Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome in Ecommerce Growth [Marketer of the Day Podcast]

Robert Plank: Welcome back. Mike Danford is on the podcast from Adverio, and we are going to be discussing ecommerce, specifically large-scale catalogs, breaking through revenue plateaus, scaling strategies, and getting into untapped markets. Mike is here because he knows his stuff. Mike, glad to have you.

Mike Danford: Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to it.

Robert Plank: We did our best to introduce you, but in your own words, what are you focusing on, what has you energized and fired up?

Mike Danford: There is a lot. Professionally, we work with large catalogs, understanding how to navigate that when each marketplace has a different set of data they release and a different way of presenting it. So you need to understand how to clean it up and present it in a way that makes the most sense for your brand, so you can make educated decisions. And the last year and a half or so, we are in the AI agentic hat as well, since we have such large data sets, how can we do more with less and supercharge our team to allow them to make more data-driven decisions, and help with standardizing that, making sure there is consistency in the mechanics behind the scenes, so we can keep those results on repeat for new brands.

Robert Plank: You mentioned AI, and a lot of us use AI every day for copywriting. So many times the work is fitting the pieces together, here is this data source, it runs through Zapier, there is a spreadsheet, custom coding, and that is the headache, making sure the input is just right. Tell me about the challenges you see. All these things are available with ecommerce, anyone can plug into Amazon or Walmart, and even I just saw on your website you can be listed at Target. So what is happening in the ecommerce space, where are people succeeding, where are they failing?

Mike Danford: 2024 had a different set of challenges and 2025 will have its own. For the last year, certain platforms, and I will speak more to Amazon, have released more data than historically. Since Andy Jassy has been in, there have been significant changes on the back end, and it is helping our brands stay away from shiny objects, anything that comes out they think they have to use and understand. We are able to leverage that, since we manage so many brands, hey, we have already tested this, no need to do that, or here is the best way to reduce your learning curve. It is not being afraid to try new things, but also not letting that overrule your existing quarterly and annual goals. On the AI piece, AI has been out for years, for us it started as more of a bidding, very simplistic model, and now it is a lot more, you can get outside of just numbers into images and scans and so much more. The brands that lean into it and learn to leverage it are putting a gap between the brands that are more, I do not like AI, my wife is anti-AI, but you have to understand how it works or it is going to take over certain parts and you will be left behind. So the brands getting familiar with it, asking how can AI help us do it better, faster, or both, will stay with the curve or ahead of it. AI can give you ideas at large data sets that a human would take hours, days, or weeks to do. For 2025, the advertising and marketing section is getting more saturated, both in volume of sellers and new ad types, and everyone is now using some form of SaaS to optimize bids and placements, so it is getting more competitive and harder to squeeze out that extra incrementality at a macro level. However, we are seeing a big gap where a lot of brands are still not testing their pricing. If you can allow Amazon to be your north star where the other prices follow Amazon, there is a lot more juice out there if you learn to make micro adjustments, leaning into your low conversion days versus high conversion days or around tentpoles. AI helps with that, rules automation, looking at what the market is doing and understanding what your competitors are doing, willing to say our competitor dropped by X percent, we do not want to drop below that, so let them have their little sales pop now and we will take over later. It feels like the bidding of advertising five or six years ago is where we are at with the bidding of our prices, being sure not to make too large of changes so you do not get delisted or blocked out of the buy box. The micro adjustments there, we are seeing 2 to 3 percent margin for a lot of brands, consistent, or more if they have not touched their prices in years. It is also a way, when we connect to a brand with A, B, C, D tiers, maybe the bottom of the catalog does not make sense to run advertising, so let's test your pricing, the only thing we change is your pricing, and a lot of times that gets some of the slow movers moving to normal velocity, letting you liquidate stuff that has been sitting. It is nice to not have to spend more to find out if it is going to sell more.

