Fellow marketers DONUT Press Media employees: Welcome to a test run of The ROAS Report, a free weekly email w/ growth-marketing news, tactics, tips, and tricks - backed by proprietary data we see across dozens of live advertising campaigns at America’s most-exclusive newsletter network.

Basically, if you work in marketing or are focused on growing a company, this email will make you better at your job. It’s also cheaper than a consultant and (much) smarter than a podcast.

Anyway. If you spot any formatting/rendering errors, just reply to this email and let me know; pls ‘n thanks. Without further ado, here’s what to expect in inaugural issue #1:

• 🧠 A tactic to save money on paid spend and produce better results
• 🚧 How to eliminate bottlenecks; learnings from a 300k-creator network
• 📈 The best ROAS channels, according to marketers

Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe here for free.

DATA INSIGHT

🧠 With a little work, you too can 35x your CTR

A multibillion-dollar publicly traded health and wellness company ran the exact same creative in a gardening newsletter and a consumer finance newsletter in our network over the past seven days. The results? More surprising than a poorly timed jack-in-the-box.

By the numbers: The gardening placement generated nearly 3,600 high-intent clicks from a single send. The consumer finance placement, w/ a comparable audience size and content engagement rate, generated just over 100 clicks.

• Same creative, same week, same brand - roughly 35x more clicks.

🤔 Why?

When we broke down the individual components, the disparity started to make sense. And it basically boiled down to this: Mindset beats category match.

• The finance readers are in more of an optimization, working mindset when they open the email, turning this largely consumer audience into something more resembling B2B.
• The gardening readers - also a largely consumer audience - are in a personal, leisure mindset. They're actually open to lifestyle consumption.
• Translation: A reader in leisure mode processes a product recommendation as content, while a reader in work mode processes it as an interruption. Think of it like trying to hand someone a flyer while they're running to catch a train, vs. when they're sitting on a park bench.

🤑 How you can capitalize

There's a massive pricing arbitrage in leisure…

• Consumer finance and business newsletters command premium CPMs b/c advertisers view them as premium, and bid them up.
• Hobbyist and lifestyle newsletters have lower CPMs b/c fewer brands compete for them. But think of one of your hobbies and be honest w/ yourself - you can prob get obsessed.
• In real-world marketing terms: this multibillion-dollar health & wellness brand paid nearly 3x the CPM for the finance audience, and got a fraction of the clicks - essentially paying a massive premium to annoy people who are trying to work.

…and the demographic overlap can be similar enough.

• The actual people reading both newsletters have similar household incomes and ages.
• This means you're reaching a very similar - if not the exact same - high-value consumer, just at a different moment in their week.
• It's the same CFO - just reading about tomatoes on Sunday instead of tax law on Tuesday.

NEED TO KNOW

🔍 What you may have missed this week

🤪 Personality sells: How SharkNinja adjusted its strategy in order to chase younger buyers.

📝 ChatGPT Ads gets an update: Introducing - custom audiences and suggested ad drafts.

🤖 Speaking of chatbot ads and OpenAI: Emarketer projects the US chatbot ad market will hit just $5.4B by 2030…leaving OpenAI's $100B ad revenue target looking increasingly unlikely.

😡 Frustrated w/ lack of transparency in CTV reporting? You’re not alone. While digital ad spending is booming, just 41% of the marketers using it trust CTV commerce and retail media networks.

⚙️Bottlenecks, eliminated: See how Unilever is using AI to vet influencers and streamline workflows. In essence, the system scales a 300k-creator network w/o automating actual creative decisions.

COMMUNITY POLL

🤔 More operator insights

Last week’s poll question + results*:

What's your single highest-ROAS channel right now?

• Email came in first (39%), followed by organic search (24%), then paid social (19%). Newsletter advertising specifically came in at 11%.

*This is just an example of what will be included in this section every week; numbers should not be trusted as accurate.

This week’s poll question:

Are you planning to increase or decrease your Meta spend in Q3? Click to record your vote.

• Increase
• Decrease
• Holding flat
• We don’t spend on Meta

That’s all for today. Happy growing; see you back here next Wednesday✌️.

-Peter & Scott

P.S. Meta or Google not providing the same bang for your advertising buck? At DONUT Press Media, we have 13.4M+ premium subscribers across dozens of highly engaged niche audiences. 43% have a net worth over $2M. 87% are decision-makers. If you're considering diverting some test spend to newsletters, we should definitely chat. Book a call →