Samuel Davel repositioned Kosterina's olive oil from a lifestyle product to a wellness ritual — and rebuilt the brand's content and measurement around it. He breaks down the Media Efficiency Ratio his team uses instead of last-click attribution, his framework for vetting agencies, and how geo-targeted influencer partnerships are helping the brand measure lift at retail.
Behind the Expert
Samuel Davel leads growth at Kosterina, the premium Mediterranean olive oil brand that has expanded from D2C into Whole Foods, Target, and a handful of other national retailers since its founding in late 2019. He landed in New York in 2017 straight out of the military with no fixed plan beyond not moving back to Wisconsin, and backed into marketing through freelance work he took on while trying to act. The acting didn't stick — he says he discovered he was a much better marketer than an actor — but the two backgrounds fused into how he operates now: a military-instilled determination to dig past surface-level metrics, and an actor's comfort presenting to CMOs and founders without flinching if a number comes out wrong on a call. He joined Kosterina about 18 months ago as the team's first dedicated growth hire, inheriting a brand that hadn't yet had someone who'd scaled one before. Since then he's rebuilt the brand's content strategy around education instead of promotion, built a measurement stack around Triple Whale and blended attribution rather than any single model, and is pushing wholesale toward two-thirds of total revenue. He's also, by his own description, "a branded-search guy" with strong opinions about how agencies dress up ROAS.
The Quick Hits
- Kosterina rebuilt its content strategy around education, not promotion — dropping deals, gifts, and recipe content in favor of UGC that explains why high-quality, early-harvested, single-sourced olive oil matters, so shoppers arrive informed whether they buy on-site or in a grocery aisle.
- The clearest proof point was a campaign Davel expected to flop: a daily "olive oil shot" push on Meta he personally didn't buy into ("I don't want to. I've tried it. It's not for me"). It became the brand's strongest post-holiday window yet, with Meta performance climbing and CAC dropping through the "new year, new me" period, and it's now locked in as an annual January play.
- His influencer strategy narrowed from broad "wellness space" partnerships to a specific, proven set of angles — creators talking about seed-oil alternatives, better-for-you grocery finds, and easy recipes — to the point his team can now predict with reasonable confidence whether a given partner will perform before signing them.
- His agency diligence checklist: is the shop inside your Shopify backend reading storefront revenue, not just platform-reported ROAS; do they run Meta and Google as one aligned strategy instead of two siloed accounts; do they understand new-customer metrics in both channels; and what share of "branded search" is propping up their reported efficiency — it's easy to show a 3x ROAS on Google when 80% of spend is on your own brand name.
- He's audited enough accounts to distrust ROAS on its own: one engagement found 85% of a brand's Meta-attributed revenue was view-through rather than click-based, and 75% of its Google revenue ran through branded terms seeded as top keywords inside Performance Max and Shopping — inflating reported performance while backend revenue stayed flat.
- Kosterina blends attribution models instead of picking one — a survey-based total-attribution read for the business view, a linear model for holistic mix, and Triple Whale's view-through data for in-platform optimization, since a meaningful share of Meta's influence shows up as in-store purchases a click model would never catch.
- On AI search, his approach isn't a new keyword game: write content that's genuinely discoverable and useful to both shoppers and LLMs. Kosterina is already seeing real, attributable revenue from ChatGPT referral traffic inside Triple Whale.
From the military to Manhattan, by way of failed acting
Davel moved to New York right after leaving the military in 2017 with no clear plan beyond not going home to Wisconsin, and got into marketing almost by accident — freelancing on the side while he tried to act. The acting didn't pan out, but he credits both backgrounds directly for how he works now: the military for the discipline to dig past surface-level metrics, and the acting for the comfort presenting to CMOs and founders that most marketers only pick up over years of client calls.
What Kosterina is
Kosterina, founded in late 2019, sells premium extra virgin olive oil made from early-harvested olives — a process that yields less oil but more flavor and more polyphenols, the antioxidant compounds tied to heart, skin, and hair health. Davel has been on the team about 18 months, a stretch in which the brand has grown D2C sales while expanding into Whole Foods, Target, and other national retailers.
Repositioning away from deals and recipes, toward education
Davel joined at a point when Kosterina hadn't had a dedicated growth hire who had scaled a brand before, and one of his first moves was pulling the content strategy away from deals, gifts, and recipe posts and into educational UGC — content that explains, on the same channels people already use for entertainment, why olive oil quality varies and what to look for. The goal isn't just conversion; it's an informed shopper, whether they buy on Kosterina's site or pick a bottle off a grocery shelf.
