Most D2C brands have tried YouTube ads. Almost none of them are getting credit for what those ads are actually doing. Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce and the guy behind YouTube growth for brands like Native, Arctic, and Dude Wipes, makes the case that in-platform reporting is under-counting YouTube's real impact by roughly 70% — and that the brands leaning in right now are about to widen the gap on everyone still dabbling.

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This one goes deep: incrementality testing, omnichannel attribution, creative frameworks, and why your Meta winners almost certainly won't survive on YouTube.

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Inside the episode:

• Why a 1.0 in-platform ROAS on YouTube is probably a 3.4 in reality — and the 190-test incrementality study behind that number
• How Arctic drove a 25% Walmart sales lift (and 230% branded search lift) by running YouTube in select markets — measured scientifically against matched control markets
• The three creative types that actually work on YouTube: hero/brand films, single-creator UGC, and the specific criteria your Meta winners need to meet before you bother testing them
• How to diagnose a broken YouTube ad using just three metrics: view rate, click-through rate, and average watch time per impression — and what each one tells you to fix
• Why campaign structure for retail lift looks completely different than for D2C sales — and how to set up for both at once

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact and request your FREE strategy session today!

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‍Chapters:

[0:00] Introduction: Why Most Brands Still Suck at YouTube

[1:51] Audience Poll: Who's Actually Winning on YouTube?

[3:15] The Core Problem: Bringing a Meta Mindset to YouTube

[4:05] YouTube as Trust: Creators, TV, and Time Spent

[8:14] Incrementality 101: Measuring the Real Impact of Your Ads

[11:22] How Incremental Is YouTube? The 3.4x ROAS Reality

[15:28] Going Omnichannel: Using YouTube to Drive Retail and Amazon Sales

[19:13] Arctic Case Study: Measuring YouTube's Impact on Walmart Sales

[24:09] Creative Diversity: The Essential Elements of a YouTube Ad

[27:16] Creative Breakdown: Single Influencer, Hero, and Mashup Ad Examples

[38:05] Creative Story Arc: How to Hook Viewers and Drive Action

[40:24] Creative Feedback Loops: What Data to Watch and Why

[46:09] Campaign Structure: How to Buy Media Based on Your Goals

[51:56] Measure, Model, Maximize: The Trifecta of YouTube Measurement

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Connect With Brett: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQmbMwBW8LYDfFAqNqlgTGw 

Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact

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, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

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Brett Curry (00:12):

I ran my first YouTube ad in 2016 and that was right when True View for Action came out. There was any YouTube advertising nerds out here, but a lot has changed in the platform and the way users use it. But you know what hasn't changed? Most advertisers, most C2C brands still suck at YouTube. So I hope to fix that for you today. It was true that people didn't understand YouTube then and largely brands don't really understand YouTube now either, but I'm going to show you seven ways, seven ways you can start to scale with YouTube ads and YouTube ads are having a moment right now. The bigger brands that I talk to, Grooons and Ridge, being a couple of them, they're leaning in hard to YouTube. The time is right to invest in YouTube. But part of what I want to do is frame this for you.

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(01:02):

How do we approach it? How do we think about it? And by the end of the day, I think you're going to have a pretty good roadmap for where to go from here. We manage China's millions and ad spend annually. Work for some great brands like Native and Arctic and Dude Wipes and Jones Road Beauty, Baseball Lifestyle, many, many others. And then I run a team of about 45. We're scrappy. We're a performance marketing agency. We won some awards. I was going to introduce my OMG commerce team, but I don't think there's any of them in here. Oh no, Jonathan's in the back. I see Jonathan. So yeah, Jonathan Wave. If you see somebody with an OMG commerce shirt, that's my team. Any technical question you have about YouTube, please grab them. I think they've heard my talk now a whole bunch of times so they're like, "Hey, we're going to just hang out in the lobby and they're helping people check in as well." But yeah, really excited to dive in here.

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(01:51):

I want to get an idea from the audience. So how many of you guys are not advertising on YouTube now? This is a no judgment zone. How many of you are not advertising on YouTube? Hands up high. It's not a huge part of the audience. That's interesting. How many of you are advertising on YouTube, but you're like, "I don't know if it's working. I'm doing some stuff." How many of you feel like, "Hey, I'm smashing it on YouTube right now. Running it profitable, couldn't be happier." That's zero of you. Okay. I mean, honestly, I think this is a key to getting better. I legitimately am excited to come here and learn, but this is what I do and talk about all day. But getting to hang out with some of the YouTube product people, I will learn something today. I'll pick up something new that I can then apply with the team.

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(02:37):

And this is also what I want to say about ... I love YouTube. I love video. I started as an SEO guy, then started doing TV and then YouTube was like all the world's coming together. But ultimately, I'm a marketing junkie first. I like stuff that works. I like marketing that drives new customers and that propels a business forward. And so that's really what this is all about. But here's the deal. Here's why there was no hands raised for those that are smashing it on YouTube. YouTube is misunderstood. How many of you guys feel like you're crushing on Meta though? Maybe depending on the day, right? Depends on what Zuck is up to today.

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(03:15):

But I think what happens with YouTube, a lot of people bring a meta mindset, a meta creative mindset, a meta campaign mindset, a meta measurement mindset to YouTube and it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work that way. If that's the way you're approaching it, you will be disappointed and you will either give up or just say, "Eh, YouTube's going to be a couple points of our ad budget and you won't do much beyond that. " And so going to change that today. So what is YouTube? Mike did a great job of kind of setting things up. I think though in a word, YouTube is trust. In these specific areas, and this is really interesting, how many of you guys are on TikTok shops? TikTok shop? Yeah. Long lived TikTok shop and a lot of brands I know that have really scaled their business there.

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(04:05):

What's interesting is that users say 98% of users say they trust YouTube creators or YouTube influencers more than any other platform, which kind of makes sense. There's still an element of YouTube where it's like, "I am following this creator. I'm a fan. I'm consuming their content. I love this creator." Whereas on other platforms, TikTok reels, things like that, it's very algorithmic. It's just like whatever's kind of popping off or trending at the time. And so there's a lot to lean into with creators. We're going to talk about that quite a bit today. And then I mentioned, I'm like a TV guy. I love TV ads way back in the day. YouTube is like TV from a brand building standpoint, but better than TV ever could have been. And TV's still powerful, but the way you can measure, the way you can look at what's going on with YouTube is unique and it's powerful.

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(04:54):

And then if you look at time spent on your connected TV, how many of you guys watch YouTube on your television? So YouTube TV, that was almost every hand in the room. So if you look at time spent on streaming platforms on TV, YouTube is the leader, have been the leader now for two and a half years beating Disney+ and all these others. I did hear, and this is just purely a rumor, but it's fun. Disney Plus was like fourth on this list a few years ago. Anybody want to know why the rumor is that they're now number two?

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(05:28):

It's one particular show. Anybody with small kids? Louie, that's what I heard. I don't know if that's actually true. But anyway, the point of this slide, that's just a fun nugget. The point of this slide though is that YouTube, the leader for two and a half years continuing to lead, they're getting the Oscars, they're getting live sports. You've got to be on YouTube and big brands are there and there's opportunities for the rest of us as well. Really four modes. And this is one of the reasons also why there's not a direct translation from something on Meta or even TV directly to YouTube because there's different modes. Sometimes I'm streaming, sometimes I'm watching on TV. Sometimes I'm searching. YouTube is still the number two search engine, the biggest of any search engine, not named Google, but I'm also scrolling on the mobile app and then I am also shopping.

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(06:17):

And so I know when I make a big purchase, I bought a truck a few years ago. I just went deep on four by four channels. I don't know. It just became like a fun shopping experience for me and it did influence what I eventually bought. And then YouTube creators, they are the new Hollywood. That's like who we look up to as YouTube creators. Now this slide was built before this next slide was built before I saw the guest list of this event. And so I don't want there to be any extreme fan girling right now. I already did and so I've got it out of my system. But anybody know this guy? James? James, come on. Raise your hand, James. Yeah, yeah.

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(06:59):

Improv stand up set later, maybe if we got a little time to ... Lunch, like free lunch. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So how many of you guys saw the original Dr. Squatch video? Your soap is ... Yeah, you're not a dish. Every time I see James though, we used to work with William Painter. I know those guys. And so every time I see you, I think your face is your money maker. Yeah, it's so good. But Raindrop, the team behind Doctor Squatch really helping propel them from a nice business to they just sold reportedly to Unilever for 1.5 billion, largely driven by the demand and the brand building capability and the conversion capability of YouTube was a big part of that. We partnered with Raindrop on Native, so worked with them for about six years. We kind of pioneered some strategies to take YouTube's on or native's online growth and drive it into retail stores like Target and CVS and Walmart and everywhere.

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(07:57):

And this is a number from Moiz Ali, the founder. So this is like, I don't know if P&G will like this or not, but he tweeted it. So it was like public knowledge about it. They did a billion last year. Anybody want to take a guess what their EBITDA margins are?

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(08:14):

North of 20 is what I heard. So 200 million in EBITDA. I'll take it. I like it. And so that was a fun one to be a part of for sure. So okay, let's get after it. Let's dive deep. Let's talk first about incrementality. And this is where we're just starting nerdy, man. We're just going super, super nerdy. How many of you guys have run an incrementality test recently? Does anybody not know what incrementality is? And again, no judgment zone. This is just so I can understand. Okay. Yeah, totally cool. I was at an event in Miami a couple weeks ago and like nobody raised their hand. Nobody knew what incrementality was, which is fine. This is kind of the new thing in marketing. It's not necessarily new, but the way we're measuring it and thinking about it is new. The idea here is to try to understand what was the real impact of this ad.

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(08:59):

If I'd shut this ad off, if I never ran it, what would happen to my business? And so because everything's wanted to take credit and there's in- platform and MTAs and all kinds of stuff, but what's the truth of what actually worked if we can handle the truth? And so we'll see if we can. So this is the real impact of ads. And so it's like, hey, what would've happened if we did not run these ads? So I'll give you a bit of an example to think about this. So if we run a ... Anybody still prefer to shop in- store or you like to shop in store and online? Yeah. It's still an online. Yeah, but I like to visit stores. It's fun. So let's say that we run a retail shop and sales are up this month, so it's a good month in our brick and mortar retail store.

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(09:44):

And so we're asking the question, why? Why is our sales so good? Why are sales up? Well, it could be we're running a sale. We had a sales sign up on the window as the door as you walk in and some sales signs up in the store. So if you're thinking about this from a traditional attribution model, those signs could claim 100% because everybody that bought saw one of those signs. They walked in, they walked in through the door, they saw signs up, things like that. Now what's interesting is that there probably were some people that were just hanging out in the store and the sales signs did tip them over the edge and they bought. But a lot of people they were going to buy anyway or they maybe didn't notice the signs, right? But then what about a TV ad? What if we ran a TV ad in the local market or a YouTube ad reaching the local market and that drove people to the store?

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(10:40):

So this is really an understanding of like, okay, well, what worked and what was the impact? It's actually not an easy question to answer, but there are tools that allow you to do it. North Beam has got an incrementality tool. I think it launches soon, right? Yeah. In this quarter, which is phenomenal. And so we'll talk about a few things, branded ads. I'm a Google search guy. I have been for a long time, but here's the deal. For a lot of brands, if you turned off branded search, I may get quickly kicked off the stage, I'm not sure. But if you turned off branded search ads, there might not be a whole lot that happens to your business. I still believe in brand defense. So there is a reason to do this. I believe in that, but not super incremental. It can be strategic, but if you turn it off, might not feel it.

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(11:22):

But what about TV ads? Again, as an example, for some brands, you stop running on TV and you kill growth. The growth stops for the brand. Or a lot of you turn off Meta or something else like that, you feel it immediately. So what about YouTube? How incremental is YouTube? Well, I would propose to you that it may be one of the most incremental platforms in existence. It's just that people don't see it and they don't know it, but we're going to kind of break this down. Now I'm going to break down a study for you, but the impact or the results of that study showed that whatever you're seeing in platform in Google Ads, the real results, the real impact are probably on average about three and a half times better than that. So if you see a one ROAS in platform for YouTube, you're probably actually getting a 3.4 ROAS.

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(12:15):

And so we're going to break down kind of the whys of that, but here's what this is looking at. Now I'm not paid by House Analytics, but I love this study they did, so I reference it all the time. I think it's the biggest incrementality study for YouTube that's ever been done. 190 incrementality tests, big write-up that they did about that. 74 brands, 190 tests. These were pretty big brands that were spending about 30% of their meta budget. They were spending on YouTube. So they weren't just dabbling and they were just doing a hundred bucks a day on YouTube or whatever. They were investing in YouTube, about 30% of their meta budget or thereabouts and they were D2C and omnichannel brands. So 190 tests, let's see what is the impact of YouTube and what they found. Just like I said, almost three and a half times better.

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(13:00):

In platform is under reporting by about 70%. Really glad to hear, and I know Google's working hard on this to improve that performance. And so the average the range of incrementality was anywhere from one to 10. So some people, what they saw on platform was what they were getting in reality. Some, it was 10x better than that. So they saw one in platform. They were actually getting a 10X ROAS when you looked at it from an incrementality standpoint. And then it also drove net new customers. So 76% of customers were net new from YouTube. And so begs the question, nobody's really better at tracking stuff than Google, right? Google Analytics and all that. Nobody's really better than Google. So why? Why then do in- platform numbers look one way when the incrementality result is another? And just to clarify this a little bit more, the way this is done, you can either done on a user level or a GO level.

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(13:53):

So we have one GO that gets YouTube ads, other comparable GOs. Everything else is the same about those GOs except for YouTube. And we measure the difference between those two. It could also be done at the user level. So here's a group of users that could see our ad. We're going to hold some of them out. Some of them don't see YouTube, some of them do. We're going to measure the difference in behavior. I'm going to show you some examples a little bit later, but it's still like, why? Why is this happening? And so there's a few things. One, not that many people click on YouTube ads.You're watching YouTube, you're there for a reason. You're watching something entertaining, you're there to watch Mr. Beast or you're there to learn something or you're researching the next product you want to buy. You don't necessarily want to click away from that.

