WHY BRAND?

Brands are moats. What we're trying to do is find a business with a wide and long–lasting moat around it, protecting a terrific economic castle. In essence, that's what business is all about.

Warren Buffett

American Investor

A great brand, meaningful to consumers will outlast the marketing spend.

Dave Powers

CEO of Deckers Brands, owner of HOKA and UGG

Brand and activation work in synergy, each enhancing the other. Brand communications create enduring memory structures that increase the base level of demand and reduce price sensitivity.

Les Binet

Author of The Long and the Short of it

People largely use their memories when buying, rather than searching. Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought

John Dawes

Ehrenberg–Bass Institute

I think probably our most important piece of intellectual property is our brand name

Jeff Bezos

Founder of Amazon

Our goal is to increase the probability that the brand comes to mind when the buyer goes in–market, not to persuade the buyer to go in market. You can’t push buyers down a funnel, but you can catch buyers as they fall

Jenni Romaniuk

Ehrenberg–Bass Institute

built by Experts and Entrepreneurs

Marathon is brought to You by the best data scientists, engineers, PHD's, and the scrappiest entrepreneurs from:

With 10x Better Brand Measurement, You Can

Build Real Asset Value (A.K.A Your Moat)

Long–term, sustainable profits come when you build revenue you can count on — not the fleeting bursts from ever–increasing promotional periods and expanding direct–response ad spend.

Businesses built this way are:
1) easier to run,
2) more profitable,
3) better protected from competitive pressure, and
4) more likely to reach an exit (see reasons 1->3) or to simply spit off huge amounts of cash.

That's why the core of Marathon is a daily forecast of the incremental resilient baseline revenue that you build every day from a massive set of brand actions that have a statistically significant connection to YOUR actual revenue informed by the largest and most accurate dataset on the planet, with the best model on the planet.

A daily measure of Brand that links digital engagements directly to bottom–line growth

Our Brand measure is:
1) behavioral vs. surveyed,
2) real–time vs. months old,
3) rooted in engagements you are already optimizing for, and
4) tied directly to bottom-line growth in your business

This is the only measure of brand that's directly connected to your revenue, purely informed by what people DO rather than what they SAY.

Quantify the $$ your organic social channels are driving — per post

Your organic channels are now revenue–driving performance marketing channels without needing to hammer your audience with a "15% OFF FOR THE NEXT 12 MINUTES IF YOU USE CODE "NOBRAND" AT CHECKOUT".

See the total value driven by your advertising

We can now demonstrate how every single ad drives both short- and long-term revenue. As performance marketers who understand the importance of brand, we've always recognized that the full value of our media isn't captured in a 1- or 7-day click attribution model. However, without a way to quantify it, we couldn't use that intuition when making budgeting decisions across channels, tactics, or creatives.Now you have that information.
Now you have Brand ROAS.
Now you can run your media to maximize both short- and long-term performance, aiming for total ROAS.
Brand return is a purely incremental measure, unlike any direct response ROAS measure.
This straightforward (though challenging to build) approach completely transforms the game. It's not just “brand marketing”; it's about strategically using your valuable ad dollars to drive incremental mid- to long-term baseline revenue growth—growth that relies less on discounts, promotions, or today's ad algorithm performance.

Drive Success with Clear Ownership

Add Accountability at the top–level to any Brand Initiative

get on board

How Marathon's Model Works

Every day a subset of your target audience is taking action towards your brand in the form of searches, mentions, comments, shares, likes, follows, visits, and the list goes on.

By tapping in the most talented data scientists in the world to work on this problem, that's just what we've done. Our model maps hundreds of millions of digital brand behaviors to billions of dollars of baseline revenue to find the strongest, most statistically sound relationships and bring them to you in the form of real baseline dollars to your business.

Ordinarily, a model of this magnitude would cost a Fortune 500 company on the order of $50m+, but because we are using a digital measure of brand, and because our model gets better with every single customer we add to the platform, we can bring it to you for effectively 0% of that cost.

Just like your business, the volume of these behaviors varies widely over time. And when you look across many businesses across many different industries, you can start to build a very sophisticated model for the relationship between changes in the volumes and degree of digital brand behaviors and growth in the resilient revenue of any given business.

Brand Measurement: The Traditional Approach vs. Marathon

Methodology 📊

Marathon

Behavioral — directly representative of memory–driving actions users take towards your business

Traditional

Survey–based = survey bias, dirty data, misaligned incentives of survey takers

Scale 📊

Hundreds of millions of brand–oriented behaviors tracked and counting

Survey sample size — typically in the thousands, extrapolated to populations 300m+

Speed 📊

Daily results for 2y+ historical

Quarterly, Semi–Annual, or Annual survey results most common — no historical record

optimizable 📊

Daily/Weekly/Monthly results give you new top–level metric to optimize in real–time. Connection to digital behaviors gives accountability to specific marketing tactics and creative.

Test for 6 months, hope you moved the survey results — no accountability to any tactic

Accountable 📊

Based in ROI on your business and verified across our entire Marathon dataset — Billions of dollars of baseline revenue and hundreds of millions of brand behaviors

No accountability to speak of except at the highest echelons of Fortune 500 with price tags in the $Millions

Testable 📊

We start with a Marathon–financed 6–month incrementality study to ensure growth in the metrics that matter

Not at all

real results from 4 customers

why we are doing this?

Our Story

Chubbies almost went out of business because of the exact problem we're trying to solve at Marathon.

In the early days at Chubbies we built Brand because we had to. We had no money. We were scrappy, creative, dynamic. And we built an awesome Brand.

Then we monetized that Brand with performance DR. We convinced ourselves that that was the source of our growth. We almost went out of business.

We righted the ship and built, brick by brick, to a >$100m exit, culminating in a >$1B IPO, but to do that we had to overcome the overwhelming pressure to take a short-termist approach.

As we've seen this direct–to–consumer brand market evolve over the years, we've seen the same cycle happen to nearly every other business out there: Starting hot, pushing performance marketing, then stalling out and never getting to long-term sustainable growth.

This was the problem we felt absolutely compelled to solve because we felt for these brand builders and entrepreneurs. We were in their shoes. And but for a whole lotta luck and a gritty–a** team, it would have sunk us.

Then we looked around and realized there just isn't anything on the market that helps companies do this — this most important thing imaginable.

So that's what we're working towards, would love your feedback.

Tom

CEO

Preston

Co–founder

understand the actual revenue impact of brand

free your brand from the shackles of substandard measurement

Get on board

message for our clients

Step into the new brand measurement