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Cody Plofker

Hey, I’m Cody. I'm CMO of a 9 figure DTC brand and write a weekly newsletter with actionable marketing advice to make you a better marketer in 5 minutes a week.

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Random DTC Thoughts on A Plane

Hey. I’m on a plane to San Francisco for the next few hours. I’m on my way to the Postscript Customer Advisory event which is in Napa. Not only do I love Postscript and the team, but also a good opportunity to see a bunch of people I know and make some new connections, plus who can turn down a free trip to an Auberge in Napa? Gonna miss my kids but it's a short trip. I’m gonna do a bit of a random, mixed bag issue today with some thoughts that are in my mind. 1. Brand is really hard to...

Happy Saturday and wow can't believe it's August Summer is flying. I was at a Youtube event hosted by Raindrop and OMG Commerce at Google HQ last week and really enjoyed it. I wanted to share my notes and takeaways on Youtube best practices and state of the platform. Here are a bunch of very random notes and thoughts I had from the event. Speaking of Youtube, I'm a big fan of merging strategies. Frequency is important, so an integrated strategy where people will see you programatic ads,...

Hope you are having a great week. I am shocked I was able to get this out this week, but had something on my mind I wanted to chat through. Writing helps me flesh out my thoughts, so this is more for me and my team than you ;). But what's on my mind is doing creative strategy research to help inform new buyer personas for paid social. Everywhere I look people are talking about partnership ads, and for good reason. I can personally tell you that we are solely focused on 10xing out partnership...

Hello and happy first day of Prime Day to those that celebrate. No prime day for us but we have a big launch we are gearing up for that is 3 years in the making. I don't normally like to rip my own content from other channels, but this is a launch week so I'm super busy, sleeping terribly with a sleep training newborn, and I thought this tweet was really good. I'm trying to talk about some things not just ads related. Let me know if this helps you. You can see the original tweet here if you...

Hey, Hope you’re having an amazing day. It's been a little while; life has been somewhat busy. I'm back today with some updated thoughts after the Meta Performance Summit. I wrote most of this on the plane about a week ago; but I got busy catching up and had a few sick kids. But I've had some more time to reflect on this, which I think rounded it out a bit. I was on a panel day 1 talking about value and measurement which was fun. We recorded a Marketing Operators and Operators live podcast...

Happy Tuesday. I am writing this on the plane back from Portugal. This was my first international travel with 2 kids and man, never doing that again. Today’s newsletter will be a little different. It can be hard to come up with new marketing topics every week, so today I’ll share a bit more internal or operational and let me know if you like it. I want to thank today's first sponsor, Insense. We all need a high volume of good, affordable, and effective ads. Consider Insense your all-in-one...

Hey, happy Sunday. Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. I’m getting killed with allergies right now in the Northeast. If you have been able to improve your allergies, let me know because I feel like I’m really struggling with them. Listen, social evolves fast, especially paid social. If you're running the same playbook as a year or two ago, you have pretty much zero shot. You need to evolve and meet consumers where they’re at and meet the platforms where they are going too. You...

Hope you are having a great week. Look, it’s clear this is going to be a challenging year. The Fed has said GDP is down as of today, and public consumer companies are getting slammed. Beauty is hit pretty hard right now, luxury as well. There are some bright spots, like in health. But it’s clear this year is going to be challenging, and not a big growth year. Prior to the start of the year, there was a bunch of optimism but most of that has faded and faded hard. I’ve been looking at a bunch...

Hope you’re having a great week. I loved last week’s episode of Marketing Operators, where I tried to define our Creative Strategy on Meta. It’s a worthwhile exercise I think every brand should do. I wanted to do this because we’re trying to be more intentional about our testing, and as we ramp up volume, we want to make sure we’re guiding our internal team and agencies in the best direction we possibly can. A lot of these “rules” sound obvious, but that doesn’t make them any less important...

What's up, everybody? It's been a week, it's been a year, you know. Just when you think it can't get worse, it does and more will happen. You know, feeling for everybody that's affected by tariffs. It's a hard market right now. I'm not going to give tactical advice because first of all, I'm not a supply chain expert. I won't pretend to be. Very few people know what's actually going on and I would hesitate to restructure your supply chain since it hasn't even been a week yet. Long term, it's...