The olive oil shot: betting against his own instincts
The clearest example of that education-first bet is the campaign the episode title refers to. In 2025, Kosterina pushed heavily on Meta around the idea of a daily olive oil shot — a new use case for the product, not just a cooking ingredient but a wellness ritual. Davel personally thought it would flop; he doesn't like the idea of drinking a shot of olive oil and said so on the record. He ran the test anyway.
The result surprised him. The campaign produced Kosterina's strongest post-holiday stretch to date, and it's now permanent on the calendar as an annual January push.
Finding influencers who won't flop
Kosterina's influencer program went through the same narrowing process. It started broad — any wellness-space creator willing to partner — and got refined as the team looked at which posts actually drove performance. What's left is a small set of proven angles: creators who talk about seed-oil alternatives, better-for-you grocery finds, and easy recipes, refined enough that Davel's team can now forecast a partnership's odds before it launches.
What inflated ROAS actually looks like
Davel's skepticism of agencies is specific, not generic. Kosterina worked with a paid-media agency before he joined, and while he wasn't there for it firsthand, what he's heard tracks with a pattern he's seen elsewhere: metrics that look strong on a dashboard without backend revenue actually moving. He's seen the mechanics of that up close — a past client asked him to audit an account because the reported numbers didn't square with what was showing up in the bank account.
A diligence checklist for vetting agencies
Out of that experience, Davel has built a specific list for evaluating any agency partner: whether they sit inside the brand's Shopify backend and look at storefront revenue rather than platform-reported numbers, whether Meta and Google run as one aligned strategy instead of two competing accounts, whether they understand new-customer metrics in both channels, and — his own specialty — how much of their reported efficiency is really just branded search wearing a performance costume.
Blending attribution, and proving lift at retail
Kosterina treats Triple Whale as its source of truth but doesn't lean on any single attribution model — it blends a survey-based total-attribution read for the executive view, a linear model for holistic channel mix, and Triple Whale's view-through data for in-platform optimization, since a meaningful share of what social drives shows up as a purchase at Whole Foods or Target that no click could ever capture. That same instinct — measure lift, don't assume it — carries into retail, where Davel's team pairs micro-influencer partners with market-level store data to prove impact before and after a campaign runs.
Writing for AI, not tricking it
Davel sees the shift toward AI-driven search as less of a new discipline than a revival of an old one. His team's approach is to write content that's genuinely discoverable and understandable to AI crawlers — the same instinct behind the brand's educational UGC push — rather than chase a new set of tricks. It's already showing up in the numbers: checking Triple Whale's revenue-by-channel report, he found a meaningful, attributable stream of orders — around $30,500 in a recent month — coming from ChatGPT referral traffic, which briefly sent him hunting for a broken UTM before confirming it was real.
Sound Bites
- “We pushed heavily on Meta to talk about olive oil shots. I thought it was going to flop. I don't want to — I've tried it, it's not for me — but let's see if there's something there. That's something I love about marketing: your biases are gone. Lean into the data.”
- “We found a solid two-week to one-month period after Christmas — the "new year, new me" phase — where it was really successful. We saw our Meta numbers climb, our CAC decrease. It burnt out in the middle of Q1, but early in January it was really successful. That's something that really shocked and surprised me.”
- “Early on it was really about just finding influencers in the wellness space that we could partner with. So we narrowed it down to specifically influencers talking about seed oils, grocery store finds that are better for you, and easy recipes.”
- “I spent about two hours in their Meta and Google accounts, and found that about 85% of their Meta-attributed revenue was view-through, not click-based. 75% of their Google revenue came through on branded search.”
- “First and foremost, understanding marketing metrics like MER, or a TACoS metric — whether they're in your Shopify backend and seeing your storefront revenue. It's easy to sit at a 3x on Google when your branded search is 80% of the spend.”
- “We've pushed out to specific markets and then taken a look at the store data in those specific markets to see if there's a lift in velocity prior to the influencers going live and posting. So that's been huge.”
- “SEO is having a revival. For the past few years, a lot of brands treated it like it doesn't really matter, an afterthought. I think that's having a revival because of these AI platforms that crawl your sites. We want to write content that's discovered by AI and understood by AI, so that when somebody plugs into ChatGPT, "what's the best olive oil out there," our platform comes forward.”
