When the pandemic left Garrett Goslin without his sommelier job, he turned his passion for pickleball into an innovative paddle company. Alongside childhood friend Kyle Goguen, CRBN Pickleball has emerged as a leading premium brand in one of America's fastest-growing sports. Their journey offers valuable lessons for any brand looking to build authentic community and stand out in a competitive market.

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Key Takeaways:

• Product Innovation & Customer Feedback: Learn how CRBN maintains its competitive edge by leveraging multiple feedback loops - from pro athletes to local ambassadors - and investing heavily in R&D to stay ahead of larger competitors.
• Building a Multi-Channel Brand: Discover their strategic approach to building a premium brand across direct-to-consumer, Amazon, and retail channels while maintaining consistent positioning and storytelling.
• Community-First Growth: Explore how CRBN built a powerful ambassador program without spending big marketing dollars, and why their grassroots approach helped them compete against established sporting goods brands.
• Founder Authenticity: See why sharing the founder's story - even when uncomfortable - has become a key differentiator in their marketing strategy and helped forge deeper connections with customers.

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The episode provides a masterclass in building a premium brand through community engagement, product innovation, and authentic storytelling.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction: The Founding Story of CRBN

(09:51) R&D and Product Innovation in Pickleball

(15:03) Understanding Customer Feedback: The Heart of Product Development

(19:00) Building a Community: The Role of Ambassadors in Growth

(24:32) The Power of Authenticity: Leveraging the Founder’s Story

(28:25) Sponsoring Athletes: A Strategic Approach to Brand Visibility

(32:20) Maximizing Amazon: Strategies for Growth and Brand Building

(40:16) Future Innovations: What's Next for Carbon Pickleball?

(42:31) The Affiliate Strategy: Quality Over Quantity

(46:39) Conclusion

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Garrett:

I don't think you're going to get anywhere in this sport or any industry without really trying new things. And I think that's really what's setting us apart so far is just being different.

Brett:

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 we are talking about something that has been sweeping the nation. It's incredibly popular. I don't think it's going anywhere. We're also diving into brand building, product building, some unique marketing and growth aspects. So we're talking pickleball today and I've got the two execs from CRBN Pickleball on today. I met with these guys in Seattle at the Amazon Accelerate Conference. We hit it off, we had some mutual friends. I got one of their paddles. We became bros and we decided, hey, let's do a podcast and tell people the story behind CRBN. So with that, we've got the founder, Garrett Goslin and his right hand man. I guess I don't even know exactly how to intro you, Kyle, but Kyle Goguen as well. And so Garrett and Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle:

Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having us.

Brett:

Yeah, man. Really excited to have you guys. And so let's tell the story briefly because I always love it when it's like, Hey, we're business partners, we work together, but we're also brothers or childhood friends or whatever. But you guys are childhood friends now. You run a very successful business together. What is that like? And then also Kyle, I know you kind of run marketing, but you run a lot of stuff. So talk about your individual roles as well.

Kyle:

Yeah, sure. Garrett, you want to start?

Garrett:

Sure, I'll start it off. Okay. So CRBN started in late 2021. I was working in the hospitality industry as a wine sommelier and the pandemic hit and lost my job. And there's not a lot of need for people pouring wine at country clubs when you can't go to any.

Brett:

I've heard. Just a quick pause on that. I think this is an interesting, Garrett. I've heard it's very complicated to become a wine sommelier.

Garrett:

It is not easy. I was studying, there's four levels. I was studying for my level three when the pandemic hit. My boss was a master song, which is the very top level, and it took him about seven years to become a master.

Brett:

That's crazy.

Garrett:

Yeah, crazy.

Brett:

So do you still like to impress people with your wine knowledge at parties and things like that, or you

Garrett:

It's definitely fallen off a bit. I've lost some of those skills, but I can still impart some knowledge on people, but

Brett:

Got it.

Garrett:

Yeah, so it was a good time while I was doing it, but when that ended, I found myself with a lot of time. I had been playing pickleball since 2017, and so being unemployed at that time allowed me to play a lot more pickleball. I was playing every day of the week, a couple hours a day. And in that process I started kind of running up the ranks a little bit, getting a little bit better, starting to play more competitively. At that time, there weren't as many people in the game playing, so my skill level seemed a lot higher than what it would be now. It's very competitive now, and I do not compare to any of the pros these days. But

Brett:

Back And you guys in southern California area, right? Orange County is kind of where you're competing?

Garrett:

Yeah, we're in Costa Mesa, Newport Beach area. So anyways, since I was playing so much, a lot of my paddles that I was using just kept kind of falling apart, breaking, falling down, falling and losing grit, surface grit on them. And it just came to the point where I was just like, maybe there's something better out there. I feel like I can find something. And there was a company doing something with CRBN fiber on the surface at the time, but didn't really the shape that they were doing. And so I took that idea with CRBN fiber and applied it to, I would say more user-friendly shapes of paddles and had it made for myself, myself and my double's partner at the time. And the idea was we'll have these badass paddles that we'll use and play tournaments with, and it kind of worked. And then we were playing at our

Brett:

Was your goal just at that time, just like you wanted to go pro and pickleball or just playing?

Garrett:

I think so. I think, did

Brett:

You think product business at that time or you were just making the paddles so you could dominate?

Garrett:

Yeah, exactly. I didn't have that thought at all. It was really just so I could have a competitive edge. And then at the club that we were playing, people started noticing our paddle and it seemed like we were getting a lot more power and spin and longevity out of these paddles. And so eventually people started asking like, Hey, can I buy one of those? We were just like, no, they're for us, sorry. And then eventually it came to the point where I was like, all right, we'll try this out. So placed an order and a very small amount and to see how it would do, and they sold out right away within a couple of weeks. And then I kind of knew we had something going here. Then Kyle wasn't on from the very beginning. But then very shortly after, once we started getting a lot of traction and I realized this is not a one man project. I had reached out to Kyle since we've known each other for the better part of 25 years, and I knew his background and his success that he's had in marketing and e-commerce, he's the perfect man to partner with and there's a lot of trust there already. So it's worked out.

Brett:

Totally. I love it. And did you guys ever at recess in elementary school ever like, dude, one day we're going to build a business together?

Kyle:

I don't know if it was in recess, but Garrett and I have chatted about starting a business in the past. I think it was more in the college years. I mean, if I think back, actually, I think the first business that I considered pursuing first real business was with Garrett. And we went as far as meeting with people and sketching out what a business plan might look like, ended up not pursuing that idea thankfully. But it is kind of fun to think back and realize that the writing was sort of on the wall and then this sort of happy accident happened. And then we have since done it and things have gone well. And I think Garrett already touched on this a little bit, but we have very complimentary skill sets, I would say, and that plus a high level of trust makes this partnership work really well.

I mean, Garrett, as he already got into handles basically all of the r and d and since the beginning, but I mean these days we have a full-time engineer with a workshop in Southern California where we can iterate very quickly, which we might touch on later in this pod. But Garrett, he handles all of that and a lot of the branding and a bunch of other parts of the business that I'm not great at and I handle, I'm more so focused on the marketing in general and specifically that's my background. So prior to partnering with Garrett, I had a pet brand that I started 10 years ago right after college. So I spent the last 10 years building up that business, building a team, running it. And so it kind of gave me, while it wasn't pickleball, paddles gave me a ton of experience. I mean, selling dog treats online in many ways is similar to selling pickleball paddles online. So I'm able to kind of bring that experience to the table while Garrett focuses on the product, since he's frankly a much more talented player. He can bring a lot to the table knowing exactly what we want want to create.

Brett:

But I hear Kyle, that you're gaining on him because you're playing more. He's got a kid now, he can't hit the courts as much. So is your goal to beat Garrett consistently in pickleball or what he striving for

Kyle:

Sure we could say gaining on him, but I would not say quickly gaining on him. And no, I don't think that's a goal. I think my goal is to not embarrass myself

Garrett:

Like

Kyle:

That or the company. And outside of that, I'm happy with Garrett being better than me. Totally makes sense. He can have that trophy. You can keep that title. Yeah,

Garrett:

Kyle's better at me than plenty of other things, so I'm going to

Brett:

Take it out.

Garrett:

Yeah, I'll just stay number

Brett:

One

Garrett:

In e-comm.

Kyle:

There you go.

Brett:

Love it. But that is interesting that you bring that up to Casso. So selling, building a pet brand, which was very successful, you built, there are some similarities between pickleball, right? Because it's a large market, so the tam for both is large, and it takes some skill to differentiate your product amidst a lot of competition. There's a lot of competition, pickleball, a lot of competition in the pet space. And so yeah, definitely you guys have cracked the code with this combo of great product and great marketing. And so let's talk about r and d and the strength of your product because I think there's a lot of lessons there that other brands can learn from. And I remember, Kyle, you were telling me this story, Adidas, I think obviously probably put a lot of money into launching their own pickleball paddles and they flopped. And I think the theory or the guest there is they just did it right without maybe a lot of deep knowledge into pickleball and what pickleball players wanted. And so you guys are pickleball players, Garrett, you played tournaments and you're competitive and the sport. How do you approach r and d and what do you think it is that makes your product so special? Because I know one thing you guys said, and I've seen this with other businesses, when you get the product right, everything else is so much easier. Marketing is easier, distribution is easier. Charging a price that allows you to have the right EBITDA is easier. So what are your secrets to making a great product?

Garrett:

Yeah, I'll start by kind of saying that Adidas has stepped their game up. I don't want to completely disparage their name. I think first their first splash into the market was a little bit more cookie cutter, and they were just kind of testing the waters to see how it worked. But they've definitely, they've invested a little bit more into r and d and stuff like that recently, it seems.

Kyle:

I think just broader, not speaking specifically about Adidas is that I think a lot of big brands have tried to get into the pickleball space because they realize it's growing really fast. And I think early on, a lot of them just assumed, look, it's just this random hobby that's very simple. It's maybe not for hardcore athletes and they didn't put the time and effort into the r and d or they just hired, they had their existing engineers develop product or whatever, or they licensed out their brand or whatever they did where they didn't develop a very thoughtful product, frankly, which was great for us because it gave us opportunity, which Garrett's going to touch on here in a second. But it was just fascinating to see these behemoths of a company across the board come in, try to do well and have every advantage in the world, and then people not take them serious in the hardcore pickleball world.

Brett:

And it sort of seems like some bigger brands or brands that don't know pickleball just coming in and they're trying to access that market. It's an opportunity. I'm trying to take advantage of that opportunity where Garrett looked at it and said, Hey, I'm trying as a pickleball player, I'm trying to solve a problem. I am losing my grip on this. My paddles are wearing out. I want more velocity, things like that. So you're solving a problem rather than just trying to tap into an opportunity. So yeah, how do you kind approach r and d and how do you approach iteration? I know you guys are always iterating, improving, launching new products, things like that.

Garrett:

Yeah, so I mean definitely from the get go it was solely myself and a couple of drilling partners that were doing the RD for the company. And from an RD standpoint, it was like you said, just based on trying to solve a problem. And I think we started with a very innovative product and noticed that it kind of caught on that technology we found ourselves. We would start high and then get caught up to, and then we'd have to make another jump and then get caught up to, so it's always been a little bit of cat and mouse with developing and innovating. So I think that's just because that we feel like it's been kind of that chase game since the inception. That's just kind of how we position ourselves now is always trying to just set the new bar. And we really started taking that seriously a year and a half ago and decided this is what we want to be doing and really pushing the limits.

So we invested in an engineer and being able to just iterate on a dime, a new paddle every couple of days, stuff like that, just really trying to, and not being afraid to fail. That was a big thing too. And it's just really trying to just push things that haven't been done before. And if they don't work, cool, at least we tried it out. But I don't think you're going to get anywhere in this sport or any industry without really trying new things. And I think that's really what's setting us apart so far is just being different.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so good. And so you're constantly trying to look for that next thing because if you create a great product, it's going to be knocked off, it's going to be duplicated, other competitors going to catch up, and so no product lasts forever. So you got to be constantly reinventing. You've got the advantage in that you both play pickleball, you're both in the sport, but what else are you doing? Are you going to tournaments and talking to players and finding out what they want, what they're frustrated with, how are you, any insights that other brands can latch onto for how you're iterating and coming up with those next designs?

Garrett:

I think the really cool part about this sport is it has such a passionate customer base and really strong following, and you are able to track that on a lot of different levels. And I'll let Kyle kind of take over, but there's so many different platforms and channels to reach our customer and to get feedback. And we have a lot of ambassadors and we have a Discord channel and a lot of reviews, whether it be our website directly or YouTube. So there's just a lot of ways to get feedback and really have what we feel is a beat on what's going on in the world and what people are looking for.

Brett:

That's so great. Yeah. I want to talk about the marketing and growth side too, but before we do that, what are you doing to create feedback loops and to create mechanisms and opportunities where you can hear directly from your customer?

Kyle:

Yeah, for sure. So I mean, I think kind of like you mentioned at the highest level, if I think top down it's number one, the company is full of people who are passionate about pickleball players or passionate about pickleball rather. So Garrett and I are both pickleball players. Most of our team, if not all of them, are really passionate about the sport across all different skill levels. I also think that's important too. I think if it was just people at a very high level, we wouldn't be able to think holistically about the industry. So we kind of touch every aspect. We are our customers, so that's most important. And then I think going down the different level, the different tiers that I would think about it is next is our athletes. You already mentioned that we sponsor a bunch of different athletes on the pro level and the pro scene.

Garrett's working with them very closely to get them prototypes, get feedback on a regular basis outside of what he can gather himself. So you have that at a very, very high level. The athletes that we're actually sponsoring and you go down one tier below that, we have our affiliates that we work with, and these are the hardcore paddle reviewers, like the paddle heads that know every spec of every brand, all of that sort of thing. These people exist and they're really great for getting feedback as well because while they're maybe not as skilled as some of the pro athletes, arguably they know more about paddles than the athletes do. So you kind of get that perspective. And then maybe one tier below that is our ambassadors. So we have thousands of ambassadors, mostly in the US but really globally. And so we get paddles and product in their hands and whether we want them to or not, they give us a lot of feedback.

We have a closed community with them and they're telling us all the time what they, what they don't like, new product ideas. All of that is kind of built in, which has been really cool. And then I guess one level further below that is just our regular customers. So we use what you would assume different apps and tools to solicit feedback, product reviews, and just frankly emailing people as well whenever we need to. We'll just straight up ask them for feedback if they've bought a product. So that kind of covers many different people and many different stages. It really just depends on the product that we're trying to launch,

Brett:

Covers all the skillset levels and all the use cases and different types of buyers. And so it makes a lot of sense. I want to actually talk about each of those groups a little bit, but let's start with the ambassadors. So this is going to be different skill levels. Maybe some of those are competing, maybe some of 'em are not, they're just playing with their family or whatever. How are you identifying potential ambassadors and then what does that program look like?

Kyle:

Yeah, so lucky for us, we've mostly built that program with inbound. We've never really solicited ambassadors. It's just a form on our website. People share it with their friends, they're excited about the brand. I think that's a big part of this is we've built a strong brand that people want to be a part of, so they're applying. So they fill out this pretty thorough form, essentially trying to become an ambassador and our community manager vets all of them and makes sure that they're a good fit for us both in culture is probably the most important thing. Trying to make sure that frankly they're a good person ideally and someone we want representing the brand. But sometimes that's hard in a form, but we do the best we can. And then outside of that, we're looking at all different attributes, things like how good are you at the game, but also how involved you are in the community and what you are doing or what you can do to promote our products. So I mean to boil it down, I would say our ambassadors usually fit in a couple of different buckets. One of them is just the best player at your local courts. Ideally that person is repping our product, kind of that aspirational the person you want to be. Then you also have the person who's heavily the

Brett:

Person or the doubles team that they're winning all the local tournaments, what paddle are they

Kyle:

Using? If you're getting crushed by someone or a team that's using CRBN, you're going to give it another look. Then you also have the people that are just heavily involved in the community, whether they're the person club president or the one putting on little local tournaments, influencer in person locally. So that person's great. And then another bucket I would say are pickleball coaches. So those are the people that are giving people lessons, teaching them the basics or even more advanced level tips and stuff like that. What paddle are they using and what paddles are they promoting? That's hugely influential I would say. And so we just want to get as many of those people as possible and that's been a fun experience kind of vetting all the applicants that we get and building out that community.

Brett:

It's such a smart approach where you're looking at, hey, who has the eyes and ears and the influence of our target audience, and then how do we build a relationship with them? Because I think a lot of brands that we talk to really are just leaning into paid ads. And obviously I love ads, we're running an ad agency, so big believer, but the more you can do to brand build, to build a community, to get a following, to get other people out there, becoming ambassadors for you makes everything work better. So any success stories you want to call out from the ambassador program? I think this is something that a lot of brands are missing. Obviously it's a little easier for you because this is a product that is part of a community anyway and it's growing and it's fun and people like to talk about it a little harder if you're selling pain cream or something like that. But any ambassador success stories you can talk about.

Kyle:

Yeah, sure. I think mean you hit on it like you just said, there are some advantages because our product lends itself to being out in the public and in these communities. But I think the one thing, if you can figure it out, if you're a business owner and you can figure out how to build something like this, the cool thing is it's a perfect program for a bootstrapped business or one that's got a tight budget early on. This is something we were able to build just with our effort early on in the business. We didn't have a ton of funds for advertising or hiring a nationwide sales team. I think a lot of the bigger brands don't take the time to build out these grassroots efforts because they're just like, well, we'll just hire a sales team.

Brett:

Totally.

Kyle:

And yeah, that actually is effective, but in a different way. Those people are going after retailers. We want to influence the people on the ground at the courts. So I think it's just one of many different marketing tactics people should probably be using. But for us it was once we identified big how community focused pickleball was as a sport, it was a no brainer. So I think if there's any sort of community aspect to your industry, this is a perfect fit, some version of this.

Brett:

How do you incentivize your ambassadors? Are you giving them discounted product free product? Are you paying them affiliate commissions? And obviously you don't have to share anything that's confidential, but how are you incentivizing your ambassadors?

Kyle:

Yeah, no, happy to share. I mean, it's public on the application itself. So yeah, they're unpaid outside of commission that they drive through sales, and then they also get heavily discounted product. So perfect. Again, cashflow wise, it's great. I mean we're paying them after they've made the sale. It makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint and they're really excited to do it. They love the brand and they want more swag, more gear, more everything and just be as kitted out as possible I guess on the courts.

Brett:

Very cool. I want to talk about some of those other groups in a second as well, but I got a question for you, Gary, because I think this is interesting. You are a unique business in that you are the founder and you're a customer and you've got this great story. How much are you in your marketing? How much are you leaning into that founder's story versus just leaning into the brand and maybe athletes and affiliates and things like that? How do you strike that balance? Because there's this classic story of Wendy's, right? Where Dave Thompson, I believe is the founder and always they'd hire a new ad agency and the ad agency's like, well, let's get Dave out of the commercials. I want to get Dave, but nothing performed as well as having Dave in the commercials. I think it's good to have a good mix of things, but what's your philosophy on that, you being in your ads versus just leaning on the brand or other spokespeople?

Garrett:

Yeah, I mean, I don't dunno the exact percentage split, but we're definitely using that founder story and I think to pretty great success with that. I mean, like you said, I think we're getting pretty solid feedback when we do talk about my story or my journey into starting this business. It's something that a lot of people can relate to. It's a very personal story and as much as it can be awkward for me and a little, because I definitely don't want to be in the limelight, but it's cool to be able to share something that I'm passionate about and where the brand is going from my point of view. But yeah, I let Kyle kind of finish that up, but

Kyle:

I can chime in here. Garrett's a super humble guy and frankly he doesn't like being in front of the camera. He doesn't like putting his story out there and it's been something that I've been working on with him for years basically is just convincing him that this is a story that people want to hear. And absolutely, we we're well known in the pickleball industry, but we are not one of the big, big guys in the space. There is a unique aspect to us is that we are a fairly lean team. We're pretty young in our overall business journey and people want to buy from people and you tell Garrett's story and people want to buy from him and talk to him. And so from an email marketing standpoint, a lot of the emails Garrett's writing because people want to hear from him. A lot of these big brands don't have the ability to do that because the founders or the business owners are long gone. They're not part of that. And I think it's something we can take advantage of right now because Garrett is in the weeds and I think again, he doesn't love it. But we'll continue to double down on that story because I think it's a compelling one.

Brett:

And I think Dave from Wendy's didn't like it either. I think he wanted to get out of it. I think it wasn't just the ad agencies, but he never did because it always worked. And I think it's a competitive advantage for you guys, just like you said, lean into it. As you grow, there's going to be more and more people that just come to the brand because their favorite pickleball athlete use it or some friend or they just see an ad or they see it on Amazon and they buy it and they love it. But that's something you got to lean into for now, and I think it's going to continue to pay dividends. It's really interesting. We get to audit dozens of great brands, Google ads and YouTube and Amazon and stuff, and just audit a really large pet brand. I can't say who it was or who it is, but they've got these hero videos and they're funny and they're so good and they work really well.

We're going to lean into them on YouTube, but then they have these founder story videos and it's literally just the founder, one dude on camera talking about why he designed the product. And I know it costs almost nothing and not nothing, it looks good, but the comparison of the two, the hero video and that founder video and the CPAs are about the same. The founder video, they just work. So I think you got to always lean into that because people are going to resonate with that story. So love that. Glad to hear you're doing that. Let's talk a little bit about athletes for a minute. So is this something you started doing from the beginning like, Hey, let's go sponsor athletes and we're at a stage in the development of pickleball where this is not the NBA where we're going to pay somebody millions and millions of dollars to be an athlete that reps our products or is the athlete thing, is that more new for you?

Garrett:

I'll start, I guess, but I think, so the first few months before Kyle came on into the company, I have very little internet marketing experience to almost none. And so the lowest hanging fruit was to sponsor local pros around me that I knew and that were already advocates of the paddle. So it was just kind of a really easy match. They wanted to use it, and so it made a really easy relationship. Even fast forward to now, we still do sponsor a good amount of athletes because it's just really good to see those eyeballs on it. But I, there's a lot of importance on what Kyle's doing, and so I think that's really even split at this point.

Kyle:

Yeah, I mean, one thing I would say too, Garrett, I have to assume early on, well, I guess always taken inspiration from that southern California surfing industry.

Totally. Garrett and I grew up in Southern California together by the beach every day as much as possible. And so we grew up around these brands that were created in Southern California, and so much of the marketing was sponsoring surfers. And so much of what we take inspiration from is the look the field, the vibe that we're going for as a brand, but also that as well. I think that's what Garrett knew these companies were doing. We followed a similar model, and I will say we were lucky when we were kind of early days of CRBN. The pro scene of pickleball was still kind of in its infancy. It had been around for years, but it was just starting to really garner some momentum. And so you could argue ton

Brett:

Of money flowing at that point either, right? Nobody's getting necessarily rich off of being a pro pickleball player

Kyle:

Exactly early on. So it like it matched our growth. So it was like the money that was needed to sponsor a pro pickleball player was matching the money we could afford, if that makes sense. So like you said, if I were to start a basketball shoe company today, you can't afford any of the NBA athletes, but at the time we could afford pickleball athletes. It's changed drastically very quickly, but it's still a big part of our strategy. I think what I've been able to do is combine what Garrett has done, which is that grassroots effort. These players are playing with it, people see it, they get influenced, they want to buy with the digital set of things. So when we sign athletes, we're looking at white listing ads with them, creating ad content, how can we leverage their likeness everywhere in ads, but also on our website, all our landing pages, everything to just really get the most, maximize the exposure and also the benefits that come from sponsoring these people.

Brett:

Super smart. I think that that's where you really can make a sponsorship pay for itself. You never know. You sponsor an athlete and then you may find out, yeah, they're not really that outspoken about my product, but if you structure where, hey, we're getting videos with this athlete and then we're going to create mashups with other athletes, we're going to run this in our ads, we're going to put it on the website, we're going to put it everywhere, emails, things like that. Now you are almost guaranteeing an ROI for that sponsorship, so very cool. So we've got these three A's right, athletes, affiliates, the ambassadors. Let's pivot to another A really quickly, then we come back to affiliates if we have time. But Amazon, so we met at an Amazon event in Seattle, which was super fun, but I was just a dude there attending and talking to people. You guys were guys were rising stars at the Accelerate conference. I met you guys, you had Jean jackets on with your logo and Amazon Rising Stars on it. But in all seriousness, you guys were featured by Amazon ads because you've just seen tremendous growth on the platform. I think I got a little card with my paddle that said 14 x growth, something crazy like that. But how are you guys viewing Amazon as a channel and then Amazon ads as a means to accelerate growth on Amazon?

Kyle:

Yeah, I can take that one. I think for us, our strategy frankly from the beginning is that we want to sell our products and our paddles to anyone wherever they want to buy them. And I mean if you look at just the internet, obviously that includes our website. It includes Amazon is a huge player, it includes some of the other big online retailers of pickleball equipment, but that also includes brick and mortar retail. So we sell quite a bit into retail. So we are pretty well diversified and we just want to be in front of customers wherever they want to shop. So Amazon, a lot can be said about Amazon, good and bad, but there are a lot of customers on Amazon and if they want to buy us there, we want to be there. So that's been our strategy from the beginning and we've had good success.

And I think because of that success and some of the relationships I had kind of gathered over the years with the pet business, we were able to kind of get that unique opportunity to be part of their season. One of Rising Stars, this new kind of series, this program that they've developed, that program I guess is they have it overseas and it was really successful. And then now they're bringing it to the US for the first time. So I know they're doing season two and doubling down on this. And it was a good opportunity to get a ton of content shot about our company and get some good PR and free marketing and free marketing is the best kind of marketing, I guess. So it was a good experience.

Brett:

Cannot beat that. Yeah, it was really great little documentary they put together that Amazon ads put together about CRBN pickleball and a few other brands. And so what a really cool experience to see that. And I love the way you frame that, Kyle, because we're now working with larger brands and more Omni-channel or multi-channel brands. That's really where things are headed. We've worked with Native for years and years now, and I can't really share any details there, but they started as D two C only and then when p and g bought them, P g's playbook is really retail store, that's where they grown, where they take a brand from millions to billions.

But this is what we're seeing a lot of where as we talk to bigger brands and help them craft some of their strategies, it's often retail stores are their biggest source of distribution, Amazon's second or sometimes those are flip flopped, and then D two C is third. And that's even true for brands that started D two C, but now they're just expanding. And I think it makes a lot of sense. There's still so many things that we like to buy in store trying, holding it, seeing the paddle, comparing the paddle to other paddles, or we want to buy online, we just want to buy on Amazon because it's easier and it's simpler and we can check out in seconds type of thing. So I love that approach. How do you guys view Amazon ads as that? And obviously you're a rising star there and they featured you, so you must believe in it, but how do you look at Amazon ads compared to just organic growth on Amazon?

Kyle:

Yeah, I mean Amazon ads are hugely important in my opinion, and can be hugely profitable if you do it. I think my opinion is Amazon ads are probably the most straightforward ad platform online. Totally. I mean, everyone's got their credit card out ready to shop. Conversion rates are nuts on Amazon compared to other channels. So I think it's very straightforward. It's like the most bottom of funnel traffic you could probably go after. So it's a no brainer. Obviously you need someone to be managing the ads that knows what they're doing or you need to take a course or learn it yourself or whatever. But pretty much everybody should be running ads if you're going to be selling on Amazon, I guess is my answer.

Brett:

Totally, totally. And I love that. I fully agree with that. We run an agency, obviously we offer it as a service, but we partner with Ezra Firestone and Smart marketer built an Amazon ads course just so people like it. There's a lot of people that want to learn, and at a base level, it's not rocket science. You can learn it and grow using it. And so one of the things you guys do on Amazon though that I think is so, so important, and this is what we've been telling brands for years on Amazon, is it's not just about making a sale on Amazon, it's about building a brand. You guys have an amazing storefront, you have an amazing presence. As I look at your paddles and what you're doing on Amazon, I feel like I'm buying a quality product. And then later if someone said, oh, what kind of paddle is that? I wouldn't say, oh, it's just something I bought on Amazon. I'm not really sure. I'd be like, no, this is a CRBN paddle. And I think that's a good litmus test is like, hey, if someone's telling somebody else about what they just bought, are they saying, oh, it's just something I bought on Amazon, or are they saying it's this brand? And I think you guys are definitely in that category of this brand. People are talking about you. How do you guys approach the brand building side of Amazon?

Kyle:

Well, I mean if we're talking specific to Amazon, I think it's lucky in that we're doing all that work for our website and retailers already. So a lot of times we're just taking similar content and repurposing it. I mean, Amazon has a whole slew of different requirements and different strategies you can implement when it comes to content. But yeah, we're just repurposing. Luckily we shoot a lot of stuff with our pros and a lot of different influencers and content producers. So we have a ton of lifestyle content that we just slap in a different format and put on Amazon. And that's been great. And I totally agree with you. Anything you can do on Amazon to stand out as a brand is hugely beneficial. It's a huge marketplace with every product under the sun. So anytime that you can get your logo and your brand in there and tell a story, it's worth it.

Brett:

And I think what a growing trend is, so many people have bought something on Amazon without really digging in and then they were kind of burned to buy it. And so I think there's definitely a trend where people want to buy from brands from quality, reputable brands. And so we got to lean into that. And the way I like to frame it is if I go to Best Buy and I want to buy an Apple product, it's not just an Apple products sitting on a shelf. I'm going to the store within a store, the little Apple store within Best Buy. I think that's what you should try to create for your brand. So where someone's shopping on Amazon, it's like, no, I'm experiencing CRBN. I just happen to be shopping on. And

Kyle:

I think Amazon realizes that and has started doubling down on that. I mean, every new feature they come out with is giving you more and more ability to do that. So you mentioned the storefront, same thing. We sell complimentary products, accessories and all kinds of different things. We want people to check out our store and see that we sell bags in addition to paddles for example. Those are the cheapest sales when people do that. You don't have to run ads to sell them on it.

Brett:

Absolutely. They're getting those add-ons and Hey, I've got the paddle, I love the paddle. Let me just load up with CRBN gear so I can look cool at the next pickleball tournament, make up with people jealous. But let's talk. So I want to to circle back to affiliates in just a second, but what's next? And Suge, maybe you take this on the product side. I know you may just have to tease, this may have to keep things under wraps, but what's next for CRBN?

Garrett:

So we're always coming out with new fun accessories, stuff like that. But I think most importantly, we're a paddle company, so that's where we spend all of our resources on innovation and engineering. And so we've been working on a new paddle line for the better part of a year now. And honestly, it's been just a grind trying to figure out a totally new platform for a paddle. And it's something that we're really excited about and something that we think has a potential to really change the game and change how people look at a paddle. Because right now it's just a very, not linear, but it's just the way that paddles are made right now is it's just kind of very one sided and they're like, this is how they're made and this is how they're always be kind of that. So we're just trying to flip that on its end, try something new and just say, Hey, it's not only this, it can be this or this or this. And so we're just trying to really branch out like that. So we're excited. We'll hopefully be able to announce something within the next couple months here.

Brett:

Really cool. Can't wait to see it. I love that awareness of your brand and what the brand is all about, but also what drives you, what propels you. And I think it's similar. We talked about some of the bigger brands. If you take Nike or something, they are a shoe company. Obviously the accessories and the apparel all super, super important. But I got to think that without the shoes, nothing else really has momentum. And if the shoes really fall off the map and the shoes are no longer cool, they're no longer great, I'm not going to buy the shorts either. Right? And so you guys understanding that, that you're a paddle first brand just makes a ton of sense, so very cool. Kyle, what tips, insights can you give us on affiliates? How are you finding affiliates? How is that working and is that a significant part of your growth?

Kyle:

Yeah, it's definitely a significant part. I think differing from ambassadors a little bit, I think affiliates are more of a quality over quantity play. I mean, at that level where someone has got a serious blog or social media presence or podcast or YouTube channel or fill in the blank, this is person's job or side hustle, they're focused on it and you want the best of the best that is speaking to your audience. I mean, the difference in conversion rate between the best people and the worst people is massive. And I think, yeah, we try to work with most people, but we really focus on the best people that align with our beliefs and goals, but also can sell a lot of paddles. And I think we've tried to be good partners to them. I think that's a big part of it too, is don't take them for granted.

Don't treat them like they don't matter because they do. And I think being really honest and transparent with them has been huge for us as well. I think some other brands have gotten themselves into trouble where they try to overly influenced whatever would be a review, will be on a paddle or frankly they get upset if their paddle is not reviewed. Five stars across the board. I think for us, we want our products to do the talking. Of course, I prefer someone to give us an a plus rating, but we understand things are subjective, so we want these reviewers to be authentic. And I think giving them the ability to be authentic and encouraging it is refreshing for them. So all of those things, I think most industries have these affiliates that are living somewhere and you just got to go find them and reach out and convince them that they should take the time to look at your products.

Brett:

That's really great. I love the idea that let the affiliates say what they say, let it be authentic and real. I can always tell, and I think most people can, when you watch a video and you're like, does this person really like this product? Are they really using this product or is this just a performance and they're just doing this to sell some stuff? I think a lot of times you can tell, you can sense it. Are you taking the approach where you're pretty open about who you accept as an affiliate, but then you're putting your time and resources in to those who really prove themselves that they can drive sales? Or are you pretty picky about letting someone join the program in the first place?

Kyle:

Yeah, I think we're kind of somewhere in between. I would say we're fairly picky when it comes to affiliates, but I mean if we see promise in someone, we're definitely going to double down on that. So what I mean by that is maybe they have a low, small following, but we can see the potential. I mean, this sport is so new and it's growing so fast. We've had success in kind of trying to pick the diamonds out of the rough kind of thing. You see the trajectory that people are on or that they're doing good things, it's only a matter of time until they're going to take off. So we've invested in kind of those early stage content creators, athletes, really across the board we've invested in taking flyers on people who we see promising.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so cool. I mean the industry is a rocket ship. You guys are a rocket ship, but you're doing things the right way. You're building community, you're taking risks on product, you're iterating, you're getting feedback from people, you've got multiple channels that you're using for distribution and for growth. And so love what you guys are doing. I'm going to keep watching. I'm going to be a fan on the sidelines. And also I've got your paddle. I can't wait to play. I'm very inexperienced player, but I do like it. I can't wait to track the paddle. So I'll let you guys know how it goes when I do. Awesome. If I dominate my kids on the court, I'll definitely give you guys the credit for that. So it's awesome. Hey, as people are listening and or watching, if they say, man, I want to check out CRBN pickleball paddles, where can they find it? Where can they connect with you online?

Kyle:

Just everywhere. It's at CRBN Pickleball, so CRBN pickleball and it's CRBN pickleball.com. So check us out.

Brett:

Awesome. And now in a growing number of retailers as well, so people can buy it in store and it sounds like that's really growing, so very cool. And then are you guys active on the socials? You guys like sharing the entrepreneurial journey anywhere? Are you mostly working under the CRBN

Kyle:

Name? We're pretty private. I would say just follow all the CRBN channels and when I make Garrett share stuff about himself, it'll be there.

Brett:

That's awesome. Alright, well Garrett, Kyle, so much fun. Love what you guys are doing. Keep up with the good work and really appreciate the time.

Garrett:

Awesome. Thanks Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the show? Leave us a review on iTunes if you've not done that. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

No one is better suited to serve as an Amazon Ads evangelist than my friend, Jeff Cohen. 

‍

Jeff is a founding member of Seller Labs and has been keynoting, exhibiting, and attending Amazon events for the last decade. If you've been to an Amazon event, you've probably seen him! Now he's serving as the official Amazon Ads Tech Evangelist.

‍

I wanted Jeff to join the podcast to talk about what's new and trending with Amazon Ads. This is important information even if you're not selling on Amazon. Amazon is now the 3rd largest digital ad platform behind Google and Facebook, and it's growing rapidly.

‍

Here's a look at what we cover:

• How vertical videos are improving shopping experiences and making ad performance better.
• What the new integration with Facebook means for shoppers.
• How Sponsored TV ads are democratizing TV advertising and utilizing Amazon's rich buyer signals.
• Prime Video Ads and what they could mean for your brand (and when to consider running them).
• Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC): what it is, and how and when to use it to unlock new actionable insights about your business and advertising effectiveness.
• Plus more!

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(06:18) The Rise of AI in Advertising

(14:14) Understanding Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)

(18:50) Leveraging Audience Insights for Targeted Advertising

(22:48) Brand Building in the Amazon Ecosystem

(28:18) Understanding Incrementality in Marketing

(35:38) The Role of Data in Marketing Decisions

(37:11) Innovations in Amazon DSP

(46:20) The Future of Brand Building

(49:43) Conclusion

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Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Jeff:

So this is another, I'd say step forward with Amazon and using our AI intelligence and our large language learning models that have always been applied to some of the core principles of our advertising to make the DSP easier to use, more accessible and more perform better for advertisers.

Brett:

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 we're talking about what's new with Amazon Ads, the latest, the greatest, the betas, the new things, stuff that marketers are salivating over, stuff that maybe we're excited about but a little bit unclear about. And so we're going to hopely clear things up today. My guest is a returning guest, Mr. Jeff Cohen, the principal evangelist of Amazon Ads, longtime Amazon guy, former VP at Seller Labs. You walk with this guy in the halls of an Amazon event and it's like you're walking with a celebrity. Everybody knows him. Everybody loves him with that. Jeff Cohen. What's up man? And welcome back to the show.

Jeff:

Yeah, thanks for having me and super excited to talk about this. And I think you really hit it on the head. It's not about the announcement, it's about how the announcements are going to be applied and what do we do with this, what do we do with it? And even more importantly, what new, and this is just starting to happen. What are the new strategies that are coming because of these announcements, right? We hear these announcements and then as tech providers, as agencies, we have to then go and apply them to our different partners, our advertisers, see what's working, what's not, how it works, and then you start to scale it across your full book of business. So it's still the early days, but I'm really excited about a lot of the announcements. I think a lot of our advertisers are excited about the announcements.

