This is a recent recording from my appearance on Jordan West's podcast. There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the incrementally of YouTube after Haus Analytics revealed a groundbreaking report from 190 incrementally tests involving YouTube (link: https://www.haus.io/blog/do-youtube-ads-perform-lessons-from-190-incrementality-tests).

On this episode I share eye-opening case studies demonstrating how YouTube drives significant incremental growth - even when traditional attribution models fail to capture it. If you've been skeptical about YouTube's effectiveness or struggled to measure its impact, this conversation reveals why it might be the missing piece in your marketing strategy and how to approach it correctly.

Key Takeaways:

-Beyond Last-Click Attribution: Discover why obsessing over ROAS metrics can be misleading, and how YouTube drives significant business impact that often isn't captured in traditional attribution models but shows up dramatically in incrementality testing.

-The Real-World Proof: Brett shares compelling case studies, including a brand that saw Amazon sales cut in half when YouTube ads were paused, and another that achieved a 12-25% lift in Walmart store sales through targeted YouTube campaigns.

-The Anatomy of High-Converting YouTube Ads: Learn the essential elements of effective YouTube ads, including how to craft the perfect hook in the first 5 seconds, the importance of standard and "over-the-top" product demonstrations, and why 45-90 second videos often outperform shorter cuts.

-Production Value Matters: Unlike TikTok, YouTube requires slightly higher production quality (though not Super Bowl commercial level) - Brett explains the right balance and why combining polished footage with authentic UGC can be particularly powerful.

-Testing & Measurement Strategies: Get practical advice on how to properly measure YouTube's impact through geo tests, holdouts, search lift studies, and why tracking your overall MER (Media Efficiency Ratio) might be the simplest yet most effective approach.

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Brett Curry:

This is like TV advertising for our generation, but way better than TV advertising could ever be. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a unique episode. This is actually a recording that I did. I was a guest on my buddy Jordan West's podcast and we dove into YouTube. Now, Jordan West is a pro. He is a master of TikTok shops. He's built multiple brands, and his podcast is the secrets to scaling your E-Commerce brand. And we talked all about YouTube. Now, the reason we dove into this episode right now, this is coming off the heels of really a groundbreaking research piece or research project that was released by House Analytics, HAUS. Olivia Corey and team there have done some brilliant work all around the idea and the practice of measuring incrementality.

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Brett Curry:

We're seeing the true impact of channels. And so they tested, they did 190 incrementality tests that involved YouTube with 74 brands, and the results were mind blowing. She was on a podcast with Andrew Ferris Albe on that podcast soon as well. But the idea here is that YouTube severely underreport or Google Ads severely underreport, the actual impact the YouTube ads has to the tune of about 70% underreporting. Or another way to look at that. The reverse is it's about 3.42 x more incremental than what you see there. So if you're seeing a one row as an example in platform, the actual impact is probably a 3.42 x ROAS or 3.42 roas, which is amazing. And so in this podcast, Jordan asked me about our experiences as an agency. We're known as one of the top YouTube ad agencies for D two C brands. So tell lots of stories, lots of examples on the creative side, on the measurement side ways we've used YouTube to grow retail sales, omnichannel sales, I think it's going to be informative, instructive, and hopefully fun. So with that, please enjoy the interview that I did with Jordan West YouTube ads.

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Jordan West:

Hey guys, Jordan West back here Today. I am so excited about this podcast episode. I have one of the experts in the space in the YouTube space that is Brett Curry on the podcast for I believe a second time, maybe even third time. Brett, welcome back to the show.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, Jordan Min awesome to be here. It is for sure, at least the second time. And maybe the third, I'm not sure, but let's make this the best one yet. That'll be our goal.

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Jordan West:

I was so happy when you reached showed to me, I'm like, yes, I want to. I was really hoping we were going to talk about YouTube. I just said, Brett Ray showed. I'm like, I will have him on the podcast. I have no doubt that there's going to be tons of value here. So really looking forward to this. Brett, before we begin and really dive in, tell for people who dunno anything about you, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Totally.

