Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / Beyond Amazon: The Urgent Ecommerce Shift You Can’t Ignore with Andrew Maffettone

Transcript

Beyond Amazon: The Urgent Ecommerce Shift You Can’t Ignore with Andrew Maffettone · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:05
  So marketing is all about emotions.
• 0:07
  It's not always about direct sales.
• 0:10
  From a digital marketing perspective, five, six years ago, it was all about direct sales.
• 0:13
  It's starting to get away from that.
• 0:15
  Today we sit down with Andrew Maffetone, founder and CEO of Blue Tusker, a powerhouse digital marketing agency specializing in e commerce brands.
• 0:26
  With over 15 years in E commerce marketing, Andrew has built and exited agencies, worked hands on through industry shifts, and is known for his innovative approach to omnichannel strategy.
• 0:39
  In this episode, we go deep into Andrew's journey, how he spotted a core problem with agency collaboration, spun Blue Tusker out of a previous Amazon focused agency and developed a new model bringing together channel specialists under one roof.
• 0:56
  You'll hear Andrew's firsthand insights on the challenges and rewards of scaling a full service agency, the power of holistic data, omnichannel marketing pitfalls, and how brands can adapt to AI shifting consumer trends and rising e commerce costs.
• 1:13
  If you want a real world look at what it takes to thrive in today's digital marketing place, you won't want to miss this conversation.
• 1:21
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:26
  All right, Andrew Mavatone, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 1:31
  Thank you, Dave.
• 1:31
  Appreciate you having me.
• 1:34
  Yes, we appreciate you being here.
• 1:36
  So Andrew, you are the founder and the CEO of Blue Tusker, which is a full service digital marketing agency for e commerce brands.
• 1:48
  Correct.
• 1:50
  And you've had that, you've had that about 15 years now?
• 1:56
  No, no, no, no.
• 1:57
  I've been in e commerce marketing for I think 15 or 16 years since I started Blue Tusker.
• 2:04
  I started in, technically, I started it in early 2020.
• 2:08
  I had actually started an agency mainly focused primarily, at least on the Amazon space with a partner in mine in 2016.
• 2:16
  We exited that in late 2019.
• 2:18
  And then kind of one thing more or less led to another and now started Blue Tusker.
• 2:24
  It's kind of a spin off of that agency.
• 2:27
  Ah, okay.
• 2:28
  Okay.
• 2:29
  I guess I had it wrong in the bio here, but all good.
• 2:31
  All right, so when, when you built Blue Tusker was like.
• 2:35
  Because clearly you had the other agency, you exited that and then you, you, you wanted to stay in the industry.
• 2:41
  Was there like a certain aha moment where you realized like, I've gotta, I've got to build this new agency?
• 2:49
  Yeah, it kind of, it stemmed from a bunch of different stuff.
• 2:52
  Right.
• 2:52
  Cause like marketing agencies, there's thousands of them, right.
• 2:55
  And there's new ones, like there's probably six that are going to start, since we started this conversation, like, they're all over the place.
• 3:01
  And so one of the things I realized when I was before, I had started the agency with a partner of mine, I was in house.
• 3:08
  And so obviously I worked with a lot of contractors and agencies and stuff.
• 3:12
  And the problem I always had was, you know, you'd work with a specialized agency and they would just do Google Ads or they'd just do Amazon ads or just social media or whatever their focus was.
• 3:22
  And the issue was when you want to do like an all encompassing, like full campaign, like maybe you want to have a big promotion around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, right?
• 3:30
  Like something really basic.
• 3:32
  Getting all of those agencies to work together was a nightmare.
• 3:36
  Like they didn't want to work together.
• 3:38
  They thought they were competitive, they had completely different processes.
• 3:42
  One agency would have like one or two things done ready to go for the campaign.
• 3:46
  The other would be like, super last minute.
• 3:47
  And so like getting everyone on the same page was just, it's.
• 3:50
  It was horrible.
• 3:51
  And so I started to look for full service agencies.