Brett:

Yeah, I'm very excited and very well said. It's like, Hey, we've been given all these new tools and some of them are AI powered tools, magical tools, but then it's like, all right, well, just having tools in your hand doesn't do anything, right? It's the application, the skillful application and the strategy that you use these to help use to deploy these. And so we're going to dive into that and really excited about it. It's one of those things too where Amazon is squarely, and this is not coming from you, this is coming from me researching, so I'm not sure how much you can talk about this, but it's like the third biggest advertising platform online just behind Google and Facebook. It's shocking how much Amazon ads have grown over the years. And in the beginning, I mean it was basically just search ads, just basic good old keyword focused, search term focused search ads. And that's great, but it's become so much more than that. And I think it's kind evolved

Jeff:

As sellers. We've covered this a little bit in our last podcast. Amazon has really become a brand building location as opposed to just a conversion focused activity. And so it's only been a year, right? It was a year ago right around now that Amazon announced that Prime video was going to start having advertising. And those only released in January, so not even a year. And if you think about what Amazon's done with a lot of the live sports properties, they're still seeing massive growth in year over year audiences around Thursday night football, they saw amazing growth from WNBA. They're launching National Women's Soccer. 2025 is going to have NBA and it's going to have nascar. So Amazon's creating more properties that are built around brand building as well as a lot of the original series. And then tying together all the different types of products that you have. There's a really cool one that launched literally like yesterday. If you haven't done it, I'm going to look it up. It's something like, it has something to do with Wicked, and it's a way to cast a spell on Amazon that's tied to the movie coming out.

But it just goes to show you how Amazon's a brand building site, and it's an ability, if you're a Prime member, you can see the movie early, there's early dates only for Prime members. There's ways to buy all of the Wicked Merch then to just buy tickets to go see the movie. And so Amazon is a brand building tool and is a tool to reach audiences at mass or at scale that it wasn't several years back.

Brett:

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And things are just coming together to make that possible, right? Amazon has always been a great place to transact and a great place to make sales, but that's only part of it. I do believe it's becoming the ultimate platform to build and further your brand if you do it the right way. And so there's several new things that I'm very excited to talk about. Of course, the new AI creative suite, new AI creative tools. So maybe we'll start there in a second. Also really excited about a MC Amazon Marketing Cloud. And one thing that we've all known for a long time is that Amazon has more behavioral shopping data than anyone. Of course, Google's got all kinds of search data, but no one knows what you buy better than Amazon. And so now we can harness that data even more using A MC and applying that to all of Amazon ads. And a MC for everyone is, I picture Oprah saying, you get to use AMC

Jeff:

And you get AMC and you get amc. We should have done that. I'm going to have to go back to the Speechwriters.

Brett:

Yeah, that's how we should have announced it. So those are cool. Some new DSP announcements, which I'm super excited about. We've been a big DSP agency for years and years now. And so yeah, and let's maybe just dive in. You want to start with AI and AI tools or you are the evangelist here. What are you most excited about? And we can start there.

Jeff:

Yeah, listen, I'm excited for all of it and I know that for you who've known me, I mean, we've known each other for quite a number of years now. You know that I'm not just saying that because of my job. I actually found the announcements this year. I don't know how you felt, but I felt like the product keynote the morning at Unboxed was, there was a different level of excitement as these announcements were made and as they built upon each other. And it's not just about a MC, but it's about how A MC is now impacting DSP and how you can measure the DSP back with the tools and measurement technology that Amazon has. The AI definitely always gets the cool factor, if you will.

And I think the easiest way to describe Amazon's AI capabilities with creative is that with the announcement of the AI Creative Studio, a brand can solve the Cold Start problem, meaning that the brand has no images whatsoever. You come and you enter in your asin, Amazon creates your product, your lifestyle images, things that you need for your ads, things that you need for your store. It can make micro seasons to add pumpkins for Halloween, but then change those to have turkeys for Thanksgiving or to change 'em again to have lights for the holidays. And you can scale from zero to nothing on the other side. If you are a larger brand and you already have content within the same content studio, you can bring in your existing content and it can kind of pull it apart to create the pieces that you need based on the DSP sizes at Amazon and all the different placements.

And it can literally read your video and create ads for you or take your still ads and create new ads for you. And so it's pretty cool because it's taking you from the SMB up to the enterprise and then from the enterprise down to the SMB, it's creating everything from still images to video to now audio ads. And the AI just keeps getting better and it keeps learning. And you're starting to see some really cool applications from brands who are applying this into their regular activity that they're doing, whether it be their ads or their stores or their product detail pages.

Brett:

Yeah, there's really, it's solving a lot of the, first of all, we're just getting started with this, so we're beginning to see the possibilities, but we're still very, very early in this game. But yeah, some of the very basic stuff, how can I take this one asset and chop it into a bunch? Or how can I retool the background of this image or chop up different sizes, stuff that would normally just take a lot of busy work, a lot of hours that really graphic designers don't enjoy. Nobody enjoys some of that stuff. The AI can now handle almost all of that and listen to be everywhere you need to be build your brand to attract new customers, to create product discovery on Amazon, you need these assets.

Jeff:

And the thing is, you might have a four by four, but you need a six by four. Well, the AI can now take your four by four, make it a six by four and fill it in. And so there's the simplistic part of it, which is like, oh, I want to take my image and put it on a beach. But then there's this little bit more complicated piece of it, which is like, now I need to size it for different types of ads. I want to add motion, so I don't want to just have my cup of coffee at the beach. I want the waves to be crashing. That creates a little bit more engagement, creates a little bit more connection to your audience. And then when it starts to use the ai, the AI isn't just doing this, the AI is also understanding your product, it's understanding your reviews and it's making recommendations. And one of the examples that our VP used that I actually thought was a great one was that he ran the system through for a blender, and when it was doing images for the blender, it started showing face mask and he was so confused. He's like, but it's a blender. It makes sense for it to have juices and things like that. But if you go into social media, you'll find that a lot of people are using blenders to do homemade face mask. And so the AI was able to pick up on these social,

Brett:

I did not know. I had not seen this trend. That's

Jeff:

Why. Yeah, so it's like even if you think back to the early days when we talked about keyword research, we were like, well, you have to figure out, well, what are they going to call this? Is it a casserole dish? Is it a Pyrex dish? And we as marketers won't always know everything we need to do. AI can make up for some of that.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, really interesting. So just because interested now, so people are blending up fibers and stuff like that, organic materials to

Jeff:

Yeah, I don't know. Or it's the chemicals that you put on and then you make a chemical. I don't know. Do I look like I use, yeah, if anybody knows, let Brett and I know, and then we'll try it on the next video.

Brett:

We got to blend up our own masks here. We'll wear masks. The next podcast.

Jeff:

I'm more into the can you blend it where you just drop random stuff into the blender and

Brett:

See if it can, dude, those were epic, man. The BlendTech blenders. But I mean, if you think about it though, that was content that built that brand. How are you going to stand out Sea of other blenders?

Jeff:

I'm going to, IM put a baseball on this blender and show that it can blend it and then still make your smoothie.

Brett:

I'm going to put an iPad in there. Back when iPads were kind of, and people were like, what? You're blending an iPad, it's sacrilege or whatever. But yeah, totally agree. The announcements that have made this year, I think they've been very substantial. There's a lot of substance there, a lot of stuff we can really use to just become better marketers and better brand builders.

Jeff:

Yeah, the AI is a great example of where that starts. And it's also like you had kind of mentioned, it's a challenge that a lot of brands have because they don't have budget or they don't have internal skills or they don't have enough to be able to scale with their agency to all the things the agency wants to do. It's making it more accessible. I think that's the beauty of ai, at least that's what I tell my kids who I feel need to embrace it. They're in high school and college, and I think you and I both agree, the next generation, you need to figure out AI because it's going to be cell phones. When I was growing up, you had to learn to live with them, and now today they're a fabric of society.

Brett:

Yeah, AI is going to be your superpowered research assistant, your marketing assistant, your copywriting assistant. It's going to give you superpowers. And so yeah, it should be attached to you at all times, almost like your cell phone is now. I think that's a good description for sure. So what of the AI Creative Suite is available now and what pieces of that are coming soon?

Jeff:

So most of the pieces, the ability to create video, to create audio and to create ads are all available within the Creative Asset library. The content studio is in beta, but I'll share the link with you that we shared at unboxed and whoever wants to sign up can sign up for it. And as they're rolling that out, you would get access to that full library.

Brett:

Cool. So we'll put that in the show notes link to the beta there for the AI Creative Studio. So yeah, it sounds amazing. Let's pivot a little bit and let's talk about A MC and kind of this A MC for all idea. First of all, quick background, what is A MC for those that don't know, and then how is this a MC for all going to change things?

Jeff:

Yeah, so three, four years ago we were starting to describe what's a Amazon marketing cloud. It sits in a clean room. If I break it down to its simplest format, there's lots of videos and articles you can read if you want to dive into this deeper. But A MC allows you to pull aggregated privacy, save data across your account to understand how things like your path to purchase are being influenced by advertising, and then use that to identify signals that you can then either market to from creating new audiences or you can use it to tweak your campaigns because you're identifying what's working. As you get more sophisticated with a tool like a MC, you can start to bring in what's called first party data. So I know a lot of your listeners are D two C companies.

Brett:

This is omnichannel.

Jeff:

Yeah. This is allowing you to connect what's happening on your store and your website with what's happening with your Amazon ads. And so especially if you're using tools like Buy With Prime, but even if you're not, you can start to see when I run these ads, what type of boost does that drive to my website or is it bleeding from my website? Because ultimately we want to know this idea of incrementality. And a lot of times what our data is finding, and of course this isn't true for everyone, is that you're not pulling away from your website. And so that as an advertiser starts to give you the confidence that you need that by marketing on Amazon, you're bringing in net new customers that you wouldn't have gained otherwise. And so A MC really starts to become this measurement tool for your brand that helps you answer these questions that you've had for a long time.

Now, a MC for everyone means that before you had to be on the DSP to be able to access A MC. Now a MC is available for only sponsored ads, which means anybody can now access a MC and one of the cool features. So it's like, okay, cool. Now what do I do with this? Right? One of the cool features I think at the beginning is just using some of our query libraries to understand path to purchase and understand how frequency of your ads, things that you would typically do within the DSP that you aren't thinking about in sponsored ads. You want to understand, well, how often does somebody need to see my ad before they make a purchase? What is the downstream impact of a sponsored brand or a sponsored display ad to my sponsored product ads? You can start to see how many people bought but saw multiple of your different ad types, and that's going to start to give you some confidence into the types of advertising that you're doing and where you want to make your investments.

One of the announcements that they made was the ability to create audiences within a MC and then to boost those audiences within sponsored ads. And so if you think about sponsored ads, you've always had the ability to create a boost for top of page or other types of placements. Now you can actually create this audience within a MC. Let's use a simple example. The audience is add to cart but didn't buy, right? You want to find all the people that have added to the cart but haven't purchased. And if they come back to Amazon and they search for a particular keyword that's in the campaign that you associate that to, then you're saying, I want to boost my bid for my ad in that particular case. And so as a marketer, I think we can start to see how that becomes, and as a hands-on keyboard operator of Amazon ads, that's where I start to ask my question, okay, so how does this start to change how I build ads? Do I bid for top of page? Do I bid based on audience? Do I bid based on both? And that's where I think some of the shifting of our strategies will start to come over time.

Brett:

So I want to dive into this audience piece for just a minute. The example you gave there makes a ton of sense. People that have added to carpet have not purchased, let's put a little bit more for them. We realize and understand, hey, they're probably likely to purchase this time around or getting close. Let's bit a little bit more how creative can we get there? So as an example, it's pretty frequent that we'll talk to brands that are a little more premium. So they're selling a product that is not low price, so they're not going to compete well on price, but it's a great product and it's more about the brand and the experience. And I think some people have this idea that, oh, will people only buy on Amazon for price? That is not the truth. If you look at the average prime household, you're talking about some affluent households and I promise you there's a lot of affluent households that don't want to just buy cheap stuff. So can you also look at like, Hey, if I was selling baby bags and we've even looked at this like high-end baby bags, diaper bags type of thing, could I target diaper bag keywords I can normally do with my sponsored ads layer in ads of people that I know are kind of higher end based on other things they've purchased? Possibly.

Jeff:

So at its core are a MC can aggregate once you get over a certain amount of data points because it's pseudonymized meaning that it's not at the individual level. And so you have to have enough data points to be able to create that audience to say that there's enough people demonstrating this and therefore it's an audience that I want to go in target. And where a lot of brands are finding success is by bringing in their first party data, mirroring that with in a privacy safe way with the Amazon data and creating audiences that could be a lookalike audience.

Brett:

Nice.

Jeff:

So this is the audience that I believe looks like people who have a propensity, this

Brett:

Is my core customer, build me a list if people like them.

Jeff:

So you could do that and then you could boost your keywords or you attach it to a campaign, you attach it to the campaign and you boost based off of the lookalike. So I would say that the simple answer is any audience you can build in A MC, you can then boost against,

I'll say the constraints are that you can only boost against a single audience. So you have to kind of decide do you want that audience to be very narrow or do you want that audience to be very broad by its nature sponsored products is a more conversion focused type of activity. Therefore, I would assume just from my own background of doing this, I would assume that I want an audience that is maybe a little bit further down the funnel that has the propensity to buy based on the activities that I'm trying to boost towards. Other types of audiences you build in A MC may be used to run more display ads or DSP ads where you're trying to build more of that awareness and consideration. And I think what's cool, and I think this was one of the big themes that took place at the show was that Amazon is full funnel advertising for everyone.

And that's I think the big power is that something that wasn't available to you in the past is now available to you and it allows you to be a little bit more sophisticated to make these business decisions of what's best for your business. And you and I both know it's really hard in a podcast to sit there and talk about what's the right way to do it because every brand and every SKU and every brand is going to have a slightly different answer. And so this is where having a test and learn mentality around your advertising really suits you to be able to build and scale to reach new audiences.

Brett:

And I think a lot of people have the mindset of, Hey, I'm just a smaller brand, even if I'm doing multiple seven figures or whatever and I can't do full funnel ads. And well, maybe that's just because historically you've had to spend a whole lot of money that's on top of funnel type ads to be able to have the tools like we're talking about here, for that to be focused enough to work. But now you've really got the tools and the technology, even if you've got a small top of funnel budget, and it can help because we don't want to all just slug it out with our competition only on sponsored product ads at the bottom of the funnel. Let's go up funnel a little bit and compete there and give our brand a bit of an edge.

Jeff:

If you're looking to brand build, and I always even equate it to the local hotdog stand down the street from me. I live in Chicago, so I have to go with the hotdog stand.

Brett:

One thing I love about Chicago hot dog stands is they do not serve ketchup at most of them. Ketchup. They're mustard only. And I really resonate with that. Kudos to you in Chicago.

Jeff:

Big debate, but that's

Brett:

Mustard only. No ketchup's no good.

Jeff:

The piece of this that I think is important is that brand building is about exposing your product and your family of products to a larger audience. That is the concept of brand building. If you're only focused on conversion based activities, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not knocking that in any way, shape or form. The level that which you can grow your brand is going to be limited when you start to look at brand building activities. And I'll give you an example. I met a brand at another conference Accelerate, which was a couple of weeks before Unbox.

Brett:

Great one. Yep, yep. I was there as well. Great event.

Jeff:

They're in the pickleball space and pickleball is hot. And I was talking to him about his advertising and he was telling me how great his advertising was doing and all these things. And I said, well, what are you doing with streaming television? Are you running ads? And he goes, no, I'm not running any ads. And I said, why not? And he's like, well, we do really well with our sponsor brands and sponsor display and we run some DSP around remarketing and retargeting. And I said, awesome. I go, did you know that Amazon has a channel called Pickleball TV that runs on Fire TV and Amazon Prime video? And he's like, no. And I go, well, if somebody's watching one of those channels, and you could target them with an ad based on that signal, and he stops me and he goes, that would be my customer. And I was like, okay, well, that's the example right there. That brand can now use the video generator to create the ad. They can use tools like sponsored television to come in with no budget and start to test across the different audiences, and they can use a MC to measure the impact and the result of how those are doing. When you start to look at a brand that like Poppy, so one of the brands we featured at Unboxed was Poppy.

Brett:

Poppy's Poppy, like the probiotic soda, healthy soda,

Jeff:

The prebiotic.

Brett:

Prebiotic, yes.

Jeff:

And what they see, I worked on that session, so I knew that their brand, and this is I think really important for people to understand their brand is four years old. Well maybe come in close to five. It was concocted in her kitchen in 2020. It's only 2024. So the brand is four years old. They had done some OTT advertising in 2023, but they really only started streaming TV and larger TV plays towards the end of 2023 and into 2024. So now mind you, they did a Super Bowl ad, they did A-W-N-B-A sponsorship, but they were able to build and scale this using streaming television, using sponsorships and using the measurement tools primarily of Amazon, but not exclusively to drive the results for their brand. And so whether you're looking at the pickleball company or whether you're looking at the Poppy, it's easy to look at them and go, but I'm not Poppy. Well, poppy wasn't Poppy four years

Brett:

Ago. Totally, totally

Jeff:

Right. And you and I go back to the days with, I'll bring up an old brand Death Wish Coffee. We knew the owner. I mean, I still know the owner of Death Wish I've known him for eight, nine years. And it's the same thing. He was able to build a brand, gain market share on Amazon in a highly competitive category and expand his brand to other channels and be very successful. That's brand building and that's the tools that are available to you that weren't as available to you before that make you look at Amazon in a brand building capacity where that investment is necessary.

Brett:

Necessary

Jeff:

Isn't the right word, that investment is an opportunity for you.

Brett:

Yeah, I like that. Let's talk about incrementality because I think this is the newer concept in marketing that really is what people newer, it's not new, but it's newer in that I think it's becoming top of mind for a lot of people and it's sort of solving the Ah, yes, that's what I want my marketing to do. And at its simplest form, incrementality is like, what would've happened if we hadn't run these ads? And what happened because we ran these ads? So are my ads actually creating a difference? So I want lay out a scenario for you and get your perspective on how A MC can help now versus maybe how MC may help in the future. So we work with a lot of Omni-channel brands. So brands that are selling D two C through Shopify or Magento, BigCommerce, whatever they're selling in store, they're selling marketplaces on Amazon as well.

So I run YouTube ads, so I'm a bigger brand. One of our brands is Arctic, their Yeti competitor. We're doing a case study, Google's one, a case study on them. So we had this big YouTube campaign that went really well. But what we know is that if we run a YouTube ad and we direct people to the website, so many people that see that and think, yeah, I'd rather just buy it on Amazon, which is fine by us. We just want to sell products, but we want to be able to see it. Right? So will you be able to connect the dots there as well? If you're sharing audiences from your site with a MC, are you going to be able to connect those dots, so to speak?

Jeff:

Yeah. So listen, omnichannel, incrementality does become difficult, right?

Brett:

It gets hard, yeah.

Jeff:

If you want to look

Brett:

At see in store. Yeah,

Jeff:

Exactly. And if you want to really look at how do you solve that, you start getting into mixed model media, you start getting into doing omni shopper panel shopper panels, and those require larger

Brett:

Holdout tests like incrementality tests and geo hold. That's which we've done those. Yeah,

Jeff:

Correct. And those were great for the brands who have the scale and have the budget to be able to do 'em, right? So then the question becomes like, then what can I do if I don't have the scale and I don't have the budget? That's when you have to start looking at things. And when I like to say directionally, how are things working? And so you're not going to have the holy grail of being able to completely track a Google ad to a website to Amazon, right? Exactly. Cookies are going away and privacy is

Brett:

Critical. Keeps kicking that can down the road. But yeah, eventually.

Jeff:

So it creates a lot of challenges for brands. But you can start to directionally see by looking at first party data and looking at a MC data, what that incrementality starts to look like and are the shoppers buying on your site and also buying on Amazon, and you start to get to a relative signal around incrementality to show you whether it's positive or negative. So I've never been a believer that incrementality is an absolute number, but I also, I

Brett:

Totally agree.

Jeff:

I also don't believe ROAS is right. So tell me the difference between a 3.5 and a 3.7 roas. And I understand it's 0.2, but what did that really mean? Well, it means directionally this campaign is performing better than that campaign. I think that's ultimately what you're trying to do and where a MC can start to help. The other data points that I think become critical is understanding new to brand audiences who has a bigger propensity to lead to a subscribe and save, which wouldn't work with an Arctic Cup. I don't think people subscribe to buy those, but people might buy more than one of them. They might be, it

Brett:

Feels like we've done that at my house. We have so many of them and it feels like that, but they're just all one-off purchases.

Jeff:

But you can start to look to see what is the 12 month, 13 month lifecycle of That's a new data point that Amazon is now valuable sharing is what is the 12, 13 month lifetime value of a customer. And so Amazon is creating so many more of these data signals that are available to you as marketers that you're able to have a more sophisticated look into that. I'll say there's always the absolute person who's, it's never going to be enough for them, but that's also the person who probably doesn't want to really spend the money to do the types of, I'm going to say this wrong, causation testing that you truly need to understand how incrementality works. And so incrementality, if you really go and read academic papers on it, is a very scientifically based data set that uses testing as a way to understand how incrementality works. And so a lot of the tools that are out there today that are offering an incremental ROAS or such are giving you directional signals to it, but you'd have to dive into their science to understand how it works. I mean, at Amazon, we have a new product that was released called Multi-Touch Attribution. It's going to be rolling out in 2025.

Brett:

Well, that'd be a part of a MC or where will your multi-touch attribution? I

Jeff:

Don't know where it's going to sit within a MC right now. Right now it's kind of its own data set for brands are accessing it through the beta, but it's all based on this scientific methodology. But that's not taking into account what's happening off of Amazon. And so that's I think, the challenge that brands have. But that's no different than the challenge that brands have always had when they've ran advertising. And so we have to use the best data that we have today to make the best decision that we can make. And as that data changes, we need to alter the decisions that we've made. And what you as a brand ultimately want to know is that if I'm spending this money, how much is this driving within my ads on Amazon and how much is this driving within ads on my website? And how much of that is crossover and that you can do with a MC, you can start to see that and you can see what that picture looks like to understand where and how that investment is working for

Brett:

You. Yeah, the goal is not to get 100% accurate data because that's not possible, but the goal is to get actionable data and clearer actionable insights. And one of the things I love about EMC is just the ability to see what is driving first time purchases versus repeat purchases and then being able to chart that and create graphs for that.

Jeff:

Well, your audience might, you can

Brett:

See this is what's driving new customers.

Jeff:

Your audience might be different. So different campaigns that you run that have a tendency to drive first time customers, you're willing to invest in them if you know that your lifetime value is higher.

But if it's bringing in repeat customers, then you're going to have a different ROAS or spend that you're looking to make for those acquisitions. So it really does add to being a more sophisticated marketer. But the one thing that I'll add and then we can move on to whatever else you want talk about is that, and I've seen this throughout my career, is that if you don't believe the data, then you're almost, I'm probably wrong to say, but you're almost wasting your time. And what I see marketers do, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, but it's the data will show them something, but they're like, yeah, but I know influencers play a bigger role, so I'm going to keep investing in them.

And you need to let the data tell you the story for the decisions you want to make. When you start to put your own assumptions into it, that's where you start to skew based on biases that you have and not based on what the data is telling you. And so if you're running influencer campaigns, there's ways to see how keywords are performing, there's ways to see how traffic from those campaigns are converting to sales and to understand the power that influencers have. And a MC can help you do that too. One of the suggestions I make to people for influencer is create dedicated landing pages in your stores. It allows you to capture them in right into your store. It allows you to put the influencer there so it's top of mind and make the connection from the off-brand to that store, and it allows you to start to see what the sales are coming from from that page.

Brett:

Let's transition to Amazon DSP for just a minute. And so obviously A MC was exclusively available to DSP clients and now it's available to all, but there's some new things coming to DSP as well. So talk about some of the new iterations, new tools, new opportunities within Amazon DSP.

Jeff:

Yeah, so the two biggest announcements around the DSP that I was most excited about was that we've changed the DSP workflow, which can be cumbersome at times and was lacking some of the features and functionalities that some of the other DSPs have within the market. Now, the beauty of this is that when you look at Amazon and our DSP, our DSP is always been known for what we called our owned and operated properties. So that's the ability to have your ads show up on Fire TV IMDB, Twitch Prime Video. But the DSP now also has quite a few publishers that allow you to be in third party websites. So your ads are broadcast across both Amazon, Amazon owned properties as well as the third party sites, bringing all of that measurement into one single place, which allows you to manage things like your frequency cap or your budgets.

And I think that's really super exciting to one, have an easier product to use, is always a big win. Two, that the product is not just more competitive with the market, but almost better than the market. I guess I will state that it's better than the market, but I guess maybe that's debatable. And then three, to be able to measure all of the insights back to understand not just how it's doing on Amazon, but how it's doing on your own channel or other channels that you're working with through a third party dataset that you would bring into a MC. So I think one of the really exciting pieces, I think the other exciting piece was that Amazon stepping forward in the world of AI has created a tool called Performance Plus, which allows you to create an A SD campaign within I think three to four clicks.

Brett:

What's a SD,

Jeff:

I'm sorry. An Amazon DSP campaign. Too many, too many acronyms. Too

Brett:

Many acronyms, man and Amazon team marketers in the military. Nobody's got more acronyms than us,

Jeff:

So I'll start back over with Amazon Performance Plus, you can create an Amazon DSP campaign in three to four clicks. And what you're doing is you're allowing the Amazon intelligence to be able to apply to get you the best outcomes for the types of campaigns that you're trying to design. So you have the ability to create full funnel campaigns that you want to and go in and tweak all the little pieces of it that you want, or you can come in and you can let Amazon's intelligence run on your behalf to see how they perform. And brands are even running these kind of against each other to say, how's Amazon do no different than how you would test another ai? Is it giving me results that are better than what I had before? So this is another, I'd say step forward with Amazon and using our AI intelligence in our large language learning models that have always been applied to some of the core principles of our advertising to make the DSP easier to use, more accessible and more perform better for advertisers. And the best way, I've always believed the best way to get a larger investment into advertising is to show better performance.

Brett:

Totally. Are you seeing any early data on how those new campaigns AI driven campaigns are performing versus standard DSP campaigns?

Jeff:

I don't know any of them off the top of my head. It's brand new, but I could probably find a case study or two to throw on for somebody that wants to dive into that deeper.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, really cool. One thing just anecdotally, and I'm curious if you've got a perspective, we've got an echo show in our kitchen, one of the, that's an 11 or 15 inch, I'm not sure, but it's great. Listen to music on it occasional I'll turn on YouTube TV while I'm cooking and watch a game or something, but I've been noticing more ads pop up when I've got the home screen that usually has our calendar, family calendar and some other things there. Then I'll see some ads on the left hand side. And it's been a variety of things. I've seen some ads for this creamer, this healthy clean creamer that we buy and it's like, oh, this is like a reorder ad. But then I've seen other things, that's not stuff that I've purchased, but I'm like, okay, Amazon is suggesting products here. What is likely, what is the campaign type driving those ads?

Jeff:

I don't know specifically the campaign type that drives it, but I think the intelligence that drives it is just that all of them are logged into your same Amazon account, which is I think one of the big powers of Amazon and their advertising campaign is that for lack of a better term, we don't need cookies to be able to understand what your signals are, but it's also triangulating the signals that you have for advertisers who are not advertising on Amazon. So if you continue to watch it, you're probably starting to see other advertisers come up where it's not necessarily about go to Amazon and buy this product. It might be about going to get some ice cream down the street. And I think that's another area

Brett:

Where some cars, some new cars place ads there as well, which is kind of interesting.

Jeff:

And you can push a button and schedule a test drive, right? And so you're probably creating some kind of signal from what you're watching on Prime video to the type of music that you're listening to, the types of products that you're buying that are saying that car may be more in line with something you would buy versus something else. I mean, for me, if you looked at my signals, you would see quite a few things that are around, I just bought a new outdoor lighting system that's all built into my ring system. So that would indicate that I'm maybe a little bit more smart

Brett:

Home type

Jeff:

Smart home. So then I might get more ads that are smart home type based because I'm showing the signals that I like a smart home technology. And I think that just goes to show what I was kind of talking about at the beginning, which is that the Amazon customer, the people who's engaging with Amazon is doing it in their car, in their kitchen, on their couch, and there's so many ways for advertisers to engage with them. And that's I think where the tagline, full funnel advertising at scale for everyone, because it's not just for people who are selling on Amazon anymore. You could be selling on your own website and you can run DSP ads that send the traffic to your website. So Amazon has really greatly expanded who can actually access this to create those ads, which I think is exciting for brands as well.

Brett:

It is because being able to target someone based on their behavior on Amazon or based on what Amazon knows about that shopper, very, very powerful because not only does Amazon have more behavioral shopper data, what you like to purchase when you like to purchase, things like that, but also what media you like to consume, what do you like to watch? All kinds of data points that Amazon has that are extremely valuable. And yeah, just this small example, but these ads on the Alexa device, I mean, choose the creamer example. Again, there've been several times where I'm like, oh, shoot. Yeah, I actually do need to reorder that. And I'll either, if I'm across the kitchen, I'll just speak and say, Alexa reorder, or you go over there and you tap it and you do your thing. But either way, the tools that Amazon is opening up, it's allowing, you don't have to be Hyundai or Toyota to use those tools.

Jeff:

And I think one of the things you just said there is really important, which is that advertising works best when it fits naturally into somebody's life. And that's the bar that Amazon has to continue to reach. Because if advertising, if it becomes irrelevant or if it becomes too much, then that's when people turn it off. Totally. And so we have to kind of keep that balance between keeping everybody privacy safe, being able to serve relevant ads based on signals and indicators, and then being able to drive the results back to the advertiser to understand how their ads are doing that really sets Amazon apart from everybody else in the space today. And I mean, I don't know, let's just kind of geek out and say, just think about where we were five years ago when we were talking about Amazon advertising and when we think to the future of the what's next? I think what excites me as well, right?

Brett:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Just getting started, and yeah, I say this all the time. I say this every year when I'm speaking in front of groups, but it's true, and it just becomes better. But there's never been a better time to build a brand you want to create and build your own brand. There's never been a better time, and it'll be even more true next year.

Jeff:

But I think the thing that I always like to kind of caution or remind people of is that brand building requires a good product. We all go back to the idea it has to be a good product, and then you have to be able to make the right investments to build the audience, to identify your product. And there's lots of different ways to do that. And Amazon has just created more tools for brands to be able to do it easier, to be able to access the creative that they need to be able to do it and to reach more audience if that's what their goal is to do.

Brett:

And let me kind of put some caveats around my statement. There may be some people listening, they're like, wait a minute. Yes, there were easier times maybe to put a product on Amazon and it goes to the moon. I know that the heydays of Amazon selling in like 20 14, 20 15, okay, it's not as easy as it was then. And yes, there may have been some times when there was less competition or you just turn on a TV ad and you go wild. But I still believe there are more tools available. And so for the savvy marketer, for the great brand with a great product, you got more tools, more opportunities to grow.

Jeff:

Yeah, I heard a podcast the other day that was actually really interesting, and it was talking about the types of businesses that are successful today and what they were based off of versus

Brett:

20

Jeff:

Years ago and what they were based off of. And if you look at when I was in college, people were running yellow page ads, not to overly date myself, it was only 30

Brett:

Years. Those were search ads, those were the demand capture ads back in the day, yellow page ads.

Jeff:

And so it's easy to always look backwards and say, well, it was easier to do something. But again, like you said, when you look back today, five years from now, you'll say that it was easier to do it today than it will be five years from now. And so you do have to continue to get more sophisticated. You have to build a product that actually differentiates itself in the market. That's not a bad thing for the consumer. I understand that maybe you were able to make money easier, but if you think about what leads to a good brand it creates, I always say, what is a brand? A brand creates an emotional response. When you say the word Dyson, you have a certain expectation of what that type of product is going to have. Sleep,

Brett:

Design, quality, solving a real problem, something I want to display on my house.

Jeff:

It was a vacuum cleaner. You know what I mean? So they built a better product and they created a brand that creates an emotional response. And so whether you're trying to do this on any social channel or whether you're trying to do this on a commerce channel, or whether you're trying to do this in brick and mortar, all of these components are still the same, and Amazon is just trying to make it easier for those that are doing it on our channel to access all these things.

Brett:

Yeah, love it. Well, Jeff, this has been fantastic. I'm super excited about the new tools and capabilities of Amazon ads. Our clients are investing more and more into Amazon ads because we're seeing the return, because we're seeing it drive incrementality. And so we'll continue to do so for those that are listening or watching and they're like, man, I need to pay attention to what Jeff Cohen has to say or need to see new announcements. How can they follow you and how can they stay in the know on what's new and what's next?

Jeff:

Yeah, so I'd say to follow me, just go to LinkedIn and type in Jeff Cohen, Amazon, and I should come up. I used to come up for Jeff Amazon, but that other guy that's bald, he beats me. Now,

Brett:

There's another famous Jeff, if I'm not mistaken at Amazon, may have you beat a little bit there by a few years.

Jeff:

Yeah, I do most of my posting on LinkedIn. And again, we talked about high level, a lot of these things. There are deep dive podcasts that other people have done on some of these products. So if you're looking to figure out how to implement these specifically for your brand, maybe go back and say, oh, Amazon a MC for sponsored ads, and there's lots of content out there. One of the things that I thought was really cool about unboxed was how many thought leaders in our space were diving into the content and sharing it on LinkedIn and other channels after the event Two years ago, I think I was one of a handful of people that were doing it, and now so many people are doing it. So there's lots of great content out there. You can always go to the Amazon ads website to get the official announcements and official releases. That's always a great place to start as well.

Brett:

Yep. Got to follow Jeff on LinkedIn. He posts awesome content, so recommend that. I'll link to your socials in the show notes as well for those that visit the show notes. And Jeff Cohen, ladies and gentlemen, Jeff, appreciate it, man. Fun as always. And I'm already looking forward to next time.

Jeff:

Yeah, appreciate having me on again and love the partnership that your company and our company has and what you guys are doing for advertisers. So keep sharing with everybody. I think it's awesome and people are learning from what you share, so thank you.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And OMG commerce proud Amazon ad partners, and so we're doing our share and staying connected and helping brands grow. So with that, that'll wrap it up for today. As always, we would love to hear from you. So would you like to hear more of on the show? If you haven't left us that review, that would make our day. We'd appreciate that. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, we dive deep into the results of Amazon's Fall Prime Day 2024. Amazon experts Christine Shiloni and Jonathan Finkes unpack valuable insights, compare performance to previous events, and provide a strategic outlook for the upcoming holiday shopping season. Whether you're an established Amazon seller or just getting started, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you maximize your Q4 sales.

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Key topics discussed:

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• Fall Prime Day performance: A 57% average increase in sales compared to last year, with some brands seeing up to 300% growth.
• The impact of inflation on consumer behavior and pricing strategies
• How to leverage different types of Amazon deals (Lightning Deals, Prime Exclusives and coupons) for maximum visibility and sales.
• Strategies for navigating the condensed holiday shopping season, with five fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.
• Critical dates and preparation tips for inventory management, including considerations for Chinese New Year's impact on supply chains.

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Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(03:03) Performance Analysis: Year-over-Year Comparisons

(06:20) July Prime Day vs. October Prime Day

(17:04) Deals and Promotions: What Worked and What Didn't

(20:44) Impact of Inflation on Shopping Behavior

(22:30) Post-Prime Day Trends and Future Predictions

(24:43) Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Window

(30:16) Impact of Fewer Shopping Days on Sales

(35:15) Predictions for Holiday Sales Performance

(37:32) Final Tips for Holiday Preparation

(42:38) Conclusion

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Connect with Brett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more.

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Transcript:

Jonathan :

There could be something that you see you are being hyper aggressive on and you're just getting blown out of the water and you're spending hundreds, thousands of dollars and not getting any sales from it, and there could be a good reason for that.

Brett:

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 we are unpacking Fall Prime Day, also known as Prime Big Deal Days in 2024. Also going to give a little bit of a preview for the rest of holiday, the cyber five, the Cyber 12, whatever cyber number you want to attach to it. A little bit of a preview there as well. And so I've got back again, returning guests. Christine Shiloni our Amazon director here at OMG Commerce, and Jonathan Finkes, one of our top Amazon ad strategists and specialists. And so we're going to unpack all things Prime Day talk holiday, and it's going to be a ton of fun with that. Christine. Jonathan, how's it going? And welcome back to the show.

Christine:

You. Thank you. It's going really well. It's going very well. We had a good fall, big deal days. We did see a nice lift for our brands that leaned in on some deals, things like that. But overall, there was definitely a lot more traffic on the site and it was a lift for almost everybody.

Brett:

Yeah, going to be great to unpack it. How do you guys feel coming back to the pod? Are you getting more comfortable, more relaxed, more excited to be on the pod? Let's just be candid here for the folks listening.

Christine:

I'm super psyched. Yeah,

Jonathan :

I'm ready to find out how many followers I have. I feel like I've been on, I think it's my third time. I should probably have a brand following by now.

Brett:

You should have some kind of following. It's probably not like paparazzi level there in New Jersey, people hiding in the bushes and things like that, but there's got to be people out there requesting more. Jonathan Fincas on the po. So we'll keep you posted on that.