The Chord take
Davel's olive oil shot campaign is a clean illustration of a rule good marketers claim to believe but rarely test: personal taste isn't data. He disliked the use case himself and expected it to fail, then ran it anyway because stripping out bias is the entire point of a real test — and the campaign became Kosterina's strongest top-of-funnel window of the year, now locked into the calendar annually. The move underneath that result is what the episode title calls use case repositioning: instead of selling the same olive oil against different holidays and price points, Kosterina found a new reason to buy it daily, then built content, influencer targeting, and a seasonal media plan around that single idea. His skepticism of attribution is the more transferable lesson for other operators. His account audit — 85% of Meta revenue view-through, 75% of Google revenue running through the brand's own name, and branded terms seeded as top keywords inside Performance Max — is a quantified version of a problem every DTC marketer suspects but few actually measure: reported ROAS can be inflated by an agency's or a platform's own incentives without backend revenue moving at all. His fix isn't to abandon attribution tools — Kosterina still runs Triple Whale as its north star — but to blend models, distrust any single number, and specifically interrogate how much of paid "performance" is just your own brand name being bid on. That same discipline, paired with geo-targeted lift measurement at retail, is what lets a four-person team credibly defend spend to leadership without inflating the numbers themselves.
Put it to work
- 1Before dismissing a new product use case because it doesn't appeal to you personally, test it anyway — Davel's olive oil shot campaign became Kosterina's strongest seasonal play precisely because he ran a test he expected to lose.
- 2Audit your own paid accounts the way Davel audits prospective agencies: what share of Meta revenue is view-through versus click-based, and what share of Google revenue and Performance Max or Shopping "top keywords" is actually your own brand name. A high ROAS propped up by branded search isn't proof of acquisition efficiency.
- 3Before signing an agency, confirm they're inside your Shopify backend reading storefront revenue, that they run Meta and Google as one aligned strategy rather than two siloed accounts, and that they understand new-customer metrics in both channels — not just headline ROAS.
- 4If you sell into retail, don't treat wholesale and D2C measurement as separate problems: use geo-targeted influencer drops and pull store-level velocity data before and after to prove lift, and feed D2C personas into retail creative and influencer selection instead of starting from scratch.
- 5Only say yes to a retailer's shelf space when your packaging, messaging, and brand awareness can actually drive velocity once you're there — jumping in before you're ready can cost you the shelf, and re-entry years later is far harder than waiting.
- 6Treat AI-search optimization as a byproduct of genuine content quality, not a new keyword game: the same authentic, well-reviewed content that earns real customer trust is what surfaces in ChatGPT and other LLM answers — check whether revenue is already showing up from AI-referral traffic in your own attribution tool.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
There's a responsibility as you're building a brand and telling a story — specifically when you have a product that's going to end up in or on somebody's body.
Samuel Davel
What we did in our strategy is we pivoted away from deals, gifts, and recipe content, and moved heavily into educational UGC content. When a retailer calls and says, 'we want you in our stores,' you're always going to take it. But you also have to be in a position where you're ready to be in that retailer, because if you jump in early and your velocity isn't there, getting back into that retailer years later is significantly harder.
Bryan Mahoney
AI is going to play a role.
Samuel Davel
You want to write content that's being discovered by AI and understood by AI. It's only a matter of time before ChatGPT starts advertising inside of ChatGPT.
Bryan Mahoney
Thanks everyone for tuning in to another episode of the Brilliant Commerce Podcast, where I get a chance to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce and unpack the secrets behind some of the industry's most iconic — or, as I like to say, soon-to-be-iconic — brands. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Samuel Davel, a key member of the growth team at Kosterina. Samuel, welcome to the pod.
Samuel Davel
I appreciate you having me, Bryan.
Bryan Mahoney
I asked you this in the sort of warmup, but where am I catching you today?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, I'm in Manhattan in New York City. I live on the Upper West Side, work mostly remote — about 90% remote — and luckily have a pretty good setup here in our apartment.
Bryan Mahoney
Nice. Have you been in New York your entire career?
Samuel Davel
My entire marketing career, yeah. I moved up to New York right after getting out of the military in 2017. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, or really any idea, but I didn't want to go back home to Wisconsin. New York sounded good, and I actually got into marketing by doing a lot of freelance work while trying to act.
Bryan Mahoney
Huh.
Samuel Davel
Yeah. Later on the acting fell aside, and I found out I was a much better marketer than I was an actor.
Bryan Mahoney
That's awesome. What do you think helped you more, or helps you more today as a marketer — the military background, or the time you spent trying to act in New York?
Samuel Davel
I think doing the work — the military background, 100%, without a doubt. There's a level of real determination to figure out what's going on and what's working, and to really dive into it, as opposed to just looking at surface-level metrics. And having worked at agencies, the acting experience has helped massively when talking with CMOs or founders — being comfortable presenting, comfortable having conversations like this.