• 3:54
  And the issue with that was it was all generalists.
• 3:58
  It was like a bunch of kids out of college who like, knew a little bit about a lot, right?
• 4:04
  And so then I was like, okay, this is obviously a problem.
• 4:07
  So started this last agency with a partner of mine and because of the way the space was, you know, in 2016, 2017, very Amazon focused, a lot of people were focused on Amazon.
• 4:17
  They really didn't want to do much for building their own brand off Amazon.
• 4:21
  But what I started to realize around that time was the average consumer was shopping wherever they wanted, right?
• 4:27
  Like you could send traffic directly to your website.
• 4:30
  They didn't care, they'd leave, they go to Amazon.
• 4:32
  You have people that would shop, find you on Amazon, they'd leave, they go to your website.
• 4:35
  So they'd be all over the place.
• 4:36
  And what I realized was the consumer really is better affected by more omnichannel marketing strategies, stuff where you're letting them shop wherever they're most comfortable.
• 4:47
  But the problem is, is in order to incorporate some of those strategies, you have to have people that are specialized in certain areas, but they have to know, like the right hand has to know what the left hand
• 4:57
  is doing.
• 4:58
  And so what we did, what I wanted to do here at Blue Tusker, which is kind of how we structured everything, is everyone who works here is a specialist in their space.
• 5:08
  So we have a paid media team with sub departments that solely focus on Google Ads or solely focus on Meta or TikTok.
• 5:16
  Or Amazon or Walmart.
• 5:17
  So they're all very specialized in their areas.
• 5:21
  Same thing on the own media side.
• 5:23
  So then we have people that just focus on social media or just, just email marketing or SEO.
• 5:28
  So you're still getting the benefit of working with a specialist in the space.
• 5:33
  They're all hidden states, they're all people that have been in the industry for I don't even know how long at this point.
• 5:39
  And then you have an account strategist that kind of acts as like a fractional CMO to a certain extent.
• 5:44
  So for some of the brands we work with, we really are like their entire marketing department in some cases.
• 5:49
  In other cases we just do a couple things for them.
• 5:52
  We act as more like a puzzle piece of whatever their marketing department is missing.
• 5:55
  But that kind of allows us to still have specialists in these certain strategies while being able to incorporate them across the entire business so we can develop more of these omnichannel approaches.
• 6:09
  Okay, appreciate the explanation there too.
• 6:14
  And with what a brand would require given that the various campaigns they'd want to run and how they would want to scale.
• 6:22
  But given the way like the industry was and, and like you said, all these different generalists in some cases or other specialists not wanting to work together, like how did you go about building this all encompassing agency that
• 6:36
  would really function like a well oiled machine?
• 6:39
  I mean it started, it didn't start full service.
• 6:42
  You know, it started primarily on the paid side.
• 6:46
  It started mainly with like Google Ads, meta ads, Amazon ads.
• 6:51
  We had a little bit of email marketing in the beginning.
• 6:54
  So it wasn't, it didn't start off completely full service.
• 6:57
  We kind of had to grow into it.
• 6:59
  And the way that I had structured everything was because that knew that was the direction I wanted to go in.
• 7:04
  Part of the problem specific to E commerce anyway is there's so many moving parts, right?
• 7:09
  And there's so many different sales channels, B2B agencies and stuff.
• 7:14
  Very black and white.
• 7:14
  You're sending people to one website, they're going to convert, they become a lead.
• 7:17
  Great.
• 7:18
  That's their thing for E commerce.
• 7:20
  Very different beast, right?
• 7:21
  Like you could send someone to your website and they may leave and go to Amazon.
• 7:25
  So the problem was is if you worked with an agency that solely focuses on meta ads and they're driving all this traffic to their website, but they have no idea how Amazon works.
• 7:36
  They're not able to tell how much crossover you may have.
• 7:39
  So like for us in that specific example, we've done a bunch of tests where like our Meta ads team will run a bunch of traffic to a website and then our Amazon ads team will kind of collaborate with
• 7:50
  them and evaluate what lifted we see in branded search traffic.
