Omer Shai on marketing finance
From 16 Years Of Marketing Lessons In 54 Minutes - ft. CMO Of Wix.com · · Marketing Against the Grain
“We introduced 'TR' — time to return on investment — because we didn't want to predict users' lifetime value; we were okay building the company as long as we recovered cash within a set period (about eight months), which allowed us to be aggressive with marketing spend.”
On , Omer Shai, CMO at Wix.com, spoke about marketing finance during 16 Years Of Marketing Lessons In 54 Minutes - ft. CMO Of Wix.com on Marketing Against the Grain.
About Omer Shai
Omer Shai, Chief Marketing Officer at Wix, has been discussing his approach to marketing investment and team leadership in recent interviews. He stated that he does not give bonuses based on short-term results, as he wants employees to feel able to say "no" to investments they consider wrong without being in conflict between compensation and the company's interests. Shai said he prefers measuring "time to return on investment" over lifetime value, describing lifetime value as unreliable and stating that the metric allows for faster decision-making about growth. He noted that Wix refers to marketing as "marketing investment" and introduced a metric called "TR" (time to return on investment), explaining that the company was comfortable building as long as cash was recovered within about eight months, which enabled aggressive marketing spend. Shai has also reflected on his 17-year tenure at Wix, during which he said the company scaled to more than 250 million users worldwide. He described himself as a "full stack marketer," defining the term as someone who can do much more than they think they can, with no boundaries. He emphasized transparency in communication with customers and team management, and said that in April 2020 the company added more than 3.2 million users in a single month as businesses moved online. In earlier interviews, Shai described Wix as a do-it-yourself platform that enables users to create websites for free, with a premium business model where users pay to connect their own domain and remove branding.