Bryan Mahoney
Is that the storytelling component? Is that fair to say?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, I think that's a good way to say it. I also think, in the world of acting, you're constantly on camera and constantly the center of attention, so you don't fear that anymore. That element of, am I going to stumble over a word, am I going to mess up a metric — you just don't care anymore when you're on calls. It's very personable, very real, which helps.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah. Some of the best marketers I know, or that I've been fortunate enough to work with, are great storytellers, and I think it's a good way to bring a team along, or bring an audience along. I really appreciate the twinning of that with the grit I'd imagine you get from military experience. From my point of view, we need more of that in the marketing world — the paid world. Sometimes there's this feeling that there's just one way of doing it, that there's a playbook. My experience has been that it requires grit, and it requires curiosity, to change things up as the landscape is quickly changing around us.
Samuel Davel
Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree. One of my biggest issues with a lot of agencies out there is this idea that it's just rinse and repeat. A lot of brands work with agencies where they've done something that worked with Brand A and immediately apply it to Brand B. And each brand, while there are similarities for sure, is unique and deserves a unique strategy in order to grow.
Bryan Mahoney
I love that. Okay, let's use that as a segue — I'm finding you today in New York, but I'm finding you running growth at Kosterina. Kosterina is a discovery for me. Fun fact: one of my daughter's favorite things to do is go olive oil tasting — we live in a part of the country where that's available to us, and at least one weekend a month we're driving around doing olive oil tasting. She hasn't tried yours yet, which I guess makes me a bad dad, and I'll remedy that in short order. But can you tell me and the audience a little more about the brand, and maybe what makes the products unique?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, absolutely. And also, please share your address afterward — I'd love to send you a bunch of product and get your daughter's thoughts on it.
Samuel Davel
Yeah, please, absolutely. So Kosterina is a premium Mediterranean brand. We specialize in extra virgin olive oil — very high quality extra virgin olive oil. It's early harvested. The olives produce less oil when they're early harvested, but it's a lot more flavorful. It has more polyphenols, which are antioxidants and things that help with heart health, skin health, hair health. So we're a very premium brand, and we're really focused on this idea that better-for-you products shouldn't mean sacrificing anything. We don't want to sacrifice flavor.
Samuel Davel
We don't want to sacrifice durability, smoke point, things along those lines either. It's a better-for-you product that is, of course, a little bit more expensive to make — but it can be a true pantry staple. So that's a little bit about Kosterina. We were founded late 2019. I've been on the team about 18 months now, and we've grown pretty dramatically. We do a lot of sales on D2C, but we're also in Whole Foods, Target, and a handful of other retailers in the U.S. — that's awesome.
Bryan Mahoney
I love this. I came from D2C as well, and it was a product you wouldn't put in your body, but it was a product you'd put on your body. We used to say there's a responsibility as you're building a brand and telling a story, specifically when you have a product going in or on the body, to not sacrifice quality. So I'd be curious how the approach to marketing or brand-building or storytelling has evolved during your time there, and how important that is when you're trying to get eyeballs on your product versus another olive oil a consumer might be considering.
Samuel Davel
I think I came on at a really interesting point, where they really hadn't had somebody who specialized in growth and had grown brands before. Early on, one thing we did in our strategy was pivot away from deals, gifts, and recipe content, and pivot highly into educational UGC content — where we really inform users, on channels they're already on for entertainment like Meta, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, why they need high-quality olive oil. What's the importance of that? What does that do for their health? What does that do for their meals? Why are olive oils differentiated? So we've really leaned into these educational UGC concepts, where our hope is that the consumer is informed when they come to our site and they know exactly what they're looking for.
Samuel Davel
And then vice versa — since we're in retail, if they don't come to our site, when they go into the grocery store they're starting to look for things like single-sourced, early-harvested. Some of these key terms we really highlight in our UGC help them make an informed decision on what they're buying. We kind of like to say internally, we'd love for them to buy our product, but at the end of the day we just want more consumers buying high-quality olive oil that's good for them. And if they're doing that, then we're probably growing as the category grows.
Bryan Mahoney
That's a fascinating point of view. So how do you educate the consumer that there's a better product out there — and obviously you want them to buy yours — but what I'm hearing is you feel there's a responsibility to do that education, to bring customers up-market, to be more considerate when they're making a purchase, thinking about what they're ultimately putting in their body.
Samuel Davel
Exactly. When I joined the team, I had no idea — I was going to the store and buying the cheapest possible olive oil on the shelf, thinking all olive oils are the exact same, not realizing that when you're putting high-quality olive oil in your body, one, you feel a lot better. There have been numerous studies about reduced inflammation, skin health, nail health, hair health, et cetera. And two, you're putting a fat in your body that's relatively high in calories. A lot of people stay away from olive oil because of the calories, but this idea that five calories of one thing is different from five calories of something else really matters.
