From Cash Back to Outcomes: Bryan Leach on Building Ibotta, Going Public, and Betting on Denver
What does it take to walk away from a prestigious legal career, build a technology company from scratch, take it public—and then reinvent the business along the way?
In this episode of Signal & Noise, Brett House and Rio Longacre sit down with Bryan Leach, Founder, CEO, President & Chairman of Ibotta, for a wide-ranging conversation about entrepreneurship, commerce media, measurement, AI, and why he chose Denver as the place to build.
Bryan’s path to technology was anything but conventional. After Harvard, Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, Yale Law School, a Supreme Court clerkship, and a successful career at Bartlit Beck, he realized he wanted to build something of his own. The idea that became Ibotta began on an airplane, when Bryan watched another traveler photograph receipts and started thinking about how smartphones could capture purchase data—and eventually make rebates dramatically easier for consumers.
What started as a cash-back app has evolved into something much larger: the Ibotta Performance Network (IPN), which distributes digital promotions through major platforms and retailers. Today, much of Ibotta operates behind the scenes, powering offers inside experiences like Walmart and other publisher partners rather than requiring consumers to use the Ibotta app itself.
The conversation goes deep on one of advertising’s hardest problems: proving outcomes. Bryan explains why a redemption isn’t enough, why incrementality matters, and how Ibotta is trying to shift CPG promotions away from impressions, clicks, and blanket discounts toward measurable incremental sales and a true cost-per-outcome model. He also explains how persistent retailer IDs and item-level purchase data make it possible to compare exposed and unexposed consumers and measure actual lift.
They also dig into:
Why Bryan left law even after reaching a career most people would never walk away from—and how one mentor’s decision to invest became a pivotal moment in Ibotta’s creation.
How Ibotta grew from roughly 2 million to 20.9 million redeemers, with much of that growth coming through third-party publishers.
Why Bryan believes promotions should increasingly be treated as an always-on performance channel, with spending governed by incremental economics rather than fixed annual budgets.
How AI is already changing Ibotta’s product, software development, measurement capabilities, and internal workflows.
The transition from private company to public company—and the lessons of building one of Colorado’s landmark technology companies.
Why Bryan sees Denver’s culture, talent base, quality of life, and civic accessibility as competitive advantages for founders.
It’s a conversation about much more than coupons or cash back. It’s about transforming promotions from a century-old marketing tactic into a measurable growth engine—and what Bryan learned from taking Ibotta from an idea to a public technology company along the way.
#SignalAndNoise #Ibotta #BryanLeach #CommerceMedia #RetailMedia #CPG #PerformanceMarketing #AdTech #MarTech #Incrementality #MarketingMeasurement #DigitalPromotions #RetailTech #CustomerData #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Entrepreneurship #Founders #Startups #DenverTech #ColoradoTech #IPO #BusinessLeadership #Innovation #Marketing #Advertising #ConsumerBehavior #FutureOfCommerce
Read the full transcript below.
Brett (00:00.773)
Hey everybody, welcome back to Signal and Noise. I'm Brett House, joined by my co-host Riel Longacre. And today's guest, we're thrilled to have Brian Leach, the founder and CEO of Ibotta, like Ibotta Bag of Groceries. thanks for joining us from Colorado, also in Denver. You guys are in different offices in the same great Colorado City. one thing I thought I would say, you know, considering you're a resident of Colorado, before I kind of get into your background, Brian, you're
Rio Longacre (00:18.72)
A few blocks away, yep.
Brett (00:28.993)
You've climbed all fifteen of the state's fourteeners, right? Which means you're kind of a mountain climber, kind of an endurance athlete, right?
Bryan Leach (00:32.44)
True.
Bryan Leach (00:37.378)
I wouldn't go so far as to say endurance athlete. I I am a an alpinist, high mountain enthusiast, amateur weekend warrior who loves the high country for sure.
Brett (00:47.171)
That that's awesome. Yeah, we always talk about Yeah. And I and I always find people that do that kind of stuff with that type of focus, it's sort of the drive that makes for successful careers, right? Excellence in one area begets excellence in another, right? So we all have our side gigs. Rio used to run marathons. I don't know, you might see you do that. I'm like a hardcore cyclist and ride out, you seventy miles si seventy mile rides on the weekends, but it's helpful. It clears our brain. It's a stress reliever.
Rio Longacre (00:48.282)
Well, it's a good place to Colorado's a good place for that, for all those things, that's for sure.
Bryan Leach (01:14.19)
Yeah. I was gonna say I think it's mostly about managing the stress of our jobs and needing outlets to regain perspective. Yeah.
Rio Longacre (01:19.034)
Yeah. It helps.
Brett (01:19.097)
Yeah.
Brett (01:22.497)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like our zin. So your resume, you know, and and for people that don't know Brian Yeah, yeah. It i you seem like someone that was destined for a corner office at a white shoe law firm, to say to say the least, right? Yeah.
Rio Longacre (01:28.41)
It's a cool story, yeah. We'll g we'll dig in, but it's cool story.
Rio Longacre (01:36.962)
Well, he was on that track.
Brett (01:39.216)
Harvard, a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford, Yale Law School, a clerkship for the US Supreme Court Justice David Souter, I think you pronounced his name right. Souter, suitor, and a partnership at the Denver Litigation Boutique, Bartlett Beck. So you've made a a a big transition in your life, and I think it was in your early 30s, if I read it correctly. you didn't have a ton of sort of business experience because you'd spent your background in in in law, in the legal industry, and you decided to become a founder. You raised some money from about 50.
Bryan Leach (01:48.129)
Suitor, yeah.
Brett (02:09.279)
Different angel investors. And it seemed like you were pushing towards, and I think I've read this in a couple different places, to fix a problem that was annoying you as a consumer, that that promotions and advertising were often super generic and disconnected from the actual transaction. You know, it's the pair of boots that you bought for your wife that follows you around after your purchase has got everything wrong about you. is that an accurate statement to say, say you you saw something that you that you knew was an opportunity to fix and
Ebada came to mind.
Bryan Leach (02:38.515)
I mean, it's not the case that I was particularly interested in coupons or promotions. In fact, I didn't really do any of the grocery shopping in my own family. I was on a flight coming back from Rio where I was at a conference on international arbitration, which was my my field and as a lawyer, and I watched a woman pull out her phone and take a picture of all the receipts that she had from the trip to submit her expenses for reimbursement.
And I started thinking about how you could use the camera on a smartphone to capture purchase data. And then you could manipulate that data as a consumer and have access to your own purchase data, thus the name Ibotta, you I botta bag of groceries, as you said. So the idea was: okay, if I could control my own purchase data, what would I want to do with it? And one of the things I might want to do with it is send it as a proof of purchase, the way that I would a rebate in the mail. You know, hey, I bought this thing. Here's the
Brett (03:04.217)
Yeah.
Brett (03:29.753)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (03:31.062)
I cut out and mailed off to get something of value in return. So the thought experiment was: what if you could take a picture of a grocery receipt and get cash back credit on a PayPal account? I don't have to wait for a mail, a check in the mail. I don't have to do anything with the mail. I can just use my phone to kind of generate cash instantly by just validating that I bought a featured product. And that popped into my head as a product I would use. Not necessarily that I was grappling with the pain of coupons, but it just struck me as.
because I would never consider using a coupon 'cause it's so much friction and effort. But this would be something that would be a free app that would pay me cash for things that I'm buying day in and day out. And yeah, it could get to know me, it could recommend things, I could discover new products. And I started getting excited about it from that that point of view.