• 7:54
  So we can evaluate, okay, we actually saw X amount of people, x size increase of search traffic primarily at least presumably due to the increase in the meta ad spend.
• 8:05
  So it's kind of getting everyone to work together and look at the business a little bit more holistically.
• 8:10
  Because when we first started we did a bunch of those tests where like you would leave, you'd leave med ad spend even for the month and you would leave Amazon ad spend even for the month and you'd have
• 8:20
  a baseline.
• 8:21
  Then the next month we would increase meta ad spend but leave Amazon as is.
• 8:25
  And I think 75, 80% of the time, almost every brand we did it with, we saw a pretty significant jump in revenue on Amazon even though that traffic was headed to the website.
• 8:36
  So we had to have our meta ads team start to work a little bit more closely with our Amazon team because we knew there was bleed over.
• 8:44
  Now we've got the opposite happening where you get people that are finding brands on Amazon, they're actually going to the website or like we do a lot of work with the Buy with Prime team.
• 8:52
  They now allow you to run DSP ads from your, from Amazon back to your website.
• 8:57
  So now we're trying to find ways like, okay, now our Amazon team has to know what our website team is doing because we're kind of cross promoting everything.
• 9:03
  So it's, it's being able to have all of those people that have the specialties in house that can actually collaborate together to evaluate what, what are the smartest things for us to be doing as opposed to someone internally
• 9:15
  trying to juggle 600 different agencies who are basically focused on the same thing.
• 9:23
  Okay, and how's that transition been meaning, you know, getting these different specialists to really work together even though they might be bouncing traffic to each other's department.
• 9:32
  I mean they're obviously your employees, so they're not, you know, maybe competing from that standpoint.
• 9:37
  But how has the synergy been within the team and putting all those pieces together?
• 9:42
  I mean we, we always elaborate what our, our overall overarching kind of KPI is with a certain brand.
• 9:50
  So obviously, you know, nine times out of 10 you've got brands that are focused on like, like on Amazon, everyone's got a tacos goal.
• 9:57
  Right?
• 9:57
  So how much ad spend you, what your ad spend was versus your overall revenue, technically you really should be looking at your Business holistically like that, regardless.
• 10:06
  So, like, we look at overall ad spend even off Amazon, factoring in Meta and Google and TikTok and everything else we're running ads for, and then overall revenue coming in not just from Amazon, but from Walmart or ebay
• 10:18
  or your website or anywhere else that they're selling.
• 10:20
  So we look at everything holistically and so the teams are all aligned with.
• 10:25
  We know what the goals are.
• 10:26
  Yeah, there are certain things that the SEO team is trying to do in terms of increasing organic traffic, et cetera.
• 10:32
  There are certain things the Google Ads team is trying to do from increasing revenue from SCM perspective, but they overlap so much.
• 10:40
  Where there's keyword sharing or Google Ads team is running ads to specific articles to help them rank faster.
• 10:45
  So it's allowing everyone to kind of work together to go towards whatever that ends KPI is for that, for that brand that we're working with.
• 10:55
  Okay.
• 10:56
  All right.
• 10:57
  And as you've scaled this, this company out, what's been the biggest challenge that you've come across?
• 11:06
  I would say the omnichannel side.
• 11:09
  The omnichannel concept.
• 11:11
  Right.
• 11:11
  So basically positioning your marketing and your business to allow the consumer to shop wherever they're most comfortable.
• 11:20
  It might be your website, it might be Amazon.
• 11:22
  Looking at your marketing from more of a holistic perspective is not something a lot of brands grasp.
• 11:31
  Like five, ten years ago, right?
• 11:34
  Online, you could count every penny, every penny that you put into anything.
• 11:39
  You knew exactly what your return was.
• 11:41
  You knew where people were going, you knew where they bought.
• 11:44
  Like, it was pretty black and white.
• 11:46
  Then you had the iOS change.
