts with Brand Value: a simple way to see how brand activity is changing future incremental revenue before you commit to a sales process.
The platform connects brand signals, paid media, revenue, margin, branded search, and causal incrementality measurement so Marathon Engine can decide what to scale.
Is Marathon Engine an AI performance marketing agency?
Yes, but not in the “software runs your ads on autopilot” sense. Marathon Engine is a senior brand + performance operating team powered by Marathon Data’s measurement platform and AI-assisted analysis workflows.
The AI helps our operators find patterns faster across brand demand, paid media, contribution margin, customer quality, retention, LTV, and causal incrementality measurement. The accountability stays human: senior operators decide what to scale and prove whether the work creates incremental profit.
Brand + Performance Beats Performance Alone
Marathon shows how top-of-funnel spend changes revenue, contribution, branded demand, and channel efficiency.
validated incremental brand ROAS
retail partner revenue lift
top-of-funnel brand media iROAS
annualized revenue from site work
branded search lift
branded search volume since pre-campaign
Profitable growth, proven — not promised.
Across the portfolio, Marathon grows the business on the metric that matters — contribution dollars and incrementality, not vanity ROAS. Recent month-over-month profit gains and causal incrementality measurement below.
Real business impact — fast.
What changed for four consumer brands in their first ~90 days with Marathon — growth and profitability moving together.
May 2026 vs the Q1 monthly average
in one week — barely 60 days in
Measured incremental lift.
Causal incrementality measurement isolating the incremental return of Marathon-run brand media — the honest read of whether spend actually drove new demand.
We do CRO, too — and it compounds into the P&L.
Beyond media, Marathon runs a continuous, structured on-site testing program — and only validated winners ship to 100% of traffic. It’s the most under-rated lever in growth, and it compounds harder than any paid-media incrementality test: an incrementality test measures the return on one channel’s spend, while a CRO win lifts the value of every session — paid or organic — permanently, right at the bottom of the funnel where intent is highest. A single win keeps paying across all traffic, from every channel, long after the test ends — and the downside is capped: a test that doesn’t graduate never ships and costs nothing but a sharper read on what does.
Contribution figures combine actual revenue with the brand’s standard variable-cost assumptions. Percentage-point (pp) deltas shown for rate metrics. Pre/post YoY framing isolates Marathon’s engagement period from the same months a year prior.
Quantify your brand upside.
Create an account to see what Marathon Data can measure from your brand, or learn more if you want the operator team to run the full system.
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.
- 2.39x Validated Incremental Brand ROAS A Beauty Brand Your Friends Keep Recommending 6-month causal incrementality measurement across Shopify, Amazon, and TikTok Shop with 97% probability of positive return. Brand beat every DR tactic tested in the same account.
- 2.5x Proven Revenue Lift at Major Retail Partner An Outdoor Brand Built for the Backcountry Brand media drove measurable wholesale sell-through at a major outdoor retailer. 90% CI: 1.24x–4.46x, excluding DTC channels.
- 1.93x Validated Incremental Brand ROAS A Lifestyle Multichannel Food & Beverage Brand Every $1 in brand spend returned $1.93 in proven incremental revenue over 6 months. 80/20 DMA causal incrementality measurement, 90% CI: 1.45x–2.41x.
- ~$2M Annualized Revenue from Web Merch & CRO Marathon Data-Powered Site Work Nearly $2M in annualized incremental revenue in the first months. Higher revenue per session makes every paid media dollar scale more profitably.
- Branded Search Volume +78% Since Pre-Campaign A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Branded search volume up 78% — from 497 to 883 daily organic searches. Measured pre-campaign baseline vs. week of Mar 9, 2026.
- 1.88x Higher Lift in Walmart vs DTC A Lifestyle Multichannel Food & Beverage Brand Brand campaigns drove nearly 2x the incremental lift in Walmart compared to DTC. Walmart 6.2% lift vs. DTC 3.3% in the same causal incrementality measurement.
