Podcast guest & speaker
Where should the next marketing dollar go?
I’m Tony Lee, a growth and performance marketing leader with 13+ years across in-house and agency roles. I talk about the decisions behind the work: where to spend, what the reporting tells us, and what we still need to find out.
My experience includes in-house roles at Shopify, Yamibuy and Starz, and agency work for brands including Google, A24 and Searchlight. The topics below draw on that work, along with four years playing poker professionally before I entered marketing.
Experience at a glance
- 13+ years
- Growth and performance marketing across tech, entertainment and retail
- Meta for Business
- Featured in Social Skills, Season 3
- 4 years
- Professional poker before marketing
Topics
What we can talk about.
Six starting points for a conversation. Each includes questions you can use or adapt for your audience.
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01
Friction by Design
At Shopify, I added an interactive step before the landing page to help qualify the traffic reaching it. The campaign achieved the highest session-to-lead conversion rate among the sources tracked for store-acquisition work at Shopify. We can discuss why I added the step and what the result tells us.
Sample questions- What job did the extra step do before someone reached the landing page?
- When would you remove a step instead?
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02
Would they have bought anyway?
At Yamibuy, I replaced cart-item retargeting with weekly promotions and changed which products we used to acquire new customers. The broader acquisition work recorded CAC 15% below baseline and orders up 25% year over year. We can discuss why a best-selling product wasn’t always the best starting point for a new customer.
Sample questions- Why did you change the retargeting tactic and the products featured in acquisition ads at Yamibuy?
- What would make you move budget away from a channel with a strong-looking report?
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03
What poker taught me about marketing decisions
I played poker professionally for four years before entering marketing. This conversation looks at bankroll management, bet sizing, and why a good decision can still have a bad outcome.
Sample questions- What did managing a bankroll teach you about managing a marketing budget?
- Where does the poker comparison stop being useful?
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04
Making room for experiments: 70/20/10
I use 70% proven work, 20% promising ideas and 10% new experiments as a starting point for a budget conversation. We can discuss what changes with the business and how leaders protect room for learning when a test doesn’t work.
Sample questions- What would make you change the 70/20/10 split?
- How do you decide whether an experiment deserves more time or should stop?
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05
Did this work?
What would have happened without the advertising? This conversation covers holdout tests, the limits of attribution, and how to make a budget decision when the evidence is incomplete.
Sample questions- What can a holdout test tell you that an attribution report can’t?
- How should a team act when a test is inconclusive?
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06
Zero to twelve
I joined an international media company as its first U.S. employee and helped build the account base from zero to twelve in eighteen months. We can discuss the work of adapting the business for U.S. clients and serving the accounts as they came in.
Sample questions- What needed to change for U.S. clients?
- What did it take to serve the new accounts as the business grew?