Brett (04:17.347)
Yeah, and that connection 'cause with Nielsen Catalina and some of those solutions had been there in terms of measurement, right? Where you were where consumers were brought onto almost consumer like panels, bring stuff home, take photographs of it. I was at Nielsen for a few years, right? And then record their transactions for some sort of basic monthly fee. But this I think the difference here is that there's a Yeah.
Rio Longacre (04:36.068)
Well that's always been a blind spot, right? For for for these for f certainly for the the ma the manufacturers and the brands themselves. Like what are people actually buying at point of sale? 'Cause they sell through channels. This is always what so it's and it people have tried this over the years to solve it, right? But and yep.
Brett (04:44.292)
Yeah.
Brett (04:49.529)
But you added that rebate that cash back play, which is a completely different play in terms of you know, which solves a problem of like who who cuts out who cuts out the the the coupons and actually redeems these things on a on a regular basis, outside of a f a a certain number of demographics.
Bryan Leach (04:55.51)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (05:03.851)
Yeah, I mean the the the ho the household panel that you're alluding to is was a a big gun that they would give you. They would you'd go get it in the mail and you would have to come home from your shop and scan the barcodes on everything you bought, and you know, you'd forget to do it sometimes. It was very laborious versus just you have your smartphone, you take a picture of your receipt. So optical character recognition was a technology that had not really been applied to receipts back in 2011. So being able to take an image
Brett (05:13.027)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (05:32.886)
Rendering it with sufficient, you know, granularity that you could translate it into in effect and e-receipt that was accurate. And there are a lot of problems you have to solve. So for instance, on a receipt, sometimes they have the numbers of the product, sometimes they don't. It'll just say, you know, D T C K E Mini, and you're like, well, what's that? Diet Coke, mini cans. But that shows up differently as a text string at Albertson's than it does at
Kroger. And so having to build a universe of all products, text strings in all retail environments, so you could looking at the price, make a best guess of what they probably bought. And then, you know, various other challenges. Like what if the receipt is not this long, but this long? Are you going to stand on top of a a ladder and take a picture of the receipt? Are you going to do segments of the receipt? And then what what do you do if people try to submit fake receipts? How do you detect those? So there were those are the challenges that back in 2012 we were
Brett (06:13.249)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (06:24.875)
We were solving when we were only an app.
Brett (06:28.46)
Yeah, and and now you guys are are a pro are a per performance network, right? The Ibotta the Ibotta Performance Network at IPN, which is a distributed promotions infrastructure. It sounds like you guys are solving a core data infrastructure problem, right? That's aligning all of this stuff, whatever format it's in, around a specific product from a specific retailer, which seems like a was was kind of a cumbersome, arduous process before that, right? and and for those that don't know, you guys reach more than two hundred million consumers. you have a publisher partner network.
Rio Longacre (06:32.059)
Yeah, that you have an ad network too. Yep.
Brett (06:58.394)
Right. You have partnerships with Walmart, Instacart, DoorDash, Uber, Giant Eagle, which is a big Midwestern Giant Eagle's a big Midwestern groceries chain that that one of our good friends actually, his brother works there in the logistics space of the business. yeah, so you've done you've done a lot, and American choppers have earned about what two point five three three billion dollars in cash rewards through your service. So clearly it's grown. You've taken a you've taken a public, you're public you're on the New York Stock Exchange at this point.
Rio Longacre (07:03.383)
Uber one's recent, yeah.
Rio Longacre (07:26.415)
Yeah, in fact, Brett in fact, Brett, I think that the the the the going public, correct me if I'm wrong, Brian, but biggest tech IPO in Colorado history, if I'm not mistaken, right?
Bryan Leach (07:36.274)
It's true. to to back Brett to your point, yes, now what we do, most of what we do is actually supply the digital promotions that are what you see on Walmart.com when you search for serial or detergent and there's a little blue box that says get Walmart Cash. You tick that box. We're supplying that, providing that through our APIs and our recommenders and using AI to figure out who should get what promotion. and so we go out and work with Coca-Cola and
Brett (07:50.712)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (08:04.863)
Anheuser Busch, whoever, Procter and Gamble, and we explain to them, you know, what we what we offer. And they say, well, my goal is to deliver this many dollars in incremental sales at this cost. And we say, okay, what's fashion? A promotion that can do that. And then instead of just putting that promotion on our app, which is 50 million registered users, we put it out in front of
All of the people who use Walmart.com, the people who, as you say, use Uber. We just signed 7 Eleven. They have 100 million loyalty members that will now get access to our content. And that's all white labeled. So you don't see the word Ibotta. You don't register for an Ibotta account. You just, we're the ones behind the scenes there. I mean that's now, you know, three-quarters of our business, whereas we started out just being a direct-to-consumer app.
Brett (08:39.959)
Yeah.
Rio Longacre (08:48.667)
Cool. Well, Brian, it's a it's a great story, a big success story. as like as I mentioned, biggest tech IP on color history, which frankly I didn't think got enough press or fanfare, i i in my in my humble opinion. so we really wanted to bring you on for number one, hear hear a little bit about Ibata. I mean I think it's a to your point, it's powering a lot of the great a lot of a lot of the big brands and b like
Walmart, for example, Uber, a lot of their a lot of their performance ad businesses is powering a lot of that, and people may not know it. But also wanted to talk about why Denver, how's it been how how's it been running a startup here? yeah, I just had some good meetings with the colored ad tech market board, which has I think been a good success story. And I've been here for 10 years. It's it's been interesting to see the city grow. So wanted to talk about that. So maybe before we dive in, you posted something in LinkedIn that I thought was really
That's a great story, but also touching about your background. Because as Brett mentioned, going from like white shoe law into into tech, not a not let's say a natural pivot. I love if you could maybe talk about a little bit like when you decided to leave Big Law. And by the way, did you work with did you cross paths with Andy Bach when you were at Bartlett Beck at all? Andy's a good friend. I think he listens to the pod. So Andy, if you're listening.
Bryan Leach (09:57.74)
Yeah, I did. I did. Yeah.
He's a great lawyer. He's a he's one of many great lawyers at Bartlett Beck. yeah, look, the the short story is when I was born, I was the living in Nairobi, Connecticut. My Connecticut, Nairobi, Kenya, sorry. My father worked at a a car dealership in downtown Nairobi in East Africa. And we moved to the United States to to to allow him to pursue his dream to become an entrepreneur. And and he was British.
Rio Longacre (10:03.801)
Very cool. Yep.
Brett (10:18.914)
Interesting.
Bryan Leach (10:27.593)
And his American dream really was come over here and started a storefront in the mall in Atlanta. And so I kinda had a front row seat to being an entrepreneur. They they built that company from ten people to eighteen hundred people, took it public when I was in high school. And then I I kinda got down the legal path. I watched the the movie A Few Good Men and got sort of excited about the idea of being a trial lawyer. I never actually
Brett (10:36.855)
Yeah.
Rio Longacre (10:49.327)
You can't handle the truth, right? Yeah.
Brett (10:50.947)
Ha ha ha.