- Contribution Margin: 24.0% → 25.2%, CM$ +20% YoY An Automotive Brand Going Viral CM$ grew +20% year-over-year on a multimillion-dollar revenue base. Margin rate and absolute dollars both improved simultaneously.
- Follower Growth: 2/day → 683/day A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Follower acquisition went from ~2/day to 683/day. Brand equity showed up in owned audience before it showed up in revenue.
- Contribution Dollars Up ~50% YoY, No Trough An Apparel Brand You Already Wear Contribution dollars grew roughly 50% year over year as brand campaigns reallocated the least-efficient spend — total revenue and new customers climbing the whole time.
- Brand Search: YoY Decline → Positive Comp A Fitness Brand That Changed the Game Reversed declining branded search into +30–40% YoY growth within weeks of launching brand campaigns.
- 2.39x Validated Incremental Brand ROAS A Beauty Brand Your Friends Keep Recommending 6-month causal incrementality measurement across Shopify, Amazon, and TikTok Shop with 97% probability of positive return. Brand beat every DR tactic tested in the same account.
- 2.5x Proven Revenue Lift at Major Retail Partner An Outdoor Brand Built for the Backcountry Brand media drove measurable wholesale sell-through at a major outdoor retailer. 90% CI: 1.24x–4.46x, excluding DTC channels.
- 1.93x Validated Incremental Brand ROAS A Lifestyle Multichannel Food & Beverage Brand Every $1 in brand spend returned $1.93 in proven incremental revenue over 6 months. 80/20 DMA causal incrementality measurement, 90% CI: 1.45x–2.41x.
- ~$2M Annualized Revenue from Web Merch & CRO Marathon Data-Powered Site Work Nearly $2M in annualized incremental revenue in the first months. Higher revenue per session makes every paid media dollar scale more profitably.
- Branded Search Volume +78% Since Pre-Campaign A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Branded search volume up 78% — from 497 to 883 daily organic searches. Measured pre-campaign baseline vs. week of Mar 9, 2026.
- 1.88x Higher Lift in Walmart vs DTC A Lifestyle Multichannel Food & Beverage Brand Brand campaigns drove nearly 2x the incremental lift in Walmart compared to DTC. Walmart 6.2% lift vs. DTC 3.3% in the same causal incrementality measurement.
- Contribution Margin: 24.0% → 25.2%, CM$ +20% YoY An Automotive Brand Going Viral CM$ grew +20% year-over-year on a multimillion-dollar revenue base. Margin rate and absolute dollars both improved simultaneously.
- Follower Growth: 2/day → 683/day A Food & Bev Brand You've Definitely Heard Of Follower acquisition went from ~2/day to 683/day. Brand equity showed up in owned audience before it showed up in revenue.
- Contribution Dollars Up ~50% YoY, No Trough An Apparel Brand You Already Wear Contribution dollars grew roughly 50% year over year as brand campaigns reallocated the least-efficient spend — total revenue and new customers climbing the whole time.
- Brand Search: YoY Decline → Positive Comp A Fitness Brand That Changed the Game Reversed declining branded search into +30–40% YoY growth within weeks of launching brand campaigns.
Your Agency Has a Shelf Life
Your agency wasn’t wrong. Every media strategy works for a moment in time, especially when you have real product innovation. But the DTC playbook that built the brand eventually becomes too narrow for the business you actually run: retail, Amazon, wholesale, organic demand, retention, and customer quality all matter, while the dashboard still grades you on short-term conversion. By the time a brand is pushing toward $100M, the old playbook can stop explaining the whole business, and growth and profitability get harder at the same time.
Ad platforms eke out all the margin that exists
Ad platforms are structurally built to capture more of the surplus over time. The longer you rely on the auction alone, the harder it gets to protect margin.
Competitors will bid on your buyers
Within months of a product innovation, copycats can appear. Competitors and close substitutes enter the same auctions, and that pressure usually pushes costs up.