Samuel Davel
So if you're going to put those calories in your body, have them come from something that benefits you and is truly good for you — so that you get something out of it, as opposed to just emptiness.
Bryan Mahoney
How do you measure that? I mean, not how do you measure the calories — how do you measure the effectiveness of that type of marketing message? You've got to decide between spending money to acquire a customer versus spending money on a brand campaign. I'd love to unpack that a little. How do you think about it, how do you go advocate for that with executives — to say, listen, I'm going to spend money and I'm not going to be able to directly attribute it to an order or a customer, but it's important for the following reasons, because I think we're getting back to something like the golden age of marketing, where there was a lot more of that.
Bryan Mahoney
This balance between brand and performance, or targeting — because those never used to exist as separate things. It was just, I need to get eyeballs on this thing, and I need to compel people to want to be friends with me, to want to pick up what I'm putting down. Just curious how you think about that strategically.
Samuel Davel
Yeah. In 2025, we pushed heavily on Meta to talk about olive oil shots — the importance of taking an olive oil shot daily. And I kind of thought it was going to flop. I was like, I don't think consumers want to take daily olive oil shots. I don't want to — I've tried it, it's not for me — but let's see if there's something there. I'm not an expert in the olive oil field, I can be totally wrong about this. And that's something I love about marketing: your biases are gone. Lean into the data.
Samuel Davel
So we did that, and we found out there was a solid two-week to one-month period after Christmas — in the early January phase, the 'new year, new me' phase, as a lot of brands like to call it — where it was really successful. We saw our Meta numbers climb, our CAC decrease. Holistically it was really successful. It kind of burnt out in the middle of Q1, toward the back half, but early in January it was really successful. And that's something that really shocked and surprised me.
Bryan Mahoney
Does that become something that's annual now? Do you think about January as that moment where, as a wellness brand, that's your time to shine — does that become an evergreen campaign?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, it definitely will. This year, in early 2026, I knew January was going to be a big time for us no matter what. Being a better-for-you brand, I just didn't necessarily think this idea of the olive oil shot, and the way we were messaging our olive oil, was going to have the impact it did. But absolutely, it will be part of our early-January strategy moving forward.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool. Okay, so Meta and Google — two channels I heard there — and I think that content, the daily olive oil shot, feels like the perfect content for UGC or even influencers. Is there an influencer strategy at the brand, and if so, how has that evolved over time?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, there definitely is. I think early on it was really about just finding influencers in the wellness space that we could partner with. As we dove into performance and looked at the data, it became: what are these influencers posting, and why are certain ones working and others not? So we took this big idea of 'just wellness space, let's partner with a ton' and narrowed it down to specifically influencers talking about seed oils, influencers talking about grocery store finds that are better for you, and influencers talking about easy recipes. Creating recipe content has been a big one for us. So we've really refined and pinpointed the specific influencers who work well, out of what started as a really big idea.
Samuel Davel
And now we have a pretty good sense — we can look at an influencer and think we're probably going to be moderately successful with this one. More than likely, it won't flop.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, cool. That's a lot to manage across all those different channels, and even the measurement for all of that. What does the team look like today? Are you a one-person show, or do you have support?
Samuel Davel
No, thankfully we're not a one-person show. We have a small team — very lean. It's myself, kind of as the growth expert. We have a CMO, Katie, who's fantastic — she leads all of us. We have somebody who helps out on affiliate and influencer, Alex — she's very smart. And then we have Sam, who works on organic, social, as well as content creation and UGC support. So it's a very small team of four, and then we work with a handful of freelancers for other tasks — like an email freelancer named Johnny, who's fantastic, incredibly smart, we lean on him for a lot of reports. But yeah, it's a pretty small team.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, but no agencies in there — so it sounds like you're doing a lot of it in-house and augmenting the team with a trusted network of freelancers. Have you always taken that approach, or — I'm just curious, since we brought up agencies at the outset of the call — burned by them? Open to working with them again? All of the above?
Samuel Davel
Yeah. So Kosterina was working with an agency before I came on — they were doing all of the paid efforts. We do work with an agency on the Amazon side of things, Nexus Group, who we really like — they've been great to us. But the way I've kind of heard about the prior paid agency — I wasn't here for that experience — is that a lot of metrics seemed inflated, and there wasn't a whole lot of education on the back end. You and I both know that working in paid, you can inflate a ROAS number pretty dramatically while back-end revenue isn't increasing. I think there was a lot of that going on, which unfortunately I think a lot of brands see with agencies. I think agencies are fantastic.
