Scalability School
Podcast Description
Scalability School is your cheat code for building a more profitable DTC brand or agency.
We break down tactical strategies, real-time wins, and tough lessons from three powerful perspectives: operator, agency, and community. It's not theory—it's what’s actually working in the wild. Skip the fluff, steal what works, and scale with confidence.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on key DTC marketing strategies, performance optimization, and creative operations, with episodes exploring topics such as effective ad testing methodologies, leveraging user-generated content on platforms like TikTok, and scalable creative production frameworks. Specific episodes detail strategies for measuring agency performance through report cards and making pivotal hiring decisions based on ad spend thresholds.
Scalability School is your cheat code for building a more profitable DTC brand or agency.
We break down tactical strategies, real-time wins, and tough lessons from three powerful perspectives: operator, agency, and community. It’s not theory—it’s what’s actually working in the wild. Skip the fluff, steal what works, and scale with confidence.
This episode is a tactical breakdown of AppLovin as a scaled acquisition channel—what’s actually different vs Meta, what you should change in creative + campaign structure, and how to think about incrementality + reporting so you don’t judge it with the wrong yardstick.
Miranda Pettinger, Performance Marketing Manager at 365 Holdings explains how they onboarded to the platform when Meta was underperforming and AppLovin started popping off in buyer circles. They used a Triple Whale onboarding credit to test with low risk, and at the time it wasn’t even self-serve (you had to Slack the rep for changes).
The short on “why AppLovin works” is AppLovin’s rewarded inventory creates an opt-in attention trade (“watch this 30s ad, get coins”), which changes the psychology from “I’m annoyed by ads” to “I’m choosing to watch this.” That makes the creative game feel closer to a 30-second TV spot: you’ve got time to explain, objection-handle, and sell in one sitting. From there it turns into a playbook with these Keytakeaways:
18:30 Bidding / structure: ROAS vs cost-per-purchase, why value doesn’t work for some catalogs and how to structure campaigns
19:40 DPAs + catalog control: Why DPAs can help if you’ve got lots of variants and the importance of controlling what products show up.
25:50 Measurement reality: AppLovin tends to under-report purchases, especially at scale, so you want to validate with post-purchase survey, MER/traffic lift and/or a 3rd party data tool.
29:30 Incrementality / overlap: The Meta+AppLovin overlap and how Meta+Google overlap is likely way bigger.
33:55 Creative testing: unlike Meta where “testing vs scaling” can feel walled off, AppLovin can allow new winners to climb fast inside the same campaign, without dumping spend on junk.
38:30 End cards: offers matter a lot. How animation helps, and showing variants (colors/metal types) can lift clicks
To connect with Miranda, you can follow her on x at https://x.com/mirandpettinger
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
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