Jonathan :

Just got to figure out how to capitalize on it. That's it. Yeah,

Brett:

Exactly. Exactly. So Christine alluded to it, we did see some big wins this prime day, this fall, prime day versus last fall, prime day. So we're going to talk about how did this year stack up to last year. We're also going to talk about how did fall Prime day or October Prime day compare to July Prime day of this year, and is that consistent with what we're seeing in previous years? And if not, or if so, then what does that mean? And then all of this could, should be at least a bit of a bellwether for the rest of holiday. So we'll pontificate and maybe make some predictions there. And then we'll get very tactical and give you good advice for what to do for the rest of holiday and then how you can get ready. So let's do this. I'm going to highlight a couple of the bigger numbers, just kind of the broad numbers overall, looking at all OMG clients and we've got a number of seven figure sellers, a number of eight figure sellers, a few nine figure sellers.

And so this was all blended together, but I think it's helpful across a wide variety of categories from medical devices to supplements to food and beverage to home decor, automotive. It's a pretty broad spectrum if you look at the OMG client base. And so if we look at this fall prime day, so the October 8th and ninth, those were the dates. This year compared to last fall, prime day, our average client was up about 57%. So up 57% year over year for fall prime day, which is pretty great. Christine, I know you've got a couple of specific callouts and we can't mention client names, but what were a few of the notable callouts and what do you think drove that?

Christine:

So we have a supplement brand. They were up 70% year over year. They did lean in pretty heavy on a lightning deal that did over 120,000. So that certainly fed into their success.

Brett:

So just the lightning deal did that much.

Christine:

Yeah, the lightning deal.

Brett:

Yeah. So they're above the average up 70%. Our average was 57, so nice lift over the average,

Christine:

But they leaned in on a lightning deal. They also ran prime exclusives when they couldn't get the lightning deal. They ran a lot of coupons, so they went all in and it paid off for them for sure. And because they're a supplement brand, we're basically taking a loss leader because now they're hopefully going to go into subscribe and save. So it's Did they actually

Brett:

Discount to the point where they were losing money on each sale or using that term loss leader loosely?

Christine:

I'm using it loosely.

Brett:

Okay.

Christine:

I'm using it loosely, but to get them into the subscribe and save funnel for their products.

Brett:

Right, right. Yeah. And that is the advantage within Consumable. You get that first purchase, you're likely to get more. And we didn't see that. We saw that when we were at Amazon Accelerate. The three of us were there hanging out, that there's a direct correlation. People that use a coupon are likely to come back and subscribe and save. So pretty good data surrounding that.

Christine:

We have another, it's a newer brand that just launched last year. It's also, it's a coffee supplement. They were up almost 300%, 277% year over year. They did also lean in on some prime exclusives. Again, getting more people into the subscribe and save funnel, which is great for them. A beauty brand, they were close to 60% and they just went straight coupon. So you can see anybody that was running something.

Brett:

So when you say straight coupon, you mean it's not attached to a lightning deal? No Prime Day discounts, per se, just

Christine:

Coupon. They did a 20% off coupon, their entire catalog.

Brett:

Nice.

Christine:

And they're not expensive items, so it was more of a multi purchase, three, four items per sale. So they came in with some pretty good numbers.

Brett:

Nice. On the ad side, Jonathan, what did you see or anything worth noting this fall Prime day versus last or this fall prime Day versus July, purely from an Amazon ads perspective?

Jonathan :

Yeah, so most performances were on par in terms of ad spend. The average account doubled its daily ad spend. The accounts that leaned more heavily and saw into promotions and saw really big surge in traffic, those were closer to a three or four X in daily ad spend. But the biggest unique call out that I saw was that on a lot of our consumable brands, whether that's in health and beauty supplements, protein powders and those kinds of things, they saw a really big surge in PPC impressions for the 10 days in the lead up to the event, which usually in the lead up to these events with Prime Day or last year's big deal event in October, usually we'll see a little bit of a slump, especially in the first couple of days right before the event, because shoppers are like, oh, I'm not going to go on Amazon. I know the events come in in a day or two. So that was a very unique to see that traffic surge.

Brett:

So seeing the lift in impressions those 10 days prior just means there were more people searching during that timeframe and maybe scouting, doing a little research before prime day deals. Do you have any thoughts there? Have you seen any other data that would support a theory there, Jonathan?

Jonathan :

Yeah, no, it's that I think that people were scouting a bit more, but then I'm also questioning if there was some adjustments to Amazon's algorithms on the backend and that they were potentially serving ads to more shoppers than they normally do. Maybe spreading out, getting a little bit more broad on their categorical targeting. But that's stuff that's just my digging into conspiracy theories of Amazon. Yeah, interesting. So

Brett:

Yeah, could be that there are more people searching, but we don't exactly have that data. It could just be that it was an increase in impression, so meaning more people saw the ads, it could just be that Amazon's kind trying to expand the reach of those ads, showing them more places trying to drive performance on their end by showing ads more so super interesting. Now let's do this. Let's compare fall Prime day to July Prime day. The og, the original Prime day, if we remember July Prime Day, July is the slowest month in retail historically. And so Amazon decided, Hey, let's just create a holiday in July and see if we can get a ton of people to shop. And Bezos Magic worked. Now every other retailer has copied it, right? Walmart does a big, I don't remember what they call it, but they do prime day discounts and so does everybody else.

And so now it is a thing. It's an event. People look forward to it, people plan on it. And so how did the two compare? I'll give you the bigger dollar figures here, how they compare, and then we'll talk about some insights. But were, this October Prime day was off by about 38% from the July prime day this year. So 38%, call it 40% fewer sales or sales totals this October versus July last year, it was similar. It was a little closer. It was in the high twenties. That was driven by a couple of large clients though too. Some of this is deal based and whatnot, but we can safely say October or fall Prime Day, not as big as July Prime day. What are your theories there? And I know Jonathan, you were sharing a couple of theories earlier, but why do you think those two days are different and how are they different?

Jonathan :

Yeah, so it's something we've been thinking about internally is that the prime day in July is really, that's the first really big event of the year. It's also been Amazon's kind of keystone cornerstone event for, I don't know, since they came out with it. I forget how many years it's been now, like 10, 12 years ago, maybe more. I don't know. I'm not someone who's a little bit wiser or more gray haired than me. We'll have an intern look that up right now. And so yeah, so that's an event that really has a ton of brand

Brett:

Recognition. 20 15, 20 15, July 15th, 2015,

Jonathan :

Not as long as I was thinking, only nine years. So that's got a lot more brand recognition that mostly anyone who knows of Amazon, definitely any prime member knows about the prime day. And I think that there's probably some murkiness and confusion to the fall event, though we definitely saw more promotion of it from Amazon. I think they announced the date slightly earlier than they do for some of those events. Really trying to get the word out there that hey, these two days in October, there's going to be another big deal event. And so they're really trying to drum up more awareness of that event. But I still think that there is some murkiness that not all shoppers are aware that event's happening. And that might point to that impression surge that we saw 10 days out where people are like, Hey, I know there's an event happening in October, when is it happening?

And so they were just going into Amazon a little bit towards the end of September and then into the first week of October to be figuring out when that event was. And then because the Prime event in July is the first really big deal event of the year, and then this one in October is pretty close to Black Friday, cyber Monday. That kind of leaves it in this weird spot of the procrastinators among us, which I am definitely one are not going to be buying Christmas gifts in October. I'm not buying Christmas gifts usually until December, and then I'm like, I should have bought it on Black Friday. So that's why it's in this weird spot. And that's why I think also we kind of see which product verticals did the best in October, were more of the household goods, everyday purchases, consumables. So that lends to me that it's not really gift buying.

There is gift buying. About 25% of people said they were buying gifts, but I think the majority there is just seeking out the deal. Whereas back in July, it's like that's kind of a cornerstone event of the year where you're like, oh, I'm going to buy an electronic I've been holding off on, or some other big ticket item that one or two times a year between July Prime Day and Black Friday, those are the two. Or Cyber Monday. Those are the two events where I'm going to do a big purchase item, buy a lot for a bunch of discounts where it's a little bit murkier for October.

Brett:

It's interesting, the October dates are kind of in this weird space where it's almost a little, it's too early for the procrastinators. Maybe it's just right or almost too late for people that are really ahead of the game. But there's going to be a lot of people I think that see the Fall Prime day deals and say, yeah, maybe I'll wait. I'll take my chances. I think the discounts are going to be bigger around Black Friday, cyber Monday, but that July prime day, there's nothing, you're not going to say, I'm just going to wait for Black Friday Cyber Monday, unless it's truly a gift and it's only going to be a gift for the holidays. But yeah, kind of two different buying modes there. I think from your perspective, Christine, what did you see or what you see in the data about what was purchased in fall Prime day versus big purchasing categories in July?

Christine:

So as Jonathan said that the fall prime day was really more household items. I'm going to restock on something for the house. I use this cleansers. I'm going to buy more of this July prime day. I've seen more larger purchases like furniture or more clothes. It's more personal items because you haven't had a sale since last December, really. So it's more personal items, more. I'm a big fan of searching the week before adding everything to my cart that I would like,

Brett:

And

Christine:

Then I go in on Prime Day. I'm like, oh, it has a badge. I think I'll buy it. So the badges really, they get people to convert. That could be what the impressions were for.

Brett:

So it could be the people. Yeah, the impression could also be those people going in to add to the cart ahead of time to see what's going to go on sale.

Christine:

It was potentially me and I was asking my family to do the same thing.

Brett:

It's mostly Christine and her friends,

Christine:

It's mostly me. Another thought process on this October Prime from a seller's standpoint, how much of your inventory can you replenish

Brett:

Before

Christine:

Cyber five? How much are you willing to go through in October not knowing can I get any more back in for the really big traffic and when I really need it to be there? So I think that does put a little bit of hesitation in a seller's mind where, okay, I can go through it in July because I still have four months to get it back, but if I go through it in October, am I going to get any more in? So I think that's

Brett:

That's really good. And I think there's this perception for them, this totally ties into it. There's a perception with the shoppers that the biggest sales of the year, black Friday, cyber Monday and July Prime Day, those are probably the deepest discount days for me as a shopper. And so I think that's that perception, but it totally ties into the seller's mindset as well, right? Do I want to burn through all my inventory now I need to save some for those prime shopping days?

Christine:

Exactly. And October Prime day, it was started during 2020. I don't think there was one in July because there nobody could have inventory. So this was kind

Brett:

Of, well, I think it was also kind of one of those things where I wonder, and I heard theories where Amazon was trying to get ahead of the game a little bit. They were concerned maybe about can we deliver everything now? Everything is online during peak covid, and so let's start things early to ease as a relief valve for our delivery infrastructure and specifically last mile and things like that. And then it just sort of stuck, right? The fall primates

Christine:

Stuck. Yeah, why not? It worked. It worked.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. For sure. Interesting. What did we see in terms of the deals that worked versus the deals that didn't work? Any specific callouts or interesting callouts this prime day? Or is it kind just the usual takeaway is what worked this time is what works? Every time

Christine:

We did have more brands leaning into prime exclusives and even coupons. The window for the Lightning deals to sign up for any deals usually closes six weeks or so or more before the event even happens. So I think a lot of sellers are even missing that. I think the window closed in August for October, the window closed last Friday for your cyber deals, and you don't know, can I pull the trigger on that? Am I going to have the inventory, et cetera. So if you don't,

Brett:

And why is it there's such a lead time? Do we know why does Amazon require that? Is it for inventory and planning purposes or what drives that?

Christine:

I think they're trying, honestly, I think it's a demand issue on their part. Let's try to get as many people into this set a level of urgency. I better sign up now, I'm never going to get it. Whereas before you'd be like, oh, I think I'll sign up two days before the deal. So this way you can get your deals in there, but you have to be on top of it and get in early. You're not sure how much inventory you can allocate to it at that point, so much in advance. And one of the issues with Lightning Deals is it's going to populate on the last 30 days, and the same with prime exclusive discounts. So you had to be very mindful that I run any deals earlier. Is my sale price now going to be lower than I need my contribution margins? So that all kind of goes into how you plan your deals. And they're also costly deals on these tent pole days can be upwards of a thousand dollars and when you have to give at least a 20% discount that that's eating into your numbers pretty good.

Brett:

For sure.

Christine:

And that's potentially why items like supplements and things that are on a reorder basis are like, okay, we can do that one time

Brett:

More likely seller is more willing to give those discounts for those consumables.

Christine:

Exactly. So prime exclusive, I think people are catching onto that. It has a red badge, so it looks good in search, looks a little bit better than a coupon, not as good as a lightning deal, but you're still in the game.

Brett:

And why do you say that? How does the Lightning deal stand out versus the prime exclusive?

Christine:

Sometimes it's even a little bit bigger deal, prime deal or the terminology that they use on those are more eye-catching than they will on just a coupon, which might just be yellow or green, not as big either. So they're a best deal. They're really trying to push people to those deals, which increases your traffic, so it makes it worthwhile.

Brett:

So lightning deals are called out the most and usually the biggest discount than Prime exclusive than just a standard coupon kind in that order in terms of how much it's emphasized or called out on a page?

Christine:

Yes, exactly.

Brett:

Got it, got it. So I know one topic that's been a hot topic for years, it's settled down a little bit now, driving potential rate cuts, that inflation is under control a little bit, but I still think it's important to look at how do you think inflation, even though it is kind of now in that normal sub 3% range, how do we think that's, or do we think that's impacting shopping at all? Or is that impacting strategy, pricing, strategy with our clients and with sellers on Amazon?

Christine:

I think it's impacting all the way around really. I mean, sellers can only charge so much. The market can only bear so much. So they can't really increase their prices that much. They just price themselves out of the market For individuals, for shoppers, their buying power is less than it once was in some cases. So shoppers I think are a little pickier, not so quick, oh, I'll just add it to my cart and buy it. I think they're thinking two or three times. They're comparing prices, what's on sale, what's not on sale, probably impacting bigger ticket items a little bit more than household items necessarily. We might, it's stable from last year, so I don't see that we would see a big difference, kind of a new normal,

Brett:

All those things are normal or all those things are true you just said, but it's almost like a new normal for people.

Christine:

It kind of is a new normal. So that's why I don't think we're going to see a big differential in the sales from last holiday season to this holiday season. But just understanding that buyers have less buying power, they have less in their pocket than they did a few years ago.

Brett:

Yeah, prime Day July was up quite a bit, year over year, fall prime quite a bit year over year. So hopefully we'll see something similar in holiday, but we shall see. Jonathan, from the ads point of view, what did you see immediately after the fall prime day? Was it the typical lull where hey, people's wallets are kind of empty, so they're going to wait a little bit? What did you see there?

Jonathan :

Yeah, I would say we actually saw a bit more significant of a lull in the days immediately following the event than what we usually see. And for a few accounts that kind of extended out to a four to five day lull. I think that's a

Brett:

Big, were those the brands that had the biggest discounts or did that seem to not correlate?

Jonathan :

No, that didn't really have a correlation. The only correlation that I could really pull out from that was more of the cyclical purchase trends per account. Because some accounts, if they have a ton of subscriptions, then that's really more evenly, your sales are a lot more evenly distributed throughout the week. But then we have a lot of clients that are weekend heavy. And so the people who typically buy on the weekdays really focused in on the deal event. And then of course the weekend did as well. And so then all the weekend shoppers, which there aren't as much already or all the weekday shoppers, which there were fewer already really focused in on those two days. And so then the rest of that week, finishing out the week for the Thursday, Friday and into the Saturday, those were just kind of obliterated. It wasn't like 10% of sales, but it was significantly down from the normal average. But then after about the fourth or fifth day, they were back up to the pre-event levels in terms of sales,

Brett:

Normal daily averages kind of kicked in at that point. Got it, got it. Interesting. Okay, so let's talk a little, let's shift our focus. Well, any final call outs for Prime Day before we shift to holiday?

Jonathan :

Good? No, I don't think so. We're

Brett:

Good. Cool. So as we look at the holiday shopping window for a lot of people, holiday shopping kicks in earnest during the cyber five, that Thanksgiving through Black Friday, that's when it happens. Now I've heard this is like the Cyber 12 and the cyber whatever number you want to throw at it, kind of the week, extending past Cyber Monday and going a little bit before Thanksgiving. It's all kind of thrown in there, but a lot of people, that's when holiday shopping kicks off for them, interestingly enough, and this is just the way the calendar falls sometimes. Thanksgiving is five days later in the year this year than it was last year. I believe it's November 28th this year. And so there'll be five fewer holiday shopping days this year kind of measuring that beginning of the cyber five through final through Christmas or whatever. And so fewer shopping days, how do we think that will impact things and what do we need to consider there? And I'll ask you that first, Christine.

Christine:

I think the first thing to consider now that Amazon has extended their cyber event from basically Sunday through Tuesday, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, basically through the Tuesday after Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving. But if you end up, for instance, with a Best Deal, which is a seven day deal that starts on Monday or Sunday, you run the entire week after Prime Day. So one of the key things that you have to keep in mind when you have set up these deals in the past, because you set them up already two months ago, what deal placement do you get? Am I running on Monday? Am I running on Tuesday? Am I running on Wednesday? Am I running on Thursday, Friday, whatever? And how does that compare to my sales from last year and what did I run last year and what days did I run it? So what days are going to perform best for me for my sales volume? It's number one. So for instance, if you, you have no control over the timing, they usually come out about a week before the event. So it's incumbent upon, we have to check it.

Brett:

And these are prime exclusive or what deals are talking about right now

Christine:

Where you have no, these are deals and best

Brett:

Deals. Oh, lightning deals. Okay.

Christine:

So a best deal, you could potentially get the Sunday before Thanksgiving and then it's going to run seven days to the Sunday after. Or a Best Deal would start on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and run the following week. I actually had huge success with that, a seven day deal post Thanksgiving. So you need to determine out of those days, are those going to be good for me? Is that worth me spending a thousand dollars on this deal to run on Wednesday when everybody's traveling? What if I get a Thursday deal, it's Thanksgiving, is that going to work? Everyone should take the deals that come on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Brett:

But you're saying you don't get to pick

Christine:

Say, but it's incumbent upon agency seller to look at your placement that you've been offered and make sure it's worth running it if it's not worth

Brett:

Running it because you get selected and once you know your date, then you can choose whether you want to do it or whether you want to

Christine:

Reject it. Exactly, exactly. And you can say, oh, that's fabulous, love it, keeping it or That's not good. I think I'm going to cancel it. And your pricing for your deal will be affected by your fall big deal days for both your prime day, prime exclusive and your Lightning deals. So you're going to have to wait at least 30 days after that to see where your pricing is going to be and what price Amazon is going to tell you you have to sell your product for and your lightning deal. So it's a continuous checking, but it's post 30 days.

Brett:

So basically is what Amazon's trying to do is they're trying to make sure that the deal you offer for cyber is at least as good as what you did for fall prime day or something. Is that kind of what they're looking at or how

Christine:

Does that work? It's based on your lowest price in the last 30 days. So then they take the discount off of that. So if you went in now and you're like, oh, let me upload all my prime exclusive discounts for cyber week, the referral price is going to be your, if you had it on sale, that price from the October Prime day. So you just want to wait until that cycles through. You've had your regular price for 30 days, and then you can upload it with your 20% discount for Prime exclusive, a lightning deal or a Best Deal, let it cycle through for 30 days. Amazon will reset and whatever percentage off they say you should have on that deal will be based on your current price, not your sale price. So these deals are not set it and forget it because you also can assign inventory. It assigns inventory. So you decide how many units can I even sell through at that price.

Brett:

So are you saying you need to wait 30 days after fall prime day before you submit some of this? Is that cutting it close? So as far as deadlines go,

Christine:

No, because October Prime, you've already set it up, so you're fine with that because you already have the deals in the console. It's just adjusting the prices that you're going to charge for it. So it's not too late. I would say you can upload your prime exclusives October, November 15th around that date. That still gives you over 10 days to clear any errors for your light.

Brett:

So that 30 day window between

Christine:

Prime day and that 30 day window closed, the system is reset now on your current price, not your sale price, your current price. So you should be able to apply your 20% or whatever you want to do. And the lightning deals or best deals should also reset, but keep an eye on the inventory levels and you can adjust those. Also determine how many units do you want to go through at this price.

Brett:

Got it. Got it. Jonathan, what is your perspective here? So five fewer shopping days this year versus last year. How will that impact total sales? How will that impact ads? What's your perspective?

Jonathan :

Yeah, so what we typically see is that the accounts that really benefit from the gift buying, they just continue to keep increasing in sales through December until, and I guess I haven't looked at when Christmas falls in the week, but pretty much right up until the 21st, 22nd, as long as those products are still getting next day or two day or one day shipping. And so

Brett:

Christmas is on a Wednesday this year. There you go. Oh, Wednesday, yeah, midweek, midweek Christmas. Yeah.

Jonathan :

Yeah. So probably Sunday, the Sunday before will be the last day when, and again, it depends on your inventory, quantities on how great your shipping's going to be in that narrow region Saturday, Sunday. So really condenses having those five less days between Black Friday, cyber Monday and Christmas really condenses that shopping period for shoppers and gift buyers. So usually people who are going to buy are still going to buy, they have a little bit less time to buy. So the only people that are really slipping through the cracks are those really extreme procrastinators who are probably going to have to run to a retail store anyways because they're going out on Christmas Eve to buy the gift. But for Amazon traffic, that just makes those days that more valuable because there's five days that are just gone. So you really got to be on your game making sure that you're showing up, especially when you're running promos, that you're broadcasting that promotion with your advertising as prominently as possible to make sure you're really maximizing the impact and reach over that narrower timeframe.

Brett:

Yeah, it's really interesting. So I think for most brands, most products, most categories, sales should be fairly consistent. And so just the loss of those five days mean it's just going to be more concentrated and sales are going to be higher during some of those days because if you think about it, you're still going to buy gifts for your kids, you're still going to buy gifts for your spouse, none of that can change. You can't just say, Hey, fewer shopping days couldn't get you anything this year. That's going to happen. But what could shift is where you buy gifts. To your point, Jonathan, if you are a procrastinator, maybe now you're forced to buy in store versus online. And I've also seen, because this cycles through, so we have these windows where holiday shopping period is condensed. We have periods where it's extended and these periods where it's condensed, sometimes people don't buy some of the extra gifts.

So like someone buying for their great niece or something like, okay, well I didn't see a special deal and so it just didn't happen. Or, oh, I saw this deal. I'm buying this for a friend. Maybe I wouldn't normally buy them a gift, but it just was there. So some of the more spontaneous things might not happen as much this year. So again, it doesn't impact big gift buying and I don't think it impacts your primary categories. But yeah, it does condense things. And it may kind of have some fringe edge case impacts, which is super interesting.

Christine:

It may make some other days bigger even than they once were. So maybe that Saturday, the two Saturdays after Thanksgiving or whatever, there'll be some days where you'll be, wow, I'm really up

Brett:

The Saturday.

Christine:

I think we're really down before. So I think in the end it'll probably be, it'll average out about the same, but I think it could make a few days bigger than what people anticipated from last year.

Jonathan :

Totally. Yeah,

Christine:

The panic you were

Jonathan :

About to say something, Jonathan? Yeah, just another aspect of that is usually we'll see that November on whole is a little bit softer than we thought it was going to be or year over year numbers wise compared to like 2023 November year over year for 2022. And then December should be proportionately stronger year over year than the trailing one just because the shopping is more condensed into those December weeks and a little bit less into the November

Christine:

Number

Brett:

Because now cyber cyber Monday is the 2nd of December and Sunday, which is part of cyber, cyber five is also December, December one. So it's going to shift some of those November sales. The November comp will be different. What's that?

Christine:

November numbers will look a little off because you're missing eight days of prime selling in November, so it's going to probably negatively impact your November numbers. But then hopefully you make that up on the December side,

Brett:

You have to do a little bit of calendar work to, because that five day shift you'll have to, your comps will be a little bit different, but that just kind of happens. So as we prep for the holiday, any big predictions you think this is going to be? Do you think we should see similar lifts for all of holiday that we've kind of seen say for Prime day, year over year? Do you think this holiday is going to be kind of flat year over year? What are your predictions from a big picture perspective?

Christine:

I think we're probably going to end up pretty similar to last year. A couple points here or a couple points there. I think one point that you had mentioned earlier, Brett, in regards to inflation, it's still here. So that part of the equation hasn't changed. I think people will buy about the same amount of stuff that they were going to buy, even with a few less days. So I think it'll probably going to be pretty stable with last year.

Jonathan :

Last year, yeah, same. I'm expecting to have a really solid Black Friday, cyber Monday in December, election year's, a little bit uncertainty of what's going to happen there, but I don't think that that is ultimately going to play too much into Christmas shopping trends. And if there's one thing that is wholly undefeated, it is the American consumer.

Brett:

It's so true. Yeah, the election, it's such an interesting story. That election also, it's a major, major hotly contested, all polls show it's a tight race, so the election is a big deal. The nice thing though, on the Amazon side, it doesn't really impact. There's no political ads on Amazon. Thank God that's a place we can go and hide from political ads. It does impact us on the YouTube and meta side and stuff like that. But yeah, I think the election, depending on which way it goes, maybe your gathering with your family is going to be more or less depressing depending on how your family views the outcome of the election. But I think there's going to be enough window there between the election and cyber kicking off and earnest and there's going to be people shopping for therapy, there's going to be people shopping for celebration, people are going to shop. And so 100% agree with that. On the ad strategy side. Jonathan, anything, are you thinking about this holiday any differently than other holidays because of the condensed window or any just special callouts on holiday prep from an ad perspective?

Jonathan :

Yeah, so the main special callout for holiday prep is just to really know, obviously I'm working on the agency side, but if you're a seller listening to this, you just got to know your strategy going into it. You obviously need to know your margins. You need to know what promos you've got. We're already past the deadline for being able to submit lightning deals and best deals, but you can still run prime exclusives if you don't have that eligible. You can run coupons at the bare minimum. And so knowing when those are going to be running, and like I said earlier, capitalizing on when they're active, obviously, like Christine mentioned, you don't get to choose the timing for Lightning deals and best deals, but if the best deal is running over Black Friday or it's running over Cyber Monday, those are the moments to really capitalize if you're, everybody's tight on budget. But if you're really tight and you're really trying to say, I can really only really hammer in on a day or two. Obviously back Friday, cyber Monday are the best. Cyber Monday usually edges out for Amazon, especially if you are a little bit more textile product. And then also the data, it's

Brett:

Interesting because on the D two C side, it's usually the opposite on the D two C side. What we see on the Google side is that the Black Friday's a little bit bigger, but Amazon really wins on Cyber Monday. Interesting.

Jonathan :

Yeah, definitely. And then I'm always a big, I like to scrutinize waste and that really drill out as much waste as possible. And that's kind of an evergreen tactic that I have. But that's something to really hone in on for the deal events. And really, you got to be checking in on your campaigns and how they're performing throughout the day. Obviously there's going to be a lot of attribution dust that settles later, but there could be something that you see you are being hyper aggressive on and you're just getting blown out of the water and you're spending hundreds, thousands of dollars and not getting any sales from it. And there could be a good reason for that. Or maybe there's something you need to dig in and adjust. Maybe your promo didn't start running because you had the pricing wrong or something and it wasn't deep enough the discount or some other issue. Maybe you lost the buy box or something. I don't know your issue, you're going to have to see if there's an issue and dig into it yourself. And each of those issues requires kind of a custom tailored, obviously response to that.

Brett:

Totally. And it's such a good call out though, the waste piece, because yes, conversion rates are up. Yes, everybody's shopping. Yes, it's a buying frenzy. Everything is condensed anyway in a normal holiday period. It's condensed more this year, but there's still going to be waste. And you still got to be mindful, Hey, none of us want to just give all of our extra profits back to Jeff Bezos in terms the form of advertising fees. Nobody wants to give more money into Google or to Zuck than we have to, right? So we've got to be mindful of those areas of waste. And so it's one of those things where really every sale day in the holiday can be the equivalent of a week or at least several days that are normal days. And so got to have your ad team on it, whether it's internal or an agency.

And hey, this is just a quick plug, quick shameless plug for OMG commerce. Depending on when you listen to this, it may be a little late, but we would love to get in and see how we can assist you depending on when you reach out. We may be heads down with existing clients, but this is the time certainly to bring in pros. So we're a little bit over our allotted record time. I know you guys both have to go and take care of clients, but Rapid Fire Christine, tips, dates, what do we need to be aware of and what we need to be planning for to make the most of holiday

Christine:

Quick tips? Add a holiday banner to your brand store, update your brand story. Give it a little holiday background. You can quickly add holiday search terms to the back end bulk upload. Doesn't matter how many ASINs you have, just put 'em in the backend. You don't need to update anything else on your listing. Be mindful that Chinese New Year is the 29th of January. Last day to place an order is December 6th. Last day. It's going to get on the water is probably very close to the 29th. And after that, nothing comes out till the 12th. So if you see you're crushing it in the beginning of November, middle of November, cyber week, get your order in, get it on the water so you can still be selling in January, February, and March.

Brett:

Totally, man. Nothing would bring down the high from a great holiday. Like not having inventory

Christine:

Like zero for

Brett:

January to February, especially if you're food and bev or if you're anything health or fitness or supplement related January and February, or very strong, even bigger oftentimes than holiday. So you got to be ready for that. So Christine Shalon, ladies and gentlemen, and Jonathan FCUs, you guys crushed it as always. Thank you for your hard work. It was a great super, super fun prime day. I love how we have internal sheets we keep track of and we're popping messages back and forth on Slack and kind of watching how things go. It just got me real fired up for holiday. It's even bigger and even more fun. So good work to the both of you and to the team. Any final callouts, any final callouts tips, advice that you would share with the audience?

Christine:

Watch your deals.

Jonathan :

Watch your deals. Watch

Christine:

Your deals.

Jonathan :

Organize. Organize your ads with your deals and your inventory. Strategize around that, optimize continually, and just stay focused on all of that. And you'll be good.

Brett:

Now's the time to really be fine tuning that strategy. Really get that dialed in, have your playbook laid out. How are we going to execute this? Because really, you don't want to be figuring things out during holiday. That's when you're just executing, making in-game adjustments and optimizing. But you got to have that overall strategy. Love it. So thank you both. Super, super fun. Excited for our next chat about Amazon Growth here coming up soon. And as always, thank you for tuning in. Please give us some feedback. Let us know what you'd like to hear more of or less of on the show. Leave us a review on iTunes if you've not done that. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

In this illuminating episode of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast, I sit down with AI marketing expert Russ Henneberry to explore the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in eCommerce. Russ shares invaluable insights on how we can leverage AI as a powerhouse marketing tool by creating customized AI marketing hubs. This episode is a must-listen for any eCommerce professional looking to stay ahead of the curve and harness AI's capabilities to drive business growth.

Key topics covered:

• The concept of "AI marketing hubs" and how to build them using tools like Claude and ChatGPT.
• Strategies for fine-tuning AI models with your business data to dramatically improve outputs.
• The three key AI roles in marketing: Scribe (content creation), Optimizer (asset evaluation), and Strategist (big picture planning).
• Tips for crafting more effective AI prompts using the RTIF (Role, Task, Input, Format) framework.
• The future of AI in marketing, including predictions on how major tech companies will shape the landscape.

Tune in to discover how you can take your AI marketing game to the next level and turn generic AI outputs into tailored, high-impact marketing assets for your eCommerce business.

---

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 

(05:14) Mistakes and Misconceptions About AI

(23:02) The Role of Prompts In AI

(27:57) Introduction To AI Marketing Hubs

(45:16) Examples of Well-Built Marketing Hubs

(51:20) What About Gemini? 

(54:14) Conclusion

---

‍

Show Notes:

• Russ Henneberry 
• theClick
• Molly Pittman
• Sway Thai
• Torchy's Tacos
• Nvidia
• ChatGPT
• Anthropic
• Claude
• Perplexity 
• Gemini
• Llama

---

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

---

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

‍

---

Transcript:

Russ:

We don't need AI to get better. You need to be better at using ai.

Brett:

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 we're talking about AI and marketing. What are mistakes and misconceptions that people make about ai? How can you turn AI into a powerhouse marketing tool or marketing assistant or marketing team member for you? And my guest is a long time friend, multiple time returning guests to the pod. Although it's been a while. It's been too long. I'm sure it's been a long time. It's been a long time, dude. Yeah. But Mr. Russ Henneberry of the click join the click.ai. We're both Missouri boys. He's in St. Louis. I'm in Springfield, so representing Missouri. But Russ, what's up man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Russ:

Welcome back to, I'm so excited to be here and I haven't seen you in person in even longer.

Brett:

Thanks.

Russ:

It's been forever actually. I saw you

Brett:

In Austin, wasn't it? We were both doing, why were we there? It was something with Molly and Sam and I don't know why were, were we in Austin?

Russ:

I'm not sure. You were in an e-comm event. I was at Kajabi's event.

Brett:

Got it. But Molly Pittman was there, wasn't she?

Russ:

Molly Pittman was there.

Brett:

Yeah. So we hung out, waited at a great restaurant, Austin man, Austin does food, right?

Russ:

Sway.

Brett:

We went to Sway. Sway. Look at your memory. Yeah,

Russ:

Sway. Because I go there every time I go to Austin. It's the best Thai food in the world.

Brett:

I love Thai food, man. I am a huge, huge Thai fan. And you had some kind of funky congealed beer or something, if I remember

Russ:

Right. Molly bought me a beer that slowly freezes after you open it and then,

Brett:

Which shouldn't happen. Alcohol doesn't freeze, so it just kind of turns into a gel or something.

Russ:

I can't remember what the heck happened, but a mess, hijinks ensued and Molly just sat there and laughed the whole time.

Brett:

She was cackling. It was entertaining to watch the beer congeal or whatever, and you try to deal with it, it was equally as funny or more so watching Molly's amusement at the whole thing,

Russ:

You basically just, you walk up and you hand somebody a problem and they have to deal with it. You basically have to drink.

Brett:

I'm going to watch this unfold. I'm going to see how you do there, buddy. How are you going to do with this congealed beer? But Austin such fun town to hang out in. They do food, right? Tacos. Oh my goodness. I was just in Dallas for an event with my family and Torchy's Tacos, Austin original. It originated as an Austin food truck. They're in Dallas now. So I ate some, oh my gosh, that was one of the best tacos I've had and in a long time. So Torchy's tacos, highly recommend sway if you're winning Thai food. So there you go. Some Austin recommendations for you. Free of charge on the eCommerce Revolution podcast, free charge, free podcast. That's awesome, dude. So let's dive in and let's talk AI a little bit. Obviously it's the buzzword. Hopefully everyone here has invested in Nvidia stock from way back in the day, and hopefully you're wildly rich now. And AI is all the buzz. We're not really sure who's benefiting from it other than Nvidia who's really benefiting from ai. But you and I are both very bullish on the technology being at least somewhat disruptive now. It's going to continue. But why are you so excited about ai? So much so that your membership site is about ai. I know a lot of the consulting you do is about ai. Why are you so pumped up?

Russ:

Well, because my background, I know yours we're similar age. We came up when the internet was becoming a thing. My first job in marketing, I was in direct mail and then I saw this internet thing,

Brett:

Yeah, was TV radio for me.

Russ:

So we were both doing more old school types of media and we probably, I saw the internet coming along and I was like, I'm hopping on this train. And I never looked back. And I rode that wave. And when I saw this coming out, I pumped the brakes for a while and was like, okay, I'm not going to say anything about this. I'm just going to watch it. I'm going to study it. And eventually I've come to the conclusion there's no future that I see where we aren't using AI isn't just infuse everything we're doing as marketers. So yeah, I'm all in on it.

Brett:

Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I've kind of gone personally from being fascinated by it, maybe partially afraid of it, skeptical a little bit to like, okay, no, this is going to happen. It's going to be good, but not really using it to, now I utilize AI quite a bit. I'll share some stories as we go here, but let's maybe open up with what are some of the mistakes and or misconceptions people have about AI related to their marketing?

Russ:

I think people are frustrated with ai. You mentioned earlier that where are we seeing the ROI in marketing? There's a lot of investors asking if there's a bubble here because there's so much money flying into ai, billion,

Brett:

Billions and billions and billions of dollars being invested in AI right now.

Russ:

And where's where are the sales? So what I think we're seeing right now is that intelligence has become a commodity like electricity or internet access. At 20 bucks a month, I can have access to the leading Frontier model, the most intelligent model. And that's not going to change. We're going to see chat BT five come out, chatt six, claw five, whatever that comes out. And we're going to be able to have commoditized access to intelligence. So what I'm seeing is that it's going to be how we use this resource, just like the way we use the internet. So just because everyone has asked us to the internet doesn't mean we all used it to our best capabilities. Some people won, some people lost, some people won big, some people won small. So it's going to be the same thing here is how is it that we go about using this and the business?

And probably not just the average, but the majority of businesses that I see when I talk to them are using off the shelf ai. So they're using maybe a paid license to cloud 3.5 sonnet, which is right now, a lot of people say the best model, I would say is the best model out there or chat g BT four oh or whatever it is they're using. And they may be paying 20 bucks a month for it, and they're just using the generic off the shelf ai. And what they're getting back from it is generic boiled chicken output. So

Brett:

Boiled chicken, boiled chicken is not something you're going to find at many Austin restaurant menus. So if we're going to just harken back to the good food, it is not boiled chicken. So just wanted clarify.

Russ:

Torch's Tacos has a boiled chicken taco though on Thursday.

Brett:

Do they? Really? No kidding. They do have the trailer park, which is the fried chicken and dude that's so Trailer Park, I love

Russ:

It. But I mean the key to this whole thing that we're seeing reports coming out of places like Accenture, those big consulting companies, Accenture, Deloitte, Dell, IBM, saying that what they're seeing is that Billings for AI consulting are going to go up 400% over the next five years and they're growing 32% year over year right now. And so I started to dig into what it was that they were selling to big companies like Best Buy or Target or whatever, like their clients. And what they're selling is something called fine tuned ai. And this is really the key to unlocking the potential of what AI can be for even a small business. Forget Best Buy and Target. They're paying these big consulting companies to come in and do complex fine tuning projects, but we can just fine tune $20 a month chat, GPT or Claude and get incredible results out of it.