Samuel Davel
I think the wealth of knowledge held at agencies is great. I think brands need to do their due diligence and find good agencies to work with — ones that actually increase revenue, as opposed to increasing ROAS.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, what would be on your diligence list? So you're writing a diligence list to help brands find the right agencies — what's on that list?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, I think first and foremost, understanding marketing metrics like MER, or a TACoS metric — I think one important thing would be whether they're in your Shopify backend and seeing your storefront revenue. That's a huge one. If they run both Meta and Google, I'm not a huge fan of segmenting those two channels into separate agencies — I think they should always be aligned, and the strategy should be aligned. So those are two big ones I'd want to know about. And then I'd want to get into their channel strategy: do they optimize for new customers? Do they understand new-customer metrics in both channels? What does their branded search look like on Google? It's easy to sit at a 3x on Google when your branded search is 80% of the spend.
Samuel Davel
I'm a branded-search guy — I think branded search is important — but what does that all mean holistically for your entire marketing strategy? So those are kind of the diligence points I'd launch off of and have conversations around. I was talking to a marketing friend the other day, and he brought up that agencies and AI companies coming out with all these different marketing tools hate talking to guys like us, because it's tough to sell to people who've been in the channels, been in the platforms, and understand it. When something doesn't quite click, it's like, well, what do you mean by that, what is that, let's dive into it — and it's just really difficult.
Samuel Davel
And then the other thing is, I just don't really want a super flashy agency — one that sells us and talks about another client hitting a 13x ROAS. In my mind, that's not real, that's unrealistic. Don't put that in your client's head. So yeah, that was kind of a long answer, but I love that.
Bryan Mahoney
I mean, I think that's great advice for brands, but it's also great for agencies that are listening — how do you under-promise and over-deliver, and how do we align our incentives too? I like to say that anyone can get rich with a bottle of wine and a spreadsheet — you can model a row where your brand's going to grow like this, and more often than not, that's just not the case. But if we think about telling the right story, reaching the right people, looking at the right metrics, working together, and being curious, you can grow in these times. So I love that diligence list.
Bryan Mahoney
I think that's super thoughtful. We talked a lot about metrics and measurement, and I think sometimes agencies show up with their own way of measuring, their own data. I've tended to see brands be more successful when they're in control of those numbers — there's a place they can go to that they mostly believe what they're being told. It's difficult when you have to rely on the different platforms, because their incentives aren't aligned with yours — they're incentivized to tell you they're driving all of your revenue. But when you add it all up, it doesn't always equal what's in the bank account. So, as someone who's as metrics-focused as you are, what are you using for measurement within the company?
Bryan Mahoney
And we'd love to just unpack the martech stack, if you wouldn't mind.
Samuel Davel
Yeah, absolutely. So at Kosterina we use Triple Whale — Triple Whale is kind of our source of truth. I don't think a lot of brands need Triple Whale or an attribution solution. I think what they need is to understand channel metrics and how to read them without being lazy. I came from the agency side, and I had a previous client reach out and say, I don't like what's happening — we're not seeing our revenue increase, but our ROAS looks really great. Can you just audit our account? Something doesn't feel right, and I really like this company. And I said, yeah, not a problem, let me take a look.
Samuel Davel
I spent probably about two hours in their Meta and Google accounts, and very quickly found that about 85% of their Meta-attributed revenue was view-through, not click-based. 75% of their Google revenue came through on branded search. And they also had branded search terms included in their Performance Max and Shopping campaigns — those were their top six or seven keywords across all campaigns.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Samuel Davel
So really early on, you're kind of seeing, well, that's why your revenue's not increasing — you're looking at a 12x ROAS reported, but your revenue has stayed stagnant, it's not increasing. So I think a lot of brands, if they're not going to use an attribution solution like Polar Analytics or Triple Whale or Northbeam — there's a handful out there — it's just about understanding what the channel is reporting to you, how to interpret it, and how to optimize off of it. If I'm that brand, I'm optimizing off of click data.
Samuel Davel
I probably still have the one-day view enabled in our campaigns, because we're not spending a lot — I want those events so the algorithm can learn. But I'm going to optimize off click-based data, and I'm going to optimize off a new-customer segment — that's where I would go. But for Kosterina, we use Triple Whale, and we trust it. We think the attribution is mostly accurate — at least accurate enough to be a north star for us.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay, directionally accurate. Just curious, are you looking at multiple attribution models? Linear, multi-touch, last-click — do you put them all together and decide what's actually working, or are you fixated on one?
