Scaling Restricted Products With AppLovin: Lessons From cbdMD With Wade Brown

Wade Brown is the Vice President of Marketing at cbdMD, a publicly traded company known for its CBD and cannabis product lines. He is a seasoned executive with expertise across ecommerce, B2B and B2C channels, digital advertising, and strategic partnerships. Wade has led marketing for restricted product categories, including CBD, THC beverages, firearms, and tactical gear, with leadership roles at SupplyKick, Inc Authority, NatureWise, among others. At cbdMD, he drives customer acquisition and creative ad strategies, spearheading the launch of the Herbal Oasis infused beverage line and securing distribution with major retailers like Total Wine.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:56] Wade Brown highlights why AppLovin is a top-of-funnel acquisition channel
• [4:22] How cbdMD uses AppLovin to advertise restricted products like CBD and THC beverages
• [7:58] Leveraging HTML ads on AppLovin for higher engagement
• [11:32] HTML ads versus video and image creatives
• [13:15] How fast brands can expect to see results when testing AppLovin
• [15:57] Common mistakes marketers make when measuring AppLovin’s impact in the funnel

In this episode…

When the usual ad channels become crowded, expensive, or off-limits, many brands can get stuck with limited growth options. For companies in restricted categories, the challenge is even greater: How do you reach high-quality customers while staying compliant and profitable? Could a lesser-known platform like AppLovin be the untapped opportunity these brands need?

According to Wade Brown, a seasoned marketing leader with deep expertise in restricted product categories, AppLovin has become one of the most reliable top-of-funnel acquisition channels. He highlights that the platform delivers trackable, high-quality traffic, often outperforming Meta and TikTok. The key, Wade explains, is repurposing proven creatives like UGC videos while also testing interactive HTML ads that offer richer engagement. By treating AppLovin as a funnel starter rather than expecting immediate conversions, brands can nurture audiences more effectively and expand reach into new markets. This strategic approach helps restricted brands capture authentic traffic and build sustainable campaigns.

In this episode of the Minds of Ecommerce, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews Wade Brown, VP of Marketing at cbdMD, about how AppLovin helps restricted brands scale customer acquisition. Wade discusses the advantages of HTML ads, how to repurpose winning creatives, and the importance of patience in testing. He also shares insights into funnel measurement, traffic quality, and common mistakes marketers make when evaluating new platforms.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle: LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Wade Brown on LinkedIn
• cbdMD
• AppLovin
• Criteo
• AdRoll

Quotable Moments:

• "AppLovin allows 21-plus; it allows advertising directly to our site without loss of attribution."
• "The HTML file functionality is definitely a hidden gem that I think is worth mentioning to your listeners."
• "HTML files are performing the strongest for us, and it's not like doing anything beyond."
• "It doesn’t take all day to recognize sunshine, bro. It’s a quality ad platform."
• "Being too dismissive of a channel and writing it off is the biggest mistake marketers make."

Action Steps:

1. Test AppLovin as a top-of-funnel channel: Using it for awareness campaigns helps brands reach high-quality audiences in less saturated spaces. This creates a stronger entry point into the customer journey.
2. Repurpose proven creatives from other platforms: Start with your best-performing Meta or TikTok ads when testing AppLovin. This minimizes risk, reduces creative costs, and accelerates results.
3. Experiment with HTML ads for engagement: HTML formats offer interactive, website-like experiences inside apps. They can outperform video and image ads by providing a more dynamic and memorable interaction.
4. Measure channels according to funnel stage: Don’t expect immediate conversions from a top-of-funnel platform. By aligning metrics properly, you’ll discover the real value each channel provides.
5. Be patient with testing before judging results: Jumping to conclusions too quickly can lead to dismissing promising platforms. Patience allows optimization, better creative testing, and more accurate insights into performance.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend
You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  0:06  

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15-minute episode. Founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy. So you'll get to learn and grow your online sales today on episode number 64. Get ready. We've got Wade Brown, who's the VP of Marketing at cbdMD, and we'll talk about AppLovin, the why, the do's and the don'ts. It's gonna be a very fun episode. And well, I'm your host, Raphael Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase, and this is Minds of Ecommerce. Now this episode is also brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine-figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice, and Amika grow through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. We figure out why your website isn't converting, and then, well, we help you fix it. You get increased conversions, higher AOV, and, of course, more money, which allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it for over a decade now, and we can help you take care of the entire process from A to Z. So if you want to learn more, go to splitbase.com today to request a free proposal. All right, Wade, welcome to the show.