• 11:48
  Attribution starts to become an issue.
• 11:49
  Cookies kind of come and go, and so it becomes a lot more difficult to track those things.
• 11:55
  And so if you look at marketing 20, 30 years ago, billboards, radio, TV, like if they.
• 12:02
  You don't know the ROI of a billboard.
• 12:05
  There's not one billboard that someone says, oh, I made X amount off that billboard.
• 12:09
  You don't know because it's off brand awareness, it's off brand recall, it's off just people's ability to remember who you are so that when they come to make the decision, they remember who you are.
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• 12:54
  so marketing is all about emotions.
• 12:56
  It's not always about direct sales.
• 12:59
  From a digital marketing perspective, five, six years ago is all about direct sales.
• 13:02
  It's starting to get away from that.
• 13:04
  People are finding products on TikTok and they're going to Amazon to shop.
• 13:07
  People are finding products through Google Search, getting to your website and then they're leaving and they're going to buy from you somewhere else.
• 13:13
  So like, looking at it holistically is what a lot of brands need to be doing because that's how people are discovering product because they're all over the Internet and, and they keep going even to new, newer places.
• 13:24
  So the issue kind of has become educating brands on why you need to look at the business holistically and not be so reliant on platforms like Amazon that just constantly increase costs.
• 13:40
  Yeah, very true.
• 13:41
  And how, how has that conversation been?
• 13:44
  Because like you said, there's so many specialists and like the Meta ad agency might, you know, right.
• 13:50
  Be telling the brand, no, it's about, you know, the, the sales within Meta and then, you know, the other specialists might say, no, it's only about direct sales here.
• 13:59
  I mean the, the concept makes a lot of sense.
• 14:01
  But how, how have the brands been in term of GR in terms of grasping that even when, you know, maybe they can't tell directly where the, the, the traffic came from or where the sales came from.
• 14:13
  But again, the, the overall number, if it makes sense, if it's, if it's increasing.
• 14:17
  Right, and you're, the ROI is there, then you would think they'd be good with that.
• 14:22
  Yeah, it's all about the, it's all about the data you're looking at.
• 14:25
  Right.
• 14:25
  Like traditional Meta ad specialist agency, they're going to be very focused on the results within Meta and then probably hopefully the results directly within your websites, let's say through Google Analytics or like Shopify or something.
• 14:39
  Right.
• 14:40
  What they're not going to be able to do is also evaluate how your Amazon business is doing and decipher if there's any overlap.
• 14:50
  Some products that's not the case.
• 14:51
  Right.
• 14:52
  Like it's not every brand and they're going from website to Amazon or vice versa.
• 14:56
  It's just certain products, that's what it calls for.
• 14:59
  It's people like the type, the product type, they want to get it in a couple days or maybe it's a newer website so there's not a ton of reviews on it.
• 15:07
  So people hop over to Amazon, see how many reviews you have.
• 15:10
  There's a ton of different reasons.
• 15:12
  If you're a Met ad specialist agency, let's say in this scenario they're only going to look at what the results are on your website and if you're not seeing the return that you want to see through the meta
• 15:22
  ads, brands turn them off.
• 15:24
  There's been a bunch of times where we've gotten into certain meta platforms, we've gotten into TikTok ads or whatever and we look at the results, we go, okay, we see why you're not happy with these.
• 15:33
  And then we do some digging, we look at their Shopify, we kind of look at what the brand lift is on on Amazon and start to evaluate like based on when you increased ad spend on meta, what was
• 15:43
  your brand lift on Amazon?
• 15:45
  And then we can start to look at those numbers and we can actually go, actually, even though you have to factor in the gray area, right?
• 15:52
  Like you don't know that they came from Meta and went to Amazon, but there was a significant brand lift during that time.
• 16:00
  So we can assume some of it was.
• 16:02
  So you have like a gray area of data.
• 16:04
  That's where you look at it and you go, actually your meta ads are doing really well.
• 16:08
  The problem is your website doesn't convert as well as you need it to and people are leaving and they're going to Amazon.
