Everything it takes to grow profit from media.
Most agencies run one channel. Some run two. We run the full stack — brand media, performance media, creative, CRO, retention, forecasting, and the measurement that ties it together. Built by operators who did this with their own money first.
Seven components. Every dollar accounted for.
Most media partners optimize for their slice. We're built around a different question: where does the next dollar produce the most incremental contribution?
That takes more than a media buyer. It takes a measurement foundation that can actually quantify brand spend, a creative engine that feeds signal back into strategy, a retention lens that weights LTV against acquisition cost, and a CFO-grade narrative so the business never loses confidence mid-build. Every component below is connected — the measurement tells us what's working, and the results show up as contribution dollars, not dashboard metrics.
Seven components, one measurement core. Every dollar's return is read by Marathon Data — so the system optimizes for incremental contribution, not seven separate dashboards.
What we actually do.
Each component is active from day one. None of them are bolt-ons.
Brand media management
Plan, buy, and optimize brand campaigns as part of one integrated media mix — not a separate "awareness budget" handed to a different team. Briefing, channel selection, frequency, and audience sequencing run in the same rhythm as performance.
Customers acquired with brand exposure convert better, churn less, and carry higher LTV — none of which shows up in last-click. We built the measurement to prove it, so the investment decision stops being an argument.
Direct-response paid media
Full management of performance media — Meta, Google, and beyond — with a contribution-dollar lens. We set the guardrails: the defensible MER floor for your margin and LTV, where incremental spend hits diminishing returns, and how to allocate on real incrementality, not platform ROAS.
Performance media generates revenue at any spend level. The question is whether it generates profit. We manage to contribution dollars and payback — and our pay isn't tied to how much we spend.
CRO · web merch · landing pages
Audit and prioritize conversion lift, build purpose-built landing pages for paid campaigns, run structured A/B tests, and advise on merchandising — what gets featured, how products are sequenced, how the site treats cold vs. warm traffic.
A lift in conversion rate has the same effect as an equal cut in CAC — permanently, across every media dollar you spend after it. It's the highest-leverage place to lower the cost of a profitable customer.
Creative strategy & analytics
Run creative as a production process, not brainstorms: a defined testing framework, briefs grounded in performance data, structured analysis of what's driving incrementally better results, and a clear loop from analytics back into the next brief.
Creative is the highest-variance input in paid media — most brands are running on fatigue without knowing it. A disciplined analytics layer turns that variance into edge: the brand that learns faster wins the auction.
Retention & LTV (profit) strategy
Strategy and analytics for email, SMS, subscription mechanics, and post-purchase — built to grow contribution dollars per customer. We analyze cohort LTV, find where repurchase drops off, sequence retention to extend payback, and connect LTV assumptions to your acquisition ceiling.
Your acquisition economics are a function of LTV. Knowing what a customer is truly worth lets you spend to acquire at a fundamentally different cost than a brand guessing — retention doesn't just lift margin, it unlocks a higher ceiling for profitable acquisition.
Forecasting & demand-planning
Build and maintain the bridge between media forecasts and business-wide planning: scenario modeling for spend changes, guidance on framing projections for your CFO and board, and a disciplined process for updating forecasts as real data lands.
The brands that scale fastest are the ones where marketing and finance trust each other's numbers. Disconnected forecasts create stockouts, cash crunches, and reactive spend. A shared model prevents all three.
Measurement narrative · CFO confidence
We don't just build the measurement — we help you use it: translating incrementality results into language your CFO can act on, designing the reporting cadence that keeps leadership aligned, and staying in the room when the investment thesis gets questioned.
The biggest risk in a brand + performance build isn't creative or buying — it's losing conviction mid-build because the platform dashboard looks slow. We built Marathon Data to quantify what's actually happening, and we treat the narrative as a deliverable.
From day one to compounding growth.
We're on the full stack from the first week. Here's how the engagement builds.
Measurement foundation
Before we spend a dollar, we know what we're measuring and why. We audit your attribution, establish incrementality baselines, and build the framework that tells us whether the build is working — in terms finance can trust, not platform metrics.
Engine architecture
We design the media mix, channel strategy, and creative framework for your specific economics — your margin profile, your LTV curve, your current efficiency. Not a generic plan; built from your numbers.
Full-stack execution
Everything runs at once — brand media, performance media, CRO, creative testing, retention. We're not a handoff agency: the team that designed the strategy runs the execution.
Compound & scale
As data accumulates, the system self-improves. Creative learnings feed the next brief. Retention data updates the LTV model. The LTV model updates the acquisition ceiling. The compounding is structural — it's how the architecture works.
"Fast results, deep partnership. We stay in the room for the strategic and emotional parts of the transition — not just the workstream updates."
Built different. Compensated different.
We spent 15 years making these calls with our own company's money. That changes what we pay attention to.
Ready to run the full stack?
If your setup runs performance in isolation — without the measurement to see what brand is doing, the LTV model to know what acquisition is worth, or a team that runs all of it as one system — let's talk.