So this is kind of the key is to fine tune it. What fine tuning basically means is that we are going to take an existing LLM model like Claude or chat GBT and adapt it to the use case that we want to use it for. So to keep on our food analogy, if we plugged all of my recipes from my family or something into Claude 3.5 sonnets brain, I can then start to have conversations with that version of Claude about my marinara sauce or about my Texas beans recipe, which if you're real nice to me, I will send you

Brett:

No way. The family, the Henneberry family Texas Beans

Russ:

Recipe, this is the Russell Texas bean recipe. I found it from being down in Austin and going all those barbecue joints and I was like, I got to figure out how to make these beans, but I can

Brett:

The marinara, not to get too focused on food here, but the marinara, you're in St. Louis. So a lot of people don't know St. Louis home of amazing Italian food.

Russ:

It's on the hill, man.

Brett:

It's on the hill.

Russ:

My marinara, I'll put it up against anybody.

Brett:

No way.

Russ:

But I did demonstrate this. I went to Claude and I said, I put all my recipes in there and I said, I just asked simply how could I improve my marinara sauce

Brett:

Recipe?

Russ:

And it says to me, you're not simmering long enough. It went and looked at my recipe. It's like you're not simmering long enough. Interesting. You're using dried herbs. Try using actual fresh oregano, fresh basil in your sauce. So it went and consulted my recipe. Right.

Brett:

Did you try any of those recommendations?

Russ:

Not yet.

Brett:

Okay.

Russ:

I'm going to make the Texas beans though this weekend.

Brett:

Well, let's see if it's

Russ:

We're going to go

Brett:

Russ Original or Russ plus clawed. What does better,

Russ:

I'm going to ask it about how to improve my Texas beans risk. But the thing is, when you go and you customize an AI and you can do this so easily, this is not a technical problem at all. Like Claude has a feature called projects where you can start a new project and upload information into its knowledge base and it will consult that knowledge before it's first and then on it'll

Brett:

Consult that knowledge plus use the llm and now you've got specific insights.

Russ:

That's exactly right. And this is the thing that people are really missing the boat on. And I think a year from now, everyone's going to know this intuitively because there won't be another AI model that rolls out that doesn't allow us to customize it easier and easier. So they are going to make the user interface and the ability to customize AI and fine tune AI to our circumstances easier and easier as it goes along. I'm sure chat, the next iteration of chat GT will make it even easier. Right now what you have to do is go build a custom GPT, which is actually quite easy to do as well. It's a little bit clunky, and I think by the time we get a year from now or whatever, we'll think that the interface with both Claude and Chat GP PT was very clunky. But right now you can already go in and start to fine tune AI for your use case, which is you're a marketer. So we are going to fine tune with the typical marketing stuff like customer personas offers that are very well written out in detailed so that because if you think about it, an off the shelf ai, it's ingested the entire internet.

Brett:

And

Russ:

So it's incredibly knowledgeable, but it also knows absolutely Jack Squat about your business or any business that you're marketing. So I've created this process, I call it the AI Marketing Hub, and all it is is just if I build one in chat gt, it's a custom GPT with custom knowledge about the client's business that I'm working on, or if I'm working over in Claude, I'm going to use projects to create an AI marketing hub. And it's sort of like a central command center from which I'm going to do any AI work with that particular business. So inside that hub, there's custom knowledge about the circumstances of that business. And then I have another hub for, so it's sort of like having an MCC for a client in Google this. Every client has their own

Brett:

Place, account hub accounts, it's all kind of connected a little bit. So let's do this. So fascinating concept AI hubs. We're going to dive into that, really explore that. I know that ultimately this is more about AI is really just a tool, so it's more about what you do with it and how you use it that really matters. But you did say something that was interesting. You said, Claude maybe is your most advanced model or your favorite model. I still talk to people that I'm like, I use Claude. And they're like, who is Claude? I'm like, well, Claude is AI right by Anthropic. And I use chat GPT too. I've got chat GPTO on my phone, but for anything creative writing, I actually use Claude. I really, really, really like it. Compare and contrast the two just briefly for those that are wondering and those that are new to Claude,

Russ:

Well, I'm using Claude for the same purpose. You're using it for any sort of content creation or copy creation. It is superior, my opinion to chat GPT. The problem with Claude, right? The reason that I end up switching back over to chat GPT quite often is because it doesn't have certain features. So for example, Claude is not Web Connect. So one of the best use cases for using chat GT is to kick over there. And I might have it go look at a webpage for me. Like, Hey, go look at this landing page and evaluate X, Y, and Z on there, or pull the copy in here so I can work on it or whatever it is I'm trying to do. So Claude for whatever reason, is still not web enabled. It will be that this is one of the places we're seeing lots of development is in these kinds of user interface type things.

It can't accept video, it can't accept audio. So the multimodal capabilities of Claude are much more limited than you get over at Chat G gt. But overall, if I'm working with text, I am going to use Claude. And then the other big thing over at Claude is this concept of projects, which we talked about and is so critical to building an AI marketing hub we're talking about and sort of fine tuning a knowledge base. But the other thing that they've released that is very cool is called artifacts, which is essentially where you're able to talk to the AI on the left side of the screen and on the right side it's building something, an artifacts what they call it. So it could be a document, it could be an application, it could be interesting, it could be a set of graphs or a dashboard or something. So you start to see where AI is going to go is do you, Brett, you remember when the first CMSs started to come out like JU Law and Drupal and

Brett:

Yeah, early

Russ:

In the day,

Brett:

Absolutely.

Russ:

Before that we were using Dreamweaver or writing custom websites and stuff like that. And once those CMSs came out, we saw such an explosion in content produced on the internet. It was like we have these, what you see is what you get editors, we call it the wyg. Wizzywig is such a huge thing because it was like it took coding out of the game at least for producing, just being able to publish the internet. Well, what I'm seeing happening with artifacts and how when I started to play with artifacts, I started to feel like I had this magic wand in my hand and it was sort of what you say is what you get. So if you can describe it in the English language, I saw somebody on Twitter the other day say something like the hottest new programming language is English,

Brett:

And

Russ:

I love that you say what you want.

Brett:

Can you ask good questions and can you articulate? Which you don't even have to be all that clear, dude, that's so good. And I'm a big fan of Claude too. Obviously you got to use multiple tools. So this is not this tool versus that tool. It's important to be educated. You should probably play with and use Claude as well. But yeah, what I'm using it for a lot of times is transcripts from podcasts or transcripts from interviews or transcripts from long videos and stuff where it's like you upload that transcript and then you can just converse with Claude about that transcript. And I've used it where I have a PDF had this offer from an investor or whatever, and I looked at it and I was like, Hey, pull these numbers from this image or from this PDF, put it into a spreadsheet for me. Okay, now clean this up, change this. It's awesome dude. And I love that. Now the best programming language is English. That's really, really smart.

Russ:

It's going to head to where if you can understand how to articulate what you want. So I really think people that are in the creative world are scared that AI is coming for your job. And there is some truth to that. I mean we just had reports that Amazon, it's Q program or whatever, just replaced 4,000 years of programming time, crazy,

Brett:

Crazy

Russ:

Using ai and it's 79% accurate. And the question is of course, what are they going to do with that? How does that impact programmers at Amazon and everywhere else when we're starting to see this? So there's that. But the exciting thing about this for me is that if you're a creative person and you've ever wanted to build something but you're like, I don't know, I'd love to build that, but I'm not a videographer or I'm not a coder or I'm not, whatever it is that is that barrier, they are going to remove all of this for us. It is going to be literally a magic wand where it's what you say is what you get. And if you want to see this in the earliest infancy, go play with Claude 3.5. It's even the free version has artifacts. And just ask it to build you a landing page for example, and it will definitely activate Claude's artifact function.

It'll start to build the page on the right side and you can talk to it on the left and say, move that button down, change the color to this. And it's just going to keep rewriting that code. And I mean the website will look like it's from 1998 because it's early days, but this is just what's interesting about it is that communicating with something and just sort of casting a spell, right? Like hey, switch that over to this, switch this over to that, and it's just speaking English. That's the programming language you're using because it's going to write the code for you in the background.

Brett:

Totally. And I'm a huge believer that there will always be a need for smart humans. Of course, we've talked about this a long time in the agency space. I remember when years and years ago, Google first came out with smart bidding, with machine learning based smart bidding, and a lot of agencies were terrified and they were like, this is not good. This is not going to be good for your business. Google is evil, whatever. I choked up, hold on. I was on a rant. I got choked up. Oh geez, this is not good for your business. What we found is it really did not limit people's desire for agencies. It kind of just allowed us to do more. Now we could focus on more things rather than just bidding. And so the way I've heard it described, which I really believe is true, you're not competing against AI per se. You are competing against people who are using ai. And so it's always going to be a partnership. Smart humans plus AI is likely going to be the future. And so is then the solution. Russ, just better prompt engineering. Is that it? Do we just need to get better at asking questions we need to get better being more clear, more succinct, more whatever? Or is there something more?

Russ:

Well, so when AI came out, I told you I'd pumped the brakes and started watching it. I saw courses coming out already. Some of the big names or whatever that are always sell course exactly four days after chat toed is out, there's a course on it. But I was basically like, we need to study this, we need to watch this. And one of the things that I saw coming out a lot was, here's a hundred prompts as lead magnet kind of thing, and here's some different things around prompts and there's no question about it. Better prompting gets you better output, but it still doesn't solve the problem that ai if it's not fine tuned. In other words, if it doesn't have any information about your business and its knowledge base, it's always going to give you generic information. I mean, consider that if you hired a consultant for your company, a human consultant, and that person came in, they were very capable and very knowledgeable and very smart, but you blindfolded them, didn't tell them anything about what they were selling, who you were selling it to or anything about the business it was trying to market.

And then you ask it questions like we ask AI sometimes like, Hey, help me build a webinar series or what new products should I roll out for Black Friday? Stuff like that. And that consultant is going to give you maybe good generic advice and that's what we're getting from ai. So that consultant, if that consultant knows what they're doing, which in this case it would be the metaphor is that AI does know a lot, it's very knowledgeable, but it doesn't know your business. So a better prompt, being able to ask the AI in a more clear way is going to get you better output. It's still not going to get you there until you actually take the time to fine tune it or add to its knowledge base.

Brett:

I want to talk about the knowledge base and the AI hub because that's really a neat concept that you've kind of pioneered here and I want to dive into that. I do want to talk a little bit though about better prompts because I think this is important. Used to do a lot of customer testimonials. We used to do video interviews with customers and then create customer testimonials from that. And I promise you, the person behind the camera, which for a long time it was me, the person asking the question, the quality of those questions, the sequence of those questions in this case, because it was human IT enthusiasm, it's an art, you would get lame answers, boring answers, timid answers, afraid answers, or you could get dynamite stuff and it was based on how you asked the question. And I think the same is true if you're doing surveys and stuff like that, the way you ask the question, you want better answers, ask better questions, a little bit different because AI is not human and not emotional, but any tips on better prompts just as a baseline that I think some people will really benefit from before we dive into the Yeah,

Russ:

And that's such an important point. I mean you're right. Surveys. I mean look, we're all marketers, so we know words matter the sequence of when we say things. And so there's no different here when you're prompting. And so what I like to do is keep in mind four, this little four letter acronym, RTIF. So when you build a prompt, if you can start out with telling the AI what its role is, that's the R part and RTIF. What is the AI's role?

Brett:

Pretend you are a marketer, copywriter, director, editor, whatever.

Russ:

Exactly. And what that does, the issue is that large language models are large. They've ingested the entire internet. So that role immediately zeroes the AI down into some domain of knowledge. So if you tell it it's a copy editor, then it's immediately going to zero down because right now you start with a fresh generic out of the box, new chat, you could literally ask it anything. So it's literally accessing the entire index of everything it has, which is everything that we've ever produced and put online. So the minute you give it a roll, you're going to get better output because it's going to be like, okay, I'm zeroing in on this domain of knowledge. The second thing to do is to give it a task. So if you give it a roll, you're a copy editor, your task is to review these product descriptions. And so now you've zeroed in even further, you've given it more clues as to which domain knowledge that you want it to access inside of a sprain, and then we give it input.

That's the I. So role task input. Now input is super important. If we can spend more time with input, the better. So one thing you could do is you could say, here's the product description I want you to copy at, and that's it. So that's all the input that you give the AI is you are a copy editor, your task is to copy edit these product descriptions, here's the product description, edit that please. Then the last one is format, which is the way you want that output formatted. So it could be that you want it long, it could be you want it short. It could be that you want it in bullets. It could be you want it at a table or you want it however you want that to come back to you is the last bit of a solid prompt. But let's kick back to the idea of this input is super important.

If you tell the AI that you want it to do to assume the role of the copy editor, edit these product descriptions and then you give it the product descriptions, you want it to edit, that's basically a zero shot prompt, what we call zero shot. It means that you've given it zero shots. And really, I don't know why these engineers want to call it shots because you could just use the word example. So if I instead say you're a copy editor, your role is copy editor, your task is to copy edit these product descriptions and then here's five product descriptions that are done right now. If you've hit five product descriptions, you have a multi-shot prompt. So you're going to get way better results because you're basically saying use these as a model. And so that is a major part of prep, preparing a good prompt is whatever it is you're asking it to do, can you give it anything more and show it something that is the proper output?

Brett:

It's really great, really, really great. Okay, so let's then talk about AI hubs, AI marketing hubs. How are you building these? What do these look like? Walk us through that.

Russ:

Well, so if we start with this idea, I mean we can go back to what I just said, which is when you give it something to go off of when the AI is fed something into its knowledge base. So it's like, let me give you some more context here so that you're not just again, pulling from this enormous index of information that you have. Instead, I am giving you examples, I'm giving you other things. So yesterday I was at a conference, actually I spoke at a conference and somebody from Google was speaking there and I went to her session and in the end I raised my hand and I said, so what you're telling us is that we need to be bringing our own data to the party, right? Because she was going through some AI enabled ad stuff that's now available at Google Cloud, and in the end what she was saying is you can bring your own data into Google Cloud and we can crunch it up and segment it and do all kinds of stuff and then use it for targeting, creating segments and improving your ad output.

And so at the end of it, I was like, I feel what you're saying is that you guys are doing all of this with Max and everything that you're doing. You're doing a lot of AI stuff already. You're doing a lot of machine learning and everything you're doing there, but that now we are able to bring our data in from Salesforce or HubSpot or our email analytics or whatever and crunch stuff up and she goes, yes, I really love that idea. I'm going to start using that of you need to bring your own data the party. And so I was like, I'm going to start using it too. I really love that. And so I want you to think about an AI marketing hub as a place where you've brought your own information and data to the AI party. So you've got the AI model and it's tremendously capable, we know that. But I think if you're like me, you are probably getting some pretty frustrating output from it. So you're just like, okay, this is good, not great. And as marketers we

Brett:

Know, and maybe that means it's entertaining but not usable. It was interesting that you created it and it's kind of impressive, but it's like, but I can't use this.

Russ:

I can't really actually use this. And so when you build a hub, whether it's through a custom GPT or through a Claude project, or you could go pay Accenture or Deloitte to come in and build an entire model off over the top of llama for billions of dollars, which is what they're doing, they're coming in and charging lots of money to customize AI for all kinds of use cases for the biggest corporations in the world. But you and I, we can take our small business, our mid-size business and we can open up an off the shelf account over at Chachi PT or with Claude, and we can start a project or a custom GPT and we just add to that project's knowledge base with information that's going to be relevant to the type of marketing that we're doing. So if we start thinking about what kinds of things you might bring to the party, the first three things I recommend because there's just almost no marketing case where we don't want to know who we're trying to sell to and what we are selling. So if nothing else, you want to build an AI playground, I call it an AI marketing hub. So use a project or a custom GPT and then upload customer personas and detailed information about offers. And this is just ugly documents in PDFs that it can read. So if you're thinking

Brett:

Clearly outlined that, hey, this is what this PDF DF is, this is what this slide deck is, whatever.

Russ:

Yep. Yeah. If you were going to unblind fold that marketing consultant we talked about earlier and begin with how do we get more out of this marketing consultant we're paying, the first thing you might tell them is, here's our customer and here's what we're selling, right? Because without that, I don't know how we're doing any marketing about anything. You're absolutely working in the blind. You'll be shocked by how much better your AI performs with just a little bit data points. If you have a good well constructed persona and make sure that you've elaborated on the most important part of a persona in my opinion, which is the pain, the challenges that cut. If you were just going to give me one piece of information about somebody that I needed to sell something to, it would be what's the problem? So make sure that part of that persona is very well fleshed out, but you build a persona, however it is that you build a persona. There's no shortage of trainings out there about building personas, but you just need to get it into a readable format. PDFs are great. You write it in a Google doc, create it in a Google Doc, and then you attach it to a project or a custom GPT and you do the same thing with whatever. Take one of your bestselling products, for example, and do a nice description of that. Maybe pull the product description

Brett:

Out so it even be like the product detail page, but put into pdf DF form or something.

Russ:

Yes. Yeah. And so you say, how do we sell more of that offer this PDF to this customer and the AI will be like, let's talk about that. I got a lot of ideas and you'll be, so what I think a lot of people are doing is they're sitting there thinking, I keep getting this average output from ai, so I really am just going to kind of put this on the side until AI gets better, until chat two, PT five comes out or the next cloud. I mean it's good. It's not great and I want to produce great stuff. We have to be producing great stuff. That's what the best marketers do. We don't build average stuff.

Brett:

And

Russ:

So this is, I think a mistake because we don't need AI to get better. You need to be better at using ai. And so if chat g PT five comes out and it's smarter and faster and stronger and able to leave tall buildings with single bound, it still isn't going to know anything about your business. So you've got to learn this skill, which is basically how you fine tune an AI and you don't need to know all the fancy dancey fine tuning tricks and moving weights and all of the weird things that engineers talk about, but we need to understand is what do marketers need to do to AI to get better output from it? It starts with giving it things like customer personas and offers.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. So I want to dig into some other details here. Maybe get a couple of examples from you too, how you've used these for different clients you work with. So personas and product details or offers. If you want to go next level though or give it more information, what else are we sending? Are we sending things like customer reviews and competitors and things like that? What else are we putting in this marketing hub if we want to go next level?

Russ:

Alright, yeah. And what want you to think about is imagine that anybody that's working on that business, whether it's a client or whether it's your company, is working from an inside of the hub. So now it becomes a game of what else could I give the AI in terms of context and information that would make it stronger and make it more useful to me? And what you find is that it can assist with everything from media buying, data analysis, content generation, product marketing, whatever it is, there's almost no scenario that it won't touch. And so other things that I have bolted in here at different times based on what it is we're working on is you might bolt things like data on there like sales data, inventory reports, website analytics, email reporting, things like that. So you can plug data into its brain and have it understand that first of all, what I like to do is give it a document and I just say simply to it, what do you see there? Because I want to see if it understands,

Brett:

Is it understanding this?

Russ:

Yeah, I'm sort of checking for its understanding. And what you'll find is that it does understand your sales reports, it understands your inventory reports, it understands these things like your website analytics. You can plug things like reviews on products in there, writing samples. If you're trying to create an AI that can more easily write like you, going back to what we talked about with multi-shot prompting, can you give it good writing samples? Here's 10 emails that I wrote already over the last month that are good model when you're writing this promotional campaign, you can put anything in there. If you've got a loyalty program for example that you're working on and you've got details around that, attach it in there and say, Hey, this is our loyalty program. Just so you know, we got a loyalty program, big market analysis, but it does become this sort of creative game, which I love Brett. It's like, what else could I give it?

Brett:

Right? That is how would that change the output and change what it actually creates better,

Russ:

Right? It's such a creative process. And so depending on what it is that you're working on, you just want to think. And if you really think of it this way, if I was working with a human who I'm asking to do X or Y or Z, what would I want them to have access to? Do they need access to my inventory reports to do this work? Do they need access to my website analytics? Because if the answer is yes, they would do a better job with these three different resources, then you ask yourself, how much effort would it be for me to get that into a format where I could bolt it into the brain of the ai? Well

Brett:

Treat it like a marketing treated like your assistant CMO or something. Treat it. I like that frame. What would a marketing employee need? Give that to the AI as well.

Russ:

And the thing is that we may not see that the next few models that come out are all that much more intelligent than the AI that we're playing with now. And we might see that they're become quite a bit more intelligent, but even if we don't, where we are going to see a lot of development in AI is going to be in its multimodality. So multimodal is an important place to be watching can the AI take in and put out, so what can it take in and what can it put out? So can it take in text image, video, audio, data code, and can it put out, so can it take in text and give you back an image? Can it take in an image and give you back a video? Can it take in audio and give you back a video? So that is where we are already obviously seeing right now, chat, GT four oh has vision. It can see things, it can talk to you. That's another modality. And when we think about how we are going to be able to give an AI context around our businesses and our customers and everything, as the modalities change, so will your ability to

Brett:

Put

Russ:

Different things inside of its brain. So if you could literally take, were we live when you were talking about the customer videos that you were

Brett:

Doing? No, I wasn't. No. I can frame that really

Russ:

Quick. Yeah, tell that story because I mean you could upload that whole video in there

Brett:

And you mentioned that Claude can't communicate with audio or video, but Claude is the tool I use most. And so had this project four client, they had five customers give these long interviews on video and ended up each one was like an hour. Now in the old days, we would sometimes pour over those. We'd watch the same hour like five times and try to piece out, pull out little nuggets of hey, this five seconds here, this 10 seconds here, we'd make for a great clip or great customer testimonial to put into a TV ad or something. So what I was able to do though with AI is I took the video, stripped out the audio, uploaded the audio to Riverside, which is a tool we're using now for the podcast. It will transcribe things. So created a free transcript. I uploaded that transcript to Claude and I said, Hey, here's the project, here's the product, here's what it does.

This is what we're trying to do, trying to create a TV commercial. And so find me five or six quotes that speak to benefits, speak to pain, speak to experience, and I need them to be about five to 15 seconds long and it spit 'em out like that. And so then I was like, okay, those are cool, but give me a few more or okay, give me a few more and make them longer or are there any quotes that talk about this? And then as I got to the ones I liked, I was like, okay, give me all of those quotes and put them in a time code spreadsheet where I can see start time, stop time and how long that quote is. And now this was all taken from tech. So Claude was like, Hey, these are going to be estimates, but we'll give you best guess. It was pretty accurate. So dude, this was something that would've taken days and could do it all in. I don't even know how long it took, but it wasn't long. It was 30 minutes. Hour or something like that. Just crazy.

Russ:

What's even crazier though is that you had to strip out all the audio you had to do. You had to actually,

Brett:

I had to do some work.

Russ:

You had to do some work to get it into a format that this tool could accept and that's all going to go away. Eventually Claude and every other model, it will accept all modalities and it'll be able to output all modalities. So in that case, you would've just uploaded the video and

Brett:

Then it probably would've spit out the video for me and then I could say, well, give me the video in this format.

Russ:

That's exactly, that's exactly right. So I think the big thing to think about here is that this whole idea of what data are you bringing to the party? Because if you're just using generic off the shelf AI and you're asking it questions like, Hey, can you make me some interesting things to post on LinkedIn about some topic? It's like, sure. One of the frustrating things actually for me about AI is that it always answers you. It will

Brett:

Always answer you, try again, try harder, dummy. That was a stupid question. Yeah, it doesn't do that.

Russ:

Yeah, it never says, I don't know. And it never, and even though perplexity one of the startup companies that's challenging, Google with ai search perplexity is starting to get a pretty cool interface in terms of trying to ask you more for more context and ask you questions and prompt you and have you select things. And that's what we'll see from all companies. They're going to try to make it so you don't have to be a prompt master, you don't have to really understand how the model works. But for now, if you ask it a question like, Hey, can you create me a LinkedIn editorial calendar? And it has no context about your business, it doesn't know who you're trying to talk to, it doesn't understand your offer, it doesn't understand anything, it will answer you. And then at the end you'll go, I guess I'll use this, and you're going to have a pretty boiled chicken bunch of stuff. Totally. Or you're going to be like, that was a big waste of my time. I'm going to have to go do this myself anyway. But then you go and you plug in all this stuff, you create a hub and the hub, the other cool thing about this hub concept is that it eliminates what I call a cold start problem.

So the cold start is, okay, every time I go to use ai, I have to reprompt give it all this information and have it understand this well, these projects and these custom GPTs have memory of their own and it's contained within that area. So it remembers things and it obviously is able to access things in its knowledge base, but it's also remembering things that are happening in those conversations so that you don't have this cold start problem, you just jump back into your hub and you start back up talking about the LinkedIn editorial or your next email promotion or whatever it is you're doing,

Brett:

Just like you would converse with your CMO or marketing associate or whatever. They've got context now you've been working on stuff together, now you can just ask a question rather than, okay, every time I got to give all this background, it already has it. So that's really cool. Can you give some examples and you practic to be careful on confidentiality and stuff, but examples cool things you've seen people do with these Well-built marketing hubs.

Russ:

So there's three roles that I like to build out and when I'm working with clients on these, I ask them, where do you see the biggest use case for these? And the big three places that I think AI can do better than the average human can is one role is I call it the scribe. So the scribe is like, it's your creative person, it's your creative role within this AI marketing hub. And so we take in, of course, if you were going to hire a writer or somebody that was going to help you with content marketing, what would you want them to have? You might want 'em to have things like editorial guidelines. You might want them to have access to writing samples that are good, maybe they aren't even yours. You go and look at a competitor or you look at some brand you admire and you say, let me pull these last 10 articles or emails or ads or whatever it is, and you say, these are good samples of what we want to be producing.

And you give that to the AI's hub, you give it to the editorial guidelines. I've built a very, very cool prompt that is able to extract the style of a writing out. I post on LinkedIn the other day, I said, and I decided to do this with an author, one of my favorite authors actually John Steinbeck from Wrote Grapes Rat and all that stuff. And I took the book of Mice and Men on PDF put it into Claude and I gave it this prompt and that prompt basically says it is a big long prompt that's like, I want you to look at this and this and this and this. Everything, the cadence, when you look at the styles, are they using idioms and metaphors and dah, dah, dah. So there's like a million things that this prompt is asking it to analyze inside of the Steinbeck piece or whatever kind of content you give, you give it. I also gave it 30. I went and just scraped 30 customer stories off of Salesforce's site and I ran the same prompt. What I'm trying to do is build a mimic, literally extract the style and the tone and everything about that data. And I went and I grabbed a paragraph from a real Steinbeck paragraph from one of his short stories, and then I actually had it write a short story Claude using this prompt that I've used to extract

Brett:

And it read of Mice and Men you gave it that

Russ:

Get rid of Mice and Men and it's also probably got a decent idea of who Steinbeck is. Anyway, but it was really this prop I think that went in there and was like, because it did the same thing when I ran it through Salesforce's stuff. And then I've created a section that's like write like Russ, so I want you to be able to write like me. And it still doesn't get me all the way there. But with the Steinbeck thing, it was crazy. I posted this on LinkedIn and I said, which one's Steinbeck and which one's clawed?

Brett:

And

Russ:

People

Brett:

Did people get it right?

Russ:

Swearing up and down, A, it's B, it's A, it's B. And I was like, no one could agree on which one it was. That's how good of a

Brett:

Mimic

Russ:

It was, right? So that's the scribed functionality. And what you want to think about is what could I give an AI to turn it into a scribe? The second functionality that AI is really good at is what I call the optimizer. So it is somebody who can evaluate assets like landing pages, ads, emails. And for this we use rubrics back in the old digital marketer days when we were building rubrics for people to say, here's what are the 10 elements of a good ad

Or here are the 10 elements of a good opt-in page, or here are the elements of a good email promotion, grade your work on this. We used to do these when I was with digital marketer. We would create, so instead of just intuitively looking at say an ad and saying, well, I see the problem with that ad, fix this. Instead, we would literally extract the knowledge of Molly Pittman, who's such a good ad person and put her knowledge into a rubric where it was like anybody could look at an ad and kind of figure out what's the problem with this ad? Where could I improve this ad? Well, if you feed an ai, a rubric like that, and then you show it a landing page or you show it an ad or you show it an email, it's able to really quickly, it scores it, it would like a professor would, but it's a professor that's got a rubrics working against for a landing page or for, and it's really, really powerful.

And so I call that role to optimizer. And then the last one's the strategist. The strategist is somebody you talk about long-term, bigger picture type marketing stuff and you feed it things like business competitor analysis, market analysis, SWOT analysis, bigger picture idea stuff and give it an idea of, and you can have these crazy long conversations with it about things like strategy. Like hey, I'm thinking of, I think I want to expand my product line in this direction. What do you think about that? What are some risks here? What are some things you can have these kinds of conversations so much context for it to be working for him. So it's pretty wild.

Brett:

That's great. So scribe optimizer and strategist, really, really great. Love that. So we talked a lot about chat, GPT and about Claude, what about Gemini, Google's Gemini? Are you using that at all? What are your thoughts? Any POVs there?

Russ:

Well, so my big point of view there is that Google, and I don't use Gemini very often very much, but Google has instant distribution. They've got AI built into everything. Just like my son, I just bought him, he's going away to college. So I got him one of the new surface laptops with copilot built in. So Microsoft has immediate distribution, Google has immediate distribution. And here's the big thing to think about that's connected to this concept of adding to a knowledge base is that Google already has all your information. So if you're using Google Workspace for example, they already plug, they can plug their AI into your Google drive,

Brett:

Legitimate right into drive

Russ:

Into your calendar, into everything. And that's where we're going with this is that the extension of the knowledge base. So you'll have Gemini, the brain, the off the shelf ai, but it will have access to, and it already kind of does. It's really early days here with that laptop that my son just got. They are not allowing certain functionality in there yet because they're saying that they're still trying to figure out the security and the privacy side of this. But that's where we're going is where you want to extend your knowledge base. We've got all your files, we have access to your Google Drive, we have access to your email, everything. So Google is a major player and while OpenAI feels like the cool kid on the block and Claude sort of feels like the guy from the village that's super like artsy and cool, that's fair. It's really going to be Microsoft and Google that. I think we'll pull ahead eventually because just

Brett:

Because of distribution and access to all the data. Yeah, it's a really good point. And Apple.

Russ:

So Apple, while they don't have a model of their own, they're just renting right now, they could easily go build one if they wanted to. And then you have Facebook, which is super interesting because they've decided to go open source and allow people to build on top of llama and it's as good as CHATT four. That's what I've heard.

Brett:

Lama's great and not played with it, but I've heard it's

Russ:

Awesome. Yeah, I mean it's amazing. It doesn't have a lot of the capabilities of this and that, but you can build on top of it and build anything you want. That's what's crazy about what Facebook decided to do is open source. Super

Brett:

Cool man. Early days. We are early innings, just like when we were first starting to use the internet, that's where we're right now. So Russ, it's people listen to this and they're like, all right, I got tap more into Russell's brain and I need to look at some of these resources. Where can people connect with you? I think you've got a mini course that people can kind of take. Where should they go

Russ:

From here? Yeah, well if you want to get your feet, well ai, you go to join the click.ai/jumpstart. That's a 60 minute course where we've got eight videos and six exercises and by the end of it you'll be like, I feel pretty good about this. So you can go to join the click.ai/jumpstart and take that little mini course and it moves fast and you'll just open up a free version of chat BT and do the exercises. And you'll feel a lot, you'll feel like, okay, I'm ready. Right? I feel like I understand this now, but I love LinkedIn. I talk to you on LinkedIn when I hit you up. So if you see me over on LinkedIn, I love connecting with people over there. So it's just Russ Henneberry over on LinkedIn. But yeah, check me out@jointheclick.ai and I'd love to, that's

Brett:

Awesome, man.

Russ:

Geek out on this stuff.

Brett:

Let's geek out a little bit. Join the click.ai I'm fired up to. I just want to take my game to the next level with ai. And so Russ is going to be my guide, so check out his resources, check him out on LinkedIn. I'll of course link to everything in the show notes, but you can find it as well just by looking. And so Russ Hena Barry, ladies and gentlemen, Russ, thanks so much, man. Ton of fun.

Russ:

It's a lot of fun. Thanks Brett.

Brett:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. I'd love to hear from you, what would you like to hear more of on the show? And as always, would've loved that review on iTunes if you've not done. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

‍

No one knows more about eCommerce growth than my friend Ezra Firestone. Arguably, no one is a more interesting interview than Ezra either. This episode does NOT disappoint. Ezra bootstrapped growth for Boom from $0 to $40mill + per year. He also recently bought another high-profile eComm brand (more on that in the show).This episode is straight fire. Here’s a look at what we dive into:

• How Ezra is approaching email marketing and email list growth in 2022. I’m guessing you’re missing his email strategy - even if you consider yourself an email marketing pro.
• How BOOM is approaching front-end offers.
• Why you should consider inventing a holiday and how BOOM has done that.
• Growing your SMS list.
• Plus MUCH, much more!

‍

Mentioned in this Episode:

Ezra Firestone

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

   - Twitter

   - Facebook

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

oVertone‍

Zipify Pages‍

Smart Marketer‍

Blue Ribbon Mastermind‍

Klaviyo‍

Postscript‍

Attentive‍

Dan Kennedy‍

Jay Abraham‍

Native Deodorant‍

Northbeam‍

John Grimshaw‍

Molly Pittman‍

Train My Traffic Person

‍

Transcript:

Brett Curry:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on what it takes to grow your business online. Season one is built on the old business adage that it really takes three things to succeed. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often.

Brett Curry:

Today, my guest is none other than the e-commerce legend himself, Ezra Firestone. If you're serious about growing your e-commerce business, then you have to pay attention to Ezra. And arguably, there's not a more interesting interview than Ezra Firestone. He bootstrapped Boom by Cindy Joseph from zero to now, $40 million a year in growth. He now owns and operates Overtone, a $25 million a year e-commerce brand. He also co-founded Zipify Pages, Smart Marketer, and he's the mastermind behind my favorite e-commerce mastermind, Blue Ribbon.

Brett Curry:

This is a wide ranging discussion. We talk about things like cold plunges and samurai swords. But yes of course, we spend most of our time talking about e-commerce growth strategies. We look at Ezra's really unique approach to email marketing, and how much of his ad budget he's dedicating to growing his email list. We also look at SMS marketing. And we look at how to invent a holiday, and what that looks like. And then we're also looking at how Boom is crafting and creating front end offers. You won't want to miss a minute of this show. I hope you enjoy my interview with Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability. All right, I am absolutely stoked out of my mind for this next guest, and personal friend of mine. We do some work together. I always count it a joy when I get to talk to this guest. And so, to have this uninterrupted time to dive in deep on strategies, it's going to be amazing, and I'm glad you get to listen in. And so if I look at, man, if you need tactics, if you need strategies, if you need help for how to take your e-commerce business to the next level, and if you need to get a little bit spicy, you need Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

And so today I've got the man, the myth, the legend. He's flexing if you're watching the video. Got Ezra Firestone on the call. We're talking about eight top strategies to just blow up your business this year in a good way. We may not get to all eight, we'll see how it goes. But with that intro, Ezra, what's up, man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Ezra Firestone:

Brett, the Fury Curry, I'm fresh out of the cold plunge, dog. One minute, 30 seconds, 32 degrees. My whole body is red, I'm shivering, I'm shaking, we're podcasting. Happy to be here man, thanks.

Brett Curry:

It's hilarious. You hopped on the call and I was like, "Oh no, something's wrong with Ezra. He just doesn't look right." It's like, well, you just got out of a 32 degree bathtub. Of course, your body's in shock. But I appreciate taking the time to do this. And man, it's just always, always fun to chat.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, man. And just watching your journey, I seen you come up in the game from back in the day, when you had an SEO agency. You know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

From way back. I don't even know if it was 2008, 2009, it was a long time ago. 2010, whatever it was. And then to watch you rise to be one of the most prominent voices in the e-commerce world, and also to have a top 2% advertising agency, maybe you guys are top 1% at this point, I mean, you run all of our stuff. So it's been fun to watch your journey and just happy to be on the podcast.

Brett Curry:

Dude, thanks. It's been so fun to grow. I credit you and your community with a lot of that growth. And your approach to having fun, and doing what's right, and being extremely successful, and that blend, is awesome. Your motto, for those that don't know, is "Serve the world unselfishly and profit." And actually before we get into tactics and strategies for this year, and there's some amazing ones, can you talk a little bit about that for those that are new to the world of Ezra Firestone?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a description-

Brett Curry:

... Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's a description, not a statement. It's how I have seen things work. That when you are in a role of service, unselfishly with the goal of serving, you do profit by the very nature of serving. And it may not be monetarily. Maybe it's spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, energetically. But my goal is to serve. And I find joy in the act of service. I think there's a lot of value, and fun, and enjoyment, and good. And also in business, if you can truly serve a community, you will be profitable. And so I think that's just a description of how it goes. And also it's what I'm looking to do. I'm looking to serve the world unselfishly and also profit. I want to take care of my family. I want to take care of my community. I want to put resource towards causes in the world that I find noble. And I need fucking money to do that. Right?

Brett Curry:

Exactly. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And the way going to get that money is by helping a group of people out with solutions to problems they have.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. If you look at, what is leadership, what does it mean to lead a company or to be a CEO, it's really serving. Serving your team more than commanding and dictating.

Ezra Firestone:

100%.

Brett Curry:

And how do build a brand, how do you build a business? It's serving a community. It's serving the needs and meeting the needs of buyers. And so, yeah. I love it. So it's really, really just-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. And then just because you're serving a group, doesn't mean you can't sell them stuff.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

Ezra Firestone:

Selling them stuff is also serving them.

Brett Curry:

Because people want to buy stuff, right?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

They want to have those needs met. And retail therapy is a thing too. So one of the greatest acts of service you can do, is sell a good product to the right person.