Bryan Leach (10:51.445)
I exactly. I did what I what I should have done is go find out what lawyers actually do day in, day out. but I didn't do that. I watched a movie and and thought about, you know, prosecuting fence line shootings in Cuba. And when I graduated from college, I applied to law school thinking that'll be fun thing to do for someone with kind of a theater and debate background and and let's let's see how that goes. So after I came back from my my graduate degree at Oxford, I went to Yale Law School and when I was at Yale Law School I discovered that
Brett (10:57.176)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (11:21.259)
Yeah, I was interested in a lot of areas of the law that were international. So international arbitration, international law. I worked at the State Department for one summer. And so, you know, I I figured that's what the kind of law I would practice. But before I did that, I clerked for a judge on the Second Circuit and then for Justice Suter. So getting to work at the United States Supreme Court, walking up the marble steps, going down the hallway, into where they argued all these famous cases was really neat.
after about nine months of working at the Supreme Court, I found out about an opportunity in of all places Denver, Colorado, to work for this person called Fred Bartlett. And yeah, I I'd never really had spent very little time in Denver. My wife's not from here. I'm not from here. but this particular law firm, Bartlett Beck, they are the leading boutique firm if you w if you like trying cases. And, you know, Fred Bartlett had been lead counsel in Bush versus Gore. He he
Brett (12:14.839)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (12:18.635)
decided the presidency by winning that trial down in Florida. He was also you know, appointed by Obama on the Deepwater Horizon Project. He had a really fascinating career. He he tried the largest civil case to verdict in U.S. history. and he also argued in every other tribunal around the world and in the U.S. Supreme Court. and he was a very kind of imposing, booming voice figure, kind of army ranger, company commander type of person. And his firm was in Chicago. And I knew about
Brett (12:23.619)
For Jeb Bush, yeah.
Brett (12:45.847)
A little a little intimidating at first.
Bryan Leach (12:48.609)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, Bart LeBec was they don't even really recruit except for out of the Supreme Court. And so, I heard about the fact that they have a Denver office, which is lucky because you know, Fred liked to go skiing and wanted to have an office closer to his home in Vale. So because of that, they had No, no, no, I never I've barely even been. I mean, I'd been out here one time. and so yeah, this you know struck me as kind of a a lark. And everybody at the Supreme Court thought
Brett (12:55.362)
Yeah.
Rio Longacre (13:05.165)
And you had never lived in Denver at this point?
Brett (13:11.96)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (13:17.397)
You know, that's a really sad waste of a career. Going to Colorado and doing horse law and gas law, you know, you're never gonna be heard from again. Total, total. I mean, there's only like ten approved j job choices out of the Supreme Court, you know, Justice Department, Office of Legal Counsel, become a law professor, work at a big New York or DC, or know, but but going to Denver for a law firm is just not done out of that job. so I did it and I immediately realized that.
Brett (13:24.034)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (13:43.948)
This is a really special place to to live and raise a family, that it's a great combination of access to the outdoors and access to the wider world with our airport and so forth. and I got to work with Fred right away. I mean, I went off on trial. My third week as a lawyer, I was in a $400 million jury trial carrying Fred's bags, watching the great man operate in court. we won. watched watched this person who'd had, you know, a 50-year career.
Brett (14:05.579)
Mm-hmm.
Bryan Leach (14:12.279)
he was at that point in his late 70s, early eighties, you know, doing fi a 50-year career as a trial lawyer, and I was getting to kind of apprentice, and we became friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We he and I became friends over time. I yeah, I was junior, he was the most senior, I was the most junior, but he he saw in me a a more kind of entrepreneurial person than the average lawyer. Most lawyers are more risk averse, you know, they they like the fact that it's a very predictable track that you're on and
Brett (14:15.377)
well.
Brett (14:20.759)
He was doing this stuff in his sleep at this point. Yeah.
Bryan Leach (14:41.281)
You know, they they their jobs
Rio Longacre (14:41.903)
Yes, a hard track, but you know, you once you're on partner track you can do really well, but it's it's but it is predictable, yeah, to your point.
Bryan Leach (14:47.583)
It's predictable and you work hard and you get out what you put in and there's also a a sense of kind of comfort with precedent in the law. you know, sti stick to what we know works and that's kind of and I wasn't like that. I was wired like I enjoyed creating law practices more than I enjoyed practicing law practices. So I wanted to build something. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to build this international practice.
Brett (15:05.631)
Yeah yeah, you're a builder, right? Yeah yeah. And and the nature of the work, did you have problems with the nature of the work? 'Cause you made a you made reference to the fact that it's really ha you know, ninety-nine percent of the time is spent, you know, slaving over documents in the office versus actually, you know, being in court. Is that is that a reality? We have a lot of close friends that are attorneys and
Bryan Leach (15:22.091)
Yeah, yeah.
Rio Longacre (15:24.997)
Well the billable hours thing, it's tough. It's a tough profession. People don't realise that.
Bryan Leach (15:27.691)
Yeah, I mean Bart LeBec didn't actually have billable hours, which is one of the reasons why I went there. they they had a really unique model. However, yeah, I mean it's not like the movie. It's a lot more like if they if they showed Tom Cruise responding to interrogatories, nobody would watch the second half of the movie. You know? So instead they have fence line shootings and and you can't handle the truth moments. And there are those moments, but I like people and I like I like storytelling and performing and public speaking and
Brett (15:32.546)
Yeah.
Brett (15:43.639)
Yeah.
Brett (15:49.452)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (15:56.638)
I was a tour guide in college. I was a stage actor. I missed that. And the only way to get that all the time is to work as like a prosecutor or a public defender, but then you don't make money. and so the compromise was go to Bartlett Beck. I did try six or seven cases. I got to argue
Brett (16:00.876)
Yeah.
Brett (16:07.072)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (16:14.599)
in the Court of Appeals before Judge Posner. I got to do all sorts of cool stuff. But then I kind of realized I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life and be, I'm gonna regret that I didn't build something or take a risk on myself. And I never really built my own work culture. I was living inside of Fred's work culture. So after I pursued bar you know the idea of Ibotta, the company was originally called Zing, by the way, not Ibotta. but when I was pursuing fundraising for Zing, I wasn't able to raise money from any
Brett (16:29.215)
Yeah, yeah.
Brett (16:37.538)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (16:42.507)
venture firms because as you might imagine, you know, first time entrepreneur, not putting his own money behind it, still holding on to his full time day job as a lawyer with no team, no prototype, nothing but a PowerPoint.
Rio Longacre (16:52.507)
Yeah, it's a tough investment for a V C, right? It's like, well, okay, you're still full time. Are you really in? You know, we want to invest in a founder, right? More than the idea. Yeah, it makes sense.
Brett (16:59.136)
Well th it's kinda like signal and noise, right? We put all this b you know this blood, sweat and tears for for little money and it's you know, we're not gonna go out and raise a ton of money, but it is a d not a day job, so to speak. It's a passion project.
Bryan Leach (17:09.195)
Yeah, it's it's a difficult difficult to raise money. Yeah, that's what people thought. And so but at some point I realized, okay, I have enough money that I'm gonna take the plunge. I'm gonna this is gonna involve a six X pay cut or whatever, but I'm gonna take the plunge. I persuaded my wife, which was you know, we had a lot of law school debt, a debt to the firm who had helped me buy my house.
So around Christmas, two thousand eleven, I drove up to Vail to sort of break the news to Fred that I was gonna leave the firm and keep in mind he had paid me this big signing bonus to come out 'cause I was a Supreme Court clerk. He had taught me the ropes and I I thought I thought he might be pissed. I thought he might be re ready to land on me. And I yeah. And I so I I I was
Brett (17:47.18)
So he was pissed. Yeah.
Rio Longacre (17:51.931)
That was a distinct possibility, right? Yeah.
