How Haus' Tom O'Bara helps billion-dollar enterprises with their biggest marketing investment decisions

Enterprise Measurement Strategy Lead Tom O’Bara was in the middle of his usual Monday morning Slack catch-up when a message came in from Haus’ biggest customer. As an enterprise business with billions in annual revenue and a nine-figure paid media budget, they could have been reaching out about any number of things.

But today, there were no fires to put out, no quick huddles to join ASAP. In fact, they had good news: They were reaching out to let Tom know he’d received the top prize in their employee recognition program. 

No, Tom is not an employee at this company. But to use their own words, Tom’s “heroic troubleshooting” and “gold-standard dedication” have made him seem like an essential partner and an extension of their team.

It’s this same dedication and expertise that has earned Tom a seat at the table with some of Haus’ largest customers, including owning communication with every film studio Haus works with. These Fortune 50 companies don’t just come with massive ad budgets; they also feature sprawling teams — small armies of analytics, marketing, and data science decision-makers spread across in-house and agency teams. It’s not uncommon for Tom to lead pre-sales calls in front of twenty stakeholders at a time.

The common thread across all of these enterprise accounts: building individual relationships. In talking with Tom, you can pull out three strategies he uses to build strong relationships with customer contacts at enterprise companies:

• Position these customers for success within their organizations
• Help these customers tell a clear, data-backed story to finance partners
• When skepticism emerges, double down on transparency

While these strategies might sound straightforward in the abstract, they’re genuinely inspiring to see in practice. Two stories from Tom’s time at Haus stand out and underscore just how much enterprise organizations value having a partner like Tom in their corner.

“Our CMO is going to love this”: How Tom creates measurement heroes

When Tom sits down with a customer to build their testing roadmap, one question is at the forefront of his mind: What tests will make this customer look the best internally?

“How is Haus going to help them get promoted?” he says. “How are we going to help them be great at their job and earn upward visibility in their org thanks to this partnership with Haus?”

Tom put this strategy into motion while working with a major film studio on the paid media strategy for a highly anticipated title. The movie was coming out in January, so the studio wanted to do a campaign around the holidays, running ads in the three days before and after Christmas. Then they wanted to test whether people who had been served media during the holiday period went on to buy tickets.

This proved true — people who saw the ads bought at a higher rate. But then lift dropped off abruptly after the campaign. Once the movie was out, that paid media wasn’t making an impact on ticket sales.

“This confirmed the CMO’s long-standing hypothesis that advertising a film after it comes out is a waste of ad dollars,” says Tom. “The thinking goes that by then, viewers have made up their minds whether they’ll see the movie.”

The team immediately knew their CMO would love these results. After all, this had been a hunch for years, but before working with Haus, they’d had no way to confirm that hunch with trustworthy results across multiple incrementality tests. Now, they could use causal data to tell that story in the room where budgets get decided.

Turning skeptics into champions at a major home improvement retailer

Measurement stories aren’t always as straightforward as that journey with the movie studio.

When Tom first started working with a massive home improvement retailer, things were shaky at first. The brand was savvy, but unfamiliar with Haus’ synthetic control methodology, as well as geo testing in general. They spent initial tests focused on whether a six-figure investment in Pinterest and Meta was driving incremental sales to their entire business… which does nearly a billion dollars in sales a day.

“Naturally, that small of an investment wasn’t going to move the needle for such a massive brand,” says Tom. “So when this test registered minimal lift, the team had a lot of questions. Frankly, they weren’t very happy with the results.”

Luckily, this wasn’t the first time Tom had worked with a large company — and certainly not the first time he’d worked with a skeptical large company. Across those experiences, he’d learned an important lesson: The best cure for skepticism is transparency.

So, as this home improvement retailer asked more questions about methodology, Tom decided to open the black box. He brought in analytic leads and other science voices at Haus who walked the client through synthetic control and fielded deep questions. Meanwhile, Tom restructured their tests around more granular KPIs that would focus on specific categories rather than the entire business.

This radical transparency turned things around. With more tests under their belt, the relationship has strengthened into something collaborative and mutually rewarding.

“Now our calls are friendly and conversational,” says Tom. “Earlier today, we were on the phone just spitballing ideas for future experiments. It actually felt fun, and like a real team effort — not your usual vendor-customer relationship.”

Why Tom’s work matters for the future of enterprise measurement

Tom isn’t a rookie when it comes to enterprise measurement. 

Before Haus, he helped companies like Microsoft and Grubhub achieve their online performance goals. Then it was off to Amazon, where he helped internal brands like Prime Video, Audible, Kindle, and Echo efficiently manage their massive ad budgets. He maintains that having Haus at these stops would have made his job “10 to 20 times easier.” (Leave it to the measurement pro to provide a confidence interval.)

That measurement work continues at Haus, where Tom takes an active role in the actual Haus product. When he isn’t whiteboarding test ideas with billion-dollar brands, he’s taking their feedback and piping those insights right back into Haus’ product roadmap. 

When Tom sees the same question surfacing across studios, retailers, and streaming giants, he works with his colleagues in science and product to turn those edge cases into features, so the next customer doesn’t have to start from scratch. 

It all comes back to Tom’s original goal: Making sure the Haus platform is equipping customers with data they can trust and act on with confidence. Meanwhile, Tom is the indispensable collaborator throughout the process, helping some of the biggest companies in the world build a continuous, actionable measurement framework to power their decision-making.