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Brett Curry:

So I'm the CEO co-founder of OMG Commerce. We are a performance digital marketing agency. We focus primarily on D two c e-commerce and omnichannel retail brands, specialty with YouTube ads as we'll talk about today. But also all things Google. We lean into meta. We're full service on Amazon and we do retention marketing as well. So email and SMS, but I'm just passionate about marketing that works and marketing that builds a brand and also drives bottom line impact. So got team of about 40. We've been doing this since 2010, won some cool awards, been featured with some Google case studies and some other fun stuff. But at my core, I'm a marketing and business junkie, and so thrilled to be talking with you today.

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Jordan West:

Awesome, awesome. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think one of the interesting things that you and I were touching on before we actually pressed record here was this idea around trying to measure incrementality of some of these channels that are really hard to measure. So for me, everyone knows I've gone super hard on TikTok this year. I think the reason why TikTok shop was so interesting to me is that we always knew TikTok was driving business results.

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Brett Curry:

Yes. But

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Jordan West:

No one could ever tell you that there was no measure, couldn't

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Brett Curry:

Measure it,

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Jordan West:

Right? Because it just doesn't work like that on TikTok. It's not a direct response channel. In the same way now TikTok shop is right. Shop has changed all of that, and we have this nice closed ecosystem that you can measure, but I talk about this halo off of TikTok shop the entire time. But interestingly, YouTube is such a similar channel to me where it's like how many times do I, am I watching something on YouTube? I see an ad and I'm like, yeah, I should go buy that product. I totally forgot about that. I never in my life have ever clicked from a YouTube ad over into buy a product, never once because I'm watching something, but it's there with me. It's the TV of 2025.

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Brett Curry:

Exactly.

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Jordan West:

Yeah. And

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Brett Curry:

It's so interesting.

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Jordan West:

Walk me through this. What are your thoughts? Why are you still in the YouTube game and how do you continue to scale?

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Brett Curry:

I don't like to do anything the easy way. Apparently. I like to get beat up on a daily basis. So leaning into YouTube, it's a bit of a battle. A lot of people have rid off YouTube as a viable channel for growing their business. A lot of people opt to just pour all their dollars back into meta and hey, I'm a believer in meta ads. We spend on meta, even as an agency, of course, not just for our clients, but for omg, but for

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Jordan West:

Yourselves, of course,

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Brett Curry:

YouTube is so unique, and I love the way you framed it, and I fully agree with this statement. This is TV advertising for our generation, but way better than TV advertising could ever be. And I'll kind of set this up a little bit. So I got my start when I was in college in the early two thousands. I worked at a radio station and they got involved in some TV and stuff, but I just remember talking to local retailers, local furniture stores, local car dealerships, local restaurants, and they would tell me things like when we advertise on radio, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, I don't know. But when I run TV ads, people come in and people mention it, and they couldn't directly attribute, but they could feel it and they could see it. When the TV ads were on, people were coming in, right?

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Brett Curry:

That's incrementality. You shut TV off. That business goes away. And so that's what YouTube is now, and we've all just gotten addicted to last click or multitouch attribution models where we want to see the click. We want to see the evidence that this ad led to this sale or this result. Ultimately, I think we were all coming to that. We've kind of come full circle. It was like, oh, offline is so difficult. You can't measure it. Online is magical. You can measure everything. To always we're measuring online is really shortsighted and maybe not very helpful. We want to just as an example, lean in fully to roas. Well, if you want to maximize roas, just run branded search. That's the maximum

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Jordan West:

ROAS course. Of course. And then try scaling in.

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Jordan West:

Yeah, right. This is the hilarious thing. It is funny. I've been trying to lean in on how, for me, I owned a bunch of brands over the years and trying to lean in on how I can help e-comm brand owners, especially the smaller ones that we don't work with anymore. I'm trying to figure out, I'm like, how do I help you guys that are listening to this podcast? A lot of you guys are listening to this podcast, and profitability is an interesting thing. We've been obsessed with these marketing metrics that just don't matter What we see in branded search, what we see in most people running Facebook ads on bottom of funnel. I'm like, good. You think that looks good? Who cares? It doesn't do anything for your business. It's not going to make you profitable at the end of the day. This is something I obsessed with

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Brett Curry:

It off up, probably no negative impact to your business. Shut that off. You'll probably get all the sales. You're currently kidding.