Wade Brown  1:27  

Thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  1:32  

Yeah, well, AppLovin, I'm so glad we're chatting about this today, because it is not a topic we've talked about a ton on this podcast, and I know that it's been pretty significant for you guys. So let's just dive right in. As you know, this podcast is all about, you know, cutting straight to the meat, the actionable parts of it. So maybe for some context, why AppLovin?

Wade Brown  1:56  

I feel like it's one of the most solid top-of-the-funnel acquisition channels now. So, yeah, I've just had a great amount of success. It's trackable. It's traceable, and it's, you know, from a lot of measurable standpoints. It's outperforming Meta and TikTok, and some other channels that use traditional, amazing. I'm kind of curious, right?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  2:20  

Because I think, like so many people have heard of AppLovin, but there's also a bit of a mystery around it, where you hear of so many people having successes, yet the familiar is Google. It's Facebook, to some extent, even TikTok, right? I'd love to know about, like, your path to using AppLovin. Like, is there anything specific that made you think at one point? Hey, you know, we got to branch out. We got to try app loving. How did you just approach that?

Wade Brown  2:52  

Yeah, great question, AppLovin is, I'm sure you're aware, and most people who listen to your podcast or in our space, it's a new, it's an emergent platform in the past couple of years, right? I think when you hear app marketing, you usually think of apps selling to apps. And quite honestly, a lot of the app paid ad marketing places were just that, right? It's like, I have an app, I need to scale it. I go to an app store and do app marketing, app loving, without a doubt, you can still market apps. But what made it, I feel like such a great option, is you can advertise consumer package goods and other products and services. So AppLovin opens up the gaming and, you know, Candy Crush, all these apps essentially that people are playing on. And unlike meta and the quality of the traffic, if the real user's AppLovin somebody sitting and playing a game or an app is a human being. So the quality of that one-to-one interaction, and ultimately, for us with cbdMD, is we're a restricted category in brown nine th drinks under our umbrella, we have her little basis, which is an infused beverage line. So AppLovin allows 21 plus. It allows advertising directly to our site. So quite often, you know, given the restricted nature of our product, it seemed going to platforms like perhaps Twitter or app loving that allow adult products and can advertise to adults, makes the most sense, and it it prevents, as we all know, the decay of events and attribution with the customer, so that one to one connection from AppLovin to our actual primary website, without that loss of attribution is been very, very helpful. So that's why I love Apple. I mean, it lets us advertise adult products, typical restricted categories, as we know, med is somewhere in the middle, and then TikTok is very, very protective. So if you're talking like, for me, who's done business, firearms, tactical stuff, being in restricted categories, you kind of have to get more creative wherever you're ever. Allows that, and it's, yeah, like a solid platform on top of it. So it's, like, the best of both worlds, yeah,

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  5:07  

I'm also curious, right? Like we think of the context in which users are clicking on those ads, right? It's always a bit different from platform to platform. You know, meta people are in the content consumption, Instagram audience is maybe a bit more distracted, but you know, similarly, I think it's starting to be a bit more like just Facebook in general, with more content consumption type of thing. TikTok is a heavily distracted audience that wants instant gratification, low attention span. Things need to go a little faster. Ultimately, where does AppLovin fall into, considering people are playing games? Does your landing page? Where are you talking to that traffic? Does it need to defer that much from maybe what you're doing on other platforms, or is it still pretty similar?

Wade Brown  5:55  

Another great question so far for us, I use it top of the funnel, primarily, given the CPMs are more expensive. And if you're gonna, like, if I'm gonna hammer remarketing, there's options like Proteo and things that can really fall around that user once they've been identified for a much more cost-effective fashion. And get all of those, you know, multiple interactions and submitting them to the synapses. Right, so app loving, as far as the creative and how I've utilized that, it has the traditional so it's like meta. It's more known for nearly a decade. It's not that the platform is not robust. So you can recycle, you can take videos, image ads, same thing as meta, where we're seeing the best success with this UGC top of the funnel stuff, the people are actively engaged in the game, and then it forces them to watch the entirety of the video. So it's not as though it's simple, it's it's so that I feel like is, you have somebody who has to watch a video to go to the next level, and then, you know, so hopefully that audience is more willing to engage than they were be if they just scroll past and it's an impression, and you don't really know how much you know, I guess you can do operate to see what the view rates. But anyway, so what we've used is scroll, stop being top of the funnel, UGC, primarily to try to get them back to our site. So we've tested a variety of offers, so the typical DTC offer testing and UGC content creator, all of that, in my mind, is from a marketing brand standpoint, easily recycled into AppLovin. So I think from an internal operation standpoint, it's a light lift. You can take what you're already using in meta and TikTok, and throw in the AppLovin.  In addition, and this is where I feel like the opportunity also lies, is that they have HTML files so that you can do more than you can in the other platforms because of the game nature. So yeah, app loving allows you to push them. Can you elaborate on that?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  7:58  

I think, I think that was like an interesting tidbit, yeah?