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(14:40):

So half the click-through rate of Meta or less in some cases we're just not clicking that much. Half the views now are on TV. We talked about that. Now this is a fun one. Anybody watch YouTube shorts on TV? It's a weird one to admit, but there's a couple people here. Yeah. Yeah. I remember my 15-year-old daughter Maggie, I walked in and she was watching shorts on TV and I'm like, "What are you doing?" And it turns out that's a trend. A lot of people do it. So if that's you, you're not weird. Well, maybe you're weird, but it's not too uncommon. And so there's no clicking on TV. You can send a phone and do some of those things, but people don't really do that. So there's no clicking there. And then we all have a bunch of logins to Gmail, at least a lot of us do.

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(15:25):

But also there's some viewing experiences with YouTube

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(15:28):

Where we're watching with multiple people, like watching Beast games and stuff with my kids, there's like eight of us watching Beast games. And so if somebody else saw an ad and then took action, there'd be no way really for Google to clearly measure that apart from incrementality. And so the measurement is just different. Okay. More actual reports on that in a minute. Number two, you got to go omnichannel. How many of you guys are in retail store? So Walmart Target somewhere in retail stores? Yeah. All of you on marketplaces, on Amazon and such. So here's what's interesting. There's going to be come a point in time in your growth where you're going to need channel diversity, which YouTube is here to provide that, but then also distribution diversity. It does unlock new levels of growth. We love doing this. We did this for Native first, just helping them kind of blow up in retail stores.

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(16:21):

Now we've launched this for a number of brands, one of them being Arctic. But here's what that study also found. So if you're just measuring online sales and you see a one ROAS in platform, probably got a three and a half or 3.4 X ROAS. If you were in retail, you could add another 100% to that. So now you're like a 4.4, right? ROAS when you consider Amazon and/or retail sales also. Do I have any Arctic fans in the crowd? I know Doug and is, yes. Cooler or drinkware? What's your flavor of Arctic love here? Drinkware. Why do you like the drinkware? I'm with you on the drinkware. I own both, but yeah.

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(17:07):

The tops. Okay. Yeah. Got to have a good top for a drink for sure. Now this is going to show the weird side of my person. I'm a litle bit bougie in some ways, mostly not. Anybody drank out like a standard tumbler and you're like, that tastes like a penny. That tastes a little bit like I got a penny in my mouth. It's because of the metal lining, right? First world problems. But Arctic has ceramic lining in the tumbler. I'm telling you it's a game changer. Your coffee will taste better. Your drinks will taste better. Also, quick shout out. Taste Salud. Can the Tastalute team raise their hands? Give it up for Tastalude if you would please.

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(17:42):

One of the leaders in the hydration movement right now, one of the best things I did. We started taking hydration every day. Got to get your electrolytes. Your hydration drink will taste better in an Arctic mug as well. And then if you got the gift bags, there's some Taste Salud in there. There's some grooms in there. So load up on both. And then also, I forgot to mention this before. There's a Bass Pro hat in there. Is anybody like, why is there a Bass Pro hat? Does anybody have a guess as to why we just randomly put a Bass Pro hat in your bag? Yeah.

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(18:19):

Yeah. It's actually 100% true. So OMG, we are based in Springfield, Missouri. That's where me and my team flew in from and that's the home of Bass Pro. So Bass Pro is everywhere. Cabela's is everywhere, but the founder still lives in Springfield mode, so we want to give you a little taste of Springfield. But the point of all of that is I found sometimes rabbit trails help people focus. Hopefully that's true for you because I'll have a few of them. But Arctic, amazing brand. So we were tasked with, can we grow sales in Walmart for Arctic? So they came to us, they were like, "Hey, we're about to be coast to coast in Walmart. Can we use YouTube to drive retail sales?" And we said, "Absolutely." But we didn't want to just measure retail sales because you never want to just measure one thing that's like the worst idea because when you run ads on YouTube or anywhere, where do people buy?

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(19:13):

They buy wherever they want to buy, whatever fits for them. So we did all of these things. We looked at Walmart sales. We looked at search lift. This is one of my favorite reports you can run with YouTube where you can see, "Hey, people that saw my YouTube ad, how did they search differently? Did they search for me more frequently than people that didn't see my ad? What do those actual numbers look like? So measured search lift. You can track in- store visits for people that are opted into that. And of course we tracked online sales. And then post-purchase surveys. How many of you guys are doing post-purchase surveys? You got to. And as things become harder or just different to track online, post-purchase surveys are a source of truth. They help kind of round things out, so you got to do that. So we did for Arctic, so this will also kind of frame this incrementality look.

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(20:01):

So we did an analysis of the US. We looked for markets that had high category demand, meaning people were looking at wheel coolers at the time, but people searching for wheeled coolers. So over indexing or just higher than average searches for wheeled coolers, but lower than average knowledge of Arctic. So people that were looking for coolers to know Arctic. So we chose these markets, chose 16 of them. And then we chose 16 markets that looked almost identical. So Midwest City, two Midwest cities, one that we ran YouTube and one that we did, and then we compared the results. And so a couple of things we saw, let's talk search lift first. We saw 230% lift on mobile devices. So people that saw the YouTube ad searched 230% more for Arctic than people that didn't see the ad. So that's one of the most direct behaviors that people engage in.

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(20:53):

They see the ad, they like it. They don't click because they're watching something, but later they go search on Google. And so 231% lift on YouTube search. And then here's a couple of looks. So we did kind of a comparison of how did Little Rock do compared to Little Rock before YouTube, but then how did Little Rock do compare to its match market set? But it was up 44%. And then I just put Springfield Missouri in there because I do think that was all me or rather all my wife. I think all of that. 17% Lyft, it was us. We bought like a thousand coolers or something, but it just made sense to do it. And so this is what we saw though, on average about a 25% sales lift in locations using YouTube versus those that didn't over an eight week period, very scientific measuring it.

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(21:39):

And so that's where you look at, okay, ClickData may not have told me any of this, but now I can look at the actual sales and I can look at these markets and I can compare the before and after and I can do the side by side and I could say, okay, this is what YouTube did in those markets. And so moving into retail, retailers love you when you can drive extra sales. Walmart loves Arctic for a lot of reasons, but they really loved this. We won an agency excellence award here. So we got that from our friends at Google for a case study we built around this as well, which was really exciting. Hey, this episode is brought to you by OMG Commerce. That's the agency that I get the privilege of running. You ever feel like it's Groundhog Day when it comes to your marketing where every day's the same, you're still relying on the same channels, got the same ads you're leaning into.

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(22:27):

Maybe it's time to diversify. Maybe it's time to unlock new growth. That's what we specialize in. My guess is if you're like most brands, you're probably leaning heavily into Meta ads and long live Meta. We love it, but you're probably missing YouTube ads. And my guess is maybe Google is underleveraged as well. We've helped multiple brands go from zero to five, 10, 15, even $25,000. A day we helped Karenik a hair regrowth product go from zero to $1 million in YouTube ad spend in 90 days while hitting their CAC target. And we'd love to see if we could do the same for you. So we'd love to chat, talk about what it takes to scale on YouTube and how ready you are right now. Let's chat and go to omgcommerce.com, click the let's talk button and we'd love to help you dominate with YouTube ads.

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(23:18):

And so using YouTube to go omnichannel, you got to do it. So incrementality, omnichannel, but also thinking about Amazon. So we have a popcorn brand. We're going to show some of their creatives on a minute Superfund brand. They needed to pause YouTube during holiday just for a bit because they were like, "Hey, there's some stuff we got to look at." And it was not very long, like a few days after they paused that the owner reached out and said, "Hey, Amazon sales are down." We're not getting branded searches on Amazon like we were. Amazon sales are down. And so they said, "The only thing we've changed is YouTube, so turn it back on. " And we did and then Amazon sales rebounded. So it was one of those things where I talk about this stuff all the time. I know this happens, but just another confirmation of like, "Oh yeah, of course." We didn't necessarily see that in any of the click data, but he felt it when we paused YouTube.

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(24:09):

So let's talk creative diversity. I know this is something that is talked about a lot on other paid social platforms. You don't just have to have good creative, but you have to have creative diversity. And so I'm going to break this down. I'm going to create a couple of frameworks and then Jacques is going to go deep and is going to show you some amazing creatives that you're going to want to learn from there as well. But I hesitate a litle bit to use the word formula because I think that can be not super helpful, but these are kind of like guiding principles. Your YouTube ad will need these elements to be successful, almost certainly. All kinds of different ways you can approach it, but it'll need some of these elements. It will need a hook. We got five seconds before someone can click that magical skip button.

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(24:51):

You got five seconds to make them say maybe. Maybe I'll stick around, maybe I'll watch a litle bit longer, maybe I'll consume this, maybe I'll consider it. Product demo, this is video. We need to see the product in action either if it's something that's easy to demonstrate right like before and afters or the product where we're actually using it or maybe if it's a supplement or something like that where we're visualizing the end to state. It's a little harder to see a demo of hydration or supplements or whatever, but you can still show some of it and show the end state of that product. We still need social proof. There's still an element where we're like, "Eh, I'm a little skeptical, a little skeptical of should I believe you or not? " And so we need some social proof. There are objections and objections left unhandled, people will not click or take action.

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(25:39):

And then there does need to be a call to action or an offer of some kind. Now, let's talk about what creative diversity looks like. Here's one of the great things. Anybody on Meta where you're cranking out multiple hundreds of ads per month, anybody multiple hundreds of ads per month. I just hear that that's the game, right?That's the game on Meta. The cool thing with YouTube is you don't need hundreds of ads a month. You may need a handful to get started. You may need then a handful a month to kind of test. Sometimes though, we key in on a couple of winners on YouTube and we'll ride those winners for like a year and sometimes that happens on YouTube. But these are some types of creatives you should consider. Again, Jacques is going to give several examples as well, but this is a place where that hero style video, that higher production quality, it can really shine on YouTube.

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(26:28):

YouTube's got an appetite for it. Users like it. They not necessarily expect it, but they like it on YouTube, so it performs well. This is often the best place to start, easiest place to start though, like a UGC or creator influencer mashup. Show some examples there where it kind of blends authenticity with a litle bit of polish that works really well on YouTube and then top social ads. So we almost never did this in the past. We are doing it some, but you can take your top performing meta ads and translate them over to YouTube. However, most of them will fail. Most of them just will not work. And so anybody tried that and experienced that. I moved my top Meta ad over and it sucked. I'll show you why, but I'll show you which ones you can move over. And then new concepts, explainers, demos, things like that.

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(27:16):

So let's break down a couple of these. So this is going to be kind of an interactive part. I want to hear your thoughts here, but this is one of the ads that really crushed with Arctic. This is one creator, just one influencer. We're going to watch this and then we'll talk about it.

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Brett Curry (27:32):

This is the 65 chord ultra tough heart dick cooler. And I actually put it to the test in quite a few fun different ways and this thing is ultra tough. I am April Wilkerson and I'm a builder. I am always running and gunning, whether it be in my work or in my hobbies. I put a high value on function, durability and high quality. And that's why I resonate with Arctic here because they are overbuilt but not overpriced.

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Brett Curry (28:01):

There were variations. So that was a 30. We ran a 60, ran a 90, really a great ad. What did you like about that ad? What resonated with you from that ad?

‍

Brett Curry (28:09):

Action.

‍

Brett Curry (28:12):

Action? Yeah. She's chucking this thing off of a deck. She's parking her F350, not even a 150. It's a 350. Parking it around on that thing. Yeah. What else did you like about it?

‍

Brett Curry (28:23):

Authenticity.

‍

Brett Curry (28:25):

Authenticity. Yes. So anybody watch home improvement from the 90s old show, old show, right? But like Al Borland, Tim's assistant, I'm like, she's the female version. Whatever she says, I'm like, I believe you. I don't know. I trust you. Whatever you're saying, no resistance. I'll just all buy whatever you're talking about. So you trust it, you believe it. Anything else? It's got a good pace to it, doesn't it? You're sitting around getting bored. One of the best things to do if you're previewing a YouTube ad before you run it is are there any moments when you start to look at your phone? Like if you're watching on a computer or something, or if you're showing it to your friends, is there any moment where they start to do something else? Because it happens. And I've noticed that myself. I'll be watching an ad for a client and then I'm like, oh, I got distracted.

‍

(29:13):

I started looking at something else. And then you know, that's not good. That's a part of the ad that we need to fix. So there's a good pace here. All right. I'm going to show this one as well. This is a brief one. This is kind of a brand anthem video, so we'll watch this one as well.

‍

Brett Curry (29:27):

What do you love about being outdoors? Lighting the barbecue, hitting the trail with a few friends, cheering your team on at the tailgate. However you spend your time outside, Arctic is made for it, made for real life adventures, made for real life budgets, made with quality materials and innovative designs that lock in the col engineered the right way, built to last, never, ever overpriced.

‍

Brett Curry (29:57):

So this one was important as we looked at driving sales to Walmart, had the one Our tag and stuff there.What'd you like about this ad? Don't more like a TV ad, just sir, in the back. Yeah. The last one, it's very easy to see how Article fit into my lifestyle. Yeah. Again, it's moving fast, but basically any scenario you're looking at, you're just hanging out in the backyard, you're going to the river, doing something, camping, whatever. You're going to find it fitting. Or if you're just in class or in the library, there's a girl with a cup there. Yeah, it's going to fit into your lifestyle. The product is the hero of that video, but it's also fun and it moved fast and it makes us want the product. So those styles work. This is kind of the hero style. Jacques's going to show you a ton of examples in a little bit.

‍

(30:38):

The single influencer works well also, but then you can start here. And this is often the easiest place to start because a lot of you guys have social ads. So this is one for Native. This is actually not their biggest product, but I just love this example of an ad. So I'll play at least the first part of this.

