• by Kate Terhune , September 5, 2025

Your CFO’s Favorite Brand Strategy

In a world ruled by dashboards and instant performance metrics, it’s easy to confuse short-term demand spikes with long-term health. But what if the real power of marketing lies not in the click, but in what happens long after?

At Chubbies, Preston Rutherford helped scale a cult-followed brand into a $100M+ business by betting on brand—in a measurable way. When performance started to stall, he built a new framework: one that prioritized baseline revenue, emotional connection, and causal evidence that even a CFO could love.

Now, as co-founder of Chubbies and now co-founder of Marathon Data, he’s helping other marketers reframe brand as performance, track signals that matter, and build businesses that don’t fall apart the minute an ad goes down.

This week, we go one-on-one with Preston to talk about the fallacy of ROAS, the metrics that actually move equity value, and why your marketing comp plan might be the most important decision your company makes.

The result? A masterclass in how to manage up, scale smart, and build marketing engines that run—even when your budget doesn’t.

You can listen to the entire podcast at this link.