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Jordan West:

Totally, totally. Exactly. YouTube again, I was telling you about a funny little small case study and from a colleague of yours that's running this ad accountant, it's us spending a ton, I think it's 20 or 30 KA month right now, but I will tell you it as we scale it up, right on platform, it's showing about a one return on ad spend. So normally you'd say, let's turn that off, right? Yeah. Well, when we turn that off, everything dies. There's no business. So that's number one. Number two, the MER is about 3.5, so I'm not dumb. I know something's happening there. So that's my sort of look at all of this of like, wait, we've got to get out of this granularity that we think that we know how a customer journey works. Come on. We'll never know how a customer journey exactly works.

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Brett Curry:

Customers don't know how their customer journey works. They don't know they're, they're seeing things and reacting and then reacting again. And they probably couldn't even stitch together their buying journey. So what makes you think you'll nail that with 100% accuracy? You just won't.

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Jordan West:

So tell me what you guys do. You've been all in on YouTube since I've known you. You're the YouTube guy, Brett.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. I mean, this is what we're known for. A lot of big brands come to us because we've cracked the code, so to speak, on how to make YouTube ads work. And the good news is, while it's not measurable in the same way that meta ads are, or in the same way that search or shopping ads are, you can measure it. You've just got to work a little bit harder. You got to kind of triangulate the truth a little bit, but you nailed it earlier, Jordan, when you said, I've never clicked on a YouTube ad, right? YouTube is the TV of our generation. Nobody clicks on their tv. So you just use that as your comparison. And actually this is interesting. Over 50% of views now, and I've seen numbers show as much as 60% of all views on YouTube, just the YouTube app are on TV screens. It's the fastest growing platform or fastest growing screen for YouTube consumption. Yes, there's the option to send a phone or you can scan a QR code on those YouTube ads that appear on a smart TV or a connected tv. But that's so rare that usually you're doing something on YouTube, you're probably not going to do those things. And so it's just people don't interact with YouTube the way they do, even Facebook or TikTok. And so you have, I want to give you that at a core level. Yeah, go ahead.

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Jordan West:

I just want to give everybody a fun anecdote here. So my kids watch a lot of YouTube. They've got the few creators that they love. My daughters love Mariah Elizabeth, she does all these crafts and stuff, and then obviously Mr. Beast, right? Everyone, Mr. Beast,

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Brett Curry:

Mr. Beast. Beast. Yep. He's the best.

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Jordan West:

And there's these massively long YouTube ads in between, right? There's like 62nd. My kids recently came to me and they said, dad, I hope in the next election, now remember I'm Canadian and we are now going, right, of course. Just like everyone's making the swings. And so they come up to me and they're like, dad, I really hope in the next election that you're going to be voting for Pierre Polly because his tax plan seems really good. Remember this is 11 and 9-year-old. I've heard a lot of things about what he said, and I'm like, don't ever tell me YouTube ads don't work because exactly. You

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Brett Curry:

Have to be watching them, dude, that is so good. And I remember as a kid, for me, and this still was stuck in my brain and probably meant that I was destined for a career in advertising. I remember trying to convince my parents to buy Ginsu knives because I saw these great commercials and I'm like, guys, you don't understand. You can cut through a can of Pepsi and then you can cut a tomato without sharpening. And I'm just regurgitating the ad, but it's such a good example. So yeah, your kids are now a spokesperson for political qualities.

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Jordan West:

Exactly. Exactly.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's such a good story. Anything.

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Jordan West:

So what's funny is that this is years ago, I think this is 2018, maybe 2017 or 2018, somewhere around there. And we just had this little tiny agency at the time. Now we're kind of similar to your guys' size. I was actually just looking around 40 right now,

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Brett Curry:

And

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Jordan West:

I think there was three of us at the time, and my accountant decided to run for mayor, and I thought to myself, well, what's the best way that I can get him seen by everybody in the city that we live in? Abbotsford, it's called. It's like, how can I get him seen? And I was like, I think I'm just going to go to YouTube. And so I've made these really long videos of him. Remember he was a candidate that nobody knew. He ended up getting second place and getting about, I think it was somewhere around like 30% of the vote. And I was like, whoa. And even more, we have this meme account on Instagram called Asford Memes, and one of the posts on there was about his YouTube videos being everywhere. And I was like, crazy. Yes, this works. I wish I would've just tripled down on that.

