We all know that data doesn’t speak for itself, but what happens when multiple instruments of measurement contain flaws or gaps that impede our ability to measure what matters on their own? Turning to our intuition and triangulation of what’s happening in the broader macro sense can often help explain our understanding of our customers’ ever-changing choices, opinions, and actions. Thankfully we had Erika Olson, co-founder of fwd. — which in our opinion is essentially the Freakonomics of marketing consultancies — join Tim, Moe and Val for this discussion to dive into some real-world examples of things that are inherently hard to measure and ways to overcome those challenges.

Podcasts, Videos, and Other Neat Things Mentioned in the Show

• @tonykellyworld on Instagram


• (Podcast) Acquired – LVMH episode


• (Event) Canva Create 2025


• (Podcast) What Now? with Trevor Noah: Adam Grant Gives Trevor an Intellectual Wedgie


• (Podcast) The Product Manager Podcast: The Product-Process Gap – How To Stop This Leak In Your Org’s Budget with Manuel Da Costa


• (YouTube Video) What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Games

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Episode Transcript

0:00:05 .8 Announcer: Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. Analytics topics covered conversationally and sometimes with explicit language.

0:00:13 .7 Tim Wilson: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Analytics Power Hour. This is episode number 264 and I’m Tim Wilson from Facts and Feelings. On this episode, we’re going to talk about hard things. There are a lot of hard things out there. There’s Tuvan throat singing, there’s tightrope walking, there’s memorizing PI to 70,000 decimal places, differential calculus, trying to get me to make a coherent point. Right up with all of these, some would say, or at least many marketers would say, is measuring brand. Anyone within a country mile of marketing or marketing analytics has heard the declaration, we’re spending a bunch of money for branding. It’s a top of the funnel investment. It really just can’t be measured. Well, on this episode, we’re going to dig into that specific hard thing, measuring brand. My suspicion or my hope, maybe my expectation is that, well, first and foremost we’ll surface some useful thoughts about how to approach measuring brand, what that means and what is and isn’t advisable. I suspect though that along the way we’ll get some perspective that can be brought to bear on measuring other things that are hard to measure. We’ll see. Joining me for this episode is Val Kroll, also from Facts and Feelings. Val, how you doing? Have you ever tried Tuvan throat singing?

0:01:34 .5 Val Kroll: What would you have done if I had given you a little sample right there?

0:01:38 .5 Moe Kiss: I want a, I want a sample right now.

0:01:44 .4 TW: And that other voice we just heard from down under is Moe Kiss. Who is from, is it, was it Canvia? It’s Calavania. What’s your company’s name again, Moe?

0:01:57 .0 MK: Canva.

0:02:00 .9 VK: What a comedian.

0:02:02 .2 TW: Well, yeah, I think just maybe need a little bit more branding work for Canva. Canva follows me around a lot.

0:02:10 .0 MK: I’ll let the team know. We should do more brand marketing this year.

0:02:13 .1 TW: You know what you need to do? You need to do some podcast marketing is what you need to do on niche analytics podcasts. Well, since all three of us have dealt with this particular challenge of measuring brand in various ways during our careers, we thought we could use the podcast to pick someone’s brain who has really dealt with it. And for that we reached out to Erika Olson. Erika is a co founder of fwd, which is an insights and empathy-driven brand consultancy that has done work with a ton of well-known brands including, ESPN, Comedy Central, Nike, L’Oreal Paris, or is it supposed to be L’Oreal Paris? That’s why I don’t do French. Smirnoff. She was listing a whole bunch of other booze brands before the show, which I was tempted to just rattle off all of those to really skew people as to exactly what they work on, and many, many, many more. And today Erika is our guest. So welcome to the show, Erika.

0:03:10 .2 Erika Olsen: Thank you. Excited to be here.

0:03:12 .8 TW: All right. So we rarely sort of start shows this way, but in this case, I think it actually might be useful to have you talk a little bit about what, kind of what types of work fwd does and maybe along with that, how and where does brand measurement fit in and whatever that means.

0:03:34 .3 EO: Yeah. So we say we’re an insights-driven brand consultancy and it’s pretty vague, I think somewhat by design. In more plain English I would say, we essentially help clients with any questions that involve consumers or culture. And even that is quite broad. Right? So I kind of think about it as we do a bit of like diagnosing or reacting like where there’s problems. And this is going to foreshadow where some of those brand metrics come in. But lack of relevancy, lack of recall, slowing sales. Anywhere they see there are issues, we often help them figure out why those issues are happening, how they might be able to reverse them, what things are contributing to them or taking away from the success they’re looking for. So we do a bit of that and then we do, I would say like optimizing. So that could be very tactical, like optimizing PAC, formula, comms, whatever it is, tactical stuff and a little bit of target understanding. So sort of optimizing empathy within the organization so that they can really understand and know who they’re speaking to and make sure those people are receiving the message that they’re trying to communicate as best as possible.

0:04:43 .5 EO: And then the last one, I sometimes call it predicting. I think that’s actually like a poor word for it. But we try to make sense of things. So often those briefs will start with things like help us make sense of X or how should we be thinking about Y? So when a category is shifting or the world is changing, we help them think differently about it. And oftentimes, how you have to think about that category is misaligned with the organizational structure that has been in place. So there’s that and then a little bit of future stuff. So like the world is changing. We know that. How is it changing? Almost like scenario planning, some people would call it. So I know that was a long list, but that’s why it’s quite vague by design.

0:05:22 .5 MK: One thing I do want to get an understanding of, I’ve been having lots of different conversations about people, I suppose more in the big tech company space. And you obviously had this really interesting remit because you get to work with so many different companies. What are you seeing as kind of the level of appetite at the moment for experimentation and marketing mixed models. Are people still on that train of thought of like, yes, I believe in brand marketing from an ideological perspective or are you finding clients are really like, we want to experiment and prove the value here or is it such a mixed bag depending on the client?

0:06:03 .3 EO: You know, I feel actually like I’ve been seeing more and more briefs come from teams that are building themselves up to be the bran