Offer-led marketing erodes your brand
“Why should someone buy right now?” leads you down a path of discounts and urgency. The real question is: “Why would someone love your product?”
The Auction Trap
The Offer-Led Ceiling vs. The Marathon Method
Chart summary: product momentum rises to a decision point. The Marathon Method begins at the same level as the offer-led path, never dips below it, and compounds upward while staying offer-led declines as auction crowding leaks margin.
How we think about the job differently.
Most firms run performance channels in isolation, accountable to ROAS. We run Brand + Performance as one system, accountable to contribution dollars, and stay close enough to help founders through the months when the old dashboard argues against the right strategy.
Five Components. One System.
Most agencies give you one component: direct response. Marathon Engine runs full-funnel media, creative strategy, web merchandising and CRO, retention and LTV strategy, and measurement as one operating system on the Marathon Data Measurement Platform.
Full-Funnel Brand + Performance Media
Create new demand and capture it with one contribution-margin standard. Brand media, direct response, retail and marketplace lift, and budget allocation operate together instead of competing for credit.
- Demand creation + capture
- Contribution margin optimization
- CTV, Meta, Google, TikTok, retail, and marketplace halo
Creative Strategy & Intelligence
What should we make, why, and how do we know it’s working? Every piece of creative is measured against business outcomes, and the learnings feed the next round of decisions.
- Creative performance analysis
- Data-informed creative strategy
- Structured creative testing
Web Merch & CRO
Web merchandising and CRO as a growth function, not an e-commerce chore. We use Marathon Data, operator pattern recognition, and structured tests to raise revenue per session so every paid media dollar works harder.
- Revenue-per-session test roadmaps
- Product-level merchandising analysis
- Traffic-to-margin optimization
Retention & LTV Strategy
Retention is part of the growth model, not a separate lifecycle silo. We connect cohort behavior, repurchase timing, product economics, and customer quality so acquisition, email/SMS, and merchandising all optimize to better lifetime value.
- LTV and cohort analytics
- Retention roadmap and lifecycle strategy
- Customer-quality feedback to media and creative
Marathon Data Measurement Platform
The truth layer underneath the operating system. Marathon Data connects spend, revenue, margin, customer quality, retention, LTV, retail and marketplace lift, and brand demand signals into one decision view.
- Brand value measurement
- Geo-incrementality validation
- Contribution and customer-quality signals
Powered by the Marathon Data Measurement Platform, the foundation that connects brand spend, paid media, GA4, Shopify, product-level COGS, retail and marketplace lift, retention cohorts, and LTV data. Every component feeds the next. Brand insights sharpen media strategy. Creative performance informs CRO. Customer-quality and product economics inform acquisition, merchandising, and retention priorities. The flywheel compounds, giving brands a forward-looking view of growth rather than backward-looking reports.
Brand + Performance Beats Performance Alone
The proof we lead with is incremental lift, not small-dollar screenshots. Marathon Engine puts founder-level brand operators, senior-only execution, creative judgment, web merch, retention, media, and Marathon Data measurement into one operating system, then proves what actually grows contribution dollars across the whole business.
Brand Lift Shows Up Beyond Your Site
Measured Like Operators, Not Attribution Dashboards
Why the Old Playbook Stops Working
A generation of marketers has drifted way too far to one side. Many growing brands follow a similar arc—the question is whether you recognize it in time.
The playbook matters. The founder-level partnership may matter more.
Most brands know the old direct-response machine will not get them to the next stage. The hard part is turning that into action without losing conviction during the inevitable noisy months.
We have sat through the scary reads.
When platform ROAS falls, contribution dollars move differently, or finance wants a reset, we help separate signal from panic and decide what actually changes.
Brand investment in operating language.
We turn brand spend into a discussion about incrementality, contribution margin, baseline demand, customer quality, and payback so leadership can defend the plan.
We made the mistakes already.