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Brett Curry:

No doubt. No doubt. Yeah. Last kind of little anecdote that's related to this part of what we're talking about. We have an appliance store client, someone that I've known a long time there. They've got locations here in Springfield in Missouri where I'm based, but all over Oklahoma and stuff. So we've been talking to them for a long time about, Hey, give us a little bit of your TV budget, because they spent a lot on tv, sell appliances, give us a little bit for YouTube because we were running all their Google search ads and stuff like that. And so they finally gave us a budget, not a ton of budget, but some for a few key markets for one of their appliance chains. And they just came back to us and they said, guys in Q1 so far of this year, these stores are up 35% over last year. One of their other chains is flat, basically. And they're like,

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Jordan West:

Interesting. So you got to have a case study,

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Brett Curry:

A case study. Yeah. So I don't know if they want anything released publicly. So I've got a few case studies I can get into in detail with you, please. Yeah. Yeah, 35% over other stores. And the only thing they changed was taking some TV budget, putting it onto YouTube, and voila, they got more gross.

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Jordan West:

I mean, this is the thing that we've talked, and we've talked about this. It's funny because I'm on TikTok land over here and you're over in YouTube land, and these are the two things that nobody on Twitter really ever talks about because they can't measure them, and yet we all know that they drive both of these, drive this massive halo. Right? There is, I'm sure we'll talk in very generalizations here, but I was talking to a guy the other day who happens to do some advertising for one of the biggest supplement companies on Amazon, and they're the biggest supplement company right now on, or one of them out on TikTok shop. Their Amazon business has doubled this year with no more Amazon spend. All I'm saying is we've got, if you guys are going to get anything from this episode, just remember that in the meme curve, the person that is obsessed with Triple Whale is not the one at this end of the curve, right? Yep, yep. If you're obsessively looking at your numbers like that, that's not how you run a business.

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Brett Curry:

Totally.

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Jordan West:

That's not how you do it.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. So true. So let me give you a couple of examples, a couple of additional examples, and then we may want to talk through too at some point. When does it make sense to start testing YouTube ads? When are you maybe not ready to test on YouTube ads? Because I will say, even though I am a believer in YouTube ads, I talk about it all the time. I speak on stages. I get invited to YouTube offices a couple times a year to teach brands how to do this. It's not for everybody, and it's not the place to start if you're a young brand, probably so happy to talk through that. But one case study that I think is really interesting, so this was a brand we worked with a number of years ago. It's a haircare product for women with thinning hair, and this actually works so well that now the founder, he sold the business and now he's a partner in OMG, which is kind of a cool fun first.

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Jordan West:

That's so fun.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So with Kiran, they were doing a lot with direct response tv, doing a lot with Meta and a few other channels, but they could not get YouTube to work. They tried it, tried and failed a number of times. So we came in, we remapped the campaign strategy, we tweaked their creatives because the creative were powerful, but they weren't quite built for YouTube, so we redid the creatives.

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Jordan West:

Are we going to get into that? Because I think that's an interesting thing to get into is what makes a YouTube creative amazing. Sure.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah. So we can kind of dig into our formula guidelines there on creative, but we tweaked the creative, we redid the campaigns. We focused on who we're going to target on YouTube because targeting is so important on YouTube, we went from zero to a million dollars in spend on YouTube and under 90 days while hitting their target CPA. So this was direct response, applicable sales. Wow. They had a high CPA ceiling, they had a landing page that converted really well. They had a great product. They had a high take rate on subscriptions so they could pay a lot for new customers. So it all worked, but that was just purely D two C. Now, what we found then is as we started doing that for months and months and months, we were asked to help them with their Amazon business, and they were like, Amazon's really taken off. Amazon is going like gangbusters. And so we started helping them grow on Amazon. We do full Amazon channel management. Well, we hit a patch where we had to pause YouTube ads for a bit due to some internal tracking and a couple of the things you had to pause it for a bit.

