Building the ecosystem
that powers business growth.
Agency
Our leading growth agency. We scale the world's best ideas through highly effective advertising and marketing strategies.
Investments
Our leading growth agency. We scale the world's best ideas through highly effective advertising and marketing strategies.
Community
Our leading growth agency. We scale the world's best ideas through highly effective advertising and marketing strategies.
University
Our leading growth agency. We scale the world's best ideas through highly effective advertising and marketing strategies.
Investing in the future of commerce.
Darkmatter is the venture arm of the world’s leading growth agency. We invest and partner with brands pioneering the future of commerce.
More about how we operate ↴
We are an investment syndicate focused on needle-moving commerce businesses. Our focus is on technology companies building the future of commerce and on consumer brands disrupting incumbents through product innovation. All of our investments anticipate the changing needs of the consumer.
We have a number of ways we strategically partner with and approach investments. Read more about our two investment strike zones below.
Fashion & Accessories
With deep roots in Fashion & Accessories, we understand the level of dedication and taste needed to cultivate an active following in the fashion space. Our expertise in performance creative, retail, and e-commerce equip us for any high-level engagement in fashion and accessories with brands like Anne Klein & Garrett Leight.
Professional Services
We driven integrated growth programs for many Home Furnishings companies, and have consulted on diversifying channel strategies for many of these business. Our portfolio includes some of the largest Home Furnishings brands like Crate & Barrel, Joybird, and Nourison.
Technology & SaaS
We’re always looking at the next big thing in technology & SaaS and have done both agency work and strategic investment in many of them. We have close working relationships and advisory roles with brands like Triple Whale, Bezel, Medmo, Stationhead, onlife & Arch Labs.
Luggage & Travel
We are always on the move at Darkroom so working with Luggage & Travel brands comes naturally. We’ve done digital strategy and growth work for well-known Luggage & Travel brands like CALPAK & Found Hotels.
Celebrity-backed Brands
Celebrity and influencer driven brands are one of the fastest-growing sub-sectors of B2C. We have deep domain expertise and first-hand experience helping brands like Jessica Simpson Style, ZOA Energy, and Rinna Beauty launch and grow.
Beauty & Wellness
Over our six year tenure, we have engaged with countless Beauty & Wellness challenger brands that have reshaped CPG, skincare, and wellness. Our clients executed over 150 million in follow-on capital last year alone. Portfolio brands include Necessaire, Drip Hydration, and Bravo Sierra.
Consumer Packaged Goods
Our understanding of the dynamic between F&B and the impact digital media can have in driving sell-through is core to our strategies. We have had the privilege of working with top brands including Olipop, Verb Energy, VYBES, Everytable, and Popchips.
Hotels & Hospitality
Hospitality is one of the fastest digitizing verticals in B2C. We have developed specialized services to grow brand-driven hotels and restaurants looking for more meaningful customer relationships.
Our Thesis
We’re in a new era of marketing & advertising.
The Marketing Landscape is Rapidly Changing...
Today, many digital marketers have a lack of creative know-how and an over-reliance on data analysis, which hampers their ability to take risks, think creatively, and deliver results for the businesses they represent. Long story short…
We’re long overdue for a serious challenge to the status quo in advertising.
It’s no secret that tumultuous economic conditions both domestically and abroad have put pressure on the end consumer. Inflation, wage changes, and ballooning consumer credit are a steady stream slowly trickling down to the bottom line of many businesses across America. The next twelve to twenty-four months are crucial for companies to adapt marketing strategies that build for resilience.
Gone are the days of unchecked advertising spend. Margin is tight. Budget is tighter. And profit is hard to come by. What we have found over the last decade is that most advertising programs are not positioned to deliver OR track profit for advertisers. No wonder CMO tenure is the lowest it’s ever been.
The wake of this efficiency drop is creating advertising chaos for brands.
Urgent questions arise: how should we be allocating budget? What channels should we be investing in? How can we drive better efficiency? On LinkedIn and Twitter, there’s a lot of conjecture on all of these topics.
What we’ve understood about marketing teams needs to be re-thought in order to have success in today’s landscape. The old playbooks and frameworks are no longer effective. And yet everybody is still slow to change.
Marketers must challenge the assumptions created by a previous generation with vastly different market conditions. They must adapt to a new era of advertising where channel innovation is much quicker, creative is increasingly important, and competition is stiff. At a time when there are more ways than ever before to connect, interact, and reach your customer, brands should be succeeding. In order to do so, it’s important to first understand the history of how we got here.
The “Madison Ave” Model (1950 — 2000)
Before, things were simpler.
The “golden age” of advertising saw the evolution of Madison Avenue, large agencies, and agency holding companies. Advertisers benefitted from a growing population, the increasing popularity of television, and an insatiable demand for products in the US market.
During this period, advertising was an art form that revolved around singular creative campaigns distributed via newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio, television and direct mail. This spanned decades, eventually evolving with banner ads, affiliates, and search. Ad agencies honed their focus on creative, using it as the main instrument to drive sales and market share for clients. Most of these creative ideas were loosely rooted in data, and this is the same way creative ideation is carried out within the holding companies to this day.
Slow distribution channel innovation, inefficient real-time attribution, and uncertain marketing spend allocation were defining features of the era. Once a marketing campaign began, it was difficult to determine which channel to attribute a purchase to, leading marketers to evaluate performance based on overall media spend rather than on a channel-by-channel basis. In modern day terms, this was the equivalent of putting ad spend behind Twitter, Meta and Tik Tok and not tracking which platforms led to conversions. Consequently, and perhaps more importantly, this allowed advertisers to trust their gut and go for the big creative ideas that brands became known for.
Advertising performance was measured by its impact on — did overall sales go up? Simple.
The “DTC” Era (2008-2020)
Social media advertising changed everything.
Facebook created the most efficient marketing platform in history. Billions of dollars poured into social and the venture-backed companies investing in it as a new acquisition channel. At the same time, the Shopify ecosystem made it easier than ever for brands to get to market.
Soon, measurable channel conversion became a normal part of the attribution equation. An entire generation of marketers became reliant on direct-response creative, deterministic attribution, and the belief that a dollar into Facebook generated an accurate channel-based return-on-ad-spend.
Shifting from larger creative campaigns to more platform-native content, this period of time saw exponential growth in the efficiency of ad spend.
The digital agency, single-channel agency, and freelance economy all carved out market share in the quickly developing digital marketing space, and the “Madison Avenue Era” players found themselves on their heels struggling to develop digital competencies.
However, this time was short lived. A confluence of factors resulted in decreasing ad efficiency and fewer arbitrage opportunities on social platforms. Namely, Apple Tracking Transparency, digital channel saturation, and slowing platform growth marked the end of the DTC Era.