2025 exposed how fragile marketing systems have become. The best teams are spending Q1 connecting the pieces again.

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

If 2024 was the year of experimentation, 2025 has been the year of exhaustion.

Marketers tried every lever available: new channels, influencer tests, AI-generated creative, predictive retention, but performance never fully caught up to effort.

CPMs climbed. Acquisition costs rose. Returns stayed flat.

Even brands with solid margins and strong communities started to feel it: growth was harder to buy, and harder to measure.

Most companies didn’t lose their touch; they hit the natural ceiling of doing more with the same systems underneath.

As we head toward 2026, that’s where the real opportunity sits: in recalibration.

Operators who can connect what they already have (their creative, data, and retention loops) will see gains without needing to outspend anyone.

Today we’re breaking down how founders and marketing teams are approaching that reset. 

Let’s get into it. 

On the Menu

Let’s start with the numbers.

Across public benchmarks and operator reports, acquisition costs continue to rise while blended payback holds steady. That’s the stall most teams are feeling: more spend to win a customer without a matching improvement in return.

That pairing explains the stall: the cost to acquire keeps rising, but payback is not improving. 

Cheaper impressions on surfaces like TikTok Shop or CTV can expand reach, but they don’t lift efficiency on their own. Without stronger creative, cleaner conversion paths, and a tighter handoff into retention, the extra reach doesn’t translate into better payback.

For years, the industry was driven by two things: cheap attention and perfect data.
Meta’s targeting was surgical. Google’s last-click attribution told a clean story. Every dollar had a trackable path to purchase.

That playbook started to unravel in 2023 and 2024, but 2025 made it official. Privacy changes limited what brands could see. Algorithms got noisier. Everyone began creating more content, faster, hoping volume would make up for signal loss.

It didn’t.

More creative didn’t mean more learning; it just meant more noise to analyze. More channels didn’t mean more scale; it spread already-thin budgets across too many surfaces. And more spend didn’t mean more growth; it simply revealed how inefficient the system had become.

For most teams, the problem isn’t that they’ve lost traction, it’s that they’re running a more complex operation on the same foundation they built years ago.

That’s the plateau. Growth is capped because expansion outpaced refinement.

Recognizing that is the first step in the reset. Here is a quick diagnostic you can run today:

If your diagnostic points that way, the fix is not to add another channel. It is to reconnect acquisition to retention so each impression pays you back over time. 

That is where a full-funnel reset starts.

You’ve pushed your primary channels hard and you need another lever that can actually scale.

CTV should be that channel. Your customers are already watching 90+ minutes of streaming per day. The inventory exists. The attention is there.

But when you start exploring CTV, it’s hard to know where to start. The metrics, attribution, and targeting options can vary widely, making it tough to connect impressions to real performance.

Vibe.co just released their 2026 CTV Performance Playbook. It's a complete breakdown of how DTC operators are running CTV as a true performance channel, and how to avoid the platforms bleeding your budget on fake inventory.

Here's a peek inside:

The playbook walks through how to verify your ad inventory, connect CTV impressions to sales and shares targeting tactics brands are using to hit 300–600% ROAS.

If you're serious about scaling beyond paid social, this is how you do it without burning money on unverified reach.

👉 Download the 2026 CTV Performance Playbook

Most brands still operate like it’s 2021: paid social runs acquisition, CRM owns retention, and brand marketing floats somewhere in between. 

The result is predictable: acquisition teams chase lower CAC, retention teams chase higher LTV, and neither side can prove who actually drives growth.

That disconnect is what’s holding back efficiency. 

When the funnel is managed in parts, the data never connects. Paid campaigns optimize for clicks, but not for the quality of the customer. Retention campaigns work harder to save customers who were never profitable to begin with.

That’s the problem operators are trying to solve heading into 2026: how to turn marketing back into one system that compounds instead of competing with itself.

Shopify’s 2025 Commerce Trends report puts it bluntly: “DTC is an ecosystem, not a storefront.”
The brands compounding right now aren’t the ones chasing new audiences, they’re the ones closing the loop between awareness, acquisition, and retention.

Operators are shifting from linear funnels to circular systems. Every dollar that touches performance marketing also needs to feed retention and brand.

Here’s how they’re doing it:

1. Rebalance your budget like a portfolio

2. Start tracking MEP

Instead of chasing ROAS, calculate how much revenue every impression contributes over its lifetime.

Example: If your Meta ad costs $0.04 per impression and drives $0.25 in total customer LTV, that’s a 6.25x MEP. Suddenly, retention starts mattering as much as CTR.

3. Use brand dollars to feed retention.

Paid awareness doesn’t have to end at the click. Top teams sequence creative and email/SMS follow-ups based on exposure timing, turning brand reach into measurable post-purchase engagement.

It’s not just about full-funnel coverage anymore. It’s about ensuring every impression compounds somewhere else in the system.

You don’t fix efficiency with another ad set. You fix it by tightening how your team measures, iterates, and holds itself accountable.

Here’s the sprint many operators are planning for Q1:

Step 1: Audit your stack

Pull every channel, campaign, and retention flow into a single sheet. Mark where you have overlap or outdated creative. Highlight overlap, outdated creative, or anything that lacks a clear performance owner. 

The goal isn’t to rebuild everything, it’s to see where energy leaks out of the system.

Step 2: Trim the bottom 25%

Pause any campaign with MER < 3 or LTV:CAC below 3:1. Move those dollars into higher-compounding experiments instead of “just-in-case” channels.

Step 3: Launch two controlled tests

Step 4: Tighten governance

Move to weekly dashboards. Tie creative to LTV outcomes. And add a “budget freeze” gate at the end of March where every dollar must re-earn its place in Q2.

Operators who do this now will enter 2026 with clean data, clear wins, and confidence in every channel they’re running.