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Jordan West:

Oh, my favorite kind of AB tests where it's like, yeah,

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Brett Curry:

Exactly.

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Jordan West:

I was forced to do this. The credit card bounced and I didn't see it for seven days. The best tests.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It wasn't a credit card best, but they had to pause for a bit right when they did, because we had full visibility into Amazon, we were managing Amazon branded search cut in half, cut in half when we had to pause YouTube. Then we got YouTube back and they were rock and rolling again before long, but we were like, holy crap, that's pretty crazy. So basically we came to the conclusion that it was about a one-to-one ratio for every conversion. We saw D two C, we were getting at least one on Amazon, and one of the data scientists on the team was like, it might be two. It might be two to one for every one you're getting D two C, you might be getting two on Amazon. And so it's one of these things where were they in retail as well that were they in retail as well? They were not in retail. Now I've got another case that I talk about that there was fully retail in Walmart stores. That's incredibly fascinating. But this brand, no, they were multi-channel. So they were D two C plus Amazon plus a few other marketplaces. They were not in stores at that time.

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Jordan West:

Okay, okay. Insane. And also I think that we all brand people who have been in this game for a while are those things you do that you can't measure

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Brett Curry:

That

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Jordan West:

Is the right thing to do and actually drives the top of funnel business, but then you're convinced by somebody, maybe it's a new CMO, maybe it's a new somebody who comes into the space, maybe it's just a viral tweet on Twitter or on whatever we call that thing now that just shouldn't have gone viral because it was wrong. You must measure everything. I only scale things that are measurable. And then you're like, oh, okay, well I'm going to turn this thing off and then your business tanks.

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Brett Curry:

And I think it's important. We're certainly not making the case to measure less and we're not making the case to pay attention to your numbers. It's just that not everything can be measured the same way. I heard this, some of my team made this analogy one time. They were like, Hey, think about a light switch. You flip a switch and the result you don't see on the light switch, the result is over here with the light. I was like, this is a pretty good analogy where that's a really good analogy, Brett, like YouTube, you're running YouTube, you're doing this thing right here. The results are over here. You see the results over here, they're there. You've just got to look for them. And measuring them is harder. So I don't think you should measure less. I think you should measure more. I just think you should understand that ROAS is a bad metric overall if that's all you're looking at and the whole picture, understanding incrementality and real growth and real impact. It takes some work. It takes some work to measure it. So you got to look at everything. I can also show you a case study that might be helpful. It's from RTIC coolers, so coolers and drinkware, a Yeti competitors. Happy to dive into that or I think you may have had a question right there.

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Jordan West:

I do have a question I have to put in the middle here, Brad, I'm so sorry. But how are tools like Prescient and mms, do you trust them? Do you think that they are telling the full story? Do we need to move from an MTA model into an mm M model? Just what do you think about that?

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Brett Curry:

It's a great question. So I think there's a couple things at play here. I still like MTA tools. I think they serve a purpose. We have clients who use North Beam clients who use triple whale. I like them. I think we can gain some insights there. They got different models you can kind of play with. And so it can give some insights. Certainly, I do tend to think that an incrementality test plus an MMM type of approach is probably a little bit better. I would lean that way. But I think you can also do things like, hey, if you can track in platform performance and you can do things like incrementality tests on your own, which you can do that. You can set up geo tests, geo holdouts and things like that.

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Jordan West:

Totally just do holdouts, right? It's that simple. Just do a geo. Let's say New York and California are bringing you basically the same. That's right. California and Texas, just because they're similar and similar populations. If they're doing that, you can just hold out Texas and then you can know measure the impact. There's the

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Brett Curry:

Impact. And so there's also, there's some tools that Google can help you with. They'll do things like search lift studies, they do conversion lift studies, which basically is a way for them to do their own kind of holdouts and tell you the incrementality of a particular campaign type. Quite useful. So I think that can kind of get you on the right track. And I do think one of the best numbers, the best metrics, which you really don't need any fancy tool for is mer, right? Look at your total media efficiency ratio and watch how that fluctuates as you lean into one channel over another. Hey, when I really lean into YouTube for a couple of months, my MER improves and my top line grows. That sometimes simple is all you need, but you've got to be looking in the right places. I love MMM. I've not used prescient, but I've heard good things about them. But I do think the world is probably shifting more to MMM and incrementality tests and less towards MTA.

