In the spirit of the holiday I wanted to express my gratitude to our team and partners as we’ve made unprecedented strides. Last week, Dosh reached a monumental milestone: we trended #1 in the App Store and saw hundreds of thousands of consumers download our app and link their cards. This brought tremendous brand awareness and visibility to our platform. It felt like our company was running an ad during the Super Bowl, but only better, because instead of views and clicks we saw hundreds of thousands of dollars paid out to consumers in just a couple of days.

To illuminate what that means for me, I’d like to share my ‘why’ for joining Dosh and why we have so much to look forward to over the next few years.

I’ve been in the media business for over 25 years. The majority of that time was spent on the sales frontlines competing for 'share of ad budget'. Some days we won and took a larger share of spend while other days we lost to a competitor. In every case, the budgets simply shifted from one publisher to another and one platform to another. Conde Nast would steal share from Hearst, or AOL would gain digital budget from Facebook. Google would shift budgets from print, radio, and TV.

The point in all of this is that for my entire career I’ve witnessed a long game of musical chairs in every part of the media and advertising business. The names on the chairs have certainly changed over the years and some of those chairs are much bigger but the tune has always been the same. The music stops and the media companies scramble back to their seats trading budgets quarter over quarter. Until now....

Thanks to Dosh, there is a new chair in the circle: the consumer. Dosh represents a new tune and one that directly benefits individuals and their families every day. This is the first time billion dollar media budgets have a chance to move directly to consumers pockets and we get the chance to bring that vision to reality. What an honor and privilege!  

A shift this massive and profound doesn’t happen overnight. The media business has been running pretty much the same way for 100 years. Fortunately, brands have already begun adjusting their ad budgets in response.

As a lifelong media seller, I never take for granted the opportunity to partner with the biggest brands in the world. It is a privilege strategizing how to leverage Dosh with world class clients like Walmart, Sam's Club, CVS, Exxon, Forever 21, and Pizza Hut as well as major global ad agencies like, PMX, Camelot Media, Horizon and more. We have the opportunity to play on the biggest fields in the media industry, and as a lifelong student of the business, this is a remarkably rare position to be in.

We’re thrilled to see incredible results for our merchant partners, recently including: a 77% lift in spend for a nationwide department store to a 54.8% lift in daily spend for one of the largest convenience store brands in the world. These metrics validate why card-linked offers drive meaningful behavior change for consumers and cash back is the most effective mechanism for driving consumer loyalty. As part of our mission, we’re turning merchants into heroes for consumers.

One last data point I implore everyone thinks about: according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, the average cost of Thanksgiving dinner this year (Turkey and all the fixings for 10) will cost $48.90. Dosh and our merchant partners have the chance to 'buy' next year's Thanksgiving dinner for millions of families. With great partners and more joining Dosh every month, it should be easy for Dosh users to earn $50 cash back in the next 12 months, which is enough to pay for Thanksgiving dinner in 2019. Let’s put an extra chair at our Thanksgiving Day dinner tables tomorrow and remember why we are doing this...to benefit American families everywhere.

Wishing all of our merchant partners and their families a Happy Thanksgiving on behalf of the entire team at Dosh!