Brett (17:54.403)
P punched you in the nose Yeah.
Bryan Leach (17:56.663)
Rehearsing the whole speech, you know, and and what to say if he said this. And I walk into his house and he just stops me. He's let me guess. You're leaving to start your own company like your father. and I just was like, yeah. That was not how I rehearsed it. and then he said, What's the idea? What's the idea? And I said, Well, we're we're gonna be a single starting point for rewarded shopping on a mobile app. Keep mine, the guy's 80. He doesn't
Brett (18:08.599)
Yeah.
Brett (18:13.046)
Yeah. Yeah.
Bryan Leach (18:23.97)
do a lot of rewarded shopping. He's a very wealthy man who doesn't use right. And he says, Interesting. Do you have room for more investors? I'm my God, you know, this guy's now offering to become a a an investor, not just not upset. And by the time the Yeah, yeah.
Brett (18:25.762)
He may not use mobile apps.
Rio Longacre (18:27.93)
Right.
Rio Longacre (18:38.683)
Yeah.
Brett (18:40.064)
He was investing in you though, right? Versus the tech, so to speak.
Bryan Leach (18:43.402)
hundred hundred percent believed in me and wanted to see me take a shot at it, even though it meant leaving his own firm. And he rallied Skip Herman and Don, his other named partners, and they collectively and his friend Lanny, best friend, and they collectively put, you know, a million, a million and a quarter into a what was already only it only raised about that amount of money in the first seven months. So he doubled my fundraising haul in an hour. And
Rio Longacre (19:08.763)
That was your angel round completed, basically, right?
Bryan Leach (19:10.634)
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And then once everybody knew they were in, you know, it was easy to fill out the rest of the round. But but but that was really a fulcrum moment where had that gone differently, it's probable I would not have started the company. And Fred passed recently, and so I did post a tribute on him. You know, he's nine ninety-four years old, still skiing the backbulls in his late eighties, and really in terms of like area under the curve, quality of life, you know, had a very high quality of life into his early nineties, and that's kind of how you want to do it.
Brett (19:23.522)
RIP, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.
Yeah.
Brett (19:39.296)
Yeah, and if you can ski the backbulls and potentially even moguls and trees when you're like eighty five, I mean you've done something pretty well for your body, right?
Bryan Leach (19:47.614)
he there's a there's a run at Vale called Resolution, which is a a really tough double black on the back in the blue sky area and he would beat me down it routinely in his eighties.
Brett (19:55.008)
Yeah.
Yeah, which is incredible. I'm like you just the knee the knee stuff.
Rio Longacre (19:59.068)
That's w that's wild, yeah.
Brett (20:00.882)
so I thought, like, so that's a great story. And Rhea, I don't know if you wanted to go, but I but I think that sort of gives people a clear understanding of your sort of move into Ebata. And I wanted to sort of because I've been doing a little bit of this with clients, with a startup that's kind of getting into the payment processes processing space, or at least aggregating some of that for Intel to bring to the media and measurement ecosystem. You've probably heard that story a thousand times. But I wanted you to kind of give the audience sort of a understanding, and the way that I understand the
space just having done a little bit of research and you've been doing it for you know a good part of twelve years was that I sort of see five categories when it comes to payment data, point of sale data, and and and I'll I'll just name them and tell me how you how you guys fit into this space. I think I have a pretty good idea, but just for the audience's edification, right? So there's sort of like the direct cash back competitors like Fetch. Sure you hear fetch all the time, right? There's the retailers that obviously you know the Amazons and the in the in the Walmarts control about what, ninety percent?
I guess you add Kroger into that of all retail transactions at the SKU level, data level, right? There's the legacy measurement players like Circana that sort of compete more on the incrementality and measurement side of things. the card networks like Mad MasterCard and Visa, and even like Affinity Solutions, that kind of aggregates all the credit cards. and then the payment processors like Shopify and Clow and Clover and even Toast. Do you guys how do you guys or how do you see the ecosystem? Are those the five categories that
you kind of look at and where is your competitive advantage? Like what are you guys doing distinctly that is adding value to the ecosystem?
Bryan Leach (21:40.567)
Yeah, so first of all, we're not a payments related company. You can use our products, whether you pay in cash, food stamps, credit card, debit card. So we're not about how you pay. We're about influencing what you buy. and specifically the the items that you buy in environments where manufacturers make products and then a retailer carries a wide range of those products. So think about Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe's, Amazon, but less like the Gap, Burger King, etc. You know, you won't give the
Brett (21:52.513)
Yeah.
Brett (22:09.633)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (22:10.5)
gap and buy somebody else's product. They're all branded the gap. You wouldn't go into Burger King and buy somebody else's product from a manufacturer. So think of those two-party environments. And what we're doing is working with the manufacturers. So we help Koch, Kellogg's, you know, Anheuser-Busch, etc., Henkel, these types of companies.
Brett (22:13.943)
Yeah.
Brett (22:18.807)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (22:28.224)
drive more sales of their products, drive trial adoption, switching from their competitors, making sure people they don't lose market share to private label more effectively than any other tool that they could use. And the way we do that, yes.
Brett (22:41.538)
Yeah, and they've traditionally been really data poor, right? 'Cause they 'cause the the point of sale is controlled by the retailer.
Bryan Leach (22:46.668)
That's true, that's true. And so they need item level, what's called level three data. Credit card companies and payment companies have what's called level two data. So that's I'm Brett, I bought sixty five dollars at, you know, gap dot com. That's all you know. It's a black box. Right.
Brett (22:54.241)
Yeah.
Brett (22:59.338)
It's the cart it's like the cart level. Yeah.
Bryan Leach (23:02.24)
So but knowing what's in the basket is I'm Brett, I bought, you know, this kite this brand bread and this brand cheese and so forth. That's important. That item level data is what unlocks the ability to be helpful to the manufacturer. So if you're a card linked offer, for example.
Brett (23:15.264)
Yeah, tha that's the golden goose of like purchase data, right? The SKU level item specific data. Yep.
Bryan Leach (23:20.172)
The SKU level. Yeah, it's a lot more valuable if what you want to do is play in the consumer package goods space like we do. And that's an exciting space because those are higher margin, very deep marketing budgets and trade and promotional budgets, versus you know, doing card-linked offers and things with Groupon type business models, retail me not business models, very, very different. Racketton, eBay's very, very different. They're focused on helping retailers acquire digital traffic in most cases, or helping an empty movie theater get a few more patrons. That's not what we do. Long tails, small, medium business.
Brett (23:36.577)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (23:50.059)
Businesses and restaurants, not what we do. We focus on the large consumer packaged goods, companies, and help them have the signal they need to actually be able to figure out which promotions result in sales. And then we only charge them when the ad works. We don't charge for impressions, we don't charge for clicks. That's why it's a performance-based network. And then we take the profitability measurement on a more ongoing basis. So we look at
Brett (24:13.184)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (24:18.35)
And this has never been done, but we look at populations of that exposed and not exposed to our promotion, compare their purchases in the same time period to look at the causal effect of our promotion on the sales, and only take credit for the what we call incremental sales or sales that would not have occurred in the control group. And what's unique about it is that by by looking at that on a more continuous basis, you now have a signal of offline conversion that you can build AI.
Brett (24:36.981)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (24:47.158)
And machine learning systems on top of. So you can now tell the AI, hey, solve for a cost per incremental dollar of no less, no more than 30 cents, because that's the margin that a person makes on their product. So if by selling this product I wouldn't have sold otherwise, I make 30 cents and I spend 29 cents to acquire a dollar I wouldn't have gotten otherwise, I'm in the black. So and then what you do is you use machine learning to figure out.
