The Biggest Lie in DTC Right Now

By Jacob Rokeach

“CAC is your core problem.”

It’s the sentence I hear more than anything else when a brand comes to us.

But here’s the truth: CAC is almost never the real problem.

At least not in the way founders think.

From the operator seat, looking across dozens of brands, millions in spend, and a front-row view of what’s actually driving (or killing) profitable growth, the pattern is painfully obvious:

👉 It’s rarely ONLY a media issue. It’s almost always a creative issue. And usually it’s both.

> You can’t really optimize weak creative.
> You can’t scale generic storytelling.
> You can’t spend your way past a message that doesn’t land.

A quick example:
We recently onboarded a brand that thought their CAC problem was tied to platform volatility and bad campaign structure.

➡️ Spend up → CAC up.
➡️ Spend down → CAC… still up.

🪝 But once we rebuilt their creative system - new hooks, new angles, new formats, creator-led iterations, and a testing framework with 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗟 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 - CAC dropped by 20% in 6 weeks without touching spend.

Same media strategy.
Same meta algorithm.
Same budget.
DIFFERENT CREATIVE.

This is the actual lie in the market right now:
“Your growth unlock sits inside Ads Manager.”

It really doesn’t.

It sits inside your message. Inside the story you tell. Reliant on your content engine and your ability to generate consistent creative.

So…
👉 What’s the creative lever you’re under-investing in right now, and what would change if you fixed it first instead of last?