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Your weekly DTC industry roundup

This week was a reminder that platform changes can be both helpful and messy.

Here’s what happened and what to check right now.

• New sponsor spots are open in The Thread
• DTC Index data that’s (surprisingly) encouraging
• Google’s budget modeling is now available to everyone
• Meta’s $2B AI move is landing in Ads Manager
• Google Ads may be reactivating paused keywords

Let's get started

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Market Performance

Returning Customers Are Carrying The Revenue Growth (And Paid Media Is Why)

Total revenue across the DTC Index is up +12.01% YoY over the last 28 days.

Returning customer revenue jumped +12.46%, and during the 9-day stretch before Valentine's Day it hit +18.80%.

Brands pulled existing customers back at a rate that blew past last year.

The interesting part is how closely paid media tracked that.

The daily average revenue growth reported by Meta and Google ($3,331.94) almost perfectly mirrored total revenue growth ($3,386.54).

Correlation between those channels and returning customer revenue was 0.84.

Paid media was re-activating existing ones, instead of just focusing on acquiring new ones.

That should change how you think about what "retention spend" actually means.

One more note — Steve Rekuc from CTC flagged on sentiment. The DTCCI has been sitting stable at net -10% to -7% for four months.

Sounds bad on paper, but Steve's read is that stability actually correlates better with purchasing behavior than sky-high optimism does.

We watched the opposite play out in Q1 2025 when confident consumers just … waited.

Stable and mildly pessimistic, huh?

Turns out people actually open their wallets in that environment.

See Steve's post here

Measurement & Data

Google Just Made Marketing Mix Models Usable

MMM has been the measurement approach everyone talks about and almost nobody uses in real-time decision making.

Google is trying to fix that.

They launched Scenario Planner, a no-code interface built on top of Meridian, their open-source MMM.

Test budget allocations. See projected ROI. Stress-test channel mixes.

The problem MMM has always had is speed and usability. Nearly 40% of organizations can’t connect MMM outputs to actual business decisions (Harvard Business Review).

And most MMM projects take 8–12 weeks to produce anything.

By then, the market has already moved twice.

Historically, MMM has been a big brand, big budget, CPG play. You hire a consultancy, and six months later you get a 60-page deck.

If Google can actually compress that into self-serve planning with native Ads data integration and aggregate, privacy-safe modeling, mid-market ecommerce brands just got access to a class of measurement they could never afford before.

Or it becomes another dashboard nobody opens.

We'll see.

See how Scenario Planner works

AI Advertising

Meta Puts Its $2 Billion AI Acquisition To Work Inside Ads Manager

Meta acquired Manus AI for over $2 billion in December.

That money is now showing up inside the ad platform.

Some advertisers are seeing prompts to activate Manus for report building, audience research, and campaign analysis.

Basically, an embedded AI assistant for your ad workflow.

Meta has made massive AI infrastructure bets, and it needs that investment to feel real to advertisers.

Putting Manus inside the product is the most direct path from “we invested in AI” to “here’s something you can actually use.”

We think it’s worth testing early.

Whether it saves real time over what your team is already doing is an open question.

Read the full details here

Platform Updates

Google Ads Is Re-Enabling Your Paused Keywords Without Asking

Go check your Google Ads change history.

A system tool labeled "Low activity system bulk changes" is automatically re-enabling keywords that were intentionally paused.

The entries show up as automated bulk updates with an "Undo" option, but if you're not actively monitoring your change history, you'd never catch it.

This tool was previously associated with pausing inactive elements.

Turning things back ON is new. Google hasn't said whether it's a feature, an experiment, or a bug.

Either way, unexpected keyword reactivation can quietly blow through budgets and wreck pacing on tightly controlled accounts.

Check your histories and undo fast.

Read more about this here

Tldr

What We Covered

A common thread (pun intended) runs through all of these stories.

The DTC Index data is genuinely encouraging.

Revenue growth driven by returning customers, fueled by paid media, in a stable sentiment environment.

That 0.84 correlation between Meta/Google reported revenue and returning customer revenue should make any brand re-examine where "retention" ends and "acquisition" begins.

Those lines are blurrier than most dashboards want to admit.

Google's Scenario Planner and Meta's Manus integration are both moving in the same direction.

The platforms want to be the measurement AND optimization layer, not just where you buy media.

Both are betting that the deeper their tools sit inside your decision-making workflow, the harder it becomes to leave.

Not necessarily a bad thing. But you should know the game being played.

Which brings us to Google quietly flipping paused keywords back on. Platform automation is great when it's working for you.

When it starts overriding manual controls without a word … but that's a different conversation.

Go check your change history this week.

Better to be safe than sorry.