Robert Plank: That is a heck of an answer. What I am getting is how important it is to have that human strategy, here is this whole catalog and maybe there is that D tier we can get selling with a little nudging. You do not just let the bidding bots loose, you say we will go ahead on this level, and if our competitor is doing a sale, let them have it but do not let them drag us down. And AI gives you a lot of stuff, use it to shortcut the time it would take a person 10 or 20 days to crunch. You work at these huge brands, is there usually something that is wrong with a lot of them, a common mistake you see?

Mike Danford: There are a few. At a high level, a lot of brands will test a product in development or advertising, go to market, try it for three to six months, and if it does not do well they let it sit there wanting to retest it later. It is a small amount of inventory so it does not bother them. So we routinely come in and, like we mentioned, put a little advertising behind it, there are a lot of cheap clicks out there, just to get some relevant traffic and see what happens, and then pricing. A lot of times that will do it. One of our favorite things is we tell a brand two things. One, are you prepared for the marketing kiss of death, can you handle a lift in units and products, make sure they are prepared. And the second, my favorite, is usually about six months in, they will finally be comfortable and say, hey, we are selling this product we have not sold in 10 years, or you are selling a product now in our A tier that we have never been able to sell. So it is great to see products considered dead or not viable revamped. Brands need to not be afraid to retest. The market changes daily, weekly, annually. You may have been too early to the market for that product or style, and it may be a couple years before it becomes popular. All it takes is an influencer or two, and it takes off, and the other algorithms on the platform pick up and piggyback that. So that is the biggest opportunity for them, and honestly it makes it easier for us when we first work with a brand, hey, there are a lot of levers you have not pulled in a long time, let's pull those again with a little budget in a testing period.

Robert Plank: I love the method, it gives your client an easy win and shows the value of fresh perspective. I am looking at your website and you have all these brands you helped. Is there a fun story you can share to demonstrate the before and after and what the process is like working with you?

Mike Danford: There are several. In general, the theme is my favorite is a brand comes to us down 20 or 30 percent year over year, and you can see in their history they are trying, it is not that they are stagnant, and suddenly the business is down. Those are my favorites, because we come in, vet, and say here is where we think the opportunity is, give you a total addressable market potential, agree on how much margin you need to give up for three to six months, and go from there. At the end of six months, my favorite thing is a brand telling us we are moving products we never thought we could that have not moved in a long time. That is the most rewarding. There is a case study on our website, and we have amazing brands to work with. It is the brands that come to us humble, not afraid to admit there is something to improve, and are patient, understanding it takes a certain amount of time, and then six months to a year later seeing where it is. We tell a brand in the beginning this is not a quick fix, there are quick fixes we deploy in the beginning, but what you are looking for is significant, and if they can be patient, those are my favorite brands, because the appreciation goes both ways.

Robert Plank: The nurturing and onboarding is underrated, because there is always the focus on the process of helping the client, but then there is laying out a plan, meeting with them, telling them what to expect, checking in and showing results. It is a different mindset that is easy to ignore. As far as getting clients, what is your preferred way, going on podcasts, trade shows, paid ads?

Mike Danford: My favorite is referral, a brand we work with is the best ambassador, and they usually bring brands of comparable size and like-minded individuals. We have been doing podcast marketing for six or seven months, it has been great to connect with different audiences, and we have given away a lot of free tools on our website that help audiences even if we are not able to work with their brand, maybe they are not a seven-figure brand yet but aspire to be. We are a little old-fashioned in how we connect, we still like physical connection, trade shows are a big portion for 2025, being face to face. I have a background in construction contractor management, and I miss being able to collaborate and see things in person and build rapport instantly, which is easier than through cold email. We have a physical VSL, a video sales letter that is actually physical. And behind me is a book, Get Different by Mike Michalowicz, one of the best about thinking outside the box, do not do what everyone else is doing. Our mascots are rhinos, so we are the purple rhino among all the gray rhinos. It is about how you stand out and get through the noise and the gatekeepers. Where brands hang out changes every year, so the plan is different, it is not necessarily newsletters or cold outbound. And a big shift for us is understanding it is not the volume, it is the quality, we have a smaller subset of brands we want to work with, so being more intimate in our initial connection goes a long way.