How to recommend the exact parameters of a campaign. So Brett should buy one and get 30 cents. Rio should buy two and get 75 cents because they have different elasticities of demand. That should influence the design of a program that's activating you into a you know a very cost-efficient outcome. What's different from some of the companies like Catalina and others is that we are an interface that is that is digital and is embedded in
Brett (25:20.542)
Yep.
Bryan Leach (25:38.743)
Natively inside the retailer experience. So, you know, Catalina would hand you a piece of paper along with your receipt as you're walking out the door, which is, you know, not the best time to give someone a promotion. and they ultimately would not be able to have a digital interaction with you. What we're doing is when you search for detergent on Walmart, you're gonna see the blue box, this is Walmart Cash, and it's gonna influence that you buy that detergent and not the other one.
Brett (25:41.984)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (26:05.154)
That's what our network does. And and we're the largest digital promotions network ever built and also the most high powered and intelligent.
Brett (26:05.696)
Yeah.
Brett (26:11.455)
The largest digital promotions network ever built. Yeah. For CPG, right?
Bryan Leach (26:14.402)
Yeah, for C P G, yes. Yes.
Rio Longacre (26:16.379)
Yeah. Yeah. So so so you're getting paid based on verified redemptions. I guess that's probably the right terminology for them. And then w so did you and then I like the fact you called out the incrementality aspect to it, Brian. I would imagine that's highly important because why would anyone want to pay for these redemptions if the customer's gonna make the purchase anyway? So being being able to prove that out, is that something you had initially when you rolled out the program? You had the inc you had the ability to show incrementality or is that something you added later based on customer demands?
Bryan Leach (26:22.7)
Yes. That's right.
Bryan Leach (26:44.622)
There's different people throw the word around. I think what what we had was the ability to say, here's the number of redemptions, the percentage of redemptions that were people who'd never bought the product before, according to our data. Just you know, that's a part of the poor that's part of the piece of the pie, but of the story. What you really want is a is a test and control model where you have held constant every other variable except for exposure, and you do a randomized, you know, control like a scientific method, and you can actually look
Brett (27:06.366)
Yeah.
Brett (27:13.792)
Yep.
Bryan Leach (27:14.132)
At that period in time, at the difference in sales. What you've often seen is what's called a mixed media model. They use a regression with a bunch of terms in that regression equation, each of which has a coefficient of causality, which is just a way of saying, well, whatever assumption I supply is gonna determine what the model shows. It's not an actual scientific experiment. It's very much just assumption driven and reasonable, people can disagree.
Brett (27:26.014)
Yep.
Brett (27:38.729)
Yeah, it's g and it's it's predictive analytics with weights across the model, right? For based on its inputs. Yeah.
Bryan Leach (27:42.957)
Yeah, and it's but it's not it's not actually observing anything. You could come in and say, well, I'm putting a 0.4 coefficient on outdoor signage, and I could say, well, I'm putting a 0.2, and it's based on like survey data and stuff. So versus like an actual scientific experiment and then being able to to to put the fully loaded cost against it. So people have used terms like ROAS. You know, what does that mean? It well, it doesn't actually apply the fully loaded cost.
Brett (27:46.582)
Yeah.
Brett (27:51.242)
Yeah.
Brett (27:54.912)
Yeah.
Brett (28:07.733)
Yeah. It can it can be gamed. Yeah.
Bryan Leach (28:10.816)
It can be gamed, right? And so what we've done is say, no more, no more. We're gonna do the absolute gold standard that's done online, right? So if you if you run a YouTube ad, there's people who see that YouTube ad and people who don't, and they're basically identical, matched audiences. And you can see who converts and clicks through and buys online and who doesn't. And you can see the efficacy of that ad very clearly and undisputable. The problem has been nobody's had the data to tie out that digital identity online to an in-store purchase.
Across a variety of retailers, we're the first to get that signal. And so we are just bringing to the world of CPG, which is still mostly an offline world, 85% sold in stores still. We're just bringing the best practices that have been used in digitally native advertising since 2000.
Brett (28:53.247)
Yeah.
Brett (28:58.517)
Yeah, and how are you connecting the digital data, that digital identifier, let's say it's a hashed email or something, per some s persistent ID, to the actual point of sale? how's that architected? Tell us tell us a little bit about that.
Bryan Leach (29:09.708)
Yeah, so so if you are using Walmart Cash or you're using Instacart's digital coupons or any other partner in our network, Giant Eagle Uber, you are logged in to your their app and you have a customer ID assigned to you. and then you have when you check out, you provide your phone number. Or when you check out, you click through but you're logged in. Yeah, one way or you use your loyalty card, Giant Eagle. One way or another, there's some way to connect the basket you just bought with
Brett (29:35.967)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (29:39.597)
your ID. And then we maintain a persistent customer ID that that we can track over time. Now we don't track you as the same person at Walmart and have your hashed email and track you at CVS. We don't do that. What we do though know is that you're the same consistent human within that ecosystem of Walmart, within that ecosystem of CVS. And so we can build models for each ecosystem of how incremental the purchases are there. So I can look at what you were buying before
Brett (29:53.589)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (30:09.836)
The moment at which you saw the promotion or unlocked the promotion, and then I can look at the you know, the subsequent purchase behavior you had. Not just that you bought that one time, but what'd you do the next five purchase cycles? And I can compare that to a person who was held out or who is happened not to have seen the promotion, and I can therefore make pretty reliable claims about how much lift there was. And no one's really ever done that in the promotion space because.
Historically, the reason why brands did promotions was not because they ever thought they were profitable, but because they were doing them in exchange to placate me retailers, merchants in exchange for, you know, an NCAP display or something they thought was valuable in the store. And so there was sort of no incentive for them to ever discipline themselves to to run a more intelligent promotion. So they would run the same promotion for everyone. Think about a newspaper. You get it, you cut up, you know, what do you do? You cut up the coupons of the things you want to buy anyway.
Brett (30:52.286)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, pl
Bryan Leach (31:06.872)
Well, that's just a subsidy of someone who's already gonna buy a product. And so that's not real effective. So we're we're taking sort of the bad old days of your grandma's coupon and applying science, math, statistics, and AI to introduce the single most efficient form of advertising to to move markets for CPG brands.
Brett (31:28.222)
Yeah, and and so and by powering their loyalty programs and ha in in and powering an app and having a persistent ID, you're able to make that connection. Because Nielsen struggled that for the for years 'cause they honestly have two different data sets. There was the sort of persons level data on the media exposure side, and then there was household level data at at the because yeah, which is all they could collect, and they were never able to overcome that problem. And that whole business just just fell fell down as a result, right?
Bryan Leach (31:44.622)
That's right, the panel, yeah.
Bryan Leach (31:51.747)
That's right. That's right. That's right. And the the other problem that Nielsen has, of course, is that okay, how do you activate, right? We're not just a measurement company, we're also a lever of activation. So you can do something about that insight that you gain.
Rio Longacre (31:55.813)
Yes, O Brian look go ahead.
Brett (32:04.181)
Yeah.
Rio Longacre (32:07.854)
Looking at the Ibotta Performance Network, IPN, you know, looking at the latest numbers, it's saying two hundred million consumers that can be targeted both through I Ibotta, I guess owned and operated, plus your third party publishers. How would you differentiate IPN compared to, let's say, other retailer commerce media networks out there in terms of what it offers advertisers and the whole model?
