We Built a $100M brand. Now we grow yours.
- The agency founded by the founders of Chubbies, a >$100M brand + team of former brand operators
- Experts in Brand AND Performance
- Fractional CMO strategic frameworks, measurement, and guidance. And, execution of full funnel paid media, creative strategy, CRO and landing page funnels, forecasting and growth modeling.
We take on a limited number of new partnerships at a time.
Profitable growth, proven — not promised.
Contribution dollars, causal lift, and CRO wins — validated, not platform-reported
The homepage version is intentionally brief. The case studies page has the detail, time windows, methodology, and proof notes behind each result.
We don't list our customers' names. As operators, that's what we'd have wanted — to be protected from the endless vendor calls. Just know that many of your favorite brands are already on Marathon. Every figure traces to the brand's system of record.
Direct response alone hits a ceiling. Then it gets expensive.
Performance-only strategies compete for the same in-market 5% of shoppers. CPMs climb, ROAS slips, and the dashboard starts arguing against the very thing that would actually grow the business. Most agencies answer by spending more into the auction. We don't.
You're stuck harvesting demand, not creating it.
Last-click optimization keeps buying the customers who were going to convert anyway.
Platform ROAS isn't telling you the truth.
In-platform return double-counts and over-credits. It can't see what was actually incremental.
Brand feels unaccountable, so it never gets funded.
Without a way to measure the return, brand investment loses every budget argument to the next promo.
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.
When the only lever is “buy now,” growth gets more expensive.
The pattern is predictable. When the only available lever is the buy-now stage, the answer is always a stronger offer. Bigger discount. More urgency. More pressure to manufacture a buying occasion.
The advice every brand hears
“Why do they need to buy it today?” It’s in nearly every creative brief in the category, and on the surface it’s good advice — it converts. Structurally, it’s how a brand ends up dependent on its own promotions.
- Manufacturing the occasion means discount, urgency, or scarcity
- Each cycle resets the customer’s expectation of what the product costs
- The offer stops being a lever and starts being the value proposition
Why that limits the brand
- “Why buy now” manufactures buying occasions, which usually means a stronger offer and more urgency
- Brand memory matters because people need to choose the brand when they are naturally ready to buy from the category
- Offer pressure can work in the short term, but it gets harder to scale without weakening margin
- The goal: when someone is ready to buy in the category, the brand is already the obvious choice
The goal is brand memory, not offer dependency. We build the path out of that cycle so the offer becomes a cherry on top, not the entire value proposition. That’s the mechanism behind the offer-led ceiling in the chart above.
A founder-led operating system, run on measurement that proves it works.
Three things make Marathon Engine unlike any agency or fractional CMO you have talked to.
We built a $100M brand. We've owned the P&L.
Marathon Engine was founded by the founders of Chubbies — built from zero past $100M and through a nine-figure exit. You're working with operators who've run the businesses and made the expensive mistakes already, not account managers learning on your budget.
The senior decision layer most brands are missing.
We sit in the weekly operating rhythm with your team and agencies: reviewing the data, choosing what to fund, stop, test, fix, and explain, and guiding channel allocation, resource allocation, demand planning, and CFO/board narratives.
The measurement core that turns strategy into decisions.
Everything we do runs on Marathon Data: machine-learning models built on billions of dollars of revenue, spend, and customer behavior across 30+ brands, validated by causal incrementality measurement. It is how the operating system knows which dollars to scale — and how we prove the build pays.
Brand Value = future incremental revenue.
One system, two names: Marathon Engine is the agency; Marathon Data is the measurement software platform it runs on. Marathon Data gives brand a financial number — so before you commit to anything, you can see what your brand activity is actually worth.
The Marathon Brand Value Model is a Bayesian time-series model that predicts the incremental revenue your brand investment will generate — validated against your actual revenue and re-trained as new data arrives. Built by Chris Dolan (PhD Statistics, Columbia) and Tom Montgomery, with collaborators from Shopify, Amazon, Google, and Uber.
See your brand value before we ever talk pricing.
Connect your stack and Marathon Data shows what your brand activity is creating in future incremental revenue — across 30, 60, 90, and 180-day windows. It's the same measurement that runs inside every Marathon Engine engagement.
