Geo Holdouts, Halo Effects, and the Real Results of Your Ad Spend — With Olivia Kory of Haus Analytics

Most DTC brands are making million-dollar channel decisions based on attribution data that's fundamentally wrong. Olivia Kory — CSO of Haus and the incrementality expert Brett references on stage more than almost anyone — breaks down what it actually takes to know if your ads are working. Spoiler: if you've been writing off YouTube based on MTA, you owe yourself a retest.

Inside the episode:

Why YouTube's true ROAS is 3.4X what the platform reports — and how Haus's 190-test study across 74 brands proved it (plus why your D2C numbers alone are only half the picture)The right time to start incrementality testing — it's not when you're huge, it's when your business gets complicated enough that turning off ads won't give you a clean answerHow StockX went from barely spending on YouTube to making it their #2 acquisition channel — by running geo holdout tests and acting on the resultsWhy Meta's optimization might be too good — and how brands like Jones Road are improving their iROAS by making changes that look worse in-platformThe surprise winner: AppLovin — Olivia came in skeptical of mobile game ad inventory and got data she didn't expectHaus's new DTC Basics tier — a lower-cost entry point so more brands can stop guessing which channels are actually driving growth

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Chapters:

[00:00] Intro clip — Olivia on treating incrementality as a report card vs. a growth tool

[00:22] Introductions & background — Olivia's path from Starcom → TubeMogul → Netflix → Quibi → Sonos → Haus

[06:55] What is incrementality? — The randomized controlled trial analogy; geo holdouts vs. click-based attribution

[10:45] When should a brand start using incrementality? — The low-to-mid 8-figure inflection point; multi-channel complexity as the signal

[15:34] Native platform lift studies (Meta & Google) — Are they worth it? Signal loss, CAPI, iOS 14.5 limitations

[17:25] Geo holdout vs. user-level testing — Why Haus was "born out of the ashes of iOS 14.5" and went all-in on geo

[19:37] How a Haus geo holdout test actually works — Data ingestion, experiment design, market matching, results