Bryan Leach (32:28.878)
Yeah, I mean so typically a retail media network is gonna allow you to buy sponsored search or display ads inside of a walled garden of a retailer's website. So I can go on Albertson's Media Collective and I can buy the term bread because I sell nature's own bread, and that means I'll pop up as the top sponsored search result, just like the Google model. that's great, that's valuable, that works, that's effective. They too have access to impression data tied out to purchases.
They have not yet exposed the cost per incremental dollar, which is I think interesting. that would be good to know. What what is the actual efficacy of that search ad? You know.
Why won't you tell me? Why are you still charging me on a CPM? Why are you still charging me on a CPC? It's a we're we're at a moment where that's that's sort of breaking down though. You've now I chose Albertsons because they're they're actually leaders in changing that and putting out white papers about no, no, no, now we're gonna actually show you using statistics the value. And they may have to reprice these products at some point, who knows? Maybe they're highly effective. The world doesn't yet really know. but they are
Rio Longacre (33:11.194)
'Cause they can.
Brett (33:11.71)
Yeah.
Brett (33:31.422)
Yeah. And that and that helps and that helps the brand sorry. so I was gonna say that helps the brand calculate inc incremental ROI, incremental ROAS, right? where they wouldn't otherwise be able to see that. Yeah.
Bryan Leach (33:35.852)
Yeah, no, it's just discovery.
Bryan Leach (33:41.519)
That's right. That's right. And what we're but the the thing is we're not a substitute for that. We're a complement to it. So if you have a display ad on a website like Albertson's
And now there's also an offer associated with a product that's being advertised. Well, your click-through rate is going to be way higher on that ad. Your buy-through rate, conversion, is going to be way higher on that ad. Your visibility on that offer is going to be way higher because you're advertising and bumping that offer, pulling it out of the soup of a thousand offers to make it the offer that's featured. And so the two go hand in hand. We're not trying to replace upper funnel media. We're the bottom of funnel signal that helps you figure out how effective is your media, and we are making
Brett (34:17.236)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (34:24.12)
making your media more effective by making it more of a direct response component at the bottom of the funnel.
Brett (34:29.693)
And are they leveraging some of your data to connect it to some of those upper funnel metrics? I mean if you're if you're a brand advertiser like PNG, you've got obviously television investments, you've got potentially out of home, other media channels, C T V, digital. Are they are they are you working with teams to provide access to data that's that's down funnel data that they can connect to their sort of exposure data at the at the upper funnel?
Bryan Leach (34:50.412)
Yeah, we work with the sales team of the retail media. So what we should be doing with Albertsons, Albertsons, if you're listening, you're missing out. The reason why they're not benefiting the way Walmart is, because they're not building case studies that show that when you buy on Albertsons Media Collective, and because they're if they were a member of the IPN, they would sell way more retail media for lots of reasons. One is that their retail media would have a higher click-through and buy-through rate.
Brett (34:57.885)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (35:15.628)
Two is that more people would come to their website because the number one reason why people go to Albertson's website ain't to see ads, it's to get offers. Right? So you get more eyeballs on the website. Three, you get more people bothering to put their phone number in a checkout because they can get you know the value of the digital coupon. But then that's how they do the closed loop attribution for their retail media from offline to for on s in store. And number four.
Brett (35:23.965)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (35:39.011)
Which I think is also, you know, interesting is that being able to take this into the store, right? Retail media is on websites right now. Okay. But well, how do you get it in the aisle?
Well, you do things like put it into the AI assistant in your app. You put it into in-store mode in your app. You put it at your digital shelf table tag, you integrate offers with the digital shelf tag, you allow Bluetooth to interact with the app in the store and say, there are offers on this aisle, and then as you're finding the offers, you're looking at ads. The two are intertwined. Rewards are just a nudge to change a human behavior in a direction that is strategically valuable for you. If that is getting people to open their app in your store,
So you can advertise to them, great. If that's getting them to use a digital push cart, great. Now you can advertise on that. But you need the hook of cutting the consumer in on the deal in order to get them to take these behaviors in the first place. And so that's how we partner with retail media teams.
Brett (36:32.893)
Yeah. Yeah. What what's gonna encourage somebody to open up their app, like yeah, when they're when they're in s on store and how and how many brands or how many retailers are actually that sophisticated in terms of connecting the in store with with the digital promotions efforts?
Bryan Leach (36:47.094)
Right now it's really Walmart. they are pretty far ahead. they've got full rollout of digital shelf labels by the end of this year. There are multiple digital shelf tag companies, but the the most sophisticated and most expensive is called Vusion. They have a Bluetooth solution with a a dot that is a a a light that you can activate to show where it's it's for use for picking purposes and restocking purposes, but it's also used to identify where there are offers on that aisle.
Brett (37:10.782)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (37:15.084)
You know, Walmart has in-store mode in their app, other people don't. Walmart has Sparky, other people don't have their own sophisticated AI. So Walmart's quite a bit further along on in-store sort of digital experiences, digital end caps that are saying, hey, on this aisle there are these offers, right? So there's there's so much that they can do to capitalize on that footprint advantage, but they're they're not content with just having great real estate and great operations and supply chain. Walmart's
Brett (37:21.118)
Yeah.
Brett (37:34.003)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (37:43.404)
way out front and they this strategic partnership with IBATA is a great example of that.
Brett (37:48.03)
Yeah.
Rio Longacre (37:48.408)
Well well but it's interesting about the trade promotion spending in the end caps. I mean, I I think being able to show incrementality would be great, but then like that begs the broader question of are are they actually driving incremental sales at all, right? And some of it to your point, Brian might just be that, you know, the one of the parties thinks that they should be doing it, right? But so I I wonder I think that that brings up an isr interesting point, but looking at your third party publisher revenue, seems like that's been growing. That's been the biggest source of growth. And correct me if I'm wrong here, the past few years.
Especially relative to to the I the the Ibotta app, where are you seeing the growth and is there a str like is i are you are you focusing more on the third party publisher side, are you still focusing on both?
Bryan Leach (38:28.89)
Yeah, we're focusing on both, but you're right that you know we've grown from two million to twenty point nine million redeemers in our network over the last five years. Almost all of that growth has been from our third-party publishers coming online and then growing. So Walmart came online, didn't just come online, it grew. More and more and more and more people learned about and started using digital manufacturer offers within Walmart that resulted in Walmart cash. and so that is exciting for us because
That is a very large audience that we can reach without having to pay to acquire. We don't have to pay to get a download and then pay to retain. And that game is tough in the D2C only world. That's one of the reasons why we expanded to a network because people love the performance-based approach. They love the fact that we could do, you know, some sophisticated things like targeting, but they just needed a lot more cowbell for it to be interesting. At the scale of their brand, you know, for me to touch $50 million of GMV as an app is inconsequential in a 1.5.
Brett (39:10.962)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (39:28.624)
So you you've got to have way more sort of surface area in which to just distribute these offers. And that's what we did by opening up to the network.
Rio Longacre (39:44.258)
Looking at like the I guess like the next well, I g I guess AI. I did want to talk about AI a little bit. So I when you start when you when you start when you started out, Brian, like I like what you were doing in terms of people s getting the scanned receipts must have been very challenging. I I I think by what you were describing a couple of minutes ago about how like the even like the way that the this the the SKUs would be
Brett (39:54.673)
Of course you every conversation
Rio Longacre (40:09.273)
presented on the receipts to be very different, getting all those bills. That must have been a lot of work. But I'm imagining with what's available AI right now, if you'd only had these tools now, it would have made it a lot easier. Is that safe to say?
