01 / Paid media + growth
Media that builds demand, not just captures it.
Paid investment connected to customer value, measured honestly, and balanced between the demand you create and the demand you harvest.
02 / The problem
Wine has made brand and performance opposing teams.
On one side is a brand and hospitality culture wary of reducing the story to clicks, conversions and promotions.
On the other are media programs optimized so tightly to immediate return that they risk spending more and more money reaching people who already know the brand.
Both are responding to something real. Discount-led performance marketing can erode price integrity and train customers to wait. Brand investment without accountability can become increasingly difficult to defend when budgets tighten.
The useful question isn’t which side wins. It’s what each part of the investment is supposed to accomplish, and what evidence would tell you that it did.
03 / Point of view
Creating demand and harvesting it are different jobs.
Some media is primarily there to meet demand that already exists. Branded search. Retargeting. Marketplace presence. Retail media close to the point of purchase.
These programs can be highly efficient because the customer is already closer to a decision.
Other investment has a different job: expanding the number of people who know the brand, consider it, seek it out or become interested enough to enter the customer relationship.
Prospecting. Video. Content. Earned attention. Experiences. Trade advocacy. Brand-building media.
The distinction isn’t perfectly defined by channel. The same platform can do both jobs. What matters is knowing which job you are paying it to do.
The problem starts when every investment is judged by the same short-term conversion metric. The budget naturally migrates toward activity closest to the transaction because that’s where attribution is easiest.
ROAS can improve while the pipeline of future customers gets weaker.
A healthy growth program funds creation and harvesting deliberately, measures them differently, and looks at what happens to the customer base as well as what happens inside the advertising platform.
04 / On measurement
Attribution is not incrementality.
ROAS is useful. It tells you how much revenue an attribution system credited to advertising relative to what you spent.
What it does not automatically tell you is how much of that revenue happened because of the advertising.
A customer might see an ad, search for the winery weeks later, buy a bottle at retail, visit the tasting room and eventually join the club. Another might click a retargeting ad for a release they were already planning to buy. The platforms see fragments of those journeys.
Wine adds another layer of complexity. Purchase paths cross winery ecommerce, tasting rooms, club, restaurants, retailers and marketplaces. Alcohol advertising restrictions affect targeting and measurement. Shipping regulations change where winery ecommerce can convert. Three-tier distribution separates media investment from the economics of the eventual retail transaction.
Some of the value media creates will never appear in a platform report. And some of the revenue a platform claims would have happened anyway.
So the question isn’t whether ROAS is good or bad. It’s what the number can legitimately tell you.
The work is building a measurement view that survives that question: attributed return where it is useful, incrementality where it can reasonably be tested, customer and cohort value where the data allows it, and clear agreement about what each investment is accountable for.
05 / The work
Where I usually start.
Media audit + investment
What are you spending today, what job is each investment performing, and where should money move?
The goal isn’t automatically to spend less. It’s to understand where the next dollar has the best chance of creating incremental value.
Measurement
Attribution that acknowledges how wine is actually bought.
Campaign return where it is meaningful, customer value by acquisition source where it can be measured, retail and marketplace signals where the transaction happens elsewhere, and an honest assessment of what the data cannot tell us.
Channel strategy
Search, social, video, retail media and marketplaces, selected around the job they need to perform rather than because they belong on a channel plan.
Strategy also accounts for beverage alcohol compliance, geographic availability and the difference between winery-owned and three-tier commerce.
Testing
A structured test plan with the hypothesis, timeframe and decision rule defined before the result arrives.
When a marketing question lends itself to a clean experiment, the test should answer the question rather than justify the investment.
Creative + offer strategy
Performance creative that still feels like the brand.
Offers designed around a business objective rather than reflexive discounting, with attention to what repeated promotion teaches customers to expect.
Agency + partner management
Scoping, evaluating and holding external partners accountable.
Sometimes the answer is a better agency relationship. Sometimes it is bringing a capability in house. Sometimes it is giving the existing team a clearer definition of success.
06 / Experience
Numbers, with the context attached.
Performance numbers are useful when you know what they measure.
Crimson Wine Group
Owned paid digital investment and agency relationships across search, social and marketplace channels for a portfolio of seven wine brands.
Established ROAS targets, performance benchmarks and test-and-learn practices as part of a broader digital program during which ecommerce revenue grew 2.5x, from $2.6M to $6.5M.
Media was one contributor to that growth, alongside conversion, CRM, lifecycle marketing and ecommerce experience.
Retail media
Instacart sponsored product campaigns across current client work have produced approximately 11.1x attributed retail ROAS through audience strategy, testing and ongoing optimization.
It’s a strong result. It’s also important to understand what it means.
The number represents retail sales attributed to the advertising inside the Instacart environment. It does not represent winery DTC revenue or the winery’s net return, and it does not account for distributor and retailer economics.
That context isn’t a footnote. It determines how the number should influence the next investment decision.
J Vineyards & Winery
Managed digital acquisition across Google Ads and Meta alongside CRM, segmentation and lifecycle programs during a period when ecommerce revenue grew 51% over two years, with direct responsibility for that ecommerce revenue number.
The important part wasn’t treating media as an isolated growth engine. It was connecting acquisition with what happened to the customer after they arrived.
07 / When this makes sense
The usual moment.
ROAS looks healthy. New customer growth doesn’t.
The media program may be getting better at capturing existing demand without creating enough new demand.
Spend has scaled. Efficiency hasn’t.
The next dollar is producing less than the one before it.
Brand and DTC are arguing about the same budget.
Nobody has agreed on which investments are responsible for near-term conversion and which build future demand.
The agency reports numbers nobody internally can verify.
The dashboards are polished. The underlying assumptions aren’t clear.
Promotion has become the most reliable growth lever.
The program can create transactions, but increasingly needs an offer to do it.
Retail media or marketplaces are becoming meaningful.
You need to understand the opportunity without confusing attributed retail sales with winery revenue.
Or the media program is working and you want an independent view of where the next increment of growth should come from.
08 / Start a conversation
Have a growth decision worth thinking through?
If the question sits somewhere between brand, media, customer economics and measurement, let’s talk.