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Jordan West:

Yeah, yeah. MTAI think was something that we brought in when we needed it, right? And especially post iOS 14.5.

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Brett Curry:

Solve some real problems there for a bit. Yeah, for sure.

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Jordan West:

Absolutely. So Brett, I want to get into your case study and then after your case study, I want to hear your, so guys, stick around because Brett is going to break down what makes a perfect YouTube ad.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So excited about that. I guess about a year ago I was speaking at the YouTube offices in Los Angeles teaching a group of brands how to grow on YouTube. Met the folks from RTIC, which I was not that familiar with that brand prior to that point, but RTIC is, they sell wheeled coolers like indestructible, the best cooler I've ever had. They're direct competitor to Yeti. I think they're better and they're less expensive. They also sell drinkware. And I'm a big Tumblr fan. I drink a lot of coffee. Jordan, are you a coffee drinkers? Well, Jordan,

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Jordan West:

I drink a cup or two a day. My son got me this cup here. I dunno, like a liter basically.

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Brett Curry:

It's kind of cool. Yeah, love coffee. I go to bed singing about right as some of them big fan. But RTIC has drinkware that is ceramic lined. One pet peeve, and this is going to show that I'm a little bit of a snob when it comes to drink beverages. If you drink out of a metal Tumblr, it smells and tastes a little bit like steel, right? Almost like you have blood in your mouth, a little bit of that, right? The ceramic lining completely takes that away. It tastes like you're drinking out of your favorite ceramic mug or whatever. It's brilliant. Anyway, met RTIC. They were like, Hey, we want to get YouTube to work for us, and here is our hypothesis. Can you help us prove it? We want to see if YouTube will drive in-store sales. They were just put into all Walmart stores are almost all Walmart stores nationwide.

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Brett Curry:

They wanted to know if we ran some targeted YouTube tests, can we see a measurable lift in Walmart sales? And so we said, we love this idea. They had great creatives. We coached them a little bit and helped them with their creatives, which we'll get into more in a minute. But here's what we did. We basically did some studies with the help of Google to find what cities had really high category demand, meaning people looking for coolers and wield coolers, but then had varying ingredients of demand for RTIC. And this was all based on Google's search behavior. So we mapped out and we said, okay, let's do a test. Let's choose 19 markets that we think are poised for growth, got good store count, good inventory levels, things like that. Let's match those with 19 control markets that are basically the same size and same everything. And we're going to spend YouTube dollars in the test markets and we're going to hold out and the control markets, we're going to do that for five. And

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Jordan West:

There was Walmarts in all. Walmarts

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Brett Curry:

In all of them. Yeah, exactly. So then we could do, so it's a mashed pair holdout type study. So we lean in hard and we used all of our resources to build out the right campaigns and maximize views, and we did lean in heavily to connected tv. So that was a great placement for these ads. And we measured on YouTube. On YouTube. All YouTube's connected like YouTube's TV placements. Exactly.

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Jordan West:

This is now

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Brett Curry:

YouTube tv. A lot of people ask about that. I'm a subscriber to YouTube tv. It's a good cable replacement. That's a separate inventory though. It's powerful, but it's actually a pretty small percentage of YouTube views. And if you buy YouTube ads in the platform, like in the Google Ads platform, you're going to be on traditional YouTube. But here's one really crazy side note that ties into this. More people stream YouTube on connected TVs. So the good old fashioned YouTube app on connected TVs that stream any other platform. So YouTube, I

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Jordan West:

Do not doubt that even for a second,

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Brett Curry:

Bigger than Netflix, bigger than Hulu, bigger than Disney plus, it's bigger than Hulu. Disney Plus and a few others combined. It's bigger than Netflix, but not that dramatically. So we leaned in heavily to connect to TVs. There's so much inventory, there's so much. The inventory is insane. So many people aren't advertising here because they don't get it and they don't understand it. And so CPMs are pretty low compared to men and other places. A lot of opportunity here. So we did this five week test and we measured it all along the way. We did see Lyft and D two C, so we were able to measure those and track those. All the ads said, go to Walmart, go buy this at your local Walmart. You could click to find a local store through Google tracked people that visited stores. All of this was all about local, but we did see some D two C sales, right? Some people were just like, of course I'll buy it

