Jason Roussos

Most launches flop, not from bad products, but from ‘ta-da!’ rollouts with zero warm-up. Headed to a fall conference to break some big news? My latest MediaPost column provides a 6-week blueprint to turn the booth into a momentum machine. Details and article link in comments ↓ #gtm #marketing

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Performance agencies sometimes think they need to differentiate by building proprietary tech. I’ve seen that story many times — and I disagree. I recently had a check-in with two C-level execs at a performance agency. We’d been delivering exceptional results for their clients, including a $33 CPA using our machine learning optimization engine, compared to $120 manually. But performance wasn’t their focus. They'd decided to build new tech in-house. “If other agencies can use tvScientific,” they said, “we’re not unique.” It brought to mind the New York Times’ decision to build its own ad server — a costly, years-long detour that ended with a move back to DFP. The problem was a lack of clarity about what business they were really in and what they were positioned to excel at. The same applies to performance agencies. They’re not in the business of building ad tech (which is a constantly evolving, capital intensive business and is an entire business in its own right). They’re in the business of delivering outcomes. That means using the best tools available on the market and winning on superior client service. Not rebuilding tools from scratch. The edge comes from execution — knowing how to evaluate, adopt, and apply best-in-class technology to drive better results. Trying to be both a tech company and a service business is a recipe for subpar results on both fronts. Instead, invest in identifying cutting-edge technology, use it better than your competitors, and deliver both superior results and superior client service. That’s the path to agency differentiation. Just my .02. More detailed thoughts on this topic in my weekly newsletter (see comments).

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TODAY’S HOT TAKE: TCPA violations for AI calls now cost up to $1,500 each. The FCC clarified that "cheap" bots are a liability without a compliant workflow. Scaling voice without an audit trail creates massive exposure. For many teams, one mismanaged campaign is an operational crisis. Always secure express consent and keep timestamped records. Is your setup protecting your business or exposing it? #ZentricAi #Compliance #VoiceAI #BusinessOperations #RiskManagement https://lnkd.in/gW2-6MWx

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I spent the first 5-7 years of my career deep in mobile attribution. I was an early employee at Branch. Plus, the first consulting agency I built was almost entirely focused on helping companies stand up their marketing stacks, mostly for mobile. App installs, web to app flows, paid social, paid search, attribution across devices. That was my world. Even though I now think of myself as a B2B operator, a huge portion of my career was spent helping B2C companies make sense of how people found and adopted their products. If you worked in mobile around 2016 or 2017, you remember this clearly. There was a real playbook. You knew what tools to use, how attribution worked, what tradeoffs you were making, and where the blind spots were. It was imperfect, but it was legible. Fast forward to today, and that playbook feels gone. This month alone, I’ve had six different founders come to me with some version of the same question. They have web ads, app ads, multiple surfaces, multiple devices, and a growing sense that the numbers no longer line up in a way they can trust. For two companies I’m currently consulting with, the same problems are showing up in B2B, B2C, and hybrid models. Privacy changes, platform shifts, browser behavior, fragmented tooling, and cross-device behavior have made clean (and accurate) attribution harder than it’s ever been. I don’t think one person secretly has the answer. And I don’t think there’s a single vendor that magically solves this. So over the next month, I’m going back into the field. Talking to founders. Testing assumptions. Rebuilding intuition the same way we did a decade ago. The goal is to create a playbook that is honest about tradeoffs and usable in the real world. If you’re wrestling with attribution right now, you’re not alone. And if you’ve found something that genuinely works, I want to learn from you. Let’s compare notes and see what we uncover. PS I started the journey documenting my thoughts here on Growth Stack Mafia https://lnkd.in/ezwQ2hsd

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For the GTM-obsessed: here’s a tool that can give you a bucket load of insights. If there’s a data point, there are at least ten ways to interpret it. One way: inform how you deploy strategies in similar cities. Say a GTM strategy worked in Birmingham, AL. By identifying the most crucial indicators (GDP per capita? industry clusters? population density?)you can adjust these visualizations to find similar cities where that strategy is likely to succeed again. Birmingham mirrors Shreveport, Des Moines, and Worcester across key economic metrics: familiar customer profiles, likely similar pain points. Use it as a gut check for where your business goes next. How would you slice this data to uncover new GTM opportunities? Tool: Metroverse by Harvard (link in comments)

