Twenty years running growth, and building the measurement underneath it.
Hallsbrook is Alton Phillips. Most people who can build the measurement have never had to defend a budget with it, and most people who've defended a budget can't build the thing that settles the argument. I've done both.
The operator half
I've spent most of my career accountable for the number: running growth, owning a P&L, and explaining to a board why a channel deserved its budget.
Most recently I was VP of Ecommerce, Media & Growth at Avaline, a $50MM better-for-you retail and subscription wine brand. I owned the digital P&L and directed $5MM+ a year in media across paid social, search, CTV, programmatic, retail media and marketplaces, with growth and retention specialists reporting to me and three agency partners to manage.
Before that I was SVP of Growth at Clique Brands, home of WhoWhatWear and the Merit and Versed beauty brands. I built a 30+ person organization across growth, analytics, data science, data engineering, commerce and product, starting from five people. I was part of the executive team that sold the company, at a 6x valuation from when I started.
Earlier, I led audience development and analytics at NBC News Digital and msnbc, at Fusion Media Group under Univision, and at OZY Media. Before all of it I ran email and CRM at iVillage, when Yahoo! ranked its program among the ten largest in the world.
I also co-founded a Brooklyn wine retailer and built its ecommerce and marketing from nothing, running the paid media myself.
The builder half
I build the measurement rather than commissioning it. At Avaline that meant a warehouse unifying every core source, a Bayesian media-mix model, geo-holdout incrementality tests, first-party attribution and behavioral customer segmentation. I built it in five months, alone, and it cost about $4.50 a month to run.
I hold a PhD from NYU in quantitative and qualitative research methods, which is what makes the statistical side credible rather than borrowed. I write the SQL and the Python myself, and I'm the person who reads the output. There's no junior analyst between me and your data.
What I don't claim
I've never worked agency-side. My attribution work is first-party rather than multi-touch: I evaluated the attribution vendors and chose to build instead. Amazon isn't a channel I've run. I'd rather tell you that in the first conversation than in the third month.
Why Hallsbrook exists
Brands between $5MM and $50MM sit in a real gap. They're too big for platform dashboards to be enough, and too small to justify a $250-400k senior hire plus the infrastructure that person would need before answering anything. So they buy tools, end up with several that disagree, and have nobody whose job is to say which one is right.
Hallsbrook is what I wanted when I was on the other side of the table: the person and the infrastructure, for less than the salary alone, with everything built in the brand's own accounts.
The name comes from Halls Brook, the brook by the house I grew up in, in Duxbury, Massachusetts.