What This Year Taught Us About Growth, Part 2

If Part 1 was about survival, Part 2 is about evolution — the gritty, uncomfortable, punch-you-in-the-face truths that every real marketer learned this year. Not the sanitized conference-room fluff. The real stuff. The stuff that makes or breaks growth. Let’s get into it.

1. FIND YOUR WHITE SPACE.

Everybody loves to preach “fish where the fish are.” Cute. But here’s the part they leave out: the whole damn ocean is crowded.

If you’re selling earbuds DTC, every competitor is bidding on “best earbuds 2025.” If you’re in frozen foods, everyone’s fighting for the same endcap and the same Instacart tiles. If you’re in automotive aftermarket, every brand has a booth at the same show, next to the same brands you’re trying to beat. Congrats. You’ve built yourself a Times Square media plan: loud, crowded, expensive, and forgettable.

Those are table stakes — necessary, but not enough. What grows brands is the white space, the Blue Ocean, the 10–20% of budget where you zig while everyone else zags into oblivion.

Find the places your competitors aren’t.

Find audiences who aren’t being suffocated by 47 versions of the same ad message.

Find environments that welcome your brand instead of trying to survive an assault.

That’s how we connected new-era golfers with Technics.

Ultra-affluent Asian drivers with Cadillac.

High school hoops culture with the U.S. Army.

Hip-hop communities with Hawaiian Punch.

Growth doesn’t come from blending in. It comes from getting the hell out of Times Square.

2. DO SOMETHING COOL WITH 10%.

Most brands spend 100% of their budget trying to be broadly relevant, wildly efficient, and category correct. But the magic? The magic always comes from the weird 10%.

At Left Off Madison, we call it the nucleus target audience — your trendsetters, tastemakers, the “Edgers.” These are the people who create cultural gravity for everyone else. They influence your core audience without even trying.

For one Japan-based functional apparel brand entering the U.S., that nucleus audience was 1.9 million people, not 61 million. And that small, elite crowd was where the brand needed to launch — not the masses who don’t care yet.

Our “super-cool” plays are exclusive, insider, culturally credible. Like the Technics × Hypebeast collab — integration at a month-long SoHo residency, Technics earbuds embedded into the HypeGolf Invitational, rubbing shoulders with Johnnie Walker Blue, Michelob Ultra, Oakley — that’s how you build heat.

Nike used to dominate this lane. We were there for Nike Shox 2001. Midtown Manhattan. Vince Carter and the Freestyle cast performed for 150 handpicked insiders. That’s how legends are built.

Brands today? Most forgot how to do cool shit. Don’t be most brands.

3. SOCIAL BLABBER.

A client recently asked us to take their “ad copy” (if you can call 632 characters + 18 hashtags + 10 emojis ad copy) and dump it into an Instagram post.

I almost screamed.

Organic social isn’t the “poor man’s advertising channel.” It’s not a bulletin board for your packing slip. It’s not a dumping ground for everything you should have fit on a product landing page.

Meta recommends 150 characters.

Millward Brown proved the more messages in an ad, the less anyone remembers. And your audience — in this case men 25–54 — aren’t reading Instagram novels.

The fix?
44 words.
221 characters.
3 hashtags.
One message.
Clear as a punch to the sternum.

Organic social is for connection, community, and engagement. Not encyclopedias.

4. BUY YOUR OWN DAMN STUFF.

One of my most engaged LinkedIn posts this year was brutally simple:

If you work in advertising, it should be mandatory to buy, serve, use, and gift your clients’ products.

You learn the brand. You become the ambassador. You see what the consumer sees.
And — here’s the kicker — you often catch problems your client never knew existed.

Like the DTC brand whose website literally wouldn’t allow us to buy more than one item per transaction. Not two of the same. Not one of this and one of that. Just… one. Forever.

And they wondered why their average cart size was “1.”

We found it because we bought our own damn client’s product. Imagine what’s hiding in your sales funnel.

5. TOSS A NET — NOT JUST A LINE — ON REMARKETING.

Here’s the breakdown:
80% of brands aren’t thinking about remarketing.
10% think about it but don’t do it well.
10% are doing it right and printing money.

The opportunity here is massive and embarrassingly underutilized. Real remarketing isn’t just serving a “Hey, you left this in your cart” banner.
It’s:

• Testing frequency

• Mapping funnel friction

• Tracking creative decay

• Sequencing messages

• Matching KPIs to customer intent

Done right, remarketing isn’t a fishing line. It’s a goddamn net.

6. COOL — EVEN WITH THE SOUND OFF.

A client recently sent us “new video assets” to run on social. Multiple ratios. Multiple lengths. Lots of versions. Except for one problem:

The content was dead on arrival.

No hook in the first five seconds.

No story.

No energy.

No reason for anyone to stop scrolling.

On social, sound-off is the default. Voiceover and music? Secondary. If your visuals can’t tell the story, you’re throwing money into a bonfire.

That’s why open captioning matters. That’s why movement, pacing, rhythm, contrast, and concept matter.

We warned the client. They insisted. The metrics tanked — hard. Engagement, video completion rates… flatlined.

Now we’re replacing it. Expensively.

Let this be your reminder: If the content isn’t cool, compelling, or clear within seconds then don’t run it. Build something better.

7. CHECK YOUR DAMN INVENTORY / STOCK LEVELS

We used to celebrate “OUT OF STOCK” as a win. Not anymore.

OOS isn’t a trophy — it’s a ceiling.

It kills momentum, ROI, and customer trust.

Ask any CFO what hurts more: Wasted demand or wasted spend?

It’s shocking how many e-commerce brands don’t pressure-test their supply chain before peak selling season — or any season.

Unless you're Burberry (limited scarcity is the point), being out of stock is an operational failure masquerading as a marketing outcome.

If you’re reading this before Lunar New Year, Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, or Mother’s Day — congrats. You still have time to fix it.

Christmas? Yeah… that ship has sailed.

The Bottom Line

Growth for marketers this year didn’t come from being louder.

It came from being smarter.
Sharper.
More culturally precise.
More operationally aware.
More demanding of your team — and yourself.

Growth rewards the curious, the relentless, the uncomfortably honest, and the creatively unhinged.

At Left Off Madison, that’s our entire personality.
New York grit. Zero excuses.
Ideas with teeth. Strategies with backbone.
And a commitment to actually drive your business — not just admire your brand deck.