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I’m excited to share the results of our Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study, conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study found that TripleLift Creative Formats delivered a massive 272% ROI and an NPV of $2.2 million over three years for the agencies interviewed. Key benefits include: 🔅 $3.70 return on ad spend (ROAS) from TripleLift campaigns 💵 $1.3 million in incremental profit ⏳ 40 hours saved per campaign in labor costs The results highlight what we consistently hear from our partners - creative advertising formats, executed with efficiency and premium inventory, are essential for driving higher performance and navigating a fragmented ecosystem. Download the full Forrester TEI study here: https://lnkd.in/ebwQ49u9 #TheCreativeSSP #CreativeFormats #AdTech #ForresterTEI #TripleLift #ROAS #Profit

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AI is reinventing how we sell. At PandaDoc, we’re seeing GTM shift from static funnels to dynamic feedback loops with AI compressing time, surfacing intent, and removing friction across every touchpoint. I’ll unpack what that looks like tomorrow at RevAmp 2025 presented by Consensus. https://lnkd.in/g9EbMhfn

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I’ve been talking with founders about how painful enterprise customization still is — even in 2025. David Dworsky and Gordon Ritter just put words to what we’ve been seeing: the age of point-and-click configuration is ending, and the next category winners will make customization conversational. For early-stage founders, this is the wedge: - Own one painful workflow - Capture the data - Build toward becoming a system of record If you’re building in this space, I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it. Link to the full article on this in the comments. 

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Every company passes through three distinct phases of market fit. Most don't realize they've entered a new one until revenue stalls. These are three transition points highlighted and documented in the GTM OS™ (see graphic, below). They are critical junction points that require acknowledgement and adjustment. Problem market fit. You're testing everything - messages, segments, use cases. The proverbial spaghetti against the wall. It's necessary, it's messy, and it is difficult to scale efficiently. But it works well enough to get you moving. Product market fit. You've found a segment that sees real value, can articulate ROI, and doesn't require heavy customization on every deal. Win rates improve. But CLV is low, leaving money on the table. Platform market fit. You have customers. Good ones. But the "expand" in land-and-expand isn't materializing. Expansion revenue requires a completely different motion - and most companies haven't built it. Here's where it gets painful: as mentioned above, revenue stalls almost always happen at the transition between phases. The company is still running the previous playbook that worked at the time. This is what I meant in a prior post when I said it can be prevented and predicted. Two patterns I've seen repeatedly: A founder-led sales motion is essential in problem market fit. The founder knows the product, reads the room, and closes on instinct. But in product market fit, that same motion becomes a bottleneck. The founder is everywhere, closing deals, salvaging customers - and nothing works without them. Revenue hits a plateau. (I had a CRO once tell me that they couldn’t get anything done because the founder and all the execs were out.) Or this scenario: Strong product market fit execution - the customer base is growing but they do not engage past the initial sale (or acquisition). Cross sell and upsell consistently disappoint. The team is running the product market fit motion that built the business - but nobody has built the platform market fit motion needed to unlock expansion revenue. It just sits there. "We've always done it this way." One of the most expensive sentences in business. The next several posts are going to provide real-world examples - real situations, real consequences, and what it took to get through them. Caveat emptor - They will all be mash ups of real scenarios (to protect the innocent).

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Happy Friday, everyone. I hope ya'all are surviving and thriving out there. In a market where teams are being cut, AI is rewriting workflows, and every commercial function is being asked to prove its value, marketing does not get credit for activity. It gets credit for pipeline. Now, for a topic that is top of my mind this week, based on some clients who are annoyed that their marketing was not working. They throw around a three-letter word--ABM. ABM doesn't work, they say. Well, most ABM programs are not ABM. They are just expensive activity wrapped in better language. Or to be blunt, s**t rolled in glitter. If your program did not create real pipeline, improve win rates, and earn sales’ trust, it was not ABM. It was theater. - A target-account list is not ABM. - Intent data is not ABM. - A few ads, some outbound, and a personalized landing page are not ABM. Real ABM is a shared sales-and-marketing system built to convert the right accounts into revenue. And it's hard work to get right. Everything else is just more blah, blah, blah. Read the blog for a practical playbook on turning ABM into pipeline, not performance theater. Field Friday #3: ABM That Actually Builds Pipeline https://lnkd.in/emC2H4VY #ABM #B2BMarketing #Pipeline #SalesAlignment #RevenueMarketing #RevOps

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