Samuel Davel
No, we kind of put them all together. We start with either a total-attribution model — their AI model based on a post-purchase survey — we take a look at that one from the business side. Holistically, we typically like to look at linear, and then for channel optimizations we'll dive into Triple Whale attribution and views to make our individual optimizations inside the channel. Most of that is because we spend pretty heavily on social, and knowing we're in-store, I do think there's heavy value in our views on social for a brand like Kosterina.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so that's a great segue — you're not exclusively selling online, but you have an awful lot of first-party data. D2C is a big part of the business. How has the wholesale expansion gone, and how important has that been to overall brand growth? And if there's a perfect mix for you, in terms of blended revenue between those channels, what would it be, or what are you driving toward?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, this year it's been pretty significant. We launched in Target toward the end of 2024 — we've been in there almost a full year now, and we're getting a handful of more products in there, so it's been really good. I think the biggest difference between D2C and retail is that retail has a true top-of-funnel initiative that D2C kind of does, but kind of doesn't — because everybody likes to optimize for purchases and conversions, whereas you can't necessarily do that in the retail space. So a few things we've done to drive our retail sales — we've worked with an agency called Hummingbirds. They work with micro-influencers. They're great.
Samuel Davel
The content is fantastic, their team is fantastic. And we've pushed out to specific markets and then taken a look at the store data in those specific markets to see if there's a lift in velocity prior to the influencers going live and posting. So that's been huge. In a perfect world, I'd like to see us at like a 50 split right now. I'd like to see wholesale grow, because even though the margins are a little worse on wholesale, they're always going to be — you don't spend the same amount of money trying to acquire a wholesale customer, you have that shelf space. So I'd like to see our wholesale grow to about 60, 65% of overall revenue.
Bryan Mahoney
Do any of the DTC numbers help in those conversations with folks like Target? Were you able to say, 'okay, we understand this much about our customer, and we understand this much about yours, and this is why we should be on your shelves versus someone else'?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, absolutely, 100%. And what's also helped dramatically is understanding our DTC personas. We build creative off specific personas and implement those personas into our retail strategy — when we're looking for influencers to partner with, that's kind of how we think about using those specific personas to find influencers who match up and speak to those audiences, to drive Target velocity or wholesale velocity.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool. Is there a retail shelf you're not on in 2025 that you're hoping to be on in 2026?
Samuel Davel
Ooh, good question.
Bryan Mahoney
You're on some good ones already.
Samuel Davel
Yeah, we're on some good ones already. What I'd like — and this is kind of a politician's answer, I guess, but what I'd like—
Bryan Mahoney
That's totally fine.
Samuel Davel
What I like, politician answer or not, is us owning more space on those shelves. I don't necessarily have a picture-perfect retailer, but I'd like for us to have full pantry staples in retail — olive oils, vinegars, olives, crushed fruit vinegars. I'd like to see us have a full pantry shelf, so that retail can say, what are you looking for? You can find it all right here.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, that's an awesome answer, and that's the power of brand, I think. It's like, I tried this product from this brand and I really liked it, and then I saw some of their content, and I really like what they're saying and what they stand for — so the next time I see them expand into another category, of course I'm going to try that thing. I wish more brands did that. The brand storytelling and brand building is how you grow, whether it's share of wallet or expanding on the shelf, as opposed to just expanding the doors you're in. I think that's super thoughtful, and I appreciate it.
Samuel Davel
Yeah, I agree. And I think one thing we've noticed is you're always going to take it — if a retailer calls and says, hey, we want you in our stores, you're always going to take it. But you also have to be in a position where you're ready to be in that retailer, because if you jump off early and your velocity isn't there, getting back into that retailer years later is significantly more difficult. So I think a lot of brands should ask themselves, when a Target calls: do we have the packaging, do we have the messaging, do we have the brand awareness to actually drive velocity — or are we going to be spending a significant portion of our marketing budget building that brand awareness so we can drive velocity in store?
Bryan Mahoney
Cool, I love that. I'm just trying to look at my list of questions here — before we get to the fun stuff, you brought up branded search, and I think, gosh, we've made it 29 minutes and 34 seconds without talking about AI, but I'm going to take us there now. There's very little in the martech landscape that's changing as fast as search is, because of generative AI. I had a look at some of your pages — I think they're beautiful, I think the copy is fantastic. How are you thinking about the role AI is going to play, as you shift focus away from just branded search to optimizing for agents that are increasingly bubbling your results up to the surface, and ideally into that AI summary?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, great question. I think it starts with — I kind of think SEO is having a revival. For the past few years, a lot of brands have moved away from SEO, treated it like it doesn't really matter, an afterthought — you should do it, but whatever. I think a lot of that's having a revival because of these AI platforms that go out and crawl your sites. So really, the way we think about it is: we want to write content that's being discovered by AI and understood by AI, so that when somebody plugs into ChatGPT, 'what's the best olive oil out there,' our platform comes forward. That's a big one. And then we're really big on betas.