Ezra Firestone:

I'll tell you what dude. You and I both know that this last six months have been the most intense and stressful on the personal side of my life, with some health problems of some family members. And I done fucking discovered stress shopping, bro. I had never done that. I'm not a guy who buys shit that I just don't need or want. I'm willing to buy things. I have a lot of money, and I didn't come from money. I now have more money than basically everyone that I know, and I'm not against purchasing things. But I usually purchase things that I really like. I'll buy a nice espresso machine, or I'll buy a nice skateboard.

Brett Curry:

Which I've had espresso from that espresso machine. And you pull a mean shot of espresso, my friend.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. I will spend money happily on things that are enjoyable and that I will use, but I don't just buy frivolously, until now, dude. I bought six pairs of the same Chelsea boot. When I turned around, I was like, "What? I have lost my mind, dude." This is stress shopping.

Brett Curry:

Why did I buy this?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

I think one time I was on a call with you and you just recently bought like a samurai sword or something. I don't think it was actually a samurai sword, but it was some kind of sword.

Ezra Firestone:

A katana. Yeah, it was a Japanese katana. I use it to chop wood for my sweat lodge. So that was actually a useful tool. It's good for chopping kindling.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. That's awesome, man. Super fun. So people are buying right now. The economy's pretty hot, and certainly there are some issues too. But people are buying stuff. So let's dive in. You recently wrote a blog post, which I'm going to link to, so you can see this in the show notes, talking about eight top growth strategies. And first of all, for those that don't know the journey, talk about Boom by Cindy Joseph and how it's grown.

Ezra Firestone:

(singing)

Brett Curry:

Because you guys are set to do about 40 million this year, right?

Ezra Firestone:

So I started this brand in 2010. Took me to 2014 to make my first million dollar a year in total revenue. By 2016, I was doing 17 million. This last year, I did 42. This year I think I'll do 47. Top line revenue at about a 25% EBIDA margin, so maybe making six or 7 million a year in profit on that.

Brett Curry:

Which is amazing. Amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

I got about 30 employees at that company. I also own Zipify Apps, about a $10 million a year software company. Also a couple million bucks in profit on that, maybe about 60 employees there. And I just bought a company called Overtone Color, which has about 20 team members. It'll do about 25, 30 million this year. And I got Smart Marketer too. And I'm just a guy. I didn't go to college, I have no special skills, other than that I'm a good communicator and I'm willing to put my foot down and do the work, and ask for help when I need it. And I think my story shows that if... I'm a complete failure in the eyes of the school system. They labeled me a dumb kid, and someone who was not going to be successful. And I think for anybody who doesn't fit into the mold, who maybe is dyslexic, or maybe has some reason why the general society is telling them that they can't be successful, the internet opens up an opportunity for us.

Ezra Firestone:

And there's skills that we can develop. Advertising, direct response marketing, landing page optimization, copywriting, product development, podcasting, social media, that can support us in taking care of our families. And I didn't come from resource, and so I wanted to create that. And I've been able to, and I've been doing it now for 17 years. I got pretty fucking good at it. I made every mistake you could make. I didn't pay my taxes, I did all the stupid you can do. But I did it when I was younger, and earlier in my... And I didn't have podcasts like yours to learn from. I had a bunch of creepy dudes on an internet forum who were shilling fucking gambling and porn. That was when I got into the game.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Online marketing was a bit of a dark place back in those early days.

Ezra Firestone:

You didn't want to say you were an internet marketer. It wasn't good.

Brett Curry:

No, no, that was not prestigious. No one looked at that highly. For sure.

Ezra Firestone:

So yeah. So I've been doing it a long time now, I'm really good at it. And I've been talking about it since about 2011. I was one of the first people to start blogging about e-commerce. And by the very nature of being one of the first, I became popular. Not that I was anything special than anyone else, but I was the first to do it, and so I got real popular. And I've stayed in that space of documenting my journey. And I got a bunch of people who think it's cool, and follow what I do. And I'm pretty good at it, you know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And I've been able to successfully train and educate, and bring up in the game, thousands and thousands of internet entrepreneurs over the years. You being one of them who I've impacted.

Brett Curry:

Big time.

Ezra Firestone:

Not that I did anything for you, other than show you what I was doing. So yeah, so I like talking about this stuff.

Brett Curry:

It's been so amazing to watch that progression as well, and getting to see behind the scenes, seeing you operate with your team. So I've been to your house and I've hung out with the inner circle of Smart Marketer and Boom. And of course we were on calls, and our agency serves you and stuff. So I've seen you in a lot of different capacities. And man, you're the same leader behind the scenes as you are on stage. You care about people on stage or one on one. You're extremely smart and strategic, and you get marketing, and you understand human in nature, and you take massive action. All kinds of stuff we can break down. So it's been really fun to observe that and get the front row seat of that as well.

Ezra Firestone:

I can also do a cool poker chip trick. Look at this.

Brett Curry:

Is that right? Oh, look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Wait.

Brett Curry:

Look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Hold on. Damn, that was not cool. I dropped it. Hold on.

Brett Curry:

We're going to try this again. So if you're listening, just take my word for it. He's a great poker chip-

Ezra Firestone:

My hands are frozen. My hands are frozen. We should probably get into tactics.

Brett Curry:

Do not attempt a poker chip trick out of a cold plunge.

Ezra Firestone:

People are going to be like, "Enough of this bullshit, dude. You should talk about some tactics." We should talk about some strategies.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So here we go. So let's dive in. One thing that we've seen you guys operate on, we're running this on YouTube for you, but you're buying more email leads. So talk about that. So this is top strategy number one, buying more email leads. What does that look like, and why?

Ezra Firestone:

Dude, nobody's talking about email. Everybody's like "SMS, video ads." This and that. Well guess what has always been since I've been in the game, about 25 to 40% of my business? Literally since '05, dude. Emails.

Brett Curry:

Email. Email.

Ezra Firestone:

I've been sending motherfucking emails since 2005. And it is to this day, it'll be 36% of Boom's total revenue this year.

Brett Curry:

It's crazy.

Ezra Firestone:

And nobody-

Brett Curry:

Email touches 36% of all purchases through Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, it's last click, dude. It's last click for 36% of my purchases.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

So why would I not be putting so much energy in growing that list? Nobody does it. Everybody just runs top of funnel video ads, conversion ads, and they hope that when somebody comes to their website, their onsite popup, or their card abandonment, or their exit intent, are going to capture the email lead for them. Great, do that. But also, you know what I'm doing? Gated content. I'm doing giveaways. I'm doing all kinds of different straight up lead generation campaigns. One of my best ones, is we use these things called pre-sell articles, which are basically articles that are story-based, like, "Five makeup tips for older women." Or "Seven makeup tips for women who wear glasses." Or "How to overcome perfectionism in your fifties." Or whatever kind of content that our community is interested in, that leads back to our products.

Ezra Firestone:

And we use those in our email auto responders, we run ads to them, we mail them to our email list. We use them everywhere. At every stage of the sales process. What we also do, is we gate them. So we put an opt-in front of it, and it says, "Hey, enter email address here to get our five makeup tips for women over 50." We run ads to that with a conversion objective for the lead event, the lead event fires on the thank you page. They enter their email address, guess where they get dropped? On the same pre-sell that I'm running at the top of the funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But now we have their email lead, and we put them on a automation sequence, to warm them up and try to sell them. And if they don't buy, we put them on our bucket list. I also run giveaways every six weeks. And basically those are my two main top of funnel lead gen strategies, is gated content and giveaways. But I'll do Facebook lives, and I'll do other things as well. But if you just do gated content and giveaways, you should spend about five to 10% of your total marketing budget on email lead generation. Because some people take a little longer to warm up than others. So if you're only running conversion ads, you're going to miss out on growing your audience in a way that could be beneficial for you.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. I love this so much, and it's something that we've observed you doing, and something we're talking about now with other clients. That, if you can grow that email list, and if you're properly running email marketing, you're going to be able to convert that at a really high rate. And so gated content, so information people want, and/or giveaways, great ways to drive that list. And I was looking through some of your notes here. Looks like over the last 12 months you spent about 200,000 buying email leads that have then generated 750,000 in sales. So about a 375% return on add spend. That's not bad. But that's not like-

Ezra Firestone:

And that's with excluding anybody who was already on the list, dude.

Brett Curry:

What's that?

Ezra Firestone:

That's with excluding anyone who was already on the list. So those are new leads.

Brett Curry:

Just strictly new leads. So that really changes the game, because you could be looking at those campaigns and thinking, "Well, I just drove an email sign up. I didn't make a sale there, so it's not really worth a whole lot." But then you've got to look at that whole picture. What did those email subscribers do for you over the next six to 12 months? And in your case, it's a 3.75 X ROAS, which is amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

Pretty sweet. I mean, not that everyone's going to have that result, but it's worth doing, still, nonetheless.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So, all right, awesome. So strategy number one, buy more email leads. I'm sold on that idea. Idea number two, launch new products. So talk about how Boom is approaching launching new products.

Ezra Firestone:

So to have a successful e-commerce business, you have to get your repeat customer rate up. Ideally over 30% of total revenue comes from repeat customers, people who bought from you once before. The best way to do that is to sell them more of what they already bought, if it's consumable. Or to introduce new items that they might want from you. And by the way, if somebody knows you, likes you, trust you, you're putting out content, you're engaging them, you've delivered a good product, they're going to probably want to buy whatever else you have to offer if it's tangentially related to what they bought in the first place.

Ezra Firestone:

So what we do is we send a customer survey every six months to our two X buyers, and we give them a bunch of stuff, like "If we were going to add more colors, what colors do you want? If you could wave a magic wand, what products would you have us create?" We have a 20 question survey. We say, "Hey, five people who take this survey are going to win $100 gift certificate to the store". We get a couple thousand responses. Based on that, we figure out what products to make next, based on the desire of our community.

Brett Curry:

That creates your product roadmap.

Ezra Firestone:

As an example, 50% of people wanted a mascara, 46% of people wanted a lip gloss, and 53% of people wanted an additional color of Boomstick. We released all three of those products last year, based on that information. They were our three best product launches ever. We just released the Boomstick color last week, we sold 15,000 units in 18 hours. 650 grand in revenue in 18 hours.

Brett Curry:

Whoa. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again. You sold what?

Ezra Firestone:

We sold 15,000 units in 18 hours, dude. We sold out. 650 grand in 18 hours. Now of course I've got a mature company, but the point is that this process gets better over time. So when you're developing a new product, you're doing it in desire to your past customers, in relationship to their desire. And for us, you have componentry, formulation, and secondary packaging. So componentry is like, what is the component that it's going to go in? Well, the Boomstick, we already have that. That's great, we'll reuse the component we already have. The formula is, what is it going to be, why is it going to be that way, what are the benchmarks other brands are doing that we want to meet? We go through a bunch of iterations, we send it out to our best customers to test. It takes us about six months to a year to develop a formula.

Ezra Firestone:

And then our secondary packaging, is what is the box, what's the write alongs, what are the inserts? We get all that together, we run a photo shoot for it. And then we do an early bird. "Hey, we're going to launch this new product. This is what it is. Get excited, sign up for it to hear about it first." And then what happens is, as they're signing up, and as they're posting on social about it on the thread, we're finding out what they want to know. They're asking, "Is it hypoallergenic?" And we're like, "Oh shit, we don't have hypoallergenic on the sales page. It is hypo allergenic." So we add that to the sales page. The questions they ask, they become the FAQs that we put on the... So we use the pre-launch as a way to build out the marketing material. Build out the FAQ, build out the sales page.

Ezra Firestone:

And then we launch it, run ads to it, do emails to it. And then it becomes part of our ongoing marketing. Put it in bundles. And you can do this too with products you already have. So you can reformulate them to make them better than they already are. Based on feedback, you can change the componentry or packaging, make it more sustainable. You can bundle it with other items to make a kit. So you can renew and make better products you already have, and relaunch them, as well as introducing new items. But for us, we are aiming to introduce four new items a year, which is once a quarter, which is hard to do.

Brett Curry:

That's aggressive. That's one a quarter.

Ezra Firestone:

It's hard to do when you're making them all from scratch.

Brett Curry:

It's hard to do, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's a huge, huge part of the business. So yeah, it's really important to continually making the products better.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And it's interesting that it's also fairly risky, too, to launch a new product. Will it go well, will it not go well? But the approach you're taking, it really eliminates a lot of the risk. You know that if you deliver a good product, which you guys do, you know how to do that, you're delivering exactly what someone is requesting, and exactly what someone wants.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, and they also then can become a new top of funnel sales processes. So we can run top of funnel ads now. So for our mascara, I mean, that's our second best seller of all time, and we can run it at the top of the funnel because everybody's interested in mascara. And we didn't have one before. So we couldn't run ads for it at the top of the funnel. So we were missing a customer acquisition funnel there that we were able to add to the business.

Brett Curry:

Love it. And so then this actually directly ties into it. So this is strategy number three. Create more front end offers. So talk about that and how that's evolved for Boom, more front end offers.

Ezra Firestone:

I think that's mature business strategy. For Boom, we did 10 years where we had one front end offer, which was our Boomstick trio.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Boomstick.

Ezra Firestone:

And all of our social proof, all of our sales funnel optimization, all of our pre-sales, all of our video ads, all of our email sequences, everything was about that front end offer. Just make that as deep as possible. Have marketing assets for it, loyalty assets for it. Just really work on that and scale that. And that's a lot easier to go deep rather than wide. And a lot of people have a thousand skews, and they can't do that. Like with this product, this brand, I bought, Overtone, I got a hundred skews. So it's hard for me to have one front end funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But for low skew e-commerce, it's easy. You just pick whatever your widest and best seller, and most relevant seller is, and just focus on that. But once you scale that, now you got to start introducing new front end offers. There's only so many people who are interested in a multipurpose blush stick. Some people aren't interested in blush, but they're interested in mascara, or lip gloss, or brow gel, or whatever. So we've now introduced a bunch more products to the... You're right, my voice is kind of frozen. It's funny, I sound like a frog.

Brett Curry:

You're good, dude. Hey, you're so you're bringing the fire, even though I'm feeling cold for you.

Ezra Firestone:

I usually have such a rich, deep voice, man. Anyways, it gives us the ability to have more fish hooks in the sea.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Love it. Love it. Let's go on to the next one, and this is related to number one, but this is now strategy number four.

Ezra Firestone:

By the way, another front end funnel is one of those lead gen funnels, too. Even if it's leading to the same product.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Ezra Firestone:

It's a new top of funnel way of getting people in the mix. That's a new funnel. It doesn't have to be a new product.

Brett Curry:

Totally. And so looking at that, and what we've observed, working with Boom, working with other successful brands, is that a lot of them have one to three really successful top end funnels that they just push hard on, almost forever. And then with some tweaking and changing, and then you've got all your backend stuff as well. So, yeah. Really, really good. So let's talk then about strategy number four, growing your SMS subscribers. So diving into text based marketing. So, tips or suggestions you would give there for growing that list and utilizing SMS?

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, the 80/20 of SMS is this. Have the collection at checkout, where you're collecting people who check out from you, who click the little box to be collected. And have a two step opt in. First, get the email, second, incentivize for the SMS. So they come to your site, you say, "Hey, get 10% off, entering your email address". They enter it. "Hey, by the way, do you want an extra 5%? Give us your SMS". Klaviyo lets you do this, Postscript lets you do this, Attentive lets you do this, et cetera. Those are your two main ways to collect. And that's 85, 90% of the value. You can do other shit to collect, but it's not worth it. Just do that. And then when you send an abandoned card email and they don't open after 18 hours, slide a text in there, via Klaviyo. So connect it to your email logic, and do your-

Brett Curry:

Is that usually the way you do it, where you'll email first? And then if there's no response there, then you text?

Ezra Firestone:

Always. Yeah, because SMS is more expensive. So we'll use it as a... And you can only do this if you're using Klaviyo, because it talks to it. You can't have Attentive in Klaviyo, because they don't talk to each other. So if you're using Klaviyo, Klaviyo's a little more expensive for SMS, but if you're doing it the way I do, it doesn't matter, because you're only using it as a... You know? You're using it as a way to capture the people who aren't responding to email. Instead of just blasting them with both, and spending the money for that. So, if they don't respond to the card email, we'll slide an SMS. If we go purchase email, they don't cross-sell, we'll slide an SMS. And then once a week, you broadcast your bucket list with a piece of content or a sale. That's it. That's all you need to do. Have an opt in pre purchase, have an opt in at checkout, use it in your automation sequences, do one broadcast a week, your solid potato salad, you have 85% of the value you can get from SMS.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. You really go beyond that, it's just going to be tiny little gains. And potentially a difference-

Ezra Firestone:

It's not worth it. It's not worth it.

Brett Curry:

Not worth it. Not worth the effort.

Ezra Firestone:

Just spend your energy acquiring more customers.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally. And so those weekly broadcast on SMS, are you doing a mix of promotions and content?

Ezra Firestone:

So those will be content. The best piece of content from the week will drop via the SMS. And then if we're running a sale, that week, we won't send content, we'll send about the sale.

Brett Curry:

And your best piece of content pulling from the way Boom is doing it, it's based on blog, is that right? So you're writing blogs weekly or something?

Ezra Firestone:

We send three pieces of content to our list every week. Maybe it's a long form article, maybe it's a user generated content video, maybe it's a recap from a Facebook live we did. Whatever. We're sending content every week, at least three pieces, long form written articles, videos, user generated content. We've got a whole social media content engagement system. And so whatever worked the best that week, we'll drop to the SMS list. And then every six-

Brett Curry:

Nice. So you're emailing that content initially. So you're emailing-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, we're emailing that, we're posting it to the blog, we're posting out to social, we're amplifying it. We're doing the whole system. And then the best shit, we drop to the list, which links over to the blog. And we drop to the SMS list. And then every six weeks we're running a product launch or a sale. So that sixth week will be a promotion via SMS.

Brett Curry:

Got it. And anything you can say about response rates, metrics? How is SMS working in comparison to email? I know it's just designed to be a compliment to email, but anything you can say about stats, performance?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, SMS gets better response rates, but you have smaller lists. And you get way more unsubscribes. So it's-

Brett Curry:

And you got to be really careful about spam related stuff.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

People get pretty hot on-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot you got to worry about with that. But basically it works really well, and you should use it as a compliment, and not instead of... And you should do what I'm talking about, which is basically 80/20 it.

Brett Curry:

Not really standalone. You're not going to just be like, "Hey, SMS is my one strategy."

Ezra Firestone:

Some brands do. Some brands do. But I think if you ignore email, what are we doing?

Brett Curry:

Right. For most people, it's just a beautiful compliment, and a way to really increase the effectiveness of email. But it is a compliment. Awesome. So now we're going to move into strategy number five. I actually love this one. I love all of them, this is all gold. But this is something that was kind of an aha moment for me. I first heard about a strategy like this, it was made be Dan Kennedy back in the day, maybe Jay Abraham. I go way back, man, looking at marketing stuff. But you're talking about inventing a holiday. So there's this idea that people need a reason why. They need a reason why I should buy now, they need a reason why your product is better. And sometimes an invented holiday is a great reason why you should buy now. So, talk about invented holidays, and talk about what you're doing at Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

So excuses to communicate are important. And we take everyone we can. We communicate on Earth Day, we communicate on Animal Friendly Day, we communicate on National Dog Day. Because people like that kind of shit.

Brett Curry:

They do. People like it.

Ezra Firestone:

And everybody has a dog, and everybody likes the earth, and so on and so forth. And we do too. And so we are always doing emails like that. Like, "Hey, it's Earth Day. And you know what? We care a lot about sustainability. And these are our most sustainable products, for these reasons." And whatever. And so we're constantly mailing on using the fake or created holidays as a reason to communicate on social and on email. And so we made up our own. We made Pro-Age Month. We are the first people to say pro-age. Now it's a commonly known thing. Now you've got a million knock brands, but we spent 40 million over six years, popularizing the concept of pro-age, back in 2010. And now Allure is stealing it, and it's like we have penetrated the mainstream with this.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

We've entered the zeitgeist with this concept. And so now it's a thing. And so we want to claim ownership of that, because we do own it. You don't never own an idea, but we created that movement. And so we created Pro-Age Month. And the month of August is Pro-Age Month. And we tell pro-age stories, and we've got a logo for it. And we are claiming our rights to the pro-age movement. The pro-age revolution that we started in 2010. And a good way to do that, was to create a holiday around it.

Brett Curry:

Create a holiday, create a month, and people love that. And it's such a great conversation starter and connection point. And if you think about one of the big components of building a brand, is just building that connection and that community. And sometimes odd or unusual holidays do that. And inventing your own holiday, I think it's brilliant. I think more people should look at it. And I think a lot of brands lend themselves well. Maybe it's not pro-age for you, and Ezra owns that anyway, so back off, really. Seriously.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, whatever. You could say pro-age if you believe in that. What I find, is most people say pro-age and they don't actually know what it means. Which is hilarious. They'll be like, "Pro-age..." this or that. And then they'll have anti-aging skin drops.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. "But cover your gray, and no more wrinkles." Yeah, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

You've missed the point here.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. But inventing a holiday, pure gold, I love it. Anybody can do it. And so highly recommend that as well. So we're getting tied on time, so we're going to have to maybe move rapid fire through some of these or just save some of them for the blog. But number six is, list products on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

What are you guys doing there for your brands? Talk about that a little bit.

Ezra Firestone:

Amazon will make up 20 to 30% of a good brand's sales. And you're going to miss those customers if you're not over there. And our-

Brett Curry:

Because some people only buy on Amazon. That's just it.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, yeah. And we waited 10 years to put our products on Amazon, because we could fill the demand that we had with... Our supply chain could barely fill the demand we had from direct to consumer. But once we beefed up our supply chain, and we realized that adding to Amazon wasn't going to cannibalize our direct to consumer platform, we added our main product on there, and it just crushed. It just added 10 to 15% of incremental sales.

Brett Curry:

Immediately. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

So now we're adding every one of our products, once every two months, onto Amazon. You guys are running all of our ads over there, doing all of our A plus lists. All we do is do the customer support, and create the assets for the page. You guys literally do everything else. You run all the ads, you optimize all the pages, you handle all the seller support. You do fucking everything for us. So it's great for us, because it's a channel that really works, that we don't really have the expertise for, that you just do for us. I mean, we pay you for it, but probably not what you should get paid. Because I think you give us a deal. But-

Brett Curry:

We do. We do. But, gladly. We gladly give you that deal, for sure.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. So it's been really good for us.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's been amazing, it's been fun to execute on our end for sure. And one thing we noticed with you, we noticed this with native ... as well, client, friends. And we don't run their Amazon, but we observe. We run their Google and YouTube. Is that there's some expectation that when you launch on Amazon, there's going to be some cannibalization of your store's sales. And certainly that happens some, but this has been mostly incremental growth for you guys, right?

Ezra Firestone:

100% incremental. There's been no cannibalization whatsoever. Which is crazy, because I was sure there was going to be. We sell it at the same price, and some people just like to buy over there. And I think what was happening was a lot of people were seeing our ads on Facebook, going to buy on Amazon, not finding it, and then buying knockoff brands. Because they only buy on Amazon.

Brett Curry:

Buying something else. Buy knockoff. Yeah, we experienced that. That'd be a topic for another podcast. The copycats and the people that were...

Ezra Firestone:

...

Brett Curry:

... really leeching off of your brand name on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Nightmare.

Brett Curry:

But yeah, nightmare for sure. For sure. But we're getting there. So yeah, big believer in Amazon. And what's interesting to me, and this is where Boom and Overtone are set up perfectly for Amazon, is that success on Amazon in the long term, and I think even right now, is based on building a brand. So taking the community building aspect, the brand building aspect that you're doing off Amazon, and do that on Amazon, that's where you see long term success. It's not just hacking the titles and the keywords, and the bullet points, to try to inflate your ranking, or using super URLs, or some other strategy to hack your ranking, but building a real brand.

Brett Curry:

And that's what you guys are good at, and that's what we're helping you with. And it's working. It's working on Amazon right now. So let's talk, and this will probably be our final concept for the podcast, and I'll push the final one, people to go check out on the blog post. But the seventh strategy for growth, is advertising on television. TV? What? Come on now. So what are your thoughts on TV? And this has been fun to watch too, but what are your thoughts on advertising on television?

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's really only for very, very, very mature brands. Because the minimum that you need to do it is 350 grand. Minimum. Just to test. And that's a two month test. And you also have to produce television quality ads. Now we were able to use user generated content. We spent 50 grand on a TV commercial produced by a fancy agency, and at flopped all crazy. And then we made our own ad, based on UGC that we had. And we crushed. So we're much better direct response advertisers than these TV agencies, it turns out. Which we should've known, because we've been fucking running direct response ads for 15 years. Makes sense we would know what would work, versus what they produced. Even though what they produced, it was a whole... We could talk about that another time. It wasn't very good.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's hard to tell how successful TV has been for us. We've spent about half a million dollars over the course of six months, and I think incrementally, it has been successful. But we're having Northbeam, which is a company you hooked us up with.

Brett Curry:

Shout out to Northbeam, Austin, and the folks there.

Ezra Firestone:

We just turned it off, and looks like sales are down 15K a day since we turned off TV. We'll see. I think TV is great for omnichannel presence. If you're spending three, four, 500K a month on social media ads, you should add in TV at 10, 15% of your budget, to reach more people, and reach the people that you're reaching on social in a different area. And for us, we just turned it off to see how it's going to impact whether we run it or not. And so we're still trying to figure out the attribution on it, and how well it's working. But our sense is that it worked pretty well.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And that's a great way to test it. Turn it off, see what the impact is there. And it also helps tremendously to have a tool like Northbeam, third party attribution. Brilliant stuff, check it out. And we're seeing some similar things. So first of all, I got my start in TV, radio, print. So I still really like TV. I'm still involved in local TV just a little bit with a friend of mine. But I love this strategy. I think it is for bigger brands. But yeah, if you're spending multi six figures on Facebook ads, YouTube ads, then TV may be something that you check out. But along a similar vein, we're testing now, we tested it with Boom and with a few other clients. Creating some awareness, we call it awareness layer YouTube campaigns.

Brett Curry:

And again, you kind of need something like Northbeam in place, to really see the impact of this. But the idea there, is as well we're just going for low cost engagement, low cost views. We're seeing CPMs for some of these awareness level YouTube campaigns at six bucks, five bucks, which is crazy low. But there's something to be said, and this is marketing 101, old school stuff. If you talk to the right people enough times, with a right message, so right message, right market, right media, you're going to get results. And so obviously you got to be ready for it with budget, and you have to have the tracking in place to really make good use of it. But I love that you guys are testing TV. And I also love the fact that it wasn't the super duper polished stuff that worked. It was what we do. The UGC stuff that did well on TV, too.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. It was UGC. And we started doing video view advertising on Facebook, when iOS 14.5 happened, because Facebook lost all its data. So we started running video view campaigns to all the audiences that we used to run conversion campaigns to, to let Facebook build up some data of the people who watched most of our videos. And then we would follow up with those people and run conversion ads to them. And now we're doing that with YouTube as well. And I think that strategy post iOS 14.5 on both networks, where you spend a thousand bucks a day at our scale, running video views, or maybe 10% of your overall spend, is a great strategy. We're doing it at Overtone too.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, this has been amazing, Ezra. So that's seven of the eight tips. Hey, to get that eighth tip, check out the show notes, go check out Ezra's blog, smartmarketer.com, and get that final one. But Ezra, as people are listening, I know we got some super fans-

Ezra Firestone:

I'm cold, man. I'm cold. That's what's going on.

Brett Curry:

You're cold. Then yeah, you need to go warm up, dude.

Ezra Firestone:

I do. I need ...

Brett Curry:

Get your robe, get your blanket, go sit by the fire, or something like that. But for those that are listening and thinking, "I need more Ezra Firestone in my life." How can they connect with you, where should they learn more about you? Where should they do that?

Ezra Firestone:

I'm on Instagram @ezrafirestone, I'm on Twitter @ezrafirestone, I'm on Facebook, Facebook.com/MeetEzra. I'm on smartmarketer.com, which is a blog that I have, I'm on zipify.com, which are my apps for Shopify. But you can find me on social media. I'm on YouTube, all the social media networks. Whatever ones you use, I'm there. You can Google me on there or search me on there. And yeah. Thanks for hanging out, hope it's been some kind of helpful. Appreciate you, Brett. I love that you're between two ferns over there.

Brett Curry:

That's a hilarious show. And you're not the first person to say that. They're like, "Dude, are you between two ferns here? Are you Zach Galifianakis or what? What are you doing?" I'm a little more courteous to my guests and a little more on topic, but that show is hilarious.

Ezra Firestone:

It's awesome, dude.

Brett Curry:

But another plug that I'll make here as I'm sitting between two ferns, is, do check out Smart Marketer. Molly Pittman, John Grimshaw, running that with Ezra's leadership, Ezra started it. But some amazing resources there. Train My Traffic Person. So if you got in-house media buyers, you need to send them through Train My Traffic Person. You get to learn from me too, I'm a faculty member there teaching YouTube and teaching Google. But check that out, smartmarketer.com. Highly, Highly recommend it.

Ezra Firestone:

Thank y'all.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Ezra, appreciate it, brother. This has been amazing, thank you so much. And see you next time.

Ezra Firestone:

Talk soon.

‍

I’ve never met anyone quite like Miki Agrawal.

‍

She’s incredibly creative. No really. She once hosted a “funeral for a tree” at an old cathedral in NYC hosted by comedians and actors. It drew a crowd of thousands, generated millions in free press and helped shed light on the toilet paper waste that her company TUSHY can help solve. 

‍

She understands trends in marketing. She knows how to grab attention. So much so that she was banned by the NY   transit authority from running subway ads. Which led to a PR fight that she won…and in the end, got more press and attention than if they hadn’t been banned. 

‍

She’s also warm and kind and FUN. 

‍

She’s created multiple 9-Figure businesses and has garnered some pretty incredible recognition. She was named "Fast Company's Most Creative People", “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum and INC's “Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs”.

‍

She’s also the author of #1 best selling books Do Cool SH*T and Disrupt-HER.

‍

In this episode we unpack Miki’s wacky, impossible-to-forget and wildly successful marketing strategies and tactics.

‍

Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

• How Miki was banned from advertising on the NYC subway and turned that into a huge PR win for her brand THINX
• How to use Accessible + Relatable language 
• How to create ads that are both effective and “fridge worthy”
• How iteration is perfection
• How to start with play to create great ideas

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

Miki Agrawal

   - Website

   - Instagram

   - Link Tree to Resources

TUSHY

   - Website

   - Instagram

Thinx

   - Website

   - Instagram

Wild

   - Website

   - Instagram

“Do Cool Sh*t” by Miki Agrawal

“Disrupt-Her” by Miki Agrawal

“Zero To $100 Million” on Mindvalley‍

Cap Con 5
Ryan Daniel Moran‍

Toto‍

“Funeral for a Tree” by TUSHY video on YouTube‍

Butt Con by TUSHY

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast. We explore hot topics on eCommerce and digital marketing. We feel feature some of the brightest minds, with some of the SPT perspectives on what it takes to grow your business. Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that, what it really takes to succeed is three things. One: have something good to say. Two: say it well. And three: say it often.

Brett:

My guest in this episode is Miki Agrawal. She's the founder of TUSHY, but she's also the entrepreneur behind several other wildly successful companies. I don't know anyone better than Miki at the, have something good to say and say it well, aspects of growth. And so just a couple of accolades. Miki was named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People. She was also named by Inc Magazine as one of the Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs. She was also my favorite speaker, and she's also one of the favorite speakers that most of the events that she attends.

Brett:

We're going to dive into some crazy wild stories from her entrepreneur journeys. We're going to learn why she was banned by the New York subway from running ads there, and how she actually overcame that and then ran some pretty powerful ads on the New York subway system. We're going to talk about how she creates events that are just, blow your mind. Like, they had a funeral for a tree, and there's a reason why they did that and got millions of dollars in free press. And she talks about how to craft things that are both artful and fridge worthy, but also effective. And so, I think you're going to absolutely love this interview. And so, lean in, buckle up and enjoy this interview with Miki Agrawal.

Brett:

Over 81% of consumers are opted into text message messages from their favorite brands, and that's where Attentive comes in. Meet Attentive, the company helping thousands of innovative brands connect with their customers through personalized text messaging. Attentive's text marketing platform lets you grow your subscriber list, interact with customers in real time through two-way conversations and drive the war revenue. Brands who use Attentive see $55 in sales for every $1 they spend. See what Attentive can do for you, at attentivemobile.com/omgcommerce. Attentive: drive sales with text message marketing.

Brett:

All right, well today I am abs absolutely thrilled that my guest is Miki Agrawal. Now, I was recently at an event, CapCon 5 in Austin, Texas. My good friend, Ryan Daniel Moran was the host. And there was a star-studded lineup of speakers. Amazing, blow your mind speakers. And I got to say, Miki was probably my favorite. And I hope that some of my other friends that were speaking don't hear this, because I don't want to hurt their feelings. It's just that Miki was amazing. And so, Miki is the founder of a number of really transformative businesses. Most recently, TUSHY. Also, THINX and WILD. She's also author of some amazing best-selling books. Do Cool Sh*t. Disrupt-Her, which I'm actually in the process, I've gone about halfway through it right now. And even though it has "her" in the title, Disrupt-Her, instead of disruptor, it's for dudes too. Right, Miki? And so, I'm actually getting a lot of value out of it. And so, we're going to talk about growth and having an amazing marketing message, and thinking differently and all kinds of great stuff. So Miki, welcome to the show, and how's it going?

Miki:

Yes. I'm so happy to be here with you. And just, the thing that I just can't, I'm just so like, I love is that you have eight children, and you're sitting at the table with 10 people every night for dinner. That just blows my mind.

Brett:

Yeah. The level of noise at the dinner table is sometimes crazy. And we do this thing called highs and lows, where everybody goes around and tells their high of the day. You have to have a high of the day, you don't have to have a low of the day if you don't want to, but it is required to have a high. And the noise level is crazy, but it's also super fun.

Miki:

I love that you do that. That's beautiful, that's amazing.

Brett:

Yeah. So, part of what attracted me to you, Miki, and why I was so thrilled to chat with you afterwards. Is one, you're a master marketer. And the way you craft messages and the way you get attention, it's mind blowing, which is awesome. But you're also like, you believe in strong women, right? And I've got six daughters and I just, I want them to conquer the world. That's probably a weird thing to say, but I want them to just do whatever they feel led and whatever they feel passionate about doing. And so, love the energy you bring and the inspiration you're bringing to young women as well.

Miki:

Six daughters. I mean, it's just, yeah. Like, I think about the food bill just for that dinner, just for those meals, just now. It's just [crosstalk 00:05:10].

Brett:

The food bill is crazy. So I'm happy to talk about that with anyone offline. Yeah. So, when you include groceries and eating out, it's a median household income. It's a lot of money, yeah. But grateful to be able to do it. I wouldn't have it any other way, but it is completely [crosstalk 00:05:28].

Miki:

I love it.

Brett:

So yeah, it's awesome. Well, let's talk about a few things. So if you would Miki, give people kind of just the quick background on you. Because we're going to dig into some of the specific messages that you use at TUSHY and things like that. But give people the background. Like, how did you become this, because not only were you my favorite speaker at CapCon, but I've seen, you were voted best speaker at Inc and Fast Company, and some of these other big events. Everybody loves what you have to say. So really, how did you get here?

Miki:

Well, I'm one of three children, and the interesting fun fact about the three of us is that we are all born within one year. So I have an identical twin sister. The third sister, who's 11 months older. So we're actually, we're Irish twins.

Brett:

Yeah, Irish twins and identical twins [crosstalk 00:06:18].

Miki:

Irish triplets.

Brett:

Okay.

Miki:

So we're twins, plus Irish triplets, yeah.

Brett:

It's insane.

Miki:

Yeah. And then we grew up to a Japanese mother and Indian father. So my mother's from Japan, speaks with a thick Japanese accent. My dad is from India, speaks with a very thick Indian accent.

Brett:

I'm doing the audio book of Disrupt-Her. And you do the Indian accent for your dad, an it's just amazing. You do such a good job, yeah.

Miki:

But yeah, his most, the thing they always say is, he says, when he meets somebody, he goes, "Very good vibes". Or, "Very bad vibes." And immediately, because yeah, he can sniff people out just by "their vibes".

Brett:

By "their vibes", okay, I love that.

Miki:

By "their vibes".

Brett:

That's awesome.

Miki:

Yeah. And I grew up in Montreal, Canada. In French Montreal, in the south shore of Montreal. In a town called [foreign language 00:07:12]. And it's like, I grew up in French, like literally, we were the token Asians in the most French neighborhood ever. And so, it was really beautiful to grow up in this true mosaic of cultures. Japan, India, French, American. And then of course, Canada attracts so many, I mean, every culture, every religion, and they're all celebrated. And so of course, growing up in a household of just diversity and then going to school with just all diverse kids, I think we just learned to question everything. And to look at things from different angles. To be like, oh, this is how the Indians look at it, this is how the Japanese look it, how the French look at it, and the Americans look at it, this is how the Canadians look at it.

Brett:

It forces a fresh perspective, rather than just everybody being the same.

Miki:

Totally. So it's a mosaic versus melting pot thinking. And I think that that mosaic thinking creates beautiful picture. When you think about a mosaic image, and it's just this, all these colors and all these textures, and all of the different historical context of things, creates a different frame than just a single pain. So I think I was very blessed in just being born where I was born, to be given the various perspectives. To not just be like, okay, this is the way it is. It's like, wait, is this, or should I question it? And is there a better way, or is there more thoughtful way? Or that kind of thing.

Brett:

When did you realize that, hey, I might be an entrepreneur? Or have you ever? Like, is that really a conscious thought? Like, when did you think, hey, I'm going to build companies? And not just companies, but wildly successful and disruptive companies.