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Jordan West:

Online course. No, I want to buy it now.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, I want to buy it now. I want to buy it online. We saw Lyft on Amazon because a lot of people were like, yeah, I want to buy it now, but I don't want to buy it from your store. I want to buy it on Amazon because that's my favorite. So we saw that. But here's what we saw inside a Walmart stores. We had three different groups of markets. The worst performing group saw a 12% retail store lift in comparison of the test markets to the control markets, test markets 12% high degree of confidence lift over their control markets were very similar in size and nature and all that stuff. The best group was 25% lift over the control market. So basically they were like, holy crap, this is great. Let's do more of this. It actually lets us run a whole bunch of, or getting more of their business.

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Brett Curry:

Google was like, Hey, we got an agency excellence award for it. We really leaned into this more in the process too. We also did what's called the search lift study where Google can look at, hey, people that saw your ad versus people that didn't see your ad, what kind of impact does that have on people searching for your brand? So we saw a 241% lift in branded searches from this ad campaign, and this is where it's like, okay, you've got to kind of look at the holistic picture. And I will say, this is where YouTube really shines from omnichannel retailers. They can shine for multichannel retailers as well, but the results were stagger

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Jordan West:

Incredible. We don't have much time here. Brett, I want you to walk me through before you go, walk me through what the perfect YouTube ad looks like.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, there are a few elements and I've got a guide that we can mention that's free that walks through 17 of our favorite YouTube ads. It breaks down each one and shows. Great. We'll

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Jordan West:

Get that down in the show notes. And if you guys are watching this on YouTube, it'll be down in the description

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Brett Curry:

Below. Awesome. So the first thing, no surprise here probably, but you need a hook first. Five seconds is critical. People are, if it's a skippable ad, which is most of what we run, you got five seconds to really hook somebody. Some people are watching hovering with their finger of the mount over the skip button ready to click. So you got five seconds to convince them, Hey, wait a minute, check this out a little bit longer. So hook is important and what we say is you need to make sure you're hooking the right person. So don't come up with just some random hook explosion, something funny guy in a gorilla suit, something just wild. You want to interrupt the right person, right? So your ideal target, but then you want to up because you only pay based on

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Jordan West:

An actual view through. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you don't want the wrong, you basically want to be like, Hey, everyone else don't watch.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, you want the non-ideal shopper to skip because you only are paying for good views. And so you want someone to choose to watch your ad if they're in your market. So something to grab their intention, thought provoking question, a bold statement showing something right in their face. But it needs to be related to what you saw. So it needs to be related to the problem you're solving or the relief you're bringing or the enjoyment that your product is offering. So it's got to be relevant, a relevant interruption, a relevant hook to the right person. So the hook is critical. Next, if you're D two C, essentially most of our clients are retail in some way. It's got to be a product demonstration. You need to now show me the product in action. And Jordan, I like a typical demonstration. So what's the proper use case of this one? A good example is a flex seal, like the spray on thing to seal. If you have a leak, leak in your gutter or leak in a pot or whatever, you spray flex seal on your obsolete. So I like a standard use case demonstration. This is how you seal your gutters type of thing. But then I like an over the top demonstration. If you can throw that in there too. It's kind of like the, I dunno if you like the

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Jordan West:

Pepsi can thing you talked about before.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, exactly. So it's like the knife, the Ginsu knife commercial where they cut through the can or the old, old super glue commercial where they in one cut, put super glue in the bottom of a guy's shoe and stuck him to the ceiling, held it, and then he stayed there anyway. So show a dramatic product demonstration too, because you want them to see the standard demonstration and say, I could do that, right? But then they're also kind of skeptical. I like talk about Missouri, where I live is we're the show me state and our state animal is a mule. We're stubborn. We believe nothing. You got to show us before you believe us. Picture that your audience is from Missouri, right? You got to show them and they're going to be skeptical. Standard product demo and then over the top product demo. Then I like some social proof, so show me something that proves that other people like me love this product.

