How Eucalyptus's CEO thinks about measurement, creative bets, and why brand vs. performance is a false choice

Tim Doyle is the CEO of Eucalyptus, a digital health company with multiple brands across Australia, the UK, Japan, and Germany. He’s one of those rare CEOs who came up through marketing, and he’s blunt about what’s working, what’s wasteful, and what people keep lying to themselves about.

In this conversation, Tim digs into why “perfect attribution” is a trap, why the best creative can crush the average by a stupid amount, and why he’s still suspicious of Meta even when it takes up most of the budget.

The gist

• Most “perfect attribution” tools sell false precision. Purchase journeys are messy, so your dashboard will lie to you if you pretend it’s clean.

• Stop calling it brand vs performance. Tim says it’s “one thing” and the split makes people argue about the wrong stuff.

• Creative is the real lever. “The best creative… performs the median by 100x.” So if your tests flop, you might just be shipping average work.

• Long-term wins come from owning more of the journey. Tim’s building editorial teams to earn trust across all the touch points that are not ads.

The parts every operator should steal

Tim’s issue with attribution isn’t that measurement is bad. It’s that a lot of tools pretend they can tell a simple story about a complicated path. People see one chart, feel smart, then over-invest in the channels that are best at taking credit for conversions.

He also doesn’t love fixed funnel labels. His lens is simpler: every piece of content should move someone from one state to another. Maybe it’s unaware to aware. Maybe it’s skeptical to trusting. The point is: name the move, then decide how you’ll tell if it happened.

Then there’s the creative take, which is the one that stings (in a useful way). If the best creative can beat the median by 100x, you can run a bunch of tests and learn nothing because you never shipped anything great. That doesn’t mean the channel is dead. It might mean your output is flat.

Finally, the “long-term bets” part is not about vibes. It’s capacity and capability. Tim’s building editorial teams because he wants to own more of the research journey, not just the ad click. That’s where trust gets built, especially in categories where public perception swings around with the news cycle.

What Tim shared

• “If you are an ideas person in the classic sense, then the value of your time and the value of your work has never been higher.”

• “The cost of production is now so low that no idea is impossible.”

• “We don’t really do budgets.”

• “You have an average watch time on these video ads of two seconds, and yet they’re claiming hundreds of incremental conversions. And I’m like, how?”

Why it matters

If you’re chasing “perfect” attribution, you’ll end up optimizing for what’s easiest to count. And that usually means you drift lower and lower in the funnel until the only lever left is discounts and budget.

Tim’s frame forces a different question: what change are we trying to cause in the buyer’s mind, and what’s the best way to get there? That’s how you avoid building a marketing machine that looks efficient in a dashboard but makes the brand weaker over time.

And the creative point is the real gut check. If the upside of great creative is 100x, then treating creative like an afterthought is the most expensive mistake in the whole system.

Practical next steps

• Pick one campaign and write the “state change” in one sentence. Example: “skeptical to trusting” or “aware to ready to talk.” Then decide what you’ll accept as evidence that it worked.

• Audit your measurement stack for false precision. If a tool is telling you “this ad drove exactly X” in a messy journey, treat it like a guess, not a fact.

• Make a creative cadence you can actually sustain. If you can’t produce enough volume, you’ll shrink your bets until everything looks the same and you’ll never find a breakout winner.

• Run at least one “trust check” on Meta. If you’re getting wild conversion claims off two-second watch times, set up a harder test that limits retargeting and forces new audiences.

Invest in one non-ad touch point you can own. That could be an editorial page, a YouTube series, or a simple guide that answers the questions people ask before they buy.