Miki:

Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just genuinely unemployable. I think I'm just like, you're not my Indian father. That kind of vibes. Where like, anytime someone told me what to do, blood would rush to my head and I would just get really frustrated. I would, I don't know, get triggered or something. But no, I think I just always beat to my own drum. And I think because of this questioning, because of this philosophy of looking at things from different perspectives, I think I just always had different ideas that I wanted to put out in the world. That entrepreneurship, when it was introduced to me, I remember, I'll never forget. I met my very first entrepreneur, standing in line in New York City when I was 22 years old, at this Armani party.

Miki:

I was invited to my very first VIP door, or whatever. [crosstalk 00:09:47] And I was like, oh my God, I'm so cool. It was like, Armani. You know, whatever. Back when it was really cool to go to those things. And I remember standing in line, and in front of me was this gentleman who I'd met. And his name was Graham, and he's now since become one of my dearest friends. But I met him randomly, standing in line in front of me then. I was 22, and he was in his mid-thirties when I met him. And I was like, "oh". Like, "What are you up to?"

Miki:

And he's like, "I'm an entrepreneur."

Miki:

And I was like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

And he is like, "I have my own business." And this is, by the way, in 2001, when entrepreneurship wasn't a school thing. Nobody was getting invested in, it wasn't a thing. I mean, Facebook wasn't even there until 2006.

Brett:

Now it's super trendy. Everybody wants to say entrepreneur, stamped that on their [crosstalk 00:10:33].

Miki:

Now, everyone. But back then, nobody. It was doctor, lawyer, investment banker, management consultant. Going to work for a company. Becoming a whatever at a company. Becoming a person who starts a business was just not even in the lexicon, in the zeitgeist of culture back then.

Miki:

And he was like, "I'm not in firm."

Miki:

I'm like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

He's like, "I have my own company."

Miki:

I'm like, "Well, what do you do?"

Miki:

And he's like, "Well, I started a company called treehugger.com."

Miki:

And I was like, "Oh, that's cool."

Miki:

And he's like, "And I sold it." I think he sold it to Discovery Channel, whatever.

Miki:

And I was like, "Wow!" And then he, the next day, invited me to this brunch with a bunch of other entrepreneurs. And that's when it was my big ding, ding, ding moment. I can start my own company, I'm going to do that. And I think in life, we just get given these gifts of chance meetings. And either we kind of get opened by it or we close to it. And I was sort of just blasted open by the possibilities of that. And I think that's what really put me on the course of this new way of thinking and being, and then carrying forward.

Brett:

That's amazing. And I do want to, let's give kind of a brief overview of some of the companies. Just to give people some texture and some more context. So your mind was blown, and you're thinking, I could do my own thing. And then you have, and you've been wildly successful. Really at, essentially, everything. But can you give a quick rundown of the companies, and what they've done?

Miki:

Yeah. Well, I will first start by saying, one of the biggest stories that changed the course my life was when I was 22. After that time, 9/11 happened, and that was a huge turning point in my life.

Brett:

Yeah, because you were an investment banker, working down on Wall Street, right?

Miki:

Yes. The World Trade center was my subway stop every single morning. And it I was working at Deutsche Bank, in investment banking. I call it douche bank.

Brett:

Wow. Someone was asking for that, honestly, right? Deutche Bank, it's so close to douche, you're going to make the jokes, yeah.

Miki:

Know what I mean? Yeah. So yeah, when I was there, yeah, 9/11 happened. I was supposed to be there, and 2 World Trade Center was my subway stop every single morning. And I would walk upstairs to 2 World Trade Center, at the cafe there. And I would get tea with my girlfriend, who worked on the 100th floor. And then I would walk across the street to my office, directly across 2 World Trade Center. And then 9/11 happened, and it was the first day of my life, the only day of my life that I slept through my alarm clock.

Brett:

That is crazy and amazing.

Miki:

Yeah. And 700 people in my girlfriend's office died on that day. Two people in my office died. It was one of those, just like, you can't make this shit up. Like, this is not a real movie, that kind of level of unfathomableness.

Brett:

Unfathomable, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah. And so that single experience, again, it's those moments that I kind of really recognize as these turning points in my life. And that was a big turning point in my life. Where I was like, wow, I could die tomorrow. And when you're 22, you don't think about death. I feel like we start thinking about death after we have children, in a lot of ways. And I'm just always making sure I'm not going to die. Do you know? And I'm sure, with your eight children, I don't even know how [inaudible 00:13:50]. You know?

Brett:

Yeah.

Miki:

But death, it's just not a thing, when you're a kid, when you're 22, you're just sort of like, whatever.

Brett:

You're usually not thinking about it at all, yeah.

Miki:

Just not thinking at all. But then, because I had this near potential death experience, and people around me died, and I was just sort of like, wow, this is a real thing. And I really felt my mortality in that moment. And it was like, wow, I got to make every single day count.

Brett:

Got to do something, yeah. We're going to blink and we're going to be 70, right? And so, what are you going to fill your time with now? Yeah.

Miki:

That's right. And so yeah, for me, it was, I wrote down three things. The first was to play soccer professionally, the second was to make movies, and the third was to start a business. And that sort of set me on sort of a total path after 9/11,.I played soccer for the New York Magic, I worked in the film industry for a couple of years, and then I started my first business, which was in the restaurant space. And so, my first business was born out of a stomach ache. We know that famous thing, necessity is the mother of invention.

Brett:

Yes, so true.

Miki:

Yeah. So the first business was born out of a stomach ache, and I couldn't eat pizza anymore. It was my favorite comfort food, but I just couldn't eat anymore because it made me bloated and gassy, and just so gross feeling after I ate it. And it was full of bleached flour, processed cheese, sugar-filled sauces, processed toppings, it was all that. And so yeah, I basically started New York City's very first gluten free alternative pizza concept. And 17 and a half years later, we're still in business. Almost 18 years this year. In November, 18 years.

Brett:

Amazing. And it's called WILD, correct?

Miki:

Called WILD. Just go to @eatdrinkwild on Instagram. We have a couple locations in New York City, and one in Guatemala.

Brett:

And [crosstalk 00:15:42] for surviving the pandemic. I couldn't imagine owning a restaurant during the pandemic in New York City. That had to been just absolutely brutal. So grateful, yeah.

Miki:

It was nuts. My partner Walid is incredible, and he's such an ingenious person. He has lots of [inaudible 00:15:57]. Where actually what we did was, we opened up, on Seamless Web, three restaurants, out of our restaurants. So during the pandemic, not only did we have our regular standard fair, but we opened up two different restaurants, working out of our kitchen. So basically, we made tacos and we did burgers, or whatever, so that people could order from us multiple times a week.

Brett:

Oh, super smart, super [crosstalk 00:16:24].

Miki:

So, take away. And not just have our gluten-free pizza stuff every week, but they would have tacos one night, and different stuff. And so we just opened three different restaurants under the same roof during the pandemic. And then we got the outdoor cafe seating. And that, our business all came back. And it was actually incredible, because it felt like a bit of Europe being in New York, with all the outdoor cafes everywhere, and people walking around with the menu. It was just, it was very romantic, very beautiful. So the rest restaurants was the very first business I learned. I think I learned so much of the thesis around people and psychology in my restaurants, that then led to building Thinks and led to building TUSHY. Both now valued over nine figures, well over nine. And so I, what I learned at WILD was, when I stood outside my restaurant for almost seven years, handing out little pieces of pizza, just handing them out.

Brett:

That's how you grew the business, was samples, yeah.

Miki:

Exactly, yeah. And getting people to try. And I would also test. Like, if I said healthy pizza, people wouldn't come. But if I said, farmed fresh, healthy farm to table pizza, people would be like, oh, what does that mean?

Brett:

Yeah. Nobody wants healthy pizza. That sounds cardboard.

Miki:

Exactly.

Brett:

But farm to table pizza, interesting. And so, you were testing out those messages as people were walking by?

Miki:

AB testing, literally like email, subject heading.

Brett:

I love that.

Miki:

You know? And it was such, seven years of, it was genuinely like double PhD in human psychology and what led people to come closer to attract them, or to kind of move them back. And it was a really interesting thing. Just by standing, literally person by person, like hand to hand combat, just really getting to know people.

Brett:

Fascinating.

Miki:

And that experience led to this thesis, understanding, that again, built THINX and TUSHY. Which was having a best in class product. Like, if someone bit into it and they're like, Ugh.

Brett:

It doesn't matter, yeah.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:30] my underwear. Like tight now, I'm wearing my period-proof underwear. It was so amazing because, I started my period today, I went to my bathroom. You're like, I have six daughters, don't worry about it.

Brett:

So, it does not bother me in the least. Like, yeah, this is a common conversation around my house, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

Think of the podcast first, though. First to confess on the podcast, which I embrace this, I welcome, this is awesome.

Miki:

First of all, every single human being is here because of a women's period. So, you're welcome. You know?

Brett:

Yes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:59] Be more uncomfortable. Yeah. So today, this morning, I went to the bathroom and I was kind of like, there's a little bit of blood everywhere. And so I basically sat on my toilet, used my TUSHY bidet, washed myself clean, And then put my THINX underwear on. And I was just like, ah.

Brett:

You're like, this is amazing.

Miki:

I solved my own problem twice. Just now, in this moment. And that's when I was like, yeah, this is why these businesses are doing well. Because genuinely, they truly, truly, truly solve problems that we face every single day.

Brett:

Authentically solving the problem, not just identifying a problem and kind of addressing it just for a cash grab, but you authentically solve the problem.

Miki:

Needed it, yeah. Which is why in my book, Do Cool Sh*t, I talk about the three questions I always ask myself before starting any business. The first question is, what sucks in my world? That's to start with me, a problem in my world that sucks. And then question number two is, but does it suck for a lot of people? Because if it just sucks for me, then I'm kind of a diva or whatever, and who cares. [crosstalk 00:20:04].

Miki:

And then the third question, which I think is the most important. Which is, can I be passionate about this issue, cause, or community, for a really long time. We know the saying, it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. People don't want to sit in that discomfort for a really, really long time, and then they quit or decide to leave early, and they don't kind of get through it. I think about the entrepreneurs, I think about the musicians, I think about the actors, I think about all the people in my life who've made it. And they've made it because they've kind of grinded for a really long time. And they made through it, and they just stuck with their passion, they stuck with the thing they truly believed in. And so I think, yeah, what sucks in my world, has sucked for a lot of people. Can I be passionate about this issue? I think the passion piece is the most important. [crosstalk 00:20:49]

Brett:

It's super important. And this is something I think you may have shared at CapCon already with somebody else. But, tactics without the underlying passion are worthless or it's going to be short lived. Tactics only work for so long. Like, you've got to have that passion and that drive to push through all the messy and confusing and heartache and suffering that you have to go through as a business owner. And so yeah, the passion is super, super important.

Brett:

Now, why do you think you're so attracted to difficult things to sell? So we'll start with pizza first. So, selling healthy, gluten free pizza. When you started the business, gluten free wasn't trendy. Like, gluten free wasn't a selling point. It's not something you want to stick on all your labels. Because people were like, what are you even talking about?

Miki:

Yeah. And no one was talking about farm to table, no one was talking about [crosstalk 00:21:36], no one was talking about seasonal.

Brett:

None of that.

Miki:

This is in 2003-2004. I mean, it was still super nascent, all of those conversations, it was extremely different.

Brett:

Yeah. And when you started THINX, which is period-proof underwear, no one was really talking about periods. Or, not wanting to talk about it. And maybe some people don't want to talk about now. [crosstalk 00:21:50] But yeah, you just got to get over it. But then also TUSHY, a bidet. I still remember so many conversations just as stuff started to get in the news. People were like, "Oh, bidets are nasty."

Brett:

And I'm like, "How is it nasty to use water to clean yourself versus dry paper?" But anyway, you're choosing these categories that are difficult. Like, it's new to people or taboo to people. Why do you think [crosstalk 00:22:13]?

Miki:

Well, it's a culture shift that I'm interested in. I think from a creative perspective and as a creative challenge. Like, how do you change people's behavior, is the hardest change to make. And then how, how do you utilize innovation and creativity to do that? And so I think from a creative kind of person's perspective, it's like, wow, this is a really fun challenge to tackle. How do you get someone to change their behavior when it comes to food? When it comes to habits? Daily habits that they've been doing their whole lives, not even their whole lives, but for generations. To get them to try something new, and not only try it, but adopt it fully. I mean, that is why Toto hasn't made it to America yet. That is why the tampons and pads, which were invented by men, which is fine. But not that fine, cause they're made for women. So it's just, it's like, those are the most pervasive products in the world, because it's taboo. And so, how do we enter these conversations in a way that's artful? In a way that's accessible, and we're using the best in class product?

Miki:

And I think those, my thesis that I learned from the pizza, from the restaurants was that was that, was the three prong. Prong number one is best in class product. It has to be a best in class product. It has to be a big day that, when I clip to my toilet, it actually feels good, it looks good.

Brett:

It adds to the appearance of your bathroom. Like, it makes your bathroom feel better, cleaner.

Miki:

It makes it more upscale and cool. It makes people want to bring you to their bathroom when you're having a dinner party. You know like that? Or when you're wearing THINX, like when I'm wearing my underwear right now, I feel really sexy in them. I feel really taken care of in them. I know that I'm protect, I know that this product works. So, best in class product. The pizza, when I eat it, it tastes the most delicious pizza. It doesn't even taste gluten and free, it tastes the most delicious pizza you've ever tasted. So, best in class product, no question, that is baseline. Second prong, to really shift culture, is art. Using art to really challenge conversations.

Miki:

And I talked a little bit about this at CapCon. When I remember putting our first TUSHY ads up, or our first period ads up, out in the world, whether online or offline. People's first reaction were like, wow, that's so beautiful. And then their second reaction's, oh my God, they're talking about poop, they're talking about periods. Like, oh my [crosstalk 00:24:49]. But their very first reaction was leaning into the art and the beauty of that. And I think that, that opens up people's hearts and minds. Art just does that, and for everyone at every level, does that. It opens, art just gives people something to lean into. And I think when they're leaning into something, it makes them be curious. And so the first thing is, can we design from a lens of art? So, we hired all artists, we hired all creatives. I think art is such a beautiful lens to shift people's perspective. I mean, that's why people go to museums, people look at magazines, people look at nature as art. And a place to go and really open up our souls, open up our perspectives, change the way we look and see things.

Miki:

And I think that really lends itself to giving people the space to question their existing thinking. And I think that's all we need to do, is give them that space to question, and they can make the decision for themselves. And so then, that's the artfulness, the best in class innovation.

Miki:

And then the third part is the accessible, relatable language. I think we so often want to be so heady, and so clinical, and so technical, and so medical, and so academic, and sound really smart. And make everyone feel we've been and doing all this patent pending work and whatever. And it's just like, people don't care. They want to know, does it work? Does it make me feel good? Does it support me and does it support my life? Like, what's the point of this? Like, I don't care about your terminology.

Brett:

Patent pending.

Miki:

And like, I don't care about high sounding or smart. Like, whatever. And then, I tested all of that. That was all tested. I learned that, the more we speak from our space of truth, the more we speak from our place of that lit fire inside. We talked about that at CapCon as well. The more we speak from that real, true, authentic place, people respond. Because it's real, it's true. It's not coming from like, I wonder what they want me to say? And I'm just going to say it that way. That doesn't feel good, to receive that kind of inauthentic message. Like, imagine if you're receiving a text message from a best friend. And you can tell when they're being inauthentic or they're authentic. You can tell when your sister or brother is being authentic, you can tell when your wife or husband is being inauthentic or authentic.

Miki:

And so it's just that, can we write copy, can we text, can we write our messaging in the same way as we're texting our best friend? And I think that is such an important way to think about messaging to people. Because we're just being bombarded with advertisements, with so much people shouting at us. And we don't want that. We want authentic truth, we just want that juicy truth. And I think that truth is really what, that truth, coupled with art, coupled with the right beautiful aesthetic, the right innovation that you would want to use where, on a daily basis. That together, creates change, creates culture shift. And I've seen that time and time again. Across Wild, across THINX and across TUSHY. All three of them share the same philosophy of best in class product, artful aesthetic design across every touchpoint of our brand, and accessible, relatable language across every touchpoint of the brand.

Brett:

I love it so much. And really, when you combine all of that, plus you go back to the starting point from your first book, Do Cool Sh*t, it has to be addressing something that sucks for you and sucks for a lot of people. Right? So it's got to be that. And so then, when it's addressing a real issue, and then you've got the artful design and best in class, and it works. And you got the accessible, relatable language. All that comes together and it just works.

Brett:

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Brett:

What's so interesting and what was so powerful for me. And I remember talking to the guy that was sitting next to me at CapCon, and I made a couple comments about this. I've been in the ad world for a long time. So there's the brand building space of advertising, which is interesting. There's direct response, which I followed and studied for a long time. And I've worked in the infomercial space and stuff. But you have this ability to create stuff that looks beautiful. Like, you just want to look at it. It's an ad for a bidet, but you want to look at it. But, it also kind of makes you say, I'd like to try that. Like, I would like a clean butt too. I would to do...

Brett:

Because I think sometimes people, they go too far into the art. And it's abstract, and like, I don't even know what you're trying to say to me. Or I'm talking about patent pending, and all aloof, and who cares. So, how do you strike that balance and how do you create something that's fridge-worthy? As you'd say, artful and fridge worthy. But also, that connects and makes you say, I want to buy that underwear. Or, I want to buy that bidet. How do you do that?

Miki:

Yeah. Well so first, just to quickly unpack the word fridge-worthy, for those who don't know what that term means. Fridge-worthy simply means the idea that, you know when you walk into your home, and you go to your kitchen and you see your fridge? You go out, before, you go to grab a beer or whatever from your fridge. You see your fridge, and on your fridge are emblems of your life. You see pictures of your family members, of your eight children in your 10 person family.

Brett:

They take up the whole fridge, exactly.

Miki:

Yeah [inaudible 00:31:16] all over. You have invitations to weddings, you have little postcards from family members, you have little pictures of nieces and nephews. Or whatever it is, right?

Miki:

Hi, Stan.

Miki:

And my challenge to my team has always been, can you create something so beautiful, so artful and so personal, that it can make the small real estate on your fridge? That it can really make that small personal space on your fridge, that it can take up that space. That you can make something for TUSHY or THINX so beautiful, something so cool, that it can live in your home in some way. And so we design from that lens. And from that lens that, again, hits you personally and makes you feel something.

Brett:

It does cause you to shift and think differently. Now it's not just about, well, I'm going to choose blue. Like, you're thinking about everything differently.

Miki:

Yeah. Like, what is it that's going to make, how does it make me feel? And that's a different lens to creating.

Brett:

For sure.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

So then, how do you blend fridge-worthy then with some true sales power, or some power to make people say, I want to buy this.

Miki:

So I always say to my team, in the art of it, I still need to know. I mean, it depends. Like you said, there's top of funnel stuff, where you want to create intrigue and mystery. And that kind of stuff is like, if you look at our TUSHY Bellagio spot that we just shot. I just shot this ad, where I finally figured out, where my friend is this genius rigging person. And he rigged 10 toilets with bidets on them, with our TUSHY Ace bidets on them. That we can play them like a piano.

Brett:

Like the Bellagio fountains?

Miki:

Bellagio fountain.

Brett:

I got to see that, then.

Miki:

I'll share, I'll text with you right after this. It's crazy. And so basically, it plays. So we made this like, (Beethoven's 5th). And just this wildly weird thing. And we don't show you very much about it, but it just says at the tagline at the end. Which makes you mysterious and makes you want to click and see what the hell this is. So there's that mystery and intrigue, which hooks you into wanting to know more.

Brett:

It's a curiosity play, yeah.

Miki:

Pure curiosity play, pure top funnel. Just stuffing people in. And then we spend the rest of the time, really converting them to the bottom, bringing them down the funnel. Educating them on the product, the value propositions and all of that. So that's the one strategy.

Miki:

The other strategy for top of funnel. I always think about prospecting. I always think about, how do you get people to both fall in love with our brand, with our ethos, with our playfulness, with our just [foreign language 00:33:56], with our love of life? They can feel it in this thing, but they're also understanding, what is the product? How does it work? Why do I need it? So it really answers those questions. And maybe like, why do I need it?

Miki:

Like, we just shot another commercial with the singing toilets, with the kind of the playing toilets. Where, it's this very Wes Anderson, weird thing. Where it's like, five people laying, they stick their heads in the toilets at once. And they're laying on these, which kind of represents the heated seat. And then all of a sudden, we start spraying. Like, I start kind of smushing ice cream on this guy's face. And then, this one woman takes a chocolate cake and squishes it in her white glove. And then she smacks it on the ass of white pants on this guy. So it kind of represents all taking a shit, basically, the chocolate looks like shit. And then the sprays go off, and then we get clean. And it's this debaucherous clean thing. And then we press the blow dryer, and then we're getting blow dried. So you're seeing the value, of how it works. Like, you're seeing, we press the remote, and then the nozzles go off and it starts spraying. It's clean. And then you press the dry, then it just blow dries it. So you see slow-mo, the hair blow dried. We walk out frame. So you're kind of, you're getting the idea of what this thing is. But you're still intrigued, tickled. You feel good vibes, you feel "very good vibes". You know?

Brett:

You're probably laughing. You're probably like, I can't believe I'm watching this. But it's also product demonstration in a really fun and creative and crazy way, which is super cool.

Miki:

Yes. And so, it's a lot of things. And I always look at, what are our best performing ads? Our best performing ads are the edutaining ones. Ones that are hilarious, and the ones that educate. Tells you, why you need it, how it works and how to use it.

Brett:

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Miki:

You know? But in a really simple, easy way. And so, yeah, it is an art and science, and they have to go hand in hand. And, creative and marketing always do sometimes have this natural tension, but I think it's a good tension if you have the right leadership.

Brett:

It's a healthy tension.

Miki:

A healthy tension, yeah.

Brett:

Love it. So one thing you talk about a lot, and I remember you showing these examples. That, you'll use actual statements from real customers. And you also talk about campfire stories, sharing campfires stories as a team or whatever, to kind of stir up creativity. So, can you talk about that a little bit? Like, how do you use customer statements in your ads? And then, what about campfire stories?

Miki:

Yeah. So, I always think like, our best advocates are our customers, our users, who love our products. It just, it makes so much sense. And so many times, companies are scared to, they don't want to bother their customers. But if customers love it, and you're asking them, hey, just fill in the blank. THINX is blank. Or, TUSHY.

Brett:

This is my favorite, yeah. Just fill in the blank. TUSHY is, fill in the blank.

Miki:

Fill in the blank. TUSHY is, blank. Just fill in the blank. And within 24 hours, we got 1000 responses. For things specifically, it was, THINX is Mary Poppins in my pants. THINX is strength, freedom and dignity for all women. TUSHY is...

Brett:

One of them was, eye candy butt bliss. I wrote it down. I got the thing.

Miki:

Yeah, eye candy butt bliss. It's like, TUSHY: you could eat off my butt hole. You know? And just like, my rusty starfish has never been so clean. Stuff like that, where it's crazy, hilarious, random.

Brett:

Especially when you know that it was a real customer that said it. It's like, okay, that's super fun. And I'm now totally entertained by reading this.

Miki:

Yeah, by real. And we always say, name of the customer, from a real pooping human. And so, we now use these campaigns, as actual campaigns and taglines for our company. Because our customers know what's best. And we don't have to oftentimes scratch our heads to ask ourselves, what creativity can we use? We can literally just reach out to our customer base, and they'll give us, and they're delighted in giving it to us. And if they see it in the world, they'll be like, oh my God, that's my line. And they now feel even more connected.

Brett:

And then they totally will put that on the fridge. They will totally put that piece, and share with everyone they know.

Miki:

And they'll share it with all their friends, tell everyone they know. And it engages people, attracts them. The same thing with PR. I talk about that a lot. Like, we do a ton of inbound marketing, inbound PR. And we've gone viral so many different times. And it's because, again, studying the psychology of people. Like, how do you create intrigue? How do you create mystery? Where, they want to complete the storyline. So often, people are like, send press releases, and hope that the press will write about them. But it just never works. It piles up on people's desks. Versus, you send these mysterious boxes where you have to assemble this thing. Or like, unscramble a riddle. So recently, we just launched our TUSHY Ace, part of our electric bidet seat with the most beautiful remote in the world.

Brett:

It's the heated seat, right? Which by the way, if you've never experienced a heated toilet seat, it is pretty magical, it really is.

Miki:

Heated seat, warm water, blow dries your butt. Best blow dryer on the market. It's not like where you have to still use toilet paper, because this is a nice strong blow dryer. And it looks an Apple product. It's the most gorgeous remote. Our design, it's just, it's the most beautiful product. And so, we were launching this. And our team, we were like, okay, we are going to create mystery around this product. And so, we put together these deck of cards. And these deck of cards that we made, we made actual TUSHY deck of cards, designed by hand, by my designers. And we had this instruction sheet for the press. And we said, pull out all the royal flushes.

Brett:

Nice. Royal flushes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:40:03] And so, they'd pull out the royal flushes. And they had to unscramble the royal flushes, based on the riddles that they were given. Like, for the diamond royal flushes, this is the riddle. And you had to unscramble it based on the different words. The letters that appeared on the 10, jack, queen, king, ace. There was a letter hidden, that then unscrambled based on the riddle. So then, it made the press have to work hard to actually unscramble and send the responses. And then once they get the TUSHY Ace product and install it, they're going to feel they've accomplished something. Like, they actually, they feel so much better.

Brett:

And they're so engaged, and you've delighted them.

Miki:

They're so engaged.

Brett:

You've just made their day in so many ways.

Miki:

Instead of just sending them a product, review it. You're almost like, dance monkey, dance. Versus like, let me bring you into this fun, mysterious story with us. And we're going to be surprised and delighted together. And we're going this extra mile for you, to make you just regale in the delight. And I think that, that is what people want in life. They want to be just surprised and delighted. They want to be regaled. And like, "Oh!". And giggle. They want their heart to flutter.

Brett:

They want magic, they want mystery, they want excitement, they want to be kind of caught up in something. Right? Not just reading.

Miki:

Who doesn't want to be caught up in this ,"oh', moment. And it feels so good and it just enlivens our being.

Brett:

So, how did that work out? How was the press' reaction to that?

Miki:

Well I mean, this one, we just sent them out actually last week, so we're still underway. But guess what? The fact that we had almost, I think it was like 20 press asked for these cards. Because first, we were like, we're going to send you a mysterious package. Are you willing to take it? We need your home address, because we're COVID times. And so we had, almost 20 press gave us their home addresses, to send them the mystery packages. And so that already means that they're hooked. And we did this before, for THINX. Where we had people go and smash bricks, and they had to open the bricks and look for these invitations. And 80 people showed up to our event, after they smashed the THINX. 80 press RSVPed. We had another event, where we poked a hold in eggs, and put these mystery scrolls in them. And then all 20 press showed up to our event, because they wanted to crack open the egg and look at the scroll. And we said, you can't open them until you come to the event.

Miki:

So it's just, creating the mystery, creating the intrigue. It's human nature that, when they start something, they want to finish it. They don't like incomplete story lines, they like to complete story lines. And when there's an incompletion, there's still this intrigue, this mystery that keeps you wanting more. And so, we're in that storyline right now, with the TUSHY Ace, and I'll let you know how it goes, but I feel very confident.

Brett:

Yeah. That idea of opening and closing loops. Once a loop is open, people want to close and they want to figure out. They want to solve the mystery. That's why cliffhangers work, and all of those things.

Miki:

And in relationship and romance. When you're romancing, you're seducing. It's the same kind of storyline. It's so much fun, that game.

Brett:

Yeah. And I know you've got to go, so I've got two quick things. But I also want to mention, just briefly. You talked about two stories, two events. Because you're the master of doing these just crazy, off the wall events, that also work. So, one was ButtCon, and one was the Funeral for a Tree, for TUSHY. Are those outlined in one of your books? Because even if nothing else...

Miki:

Not yet.

Brett:

They're not? Oh, dang it. Okay.

Miki:

Not yet, but my next, maybe. I might have a Do Cool Sh*t sequel, and talk about TUSHY in that.

Brett:

We'll highlight that, or I'll find the story, that I can put. Anyway, I'll let the audience [crosstalk 00:43:41].

Miki:

I'm happy to share them really quick. I can share them over the next couple minutes, no problem.

Brett:

Okay, just do it quickly over the next two minutes, yeah.

Miki:

Sure, yeah. So again, it's all about creating unorthodox events, unorthodox gatherings. That make people go, "Huh? What are you talking about? What is this?" So we held two kind of events before COVID happened. And we're going to now resume them once COVID's now finally, hopefully at bay. But one of them was called A Funeral for a Tree. And the other one was called ButtCon. The Funeral for a Tree is, we actually held a real funeral for a dead tree at the Judson Memorial Church, which is the biggest memorial church in all of New York City. In Washington square park. We had a 400 seat capacity, and we sold out. And we had a 25 part choir. We had Matthew Morrison, the actor, is one of our dear friends, playing the reverend. We had his wife, Renee, who is one of my best friends as well, who played Maple, the wife of the dead tree. It was just the most wild experience. And the people who came...

Brett:

People were reading eulogies. Which, I got to hear one. It was hilarious. Just super funny and well done.

Miki:

I mean, it was just comedy. It was sad, it was beautiful, it was inspiring. It was all of the above, and people left so inspired to save trees. [crosstalk 00:45:14] And to do it by buying TUSHY, by doing all kinds. You know? But it wasn't a marketing...

Brett:

It didn't feel like a sales pitch. It didn't feel a, "Hey, here's your coupon for TUSHY." As you walk out the doors.

Miki:

For one second. It didn't feel like. It just felt TUSHY opened my eyes to these important things. [crosstalk 00:45:31].

Brett:

We are killing a lot of trees because of toilet paper, and here's how we can help solve that.

Miki:

That's right. 50 million trees are cut down every single year because of toilet paper consumption. 30 million cases of urinary tract infections, hemorrhoids. All these health hygiene issues, not to mention planetary issues. All these things could be alleviated by just using a bidet, using TUSHY, under $100 product. You know? But we didn't even say any of that stuff at our Funeral for a Tree event. That was, we just put on this amazing event, brought to you by TUSHY. And people just were like, this was the most inspiring theatrical event I've ever been to.

Brett:

You get an insane press on it.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:46:07] ...

‍

They said, "What are you doing?"

Miki:

What are you doing here?

Brett:

And the press you got from both those events, to pay for that kind of exposure would be almost impossible. But you got it because you did some crazy stuff.

Miki:

Yeah. It was truly, again, another reminder that just, what you put in. When you put in, like, if you build it, they will come. And you have to build spectacles. Again, things that surprise and delight. Things that make people go, I need to go and see what this is about. And that's the most important thing.

Brett:

I love that, I love it. So I know, you've got to go. So just kind of in closing. If people are listening to this and they're like, I need more Miki Agrawal in my life. And so, where can they, one, go to find your books? But also, just experience your marketing. Because hopefully, this has opened your eyes a little bit. Like, you need to pay attention to what Miki is doing from a marketing standpoint, you're going to learn a lot. So, how can people get more Miki in their life?

Miki:

Yes. Well first, you can also always come check me out on Instagram where I answer most people's questions pretty directly. Like, people have questions, I'm pretty good about responding. So Instagram, just @mikiagrawal. You can also go to mikiagrawal.com. If you subscribe to my mikiagrawal.com page, you'll actually get one disruptive move every week to do for yourself and for your business. So it's 52 disruptive moves. So that's just on mikiagrawal.com. And of course go to helloTUSHY.com. Check it out, get a TUSHY bidet. It's the best gift of all time. Holidays, it's the gift. It's just the best gift you can do for yourself. I mean, period, end of story. From a health high hygiene, confidence, feeling sexy, feeling good perspective. And then you can also, oh, if you want to learn about the strategies. I mean, definitely, Do Cool Sh*t, Disrupt-Her, check out my books. But then, if you want to actually learn about all of my tactics, of all of my strategy and building my companies from zero to $100 million plus, I built an actual course called Zero to a $100 million on Mindvalley.

Brett:

Mindvalley, I'll link to that in the show notes.

Miki:

If you go to my link in bio on my Instagram, I link to a free masterclass, a one hour masterclass which goes into a lot of these campaigns. But then, it also links to the quest, the Mindvalley quest, Zero to a $100 million. So, definitely check it.

Brett:

Beautiful. Got to check it out. I got to check that out. I got to watch that. And I'm going through Disrupt-Her right now. I absolutely love it, I highly recommend it. I like the audio version. I'm an auditory learner. And you narrate the books, so I get to listen to more Miki as I'm driving around. So that's been awesome as well. So Miki, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this. I've been inspired, and got some new ideas cooking around in my head. I know other people have too. So, really, really appreciate it.

Miki:

Yay. I was happy to be here.

Brett:

Awesome, thank you so much. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the show? What do you want to hear more of? Less of? Let us know. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Brett:

Are you a D2C brand spending over six figures a month on paid media? If so, then listen up. My agency, OMG Commerce, and I have worked with some of the top eCommerce brands over the years. Including Boom, Native, Groove, Monan, Organifi and dozens more. And every year, we audit hundreds of Google, YouTube and Amazon ad accounts. And we always find either significant opportunities for growth, or wasted ad spend to cut, or both. For example, are you missing YouTube ads? Whatever you're spending on top of funnel Facebook, you should be able to spend 30 to 50% of that or more on YouTube, with similar returns. So if you're spending 300,000 to 400,000 a month on Facebook, you should be able to easily spend a 100,000 to 150,000 or more on YouTube. Visit omgcommerce.com to request a free strategy session, or visit our resource page and get some of our free guides loaded with some of best strategies for YouTube Ads, Google Shopping, Amazon DSP and more. Check it all out at omgcommerce.com.

‍

Nick Shackelford was a pro soccer player for the LA Galaxy turned online marketing super star. You’ve probably seen him featured in FOUNDR magazine or speaking on stage of the wildly successful event he co-founded - Geek Out. 

‍

I first met him when we both spoke at Ezra Firestone’s event in Denver several years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since. Nick is a master of media buying. He knows how to build agencies. And he has a really fresh take on creatives. We go deep into his creative process in this episode. Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

• How a lack of diversity in your ads could be killing your results.
• Nick’s agency’s creative process. This is pure GOLD.
• How to use Amazon reviews to jump start your creative process - This strategy is so simple, so effective, you’ll kick yourself for not having used it.
• How a tool called Monkey Learn can help you key in on the right words and hooks to use with your audience.
• Why audience targeting is nearly dead and creative is KING.
• How Nick uses Creative Strategist and why you should consider one too.
• How to work with the algorithm rather than against it.

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

‍

Nick Shackelford

   - LinkedIn

   - Twitter

Geek Out
   - Website

   - Events

Konstant Kreative‍

Structured Agency

Design Pickle‍

No Limit Creatives‍

Penji‍

Video Husky‍

Chubbies‍

Facebook Dynamic Creative‍

Josh Durham‍

Groove Life‍

Aligned Growth Management‍

Necklet‍

Monkey Learn Word Cloud‍

Luca + Danni‍

Northbeam‍

Triple Whale‍

James Van Elswyk

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

In this episode, we talk about the creative process that will supercharge your Facebook and Instagram ads. My guest is Nick Shackelford. You've probably seen Nick on stage at one of your favorite e-commerce events, or you've seen him featured in Foundr Magazine or in a host of other places online. More about Nick in just a minute. In this episode, we talk about the fact that audience marketing is nearly dead and why creative is almost all that matters. We talk about how Nick uses creative strategists and how you should consider using one too. We talk about how Nick use Amazon reviews to kickstart the creative process. This approach is so simple, so effective, so powerful, you'll kick yourself for not having used it before. We'll also talk about a tool that you can use to choose the right words and the right hooks for your ads. Plus, we'll unpack Nick's entire creative strategy. So lean in, buckle up, and please enjoy this interview with Nick Shackelford.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, attentive, One Click Upsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

Well, I am absolutely geeking out about this episode and this guest. That was a little bit of a pun, you'll find out more about that in a minute. But, longtime friend of mine, absolute rockstar in the space. If you're paying attention to digital marketing at all, you've probably heard of this guy or seen this guy or you've heard the name. And so, today I'm absolutely thrilled to have Nick Shackelford, aka The Shack, on the podcast. And we're going to dive deep into really several things related to marketing. And if you've been listening to this season one of the Spicy Curry Podcast, we're really talking about three things, right? Have something good to say, say it well, say it often. Regardless of what changes in the online world, you've got to do those things. And so we're going to talk about what's working now, what's not working now, how to crush it like Shack does.

Brett:

And so a couple of interesting things about Shack for those that may not know, he was a professional soccer player for the LA Galaxy, and then decided, "You know what? I want my field to be online marketing rather than running around the soccer field." And so we actually met. We met at Ezra Firestones event, right, Shack? We both spoke at Ezra Firestone's event. I don't remember where that was or when that was. Was it maybe Denver, I don't know, three or four years ago?

Nick:

It was. It was Colorado.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. And I just remembered two things about you. One, you had an amazing strategy for influencer marketing on Facebook, two, you were rocking a killer hoodie, and three, you just had this swagger about you. And then as I've known you over the years, you always have a killer hoodie on. So what is the secret to getting great hoodies?

Nick:

Oh man, I actually am wearing one of them right now. This is an appropriate hoodie when you're just working at home 24/7. So this is [inaudible 00:03:41], which is another e-commerce brand that if you guys are in the space, they definitely do some interesting things. You should definitely talk to Davies. He's a smart, smart guy as well.

Brett:

Would love that intro, let's talk to him. You look like you're ready for a mountain expedition and/or you're ready just to chill at home and be super cozy.

