Making Media · Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts

A Lesson in Paid Growth with Jonathan Becker

·55 min·3 clips

Jonathan Becker says an excellent return in paid growth is “anywhere between 2 to 3x.”

1. Making Media talks with Jonathan Becker about paid growth, media buying, and the way Thrive Digital evaluates return on ad spend. 2. Jonathan Becker is the founder of Thrive Digital, and Matt and Dom host the conversation because they want to connect marketing budgets to investing. 3. The episode asks whether performance marketing works like value investing, where mispriced opportunities are found before the market recognizes them. 4. Becker says Thrive started in an old sweaty apartment with him and co-founder Brent MacArthur working out of a walk-in closet. 5. He says the early business focused on Google AdWords before Facebook ads became a major channel. 6. Becker compares keywords in Google search to audiences and says media inventory can be treated like undervalued assets. 7. He cites work for Uber, Asana, Lululemon, and Laureen Jobs as examples of that approach. 8. Becker says the key metric is lifetime value, not just cost per click, because a high CPC can still buy the best customer. 9. He says Google and Meta remain the biggest places to place ad dollars, even as Amazon ads, TikTok, and programmatic grow. 10. He says channels like Snap, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and Pinterest come up in exploration, but results can take weeks, months, or a year. 11. Becker says a 2x to 3x return is excellent, and 3x to 4x is the kind of ROAS Thrive targets on many campaigns. 12. He says privacy changes, including iOS 14.5 and GDPR, have made attribution harder rather than easier. 13. He says new clients usually do not see the results they want for the first two to three months because infrastructure and creative need to be set up. 14. Becker says a 10-to-1 return on $100 is not the same as a 10-million-pound budget, because scale changes expectations. 15. He says performance marketing for e-commerce and SaaS is mechanically similar, but lead-generation projects can take one month to 24 months to convert. 16. He says earlier-stage companies experiment more, sometimes finding a platform kink that can be exploited before it disappears. 17. On podcast ads, Becker says measurement is still difficult, but contextual sponsorships and thoughtful ad placement can produce leads. 18. He says Thrive increasingly validates media with surveys, attribution modeling, third-party tools like Recast, and geo-holdout testing. 19. Listeners interested in paid growth, attribution, and marketing operators will get the most from this conversation. 20. Listeners looking for entertainment or a purely casual chat may skip it.

As heard by us

A clear look at paid growth as capital allocation, not just ad spend.

Jonathan Becker frames paid growth as a question of capital allocation, and that angle suits the discussion. He and the hosts lean on Thrive Digital's scale, including more than $3.5 billion in deployed paid acquisition budgets, to keep the focus on investment, measurement, and…

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Why you'd press play

You want paid growth explained like an investment decision, not a marketing slogan.

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