Robert Plank: You are a hard worker but also have the awareness of the different methods and what is working. I love Mike Michalowicz, I had him on this podcast 10 years ago. We have talked about who you help and how you grow your business. Is there a question you wish I would ask you but I do not know to ask?

Mike Danford: That is a great question. No, I think you have asked great questions so far, I cannot think of one top of mind.

Robert Plank: Since we have talked about all these cool things, who is the ideal client fit, what size should their company be, and what problems, to start a conversation with you?

Mike Danford: Great question. It is typically a mid-seven to mid-eight figure brand, and ideally they are flat in the last year or two, or have some decline in revenue. That means the brand is willing to work and find a solution to regain that loss. With brands that are already accelerating, you are constantly battling whether it is our efforts or theirs that turned things around, so it is easier when there is a clear delta we can show within 30 to 60 days. Ideally they have large catalogs, we call ourselves soft lines experts, think textiles, bedding, apparel, footwear, clothing accessories, high multivariate where you have multiple sizes and colors of the same product. There are a lot of unique tactics for that, it makes your campaign set much higher and you have to be more strategic, and look at it through a macro lens. Because you have such a large catalog, you are not able to pull all those little tiny levers that this guru and that guru say to do, they help but not at the level for a large catalog. It is about pulling those macro levers and having the big deltas as quick as possible.

Robert Plank: Great insight, we might hear a guru say something exciting we need to implement, and someone like you might say, did that guru mention it because it is new, is it appropriate for you. It makes sense to have a team look in and say is that the right time, or does it make more sense to pull the macro lever first. And you mentioned free tools on your website, even if someone is not at that level yet. Tell me about these tools.

Mike Danford: I wear a bit of our CTO or technical hat with the AI. Anytime a brand comes to us wanting a particular report or way to look at their data, we work with multiple brands so we cannot always have that exact format, so we look at it and say can we create a custom report. Generally I have my dedicated data scientist create a lighter, more nimble version in Google Sheets as a prototype, it is faster than having my full software engineering team pull it in, which is a six-week process versus a one-week process with my data scientist. We get those to an MVP and then roll them out to the other teams into our full reporting for all our brands. Anytime we create those tools, we release them. It can be allocating your advertising dollars by product, how to look at very large sets of data, or a standard format that comes out of Amazon that is not available in the API so most reporting platforms cannot do it, so here is a way to pull it, it will collate it and show you over time. Some have our unique KPIs, like GEAR, growth efficiency advertising ratio, which takes a lot of data and gives you a bigger picture. In our space a lot of folks focus on one or two KPIs, they are good but do not tell the whole picture, they need to be tied together to indicate directionality, as opposed to just focusing on ROAS or ACoS. ROAS is a good metric but it only shows you efficiency, it does not show you efficacy, are the ads actually working or are we just getting cheap ads. Any of those tools are in there, along with our best practices, usually in the Google Suite, PDFs, Sheets, macros, and videos. The feedback from the community has been great.

Robert Plank: You have created something amazing, and that is a good business lesson, if you have these byproducts of your business, hand them out to someone else. It is not the whole picture but it gives them a piece and everybody wins. Before I let you go, I like to ask my guests about a fun quote or lesson that has helped them in life or business.

Mike Danford: I try to live by less is more. It is very easy with shiny object syndrome to chase things and overthink, having an analytical mind it is easy to go down tangents, but I try to reset and say can I do this easier, simpler, do I need to do that. Case in point, trying to build those reports, how do we do this lighter to make sure it works before we start pulling people off other projects. Same with our own advertising and marketing, how can we do more with less, which is what AI is doing for us, how can we supercharge and get more out of what we are already doing. If I lead with that, or remind myself of it, I get a lot more done.

Robert Plank: I love it. Easy, simple, and is it necessary. I call that avoiding going down the rabbit hole, because the newness and learning can be fun and the next thing you know you are letting your emotions carry you away. Great advice. Thank you very much, Mike, for the fun stories and advice and helping us see into your mindset.

Mike Danford: Thanks so much, Robert.