See your brand value →95% of Your Future Customers Aren’t Ready to Buy Today
Ehrenberg-Bass research popularized the point: 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%.
Performance-only strategies eventually hit a ceiling because they compete for the same in-market shoppers. Brand investment creates future demand by making buyers search for you, visit directly, and choose you when they enter the market.
Marathon measures which brand investments are actually moving that demand curve—and expresses the output in Brand Value, baseline revenue, and validated incremental lift.
Math that ties brand actions to revenue.
The Marathon Brand Value Model is a Bayesian time-series model. It learns how every brand action — likes, comments, shares, and follows on paid ads, organic posts, and creator placements, plus changes in branded search — connects to your actual baseline revenue. Three stages: a panel model trained across every Marathon brand, a client-specific model that maps engagements to organic searches, and a second that maps engagements and searches to revenue. The output: a 180-day Brand Value in real dollars for every campaign, ad, post, and creator placement, validated against actual revenue and re-trained as new data arrives. Built by Chris Dolan (PhD Statistics, Columbia) and Tom Montgomery, with collaborators from Shopify, Amazon, Google, and Uber.
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Follows
- Brand searches
- $Per campaign
- $Per ad set
- $Per ad
- $Per organic post
One operating system. Every decision that moves growth.
Most agencies only run one workstream. We install the senior operating layer above the workstreams: fractional CMO judgment, measurement, budget allocation, demand planning, and execution guidance in one weekly system. Founded by the team behind Chubbies (scaled from $0 to $100M+) and powered by Marathon Data, we help brands decide where the next dollar, next test, and next operating focus belong.
We learned firsthand that scaling requires more than channel specialists. It takes a measurement-backed decision system for capital allocation, customer quality, creative, site, retention, inventory, and finance confidence.
Founder-led CMO operating system
Weekly decisions on what to fund, stop, test, fix, and explain across media, creative, site, retention, demand planning, and finance.
Forecasting & demand planning
Modeling margins, inventory lifecycle, and cash flow to guide absolute capital allocation.
Retention & LTV (profit) strategy
Repurchase economics, cohort intelligence, and retention hooks that change your CPA threshold.
Creative strategy & analytics
High-volume direct response creative, brand asset guidelines, and structured iteration feedback loops.
CRO · web merch · landing pages
Conversion optimization, catalog hierarchy, and landing page engineering to maximize every media dollar.
Direct-response paid media
Scale paid search, social, shopping, and programmatic ads against strict incremental margin targets.
Brand media management
High-leverage video, out-of-home, sponsorships, and placements built to drive mid-to-long-term lift.
Not the usual agency people.
Co-founder and CEO of Chubbies. Led the brand's scaling from a garage to a nine-figure business, a successful exit, and a public-company IPO. Following the acquisition, served as Chief Digital Officer across Solo Brands. Now leads Marathon as CEO.
Co-founded Chubbies alongside Tom. Co-led all of the marketing, content, e-commerce, technology, and data efforts with Tom during the brand's scaling years. Now builds the brand strategy and measurement system Marathon runs on.
Brand operators who built a nine-figure consumer brand, exited it, and then built the measurement, operating cadence, and senior team to help the next founder avoid the expensive mistakes.
Book a call, get a founder-level audit of your full business. Free.
Not a media-buyer's checklist built to sell you media — the audit a founder-operator CMO and a CFO would run together. The full P&L and contribution economics, a growth model and forecast, the ad accounts down to individual pieces of creative, the website and conversion path, measurement and incrementality blind spots, and retention/LTV — synthesized into a sequenced 90-day plan you could take to your board. Run personally by the exited founders who built a $100M+ brand. You keep everything we find, whether or not we work together.
We're fortunate that more brands want to work with us than we can take on at once. We run the work ourselves — senior operators, not handed to juniors — so we take on a limited number of new partnerships at a time, and we're building the team with the best people in the industry to protect that experience.
If you think there's a fit, the fastest path is to book a call and start your free growth audit. The brands that do move to the front of the line.
Quantify your brand upside.
Get your free growth audit if you want the operator team to look at the full system, or learn more about Marathon Data.