This week's Pace Notes:
How RTIC rode Yeti's marketing budget to nearly $200 million in revenue in under two years, what "drafting" actually is, and how your brand can borrow their playbook.
Let's get into it →
The backstory:
In September 2015, two twin brothers in Cypress, Texas shipped their first cooler.
John and Jim Jacobsen were accountants by training. Their previous business was Cheap Cheap Moving Boxes, which they'd built into one of the biggest direct-to-consumer box sellers in the country. They knew how to make big, bulky things and ship them cheap. They had never sold a cooler.
They also had almost no marketing budget. Their competitor, Yeti, had put $42 million into brand marketing from 2013 through 2015 and was heading toward $469 million in sales that year.
By early 2017, RTIC had done nearly $200 million in revenue with about 100 employees.
How did they do it?
The winning line:
When the category leader spends to create demand, the fastest growth play for the underdog is to show up where that demand gets captured.
Every dollar Yeti spent on marketing made someone want a premium cooler. All those films and ambassadors amount to millions of dollars, and have one goal: make buyers search for "Yeti Cooler" online.
RTIC's entire go-to-market lived in that moment.
They bid on ad placements right next to Yeti's. That meant RTIC didn't need to convince shoppers to buy a cooler. They just needed to convince people to buy their cooler.
They did that by attacking the comparison head-on. Their slogan read "half the price, holds more ice." They explicitly marketed their products against Yeti as a more budget-friendly option. They put the side-by-sides on their own site so the comparison was easy to make.
This strategy is called drafting. Just like in racing, smaller/slower brands can tuck in behind the leader to save energy, or in our case, money. Once the market leader spends the money to generate demand, you have an opportunity to capture it before they do.
So how did it work out for RTIC? Private equity bought them in 2020, they became the official cooler of NASCAR in 2023, and they rolled into more than 3,800 Walmart stores in 2024. The draft got them to the front of the pack, and now they have no trouble going toe-to-toe with Yeti.
How you can borrow the playbook:
Name your category's leader. Find the brand whose spend is teaching your customer what to want.
Map their customer journey. Find out where their customers compare and purchase.
Buy the moment, legally. Google lets you bid on a competitor's brand terms but not use their trademark in your ad copy. Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands can land you on their listing. Build a "[them] vs. us" page and send that traffic there, not to your homepage.
Make the claim a fact. "Half the price, holds more ice" was a measurement. Comparative claims are legal when they're true and provable. Get the numbers, document the test, and say the specific thing.
Feed the comparison to creators. Send your product and theirs to the reviewers your buyer trusts. Let the side-by-side be somebody else's video. It works because it feels less biased.
Know when to leave the draft. Track your own branded search volume. When people start typing your name instead of theirs, you've got demand of your own to protect. That's when you start investing in the creative that will eventually make you the new category leader.
Cheers,
Sterling Voth
Founder, Voth Agency
P.S. - If you want to level up your ad creative, we build cinema-grade digital ads (Meta, Google, CTV, etc.) for 8+ figure automotive brands that are serious about making money. Check it out here.