Executive Summary

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Role: VP of Growth Marketing

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The Outcome: Scaled total active email subscribers from ~50,000 to 170,000+ (+240%) in under 12 months while growing monthly ad spend from $5K to $60K+ (12x) across a portfolio of 10+ media brands.

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Key Insight 1: Solved the Unit Economics problem for the portfolio by engineering a Native Teaser Funnel, which reduced Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) by 50% (from ~$4.00 → ~$1.97) compared to generic "Sign Up" campaigns.

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Key Insight 2: Simple CBO campaign structure with 3 ad sets (lookalike vs. open vs. interest) and the same 6 articles in each adset forced a head-to-head audience test.

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1. The Challenge: The Unit Economics Barrier

Overstory Media Group (OMG) needed to launch new local media brands rapidly while scaling established ones. However, the existing acquisition model was financially broken.

• The Ambiguity: There was no established framework for growth; every market launch was an ad-hoc experiment.
• The Economic Barrier: Across both new and established brands, the standard "Sign Up for our Newsletter" pitch was yielding a ~$4.00 CPA. At this price point, the unit economics for a free newsletter product were unsustainable, effectively blocking our ability to scale paid acquisition.

2. The Strategy: The "Native Teaser" Pivot

To make the economics work (target <$2.50 CPA), we didn't have the luxury of isolating variables over months of testing. I hypothesized we needed to drastically reduce friction and increase intent simultaneously. We moved away from the "Generic Web Funnel" to a "Native Content Funnel."

The Architecture:

• Variable A (Friction Reduction): Switched from external landing pages to Meta Native Lead Forms, keeping the user on-platform to maximize conversion rate.
• Variable B (Psychological Hook): Replaced "Sign Up" messaging with "Article Teasers"—snippets of high-performing local stories that required a signup to finish reading.