Don't mistake CityRow for a Peloton wannabe. Both companies launched about the same time a decade ago. But CityRow started as a network of boutique HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) studios that only started selling connected home exercise machines several years ago. And for co-founder Helaine Knapp, the growing physical presence is the brand and marketing special sauce. As she tells Brand Insider this week, that omnichannel "flywheel" drives the two achievement metrics every D2C trains for - cost of acquisition (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). As Knapp explains it, from lower-key content marketing to laser-focused performance advertising, D2C brand …

The Amazon ecommerce ecosystem continues to breed fascinating marketing and business offshoots, not the least of which is the so-called "Amazon roll-up." These companies, like Berlin Brands Group (BBG) acquire digital native brands that invented themselves principally to sell in Amazon. As General Manager and President Bob Land tells us, this is a wild world unto itself that challenges many preconceptions about what constitutes brand and valuations.

When Walgreens became a vital channel for the national vaccination push last year, the stakes for media reaching both old and potential customers with just the right message at just the right time and place went sky high. As Senior Director, Media Strategy & Planning Jennifer Peelle outlined recently at our Retail Summit, it called for "personalization at scale." But how to personalize every touchpoint, target and plan media according to unprecedented profile points like different levels of vaccination need or aversion? It is a remarkable tale that involved data reorganization, predictive modeling and shifting KPIs away from mere sales …

The "great resignation" of pandemic-fueled soul-searching and career-reassessment had an acute impact on the virtual education market. Tech literacy and some coding skills were high on everyone's list of basic skills for any career shift in the next-gen economy. Coding was not just for developers anymore, and online skills shops like Codecademy have been riding the wave. The company claims to have taught over 40 million customers across its ten year history, but the category is awfully cluttered now. With backgrounds in tech (early Yahoo) and media (Playboy), CMO Robin Zucker is marketing the brand at the intersection of performance …