‍

Brett Curry (30:55):

Maybe this moisturizing lotion helps my skin to feel so hydrated and smooth. I just love the fact that it keeps your skin moisturized all day. With a new and improved formula- And I just love how rich and creamy the formula is. They provide a deep hydration with a lightweight field. Super hydrating, but also lightweight and sink into your skin super

‍

Brett Curry (31:11):

Fast. So kind of get the idea. What did you like about that ad? It

‍

Brett Curry (31:14):

Scratches might

‍

Brett Curry (31:16):

Be great.

‍

Brett Curry (31:18):

That whole TikTok thing where there'll be three videos happening at once.

‍

Brett Curry (31:22):

Yeah.

‍

Brett Curry (31:23):

But it scratches that.

‍

Brett Curry (31:24):

Scratches the ADHD brand. Also good up for Spencer, he's taking our photos today. So good life lesson. He's taking photos. He's learning as well. He's filing stuff away. Okay, I'm going to take this home with me. There's lots of movement. It's not overwhelming movement. We've seen some edits and you've probably seen them too where you get them back from an editor and you're like, I don't know where to focus. I like it. This is too much. But this actually does a nice job. It's enough where it's like, hey, I'm paying attention. There's that panel that shows the branding of native and you're like, okay, I know who this is. It looks good. I see different hair types, different body types, different skin types. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to see myself likely in this ad if I'm in the target market. And so here's kind of a variation of that for Thies.

‍

(32:05):

This is a men's skincare line. This is why you'll still be single in five years.

‍

Brett Curry (32:11):

It's because you don't take care of your skin. Most guys treat skincare like an afterthought. Ritzing your face with water, using the same soap for your face, body, and who knows what else.

‍

Brett Curry (32:22):

But it's actually wrecking your skin. You need an actual system. It's simple.

‍

Brett Curry (32:27):

Healthier skin, fewer breakouts, more confidence. I use T. Hanley because it's a simple, effective system that works. No extra fluff, no. So

‍

Brett Curry (32:36):

You get the idea. What did you like about that ad? And selling skincare to men is hard. It's really freaking hard. You either don't want to use it or you don't want to admit that you're using it or something like that. So yeah, what'd you like about it? The hook. This is why you would still be single in five years. There's another one. This is why you're ugly AF, which I was a little intense around. I was like, I don't know, but actually it worked. It worked for the demo. But yeah, so it's like, hey, let's take some creators and let's string together a narrative. Let's tell a story with them. Yes, sir.

‍

Brett Curry (33:06):

Yeah. So I get that they won an award, but does it mean that they performed weddings also?

‍

Brett Curry (33:12):

Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I say-

‍

Brett Curry (33:16):

Did they perform web?

‍

Brett Curry (33:17):

Oh, that ad did not win an award.

‍

Brett Curry (33:19):

Okay, because it says winning that. Okay, but won before.

‍

Brett Curry (33:22):

Winning cash. Yeah. We're winning the sales here. Yeah. I was like, wait, what award are we talking about? Yeah, okay. Totally get how that's confusing. Yeah, that I did not win a single award, but it did drive sales and it got people to buy, which is the main thing.That's the award that I want. That cash register ringing. So this is one of the great examples I think. One, because I love it. I'm a popcorn fan. I love this product. But this is like looking at, okay, if we take some raw, some mashup videos, we get some dynamic videos from Raindrop. We put those together and they work in concert together, very powerful. So this is kind of a mashup we launched with this.

‍

Brett Curry (34:05):

I had no idea popcorn could get that good. I have something for you to eat. It's called Opopop. Beautiful. Get right up. There you go.

‍

Brett Curry (34:15):

My

‍

Brett Curry (34:16):

Goodness. It's just so cool.

‍

Brett Curry (34:21):

Opopop where every kernel is individually wrapped in flavor. No more half-flavored popcorn.

‍

Brett Curry (34:26):

How good can it really be? It's just popcorn.

‍

Brett Curry (34:28):

I have weird flavors like sinelicious, fancy butter, pickle monster. That one sounds good. Wow. You need to drive this popcorn. Okaypop.com you win.

‍

Brett Curry (34:48):

Realize you probably should have brought some Opopop. It's about snack time here in a little bit. But that ad, what did you like about that ad?

‍

(34:59):

Yeah. Flavor wrapped kernels, right? This is a different popcorn experience. Yeah. Makes you want to have popcorn? Maybe too. Yeah. Yeah. The single recording from the booth, from the sound booth. I spent $300. I love it. Thank you. Thank you. It's $300 poor, but so much richer with popcorn. Rich buttery flavor. Yeah, it's totally worth it. My kids are requesting this all the time. I got to buy more Opopop and stuff. I will just play the very beginning of this. This is like the nine by 16 version. So it is good. I think at the core of YouTube still the 16 by nine, but we do need some nine by 16, both for shorts, but also for kind of the mobile takeover. If someone's watching in portrait mode, so I'll play the first part of this. What is this?

‍

Brett Curry (35:53):

Oh my God. This

‍

Brett Curry (35:54):

Is amazing. That's good.

‍

Brett Curry (35:56):

They got pickle. Fancy butter, super butter. Synlicious. Maui heat. This one has a fiery touch to it.

‍

Brett Curry (36:02):

So very good. So you kind of get the idea there, just a different way to approach that slightly different form factor. And then here's a piece from Raindrop. Love this ad. So I'll explain kind of how we're using these in concert together, but those are then creator, UGC type stuff. And then let's take a look at this hero kind of brand form its ad.

‍

Brett Curry (36:24):

Moving ahead.

‍

Brett Curry (36:25):

I'll make Opopop.

‍

Brett Curry (36:31):

In a world where popcorn just doesn't pop anymore, one name dares to be different. Opopop.

‍

Brett Curry (36:38):

Opopop.

‍

Brett Curry (36:40):

Each kernel is flavor wrapped so everybody packs a punch. Opopop. So rich. So buttery. Opopop.

‍

Brett Curry (36:49):

Opopop.

‍

Brett Curry (36:51):

So sweet.

‍

Brett Curry (36:52):

Opopop.

‍

Brett Curry (36:53):

Opopop. You'll fall in love with popcorn again.

‍

Brett Curry (37:00):

Opopop.

‍

Brett Curry (37:01):

And don't worry if you run out.

‍

Brett Curry (37:03):

Opopop. Opopop.

‍

Brett Curry (37:10):

Because you can subscribe and save. Movie night has a new leading snack. Go to opopop.com to try it for yourself.

‍

Brett Curry (37:23):

It's well done. Give it up for the raindrop team. We got to give them a hand there. Yeah, it's so good. I love the little Easter eggs too, the Wall Street Kernel. Come on, that's pretty good. The name of the campaign too is also a star is Korn. Is that right? So I saw that I think from you, Donovan, which was great. So the way we're kind of using these, and this is how this kind of ties together. So we're trying to drive sales into now retail stores and Amazon. We're using these ads largely on connected TV, not exclusively, but we're leaning into connected TV. They are smashing there in terms of view rate, engagement rate. People love it. We're using these for performance as well, but then we're using some of the UGC and some of those other videos for our performance focused campaigns.

‍

(38:05):

And so the way they kind of work together and we're kind of sharing viewed video audiences and things like that, it works well together. And so then that's how you get to more people saying, I'm going to spend $300 on popcorn because they've been convinced. Next movie night, I don't want it to be a bland movie night. I want to have Opopop for my movie night and go from there. Now this is a brand. I'm just going to play the first part of this because it's kind of long, but this is for Kieranika, a women's hair regrowth product. This is a product they were running mostly direct response TV. They could never get YouTube to work. They got Meta to work, never get YouTube to work. We worked with them, this is a number of years ago. We were able to get them to over seven figures and spend monthly at a profitable return, measurable, profitable return.

‍

(38:50):

One of the things that we found, and Jacques's going to talk a little bit about creative story arc, but I'm going to give you just a quick example here. This kind of had a lead up, had a lead up into the ad and it was like, okay, worked for TV. As we looked at it, I was like, wait a minute, I don't like that. I don't like that hook. I don't like that opening, but I like this opening. And so there was a part kind of 15 seconds in that I was like, "Hey, this has got to be the opening. So I'm going to play this part so you can see for

‍

Brett Curry (39:16):

Yourself." This was a bald spot and now look at this. I have more hair, which is all due to Karenique. It actually grew hair. Karinique has given me more hair. It has made my hair shiny. It's even made my hair thicker. I would've never thought that this and this can happen in such a simple product.

‍

Brett Curry (39:40):

Don't live with thinning hair.

‍

Brett Curry (39:42):

So then it started with the explanation. So there was a version that kind of started with the explanation, not a great place to start. Start right with a dramatic story. This was a bald spot and that looks thick and full and beautiful. And then she tells her story. And so that ad worked. Now, media buying was also a huge part of that, really important, but getting the creative right mattered and mattered big time. I believe this is one of the most important things you can do right here. If you want to go from pretty good in YouTube to really excelling and kind of transformational growth, you got to get good at this. Creative feedback loops. What are we seeing in the data? What is that telling us? And then what are we changing because of that? I think we live in a world, in fact, I don't think I know this.

‍

(40:24):

We just have data being vomited all over us. We just get data, data, data. Nobody needs more data. We just need to know what should I do with this data? And so this is one of the rules we have at OMG. We're putting together a deck, we're talking to a client. What do you want me to do with this data? Like you're showing this data to a client. What is the action? What is the insight? What does this mean? Not just a whole bunch of data. And so the really kind of three main areas we're going to tweak as we look at performance. Do we need new hooks or new angles to open the video like we saw with Karen Eak? Is it the product demo? Is the product demo falling flat? Is there something in the video where maybe it starts great, but then I'm peeking at my phone halfway through or I'm looking out the window or you've lost me.

‍

(41:06):

Is there something with the product demo that needs to get better and or is it offer related? Is there something where you're saying, here's why you need to take action or do something right now? So a couple rules of thumb and then I'm going to show you the numbers we look at on a regular basis. If you got a relatively low view rate and this is relative, depends on brands, happy to kind of walk through some benchmarks at a break with you. But if the view rate is low, meaning we're serving this ad to a bunch of people and not that many of them are watching. Most of them or an overly high percentage are skipping then the hook isn't right. The hook is not quite there. Could be audiences well, maybe just targeting the wrong person, but likely you need to go back to the drawing board with the hook.

‍

(41:48):

What if people are watching it? What if they're watching it, but they're not clicking? So view rate's good. People that get served the ad, they watch it, but they're not clicking. And I know I just said not a lot of people click YouTube ad and that's true. Again, this is relatively speaking. So are they not a relative number clicking on the ad? That's likely product demo, but yeah, go right ahead. Yeah.

‍

(42:10):

Great. Let's just talk about that. Yeah, not a slide, but I'll just walk through it with you. So there's a few places to look, but if you're running instream ads, that's the bulk of where you're going to find success with YouTube. Those are the pre-roll, mid-roll, skippable ads. Really the number we should care about is return or if there's incrementality and stuff like that. But if that view rate dips below 20%, you got problems. There's an issue with you're targeting the wrong person or more likely it's just a bad ad. So for instream, usually in the mid 20s to mid 30s, if we're running a performance campaign. So that would be demand gen campaigns. That's where we're telling the algorithm, go find me new customers at this target row as or target CPA. And if that view rate's not in the mid 20s to mid 30s, you probably got some problems.

‍

(43:02):

It could be low 20s and still work, but in that range is good. If you're running on TV, it needs to be like 50 or higher because it's just harder to skip on TV, people just watching, kind of chilling. So like a 30% view rate on TV, your ad sucks. Yeah, go ahead.

‍

Brett Curry (43:21):

No, person watch the video for it to be like, okay, even though too many people are watching it, but what percentage of the video watch for it to be like, okay, this ... Because many people after the book immediately click or they immediately ...

‍

Brett Curry (43:37):

It's a great question. So how long should somebody watch a video? I'll share a couple things really quickly. One, with YouTube, if we're trying to measure performance, trying to measure direct purchases, incremental purchases, whatever, I've never seen an ad less than 30 seconds do really well. I just haven't. Great for views, great for reminding of things. We ran some shorter ads for Arctic, but it was to reinforce. So longer than 30 ads for the ad you run, you got to do that. Some people look at what percentage of the ad did they view. Ultimately, I don't really care about that, but what I do want to see is how long did they watch? And I know they may be like, "Well, what does that mean?" Well, if I'm running a 90-second ad, they may watch 30% of that, but that's 30 seconds, right? They may watch 30% of a 30-second and that's only 10 seconds.

‍

(44:32):

That extra time engaging with the ad is really important. And so I'll show you a sheet that we build.This will be for an actual client, it's all grayed out and stuff on who it is. But I do want to look at, and there's a great stat called average watch time per impression. That's the stat that will kind of blow your mind. If you think about whatever the average is on Meta, it's a couple seconds or whatever. We've got some ads, some raindrop ads, some other ads where it's like 30 to 40 seconds. Average watch time per person we show the ad to, which is kind of mind blowing. And so I would look more at that. How long are people watching rather than some percentage game because then you'll always be like, "Oh, well, this short ad had a higher percentage." I want to look at how long is someone watching.

‍

(45:15):

Yes, ma'am.

‍

Brett Curry (45:17):

Thinking about

‍

Brett Curry (45:20):

Type on that.

‍

Brett Curry (45:21):

Yeah.

‍

Brett Curry (45:23):

When I'm watching two on TV, I rarely skip the ad.

‍

Brett Curry (45:26):

Yep, yep.

‍

(45:28):

Yeah. Maybe the remote side in your lab, maybe sitting over here. It's just work to skip an ad on TV. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So we do want to look at that. And actually, let me talk about this and I'll show you a sheet, which I think will clarify quite a bit of this. So if we're looking at low click-through rates, this is where I would say the product demo is not good or that there's just something you're not getting someone over the edge to actually click. And again, it's relatively speaking because people don't click YouTube ads as much. And then if it's a low conversion rate, it's almost always offer driven. Okay. So then this is what we break down and this is the type of thing we build. Happy to build this for you as well, but we're looking at each video. What are the most important numbers?