Wade Brown  8:06  

So, um, yeah, instead of just a regular image ad, you can create an HTML ad, which then allows HTML function, website function out. So that's, that's, I think one of those. It's a heavier lift. But if concepts are proven, like putting your UGC, your videos, you're like, Okay, this is, this is, so I'm getting traffic. It's working. It can then justify like, hey, I want to have more dynamic buttons, or, you know, whatever envelopes you can push in that regard, so that that's another ad creative format type in addition to the videos and the image ads that we're seeing, the HTML files in format, doing, doing well. So, but it's, it's new, and it's novel. To your point, it's something that we mean. What do you mean, HTML ads? So you're creating an HTML-based, like a little website, put it as a file, and then you can then move it, but you can do all the stuff you can do on a website, essentially. So then that functionality, you know, changes. So it's just like most things. Yeah, I would explore the ad creative types and the testing and seeing how you can push the envelope. And I think that's going back to the original question about the customer journey, and if they're in a game, and if I can gamify an ad, all of a sudden I have a much more cohesive and engaging customer experience for our brand versus just a UGC. So yeah, you picked up on the nugget there, right? So the HTML file functionality is definitely a hidden gem that I think, you know, hopefully, is worth mentioning to your listeners.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  9:34  

I think it opens, for sure, a lot more creativity. I know there's some other platforms as well that allows that, you know, like, I know there's a role that allows a little bit of that as well, and but it's ultimately, like the tech part of it, right? Like, an HTML file is not usually a skill set. That's part of a creative team. How, how have you guys integrated when creatives are usually all. So you know, the videos or images, have you found a creative team that allows you to do that? Have you had to loop in developers? How does the process differ?

Wade Brown  10:11  

Luckily, at cbdMD, we have CTO and developers on staff, so we're able to, yeah, that was not a heavy lift, and where I was able to rely on internal resources, but you hit on something that would probably be a larger constraint. The brand's doing a couple million and don't have any real developers on staff, or anybody who can code out what you want to see. So there is, there is that caveat that somebody even needs to know HTML and what I'm talking about to create it. But the juice could be worth the squeeze, in my opinion, especially if you're saying, hey, I can put up my UGC videos and for my images ads, I'm able to drive verifiable new customers that I can then re market to on meta more effectively, and then he Oh, and to push them down the funnel more cost effectively, versus I feel like, oh, meta is just, you know, anyway, so that's kind of where, yeah, then hopefully the developer cost can be justified for a smaller brand, right? It's like, I don't want to pay all this to build it. You don't need to build it out to jump. But to your point there, yeah, it's like video editing. It's like a UGC creation. There are these hitting costs where you're like, oh, man,

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  11:18  

Have you seen better performance with HTML ads versus image or video, or do you kind of see them all on the same level, and then it just whatever is the best creative, no matter the format, just that's the one that wins. So you got to test all of them at the same level?

Wade Brown  11:32  

Yeah, I good question. And so far, the HTML ads are winning, but I don't semantics, because you never know what's behind the algorithm, and then the prioritization and the ad inventory. So my thought is, I assume, so from a larger context, it's really like you have image, video, and then HTML files, and then the same thing you see work on Meta, right? Quality creatives, quality creative video. Break hooks. You're gonna, I'm willing to bet it'll probably work over there, right? The change with HTML files. And this is where I don't know, because I don't work. I love it is my bidding on a smaller amount of real estate, so my dollars go further, because people don't upload HTML. So I don't know if it's interesting, just a bigger fish in a smaller pond, and there's that moat before it'll get saturated. But HTML files are performing the strongest for us. I don't, and it's not like doing anything beyond it's just yeah, so that I don't know why, because there isn't another parallel to test on. And, you know, I know, like Admiral and these other things. It's just, I go back to the quality of traffic. It's just these are all on App love, and they're playing games. There's no pods. It's, you're, you're, you're paying to be in front of actual people. So there's such high-quality traffic to be in front of as a brand.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  12:50  

Yeah, I'm kind of curious what I think, like so many brands are just used to testing the same proven channels. Jumping to a new channel can be a bit scary, and I know every brand will have a different experience, every product will have a different experience. But like, did it take a long time before, like, you actually started seeing results with AppLovin? Like, how much patience did you need? Did you ever felt like throwing a towel at one point?

