Ep 626: How Wolfe Sells Gifting to Everyone: Top of Funnel Testing, CTV, and AI

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Gifting is one of the biggest reasons people buy online, and most brands never build for it on purpose.

Matt Heckathorn runs digital marketing at Wolfe, the company behind Gift Card Granny, PerfectGift.com, and GiftYa. His ICP is close to everyone, which kills the usual narrow-audience playbook and forces a different approach to growth.

What you will learn:

• How a bottom-of-funnel team moved into CTV, programmatic, and out-of-home without losing measurement
• Why CTV retargeting outperformed what Matt expected, and how scale made brand channels measurable
• How Wolfe uses second-tier DMAs to test incrementality before spending up
• How gift card fraud actually works at the physical retail level, and why it shapes the product
• Where Wolfe is drawing its AI line: creative and fulfillment yes, fully agentic media buying not yet
• The cost problem almost nobody is planning for as AI usage scales

Who this is for: DTC operators and growth leads working top of funnel, anyone selling into gifting, and marketers thinking through where AI fits in a real team.

What to steal: The second-tier DMA incrementality test, the recipient-first product framing, and the human checkpoint on agentic media buying.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Future of AI in Marketing

02:12 Reinventing the Gift Card Industry

09:00 How Card-Linked Gifting Works

15:12 Top of Funnel Messaging That Converts

23:12 Building an AI-First Marketing Team

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