‍

(46:09):

So obviously all we really care about, and this is a client that they really pay attention to ROAS. So ROAS is what we care about. If the ROAS was smashing and the view rate was garbage, I wouldn't really care. I would just keep sending money. But you see there's a stark difference between instream and shorts, right? And you can see this one, is there a laser? I don't know. It doesn't matter. This one is only like an 18% instream view rate that's low, but the ROAS is good. So we're going to lean in a litle bit there and keep doing that. But there's a big difference between instream and short. So in stream, 20s and 30s usually pretty good for conversion focused campaigns. Shorts anywhere in the five range is good. Five to seven, great view rate for shorts. So it is absolutely relative. And then on the click-through rate side of things, anything over a 0.5, it's really good on YouTube.

‍

(47:01):

Again, people just don't click. So you're north of 0.5, you're approaching a one. Wow, there's something pretty impressive here. But the few things we look at is sometimes we've got something like that. Was that fourth one down? Bad view rate, 19% or borderline bad. Amazing click-through rate. Okay. So there's something in the hook that's not quite getting people to stick around, but if they do, they're clicking. So now let's rework the hook on that or advise the team like, "Hey, this hook sucks. We got to fix it. " But then you can see kind of the duration of the ad there that's column O and then how long people are watching. So again, this is average watch time per impression, but there are several of these that are in the 20s or 30s, which is just, you won't find that on any other platform other than maybe AppLovin where they've forced you to watch it or whatever, but people are engaging with these ads.

‍

(47:53):

And so that's one of my favorite metrics is the metric that we talk about a lot with Raindrop. And we've seen some, I'm trying to remember which some of our top ones were about 45 seconds, 45 second average watchlight. It's crazy per impression. And so people just love some of these ads and you have so much more opportunity to convince them to sell them, for them to remember you, for them to search for you later if they engage a little bit longer. But this is the type of stuff you need to be feeding to your team so that you know what to iterate on next, know what to tweak next. And so this data is all there, but it can be overwhelming until you look at it and say, "Okay, well, this is what we're going to test next because of this. " Great. Any other questions?

‍

(48:32):

Did that answer the questions pretty well at least? Okay, awesome. All right, great. And so let's move on then to campaign structure. Now I mentioned, I used to do TV buying. I'm a media guy. I like numbers. I'm kind of a nerd with this stuff. Media buying still matters. You've probably seen posts on LinkedIn. Media buying is dead, doesn't matter. Great posts for getting engagement on LinkedIn, no doubt about it. And no offense if you've posted that. But the campaign structure does matter. We can take a good creative and give it life and give it fuel or we can squash it with our media buying approach. And so a few things to keep in mind here is depending on what we're trying to do, the structure of the campaigns are going to look different. So if I'm trying to drive retail sales, I'm trying to get people to go buy Arctic or go buy native or go buy Lumi or Mando or something like that, I'm going to lean more into video view campaigns and video reach campaigns.

‍

(49:26):

I'm going to be on TVs. I'm going to try to get a lot of low cost, good, engaged reach. I may do some conversion focused campaigns, but you can't really track those in- store purchases that much, so I'm not going to lean into that as much. And so I'll probably try to get 50% or more of my budget going to TVs. If I'm looking at overall lifts, I'm almost equally interested in online, Amazon and in store, then it's going to maybe look a little more like this where I've got more focus on conversion campaigns, those where I'm bidding for a conversion, but then I'm going to do some view-based campaigns as well. We actually were fascinated. We're talking to a big brand. They spend like three to four million a month on Meta and we found it's just so hard. Even like you put a lot of exclusions on your YouTube campaigns, it's kind of hard to get out from under that shadow because if you lean into conversion focused campaigns, I think the algorithm's just like finding people that are kind of engaged, even if they're new.

‍

(50:21):

And so we're having to lean into view-based campaigns here to reach net new people. We'll see bigger brands doing that. You've just got to invest in how to reach net new, incrementally new customers. And so then if it's kind of D2C sales, we're mostly leaning into demand gen campaigns. Okay, great. Real quickly here, if you want to go from TikTok or Instagram reels, I mentioned before, most of those ads won't translate, they just won't. But if you want to do this, and we've actually seen this working more recently than ever in the past, you got to think about a couple things. These ads just fun, but they're not going to write conversions, and burnouts within Arctic. This is great for views, doesn't really drive conversions, right? Here's a quick example of natives.

‍

Brett Curry (51:10):

Has moisturization helps my skin to feel

‍

Brett Curry (51:12):

So- Same bad we saw before just in a different format. So here's the thing you got to pay attention to. If you want to take your winners from Meta or TikTok or wherever and test them on YouTube, this is where you got to start. So the ones that do work, they fit this mold. And we have seen more success here. A couple of home focused products where we take winners from Meta, put it onto YouTube and they kind of work, but they all fit this. So 30 seconds or longer, voiceover, meaning someone is speaking, whether it's face to camera or just like a voiceover. We see the product in action. Of course, I think most ads have that CTA or an offer and then not just thumbstop only. Sometimes ads work because they thumb stop and you got text around it to get someone to click.

‍

(51:56):

It's got to be the ads got to do the heavy lifting. And so if you have winning Meta ads that meet that criteria, I would test it on YouTube and you may find some success there. Okay. Last thing, measure, model, maximize where you get real nerdy. It's also where you make a lot of money and maybe you win some awards, but you really win that award of better growth and better merr and better overall performance. So it's kind of the trifecta of lift that we like to measure. I mentioned search lift, brand lift can be important as well and then sales lift. So do talk to the product specialist from YouTube at the lunch break about the way kind of lift studies work. But then the trifecta of measurement, you really got to look at all three of these things. So MTA is our multi-touch attribution.

‍

(52:42):

MMM, that's our marketing mix modeling. We're looking at causality. As this moves up, do sales move up with it? As this moves down, do sales move down with it Built on the rule that correlation might not equal causation, but if there is no correlation, there is no causation. So that's kind of what this was built on. So you need an MMM and then incrementality, also a great tool. Northbeam's building all of them so you can just chat with them. But the idea and the way you work these together is, hey, maybe our attribution in platform or an MTA like Northbeam, that's where we're kind of making some of our day-to-day decisions of, I'm pressing this button in platform, I'm optimizing this if this ad is working or not. But then we're taking those incrementality results and calibrating what we see there. And then we're looking at the marketing mix modeling from a bigger perspective to say, how much budget should I be moving to various channels?

‍

(53:35):

And so this is actually what you can get with Google. This is one of their conversion lift studies. So again, talk to one of the product specialists about this. Oh, no, I'm sorry, that's actually a brand, that's a search lift. So we drove like 123% search lift for one particular brand. But then also, and this is a little bit hard to see, but at the bottom, this is for a pretty large home furnishing item. This was looking at a user holdout. So again, group of users, some of them saw the ads, some of them didn't. Let's measure the difference. This led to 105 incremental purchases where Google scientifically said, "Hey, these purchases would not have happened without YouTube." It was about $874,000 in conversion value from those conversions, the view of that. And then this is an MMM. This is a brand that they came to us.

‍

(54:25):

They were doing well on YouTube, but they were like, "Hey, what if we tripled YouTube?" And I'm like, "Yes, that sounds fun." And so we helped them with creative and campaigns and stuff and we did triple the spend. And then this is an MMM tool and it said, "Hey, triple the results." So I was looking at, again, looking at from a correlation perspective as spend goes up, do sales go up and what do we believe about that from this measurement tool? And so we started leaning in more. We did an incrementality test to also kind of verify, but this is what we got to look at now. We got to look at this from a few different perspectives to understand what is really going on here. And so I know this may seem a little bit overwhelming. I think it's also fun, but hey, nothing that's really worthwhile is ever easy.

‍

(55:13):

So you got to be able to understand this and then dive into it. As I wrap up here, going to turn over to Jacques Spitzer in a second, there are ways we can help love to do a strategic review, love to talk about YouTube readiness, YouTube roadmap, kind of where are you, how close are you to being ready to push the gas on YouTube, can help with other channels as well, of course. And then we also offer free service. So I got some clients here where we're kind of running the show for them in these channels. We also have a number of other brands where they've got an in- house team or they've got an agency for a couple different channels, but they say to us, "Hey, will you just consult on YouTube? Will you just come in and help us with YouTube?" I actually got a number of brands that are doing big incrementality studies and they're saying, "Hey, just help us, help us get this right before we lean into this study." So we do that as well.

‍

(56:03):

That's me in my podcast room. I'm not even sure what I'm doing right there, but regardless, if you'd like to meet with me or my team, that will get you to our contact page. And so that's it for me. Thank you so much. You guys were amazing. That'll do it for this week's episode. One final mention if you feel like you've stalled out with your growth, if you feel like you've missed opportunities and if you feel like your current team or agency, they just don't have that buyer anymore, or maybe you feel like you've outgrown them, we would love to chat. You may be missing opportunities and we don't want to miss an opportunity to work with great brands. So if you'd love to scale on YouTube or Google or Meta or Amazon or email and SMS, or just like a second set of eyes to look over how you're growing right now, visit us at omgcommerce.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.

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YouTube ads veteran Brett Curry (OMG Commerce) and TikTok Shop expert Jordan West (Social Commerce Club) went back and forth live on what's actually moving the needle for D2C brands right now — and some of their takes are going to sting. Most brands are still treating Google spend as a given, measuring YouTube with click-based attribution that was never built for it, and ignoring a TikTok Shop launch strategy that flips the creator dynamic entirely.

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Inside the episode:

• The YouTube Shorts formula that's working in 2026 — why Brett reversed his position, and the 4 things a video must have (including minimum length) before you waste money testing it
• The Blitz methodology explained — how Social Commerce Club seeds hundreds of creators in a 24–48 hour window to manufacture momentum and make big creators come to you instead of the other way around
• Why Jordan thinks most Google spend is a non-incremental tax — and the channel hierarchy he'd use for every D2C brand over $10M
• The TikTok Shop–to–Shopify halo effect — the data Jordan's team is seeing that almost nobody is talking about yet
• "My brand is too premium for TikTok Shop" — Jordan's reframe on why that objection is almost always wrong, and what to ask instead

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

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Chapters:

[0:00] Introduction: Brett Curry & Jordan West Swap Podcasts

[1:09] Why YouTube CPMs Are the Most Underpriced in the Industry

[5:00] What's Working on YouTube Shorts: The Framework for Winning Creative

[7:57] TikTok Shop Deep Dive: Jordan's Obsession with Demand Generation

[10:01] Like, Know, and Trust: Why YouTube Is the Ultimate Brand-Building Platform

[11:28] Ad Break: OMG Commerce Omnichannel Growth

[12:37] The Blitz Methodology: How Social Commerce Club Concentrates Creator Signal

[16:46] Moments vs. Blitzes Explained: Definitions and How They Drive Momentum

[19:42] How Far Can Brands Actually Scale on YouTube?

[21:53] Why MTA Tools Underreport YouTube: The Case for Incrementality Testing

[22:58] The Problem with Multi-Touch Attribution: Jordan's New Halo Tracking Concept

[25:17] Incrementality Explained with a Retail Store Analogy

[28:43] Rapid Fire YouTube Questions: Mashup Creatives and Repurposing Creator Content

[30:53] YouTube Targeting Strategy: Why You Still Need to Feed the Algorithm Signal

[32:22] Which Brands Should Be on YouTube But Aren't?

[33:09] Hot Take: The Right Ad Spend Hierarchy for D2C Brands

[34:43] YouTube vs. Meta by Product Type: Apparel, Problem-Solution, and Omnichannel

[37:15] If TV Works, YouTube Should Work: The CTV and Linear TV Connection

[38:10] Is Your Brand Too Premium for TikTok Shop? Jordan's Answer

[39:42] Why TikTok Shop Is a Fundamentally Different Beast Than TikTok Ads

[41:05] Wrap-Up: Where to Find Brett and Jordan

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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/
• Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact

Relevant Links: 

• Jordan's LinkedIn: /jordan-west-marketer/ ‍

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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, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

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Brett Curry (00:08):

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. Today's episode is different. This is me and my buddy Jordan West from Social Commerce Club and also the host of the unofficial TikTok shop podcast. We are interviewing each other. It's like the old podcast swap if you've heard of that, if you're a podcaster, but we just decide to interview each other. And so it's part TikTok shops, what's working now, what are some misconceptions, what you need to be doing to make that thing work. And then it's part YouTube. Some of the things that are new, some of the beliefs that I've had about YouTube that I've had an about face on where Jordan grills me with some YouTube questions and I answered them right here. So this is like a fireside chat where we're both interviewing each other. I hope you find it valuable.

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(00:59):

I hope you find it as fun to listen to as it was to record. And with that, let's get into it. TikTok shops and YouTube, what's working right

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Jordan West (01:09):

Now. Hey guys, do I ever have an exciting episode of the unofficial TikTok shop podcast? Formerly Secrets of Scaling your eCommerce brand. It's on this feed here and it's incredible how many people are listening to this podcast. This is a third time, third or fourth maybe even time person on this pod. We are actually doing a combined pod today. We're doing a combined pod. Brett Curry and I. Brett from OMG Commerce. He is the absolute expert in the space when it comes to YouTube advertising, which I am obsessed with anything top of funnel that actually generates demand. Brett, we are going to be answering all of the burning, the five big things right now that are actually working on YouTube right now. And I really do think between YouTube and TikTok Shop, those are the big things. And then we're going to be going back and forth on what is working on TikTok Shop and YouTube advertising all at the same time, how it is working together to actually blow brands up.

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(02:08):

I've had so many conversations with brand owners lately that I am pulling my hair out. I don't know if you guys can tell. I mean, I'm starting to bald here. It's because- You still looking good

‍

Brett Curry (02:16):

Though, dude. You have way less gray than me. And so you're looking really good, distinguished all those things young

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Jordan West (02:24):

At heart. I did. So just everyone knows, I went on a bit of a health kick over since like 2023- ish and I realized I lost 60 pounds. 60 pounds. That will make you look and feel younger. Yeah, I had no idea. I was 250, I'm 190 now. So just everyone knows. And

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Brett Curry (02:42):

Also for those that don't know, because you can't tell on a podcast, you and I just got to hang out together in Southern California. You're freaking tall. I'm a pretty tall guy. I'm 6'3", shoes on or whatever. You're taller than me. And so I was like, whoa, Jordan West, you are taller in person than you are on a podcast. So there you go. 190 at your height. That's thin.