Bryan Leach (40:19.66)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean there's AI in our product, there's AI in our workflows, and there's AI in our code. And they're all three really exciting. So the velocity with which we are able to build things just from a productivity perspective with clawed code is, you know, forty five or fifty percent higher than it was six months ago. So if I'd had that at the beginning, I could have written the software so much faster and cheaper and not needed to raise as much money, et cetera, et cetera.
That's one dimension. Second dimension, yeah, in the product, now the power of AI to consider multiple different permutations and the compute power to run statistical models on the ro on a rolling basis just didn't exist before. So even if we had had the focus on it, it wouldn't have been possible. yeah, we had the cloud, which was a huge innovation that we benefited from at the beginning of Ibotta. We didn't have to have a server room. but we didn't have the level of of kind of compute power and sophisticated.
Brett (41:11.933)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (41:17.698)
data bricks and clean rooms, things like that. and then there's also workflows. So I mean I think this is the more universal one, but how we you know, do we need to ask our lawyers a question about our insider trading policy or can we build an agent to answer that question for free? So there's all these different ways in which AI has made it more efficient to run a business, start a business, and we're certainly a good example of that.
Brett (41:43.057)
So so where are you guys ch have you found that the budget sort of who's paying for this type of solution has changed? Because a lot of this is traditionally lived in sort of shopper budgets or trade budgets.
Right, which some argue is seventy five percent of every dollar that a CPG brand spends on marketing is for trade, chopper marketing budgets. I don't know if that's changed much. And then media is the remaining quarter per dollar. and and are are is are have you found that the b the budget who's controlling the budget, the decision makers have changed to more retail media, performance marketing, or even just general marketing budgets?
Bryan Leach (42:16.684)
Yeah, I mean I think when you envision promotions as something that you do as a sort of tribute for your merchants because they want to pass along some savings to their end shoppers and they'll they'll reward you in kind with an end cap, then you tend to lodge that promotional expertise in a in a shopper marketing team or a a center of excellence that focuses on just promotions. As we've sort of established that that's your
Brett (42:36.989)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (42:42.412)
Your outdated conception and what should think of is this is just a system for delivering a bundle of incremental sales at a given cost. So it's it's more like a red button. Do you want to push this red button that says you can get $150 million of incremental sales this quarter at a cost of $30 million? Would you like that bundle or not? If yes, push red button and we will generate a series of strategies. Now that turns tends to appeal to the CFO, the CMO, the CEO, a much different
Brett (42:49.309)
Yeah.
Brett (43:00.126)
The easy one. Yeah.
Bryan Leach (43:09.548)
hits the brain in a much different way because no one can find top and bottom line growth right now. Either you have to lower your price and erode your margins, hurting your bottom line, or you have to maintain or raise your price, in which case you're losing market share given this economy. So private labels taking over. So you're in this horrible pickle. We come along and go, no, no, no, no, you're not. You can actually grow your top line and your bottom line at the same time, big time. You just have to use math.
You have to this is the Martian. You solve a problem using science and then you get to solve another problem and another one and then you get to come home. Right? You can solve this problem. What you gotta stop doing is giving everybody exactly the same rollback and the same price and exactly the same media, not being able to measure your media, not being able to to to actually validate that what you're spending money in is generating any incremental return. Stop spending money on that.
And start spending money on things with immediate, clear, short term, measurable, incremental returns to your bottom line and top line. That's our pitch.
Brett (44:08.27)
W what about the what about the longer Yeah, well yeah, that that that's the pitch, but what when you start to move upstream and it's sort of reflective of the question I asked earlier, to yeah, you get a CMO that for P and G might be sp spending it, you know, they might have a billion dollars in
in marketing budget that's not all shopper marketing, right? It might be a lot of, you know, television advertising. How do you connect the dots in in are you do you actually go in and say you should pull money from the upper funnel stuff that's creating a halo effect around certain brands, certain products, and having downstream impact? I mean how do you reconcile those things? Brand versus performance.
Bryan Leach (44:25.004)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (44:34.508)
Yeah. No.
No. The way to think about it is you you should be doing everything that is meets the r the outcomes and constraints that you set at the outset.
So if you say, look, my outcome is I need to drive top and bottom line growth. My constraint is that given the margin profile of this SKU, it must be no more than 28 cents per incremental dollar. Those are an outcome I desire and a constraint that I've imposed. Every single dollar you can spend on our platform that is consistent with those two statements, you should spend in an always-on fashion. And as soon as you no longer can achieve that, you should automatically turn it off. This is the way it works on AppLoveIn or on Google.
Brett (45:01.075)
Yeah.
Brett (45:04.829)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (45:19.312)
It's just you have a CAC, you have an LTV, you have a unit economics. The rules dictate it. The way it works in CPG is a function of how it's the limitations of the last century. So people have said, well.
Brett (45:21.629)
Yep.
Bryan Leach (45:30.548)
I I better go get another incremental budget. I this sounds like I need more, I need a million dollars. So they go to mom and dad and go, can I go to the movies? Well, I don't know how much is it? Well, it's $27. Okay, you can use the credit card versus just establishing with their kids that, hey, as long as the movie costs less than $30, you can always use the credit card. Just keep going. Don't come back to me and ask every single time. So this culture of kind of handout for extra budget and this idea that you have to take money from something else is just wrong.
Right? Like if your upper funnel media is also delivering incremental sales that you're excited about with a low cost per incremental dollar, then do that. Maybe the two of them combined are better than either one of them in isolation, and you can run experiments to establish that. But it should be determined by math, and agents ultimately will objectively allocate resources much better than humans who have biases against categories like promotions. So what we're trying to do is create a metric, a North Star, right, cost per incremental.
Brett (45:58.002)
Yeah.
Brett (46:11.196)
Yeah.
Brett (46:21.916)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (46:27.12)
That everybody can go, yeah, that's actually the Bible. That's what I'm shooting for. And then they can move toward a more per digital performance mindset, which is to say, you know, you just you just set the criteria and the conditions and the outcomes versus prescribing individual hypotheses as humans and then measuring them a year later. That's that's a there's a quantum leap coming in agility and in sophistication of the way that CPG is allocated, whether it's Yes.
Brett (46:47.164)
Yeah.
Brett (46:51.921)
Yeah, the the tr the traditional model, right? Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Rio Longacre (46:54.85)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (46:56.716)
Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Rio Longacre (46:57.802)
And we're even seeing MMM change a little bit, become more actionable, become more like instead of those annual plans. We talked about that a lot in this pod. But Brian, I did want to talk a little bit about before I know you do have a hard stop in in a few minutes, did want to maybe talk a little bit about Denver. I mean, I I guess my question is why why why run a tech company here? I mean it's not I there's a good tech scene here, but it's not San Francisco, it's not New York, it's you know, it's not gonna make many people's top list for that. Why Denver? What did what was easier out here and what was harder out here running a tech company, running a startup?
Bryan Leach (47:27.756)
Yeah, I mean it's not San Francisco, which is why I'm here. it's not that's not a that's not a bug, that's a feature. I think that there's a an ethos and a community here that's actually really conducive to building not just your business, but being part of a a really great, cohesive kind of ecosystem that supports each other. When we went public, everybody called us and said, Hey, really, really proud to be from Denver today. So happy for y'all. That was not how it is in the valley, where it's I poached your employee, you sue.
