Hey Cowboys,

Happy Monday! Hope you had a great weekend. We’re breaking down some hot news today.

LIVE NOW — come hang out on X or YouTube.

Today’s lineup 👇 and stories.

Chase Mohseni, Chris Orzechowski, Jessica Herrin, Ashley Wright, and Cody Wittick join Ecomm Cowboy for a conversation about growing your brand across creative, email, AI, and creator-led commerce. We’re digging into where to put your team’s time and budget to turn marketing activity into profitable growth.

Amazon wants to put your brand in front of shoppers while they’re asking ChatGPT what to buy.

Amazon Ads announced a partnership with OpenAI that lets select U.S. advertisers extend their campaigns into ChatGPT. It’s currently a limited pilot, with Delta Vacations among the first brands testing it.

Why operators should care

A conversation about which product to buy is valuable advertising territory. Someone comparing options, asking about alternatives, or narrowing down a purchase is giving you context that a scrolling thumb doesn’t.

That’s the opportunity here: another way to reach potential customers during the decision process, through an advertising platform brands already use.

What to do with it

If you buy through Amazon DSP, ask your rep about pilot eligibility, measurement, and available controls. If you get access, treat it as a test: does it bring incremental customers at an acquisition cost your margins can support?

The announcement doesn’t establish that this will outperform your existing channels. But Amazon building a route into conversational advertising makes it a development worth watching before planning your next acquisition test.

Light Helmets’ Guerrilla Marketing

Light Helmets is challenging established helmet brands by signing everyone from NFL veterans to youth creators, sometimes reaching players through agents and family members instead of team equipment managers. The challenger-brand play: build demand directly with the people wearing the product, even when incumbents own the institutional relationships.

Ridge x Tony Hawk Sweepstakes

Ridge says its Tony Hawk sweepstakes drove roughly 50% year-over-year revenue growth at a better MER, becoming its first multi-eight-figure sweeps campaign. One lever worth stealing: partner-page and affiliate creative accounted for nearly 40% of Meta spend, up from roughly 3%, with creator and partner ads outperforming the baseline account on ROAS. Ridge increased Meta spend 35% while improving ROAS 14%, and cut Snapchat and X as performance dictated.

BCCGATE: We Gave DTC a Group Email Chain

An Ecomm Cowboy email copied everyone instead of using BCC (oops?), and the replies became amazing entertainment. Chris Lang called it “the most legendary email thread in all of DTC,” while Zain Ali replied, “You’ve all been added to my newsletter.”

If you're running a DTC brand and you're not on AppLovin yet, you're leaving money on the table.

AppLovin puts you in front of more than 1 billion new customers inside games like Solitaire, Mahjong, and Candy Crush. More people play mobile games than you'd think, mainstream, financially comfortable household decision-makers. The unlock is the format: full-screen ads holding an average of 35 seconds of real attention.

And it converts. 80% of purchases happen within an hour of the click incremental demand that turns interest into action fast. You can be live in under an hour and scale to $100K/day in spend within your first week. Wayfair, Dr. Squatch, and plenty of your favorite brands are already on the platform.

Get in before your competitors do.

→ Head to https://www.applovin.com/en/consumer-brands?ECOMMCOWBOY and tell them Ecomm Cowboy sent you.

Ecomm Cowboy is the go-to live show for ecommerce operators, breaking down the latest DTC, retail, and AI news while interviewing the founders and executives building today's fastest-growing brands.

We’re live every Monday to Friday at 12PM CT.

You can find our work on YouTube, X, and LinkedIn.

Have questions or want to come on the show? Simply reply to this email, we’re happy to chat.

See you on the stream,
Ecomm Cowboy Team