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Jordan West (03:01):

It's bean pull. It's bean pull territory guys is what it's getting to. So let's dive in, Brett. It's 2026. We're recording this early March 2026. What is working for brands on YouTube ads? Because I actually, and I want to preface this here with, if I could, and I actually tried to last year, I would go so hard on YouTube specifically. So I actually had a partnership with Agentio on doing YouTube ad reads specifically. Interesting.

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Brett Curry (03:35):

Okay.

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Jordan West (03:36):

Okay. Yes. And we wanted to go super hard. Unfortunately, it was just one of those things where just kind of like too many things going on. We were TikTok shop. I think it's still part of social commerce, this like buying ad reads within YouTube. You know why? Yeah. Because I think YouTube CPMs are the most underpriced CPMs in the entire industry in the world. And it's not even close.

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Brett Curry (03:58):

Yeah, totally. And underpriced CPMs but also with really high engagement. So CPMs are sometimes what you pay for them. I was talking to Olivia Corey from house the other day and

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Jordan West (04:10):

She

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Brett Curry (04:10):

Was talking about like with CTV, the CPM you pay, you often get what you pay for. And they've seen that in the incrementality reads that sometimes those 30 or $40 CPMs you get on connected TV or certain streaming platforms are worth it. And sometimes the dollar, $2 CPMs you can get on some remnant inventory, cable buys, they're not even worth that. They're just absolute cards.

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Jordan West (04:32):

So like Google display is a great example, right?

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Brett Curry (04:34):

Yeah.

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Jordan West (04:36):

No one's thinking that's a great deal. Totally.

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Brett Curry (04:38):

Totally. Yeah. But like YouTube, yeah, it's both low cost CPM, highly engaged audience. People are watching. Those impressions often lead to 15, 30, 35 seconds of watch time per impression. Crazy. So when you factor that with

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Jordan West (04:55):

A low

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Brett Curry (04:56):

CPM. Also, but like preface, I am so glad we're doing this joint episode where we get to go back and forth. So maybe TikTok shop is your jam and you're really wanting to go deep on that, or maybe you're thinking about YouTube. Well, we've got both right here, right now on this pod, which is super exciting. And so the first thing I'm going to share, the first tip, what's working right now totally ties to TikTok shop. And that is there was a time, Jordan, when I was not very bullish on YouTube shorts. In fact, I thought it was just okay and just okay for remarketing.

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Jordan West (05:31):

Lasttime you were on, you said this. You did say

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Brett Curry (05:34):

This. I remember. I did say that last time. I stand corrected. I am now taking the opposite position. Also though, I will say, and this backs me up, backs up my original point. One of House Analytics original YouTube studies, they were also like, "Eh, shorts. We can't tell if it's incremental." But now they've changed their tune as have I. And so here's what we're seeing working on shorts. If you take your top performing social ads, I'm going to give you a framework for what that social ad needs to look like.

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Jordan West (06:05):

Okay.

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Brett Curry (06:05):

That

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Jordan West (06:06):

Top

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Brett Curry (06:06):

Performing social video ad can actually run on YouTube shorts with good performance, incremental performance, some of the direct metrics we look at, like click-through rate and some conversion and stuff like that. And I know that a lot of people, their best organic content actually comes from TikTok shop creators or TikTok creators. And so the quick formula though, here's what that video has to have Jordan Fort to work on YouTube shorts. It has to be longer than 30 seconds. I've never still ever seen an ad under 30 seconds scale that's also driving some kind of meaningful conversion metric of some kind.

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Jordan West (06:46):

And this is scaling on. Com, correct? We're talking about direct.com

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Brett Curry (06:51):

Scaling. Yes. But I still believe that the biggest benefit of YouTube is beyond just the dot com. So it's dot com, it's Amazon. Totally agree. I wish we could disagree, but- The core metric is still we're looking at.com sales. So got to be 30 seconds. It has to have a voiceover. So we're talking not just a scroll stop, not just some kind of a grabber there. It needs to either have someone speaking

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Jordan West (07:16):

On camera. Has to have a voiceover.

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Brett Curry (07:18):

Has to have a voiceover.

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Jordan West (07:19):

Someone

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Brett Curry (07:19):

Speaking on camera, looking in the camera or a voiceover after the fact, either one is fine. It needs to have some kind of product demo. Most of the videos have that, so that's cool. And then it does need to have a call to action. So if it has those things and it's ripping on Meta, Instagram reels, things like that, and it's working on TikTok shop, my guess is it will work on YouTube shorts for you. So yeah, that's a new perspective for me. I used to be low YouTube shorts stock price was low in my mind. It is elevated substantially.

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Jordan West (07:57):

I want to double down here. I'm the TikTok shop guy, right? Yeah.

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(08:03):

You know I wasn't always. I just love marketing. I love marketing. I love psychology. I love this idea. So it's really interesting actually where I live. So I live in this little city. It's about 40,000 people and I have decided, I don't think I've told anyone on this podcast, but I decided to just start making content and I'm really good at making content. And I was like, huh, I've got a team that already does a ton of YouTube editing for me. I'm going to see how fast it takes to go from zero in the city to like, know and trust to the point that I could do or I could get any position. I could become mayor, I could become MP, I could become whatever. Dude,

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Brett Curry (08:41):

You should totally become mayor.

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Jordan West (08:43):

I've decided, I was actually thinking about it, but it's this October and I was like, I've got too many. We're building something, this rocket ship. I'm like, I'm not like Elon. I can't do all of the things all at once.

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Brett Curry (08:54):

You would likely hate most of it, but it'd be so cool to say you're the mayor of the town you live in.

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Jordan West (09:01):

And then be like, now I'm going to hand it off. So I am friends with the mayor now, him and I talk all the time and I give him all my ideas. So it has taken me about 10 videos to go from zero in the town to I would say 50% of people being like, "Hey Jordan, I watch your videos on the street." Crazy. Now the reason being I believe that social media, the point of social media and YouTube is the perfect example of this. Sorry, YouTube is not the perfect example. YouTube is the thing, right? Brett and I, by the way, I mean, how many years have you had your

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Brett Curry (09:38):

Podcast? Geez, since like 2017 or something, I did a podcast with another guy, another agency owner before that. So I've been podcasting for ages.

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Jordan West (09:46):

Same, same, right? I mean, I watched this great video on Rogan last night and just like about Rogan and it's like 2009. Of course, the guy has gotten his 10,000 hours over and over and over, right? Oh, absolutely.

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Brett Curry (10:00):

Yeah. Yeah.

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Jordan West (10:01):

And so again, I think I'm 2017, 2018, somewhere in there. I remember the very first episode I ever had, I interviewed the previous owner of the Vancouver Knucks. I was somehow able to get him. And it's like, why did I have him on? I don't know. But I've been doing this for a long time and I'll tell you the point of social media for your brand and for your personal brand, for your brand in general is to get to like, know, and trust. And that is it. That's the point. So you get to like, know and trust and then if you can have a CTA even better, right? Even better to have a CTA there with your product, that's it. And YouTube allows you to do that. That's why I love, I'm so bullish on YouTube forever. I can't picture a platform I actually like more as a content creator than YouTube.

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Brett Curry (10:55):

Yeah, I agree. And the other thing about that is, and I know you have kids as do I, but like you look at even what young people are doing. So I look at my nine-year-old son, Benjamin. I look at my dad who's 74. They both spend a lot of time on YouTube. We try to limit Benjamin's time on YouTube. But when we give him free reign, he's going to YouTube to watch his favorite creators.

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Jordan West (11:15):

Same with

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Brett Curry (11:16):

My kids. It's like that's that. Yeah, very bullish on YouTube for sure. Okay. So that's my first tip what's working right now. What's say you, Jordan, on the TikTok shop side of things.

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(11:28):

Hey, thanks again for tuning in. This episode's brought to you by OMG Commerce. That's my agency. Hey, we're specialists at creating omnichannel growth for brands profitably. Now the greatest brands we know are no longer just D2C. Yes, they're masters of D2C, but they're also growing and scaling on marketplaces and in retail stores. And we understand the complexities of how to grow in all of those channels from a campaign strategy, a creative strategy, and a measurement strategy. In fact, we recently won a Google Agency Excellence Award for helping Arctic coolers grow their retail sales in Walmart using YouTube. We've helped add almost eight figures in growth on Amazon for brands and we've even helped a brand go from nine to 10 figures. And so we want to help you grow. So if you're not satisfied with your growth in any of those channels or you're looking to unlock new growth, we should probably chat.

‍

(12:27):

Visit us at omgcommerce.com, click that Let's Talk button. We love to schedule a strategy session with you. With that, back to the show.

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Jordan West (12:37):

Well, I'm going to bring in, so glad you asked, Brett, I'm going to bring in a marketing principle here and this marketing principle is really, really important and it's just a general principle. So if you are running a company, if you're doing anything to do with messaging, there is one thing you must constantly do and be thinking about. And that is taking signal, sorry, taking noise and creating signal, right? Stop doing all of these disparate things and create signal, right? I talked about this on a previous podcast that I was on today. The sun is incredible, right? Imagine all of the heat, but if you took the sun and concentrated it, that is like a laser beam. I know it's a different technology, but just stick with me here, right? That could cut through anything if you took that energy and focused it somewhere. And so on TikTok Shop, let me explain to you this methodology and why I'm so obsessed with this.

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(13:34):

We have two different methodologies that we use at Social Commerce Club. Well, we've got a lot of them, but here's two that I'm going to talk to you about. Moment marketing, number one. Number two is the blitz. So the blitz, let me explain to you the blitz. So the whole idea with the TikTok shop blitz is that you concentrate all of the noise that is happening with your brand in a defined amount of time that then creates momentum, right? It's really interesting. Did you listen to, it's only been a day since it was out, but Taylor Holiday had this three hour long diatribe podcast on open residency.

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Brett Curry (14:12):

I did not. I saw it. I saw the clips and the intro and stuff. I do plan to listen, but I've not listened yet. It was funny. I saw Cody Plofker from Jones Real Beauty posted on Twitter today. He's like, "Why would I listen to three hours of Taylor Holiday telling me I'm wrong when he tells me directly every day?" And so it was a funny clip, but yeah, I am looking forward to checking that out.

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Jordan West (14:37):

It is 100% worthwhile. We made it required listening at the agency to understand because the way that Taylor and I look at all of this stuff is the exact same. And what he's talking about is that brands are not creating enough signal in times that it is not like a non-Black Friday event where you create your own signal in your own moment. So last year I decided to take on some consulting clients for a variety of reasons I decided to do this.

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Brett Curry (15:09):

You like their CMO type of thing or TikTok shops specific consulting?

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Jordan West (15:14):

No, no, no, no. Just one day every two weeks for an hour.

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Brett Curry (15:20):

Ask me anything type thing.

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Jordan West (15:21):

Yeah, exactly. You needed

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Brett Curry (15:23):

More to do.

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Jordan West (15:24):

I needed more to do. I had a problem I was trying to solve personally and I was like, "Oh, I got an idea." I charge insane amounts of money for it by the hour. I actually am not doing it anymore because I've decided I'm like, "I'm just not going to sell my time anymore." That was a fun time of life doing that. But it was really fun because what I would do is these weren't massive brands, right? Those would go to the agency, but it was just like a couple of smaller brands and I helped them grow massive, massive amounts. And what we did is we just used this exact same principle. We just used this idea of moments and blitzes to be able to concentrate all of the signal. And what it did is it created this incredible flywheel that just kept going. And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is the key." And we did this when I owned eight different brands, right?

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(16:12):

I knew how to do this and yet I hadn't really solidified it. And so on TikTok Shop, super, super important. At Social Commerce Club, this is what we do. One of our giant KPIs that we're talking about is how many blitzes we have done in a week. Guys, we work with a lot of brands and a lot of massive, massive brands, and we do a lot of blitzes. And I will tell you, the majority of them all hit in a huge way, a huge way. So

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Brett Curry (16:37):

Unpack this a little bit more then. So what is a moment and what is a blitz? I'm definitely getting pictures in my mind, but I want to make sure I'm clear on this. So can you define both of those really quickly?

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Jordan West (16:46):

Yeah. So a blitz is where we generally, mostly this is going to be for a new launch on the platform. So it's going to be the first time that a brand has launched on the platform. We're going to perform a blitz. And so what we do is we actually offline sample hundreds of samples. Now for us at Social Commerce Club, we have one of the most incredible creator communities. I hardly even talk about the creator community anymore just because I don't know, other people have creator communities and I'm like, "But we have hundreds of the top creators on TikTok Shop in our community. And so we actually will often seed out to them first if it makes sense for them to work with the brand." But what we do is we offline seed to them so that we can pick the date, the exact date and time of when we want them to post their videos.

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(17:35):

And then within the 24 to 48 hour window, we say, "Hey, we want you to post five to 10 videos." It's wild the amount of videos. We'll get thousands of videos within 24 hours. Then we pour money into GMV Max. GMV Max now takes all of those codes and pours money into them and it's like you're everywhere. So what ends up happening is these giant creators see it on their TikTok. They're scrolling through. They're like, "Who is this brand?" And then they apply for it. I want to create content for this

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Brett Curry (18:03):

Brand potentially. Yeah.

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Jordan West (18:04):

Yeah. Then they apply to work with us and it's with our brands and we're like, sweet. That is how you turn the tables from being the brand that's like, "Please come and work with me. " So many brands will come to me and like, "Ah, how do we get creators?" It's like, dude, go to the dance and put off the don't talk to me vibe.That's how you do it. But if you're desperate, if you're the desperate person at the dance, nobody's going to dance with you.

