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I want to share something important.

The next time your portfolio brand's CMO presents marketing results at a board meeting, pay attention to what metric they lead with.

If the answer is platform ROAS "Meta said we got a 4x, Google said 3x" you need to ask a follow-up question.

Because both platforms are reporting on their own performance.

That's like asking a student to grade their own exam.

Meta will always say Meta did great. Google will always say Google was the reason for the conversion.

And if the brand is using GA4 as their attribution layer, they're literally asking Google to evaluate Meta's contribution. The bias is structural.

The brands in your portfolio that are actually measuring marketing effectively are doing something different.

They're running incrementality tests. They're measuring causal impact, what would have happened if this spend hadn't existed?

That approach gives you a true picture of what each channel contributes. And it often reveals that the channels your CMO is celebrating aren't the ones doing the heavy lifting.

I bring this up because marketing measurement is an area where VCs can add enormous value to portfolio companies.

Most CMOs don't have the budget or the mandate to overhaul their measurement stack. A nudge from the board level, "are we measuring incrementality?", can be the push that changes how the entire marketing function operates.

The brands that win aren't the ones spending the most.

They're the ones who know where the money actually works.

Don’t Just Go South: Tariffs, tension, and the future of scaling Canadian brands

A question I keep getting asked right now: should we still be trying to expand into the US?

Honest answer? It depends... and it's a much more complicated conversation than it was 18 months ago.

The tariff environment has changed the math. The political volatility has changed the risk profile. And a lot of Canadian brands that had the US in their roadmap are quietly pausing to reassess.

But "don't go south" isn't automatically the right answer either. The playbook has changed. That doesn't mean the opportunity is gone.

That's exactly what we're getting into on May 7th in Montreal.

We're co-hosting a dinner panel with Izba, Ecom North and GoDirect and we're going to have a real conversation about what it actually looks like to scale a Canadian brand right now.

US expansion, alternative markets, and what founders need to be thinking about that most aren't.

Don't Just Go South: Tariffs, tension, and the future of scaling Canadian brands

📅 Thursday, May 7 | 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
📍 Montréal, QC (address shared after registration)
Panel kicks off at 7:30 PM

If you're a Montreal-based founder wrestling with this question, I'd love to see you there.

Thanks for reading,

Niket Shah
Co-Founder, Accler8 Labs

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