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Brett Curry:

So this can be reviews. So when we were doing stuff for native deodorant and we helped them really scale on YouTube, we said like, Hey, there was only over 50,005 star reviews. How could 50,000 people be wrong type of thing. So some kind of social proof. Then I like some kind of risk reversal or some kind of offer where it's like, hey, do this, try this, experience this. We'll take away the risk. And then a firm call to action. And so that call to action is, Hey, click here to learn more. Go to Amazon and buy it. Buy it from your favorite retailer. Something like that. So how

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Jordan West:

Professional does the filming need to be on YouTube? Again, I talk about TikTok all the time, right? It's the opposite, right? You don't want professional filming, it doesn't work. It's the antithesis. What about YouTube?

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's kind of the same with meta too. Sometimes it's the unpolished, the shot with the phone kind of raw candid stuff. It works on YouTube. You do need a little more polished. Think again about the frame that this is like TV and a lot of people are probably watching it on tv.

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Brett Curry:

A little more polished is important. Now we found that we've a lot of success with an ad that is professionally produced. You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it, but you need good lighting and a good camera and good audio and things like that. But sometimes when you mix good production value with some raw stuff mixed in, so good high production value, then throw in some UGC either in the middle or at the end. That combination extremely powerful. Now we've also, we scaled this auto brand on YouTube a couple of years ago, and basically all they had was UGC, but it was really good UGC. And so we did UGC mashups, which just a whole bunch of customers showing their car, talking about why they love the product, things like that. But then we added some editing and some graphics and some transition that really made it look polished and that thing scaled like crazy.

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Brett Curry:

So it's definitely going to be higher production value than TikTok or Meta, but it does not have to be million dollar type of stuff that you see on Super Bowl commercials. You don't need that. And then I'll also say if you're running an ad on Instagram reels or on TikTok or TikTok shops, whatever, you can take that ad almost exactly how it is and run it on YouTube shorts. I will say though, I haven't seen as much results with YouTube shorts only as I have when you're kind of doing all of YouTube or you got YouTube shorts, you got YouTube on desktop and mobile and connected TVs, which takes all a little bit different format for each of those. That's when it really works. We've seen less of an impact when it's just YouTube shorts.

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Jordan West:

Last question, because I am late for a meeting.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah.

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Jordan West:

What length are we looking at here? Is there an ideal minimum length? And I am saying minimum because I understand that there probably is a minimum.

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Brett Curry:

There is. I prefer 45 seconds to three minutes as kind of an ideal length that if you could shoot for 90 seconds or 60 seconds, that's great. Ultimately it's got to check the box, it's got to hook somebody, it's got to be compelling, it's got to have the product demo and the social proof and the offer and all that. But usually if it's a little bit longer, the more you tell, the more you sell, right? The more you show, the more dough. I just made that on the spot. That's actually really lame. We've that are like 62nd cuts, outperform 32nd cuts when it's basically the same ad, just the 60 numbers, A 32nd, the 62nd does better with clicks and overall lift in sales. So generally speaking, we want to go kind of in that 45 to minute and a half range, but as much as three minutes can also work.

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Jordan West:

Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Where can people find out more about what you are up to and chat with OMG commerce?

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Brett Curry:

Absolutely. So omg commerce.com, click the Let's talk button and that's how you end up getting with our team. You can find my podcast there by clicking on resources. You can see the YouTube guide and up there as well. And then I'm active on LinkedIn, so hit me up on LinkedIn. Would love to connect to you. I do talk about all things D two C and retail and business and Google and Amazon and all kinds of stuff. So would love to connect on LinkedIn as well. Awesome. And

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Jordan West:

I'm looking forward to coming on your pod.

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Brett Curry:

It's going to be, let's do it, man. It's going to be a blast schedule talk TikTok shop. So I'm excited. Awesome. Well thanks again for your time today, Brett. Thanks Jordan. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. So let us know what topics would you like to cover on this pod. And if you know somebody that would benefit from this episode, please share it and leave us a review on iTunes. That would make our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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