• 16:14
  So then we start looking at different functionality like buy with prime or sometimes we'll create like available on Amazon buttons and help people directly go to Amazon if the brand wants to do that.
• 16:24
  Or the brand may be like, no, I don't want to do that at all.
• 16:26
  I don't want to share my data with Amazon, which we hear all the time.
• 16:29
  So in which case then we figure out other.
• 16:32
  That's when our UX UI team gets involved and they go, okay, how do we improve the conversion rate on your website?
• 16:38
  Because a lot of your consumers are leaving and going to Amazon.
• 16:40
  So it's about having those different skill sets available to be able to evaluate what's actually working and what's not.
• 16:48
  Okay, and another question, how do you see like the rise of AI and everything we're seeing with zero click search now impacting the the marketing agency world.
• 17:02
  It'S really just kind of changing things.
• 17:04
  I don't really think that it's having like a major impact.
• 17:06
  I know a lot of agencies are scared like, oh, you know, we're going to be out of a job and all that stuff, like that's if anything, it's the total opposite where now we're starting to evaluate like, okay,
• 17:15
  of all the different strategies we have in place, how are we implementing AI?
• 17:19
  How are we leveraging certain prompts to make sure that we're getting the information we need?
• 17:24
  So there is the, there is the ability of using it internally, right, where it's helping with a research perspective or copy or creative or anything that we need to do from that perspective.
• 17:32
  But then you look at, okay, how is it affecting the actual brand?
• 17:35
  Right, so Google's AI overview starts rolling out a little bit heavier towards the end of last year.
• 17:42
  So as soon as that started happening by, like, I think it was November ish, when it was fully rolled out, we saw significant decreases in organic traffic across all brands.
• 17:53
  But we saw huge lifts in organic impressions across almost all brands.
• 17:58
  And what we realized was the overview is giving you the impression like you, you do get credit for giving the AI overview the answer, but if they don't click, then you don't get the organic traffic.
• 18:10
  So we had to look at a pivot from an SEO perspective to make sure that we're writing certain content in a certain way that incentivizes people to come to the website, not just answer basic questions that an AI
• 18:22
  overview is going to give them.
• 18:23
  So we kind of have to start looking at that.
• 18:26
  But then what we've realized is, especially from a D2C side, the more you improve your SEO, just from standard SEO best practices, good UX, UI, make sure you've got your keywords in place, but don't overdo it.
• 18:38
  Have good copy so that people are interested in reading it.
• 18:41
  Your standard stuff that you need to do from an SEO perspective, that's how all of these chatbots are getting the answers that they get.
• 18:49
  So if you have a really good SEO initiative and you're continuously increasing content and basically still leading towards the thought leadership that you were trying to do with your brand, the problem is you're losing traffic from Google, but
• 19:01
  you're still gaining it from things like chat GPT.
• 19:03
  So it's just looking at how, how are people finding you and accepting the fact that there's not just one or two search engines out there like there were years ago.
• 19:12
  Okay.
• 19:14
  All right.
• 19:14
  And as far as, you know, continuing to scale, I mean, what, what's, what other challenges have come up just in terms of, with everything changing in the way it has been, is are you still finding like, like difficulties
• 19:31
  in growing.
• 19:34
  For the agency or for brands?
• 19:37
  Well, I guess, you know, let's talk about for brands too, right?
• 19:41
  Because.
• 19:42
  Right.
• 19:42
  We've seen, you know, the COVID e commerce spike.
• 19:46
  We've seen kind of a return to retail in this like coming years.
• 19:49
  And then, you know, the economy has been kind of, you know, challenging for a lot of people in recent years.
• 19:55
  I mean, are you still like, what's been the biggest challenge that brands are facing?
• 20:01
  I think the biggest challenge I've seen, and I guess we could call it a challenger, the biggest mistake I've seen is a lot of brands that just half ass their approach.
• 20:13
  Like the take to Amazon for example, right?