Nick:

I like options, so the fact that I'm able to do both at a will is what I want to play with. But no, what you do, it's been fun to watch the growth of this, especially with the people that are doing it for a long time, because sticking with your theme of say it often, those that are usually saying it often are able to continue to be around because they've been preaching the same thing consistently. It might change a little bit, which trust me, I think 2022 so far, I mean, we're only 19 days into it. But yeah, there are a lot of things that have changed over the times, but we haven't stopped saying the same things, right?

Nick:

We talked about this at GeekOut. You came and you were like, "Hey, this is the consistent stuff that you have to do." And it's shocking... Maybe it isn't shocking, maybe it isn't. People forget what they have to continually do, and so reminding them over and over and over, they just might not be ready to hear it. So I always say, you always start with the basis so everybody's at the same page, but then you can get really to the nitty-gritty stuff, which you do so well, so I see you, brother, on this.

Brett:

Love it, man. Love it. So let's do this, we're going to dive into all the stuff you're doing right now on Facebook and Instagram and other platforms and what your creative genius is. And got an episode in season one here with Justin Brooke, my man, talking GDN, but I know I've seen him publicly say, "If you're not paying attention to Nick Shackelford, you're missing out, because Nick or The Shack knows what he's talking about." So tell me about GeekOut, or tell the audience. I know about GeekOut. I spoke at the last one in LA, and it was fantastic. I had so much fun, so much fun connecting with your group, with your audience. I could really nerd out or geek out. But tell me about that event and kind of what's ahead for this year.

Nick:

I absolutely will. Yeah, I was very fortunate you made it out there. GeekOut started five years ago now, and it started with the fact that I couldn't go to my partner and tell her, "Oh, babe, look at these campaigns. Oh my gosh, isn't this great?" Roll her eyes, she just didn't really care as much. And then [inaudible 00:06:04] James, he felt the same way. So we were geeking and nerding on all these things. We have a different vibe about ourselves, and what I mean... I literally have to explain this. We have the ability to deliver content and aggregate a room of people that want to learn, make money, and continue to build their business, but still feel open to talk about, "Hey, my employee just sued me," or "I'm going through this issue with my partner," or "I'm going...." these really intimate things that you don't feel comfortable expressing unless you're in a room that's safe and comfortable.

Nick:

And it just started happening organically, because I'm that way, right? I'm okay with things being very public. There's a couple things that I don't want to have super public, but I'm pretty much 99% out there on every channel because I do believe building in public builds relation, and there was no better way for us to do this except doing it in person. So this started, again, five years ago, and I remember we did it in Las Vegas literally on a couch. We thought we were renting a mansion, of course. Like all things in Vegas, you thought it was, and we figured what it really was. We got there, and I remember there was a putt-putt. One of the selling propositions on Airbnb was, "Oh, use our little putting green, and it was amazing." It was two holes, and I'm like, "Oh my God, what are we're going to do?"

Nick:

So we had a good run, but the thing that we never lacked was the quality of content. And so we've ran it back. We've done Tel Aviv. We've done Barcelona. We've done LA, Miami, New York, and we're gearing up for this year. We will be the only event that will do, I think, double digits of events this year. We're planning for 10. I think we'll probably, knock on wood because of where the world is currently at, get about six. And the first one starts in Dubai right before Affiliate World, and then we'll bring it back in for San Diego and Miami. Brett, I think I told you this before, it's the one business that I have that makes me the least amount of money but brings me the most amount of happiness, because you truly get a seed connection, and it's something that we've really, really gotten away from in the world for the various reasons that all of us are experiencing together, but it's just become way more important to me.

Brett:

Yeah, it was just phenomenal. I can't wait. I've been talking to my team about it. I've been bugging you for dates, because I'm blocking these out. I'm coming to speak at as many of these as I can or attend those that I can't speak at. It was just an amazing place to be, other like-minded, super smart marketers. I know you've had this experience. You were talking about talking to your partner. You can't really talk about ROAS. She doesn't care, right? I can't talk about ROAS to my wife. She glazes over. But you become acutely aware of how many acronyms we use in this space, right? ROAS, LTV, AOV, CLV. It's never ending, but this is your people. You can geek out about any of those things, but you can also talk about deeper stuff, people stuff, preparing for exits, buying companies. It's an awesome group, testament to you and to James, but just high level people, man. I would put it on the short list. If you could only attend a couple events this year, make sure one of them-

Nick:

[inaudible 00:09:22].

Brett:

... is GeekOut. I can edit this out later if I need to. Is there a rebrand coming too? Is it going to be GeekOut, is going to be something else? Or should we talk about that?

Nick:

Yeah, absolutely, we should. It's going to be called a GeekUp for two reasons. One, we have to level up, and so adding in that geek element is something that we still want to keep. And two, there was already a trademark called GeekOut Events. So as much of the branding I want you guys to be like, "Oh wow, that's so clever," I'm like, "Well, we kind of got into a situation."

Brett:

We're geeking out and leveling up. We're geeking up. This is amazing. Yeah, that's [inaudible 00:09:58]. Well, its going to be... I don't care what you call it, but GeekUp is super cool too. So if you attend only a few events, make sure one of them is GeekUp. And so I'll link to everything in the show notes. You can google it and check it out and stuff like that too. So fantastic, man. Any other notes on the event itself?

Nick:

Well, okay, so the segue into what I'm focused on a lot right now outside of the three businesses is we started GeekUp because it was about sharing and learning and getting that feedback of what's happening, and that led me to Konstant Kreative. We have almost our first year under our belts, and it's purely content because... Dude, you're a YouTube guy. You do good YouTubes. We don't do YouTubes, but we do a lot of Facebook, and we do a lot of Instagram, and we do a lot of TikTok, and we do a lot of Snapchat. And I used to be such a big teacher and proponent of strategies and hacks and tactics. I'll raise my hand here, I was one of the biggest people talking about various hacks and strategies 2017, '18, '19. 2020, I got a little quieter. 2020, I got real quiet. In 2022, I'm on that same quiet band because it just isn't as sustainable as it once was. I don't want to say we did this on purpose, but I like to think I did or had a feeling, my spider senses, for the new Marvel movie, which is fantastic, is tingling, and I was like, "Dude-

Brett:

That is a good movie. And actually, quick side note, the new, or new-ish, depending on when you're listening to this, Spiderman movie got us into the whole Marvel series. We watched Spiderman No Way Home, and then now we're going back to the beginning. We're, I think, three movies into the... It's like 30 movies. If you do chronologically through the Marvel series, it's nuts, but my family and I, we're going through it all, so it's super fun.

Nick:

Oh my God, I am not a movie person, but I will watch though. It's culture. It's so culture. Okay. What put us into this position was understanding that content was never going to leave us, and so we put so much time and effort into building. We weren't first to do it. There's Design Pickle. There's No Limit Creatives. There's Penjee! There's Video Husky. There's so many other people that do this content on demand thing, but we had to do it ourselves, because arguably, I've never gone through a pandemic. I'm 31 years old. I didn't know what would happen if I couldn't understand how much revenue was being driven by each one of our employees across our entire company because I didn't know what I needed to go potentially [inaudible 00:12:26] so I didn't know what loans I needed to go get.

Nick:

I needed to know that I could do a dollar earned or average per each one of our employees contributing to the bottom line. Sometimes in just an agency space or sometimes in business space, you have admins or project managers that might not directly tie to bottom line. We know they impact it, but we don't really know what they drive. Designers are another one. Editors are another one. Copywriters are another one. Unless you're in this performance tower, you know each email or each thing you write, you get dollars back on. If you aren't structured that way, you're like, "Dude, I don't really know how much money's coming in from these people." So we actually built this service and fed it to ourselves. And I think the term is dog feeding ourselves.

Brett:

Yeah, so this is a Google term. So it's called eating your own dog food. They borrowed it from Purina or Puppy Chow or something like that, where literally that company, they would eat their own dog food. It's a metaphor for using your own stuff, right?

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

You believe in your product so much, you use it. Yeah.

Nick:

Oh, so thank you. I actually didn't know where that was coming from, and I'm glad you [inaudible 00:13:29]. We built it for ourselves because content... If you're like, "Nick, what are you about right now?" it's content, and it's volume of content at a cost effective rate. Listen, before the pandemic hit, a lot of people didn't really open up their mind to the quality of support, quality of company building that you can do offshore. I'm not saying outsource. This is a complete different thing. Outsource to offshore is completely different. Offshore are full-time your employees, your people, your values, your systems, your processes. Outsource is white labeling. You don't know what's going on. They're delivering you something, you're going to wrap in a bow, you're going to deliver. So I'm going to be very clear on that.

Nick:

This was something that when we started to understand quality of talent allowed us on the agency side to operate at 35, 40, 55% margin at times on various months, you can do the same exact thing on a content iteration, say. The only issue that a lot of people don't get right when they're like, "Hey, I need a performance editor," or "I need a performance creative person," it's because they themselves don't know what they want. Here's why. There's a subjectivity in this that everybody can't get away from in the romanticism toward a brand they own or towards the content that's being shot. I'm sure you experience this, or do you?

Brett:

Absolutely. Totally. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we are our own biggest enemy, or often the brand owner is their biggest enemy in terms of getting creatives that work, creatives that actually connect and compel and move people to take action. Yeah, sometimes we're romantic about what we think that structure should be or what we think that message should be rather than focusing on... Let's not do something that's completely off brand, of course, but let's do what works. And sometimes you have the brand, or sometimes the agency gets in the way of that.

Nick:

It's so true because we're hired to do two things. Now, if you're hiring a branding agency or hiring a shop that needs to be really up here and be oh, really meta on things, God bless. I'm not in the space to where I can afford to create something that doesn't drive revenue. You're in the same boat. We have to validate the costs that we have for a lot of our partners. And so when you have this subjective idea of what happens, and I'll get into what testing, what we're doing now, what 2022, at least the bets that I'm making in this first quarter on how we're building out our testing and how we're building out our, at least our internal content structure. And actually, I'll fucking go into all the things, because I think the more that this information gets out there, it might actually spark some interest on your side, and you might have some interesting feedback for me too, so-

Brett:

Totally, totally. We're going to talk about one thing really quickly, and then I want to dive into the specifics.

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

Actually, two things really quickly. What'd you say the name of the company was, the content company?

Nick:

Oh, Konstant Kreatives. Sorry.

Brett:

Konstant Kreatives. Awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. But I could not agree with you more, right? I think in fact, back when we first met in Denver at Ezra's event, a lot of people were talking about hacks and here's little tricks and tips and things you can do to make Facebook and YouTube and all that work. And certainly, there's always going to be some hacks, but success is way more, way more about having great creatives, sticking to the fundamentals, and just being relentless, relentless on testing, relentless on looking for new angles, and then really just being consistent in what you're doing and doubling down on what's working. And so love that you're doing that. I got to learn more about your company there too so I can refer some people to you. But yeah, so let's dive in there. What is your process then for finding the right angle and getting that... Because you talk about volume of creatives too, right? You got to be testing pretty frequently, especially on Facebook. Not as much on YouTube, but especially on Facebook and Instagram. What's your process like?

Nick:

This is something that we think is an ongoing debate, kind of ongoing analysis. Let's think of it this way, you used to go to optimize campaigns at an ad level or an ad set level or even the structure of the campaign level, and we're having to do a lot of this before we even get to the campaign launch. What I mean by this is, before the conversation of cancel culture or before the conversation of inclusion really was being had, a lot of the ads that we saw were generally white males, white females across every brand, across every company, thin, thinnish, and you didn't really think about, "What if [crosstalk 00:17:49]

Brett:

Which is really just silly. But you're right, that's just the way it was. Yes, it was crazy.

Nick:

Yeah, it was silly. Listen, I'm not ignorant to who I am and what I am, but when you look at brands that are buying this, brands don't have this data. You can't run a quiz to be like, "Hey, what do you... " I guess you could, technically, but I don't know how it would come across us. "Who do you identify with? Or what do you identify as? Or what race are you?" You can't necessarily ask that, but that's the type of [inaudible 00:18:17] that you have to get done. Say, when we give a shoot or when we give content for others to see, "Hey, what do we need?" We usually recommend, "Hey, we need two different races and two different genders, and we need sizes of those genders to be appropriate to what we actually think is our customers buying."

Nick:

It's a great example, the Team Chubbies. Chubbies makes unbelievable male board shorts. I think they get an underwear too now, but makes male board shorts. And if you watch the progression over time of who was used in their content, fit male, white or black, fit male, white or black, little thicker, white or black, little dad bod, white or black, little larger, white or black. Do you know why? Because they're looking at all the-

Brett:

That's their audience, right? How many fit dudes are out there? Right? Most of us have dad bods. Not you, you're a former soccer player, but yeah, dad bods are everywhere.

Nick:

These are the frat guys that are buying it. And they literally... I've listened and watched the progression of this, and they're like... I'm sure that some people want to aspire to look great, but there's a point where you can get turned off by this, and you're like, "That's not really who I am." So it's this progression, this conversation of the testing begins at the inclusion of what's in the content. That's just a side note. I went on a tangent. I apologize there.

Brett:

Yeah, but I love it. I'll just, I'll key in on that. And so it's a side note, but it's important. A buddy of mine runs an athleisure business and they sell a lot of leggings. And so their models are very diverse, Latinos, African Americans, whites, every race, but also normal looking people, right? These are not all 98 pound supermodel. It looks like normal people, but they're joyful and they're smiling. And they are killing it because people look at it and say, "Well, that's me. That's my body type. That's my style." And it's so needed right now, so I'm really glad you brought that up.

Nick:

It's so true. And it kind of goes down to the typical structures that we run if I were to get a little technical in this. We still launch with dynamic creative. We still launch with... Dynamic creative is probably the first step. If we don't have a full hard belief, and this is the campaign structure, if we don't have a full hard belief in any one direction, whether it's like, we know this is worked in the past, but we're just trying to iterate on the value prop, or we're just trying to iterate on the USB, the box opening, we're just trying to iterate on a specific thing, we will still let Facebook choose or dictate the direction we need to go into up into-

Brett:

So by dynamic creatives, you just mean you're... Explain that for people that don't know the Facebook platform well.

Nick:

Thank you very much. So when launching a campaign, there's DCT, dynamic creative testing, which is a tool that you let Facebook choose. Essentially, you're going, "Hey, we don't want to impose any campaign restrictions to force spend," let's say on an automatic budget campaign, an ABO. You go, "I just need you to spend all my budget on these specific creatives that I, the media buyer, have told you I want you to spend on." And CBO can do that too with a little bit of limitations, but that's easiest communication I can give you on that. The dynamic creative testing [crosstalk 00:21:11]

Brett:

You're basically saying, "Hey, here's our creatives, and Facebook, you go wild and you find the winner."

Nick:

Exactly. We are not imposing a restriction on where money can be spent. We're letting the campaign dictate that. And that is... It's basically taking away the bias that we have of letting Facebook say, "Hey, we have this algorithm, we have this info, we have these consumers, and we're going to run this type of campaign on it."

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Now I will have some of my media buyers look at me and go, "Chef, I won't always run this route," but that's the baseline that we start with, because if somebody has pushback on me, say, let's say David or Scott have a conversation, they're like, "Nick, I actually believe that's not the best use of this campaign, because we're only trying to compare two main concepts." And we'll say, Bernie says, "We'll use the athleisure brand here." We want to understand which color way of these leggings are going to be the one that hits or which price point of these leggings are going to hit. That doesn't need to be dynamic creative tested. That needs to be controlled and tested equally across the board. So that to me has probably been the biggest change. Before, I would launch all with minimum campaign budgets or some sort of structure where we're going audience testing, kind of put that after the fact, because it's not as impactful unless it's going to be purely based on the content or creative and the structure when you go live with it.

Brett:

Yeah. I love that. And so really, I mean, if you look at what is our job as advertisers, whether we're agencies or in house or solopreneur, whatever the case may be, our job is to make great creatives, but to feed the algorithm, to let the algorithm, whether that's Facebook, YouTube, or Google, let... The algorithm's smart. And in the long run, the algorithm's going to do a better job than you are in a lot of ways, so how can you feed it and give it enough creative so that it finds the winners? Or how can you do a very specific test? Like you were talking about, right? I'm testing two creatives, because I'm trying to find is it black or is it pink on the leggings that are going to hit, or is it this price or that price? That type of thing, a controlled test, but either way you're trying to say, "I don't know the answer here on what creative's really going to work, but we're going to find out." And then once we find out, then we're going to go all in on that, so-

Nick:

Because you and I both have these conversations with brands that talk about, "Hey, what's your brand book? What's your stance? What do you stand for? And they have the idea of who they want their customer to be, but it's not always what Facebook will agree to be or Google will agree for it to be. You have to let the replies come in. You have to let the data speak for itself. And I'm shocked. And I don't know if this is in your portfolio, we have about 116 brands right now, 117, I believe. The amount of post-purchase surveys on where you've heard from me or what information they're gathering is probably less than 15%.

Brett:

Totally, a very few of our clients are doing them. I think you've got to do it though, because you're going to be surprised by the answers you find out.

Nick:

Exactly, especially understanding touch points now the attribution is dropping a little bit, touch points and understanding where these people are coming from or how much I should be allocating per channel. We had a very, very intelligent brand, I'll say maybe 2020s, called Rove Concepts, which are a large... It's a larger retailer. It's a furniture, so purchase path takes a lot of time. You got to include your partner. A lot of it is generated interest on Facebook, but a lot of it is actualized on Google, XYZ. And these guys were making... This is the first company or brand that came to Jake myself and goes, "You know what? I understand that we gave you these [inaudible 00:24:37] a platform. I don't know if you guys are actually impacting the bottom line because it shows Google having way more conversions than you guys." I'm like, "Heck is going on?" I'm like, "Well, okay, I get it. I'm sure there's... It's an expensive piece. There's thousands of dollars. Can we just put surveys on the back of this? Or do you have this already live, or can you share this information?"

Nick:

A lot of what we started to see was, although that might not have popped up in the platform, a lot of it was saying I heard first about you on Facebook or Instagram, yet the conversion value, all the revenue was coming from Google. And I'm going, "You can't tell me to stop or that's going to be lowered." So we did a hard test turning off paid social, top of funnel. What do you know? Numbers dropped. Yeah, we wouldn't have been able to cover [crosstalk 00:25:22]

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. I was just talking to a buddy of mine, Josh Durham, who used to be the head of growth at Groove Life and at an agency, and he talked about the same thing, doing those post purchase surveys and realizing that, man, 70, 80% of customers are going to say, "Hey, I first heard you on social, I first heard you on YouTube," or something like that. And I love Google, right? I'm a Google guy, but search and shopping sometimes takes the credit, especially branded search. You need to run it, but branded search often takes credit for a sale that, really, Facebook or YouTube generated, right?

Nick:

Sure. Preach to the choir [inaudible 00:25:59]

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. So, hey, I want to circle back to creative really quickly, and then we can talk attribution again in a minute, because there's some important notes there. As far as creatives go, what is your process? How are you guys coming up with hooks for the actual creatives, and what types of creatives are you launching with? I just want to give people ideas on what should they be testing next or how should they go about their creative process, or how should they talk to their agency to get them to do things more like you guys? Can you talk about your creative process a little bit?

Nick:

I can, yeah. We have one baseline process that we run with or usually use outside of if someone already gives us [inaudible 00:26:39]. Say a brand was coming to us and they already really had, "Hey, we know who our girl or guy is. Here's what we've learned outside of optimizing and looking at the current campaigns," we start with this process where we begin on Amazon, we begin with Reddit, and we begin with competitors. We don't go to the own brand stuff just yet, because we don't want any biases coming in from marketing messages that consumers might be regurgitating back. If you look at Amazon, there's very honest reviews at one star, two star, and even the three star, very honest reviews that use layman's terms that are common, that they're looking for solutions or points. And a lot of it on Amazon, actually, they don't really care about the brand itself. From the experience, from the information I have, they're not necessarily going to Amazon to find Lulu Lemon, they're going to Amazon to price shop. They're going to Amazon for the efficiency and the effectiveness of getting that product as quick as possible.

Nick:

You're not going there looking for a specific brand. You're usually typing in the product in which you need. Hydration packets, coats, clothing, that's the things that you're really searching for, so you usually get people that don't really about crap about who the brand is or what, and they're not going to hold back from you, because it's pretty anonymous at that point, or what have you. So what we started to find out is, before a brand would come to us and before they're like, "I don't know what talking points or hooks or explanations that need to be in this piece of creative," we go to the Amazon reviews. We probably export between 50 to a hundred. We drop it into a word cloud.

Brett:

So you're looking at the actual reviews from those customers or from competitors and from that category as a whole?

Nick:

Correct. Thank you very much to the clarification. We do not go to the brand own yet. We go from the competitors of the same exact product. So if I'm selling leggings, I'm going to the number one competitor with the most amount of reviews, similar in the legging side. I want to know why this product is winning. I want those five stars and four stars, isolate those by themselves. And I want those one stars and two stars, isolate them by themselves. I use three as a lever if I don't have clear messages of things to say or not say based on the four and fives, and the ones and twos.

Brett:

Got it.

Nick:

Four and five might be skewed.

Brett:

Right.

Nick:

One to twos might be skewed, but the threes might you my answer if I don't find it in the two buckets tracking with me.

Brett:

Totally. And this is brilliant by the way. I absolutely love it, yeah, because you're looking for real pain points, real motivators, real things that customers care about, and you're looking for their language, which just makes all the difference in the world.

Nick:

Because we are going to do market stuff. We're going to try and be cool and cute and playful. We'll do our best to not, but we sometimes fall into these categories. And I'll use one brand for this called Necklet. Necklet created a latch system that's magnetic that allows for stacks of jewelry to not get tangled. Brilliant. For women, or men, mainly for women that are wearing necklaces that don't want it to be tangled because they want to wear multiple, it's absolutely brilliant. It's genius. And the mechanism is a magnet on the back. What is it solving? Is a magnet strong enough? Is it latching? Does it pull your hair? These things are questions that the brand might not necessarily know. But guess who's going to know? The people that are buying it and the people that are leaving those reviews on Amazon. They [inaudible 00:29:51] will tell you exactly how feeling, whether this is a dumb concept or not.

Nick:

So we found out a lot of this. No matter how beautiful it might look, no matter how the feeling of joy might be portrayed, the mechanism is still the most unique value proposition for them, so we better go speak specifically towards. That, to me, was after we got from a competitors, put it into a word cloud. I think the easiest one you guys could use is probably Monkey Learn. It's called monkeylearn/wordcloud. I think you have to potentially set up an account. It's free, but if anybody else has a word cloud generator that is better than that, please hit me up. I'm always looking for more tools.

Brett:

Monkey Learn, and you're looking for... And this is like a word cloud builder?

Nick:

Yeah. So it's called Monkey Learn, and then it's a forward slash word-cloud or wordcloud. I'm not sure exactly on [inaudible 00:30:36], but I can pull it for you right after this. And that way, I'm able to aggregate all my star reviews. I would say it's easier if you... The more, the better. The more, the more accurate. Drop it into this word cloud, and it's going to generate and pull up the most commonly used words and tones. And that way, now here's your messages. Here's your information. Here's the things that you need to use. This, Brett, I'm telling you, this thing has allowed processes. Because if you don't know where to begin, that's where you go right away.

Brett:

Yeah, because if you don't have something like this, you're just going to begin with that discussion around the boardroom. It's going to be virtual, right? But you're talking to the client, you're talking to the brand owner, you're talking to the marketing director, and you're like, "Well, hey, our customer is this, and they believe this and they want that." And that's valuable, but this is amazing, where you're saying, "Okay, let's see what the people, the real customers are actually saying, and let's aggregate that. And let's look for tone and let's look for actual words." Yeah, just absolutely brilliant. I love it.

Nick:

The next step that we take from is... Say we already have this, say somebody already has this understanding, the next step that we have here is, where are you lacking? Where do you think your brand or your audience has not been addressed? This is usually right where we get in the conversation of inclusion, usually where we get in the conversation of, it seems like we're over indexed on a certain demographic, a certain gender, certain size. That, to me, is something that we really, really spend a great amount of time. We're very fortunate. We're in LA, so we have a melting pot of people to pull from, and that's something that we know, as a unique advantage, we have to leverage. So that generally is our second conversation that we have, of like, where can we do some tests to where we're not doing something that's not on brand, we're not doing something that we have fear of isolating a consumer, but we have the ability to actually get real learnings in a direction that we never ran before. Here's an example, Luca Danni, which is [inaudible 00:32:29]. It's a bangle and accessory company, bracelet.

Brett:

It's called Luke and Danni? Did I hear that right?

Nick:

Yeah. It technically reads Luca Danni, but Luke and Danni is what it is, and they sell bangles, they sell bracelets. Well, in this test, they usually always show the wrist, and it's the wrist of the woman buying it and the various women buying it. And they actually started seeing a little bit of a performance increase on the thicker in which the wrist began to [crosstalk 00:32:59]

Brett:

Interesting.

Nick:

And I'm like, why is this? Then you look at the export of the purchasing behavior of the people buying it. You have the strong representation of the Bible bell, strong representation of the south, strong representation of a little bit of the east coast. But you're like, "Wow, okay. I think some of our demographics are not the assumed thinner audience that we once believe there to be, so how do we mix this up?" So now we have wrists of all shapes and sizes. You hear me?

Brett:

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're there. I thought I lost you for a minute. Yeah, so wrists of all shapes. This is so important. What's really interesting, I going to key in on something that Ezra Firestone mentioned to me a couple years ago, where they notice, BOOM!, their brand BOOM! and Cindy Joseph, it's really women over the age of 50, skin care, makeup, and really good stuff, but they found... They thought, "Well, what if we went a little bit younger with our models, or a little bit younger with our ambassadors that we have in the videos." And they started getting complaints. People were reaching out saying, "That's not me. This person is younger than me." Right? We sometimes forget that people really are looking for, "Can I see myself in this video? Can I see myself in this product. And is this for me?" And if it's not, then they're likely not going to buy, right? And so fascinating test, that, hey, thicker wrists, bigger wrists lead to better results. Diversifying your models leads to better results. You got to explore and got to test. That totally makes sense.

Nick:

Anybody can do this too. That's probably the biggest thing that I want to drive home, is those testing of using Amazon first and Reddit first because the natural communication, community already being built there within your competitors. It's not rocket... The way you present that information, the way you speak to it really will pull in on the expertise that you have, but this isn't rocket science, man. We have anywhere between 100 to 150 brands at any time. And if anybody's looking for analysis of their creative or performance or angles or whatever they're taking, they go this direction, because they know they can get it, they can get it quick, and they don't need to wait on other people to do it. So it's something I would definitely like to pass that forward.

Brett:

Yeah. Love it. What else? What do you see working on Facebook right now? And I know that this stuff has a tendency to be short lived, but in terms of length of videos, what are you finding that's working, or maybe, maybe there's different links, different angles for cold traffic versus remarketing? What are some of the kind of tips and ideas you're seeing there?

Nick:

Well, I'm going to caveat this [inaudible 00:35:25]. We are using two tools. So we're using North Beam and we're using Triple Whale, because we are making-

Brett:

Both fantastic tools.

Nick:

I completely agree. We have to make sure that we're looking at the correct amount of information or data and it's purely based upon a third party tool that's giving me the direction of, okay, this campaign, this ad set, this purchase path is making the most sense for us, so-

Brett:

Yeah. And just a quick note here, because I know the guys at North Beam and at Triple Whale, great platforms, but I'll talk North Beam for just a second. The way it works, it's basically first party data. So they put a first party pixel on your site, they put DNS record there where now they can have an infinity timeframe-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... click attribution, right? So instead of attribution being only seven days, right? So after click happens, and after seven days, Facebook can no longer track it. With something like North Beam or Triple Whale, you track it forever, right? And you can go back and say, "Hey, this one YouTube click or this one Facebook click led to a customer who bought 20 times." Right? You can see all that data, because then these tools integrate with Facebook, Google-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... Shopify, your email platform. They pull all that stuff together. So anyway, this isn't a commercial for those tools. We don't make anything from those tools, but you need that data to know what's really working and what's not.

Nick:

Well, we never used to have... We always needed this.

Brett:

We both needed it, yeah. And [crosstalk 00:36:42]

Nick:

We can get close without it. And now we can't. So now when I'm looking at campaigns, so I'm looking at what's working. Right now, let's go January 19th, 11:50 AM, Wednesday, 2022. What's working right now is images. I'm now getting images with plain background colors, bold colors. I'm saying yellow blues, pinks and purples, and big bold text. Call outs of the pain points of the consumer. And if I were to be more specific, this is primarily top of funnel, and we're having very minimal branded elements here, because all I'm trying to do is build engagement, build a little bit of direction that I'm trying to go in this place, it's just the right path for me to go down towards, and it is the quickest thing that can be launched. It is the easiest thing that can be made.

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Pain points, value propositions, big, bold colored text, and maybe, if you really want to include it, what does the product look like? Is can just be a product on a white image or somewhere the left or right side of things. We're using this top of funnel aggressively for two reasons. One, if we can get the engagement, and if we can get some sort of understanding of people agreeing with it, or maybe it say other way, not agreeing with it, but that you're usually just seeing the comments, the shares or the engagement overall, I know I'm on the right path. I need to make an image or a more detailed image, shorter video or longer form video to run top of funnel. This is Facebook specifically. So our launching period right now is major callouts with the value propositions or with pain points that we believe for each brand with that color text to kind of pop off page. Second, if that is already being done or something that's already going down that path, we are going with 30 to 45 second videos.

Nick:

I was a huge proponent of sub 30, generally around 15 seconds, but I need this bigger audience for people to pull from, because things on platform, the pools of remarketing are not as quality as they once were because of the drop in reporting. So the more that we can have people engaging or watching the videos longer, I'm running all of our remarketing, or at least our reengagement middle of funnel, off of these audience and pools of creative that we're actually spending more time, that these consumers are spending more time on.

Brett:

Got it. So you're running... So yeah, I remember, and I'm not a Facebook guy, but I remember people talking about, "Hey, shorter creatives are working 15 seconds and things like that," which I'm sure is still the case to a certain degree. But what you're saying, and this totally makes a lot of sense, is 45 seconds, 30 seconds to 45 seconds to your cold traffic audiences, because then you can remarket to people that have watched half of that or all that or whatever the case may be, and now that's a much better audience than maybe the remarketing audiences you would get from someone who engages with a 15 second video. Did I understand that correctly?

Nick:

You did, because we need the... Well, for just a stronger audience. And I don't know what happened. I think the biggest thing that we've seen, if we're talking remarketing, the content, I'm not too sure. I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking about what's working across the board for our brands because it's very [inaudible 00:39:44] and very particular.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah.

Nick:

But one thing that is been a constant is, we need more periods of time. We used to be able to be very segmented, and like, "Cool. One to seven day, you're going to get this message. 8 to 14, you're going to get this message. 15 and on, you're going to get this. It's not working for us. We can't get... I hope it is for others because it was so incredible to push them down a purchase path, but we're going 30 days, 45 days, the largest pull in which we can get from, I think the largest pull is probably around 90, but the biggest pull that we can pull from, I want that to be my remarketing pull, and it's just a mixture of various engagement testimonials of videos of them reinforcing the product or the brand. That's the only thing that I know I can get some consistent benchmarks on, because other than this, there's just no consistency.

Brett:

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And as platforms are being more restricted on audiences they can build and how they track and how they report, I think in a lot of cases, we're just going to have to simplify, right? Some of the hyper segmentation of this seven day audience, 14 day audience, 30 day audience, some of that is going away. We're seeing that on Google too, actually, so I think that's probably pretty widespread at this point. Going simpler, going broader makes sense. How are you coming... Because I know, especially on Facebook, Facebook is hungry for new creatives, new concepts. How do you go about refreshing content so regularly and finding winning angles? Any insights there on process that you can share?

Nick:

So I don't have a... Ah, I got some stuff. So I don't have a firm one on this because it really is going to depend on budget. So I'll put a caveat there. The more money you have, the general amount of testing that you can do at higher volume. The only difference between a big budget and a little budget is that a big budget learns quicker, so it's no difference. The process is [crosstalk 00:41:37]

Brett:

You're doing the same things. It's just the speed at which you're doing them is what the budget really dictates.

Nick:

Exactly. Exactly. So I want to put, "Oh that's my brand is not spending 25,000, 50,000, whatever it is." I can't do that. You can, you just can't do as much or as quick. We did start the Konstant Kreative, why we built this is because we believe that there's an internal revision of content. There's an internal revision in planning of strategy for content. And then there's a marketing message. Generally, if it's evergreen, without talking about mother's day, father's day one-off moments, if the general process is happening, we are iterating on a seven day and a ten day window. Let me explain. Our current organization structure is, we operate in a pod system. So we have our copywriter, our senior media buyer, junior media buyer account manager, and channel specific buyers that we need to plug in.

Nick:

But the general makeup is admin, media buyers, strategist. We then started to build a new department, which is our creative strategist. Their core role is to analyze campaign performance on creative specifically. They don't care about the audience. They don't care about interests. Just the performance of the creative. Give that feedback into the client. Give that feedback into our creative director to shoot more content. And their job is to come up with the concepts of, "Here's why here's where I think the angles are going to be going towards." Now, it's various and different for all because the budget's going to be different for all, but it's usually out of two things. The increase of quality of life, that's one core concept, core understanding. Why is this product going to increase the value of my life or make my life better? Then, in the same flip side is, if I don't have this, how terrible or how poor or how unfortunate or how much struggle will my life have?

Nick:

So with those two deciding factors of how much I'm going to increase or how much I'm going to decrease, then we come into the concepts of positioning for each one of these products. So with that frame of mind, we have a seven day sprint to a ten day sprint of analysis, seven days to get the campaign running and live. First two, generally speaking, are not spending a tremendous amount of money, unless something works or unless we have... This is a commitment that the brand or us have [inaudible 00:43:48]. We are spending this money. We got to learn. I say 10 days because there's a little bit of updates attribution. You know, if you're running Facebook, data comes in very sporadically, so we want a little bit more time to run this. It's unfortunate because, at least for our team right now, gone are the days of launch a campaign on one day, slam budget on the second day, turn the campaign off on things that didn't work by the third day. That's more drawn out to a five day, seven day [crosstalk 00:44:14].

Brett:

Yeah. Totally.

Nick:

So if I sat there and go, the analysis that the creative strategy team needs to be doing is on that three day, five day, seven day, ten day window, because that's going to include a full week plus weekends and give you back on that Monday, because you're usually not going to get that launch data on that early, early day. To me, this is an ongoing iteration, it's an ongoing sequence of conversation with the brands, and I'm actually doing a pretty decent case study on what's happening on this. I'm going to unveil it live at Affiliate World, because we're working with Motion app-

Brett:

Nice.

Nick:

... which has some really good data on what's happening, where it's happening, and what insights that are having on their campaign, elements needed in creative. And then we have a large volume of assets on the constant side. So I'm trying to pull all the assets that we've seen perform before and all the assets that we've seen being requested, trying to pull a correlation between the two. And it should be some interesting stuff that we're going to find out, because a lot of this that people don't have, and I hate to hate to call it out, but they don't have a process of feedback loop. They don't have the understanding of when they need to go back and analyze and launch it. They can come up with great ideas, but how long does it take for them to make that test, or how long does it take for them to get information back to the people to create more?

Brett:

Just absolutely fantastic. So unfortunately, we're kind of running out of time, which is a bummer because I would like to continue to geek out or geek up here with you, but I want to kind of go high level for just a minute and just a few questions that I think will help anybody. And I think as people have been listening, hey, we got really technical, we got into some details, so pass this on to your media buyer. If you are a media buyer, I'm sure you're just salivating and loving every second of this. Let's talk high level, Nick. What should people be focusing more on in the coming year? And what should they be focusing less on? Meaning, kind of how are things shifting? What do we need to be really keying in on to get results? And maybe, what are some things that used to be important to pay attention to that now aren't?

Nick:

Great question. Fantastic questions. If you're media buyers or your agencies or your team is coming to you with audience insights or campaign structure insights, I would encourage them to let that go and encourage them to stop spending the time in finding structures and more spending the time on the research of what are these campaigns doing? What are the messages being said in the creative or content? And it has always been content first.

Brett:

All right, Spicy Curry listeners, here's the deal. Nick's audio cut out towards the end. Now, the good news is you heard 99% plus of what Nick had to say, but what you missed is kind of important. You missed how to get a hold of Nick. How can you follow him? How can you learn more about him? How can you get in touch with his agency? And so I'm going to tell you right now. The first thing is you have to follow Nick on Twitter. His Twitter game is an A plus. If you're in the DOC space, e-comm space at all, you got to follow him. And his handle is @iamshackelford. So letter I A-M Shackelford, so check that out. His agency is Structured. So structured.agency, check it out. They cut their teeth on paid social, but they also, Nick and Chase Dimond run an email marketing agency, so check out structured as well.

Brett:

And then one of my favorite events now. I think you should check it out. The events do get a little bit technical and nerdy, but GeekOut that Nick runs with James Van Elswyk, great event. So that's geekoutedu.com. So, check that out. You will not be disappointed. And as always, we want to hear from you. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with friends. Also, this is a brand new podcast, so go give it a rating on Apple iTunes, if you don't mind. It will make my day. It will allow other people to find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Few people understand Facebook Advertising and Direct Response Marketing like Molly Pittman. You’ve probably seen Molly on stage at events like Traffic & Conversion Summit or Social Media Marketing World or you’ve seen her and Ezra Firestone create amazing content through Smart Marketer. In this episode we dive into a subject that is often glossed over - creating great offers and building acquisition funnels. Without a great offer, your ad efforts will fall short. And great offers aren’t just about discounting. 

‍

It’s the perfect subject to help you win in a privacy-first online world. 

‍

Here's what we cover:

• How Smart Marketer and BOOM are building and launching new acquisition funnels every month.
• How to test offers via email before investing in ad dollars.
• What metrics we should pay attention to in a post iOS 14 world.
• 3 ways to get more testimonials.
• What is likely to change in the future and what most likely won’t. 

