Fourteen years ago, Angus Growney worked out he could game an attribution model. He was buying TV in Australia for HelloFresh, taking strategy calls out of Germany built around an in-house model meant to show what was working. He could move the numbers without moving the business.
I could do things that would increase our performance from their point of view,” he says, that wouldn’t actually generate revenue.
That discovery set the course for his career. Once a marketer has watched a number bend, trust becomes the thing worth chasing. Growney now leads performance marketing at Bared, the podiatrist-founded Melbourne footwear brand that does around 70% of its trade online and is opening stores in New York and Auckland.
On the episode, Growney and Triple Whale Chief Revenue Officer Zach Rego set out three shifts facing every ecommerce team:
- Trust in the data has to be built before any dashboard is worth switching on
- Once the numbers are trusted, AI can settle the calls teams used to argue over
- The frontier is AI taking action on media buying, inside guardrails the team sets
What Is an AI Operating System for Ecommerce?
An AI operating system for ecommerce is a platform that pulls a brand’s data into one place and then acts on it, rather than only reporting it. It combines attribution, analytics and AI agents so a team can ask questions in plain language and automate decisions like budget changes.
Triple Whale, used by more than 60,000 brands, applies the term to its own platform. It launched in 2022 as a first-party pixel built to stitch together conflicting numbers from Meta, Google, and other channels into a single customer journey, and has since layered AI on top.
More data isn’t better in most cases, so how do we use more data to operationalise it?
Trust Comes Before the Dashboard
Most brands want the dashboard on day one. Bared spent three months first.
Before switching Triple Whale on, the team moved its numbers into a data warehouse and checked them line by line. There was no local Triple Whale team at the time, so much of the work happened on late-night calls with US developers, six to eight weeks deep, until the data lined up.
When we move forward and make marketing and business decisions off the back of it, we can trust that it’s correct.
Angus Growney, Performance Marketing Manager, Bared
Without that trust, every meeting turns into a debate about whose number is right instead of what to do next.
Bared’s first return came from abandoned checkouts. Klaviyo runs those flows, but every pixel misses some data, so the team added Triple Whale‘s pixel as a backup to catch what slipped through. It picked up around 20% that had been missing, worth a couple of thousand dollars a week in recaptured sales. The platform paid for itself inside the first test.
Let the Data Settle the Debate
Trusted data changes who wins an argument. The loudest voice in the room stops carrying it by default.
Rego described a brand deadlocked over a Performance Max campaign, the director wanting it gone and the media buyer wanting to keep it. Moby, Triple Whale’s AI layer, read the data and recommended killing it, along with one specific slice. They did, and it was the right call.
Let’s take the opinions out of it, which we all have, and just let the data tell us something.
Zach Rego, Chief Revenue Officer, Triple Whale
Moby includes a microphone button that transcribes the meeting and answers the question at the end. Triple Whale uses the feature in its own executive meetings.
The sharpest findings often come from data nobody thought to connect. Rego cited a brand that changed a jeans inseam by half an inch and made an incremental $100,000 after social comments, reviews, and return data collectively showed that sizing was driving returns.
That reach makes Triple Whale as much a business analytics tool as a performance one. At Bared, product teams use it to see what customers buy next and which shoes to develop for each market, with alerts when a style is about to sell out while it’s still running in ads.
The view spans three markets on different seasonal calendars. Around 20 people across leadership, product, ecommerce, and marketing work off one source, from a daily trading update to a weekly product report, across Australia, the US, and New Zealand. When Growney wants to know why Bared had a big week in Colorado, he asks and has a shareable answer in five minutes.
Dashboards, on Growney’s read, are on the way out. When Bared opened the platform to its team, the first screen was not a dashboard but Moby, asking what they wanted to know. The resistance he expected never came. People typed in the questions already in their heads.
Hand the Repetitive Decisions to AI
The newest shift is AI taking the action, not just reporting on it.
Rego pointed to True Classic, which runs its entire Meta budget through Moby with no human in the loop, guided by a ten-page rules file the brand wrote itself. Thousands of budget changes a month run inside the guardrails the team set.
Media buying is mostly a decision-making process.
Zach Rego, Chief Revenue Officer, Triple Whale
Feed a system enough of those decisions, Rego says, and it can make the simple ones on its own.
Bared built its own autonomous buyer, the first in Australia to test one. It keeps scaling the US overnight while the Australian team sleeps, without a US hire or an agency to cover the gap. The rules are set. An ad that hits three times its target spend without converting is switched off, and a good ad starved of budget moves to a secondary test account to prove itself.
Those are simple decisions the AI can make. We don’t need to make those.
Angus Growney, Performance Marketing Manager, Bared
Talk like this has people calling media buying dead. It isn’t. The repetitive, rules-based calls move to a system with clear limits, which gives operators back time for the work only they can do.
Bared draws its line at creative. It won’t let AI generate finished ads, but it uses the underlying reasoning: Moby explains why an ad should work, the hook, the season, and the states it suits, then hands that to its own creative team to build on. Triple Whale generated around 40,000 images for brands last month, though Rego concedes the fully automated version still has a way to go for brands that guard their look.
The Takeaway
Attribution isn’t the finish line, it’s the foundation. Bared didn’t get faster on a smarter dashboard. It got faster by making its numbers trustworthy, then letting that trust flow into decisions and, in time, into action the AI takes on its own.
Rego’s bet is that automating the lever-pulling frees operators to focus on the work that still wins: strategy, taste and brand. If a team still argues about whose number is right, that’s the job to fix first.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Triple Whale? Triple Whale is an analytics and AI platform for ecommerce used by more than 60,000 brands. It began in 2022 as a first-party pixel for attribution and now positions itself as an AI operating system for ecommerce, covering attribution, AI agents, marketing mix modelling and automated media buying.
What is Moby by Triple Whale? Moby is Triple Whale’s AI layer. It answers questions in plain language, briefs creative and can manage media buying. It runs in a Copilot mode, where the operator approves each action, and an Autopilot mode, where it executes changes within preset guardrails.
How do you build an ecommerce measurement foundation you can trust? Get your data into one place and verify it before acting on it. Bared spent about three months moving its numbers into a data warehouse and checking them line by line, so its team could make decisions off one trusted source across Australia, the US and New Zealand.
Can AI run ecommerce media buying on its own? Yes, within limits the team sets. True Classic runs its entire Meta budget through Triple Whale’s Moby with no human in the loop, guided by a ten-page rules file, while Bared uses an autonomous buyer for overnight decisions like pausing an ad that spends three times its target without converting.
Based on Episode #646 of the Add To Cart podcast with Zach Rego, Chief Revenue Officer at Triple Whale, and Angus Growney, Performance Marketing Manager at Bared. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
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