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Brett Curry (18:32):

Yeah. That's amazing. I love it. And what this is also doing, there's an old saying, you see something once, you probably forget it, you see something twice, you've seen it, you see something three times, you're like, "This is everywhere." So now if I'm either a customer or a consumer and I see three or four videos about your brand on TikTok, you're everywhere. This is a movement, this is a trend. I've got to either buy it or I've got to get on board if I'm a creator and start working with you like it. I like the idea

‍

Jordan West (19:00):

Of

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Brett Curry (19:00):

Blitz.

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Jordan West (19:02):

So that is the Blitz methodology moment marketing is then taking specific moments afterwards and working around that particular moment in a Blitz methodology. And so we use moments all the time where we'll just start pinning moments in and TikTok Shop is amazing because they'll often have paid discounts that they're doing that you don't even have to pay for if your shop score is high enough where you get to be a part of their moments. So like all the time, just be a part of these moments, but then create your own moments. Those moments could also be like big launches on the platform.That's the thing. Let me get back to YouTube though, Brett. Yeah,

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Brett Curry (19:40):

Yeah.

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Jordan West (19:42):

On YouTube right now, where exactly is the scalability that you're seeing there? How far can brands actually scale on YouTube? Is this more of like a tertiary channel or like you've gone all in on YouTube for quite a while. Is it actually a channel that brands can and should scale? Because if it's just about dotcom, I don't see it. I just don't see how they do it.

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Brett Curry (20:09):

Yeah, it's a great question. So I do believe it's most powerful when you're multi-channel or omnichannel. So you go beyond the. Com and now you're on Amazon or the marketplaces and then you're in retail store. That is when YouTube is extremely powerful because it's not so much a click-based medium. You will get clicks, you will get conversions, especially if you're doing demand gen conversion focused campaigns and that can be on shorts and on in stream and stuff like that. But still a lot of people never click on a YouTube. It's got half the click-through rate as Meta less depending on if you're running a lot on TV screens and things like that. And so I do believe multi-channel distribution is critical, but-

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Jordan West (20:52):

Which every brand over 10 million should be doing.

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Brett Curry (20:55):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, almost every brand over 10 million is. Com and Amazon or dot com and retail. I know very few that are A figure brands that are just. Com, although there are some. But I do believe, yes, the easiest way to scale is still Meta and Google. I believe that. It's just easier to scale on Meta and Google. Once you're at a point where you feel like, "Hey, I can't predictably grow more with Meta or with Google or where you just feel like you're ready for a little more complexity," then YouTube does offer a ton of scale opportunity, almost unlimited scale opportunity, but it is more challenging to measure. So I think if you're going to lean into YouTube, you also need to lean into things like incrementality testing, either in platform or house or I know North People's launching an incrementality tool and so other people are as well, but where you're looking at, is this causing a lift in sales that I would not have gotten otherwise that's beyond just the click data?

‍

(21:53):

And Jordan, you can't just lean in on your MTA. You can't say like, "Well, I've got Northbeam or Triple Whale like the standard MTA." It underreports YouTube as well because it's still click based.

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(22:05):

MTAs,

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Jordan West (22:06):

I'm just going to just jump in here for a second, Brett. Yeah, sure. I truly believe that the worst thing that happened to e-commerce was multi-touch attribution tools. And look- It's a bold

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(22:21):

Tape. And this is coming from somebody who, number one, was Triple Whale's biggest affiliate at the beginning. No one ever gives me credit for that, so I got to give my own myself credit for it. I used to get these checks from Triple Whale that were just wild. And I don't believe in it. I just don't believe in it, which is funny because I actually bought an MTA tool recently that I am relaunching as a halo tracking tool because I believe in omnichannel halo tracking. Again, I believe in omnichannel. Let's go back to TikTok shop here for a second.

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Brett Curry (22:58):

Isn't like Halo tracking though, would that be more like an MMM or something?Bause MTA is still ...

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Jordan West (23:03):

So you have over here, this is for my editor, okay? You have over here multi-touch attribution, right? This is more on this side of like, "Hey, we believe that every purchase is made by clicks, right? Maybe a robot does that. Certainly no human that I know does that. " Most of it involves some sort of word of mouth, some sort of talk to your spouse, something in the midst of all of that, right? Yep, yep. It's not like you're Facebook and then over here straight onto Google. That's just not how it works. But then on the other side, we have MMMs, mixed media modeling. And those are big models and really expensive. I have yet to meet an MMM tool that makes sense for the majority of brands sub a hundred million. Lots of them have come to me for sponsorship deals or affiliate deals.

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(23:51):

And I'm like,

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(23:52):

I don't know, who can I sell you to? Who can I recommend this to that it makes sense to? And so I am coming in and creating a whole new category of tool called Halo, right in the middle that is using the data that you already have without the need to geo holdout and actually measuring Halo. And it's wild. We are about to launch it. I actually have a meeting right after this again to fully say it's good to go. It is wild what we're seeing guys. And number two, the most wild thing that everyone has no idea about is the insane halo from TikTok shop to Shopify. That is what we're finding out. Everybody talks

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Brett Curry (24:36):

About TikTok Shop to Amazon, but you're saying TikTok Shop to Shopify.

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Jordan West (24:40):

To Shopify, we're like, "What? How are we finding out this data?"This data is crazy. And it's funny because a lot of the smartest people that I know have built these things on Google Sheets anyway. They've built this out and I'm like, "Wait, you're a massive brand that's killed." He's like, "Yeah, check out how I deal with any..." Nobody ever calls that attribution. It's not an attribution because that's not how people shop to try to attribute something back to that. But I think about every purchase that my kids have wanted to make or made in the last forever and it has come back to YouTube.

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Brett Curry (25:17):

Interesting. YouTube and TikTok shops. Yeah, man. And I want to give maybe just a quick analogy, Jordan. This is getting a little outside of TikTok shop and YouTube, but I think it frames this discussion quite nicely. Okay. Let's say that you and I, we own together three retail stores, physical stores selling, let's sell hockey gear because you mentioned hockey earlier and the US did beat Canada and hockey. I'm not a hockey guy, but I did that. Didn't

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Jordan West (25:44):

Even pay attention. Didn't even pay attention. I don't know if you remember when Mark Carney made that speech recently on the global stage, but that was the last that I've cared about the States. So let's continue on. It's

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Brett Curry (25:56):

So funny. So we own three sporting good stores, okay? We run a big sale, like a week-long sale. In each of the three stores, we put up posters, signs saying clearance, big sale, whatever. Then also in all three markets of our stores, we run TV, Meta, YouTube. Now, if we were to look at just an MTA or just attribution, we could say 100% of those sales were driven by the signs in the store. Do you know why? Because everybody that bought saw the signs. Attribution is like the signs we get 100%. That's silly. But then what we do with-

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Jordan West (26:38):

That is Google branded search, by the way, everyone.

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Brett Curry (26:41):

That's branded search, right? Or something just like, sure, it was there, but that's not why somebody searched. If we looked at incrementality, then we'd start testing and say, "Hey, in this market, we're going to not run Meta and we're going to see how that store stacks up with the other stores." And then we'll run that for a little while and then we'll maybe pull all the posters out of one store, but keep everything else the same. How did the sales there compare to the other stores? This is like an oversimplification, but you kind of get the idea, I think, where you're like, we're running tests and experiments to say, what is actually driving sales and what isn't? That's incrementality. And then MMM is maybe just, it's a litle bit different, right? It's using complex math to see correlations and stuff like that. But yeah, I think that's the level we're all getting to where it's like, I don't think just standard attribution is actually cutting it.

‍

(27:31):

I need to go a little bit deeper.

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Jordan West (27:34):

Totally. And I'm so excited to show people this halo effect that we have created, which is essentially a ripple effect across multiple platforms and days starting in one spot. Almost like again, I'm such a, not politically, but as a person and Elon fan to the core. And when you look at how he makes decisions and how he thinks about things, it's like with the boring company, he's like, "Well, what already digs well?" A mole. A mole digs well. So why don't we create our machines that are like a mole? So it starts here and then goes down and that worked because nature already figured it out.

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Brett Curry (28:17):

Right,

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Jordan West (28:17):

Right,

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Brett Curry (28:17):

Right. So smart. So smart. Yeah.

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Jordan West (28:19):

And so we're constantly thinking about that when we're building software and building these things. It's like you normally get your best ideas from people outside of your industry and ideas outside of your industry and going for a hike and whatever it is and you're like, "Ah, that's the thing. Okay. I figured it out. "

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Brett Curry (28:33):

Love it. I love it. That's awesome. All right, man, should we go kind of rapid fire? Is it my turn to talk at YouTube or it's your turn to talk? What's the next thing that works?

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Jordan West (28:43):

We've gone back and forth.This is so fun, by the way guys. If you have stuck around until now, you will know I am having a frigging blast with Brett on this. I love this stuff. Okay. I'm going to rapid fire to you first. I got three quick questions for you. Yeah, please. What is one thing that brands are not doing on YouTube that they should be doing today?

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Brett Curry (29:04):

That's great. So this goes back to creative a litle bit and this will tie into TikTok shop as well. So one of the things they're not doing that they should be doing is taking their best creator content like we just talked about. Some of those, if they meet the criteria I said before, run those just like they are. In YouTube, they'll run mostly on shorts. They'll do quite well, at least some of them. The other thing though is we build mashups, right? So take your top performing creator content,

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(29:31):

UGC, things like that, and you mash it up and string it together to form a narrative. This can be in like a split screen UGC where if it's a 16 by nine, you got half the screen is the creator, the actual customer, the other half is the product or the product in action and you are just taking the top soundbites, the top clips, weaving them together to tell a story or pull together a narrative. And this is probably my favorite Favorite creative to launch with that plus your top social content is the best. Probably the mashup is going to win for you amongst a lot of other different creatives.

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Jordan West (30:12):

TikTok shop people take that advice too, by the way.

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Brett Curry (30:15):

Totally. Yeah.

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Jordan West (30:16):

Free content to use to mash up.

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Brett Curry (30:20):

So think about, okay, this is my top one benefit. I'm going to have four people talk about that benefit. These are my top two benefits. I'm going to have that. Or this is my top benefit. This is the top reason someone doesn't buy. I'm going to have someone talk about that. This is what it's like when you actually try the product. I'm going to have someone talk about that. So you're weaving together this narrative. It does need to be kind of minute to three minutes when you pull it all together. It's got to be fast paced. It's got to be moving. It's got to be fun. It's got to be engaging, but that's one of the best pieces of content. So that's number one. Did you ask me for three?

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Jordan West (30:53):

No, I'm giving you three here. Great. Okay. Why do brands get wrong when it comes to targeting on the platform?

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Brett Curry (31:00):

Yeah. So one of the things is that the targeting still does matter on YouTube. So I know all my friends and the people on my team that run Meta, it's, hey, mostly open targeting. It's going to know and it's going to decide and the creative is the targeting. With YouTube, we still almost always do better when we feed the algorithm signal. So we need to give the algorithm signal of either these are the types of websites that our customers visit. This is our customer data. I think you always got to do that. Google will build lookalikes. It's funny, lookalikes I know are not a new concept at all. They're still new-ish or new-ish in a good way. They used to kind of suck on Google. Now they're pretty good. So lookalikes. And then I like building audiences based on Google search behavior. So people that are searching for hockey gear and other things like that.

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(31:49):

Let's build an audience of those people. So we're feeding that to Google as a signal with our audience targeting. That's almost always what we do and it gets the campaign off to the races. And so I think you need to do that. You still want to kind of limit your demos if you're just targeting women to do that, just men and men and age is still important because it will kind of lean into what it'll just explore, explore. And I think it doesn't learn as fast as Meta. So guide the algorithms, still

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Jordan West (32:19):

Think

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Brett Curry (32:20):

Through your targeting.

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Jordan West (32:22):

What's one brand that you can think of that's not running YouTube ads at scale that should?

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Brett Curry (32:28):

Well, so this is interesting because on occasion I'll hear about, oh, this brand is spending millions on YouTube. And I didn't know that and I don't see them because I'm not in their market and they're not targeting me. But my take is this, almost any brand that can absorb an 80 to $100 cost per conversion for a customer. So it's either a larger ticket item or it's a consumable or something like that. They should be on YouTube. But is there a specific brand? Man, that is a great, great question.

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Jordan West (33:05):

Hot take in the meantime. Please do.

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Brett Curry (33:07):

Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to hear hot take.

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Jordan West (33:09):

Here's my hot take. I personally think that the hierarchy of spend on platform for D2C brands should be Meta, TikTok shop, YouTube, before anything else on Google. I think that if you want to, I think that most spend on Google is not incremental whatsoever, that you are paying a tax on Google. That's what I think.

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Brett Curry (33:32):

I've heard that from a

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Jordan West (33:32):

Few other people. I might shop anything on Amazon until you have mass competitors and just let all the spillover happen on Amazon.

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Brett Curry (33:39):

Interesting. I think there's some exceptions. So we've done quite a bit of work in the automotive space and that is one area where you kind of look at like, hey, is your brand or your product, is it more demand capture? Meaning you're just people either looking or they're not, and if they're looking, you want to grab them. If they're not looking, you're probably not going to convince them. Or is it demand generation? Meaning not that many people are looking, but if people saw it, they would want it.

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Jordan West (34:07):

And those are the kind of brands I'm talking about.

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Brett Curry (34:09):

Yeah. So those kind of brands, right? Because automotive, we're maybe like 70, 80%, not 80% ST high, but we're like 60 to 70% Google shopping or Google shopping inside of PMax or whatever just because, hey, if somebody wants a new set of brake pads,

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Jordan West (34:27):

Talk

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Brett Curry (34:27):

Them into it. But yeah.

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Jordan West (34:29):

Totally. Yeah. Totally. Very different kinds of brands that we're talking about here. For me, the brands that come to us are always these, it'll be apparel brands. Nobody is necessarily ... They're asking their friends for recommendations, that sort of thing.

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Brett Curry (34:43):

Yeah.

