December 17, 2025
In a consumer packaged goods (CPG) environment defined by media fragmentation and intense margin pressure, simply driving volume is no longer sufficient—the mandate is profitable revenue growth. In this exclusive interview on the CPG Guys podcast, Ibotta Founder and CEO Bryan Leach details the company’s evolution from a savings app to a performance marketing platform, built on a network that reaches more than 200 million consumers nationwide.
Leach reveals how Ibotta leverages first-party insights and best-in-class measurement to eliminate promotional waste. The driving force behind this shift toward the "Outcomes Era" is our new measurement solution, LiveLift™. This innovative approach to helping brands drive incremental sales with greater efficiency and agility marks a new era in the company’s evolution as it works to redefine promotions as the single most profitable media investment CPG brands can make.
Listen to Leach’s conversation with the CPG Guys and check out the highlights from the interview below.
Q: What was the genesis of Ibotta’s evolution from a consumer cash back app to a performance marketing platform? (03:38–06:43)
A: When I founded the company back in 2012, the need was an ability for CPG brands to have a direct connection to the millions of consumers who buy their products through a mobile app. We were the first to invent the idea of fee-per-redemption promotions and really pioneered the idea of total alignment of interests by having a fee-per-sale model. We don't get paid unless our clients drive an actual verified sale. The clients loved the model, but even with 20 million people actively using our platform, that was a relatively small amount of total addressable spend. They wanted a lot more scale. We saw an opportunity to take everything we'd learned and build out a network, which was the beginning of what we call now the Ibotta Performance Network, or the IPN.
Q: How has the IPN been reshaped and enhanced by the addition of new intermediaries and an increased focus on measurement? (11:38–14:57)
A: The two most recent and impactful innovations have been in measurement. The first is the ability to have ongoing measurement of a promotion’s actual profitability, which we call LiveLift. This allows you to look at the statistical lift in incremental sales while the campaign is happening on a rolling measurement basis. The second major invention is the idea of third-party measurement. We partnered with Circana to allow our partners to buy a lift study from a third party that independently corroborates that statistically significant difference in purchases, comparing the exposed group versus a matched audience.
Q: Why is CPID the right metric for proving promotion profitability over ROAS? (15:32–17:36)
A: Almost every CMO will tell you, promotions are not a high ROI alternative because they subsidize so many people. This notion that it's not profitable to run promotions is dead wrong. We look at the delta between two identical matched audiences, and all we take credit for is the delta. We ask: "what am I paying fully loaded on a cost per incremental dollar basis (CPID)?" You can easily compare that to your contribution margin of a sale and say, "let it stay up until it exceeds that number and then have it turn off." This allows you to manipulate parameters to land an offer that's highly efficient and profitable.
Q: How is Ibotta enabling the "Outcomes Era" through optimization, not just targeting? (17:36–26:17)
A: In the CPG world, we have typically relied on discrete annual, rigid budget allocation based on a single hypothesis. We are changing the culture to what we call the Outcomes Era. You define the outcome you care about — "I want to maximize incremental sales, subject to a constraint of lesser than or equal to 30 cent cost per incremental dollar." We are running these behavioral economics experiments to find the most Pareto optimal or efficient curve, allowing our partners to operate in an agile way. This is essential because the standard method is deeply un-agile; the way the whole industry is moving is toward the Outcomes Era.
Q: What is the single most important priority for brand partners, and how does the IPN deliver on it? (26:38–31:00)
A: Our brands want two things: top-line growth and bottom-line growth. We need to re-accelerate sales without eroding margins. We believe ROAS is not at all appropriate because it is incomplete; no one cares about sales that would have happened anyway. CPID is the right standard because it relates directly to the product's contribution margin, allowing a brand to deliver profitable revenue growth. This allows us to move to a scale where we can drive half a billion to a billion dollars of sales for the biggest companies.
Q: What does the Liquid Death case study prove about the IPN’s real-world impact? (31:21–40:00)
A: The Liquid Death case study shows they "have no other tool like the Ibotta Performance Network and LiveLift" because they can leave it always on and running and "know it's driving top and bottom line growth." This results in a rule-based resource allocation, not a deeply non-agile system. This is possible because LiveLift relies on the gold standard of statistics, the scientific method. We provide a free rolling lift study that is just as good as what Google and Facebook do. This conviction is strong; already 83% of the companies who piloted LiveLift have come back to invest again.
*This is an edited transcript of a verbal conversation and is not a verbatim record. It has been prepared for informational purposes only and only some passages are written here. The text may have been modified to improve clarity, grammar, and sentence structure, and some non-essential elements have been omitted. For a precise and complete record, please refer to the original audio.