Underfunded tests, overreacting to attribution, treating brand like a campaign, waiting too long to measure the real system: we know the traps because we lived them.
Where Does Your Marketing Sit?
Same campaigns, two trajectories. The widening gap is the incremental revenue brand creates — above and beyond direct response alone.
“Why buy now?” Marketing
- Offer-dependent acquisition
- Margin destruction over time
- Platform-reported vanity metrics
- Vulnerable to copycats & auction pressure
“Why Will I Remember Your Brand?”
- Brand-driven demand generation
- Contribution margin growth
- Audience ownership & real measurement
- Compounding returns year on year
The trajectories come from a different question: performance marketing keeps asking for urgency until the offer does all the work. Marathon Engine builds memory, owned demand, and compounding margin.
The hard truth: if you’re running ads this way, the model has a shelf life. The standard direct response playbook keeps reaching for urgency, discounts, and offer hooks because the platforms are designed to capture more margin over time. Brands have more leverage when they build an audience they do not have to rent back every day.
The founder question: we have a real product, real distribution, and competitors starting to copy us. How do we build brand without letting accountability disappear? Marathon’s answer starts with the Measurement Platform: expand reach, then prove whether search, owned demand, retail and marketplace lift, customer quality, retention, LTV, and contribution dollars are compounding.
Product innovation works—until it gets copied
Every media strategy works for a moment when you have real product innovation. But within six months, we had copycats. Buyers from Abercrombie, J.Crew—buying our products, reverse-engineering them. You will be knocked off. Get ready.
Competitors enter your auction
People will bid on your buyers and shoppers. Even if they’re not now, they’re coming. And the person willing to accept the worst margin will make your costs go up.
Offer-led marketing is a trap
Modern marketing has confused ads with offers. It’s almost an assumption that every ad needs a discount or urgency hook. “Why buy now?” leads you down a path of margin destruction—not love, not loyalty, not brand building.
The real question isn’t “why buy now”
It’s “why would someone love your product?” Your customers should determine when they buy. Your job is to make them fall in love with your business, your brand, and your products—not distract them with the dopest discount.
Build an audience you own
Ad platforms are designed to capture more of the margin over time. Marathon Engine helps brands build owned demand, customer memory, and audience strength that make the business less dependent on the auction.
From Onboarding to Compounding Growth
Fast results, deep partnership. We’re on the full stack from day one—and we stay in the room for the strategic and emotional parts of the transition, not just the workstream updates.
Measurement Foundation
We connect Marathon Data first, then audit the full funnel. Brand health, media efficiency, creative performance, conversion gaps, retail and marketplace lift, retention cohorts, and LTV all land in one operating view.
Engine Architecture
We architect a custom growth engine for your brand. Which engines activate first, where the quick wins are, and where the long-term compounding will come from.
Full-Stack Execution
All five components activate. Full-Funnel Brand + Performance Media, Creative Strategy & Intelligence, Web Merch & CRO, Retention & LTV Strategy, and Marathon Data Measurement—working together from week one. Results in the first month, not the first quarter.
Compound & Scale
Every insight from one component feeds the others. Brand data sharpens creative strategy. Creative performance informs media. Retention and LTV analytics sharpen acquisition quality and merchandising. We help you keep the board-level narrative intact while the flywheel compounds quarter over quarter.
Built by Brand Builders & Engineers
Marathon Engine was founded by Chubbies co-founders who built a brand from zero into a nine-figure consumer business and through a successful exit. The engagement combines founder-level strategy, CMO-level judgment, and the senior operating team to actually run the work. The value is not just the playbook; it is having people beside you who have already lived the transition from slowing direct-response growth to measured brand investment.
Co-founded Chubbies Shorts from zero into a nine-figure brand and through a successful exit. Lived the entire brand lifecycle—from product innovation to scaling, competitive pressure, and the realization that only brand-building creates a real moat.