Samuel Davel
I have to imagine at some point Google's going to launch an AI-specific campaign type they can capitalize on. I know they've launched an AI search beta that plays in that space a little bit, but not quite 100%. So when that launches, we'll get on there, figure it out, and optimize those campaigns to the best of our ability. But that's really where I think it starts right now — getting back to writing content that's discoverable by AI agents, that can be crawled, and can be surfaced in the queries people are asking on these platforms.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool. Have you been surprised so far by the amount of traffic coming from these AI searches?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, definitely. We kicked up Triple Whale a while back, and I was looking at revenue by channel at the end of the month, and we've got like $30,500 from ChatGPT.
Bryan Mahoney
Wait, where did that come from?
Samuel Davel
You're like, yeah — not on ChatGPT, like what is this, where does this come from. The way I work, I'm like, all right, which UTM did we mess up, did we accidentally copy something over? And no — it's actually coming in from people doing searches on chatbots, figuring out healthy products. That's the route everyone's going — it's easy to find a lot of information and get your answer very quickly, and every brand has to be in that space.
Bryan Mahoney
To be in that space. Cool. So the back half of this year — are there investments from you and the team into optimizing for that, or is it just going to happen organically? How are you approaching that?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, we probably will.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I mean, I think the tools are going to help. I also think content helps a ton, and authentic reviews help a ton. I remember the early days of SEO, being able to figure out the algorithm and then scrambling when it changed — but once you figured it out, you were good for a little while. I think what's tricky here, and what I actually appreciate, because it goes back to the roots of authenticity, is that the results are never going to be the same. The way a given model interprets your content, and even the search the customer on the other end entered, is going to be really difficult to predict. So it's sort of like, yeah, we've got to put high-quality content out there.
Bryan Mahoney
There are no tricks. We need to get great reviews. We need to feed these LLMs—
Samuel Davel
AI tools are out there for pretty much every responsibility now — do you want to recommend them, get a trial, bring them on? We've launched some pretty thorough research, and one of the things we're looking at is a content-and-blog AI tool that writes SEO specifically discoverable for AI. There's a handful of tools out there — we haven't launched one yet, but I'd imagine by the beginning or middle of September, we probably will.
Bryan Mahoney
There are no tricks. We need to get great reviews. We need to feed these LLMs with information to help them make better decisions, in the same way you're thinking about what information helps our customers make a better decision. So I think it's a little more aligned than people assume. I never liked stuffing a bunch of keywords into hidden tags and building a bunch of backlinks that never really felt like they were helping the customer — it was more about tricking the algorithm. But what I like about this convergence is that it seems like the better job we do trying to attract customers honestly, the harder that content works for the LLMs too. But I think it's still early innings, and we're going to continue to see.
Bryan Mahoney
But that's helpful for me to understand how you're thinking generally about the landscape for AI — small team, understand the benefits there, give people time and space to experiment, and then share those results back within the organization.
Samuel Davel
It's only a matter of time before ChatGPT starts advertising inside of ChatGPT, and some of these other platforms start advertising inside of them too. I have to imagine you'll start seeing ads, early 2026, mid-2026, within these language models.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, oh man — pay to play within the large language models. That's going to be something. But I think you're probably right. History has shown, when you look at how Google and Facebook have grown, it's just a massive opportunity to make money. And despite OpenAI's mission, I think we've seen their capitalist instincts. So yeah, you're probably right.
Samuel Davel
Yeah, we'll see. I work in marketing, but I'm like, I don't want to see any more advertisements — if I never see another one, I'd be happy. But I just think that's probably the route it goes, because if you can make money, why not?
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, it's just the thing — I work adjacent to market, mostly in marketing technology, trying to give brands better data so they can ultimately connect with their customer. But I love a good ad, and what I don't like is when I get followed around the internet and feel like I'm being bludgeoned into making a purchase — like, no, thank you. A great creative, great copy, a great ad — I appreciate brands that go out and try to do that, and I'd love to give them better data to create better ads. It's content at the end of the day, and I think that's going to help elevate those brands into the category of iconic.
Bryan Mahoney
Bringing it back to how I kicked us off — I think we've covered a lot here. You said you weren't a veteran of marketing podcasts, but sports podcasts, perhaps, are your next one. Are you talking about sports? Are you talking about marketing? What do you prefer to do?
Samuel Davel
Yeah, most likely I'll be talking about marketing. I'll be talking about sports probably this weekend, hopefully with a beer, now that the NFL season has kicked off. And I'm sure — actually, me and my wife are going to Hawaii early September.