‍

(34:45):

And the other thing I would think here, so I think probably most of the time, you're right, most of our D2C brands, Meta is number one. Sometimes Google is number two and I think it depends again on a few factors, whether that should be number two, whether it should be further down. I think for just making some generality, some hot takes here, if I was an apparel brand, I think I would use your hierarchy exactly. I think Meta is way better at apparel. I think TikTok shops is way better at apparel than YouTube. If it was something more problem solution oriented, I would maybe bump YouTube up a litle bit higher. It also probably depends on what are you, do you have the right content? Are you good at creating the right content for YouTube? That's going to be a big unlock or not. I was talking to Olivia Corey recently.

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(35:33):

She's on my podcast. She's from house for those that don't know. And she was like, "Hey, when we were at Netflix, YouTube was our biggest..." Because we were just religiously running incrementality tests. YouTube for us outperformed Meta. I

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Jordan West (35:48):

Think

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Brett Curry (35:48):

Though, if I'm built basics or I'm true classic teas or something like that, Meta's going to win almost every time and probably TikTok shops

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Jordan West (35:56):

As well. And probably TikTok shop too, because it's a very easy click to purchase. I think that's the idea is you're compressing this click to purchase versus on YouTube it's a great place to put something for consideration. The amount of ads, again, that my kids see that they eventually convinced me to buy is crazy. And then we'll buy the thing and then they'll say the ad and they'll pretend like they're doing the ad. I'm like, YouTube is scary guys. It's very scary. And yet I still prefer it over short form. I don't think it's killing their minds the way short form is. I don't know if I've given you this analogy. I feel like a cigarette executive in the 80s a lot of times where I'm like, we know that this is killing kids. In fact, I just bought the book, The Amazing Generation, which is like the kids' version of the anxious generation for every single grade five, six, and seven teacher and convinced our school district, again, make content and then you can be influential.

‍

(36:50):

I convinced them that they should read this book to every single kid that age. Actually, I offered to buy it for every kid and he's like, "Let me do you one better." He's like, "I'm going to make it mandatory for every single teacher to teach this.

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Brett Curry (37:01):

" Look at you, man. Look at you. That

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Jordan West (37:04):

Amazing. Again, a cigarette executive in the 80s. We're driving billions of views on TikTok. I'm like, it's Brainrod. It's Brainroods.

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Brett Curry (37:15):

I'll close with this and then we're going to turn back to TikTok Shop. Any brand that's finding success on connected TV or linear TV, if you're not winning on YouTube, it's because you're not doing it right. There is such a good correlation connection of if TV works, YouTube should work because now half of all views, more than half of all views of YouTube are on TV. And so there's a lot of correlation there. You maybe can't take your ads on a one-to-one basis and take them from CTV to YouTube, but they're probably pretty close. And so any brand that's ripping on TV, you should be leaning into YouTube. If you're not, you're doing something wrong. So there you go. Yeah.

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Jordan West (38:02):

Awesome. Awesome. That's great. You, Brett, if you don't mind, you can close this one question because I am late for a meeting.

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Brett Curry (38:10):

Okay. So help me with this because this is something I hear from some brands. I do hear others that are kind of taking the opposite view now, but I hear a lot of people say, "Hey, my brand is too premium for TikTok shop. My price point is too high. My buyer's too sophisticated for TikTok shops." I think it's probably crazy because I think everybody's on TikTok, but what is your answer to that perspective?

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Jordan West (38:37):

So I think that there are products that are actually too expensive for TikTok shop right now. There are not brands that are too expensive. If you do not yet have a product that could go on TikTok shop, you need to think about how you can merchandise a product on TikTok shop. People spend, again, cigarette executive, people are spending too much time on TikTok and you're not going to change them. So you might as well take advantage of it as a brand because they're spending like 90 minutes a day, like 200 million Americans.

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Brett Curry (39:09):

Wild. It's wild.

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Jordan West (39:11):

It is absolutely ... It is where all of the attention- Where the attention

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Brett Curry (39:17):

Is. Yeah.

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Jordan West (39:17):

Yeah. Honestly, it's basically there in YouTube for the most part.That's where people are spending the majority of their time. It's like either like this or like this on their phones. And so very, very important that you figure out a way that you can go on to TikTok shop. Do you not just do TikTok

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Brett Curry (39:37):

Ads? Could you not just use TikTok ads or you

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Jordan West (39:39):

Believe

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Brett Curry (39:40):

TikTok shop is a serious unlock? Yeah.

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Jordan West (39:42):

No. TikTok, no, Brett. No, no, no, no, no. TikTok shop is a beast of its own. Now the reason why TikTok Shop works so incredibly well is because it is finally the platform that has aligned incentives with creators with brands all at the same time so that you get this beautiful harmony versus you just paying the slot machine. And we all know TikTok ads. The content engine. Yeah.

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Brett Curry (40:09):

Yeah.

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Jordan West (40:09):

Right? They haven't worked too D2C. Now not saying that they're not part of the Halo. I really actually believe that regular TikTok ads are, but it's TikTok shop that is this incredible unlock and every day you have potential virality from people who are posting about your product because they're going to get paid when they post about your product. Sorry, not just to post, but to actually make money. So then they make creative that tries to sell your product and then suddenly you have like 10 trillion ways that you can sell your product and you have all these new catchphrases that creative people have come up with. You're crowdsourcing your entire R&D department and your marketing department. And then you're telling you- And then your content engineer becomes your

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Brett Curry (40:47):

Content engine. Yeah. It's so many

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Jordan West (40:50):

Benefits. Guys, guys, the brands that don't make it on TikTok shop and that don't understand this channel, it's just because you need a paradigm shift. I was going to say it's because you're stupid, but that's not nice.

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Brett Curry (41:05):

The product that will work on TikTok shops.That's what you need. I love that. That's such good advice. Dude, this has been fun. We could keep going. We could do this for another hour, hour and a half. I know you got to bounce. Super fun dude. I'm jazzed

‍

Jordan West (41:16):

About

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Brett Curry (41:16):

TikTok shops.

‍

Jordan West (41:17):

Three or four weeks of back and forth of me being like last minute. "Brandon, I'm so sorry." Yeah.

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Brett Curry (41:23):

I did it first though.

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Jordan West (41:25):

Where can people who are listening on the unofficial TikTok shop podcast, if they're interested in YouTube ads, where can they find what you guys at OMG Commerce are doing and what you're up to?

‍

Brett Curry (41:36):

Totally. OMGCcommerce.com. Check it out. Also follow me on LinkedIn or on X/Twitter. I'm @BrettCurry there post content. I just spoke at the Google YouTube offices in LA, posted some content there. I got some videos coming out there. So check those out on social, but yeah, would love to connect with you. And for those listening to the e-commerce evolution podcast, how can they connect with Social Commerce Club and what you're doing with your pod?

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Jordan West (42:03):

So we are like crazy at Social Commerce Club hiring right now. We are looking for the best of the best. I'd love to say for social commerce strategists, but there just aren't enough out there yet. And so if you are low ego, high agency and work with competitive speed and you are looking for a home to try to learn what is the next version of Facebook ads, come to Social Commerce Club. We are hiring like absolute crazy. We have a very, I would say this culture that is like really, a really high performing culture that isn't psychotic.

‍

Brett Curry (42:42):

I

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Jordan West (42:42):

Love that. Yeah. But it's for A player high performers and that is who we're looking for right now. High performance.

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Brett Curry (42:47):

Brands for fun. Yeah.

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Jordan West (42:49):

Yeah. Brands get in line. Go to socialcommerceclub.com, get in line. And we're the only platinum agency that we know of in North America. And so we perform at an incredibly high level and we'd love to potentially work with your brand, but lots of times it's not a fit. We're looking for good people right now.

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Brett Curry (43:10):

Yeah. Love it, man. And yeah, people ask me all the time like, "What's your recommendation for TikTok shop agency?" And it is a list of on and that's you guys. And so yeah, man, hey, I appreciate you. It's super fun. I think people are going to get a lot of value out of this and let's do it again sometime.

‍

Jordan West (43:26):

Sounds good. See you, man. See

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Brett Curry (43:27):

You, buddy. That'll do it for this week's episode. Hey, if you're serious about profitable scale for your brand, we would love to chat. Over the last 15 years we work with some amazing brands like Native, Boom Beauty, Arctic, Organify, Crumble Cookie, True Earth, and many, many more. We want to help you unlock new channels, find profitable scale, have better creative, better campaign, better measurement strategies, and ultimately hope you have more fun and grow in all of your relevant channels. So take a look at omgcommerce.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.

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Most DTC brands are making million-dollar channel decisions based on attribution data that's fundamentally wrong. Olivia Kory — CSO of Haus and the incrementality expert Brett references on stage more than almost anyone — breaks down what it actually takes to know if your ads are working. Spoiler: if you've been writing off YouTube based on MTA, you owe yourself a retest.

Inside the episode:

• Why YouTube's true ROAS is 3.4X what the platform reports — and how Haus's 190-test study across 74 brands proved it (plus why your D2C numbers alone are only half the picture)
• The right time to start incrementality testing — it's not when you're huge, it's when your business gets complicated enough that turning off ads won't give you a clean answer
• How StockX went from barely spending on YouTube to making it their #2 acquisition channel — by running geo holdout tests and acting on the results
• Why Meta's optimization might be too good — and how brands like Jones Road are improving their iROAS by making changes that look worse in-platform
• The surprise winner: AppLovin — Olivia came in skeptical of mobile game ad inventory and got data she didn't expect
• Haus's new DTC Basics tier — a lower-cost entry point so more brands can stop guessing which channels are actually driving growth

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

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Chapters:

 [00:00] Intro clip — Olivia on treating incrementality as a report card vs. a growth tool

[00:22] Introductions & background — Olivia's path from Starcom → TubeMogul → Netflix → Quibi → Sonos → Haus

[06:55] What is incrementality? — The randomized controlled trial analogy; geo holdouts vs. click-based attribution

[10:45] When should a brand start using incrementality? — The low-to-mid 8-figure inflection point; multi-channel complexity as the signal

[15:34] Native platform lift studies (Meta & Google) — Are they worth it? Signal loss, CAPI, iOS 14.5 limitations

[17:25] Geo holdout vs. user-level testing — Why Haus was "born out of the ashes of iOS 14.5" and went all-in on geo

[19:37] How a Haus geo holdout test actually works — Data ingestion, experiment design, market matching, results

[23:20] Actioning on incrementality data — Coaching leadership, making reallocation decisions, improving channel performance over time

[26:02] How long should you run a test? — Why 2-week YouTube tests fail; 4–6 week minimums and the role of consideration cycles

[27:19] Incrementality as an optimization loop, not a report card — Connor from Ridge, Cody from Jones Road Beauty, and the StockX story

[30:42] Key metrics defined — iROAS, iCPA, incrementality factor, and why in-platform ROAS can mislead you

[32:47] Branded search — Is it incremental? Simple Modern's 5% read, when Amazon bidding on your terms changes the math

[35:57] Treatment window & post-treatment window (PTW) — How Haus structures tests for YouTube, Meta, and CTV; lagged effects explained

[39:36] Consideration cycles & post-purchase surveys — Why your path-to-purchase report is probably shorter than reality

[41:00] Halo effects: Amazon & retail — Why omnichannel brands that only measure D2C are understating YouTube's impact

[41:58] The Haus YouTube study findings — The 3.42x incrementality factor; halo effects that doubled lift when Amazon/retail pulled in; Demand Gen vindicated

[44:10] YouTube vs. Meta: how the channels differ incrementally — Meta's short payback window, the "too good at intent" problem, and why YouTube wins on halo effects

[46:53] Surprises from the data — YouTube (not surprising to Olivia), AppLovin (very surprising), and why TV results swing wildly based on inventory type

[50:16] The biggest levers to improve incrementality — Creative first (30–50% wins), then account structure, traffic composition, and spend level

[51:46] A DemandGen campaign running on Gmail — A real audit story and why traffic composition can make a channel look broken when it isn't

[53:13] Haus's new DTC Basics tier — A lower-cost entry point to measure D2C and Amazon across core ad channels

[54:54] Wrap-up & where to find Olivia — Part two teased around the next Haus YouTube report

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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/
• Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact

‍Relevant Links:

• Olivia's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivia-kory-50230812/

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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, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

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Transcript:

Olivia Kory (00:00.35)

The brands who treat incrementality like purely as the report card are having a lot less fun. They're driving like a lot less impact honestly on the business.

Brett Curry (00:22.552)

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 I'm super excited to welcome to the podcast, the one, the only Olivia Kory. She is the CSO of Haus and she's really everyone's favorite incrementality expert. And you may be like, wait, people have a favorite incrementality expert. And I'm here to say, yes, they do and it's almost always Olivia Kory. So can't wait to dive into this discussion on all things incrementality. And so with that, Olivia, welcome to the show and how's it going?

Olivia Kory (01:02.136)

Thank you, Brett. It's going well, other than have some sort of virus that my kids gave to me, but a little bit under the weather. Otherwise great. We were talking before we started recording that you do these events that I hear amazing things about. And I hear that you pop up on the screen, my podcast with Andrew Ferris. I owe you a huge thank you for all of the help that you have given to the Haus study in the Haus YouTube data over the years because I think we really owe you one for getting it out there.

Brett Curry (01:37.39)

Totally, yeah, I'm a huge YouTube fan. I'm really just a huge fan of marketing that works. That's kind of always been my thing. But love YouTube. This study that you guys did, the 190 incrementality test across 74 brands, I reference it weekly at least. Anytime I'm on stage, I talk about it. So yeah, I put your mug on the screen a lot and my buddy Andrew Ferris. And so I've probably sent some customers your way, helped grow his podcast, but that's fun. So I enjoy doing that for sure.

Olivia Kory (02:07.062)

Funny is that I feel like vendors tend to hate on Meta and Google a lot. And I always wonder why, because I'm like, I just like advertising networks and we know that Google works. Why are you going to target? It's because they're big tech, of course, and it's like really easy to dislike them. But like, hey, there are not a lot of great places to spend your ad dollars. And so I like to lean into the platforms that I know are going to drive returns.