• 20:17
  At this point, a lot of Amazon sellers understand you have to have a good listing, you have to have good imagery, good A plus content, all the basic stuff.
• 20:27
  At this point it's rinse and repeat.
• 20:28
  We all know this by now.
• 20:30
  The problem is, is that over the past five years, I actually just did a presentation on this.
• 20:35
  Over the past five years, Amazon's FBA fees have averaged an increase of 10% year over year.
• 20:42
  CPCs have averaged an increase of 8% year over year and competition is averaging an increase of 6% year over year.
• 20:49
  So Amazon's fees, of FBA fees and, and CPCS are increasing.
• 20:54
  So you're paying more to be on Amazon, but at the same time you're getting 6% more competition at the same time.
• 21:00
  And most of that competition is stemming from overseas.
• 21:03
  So the product price point is staying pretty damn low.
• 21:07
  So the issue is if you start to out price your competitors, you start to lose volume.
• 21:13
  And so you can't entirely do that too much because Amazon's really erased to the bottom.
• 21:17
  And so because Amazon's fees are going up, but you can't really increase your product price as much as you'd like to, margins are just getting crushed.
• 21:24
  So now the problem is, is you're getting all of these Amazon brands that are starting to look into D2C, which makes a ton of sense.
• 21:31
  Like that's what you should do, you should diversify, you shouldn't rely on one channel, but they go and they just take like a random theme on Shopify, throw it together and then wonder like, where are my sales?
• 21:42
  And the D2C space is wildly different than Amazon, right?
• 21:47
  D2C, you're on the Internet, you're on Google, you're on Bing, you're everywhere, you're on social.
• 21:53
  But people are on these platforms to entertain themselves, to answer questions, to learn things.
• 21:58
  They're not always there to shop.
• 22:00
  On Amazon, people are just there to shop.
• 22:03
  They are not there to entertain Themselves, they are there to buy something.
• 22:07
  So that's why you see like 20, 30, 40% conversion rates on Amazon.
• 22:11
  But on D2C, you get like 2, 3, 4%.
• 22:14
  And so these brands just create these really big bad websites that just don't convert.
• 22:19
  Then they run a ton of ads to them and they just go, oh, this doesn't work for me.
• 22:23
  Like, well, you're, you're not approaching it correctly.
• 22:26
  This isn't Amazon.
• 22:27
  You can't just throw it up and hope that it works well for you.
• 22:29
  So that seems to be the biggest challenge is brands are realizing they need to diversify and they're just not educating themselves well enough on the DTC approach or on the individual platforms before they really start to dive into
• 22:43
  it.
• 22:43
  And, and they end up just costing themselves more and more money.
• 22:47
  Okay, all right.
• 22:49
  And we're recording this in August 2025.
• 22:54
  So given kind of what you've seen in E commerce, you know, through the first part of the year and then with the tariffs, I mean, what's your outlook for the rest of the year?
• 23:05
  I think so obviously that'd be primarily Q4.
• 23:09
  I think that I really don't see that big of a drop off from the consumer side.
• 23:15
  So consumers are still buying, they're still spending their money, they're still purchasing products.
• 23:20
  We really don't see much of a slowdown.
• 23:24
  Pretty much everyone we work with is up year over year in one way or another.
• 23:29
  And it's what we have noticed is, I don't want to say like a slowdown, but there's a little bit more of a reluctancy towards higher price point products or there's definitely, you know, what is the extra value that
• 23:44
  they're getting out of it.
• 23:45
  So there has, there has been like better responses to sales and things like that, but with the tariffs and everything, it depends on your price point, right.
• 23:51
  And your product, like if it's going to crush your margins, then you've got a different problem.
• 23:56
  So what's going to be kind of interesting, and I think Prime Day showed some of this.
• 24:01
  Prime Day, the consumers there was, I think day one, they were, it was up like 40% year over year.
• 24:08
  Something ridiculous like that.
• 24:09
  Like really good Prime Day number one.
• 24:12
  And then when you factor in over four days, it was, it was up collectively, right?
