A Better Way
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As former large agency insiders, we recognized there was a better way to meet the unique needs of growth-seeking brands. So we founded and structured Eden around the strengths of the best agencies and strategic consultancies—while solving for the two big challenges we believe increasingly hold them back.
Marketer challenge 1
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Over-reliance on dashboards
With performance media’s ability to directly link dollars spent to quantifiable results, mid-market companies with limited advertising budgets often look to addressable channels as their reliable go-to for media spending. However, measurable doesn’t always mean most effective. While data and algorithms (if applied smartly) can provide some helpful insights, they overlook core marketing principles regarding value, impact, and reach, and instead inform marketing decisions based solely on clicks and impressions. Not only is this approach under increasing pressure from privacy regulations, but it limits the target audience to the tiny subset of the addressable market who engage with media in specific, measurable ways—a worthwhile starting point, yes, but one that’s not likely enough to propel the kind of growth companies ultimately desire.
How, then, can companies at critical inflection points in their growth cycle achieve scale without an unacceptable rise in blended CAC?
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The Eden solution
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Human expertise
A media investment advisory boutique founded in 2019, Eden helps growing brands and services maximize productivity from their media dollars. To do so, we guide brands to move beyond their reliance on performance media and to instead think more broadly about “media performance,” an approach that identifies smart, strategic tactics to expand companies’ reach to their wider market opportunity.
We do this by merging our advanced media science capabilities that far exceed the scope of standard media “optimization” with our team’s expert knowledge of both media and marketing. This powerful combination enables us to assess clients’ media investments in strikingly granular detail—and to identify patterns and insights in the data that explain not just what is happening but why. Our understanding of causation, not just correlation, guides our development of strategic media solutions that are backed by data, steeped in logic, and uniquely tailored to our clients’ specific challenges. And by asking the right questions at the right times—of our clients, of our plan, of its execution—we continuously assess and refine our strategy to ensure our clients command the greatest consumer attention.
Marketer challenge 2
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Client-agency fit
Due to the reality of agency economics, options for mid-market companies looking to accelerate their growth have long been imperfect. First, there’s the issue of access: On the one hand, smaller, specialty agencies, though more affordable, are rarely able to offer expertise in more than a small set of channels; while on the other hand, large, integrated shops with the necessary tools and multi-channel expertise rarely offer clients with more modest budgets consistent access to senior-level talent and attention.
Second, there’s the issue of bias: Agencies both large and small are structured around their own financial gain, a reality that can’t help but influence their advice to clients—from encouraging larger investments to allocating client resources toward channels with higher agency margins—regardless of whether such actions truly have the clients’ best interests at heart.
How, therefore, can mid-market companies avoid a tradeoff between deep channel-level executional expertise and cross-disciplinary investment strategy—while developing a growth-driving media strategy they can trust?
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The Eden solution
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Structural ingenuity
Eden’s internal cross-functional team of senior media and measurement experts operates with select external executional partners as a collective, an innovative model that solves for the fundamental mismatch between mid-market companies’ needs and agency offerings—while fully eliminating financial bias from the strategic decision-making process.
We serve as our clients’ core strategic guides, working on retainer rather than commission to develop custom media solutions and ongoing measurement strategies tailored to their goals. We then outsource, but closely manage, our clients’ media buying to a hand-selected collection of 3rd-party executional experts—each one a deep channel specialist with whom we have no financial ties.
This partnership model not only gives our clients access to the kinds of tools, specialized talent, and integrated channel expertise of large agencies (at a cost within their budgets), but also allows us to act as an unbiased orchestrator: By removing ourselves from the buying execution, Eden is able to hold our partners accountable and remain a completely neutral party, motivated purely by the success of our clients. Though separate financial entities behind the scenes, our clients experience the Eden Collective as a single, deeply collaborative team.