Brett (47:31.534)
Ha ha ha.
Yeah.
Brett (47:47.804)
Yeah.
Bryan Leach (47:57.673)
me, I'm not happy for you. I'm jealous of your model.
Brett (47:57.916)
Yeah, yeah, so y so you were you were run you didn't want to be part of that douchey community, basically, is what you're suggesting.
Bryan Leach (48:02.65)
I I didn't I didn't call it douchey, but I I do prefer I do prefer I do prefer the Colorado ethos. And I think there's I think we have the highest educated workforce in the country. We have three hundred days of sunshine, which is extraordinarily good for attracting talent when people can live anywhere and move anywhere. They want to move somewhere where they have access to beautiful things and the outdoors and while it's expensive and it's that's a real problem.
Rio Longacre (48:03.085)
Ha ha.
Ha ha ha.
Brett (48:09.702)
Yeah.
Rio Longacre (48:14.71)
We do, yeah. Colorado does.
Brett (48:16.067)
that's it.
Bryan Leach (48:29.088)
It isn't quite as expensive as San Francisco or New York. and so I think it's been actually a a a a net competitive advantage for Ibata to be here. and you know, you can plug into the civic affairs of a state that only has six million inhabitants. We've been very involved in, you know, equal pay for equal work, the AI regulation, our perspective on any number of topics. We we know the governor, the AG, the mayor, all the legislators. You can't do that in California for the kind of money anyway that yeah.
Brett (48:43.729)
Yeah.
Brett (48:55.855)
No, I know, yeah. And and and Rio, I've seen that with you as well. I mean, you've gotten involved at a level that I'm like, I don't even know if that's possible outside of my small little village in New Jersey, in New York City. It's just too big in in
Rio Longacre (49:06.768)
In fact in fact, Brett, I met Brian at it was I think for it was Mike Johnson, I it was his inauguration party or one of his fundraiser events. That's where Brian and I initially connected. So yeah, so it's just cool. You can get involved, you can know the politicians here. it's it's it's a well run state. Stuff actually works here. It's expensive to your point, but it's not not compared to New York or San Francisco. And I've never had a hard time attracting tech talent here ever.
Bryan Leach (49:14.552)
That's right. That's true. That's true.
Brett (49:29.723)
Yeah, that's awesome. And and so when that's
Bryan Leach (49:30.491)
Yeah, every now and then we have we have a challenge, but not often.
Brett (49:34.481)
Yeah, and well and one of the challenges, I mean we've talked about it a little a couple of times on this podcast, is is the is the Colorado AI law that was considered sort of at least before it was rewritten in twenty twenty six. Yeah. I what is your perspective on that? 'Cause i p you know, a lot of small business owners and tech startups were like, This is this is n negatively impacting us. What's your perspective on on the rewrite and how that's evolved?
Rio Longacre (49:45.09)
Thank God it got rewritten.
Bryan Leach (49:45.9)
Yes, yes.
Bryan Leach (49:55.939)
Yeah, it did it my perspective is it it perfectly illustrates what's great about this community, which is that we were able to come together and find a common sense solution that addressed the underlying concerns of preventing discrimination, but
didn't have a ton of unintended consequences, it would stifle innovation. And if legislators would have those conversations beforehand rather than just copy pasting some piece of legislation from some other state without understanding it and dumping it through a bill in Colorado, that or no, in this case it was Connecticut, that's that's that you know, but I think we got it fixed. Now we have to work on the rulemaking and make sure they don't screw it up in rulemaking. But I think there's there's a lot to be said for the Colorado example, which is people are were fear mongering about AI.
Brett (50:12.699)
Yeah.
Brett (50:19.803)
Yeah, like California, yeah.
Brett (50:25.197)
Okay.
Bryan Leach (50:39.348)
And then they realized, shoot, if we define AI, it actually is sort of like saying software or the internet. It's a part of our everything we do now. And so trying to regulate it would be like trying to regulate the internet state by state in 1994 would have crushed job creation, crushed the growth of our US economy. And so how do we sort of find this balance between no regs and guardrails, which we saw what happened in social media context, that went, you know, haywire, and and makes us, you know,
Brett (50:57.479)
Yeah.
Brett (51:05.265)
That's for sure.
Bryan Leach (51:07.872)
at risk with our values w versus, you know, the European model where we just fall behind China and and lose the race for the future. And so it's an interesting debate. I think Colorado's like a ground zero example of how you can get it wrong but then get it right. and I'm I'm proud of having been a a big part of that effort.
Brett (51:23.729)
That's awesome. So a couple of minutes left, should we move to to to quick hits? Yeah. So so thanks for this. This has been an awesome conversation. so I'll I'll start. So the most misunderstood think about thing about Ibada at this point in time.
Rio Longacre (51:28.79)
Just do it, yeah.
Bryan Leach (51:29.102)
Let's do it.
Bryan Leach (51:40.243)
I'd say the most misunderstood thing is that promotions are a last resort promotion you know marketing tactic that's subsidizing people who already buy products. That was true for a century, with the sophistication of being able to put the right offer in front of the right person at the right time. They're actually extraordinarily powerful. Circana recently published a a meta study of fifty fifty lift studies showing that the average lift.
Generated by an Ibottic campaign is seven to eight times higher than the average lift generated by a digital ad in CPG. So, and and the quote from the SVP of Circana was: this is actually the single most potent way of driving real incremental sales in a short period of time. People are just stuck with some kind of outdated conventional wisdom on it.
Brett (52:14.916)
Interesting.
Brett (52:27.367)
Third party validation. I'm sorry, I mispronounced. I said Ibada. I apologize. It's Ibata. I I j I knew it was gonna slip.
Rio Longacre (52:32.428)
I bought it, yeah.
Bryan Leach (52:32.588)
That's the other most popular misconception, so it's all good.
Rio Longacre (52:36.108)
Okay. So Brian, what's what was the more difficult transition? Lawyer to founder, private company to public company, or like redemption like redemption app to like performance network?
Bryan Leach (52:47.308)
Ooh, that's a great question. I've never been asked that question before. I think fundamentally lawyer to entrepreneur is such a it's the other side of your brain in a lot of ways, right? The the right side of your brain is the creative side. That's the whiteboarding and imagining and designing and and and sort of the left side is the lawyer, right? It's the strategy, the analytics, the rational. And learning how to unlock both sides of your brain when you've been, you know, working out these muscles, or these muscles, is is really
takes some doing. And it also, you don't have any experience managing people. You don't have any experience firing people, hiring people. you don't think about how you show up differently in group settings where you're the leader and there's this wake behind you. You don't you don't manage your own emotional health and mental health in ways that are sustainable unless you learn how to do that over time. So I think that more I mean look, the other ones are also challenging for other reasons, but I would have to say that.
Brett (53:42.909)
Well I think I think that's good. I think that's awesome. So so yeah, thank you for joining us. we'll end it there. We we gotta g we gotta go to yeah, this has been great, across a number of dimensions. so for everybody that made it this far, visit our website www.signal and noise.ai, check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TikTok, Instagram, and wherever else you absorb your video and audio content. And thanks, Brian. It's been a it's been a pleasure. Appreciate it and great meeting you.
Rio Longacre (53:47.064)
Yeah, this was a great conversation, Brian. Appreciate it.
Bryan Leach (54:09.592)
Thanks for having me.
Rio Longacre (54:11.201)
So that
Comments