• 24:16
  Year over year.
• 24:16
  Nothing too crazy, but it was up.
• 24:18
  Well, the average sale, like the amount that the consumer saves was actually down.
• 24:25
  So I think year over year it was like last year, I think, I want to say it was like 26, 27% was the average amount a consumer would save, whereas this year it was like 23% or something.
• 24:35
  And so Amazon had increased some of their fees in terms of how to do the sales.
• 24:40
  And then you also have tariffs and you have all these other factors coming in now and you have people that can't really increase their price point.
• 24:46
  So like people couldn't offer as much.
• 24:48
  So what I'm curious about is what's going to happen with those brands that can't do the big sales in Q4.
• 24:55
  And that's when a lot of the marketing is going to be coming to play because, like, you've got to get creative, you've got to find ways to make Q4 still really good for you without just like giving away
• 25:04
  all of your margin and being like, hey, here's half off my whole website.
• 25:07
  Like, that's ridiculous.
• 25:09
  That's a short term solution.
• 25:11
  So I think that's where it's going to be kind of interesting of are we going to see, you know, those big like gangbuster sales like you see every Q4, or are we just going to see kind of like,
• 25:20
  hey, here's some decent sales, but the average consumer is going to kind of weigh whether they want to purchase more or not?
• 25:26
  My theory.
• 25:27
  Okay, all right.
• 25:29
  And given how far you've come these last, these last five years, what, what's next for you in Blue Tusker?
• 25:37
  And we're still growing.
• 25:38
  You know, we've started looking at acquisitions to speed things up a little bit on our end, you know, to.
• 25:43
  It's an agency space, so you don't really want to, you don't want to grow too fast because you end up taking on too many accounts and then you just hire the wrong people and it gets ugly.
• 25:52
  So we started looking at acquiring other agencies and started to explore some of that area.
• 25:58
  But you know, we're seeing a lot of Amazon sellers that are wanting to diversify and not be so reliant on that channel.
• 26:06
  And so we've really started to kind of make sure that we're putting in more resources towards like helping those brands figure out the smartest and most cost effective way to test doing DTC without just jumping into the water.
• 26:21
  So that tends to be kind of what our main focus is right now.
• 26:26
  Okay.
• 26:26
  All right.
• 26:27
  And Andrew, if people want to get in touch with you, learn more about what you do and the services you offer, what's the best way people can reach out to you?
• 26:34
  Yeah, bluetusker.com is obviously the easiest b l u t u s k r dot com and then I'm on pretty much every social media platform at Andrew Math A D R W M A.
• 26:46
  F F hey, quick one more question.
• 26:49
  What does the name Blue Tester mean?
• 26:52
  So, I mean, technically, I made it up.
• 26:55
  So, you know, when I.
• 26:56
  My previous agency and a bunch of other agencies I'd worked with in the past, they always had these ridiculous names of, like, growth digital and, like, scale marketing.
• 27:03
  And, like, they're just kind of, like, boring names.
• 27:06
  And so I wanted to just make something up.
• 27:09
  And so my wife and I met in high school.
• 27:12
  Our school colors were both blue and gray, and so I kind of went with the blue gray vibe.
• 27:16
  And then my.
• 27:18
  About a year or two before I had started the agency, I had lost my grandmother.
• 27:22
  She was a huge fan of elephants, and so I kind of went with the blue gray thing.
• 27:26
  Took elephant and Tusker is what they call them, call certain types of elephants in Africa.
• 27:31
  And then the company that acquired us from the prior agency, I did not like, and when we left, they rebranded and dropped the E from their name.
• 27:44
  So I did the same thing, just kind of out of spite, and so I made up the name.
• 27:48
  Okay.
• 27:50
  All right.
• 27:50
  Appreciate the story behind that.
• 27:52
  All right, Andrew, thanks so much for joining us and sharing all this valuable wisdom from your journey with our audience.
• 27:57
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 27:58
  Thanks for having me.
• 28:00
  All right.