- Co-founded Chubbies Shorts
- Built a nine-figure consumer brand through exit
- Chief Digital Officer of a $500M public retail company
- Scaled operations & growth systems
- Expert in unit economics & margins
- Builds the engine behind the engine
Co-founded Chubbies Shorts alongside Tom and helped build it from zero into a nine-figure brand through exit. Deep background in growth, operations, and the art of building companies that compound—not just products that sell.
- Co-founded Chubbies Shorts
- Scaled brand from $0 to nine figures through exit
- Deep expertise in brand + performance
- Built Marathon’s data platform
Not the usual agency people. Brand operators who built a nine-figure consumer brand, exited it, and then built the technology and team to help the next founder avoid the expensive mistakes.
We didn’t just advise on growth—we lived the entire brand lifecycle. Product innovation, rapid scaling, performance-marketing saturation, competitive pressure, margin erosion, the successful exit, and the public-company reality of explaining every decision to the board.
We also made the mistakes brands usually make in this transition: brand tests that were too small, dashboards that rewarded the wrong behavior, and moments where the right long-term move looked wrong in the short-term report.
- Every engine built from hard-won experience, not theory
- Proprietary measurement technology connecting brand investment to business outcomes at scale
- Founder-level partnership for board questions, soft months, budget tension, and the moments when most brands quit the brand investment too early
- Senior operators stay close to the work: strategy, creative, media, CRO, retention, measurement, analytics, and business decisions
The Thinking Behind the Engine
We share the frameworks and first principles that power the Marathon Engine. No gated PDFs, just the ideas that are reshaping how consumer brands grow.
The Engagement Economy
Why the brands winning in 2026 are optimizing for audience ownership instead of auction arbitrage. The shift from ROAS-first to contribution-first growth.
Read the full article →Why We Built This
Own the audience, not the auction
The durable path out of rising acquisition costs is to build your own audience. When more demand comes from people who already know, trust, and seek you out, the business depends less on auction pressure and competitor bids.
There is no trough of despair
Brand investment should not require a blind trough of despair. We look for early contribution-margin proof, protect near-term business health, and keep the math visible from the first weeks.
Brand outperforms DR by its own standards
What gets called “performance marketing” often performs worse than brand investment when measured by the same incremental standards. The data is clear: brand campaigns drive better business outcomes than conventional DR.
Marathon Data is the measurement foundation.
Marathon Engine is the operator system built on top.
The Marathon Data Measurement Platform connects brand spend to revenue outcomes, customer quality, retention, LTV, retail lift, marketplace lift, and contribution dollars. It is validated through causal incrementality measurement and used inside every Marathon Engine engagement. Recommendations are grounded in a data foundation your team can defend in front of the board.
A large, validated brand value model
Built from billions of brand engagements across 30+ consumer brands. Validated through causal incrementality measurement, not platform-reported ROAS or last-click attribution.
- Brand-to-revenue measurement
- Causal incrementality validation
- Auditable results your board can defend
Omnichannel contribution over ROAS
Every media dollar is evaluated against what your business actually keeps across DTC, Amazon, retail, wholesale, and marketplaces. ROAS is an input. Contribution dollars are the goal.
- Marginal CAC measurement
- Channel-level CM$ tracking
- New customer margin focus
Closed-loop creative intelligence
Every creative is tagged, analyzed by performance vector, and fed back into the next brief. The loop runs every two weeks, not every quarter.
- Creative performance tagging
- Biweekly feedback cycles
- Data-informed creative briefs
Retention and LTV analytics
We connect first-order economics to repeat behavior so budget, creative, offers, and lifecycle priorities are judged by customer quality, not just first-purchase efficiency.
- Cohort-level LTV reads
- Retention and repurchase diagnostics
- Customer-quality feedback loops
The same Measurement Platform that runs every Marathon Engine engagement is also available as standalone software for teams that want to prove brand impact inside their own stack.
Ready to Build Your
Growth Engine?
Start by seeing what Marathon Data can measure from your brand, then learn more if you want the operator team to run the growth system.