‍
Mentioned in This Episode:

Molly Pittman

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

Smart Marketer‍

Smart Marketer Podcast‍

Ezra Firestone‍

Traffic & Conversion Summit‍

John Grimshaw‍

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

“5 Makeup Tips For Older Women”‍

“The State Of Paid Ads In 2022”‍

“Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Good to Great” by Jim Collins‍

“Turning the Flywheel” by Jim Collins

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest minds, some of the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that all it takes is three things to grow. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often. My guest today is Molly Pittman. She's the CEO of Smart Marketer in partnership with Ezra Firestone. We're talking about crafting irresistible offers and building acquisition funnels for e-commerce.

Brett:

So, lean in, buckle up, and enjoy this episode with Molly Pittman.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

My guest today really needs no introduction, but I'll give a quick introduction just in case. Today, we're talking about a variety of things. We're going to talk about getting the right offers, and we're going to talk about acquisition funnels. We're going to talk about getting the right mindset as a market, as a media buyer, and as an advertiser.

Brett:

I have the one, the only, Molly Pittman joining me on the show today. Really, if you haven't had the privilege of hearing Molly Pittman, well we're about to fix that, but you've missed out. Molly is a legend, debuted at Trafficking Conversion Summit. It's been years and years ago now, I don't even know how many years. But just blew up and everyone was like, "Man, Molly Pittman is the best," and she is.

Brett:

Now she's partnered with my buddy, Ezra Firestone. Molly is the CEO of Smart Marketer, and I get to observe what she's doing there, what the team is doing there, and they're cranking out amazing content, amazing training that I get to be a part of at some level, which is super fun for me. We're going to dive into what's working now and a variety of other things.

Brett:

Molly Pittman, welcome to the show, and thanks for taking the time.

Molly:

Hey, let's do it. What's up, Brett Curry?

Brett:

What's up? What's up?

Molly:

I'm so happy to be here. I'm so happy to be here. Hello to all of you listers. You're listening to an awesome podcast, huh? When Brett reached out to do this, I was like, "Hey, it's about time." I know you've had podcasts in the past, but excited to hear you more regularly. Yes, love working with you Brett, from the agency side of things, the faculty side of things at Smart Marketer. All of our students love everything you have to share. So, thank you for having me.

Brett:

We get to collaborate on some content. Any time I can go somewhere and hang out with you, John Grimshaw, and Ezra Firestone, I am saying yes to that. Anytime I can make it happen, I'm doing that, because you guys are awesome. [crosstalk 00:03:14].

Molly:

I don't know how much work we get done, but we have a lot of fun.

Brett:

A decent amount of work.

Molly:

I'm kidding.

Brett:

Totally. When we get together, like the last time we all met at Ezra's house, Ezra just cooked some really fancy, simple... He went into full-on chef mode for everybody, and it was pretty amazing.

Molly:

Hey, Ezra is the servant leader. I think we were there-

Brett:

He really is.

Molly:

... hosting a live workshop, and Ezra was like, "Hey, my job right now is to cook and make sure you all are fed." Good example of leadership right there.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:03:49] make some lattes, or pour some espresso shots. He had this amazing espresso machine-

Molly:

"What do you need? I got it."

Brett:

Yeah. The funny thing is, I'm like, "So Ezra, are you going to drink some espresso?" He was like, "No, I gave that up." He quit. All right, so you're just making for everybody else.

Molly:

That is something that I love about what we're doing at Smart Marketer, is its different from any culture I've ever been a part of, even if it's a day of consulting inside of a business where we really do have fun first. We get our stuff done. We meet our goals. We serve the world. I think that that fun part is what a lot of people are missing out on. It is okay to have fun, and it actually makes the rest of it way more enjoyable and profitable.

Brett:

It's stress relief. It allows you get the right mindset, like fosters creativity when you're having fun and enjoying what you do, and enjoying who you're doing it with. Yeah, you guys do such a good job with that, and Ezra kind of drives that forward where it's like to serve to the world unselfishly and profit that mantra is true. It's not just something that sounds good, or sort of feels good, or looks good on a shirt. It's the way you guys live and the way you guys operate.

Brett:

I think it's part of the reason why we get along so well. We're huge advocates of culture, and putting people first, but also letting people shine and be themselves. You should enjoy working with one another. It makes a difference.

Molly:

Have more fun, y'all.

Brett:

And have more fun.

Molly:

It also allows a lot more longevity in this business. This year, I've been doing this 10 years, which isn't as long as a lot of you, Brett, or people like Ezra, but it's still a decade.

Brett:

Wait a minute. That sounded a veiled "old person" comment there.

Molly:

Well no, I just know your story.

Brett:

It's all good.

Molly:

You have seniority.

Brett:

A little bit. A little bit, yeah. In Internet years, a decade is forever. Yeah, I started like 2004, so I'm definitely the old dude when it comes to all that.

Molly:

Yeah, but you know a lot of my story where I had the opportunity to intern, and then become the VP of Marketing at Digital Marketer, and had an awesome time at that company. But man, I was grinding then. A lot of times, I felt like crap. To be in a situation where I still get to serve the market, still get to teach, still get to be in this business, but feel really good about it, the best part of it is I know I can do it for so much longer now.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly:

It's a long game. It's not a short game, y'all.

Brett:

I'm really glad we brought this up. It was not planned. That feel good, have fun, and it will bring out the best part of you when you work as well. You'll be able to produce better when you're doing those things.

Brett:

Let's dive in, Molly Pittman. We've got a lot of ground to cover. We're going to talk mindset. We're going to talk tactics. We're going to talk strategy. I also want to talk about your dog rescue. We'll get to that in a little bit. Let's talk about offers for a minute. Those that have been listening, and hopefully you're listening to every episode in season one of this podcast, we're talking about something good to say, saying it well, saying it often.

Brett:

One of the things you and I were chatting about, and I love this, is that you're really focusing on your offers right now, and what offers are working, and what offers are not working. It really digs into that saying things well, and also saying them often. Talk to me a little bit about... We have two angles we're going to look at. We've got Boom on the e-commerce side, Smart Marketer which is kind of on the info training side, but what offers are working right now?

Molly:

Yeah, great question. First, I want to talk about what an offer is. I realized during our Mastermind call last week that people use this word to describe a lot of different things. That causes confusion in itself. There are a few different ways to talk about an offer. Really, what I'm talking about today are acquisition offers. Essentially, what vehicles are we using to start a conversation with someone who's never heard of our brand before, and turn them into a buyer?

Molly:

A lot of times, that means a lead magnet, or a pre-sale article, or some sort of coupon. It definitely depends on the business and where you are currently. The more, especially post-iOS 14 with all the crazy stuff happening in paid media right now, the more that you can focus on your offers, the better that everything is going to go. I mean that in a few ways. Number one, putting more time into offer creation. I would say in both businesses, other than making sure our products, the things people are buying, are good. Other than that, I would say offer creation is where we spend most of our time, at least at the C level.

Molly:

When it comes to marketing strategy, offer creation is where we spend most of our time. Sometimes, we'll release an offer that John, Ezra and I have maybe spent 15 hours discussing. It looks like an opt-in page that took 30 minutes to write, but so much time and effort went into the psychology of what it is, and the delivery of what it is, and how it sets us up to sell. It's really, really spending time here. As the CEO, I'd be like this is one of my still most important duties every single day.

Molly:

The second part of it is thinking about the way you deliver it. People miss out on this part of offer creation because what we don't realize is that someone might be interested in solving a particular problem, or they might be interested in a particular topic. But they may not be interested in the way you're delivering it. Let's take Boom for example, a pre-sale article that Ezra has been using for over five years, that's the best acquisition offer ever created for that business is five makeup tips for older women. Simple pre-sale article, we optimize for purchases, there are different products on the page. It's an amazing, amazing pre-sale article.

Molly:

Well guess what? It also works really well as a lead magnet. A way we've been able to scale that business is to take that pre-sale article, turn it into a simple PDF, and put it behind an opt-in wall. There are some people that would rather give their email in exchange for an asset, and see that as higher value. There are some people that would rather read an article. So, this isn't just about the creation of new offers, but also the repackaging of assets that you already have to deliver them in a way that's going to reach more of the market that you're trying to reach based off of how they like to consume information.

Molly:

It's why videos and still images are equally as important on a paid traffic platform, because there are some people that like people. There are some people that react images. It's important to keep both of those in mind.

Brett:

I love that. So, what is the offer, and really crafting it and thinking about how do we make this offer irresistible, how do we craft this article so that someone says, "I have to have that. One, that designed just for me. Two, that's solving a real problem or it's meeting a real need. Three, I got to have it right now." [crosstalk 00:11:29] those things. Then also, how you actually deliver it.

Brett:

I want to break that down just a little bit. You had mentioned that sometimes you, John, and Ezra spend 15 hours crafting an offer where it looks like just a simple page, but you're really thinking about this. This goes way beyond the, "Oh, should we do a 10% discount? Or a 15% discount?" That's what I want to talk about here.

Molly:

Yes, but it's also different. What I would see, I would say, in 90% of students, is they spend those 15 hours on the ad, and "Oh, the offer, I'm just going to throw a page up there." It's like, no if you have to choose, it should actually be the other way around.

Brett:

The offer, yeah. Yeah, it totally makes sense. Walk us through a little bit. What is your process as you're thinking about crafting an offer? What questions are you asking? What are you thinking about? What do you want to have in front of you as you're building that irresistible offer?

Molly:

Of course. The first question is, what do we need? What need is there in the business that we are solving with this offer? So, the need might be "It's Q4 and we want to monetize, we need a sale, we need a promotion." Or the need might be, "Hey, we need more of an evergreen acquisition offer-"

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:12:48] need as business [crosstalk 00:12:49].

Molly:

As a business, exactly.

Brett:

Yep.

Molly:

So, is it more promotional? Monetization? Or do we need something more acquisition that's evergreen that's going to continue to bring new customers in? It always starts with what does the business need right now? We try to create one of these in each business once a month we're creating a new offer. A lot of times, we're using other offers that we've created in the past, but we try to create one new offer every single month. It first starts with "What do we need? What does the business need right now?"

Brett:

Awesome. Then what comes next? You understand "This is what we need. We need something evergreen. We need a quick hit in this area. This is what need as a business." What do you look at next?

Molly:

What are we going to sell? What is the true end goal of this offer? Maybe the end goal is for Smart Marketer, we're going to sell our Smart Paid Traffic course, and we want to do that on an evergreen basis. We always work backwards with offers. If you don't, you're going to end up with a funnel that doesn't really make a lot of sense, that might have a really attractive front end offer, but doesn't transition to the sale, which is the opposite of what we're looking for.

Brett:

Yeah, totally, totally makes sense.

Molly:

Then we pick-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:14:10]. Yeah, please keep going.

Molly:

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Then we pick the medium, so what medium do we feel is best suited for this particular scenario? That definitely comes down to business type. It comes down to what's already working in our business, what can we do more of, also what can we do that's different from what we've done in the past because maybe we have four or five evergreen acquisition offers running in our ad account. To add another, we either need to go after a different audience or we need to have a very different offer type that isn't going to compete with what we're currently doing.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Let's look at some examples here related to Boom that I think will help people a lot. You guys are working on an acquisition funnel every month, and that acquisition funnel I would assume, starts with an offer. Is that where that begins?

Molly:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brett:

What does that look like? Can you talk about any examples there for Boom?

Molly:

A great example of this is going back to "Five Makeup Tips for Older Women", the pre-sale article. We know that that works, so we know that this audience wants makeup tips, or they want to have discussions around makeup. What is something similar but different that we could do? Last year, we launched a lead magnet. We switched the delivery. It's not a pre-sale article. It's something you're opting in for. We're collecting the email address, and then going for the sale.

Molly:

So, using what we know works, but changing the conversation a little bit. Instead of five makeup tips, it was, or is, a 10 Minute Makeup Guide. So, still speaking to makeup, but now speaking to women who are less maybe concerned about the tips, but are more interested in the fact, "Holy crap, this only takes 10 minutes." That's an awesome speed and automation hook. That would be a good example of saying-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:16:16] how to take care of your makeup, or how to do your morning makeup routine in 10 minutes or something like that, that's kind of the angle or the thought?

Molly:

Exactly. That came from a need of we have scaled the current evergreen acquisition offers as much as we can across our paid traffic sources. We need something new to talk about. We need to be able to walk into the party and have a similar, but different, discussion. Okay, let's change the topic and let's change the vehicle in how we deliver it.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. The five makeup tips, and yeah we've had the privilege of running that on YouTube for four years or five years or something, and it still works. The five makeup tips is great. It does appeal to the curiosity. People are like, "Okay, well I would like makeup tips. I'm over 50," and I should not, by the way we were talking old jokes, I'm not over 50, and I'm not a woman either, so you're thinking "I want to know what these tips are," so there's a little bit of curiosity and there's also some benefit there that you want to get, which is cool.

Brett:

But this 10 Minute Makeup Guide, that's speaking to someone who says... It really resonates well with that over 50 powerful women audience that Boom is after, is they're like, "I don't have time for makeup, and I don't want to take the time. 30 minutes getting ready for the day, no way." How did you guys land on that? Was that something that you heard consistent feedback from customers? Is there something you guys started to pick up on, because you know the customer? Where did that come from?

Molly:

In both businesses, these ideas usually come from the customer, or feedback to anything that we're doing from an organic standpoint. In our businesses, that's the benefit of social media. It's not that we're going for all this organic traffic, which is nice, but not always sustainable. We use social media as a way to test different conversations with the audience. Usually, this starts, for Smart Marketer, as a blog post, for example, and Boom, too.

Molly:

Last year, we've released a blog post about our "Love Demo Love Formula" which is a formula we teach to [crosstalk 00:18:23]-

Brett:

Formerly known as "The Testimonial Sandwich", so there was the artist formerly as "Testimonial Sandwich", that "Love Demo Love". Feels better.

Molly:

It's a formula, a template that we teach for ad creatives. We see that that does really well on the blog. The email has high open rates. People are spending a lot of time on that page. They're clicking on whatever call to action is within that blog post. Wow, this is something our audience is interested in. Can we turn this into some sort of acquisition offer? Sometimes, it also comes-

Brett:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:18:54] clarify, just so people understand because you may be lost like, "What are you talking about? Love Demo Love, and with Testimony? What the heck?" It's Ezra's tried and true ad formula of starting with a testimonial, a real user-generated content testimonial, or maybe a couple, like one to three, product demonstration in the middle, product video demonstration in the middle of the video, and then you close with more testimonials or more love. So, "Love Demo Love", and also what used to be called the "Testimonial Sandwich".

Brett:

So, anyway, I just wanted to clarify for those that are like, "What are you talking about?" All right, go ahead.

Molly:

A lot of times, it comes from conversations with the audience, a response from the audience. Then sometimes, it comes just random inspiration. For Smart Marketer, an offer we're working on right now that's going to happen soon is the "State of Paid Advertising in 2022", which is a free four hour workshop. It will show an analysis we did of over $60 million in ad spend. That just came from a random idea I had in the shower, what would this audience be interested in, how can I help set them up for 2022? It's not always coming from the customer. Sometimes it's just a random idea that comes in when you give it space.

Molly:

Usually, it is coming from something that already exists, or that we see from competition, or other people out in the market.

Brett:

Just an interesting side note, are you an idea in the shower person? Is that where your ideas come from? I'd just be curious to know where do your good ideas come from? What's the space where disproportionately you have good ideas coming from that space?

Molly:

It's really whenever I give it space. That's the key. It's usually, in today's world where things are so busy, forced space, time away from my phone, which is the shower, which is driving in the car, or hiking. If you guys are interested in this topic, read "Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's one of my favorite books. I read it in 2015 or '16, but she basically explains how this works, like how does creativity actually work and how can you set yourself up to be more open to cool ideas? The cool ideas are out there. Most of us are just too shut off, too busy, too addicted to what we're doing to allow the ideas to actually come in. So yes, any time you give it-

Brett:

What was the name of that book again?

Molly:

"Big Magic".

Brett:

"Big Magic". Love that. I'm going to check that out. Just a quick note here, because I've always found this fascinating, I have zero good ideas in the shower. I really don't know that I've ever had one positive, useful, meaningful idea from the shower other than "Hey babe, we're out of shampoo." That's all I think about in the shower. However, for me, two places that I get disproportionately high amount of good ideas, one is if in the morning if I get up when it's still quiet, and I have eight kids so it needs to be early in the morning when it's quiet, but if I feel like I'm ahead of the game, if I feel like there's nothing that I have to do right that second and I can just kind of sit in the quiet, good ideas come from there.

Brett:

The other place, and this is an odd one, but on airplanes. I sit on an airplane. They shut that door. I never pay for WiFi, I just don't want to. Some of the ideas that have shaped OMG, that have shaped the agency, came from me sitting on an airplane. I don't know why. That's my shower time. I even said a few times, I'm like I should just go fly somewhere and then fly right back, and I'm going to get great ideas.

Molly:

A lot of people do that. I have a friend who took a flight to Hong Kong and back, and never even stepped into the city just to write a book. The reason for that Brett, those are different forms of meditation. It's the same thing. It's essentially cutting off stimulation that is-

Brett:

Right, there's nothing else.

Molly:

... keeping your brain busy so that your mind and your soul can be quiet, so that these ideas can really formulate. That's the key.

Brett:

I love that. I love the fact that I'm not the only one that loves... I don't even like sitting on airplanes, but I get the best ideas. Anyway, cool. That's awesome. Cool, so thank you for chasing down that rabbit trail. I think that's so useful. Where were we though?

Molly:

We were talking about offers that are working right now, and I was chatting about the 10 Minute Makeup Guide, the workshop we're doing for Smart Marketer, and just saying that lot of the ideas comes from what you guys say, what we see as a need out in the market. A lot of them are random, unique, creative ideas, which are fun too.

Brett:

So, really fostering both, so you kind of need a vehicle or a mechanism to collect that feedback from customers, and then you need to create space for yourself to have these good ideas, and then bring it together with your executive team to get the idea when you're relaxing or whatever, and then you bring it to the rest of the executive team and you hammer that out. It may be 15 hours, but at the end of that time you've got a killer offer that you can really use to grow the business.

Molly:

Yeah, Brett, and some other steps that I didn't mention there, just to sort of round out the actual tactical, how do we get it out the door. Once we have the idea and we feel good about the offer, we feel good about its ability to do what we need it to do in the business, then we go into action mode actually creating this thing. That usually looks like a brainstorm call with our copy team where we discuss what is this, and how is it going to be presented?

Molly:

We talk about the big hooks, what are the big selling points of this offer, what problems does this offer actually solve? Of course, how do we want this to be delivered? Is it a PDF? Is it a pre-sale article? Is it a simple opt-in page where we're giving a coupon, like you said? How will this be delivered. Then they're able to go and make it sound good, not only the page in which we're selling the thing, but also the delivery of the thing. Then of course, that's passed off to design, it's passed off to our ads team and everything starts to get into motion.

Brett:

It's so good to get copy involved early, because that's such an important part of everything else. You have to be able to really strike that cord and make people want it, and copy is such a huge part of that. I love that you do that fairly early on.

Molly:

Yeah, and it's not just writing the copy that is the offer. It's also the selling of the offer. Even if it's a free thing, you're still selling someone on the idea.

Brett:

Totally. Totally, yeah.

Molly:

Every new acquisition funnel is first tested through an email promotion to the list, because we don't want to go out and buy-

Brett:

Okay, so you build the product, you test the email, email to the list first.

Molly:

Yeah. Of course, it's always going to convert better to your list than it will to paid traffic. We want to test it to the list first before we start to buy ads, mainly because we want to see of course, what's the conversion rate on this thing if it's free, and does this actually generate sales? We can create offers all day, but if it's not meeting the need of the business, then it's not going to work. It's first tested to email. That also gets some good traction going on your pixel so that Facebook and Google can start to see what types of people are taking action on this page, get some momentum.

Molly:

Then we stop for a second. We look at heat maps. We look at conversion rate. We look at the performance from a data standpoint. We make any optimizations that we might need to make, and then it's ready to go to you and your team, and hand over to our media buyer for paid ads.

Brett:

I love that. I love that. So, you're testing to the email list first to understand does this convert. And hey, if it doesn't convert to your list, it's not going to convert to cold traffic.

Molly:

Exactly.

Brett:

So, does it convert, and at what level, and kind of understanding that a little bit. Then you're going to run some ads and start getting conversions, trying to pixel, finding out what's what. You pause that. You then look at heat maps, make some tweaks/optimizations to the funnel itself. Then you go ham on the advertising at that point.

Molly:

Then it's hopefully ready for scale. Probably half of these that we create don't work still to this day. That's okay. We say, "Let's put it on hold for a second." It's never that this just doesn't work, and we're not going to use it ever again. It's "Hey, let's put this to the side and try to figure out why it didn't work, and maybe we can use it later." There are a lot of times that we just can't get it to work, and that's okay.

Brett:

Right. Really, you guys are the best. You're the best in the world at some of this stuff. If you've got a 50% success rate, what's everybody else going to have? That's likely to be 50% or maybe less even. What's interesting, we just walked through that four step process you guys go through, most people it's like think for five minutes about an offer, maybe it's more than that, but think about an offer and then "All right cool, let's throw a bunch of media behind it to see how it does," where you guys are testing with your audience or email list, you're running some small tests and ads, you're getting data, you're optimizing and then you're going big. I love that so much.

Brett:

It kind of goes back to one of my favorite business principles that comes from Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great", and a book called "Turning the Flywheel". He's an awesome... I'm sure everybody's heard of him. He talks about this concept of firing bullets and then cannonballs. He used kind of this old warship analogy. The idea is fire bullets to make sure you got something that works, and then fire a cannonball rather than a lot of people fire a cannonball and they use up all their gunpowder, and all they've got available, and they're like, "Well now I've got nothing."

Brett:

So, test small and then go big.

Molly:

Also, understanding that these offers are not channel-specific. A lot of people create an offer, which they don't spend a lot of time on. They set up a Facebook campaign. They run it for a few days, and then scrap it all. "Oh, this offer doesn't work, and Facebook ads don't work." It's like guys, no it's so much deeper than that.

Brett:

Totally. Totally. Your kind of creating these acquisition funnels then for Boom, and spoiler alert, Boom is going to be releasing new products this year, which is great. Your kind of creating one of these acquisition funnels for each product. That was another thing too with Boom, and Ezra talks about this a lot, that it was just the Boom stick trio, or just the boom stick, that's all that you really use for cold traffic. Now you're building these acquisition funnels for other products, which is huge, and which is going to be a game changer.

Molly:

Look, honestly acquisition funnels are way easier for e-commerce than info or services.

Brett:

They are. They are. No doubt.

Molly:

Info and services takes way more of relationship buildup before someone purchases. It's mainly lead generation through a workshop, or a webinar, or a lead magnet, or a challenge, or a mini series, or whatever the hell people are doing today to try to convert someone into a customer or client. It's a little bit of a different ballgame than e-commerce. A lot of the plays with e-comm can be easier. A lot of the offers that Boom runs are simple. It's direct to a product page for a lip gloss, direct to a product page for a mascara, direct to something that's a direct sale essentially. Where with info, we've got to dance around it a little bit more. The offer creation is even more intensive for that business type.

Brett:

Yeah, it is.

Molly:

Like me. Good lesson, what Ezra has been able to do with Boom I think after working with us at Smart Marketer, is realize that there is a huge hole in the e-commerce space for offer creation that isn't just a giveaway, that isn't just direct to product page, that isn't just a coupon. That is a big reason Boom is able to excel, because we do understand pre-sale articles. We do understand lead magnets.

Molly:

Boom is even doing webinars. They're called "Ladies Night". These principles work for both business types, and there's actually a much bigger opportunity in e-commerce to get more creative with your offers because other e-commerce businesses are simply lazy or don't know how to go about it.

Brett:

You nailed it a little bit ago when you said that in a lot of ways offers for e-commerce, it's simpler. It's more straightforward than it is to do info products. Info products, you really got to get to the core of what this thing, and what is it going to unlock, and what are all the emotions we're trying to tap into here, and uncover here.

Molly:

And give way more value first.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. How do you do that? So kind of blending some of those principles, it's super powerful and it's definitely helped Boom get to where it is today without a doubt. Cool. We've got a few additional things I want to talk about, and not a whole lot of time to do it-

Molly:

Brett, hold on. I want to add one more thing. This is one of the biggest reasons that you might be failing to scale as an e-commerce business. If you are only relying on the people that are clicking from a Facebook ad, and directly converting and buying a product, you're missing out on a huge part of your market that just isn't ready to buy in the moment. If you're able to generate the lead, if you're able to nurture them via email, if you're able to set up a funnel where they get some sort of discount, especially if you add some scarcity, your scalability will increase in a way that you never understood, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your advertising. It's just that you are having a conversation with a different part of the market. That's all it is.

Molly:

So, if you are struggling to scale, it's probably not the ad platform, and B, the e-comm company that is willing to go outside of the box.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. It's not just I need to bid differently, I need a slightly different campaign structure in my ads manager or inside of Google Ads. Those things may be true, but often it comes down to offer and having the right funnel. Are we actually getting people to give us their email address and get a direct conversion as well? Do we have a nurture sequence? Do we have a remarketing sequence built in? All of those things really unlock the ability to scale rather than just "How do I bid differently or change my campaign structure?"

Molly:

Brett, I would say that your most successful clients, and the ones that you like working with the most are probably strong in this area. As an agency, that's a dream.

Brett:

No doubt. No doubt.

Molly:

The issue you usually have an agency is that you're great at running ads. You only have a few places to run ads to. There's only so much you can do.

Brett:

Yeah, that's one reason we love working with Boom.

Molly:

Just emphasize.

Brett:

You guys get it, and we're just able to work together and crush it. That's fantastic. Cool. Any quick insights, and I kind of designed this podcast series to have a long shelf life, but let's talk about a few trends. What's working right now, or what are some trends inside of Facebook ads that you're seeing right now?

Molly:

Good news is, as we do each year, we're seeing a huge decrease in ad cost at the beginning of the year. Almost 50% cheaper in most of our ad accounts in the analysis. We did over $60 million in spend than what we were seeing Q4, which is a huge relief with the dumpster fire that Facebook was the last six months of 2021.

Brett:

No doubt.

Molly:

That's a huge sigh of relief. We're also starting to see more accurate reporting, or at least I think we're all getting better as marketers getting our stuff together from a tracking standpoint. So, things are looking up, and we are working on offers, working on creative and copy right now so we can really take advantage of the next few months of cheap traffic, and try to do everything we can to set us up for a big Q4 again this year.

Brett:

I love it. Just one thing to keep in mind, this is going to likely always be the trend. Advertisers panic in fourth quarter because costs are going through the roof. But the costs are going to come back down in Q1, so be planning, and be thinking about that, and what's your acquisition strategy going to be in Q1 and then as you lead into and get ramped up for Q4. So, that's awesome.

Brett:

Any other specific trends you want to talk about now? I also want to dig into a mindset just a little bit, which will be fun.

Molly:

Really quick, I wouldn't say this is necessarily a new trend for right now, but it's something we've been preaching for a few years that I just literally cannot emphasize enough. I was actually just on a training call with some of our students, and one of them sells physical products. He's in the snack and wellness space. His Facebook ad results that I was looking at were incredible, $0.04 clicks, 15% click through rate, $3.00 add to cart, numbers I have not seen in years.

Molly:

Guess what he's doing from an ad perspective? It's native advertising. It's user-generated content. It is simply telling stories about people in their own words the experience that they had not even specifically with your product. This was a weight loss product. So, his best performing ad was a picture of a beach with an arrow to a certain area of the beach. The copy was telling a story from the customer's standpoint of, "Last year I went to this beach and I couldn't even walk up the stairs without getting out of breath. I felt terrible, and my health wasn't great. This year, 12 months later, I've gone back to this beach. I've lost 90 pounds. I was able to run around, and I really enjoyed myself."

Molly:

Those weren't the exact words, but that's how simple it was. It wasn't an ad about the product. It wasn't an ad about how great this product was. Absolutely nothing about features. Really, not even a lot of benefits other than the benefits that were woven into the story. This isn't necessarily new, but it's what people are still missing out on when it comes to Facebook and Instagram. These are true social platforms. People are used to engaging with stories from family and friends. Use imagery and copy that is that. It's really that simple.

Brett:

I love it. I don't really ever see that changing. We spend a lot of on YouTube and running YouTube ads, and we're seeing similar things in that videos, and usually you need slightly longer videos on YouTube than you do on Facebook in most cases, but still that user-generated content, those testimonial videos that you could weave into your YouTube ad works there too. I think it's always going to work. As long as it's an authentic, genuine testimonial that really hits on "Here's how my life has changed. Here's why I love this product. Here's my story," people eat that up. I think people will always eat that up if it rings authentic.

Molly:

Because it's a testimonial, that's not what makes it work. We chat about this and then students submit a testimonial, and the first line is "I love this product so much." It's like, guys that's words of customer, but it sounds like an ad. We need to start with things like, "As a mom of two, I didn't think I would have time to do X, Y, and Z." How much more relatable is that? It doesn't feel like you are being sold to.

Brett:

Yeah, one time we had a prospect, and we ended up not working with him. He submits these videos and you could literally read the people that are supposed to be customers. You could watch their eyes reading from a teleprompter. I'm like, "Guys, this not going to work." You want people to be sharing real emotion and their real story.

Molly:

Yeah, well sharing a life story. It's not about why the product's great. It is sharing their story and how it fit into their lives. So, we ask three important questions to get really good testimonials. If you ask these questions, it will set people up to give you really good answers. What was life like before you bought this product? That has them describe that undesirable before state, starts to tell their story. What is life like afterwards? Now they're talking about the after state, the benefits, how much better they feel. Then if you were to re-commend this to a friend, what exactly would you say? When you say it like that, they take off their "I'm a salesperson for this company" hat, and they put on their "Oh, I'm writing a message, or speaking a message to a friend. I'm going to be real about how this product helped me."

Brett:

Love that so much. Actually, since I'm such a believer in testimonials, but getting authentic ones, I created "The Ultimate Guide", I don't remember what I called it, but how to get authentic customer testimonials. It's on the OMG Commerce website. Check it out. I'm not sure if I have those exact [crosstalk 00:40:34]-

Molly:

That's sounds like a good offer for your agency, Brett.

Brett:

It's a good offer. Yeah. We can do that as an offer too for Smart Marketer. It's so true. The difference between a really good testimonial and then an average testimonial is two different planets, two different universes. Getting a good testimonial is worth it's weight in gold. Having one that's average, is really going to do nothing for you, or one that's weak. Anyway, I love that.

Brett:

What was life like before? What was life like after? What would you say to a friend? I love that so much. It's also good, you want to give someone a little bit of help as they're creating a testimonial. Otherwise, it feels like they're staring at a screen and not knowing what to say, or looking at a blank page or whatever. So, giving them some help is key, for sure. I love that. Love that.

Brett:

Let's take just a couple of minutes, and we're going to be short-changing this topic for sure, but I wanted to take a couple of minutes because this will be fun and I think it's useful. It's been a difficult road the last couple of years for e-commerce, entrepreneurs, media buyers, online advertisers, not rough [crosstalk 00:41:47]. E-commerce has grown tremendously. That's been good. E-commerce has grown, so no complaints there.

Brett:

But it's challenging times. I know you train a lot of people, you train a lot of entrepreneurs and media buyers. What are you teaching people about mindset and how mindset impacts results?

Molly:

Mindset is everything in this game. I don't think any of us are maybe even better marketers than one another. It's your willingness to stay committed, and to continue forward. It's what we talked about earlier with us being okay with half of the work we do not actually being used. Or as a media buyer, it's not even about who can set up the best ads. It's about who can continue to troubleshoot and optimize to make each piece of the campaign better so that they can move forward.

Molly:

This is personal development, a concept that most of you have heard of before, but it's really the difference between having a scarcity mindset, or having an abundance mindset. For me, I choose to be grateful. I choose to not get upset with these paid traffic platforms. I choose to look at things with the glass half full. I think that if there was anything unique about our culture at Smart Marketer, that is it. We have all chosen this mindset.

Molly:

There is going to be trouble in anything you do. I think as a human, the last few years have been hard. It's easy to get down. Of course, I still get frustrated, angry, depressed. All of those things occur. But I try to choose to bring positivity to our business, try to bring it to our employees, to our offers, to the trainings that we provide. It really is a completely different experience when you choose to do that.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I'm a really positive person. I'm naturally upbeat. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. But I have my moments. I have moments where I want to curse Tim Cook for the latest iOS update, and why are you killing a good thing, Tim Cook? Or whoever else is making the decisions at Apple. We can get in that mindset. It's okay to be frustrated and complain a little bit, but don't stay there.

Brett:

Get to a better place, because you're right, it's not just who's the smartest, it's not just who has the best campaign structure, but who can show up consistently and do the right thing, and who can be okay with "Okay, I got one, two, three campaigns that I wrote that didn't work, but then I had an offer that hit and then it scaled to the moon." Who could handle that?

Molly:

And who-

Brett:

Yeah, please add to that.

Molly:

[inaudible 00:44:31], and who actually cares? It's why I so believe-

Brett:

Exactly.

Molly:

... in the mission of our business that Ezra initially set out, serve the world unselfishly, and profit. If you truly care about the group of people that your business serves, and you care about the way that you're changing their lives, even if you're selling a toothbrush and you're helping their mouth to be cleaner, it doesn't matter. If you truly care about that, it changes the energy of the business.

Molly:

I can tell you, if you asked me "Molly, what is the difference between students that succeed or don't succeed, or friends that I know in the industry that have done great things, or people that are struggling," it really comes back to mindset, and it comes back to an authentic, genuine, caring for the group of people that you're serving. If you have that, and you stay consistent, there's no way that you can't make this work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. If you can really be passionate about your customer, and I would even say about your team, then that's way more powerful than just being passionate about your product. I think both are important, but being passionate about your customer and about your team, that's really where's it at. One thing I discovered for me, and hey I've got lofty goals, I want my business to succeed and I want to it to grow, I think entrepreneurship, and businesses, and capitalism offer a lot to the world. If it's just about money, I burn out quickly. I get to a point where I'm like, "I don't really care anymore."

Brett:

But if I think about who I'm serving, and I think about that business owner that my agency is helping accelerate growth for, if I think about team members who were helping accelerate their individual growth, and I get to see someone step and lead a call, or mail a presentation, or come up with a strategy.

Molly:

Nothing better.

Brett:

I'm like "Whoa, I never thought of that." That is so fun for me, and so rewarding. Then when you key in on that, then guess what, the profits are better too, and then the business grows better too.

Molly:

Brett, aside from the money, I saw a study last year that rated digital marketing as the most stressful job or career path out there, even above brain surgeons, or people working in the medical field.

Brett:

That's crazy, yeah.

Molly:

I believe that. Think about it, we're basically day traders.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:46:47] so much out of your control, and that's a scary thing. There's so much out of your control, it's scary. Yeah.

Molly:

Exactly. To be able to sustain that, and the changes, and the stress, and the fact that what we do never really turns off unless you choose for it to do so your mindset and who you are as a person, and how you treat yourself and the people around you, that is will what will sustain you moving forward more than anything else.

Brett:

Love that. So good. So good, Molly Pittman. All right, so people that are listening that are like, "Holy cow, I need more Molly Pittman in my life," where do you suggest people go? Obviously, there's lots of stuff people are going to enjoy at SmartMarketer.com, but where should someone get started, or what are some cool things, what are some offers you got going on right now?

Molly:

Yeah, check out SmartMarketer.com. There are some free resources there, depending on what we have going on at the time. I know this is coming out a bit later, Brett, so we do have that State of Paid Advertising in 2022 workshop coming up. We have lots of free resources on our website. If you want to follow me, I'm most active on Instagram @MollyPittmanDigital. I also read all of my DMs, so if you have questions, thoughts about this, I love hearing from you all and I would love to hear from you on Instagram.

Brett:

Instagram, check it out. What's your handle again?

Molly:

One more quick thing, Brett.

Brett:

What's your handle again on Instagram?

Molly:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Brett:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Molly:

Of course, if you like this format, you like podcasts, John, and Ezra, and I do have a podcast, The Smart Marketer Podcast. So, check that out.

Brett:

It is an intact podcast, where you get to be a guest for a couple of episodes. It was tremendously fun. Check out the Smart Marketer podcast. I'll link to all of this in the show notes as well so it's easy for you to access. With that, Molly Pittman, any final words? Any final words of wisdom, re-commendations, or asks of the audience?

Molly:

Keep doing it. Just keep at it. Take care of yourself. Maintain that balance in your life. Don't get sucked into this world so that you lose who you are. Or if you do, quickly bounce back from that. Just enjoy. We're living in a really cool time as humans, and there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. When have we ever had the opportunity to do what we're doing from a business standpoint?

Molly:

It's complicated, but also the world is truly at our fingertips. Find a group of people that you align with, that you're interested in, that you want to help, and figure out how you can serve them, and figure out what you can sell to them. I just always go back to being grateful that we are able to work in this way. It's really, really cool. Hopefully, you guys enjoy it too.

Brett:

I love it. It's a super challenging industry. It's always changing. It's very stressful. But man, it's fun. It can be fun, especially if you have the right community around you. If you can find that balance man, it's an awesome place to be. Check out Smart Marketer. Check out the community. Get to know Molly Pittman. Follow her on Instagram.

Brett:

With that, thank you so much for tuning in. This show would be nothing without you who tune in and listen faithfully. If you haven't rated the show, please do that. Leave a review. It helps other people find the show. If there's somebody that you're listening to this and you're like, "Whoa, this person needs to hear this episode," then share with them. That would mean the world to me, and I know it'd make a difference in somebody else's life as well.

Brett:

With that, until next time, stay spicy.

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