Wade Brown  13:15  

You asked a good question, sir, no attribution. Super fun question. And if you're not doing post post-purchase survey and slicing it through like last click or triple A, L and GA, and looking through a bunch of different windows, do that first Anyway, before you start mixing channels and trying to build out a funnel, as I'm talking about here. But nevertheless, back to how quickly it is verifiable. Oh, instantaneous. It doesn't. It doesn't take, dude, I should be getting a commission from Athlone for this. It doesn't take all day to recognize sunshine breath like it's, like it's a quality ad platform. It works. It's, yeah, they it's, so that's, that's for me, it was within week one, week two, and our budgets drastically shifted. I mean, yeah, so it's, it's a core part of the media mix, but, you know, as you know, that's why people hear app loving, and it's, you know, it's gaining prominence because it's legitimate traffic on games and ads, and there, it's not as saturated as meta. So I think you can still get a lot of value from it right now.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  14:19  

Amazing. Yeah, I think listeners need to remember that at the end of the day, if you're trying something new, right? Like, you could get very lucky to hit a home run from the start, but you also need to test a lot of things. You can't just say, oh, app 11 doesn't work for me, because maybe the couple of creatives you tested aren't the right ones, or the audience targeting hasn't been figured out right. Like, there are so many factors. There still needs some time. And I've heard, you know, I talk to so many brands every single day, and it's not like everybody's been saying, No, it's not working, or everybody's saying it's working, right? It's a mix of everything. So you just gotta try to see for yourself. Have some patience and

Wade Brown  14:57  

But to your point, they had already established. cbdMD has been around for a decade. Now it's publicly traded, right? It's not like coming in, they had their offers, their funnels, but had been working on that for months to change up the pricing, the offer. So the UGC creative hammering that. So we spend a lot of money, to your point, working on Meta and having worked on and cherry picking the top creative, the top performance, the best offers, and then migrating that over to app loving. So I would be remiss, and you are 100% correct that it's not like this was just like we threw stuff onto app loving that had been battle tested by millions of dollars in spend on meta and other channels. So it's, yeah, it's not, you know, nothing happens overnight.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  15:49  

Love it. We're pretty much on time. But I have one last question for you, and if there's a mistake that you see people make with AppLovin.

Wade Brown  15:57  

What is it you probably alluded to right there? Man, I'd say being too dismissive of a channel and writing off, and this could be meta Tiktok, I think is another one where people measuring a channel inappropriately for where it should sit, like for me, you know, I know been on some other things that I years ago, talked about, like, I'm a big fan of multi metric funnels. So if I'm looking for impressions, I measure four impressions and then clicks, and then I can build my funnel down for that. So I feel like, what is your goal on App loving or TikTok or Meta, and what's the audience's conversions, Henry, or remark, and get them down there. But if you're looking for conversions on App loving and you haven't tested your product, your offer, you're not going to hit them with a solid sales funnel and do marketing, you know, so that this is the value of it, right? So for me, I'm measuring it as my top of the funnel, first touch, bringing in clicks, impressions, that ratio, and then from there, the way, it super charges, like 1015, rows in the read like it's just, I'm loving it so, but this goes back to properly measuring the channel for what it is and your objectives. And I think a lot of small businesses go to top of the funnel platforms or things that are great for that, and they measure for, like, a lot of the bottom of the funnel type of effects, when it's like, if you have a finite budget and all that get good at the bottom of the funnel and build up from there. So, yeah, I think knowing where you are in your business, your sales funnel development, your offer, your product, how sound that is before you're testing channels, when your core product offering isn't even gonna win, regardless of where you sell.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  17:32  

It's so very, very solid advice we've been talking to Wade Brown of cbdMD. Wade, thank you so much for all this fantastic insight into AppLovin, into what works, what doesn't. Now, if people want to learn more about you, about the company, where should they go? Where should they connect?

Wade Brown  17:52  

Yeah, cbdmd.com, we sell CBD and cannabis products. We also have Herbal Oasis, which is our infused beverage line on Total Wines, and dominating the East Coast, so we expect continual expansion. But yeah, check out our products. And you know, hit me up on LinkedIn. Wade Brown, if you ever want to coupon code or try any of our stuff or gummies to chill out, you know what I'm saying, just let us know.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  18:18  

Awesome. Wade. Thank you so much.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  18:25  

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode, and thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes Store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce tour that does over a million dollars in revenue, and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news, because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that. Go to splitbase.com to learn more, or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions, or comments, tweet me @Rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you again. Thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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