Brett Curry (02:35.894)

Lean into what's working for sure. So lots of things I want to talk about related to this topic. First though, your background Olivia, I think is really interesting. So you're former Netflix, former Sonos and that kind of led you to Haus. So give us kind of the brief version of that. What'd you do prior to this and how did it lead you to the world of incrementality?

Olivia Kory (02:55.864)

Yep. I actually started off agency side. So I've done a little bit of everything over the years, but started off agency side. That's where I met my now husband. So I think Starcom, the very large ad agency in Chicago, for bringing us together. And then I got into ad tech. I was at a DSP, a programmatic video DSP called TubeMogul.

And that was like just as kind of programmatic media was blowing up in 2013, 14. And that actually, that experience is what got me the job at Netflix. Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix at the time was like very passionate about biddable programmatic advertising because he wanted the marketing to work more like the product. Where like if you think about the Netflix product, highly algorithmic, personalized, no two people see the same kind of experience.

He wanted to take and apply a lot of those principles to the marketing. And so I just kind of like lucked into my dream job because I had that experience that he was looking for. And at Netflix, I got just like an MBA in incrementality. I was surrounded by the smartest people in the world truly when it comes to incrementality testing. And we were running these experiments all over the world. We had a very clear understanding of what marketing was contributing to the business in this world of Netflix where it was like, tons of organic demand, tons of noise, really hard to parse out what paid was delivering on top of all that. And the way we were able to do it, there's like no secret sauce here. It was just that we had a very large team dedicated to helping us figure that out. And so that's like really where the Haus story begins because Zach, our founder, his insight was like, what if we could enable access to like that level of scientific rigor, quality incrementality testing, but instead of having to hire a huge team, let's do it as SaaS for less than the cost of a head count. And fortunately, over — he founded the company in 2021 — but fortunately over the past few years, like incrementality has kind of become widely accepted as the gold standard. So we've had some tailwinds that we've benefited from. But after Netflix, just to kind of complete the story, I moved on to a couple of roles. I went over to Quibi for a little, and then I settled in as head of growth at Sonos.

Olivia Kory (05:14.71)

And I was actually one of Haus's first customers, helping Zach and team build the early MVP. And it was just going so well at Sonos in such a short amount of time that I had to make the leap over. So I joke that I'm a vendor now. I don't know how I got here, but I'm really a growth marketer at heart. Yeah, that's my story.

Brett Curry (05:33.325)

Yeah, yeah.

It's so valuable though, as a, you know, being a growth marketer at heart, because you can help lead strategy — cause that's what the tool is built for, it's who it's built for. And so it's super valuable. I am curious. So your husband, you met him at an ad agency. You guys are both nerds. I'm sure. Do you talk about this stuff at the dinner table? Is it like off limits to talk about marketing stuff at the table? Like what do you guys geek out about together?

Olivia Kory (06:02.382)

Do you want to hear something crazy? It's going to be a bomb. I don't know if I can't remember if I've ever said this publicly, but my husband actually works at Google. So that's hilarious. He's been there for like 10 years. I actually texted him this morning because I wanted to get an updated stat on how much YouTube delivery happens on TV screens, but he hasn't responded yet.

Brett Curry (06:25.71)

It's like north of — it's north of 50%, right?

Olivia Kory (06:27.97)

I like the exact number before we — yeah. We met at the agency and then he moved over to Google. It's funny because depending on the day, I feel like I'm either like Google's best friend or worst enemy. So that's been fun. Recently, I think we've gotten into really good rhythm with Google and it's going really well. And so our paths cross sometimes in a very nice way.

Brett Curry (06:55.386)

That's awesome. And what's interesting to me, incrementality has kind of become the buzzword, the thing that's talked about the most. You talked about some serious tailwinds that are benefiting Haus. A lot of brands we work with — high eight, nine figure brands — they're all either using it, considering it, talking about it right now. But I am reminded that not everybody understands incrementality. I was speaking at an event in Miami a little over a month ago and it was like seven and eight figure brands, really, really smart, active group. And I asked — like 120 people in the audience — I asked for a show of hands, how many of you have heard of incrementality? And it was like a handful. It was like five people, legitimately five people. Then I did the event in LA at the Google YouTube offices — that's the co-branded event we do with Google and with Raindrop. And of course everybody there has heard of Haus and incrementality and are probably using it.

But you've been around this a long time. In your own words, what is incrementality and maybe what isn't it, so that we can kind of frame this and set that frame for the rest of the show.

Olivia Kory (08:03.116)

Yep. It's really funny. I was in Toronto at an event and I gave my incrementality speech and I realized I got like way too deep, way too fast. And I had to rewind like so far to really meet the audience where they were. So yeah, it's easy for me who's like talking about it all day, every day to just like quickly go down that rabbit hole. But to try to like zoom out and talk about it, maybe the way I would describe it to someone who's not in the industry is the analogy I like to give is like randomized controlled trials in healthcare. I think a lot of marketing data is based on correlation. You saw this ad and then you signed up for this service or you bought this thing. And we at Haus like kind of fundamentally believe that in order to establish causation — like true cause and effect, this advertising caused this outcome — you need an experiment with a holdout group. And the holdout group is where you actually turn off advertising in part of the country. We do this based on geo and you see the difference between the control and the treatment. And that enables you to say like, hey, this effect would not have happened without the marketing. And so in that way, that's why I say it's analogous to like randomized controlled trials in healthcare where you're giving some group of people the placebo. And some group of people the drug. And so that is at its core — when you think about incrementality, it's that counterfactual to understand what would have happened anyway in the absence of marketing.

Brett Curry (09:45.4)

Right, right. Yeah, it's so good. And it's one of those things where, you know, I think as we progress and get smarter as marketers and as there's more tech powering what we do, there's just been multiple points when I know I have thought, well, this is like, this is it. This is the solution, right? MTAs come onto the scene and we're like, now we can see all the data together and we'll finally know what's driving the impact. But then you realize, well, really every tool that's really click-based or leans on click is biased and it's going to have flaws and really every piece of measurement is kind of some level of wrong. Maybe it's still useful, but it's not complete. And really the only way to tell what would have happened without this advertising or did this advertising cause this result is to do a holdout. And so, yeah, I love it. And I think more and more people are seeing, yes, I need this as part of my measurement stack.

Cool, so let's talk about — and I'm going to kind of bounce around to a variety of topics — but when should someone consider using an incrementality tool like Haus, or there are other tools, but like when should someone say, okay, I've got my MTA, I've got some other tools potentially, when do I need incrementality?

Olivia Kory (11:03.534)

I was just talking to a brand about this on a call right before, and there's kind of an interesting dynamic happening with some of these new AI companies, which I'll talk about, but let's talk about e-commerce businesses just as the example here. When you're just starting out, when you're just starting your business, you don't have a lot of organic demand. Nobody knows who you are. You don't have any awareness and you're building this business on Meta and that's most likely how people know about you and how they're purchasing.

And thus in that way, it's pretty clear like what's driving your business. And the click-based attribution there is like probably a nice proxy for what's happening. And then you start growing and I don't know exactly, I tend to see it around like low to mid eight figures in revenue where that's where you start expanding channels into Google and YouTube, into TikTok.

So you're expanding into channels, you might be expanding your sales distribution into Amazon and into retail, and you are growing organically. Like the word of mouth is starting to take off. Maybe you're partnering with other companies and they're doing co-marketing with you. That's where it's like, at that point, your ad channels are gonna start taking credit for like a whole bunch of growth that's happening elsewhere. And the classic example there is like, you might be spending in all these channels and all of that impact is showing up as search in the click-based attribution model because that is like the last place someone goes before they end up buying. And so again, like when is the right time? I tend to just ask brands I'm talking to like, how much of your business is driven by paid? Do you feel like you have a good signal there?

And like, can you just turn off marketing and easily get that answer? Or is your business so complex and it's so fuzzy that you don't actually think you could get that answer by like a simple on-off test. And that is when you need incrementality. And like, you can think about a Sonos. Like if we shut down marketing at Sonos, like the business is so big and there's so much noise that like it would be really hard to get a clean signal on the top line. And so that's...

Olivia Kory (13:28.942)

That's typically when I'd say folks feel ready. It's like multiple channels, they've expanded into multiple sales channels in terms of Amazon, retail, and they're unclear on whether ads are kind of taking credit for what would have been an organic conversion. I just had an interesting conversation with an AI company. They're doing $100 million or more in ARR.

They grew entirely organically — viral AI product. It's like a B2B AI video generator. It's the inverse. Like they haven't had any paid. And so I was like, wow, you guys are going to need incrementality off the bat here because you have grown so quickly and you've become so viral organically that they're going to need incrementality right away. They just, they're like a year old company.

And they're signing up with us because they just launched with so much momentum. So I don't see that a lot, but really exciting. And like the Baseball Lifestyle 101 guys, I think are probably an example of that where they grew first organically and thus anything they do in paid is going to need incrementality.

Brett Curry (14:33.538)

Yep.

Brett Curry (14:40.536)

Totally, yeah, helping them with that right now on the YouTube side. And it's such a cool brand. They were community first, they kind of slow built for a couple of years and then just took off like a rocket. So yeah, incrementality is, I think, critical once you get to those stages. Just absolutely critical. And so let's think about this. Sometimes when we talk to brands, they're thinking like, okay, when do we need to look at incrementality, like we just talked about? And okay, if I do, then...

What should I start with? What's your point of view on — Google has what they call conversion lift studies. So they'll do actually a user holdout, which we can talk about the benefits of geo holdout versus user holdout, and I think that'd be a fun topic — but they'll do some incrementality studies. Meta, I know, will run incrementality studies on your behalf. What's your point of view on those? And are those like a good way for brands to dip their toe in the water and get some incremental reads?

Olivia Kory (15:34.926)

Yep. I'm a big fan of the native conversion products. I know, again, that's not a popular opinion when you're an independent third party, but I think they're incredibly useful. I think one, it gets you comfortable with the terminology, the nomenclature of like, what is an iROAS? How is it calculated? How is that different from your in-platform ROAS? And it also prepares you for what you might see when you start running more of these tests in terms of perhaps the incremental return is not what you thought. It's lower, and it gets the organization comfortable with this idea that this is a new metric and we're setting new baselines. I like it in terms of, okay, let's get used to the terminology. Let's try to establish some set of baselines. Meta's conversion lift product is, I think,

kind of widely accepted as like, all right, it has the rubber stamp of approval. I don't hear much about Google's and I do wonder if there's like a signal loss thing happening. Like I know Meta's CAPI product is solid. There might be an issue with like being able to track iOS inside of Google and maybe their enhanced conversions product isn't being as robust as CAPI. I don't know. I just don't hear about it as much. So these are all hypotheses for like why you don't hear about Google's product. I also think maybe it's not like universally available to all advertisers the way Meta is.

Brett Curry (17:14.902)

It's not. It's not. Yep. You've got to get allowlisted and stuff like that. It's going to roll out more, but yeah, it's not just available in the platform.

Olivia Kory (17:17.336)

Probably why.

Olivia Kory (17:25.248)

Yep, yeah, that's — I mean, your guess is as good as mine there. The issue with user level is signal loss, right? Like you're still relying on being able to match a user who was exposed to an ad to a sale that happened down the line. And you know this with just like iOS 14.5. It's just so many people who have opted out of tracking that they're modeling — like Google and Meta are both doing modeling and I'm sure it's working well, but it is certainly not perfect. And so signal loss over the past few years has like really, really challenged those user level products. And then the other issue is like every platform is kind of doing it a different way. And so you then no longer have like the standardized cross-channel comparable methodology where you can —

Brett Curry (18:16.578)

Yeah, you can't compare your iROAS on Google to your iROAS on Meta because they're maybe measuring it differently.

Olivia Kory (18:22.508)

Yeah, so, but like all things equal — if the signal loss wasn't such a big problem and they were all doing it the same way — user level testing is better just like objectively in terms of precision. But with privacy and whatnot, like the signal is too unreliable to really have faith in. So that's why we focus on geo at Haus. We were kind of like born out of the ashes of iOS 14.5 in 2021.

When everybody was trying to like stitch together these user graphs and like use these alternate IDs, we just skated in the total opposite direction. We're like, hey, we don't want any pixels. Don't give us any PII. We're just going to look at the aggregate sales in these regions versus some other set of regions. And that's what's enabled us to like move really quickly through like security reviews with our customers — we don't look at any of that PII in our analysis.

And so privacy durable, and then the other kind of like really good property with geo testing is you do it in the same way across every channel. And that's really helped our customers feel confident making reallocation decisions because they're evaluating them all on a level playing field.

Brett Curry (19:37.678)

It's the same math, it's the same methodology. So comparing Google to Meta to TikTok to AppLovin, it's the same measurement applied to everybody. I really like that. So, walk through a couple of things. Walk through like, how do we set up a geo holdout test? What is this usually looking like? So I come to Haus and I say, hey, I want to do an incrementality study on YouTube for this brand. How are you structuring that geo holdout?

Olivia Kory (20:02.19)

Yep. End to end, I'll start from the very beginning. This might get boring. I hope your listeners are excited about some of the technical details, but I'll just...

Brett Curry (20:13.292)

I think they are or they're heavily caffeinated, but people nerd out here. So I think we're good.

Olivia Kory (20:17.388)

Okay, so we start with data ingestion. So we take the customer — if they're on Shopify, really easy, simple plugin. But otherwise, if your sales data is in Snowflake or GCP or Redshift, we ingest sales by day by geo, or like whatever the customer cares about in terms of KPI — like new customers, subscription starts, for mobile apps sometimes they'll pass us like player value. And so whatever kind of the customer cares about — we're flexible, they set up that data ingestion and then we can basically configure their instance of the app. And then they can log into their app and based on their own historical data, we can configure an experiment across any channel, online, offline, YouTube in this example. We would set it up and then basically our tool would tell you how much you need to spend. Well, first we want to understand your business question.

"What is the incrementality of YouTube?" is like a different question than "How much should I spend on YouTube?" And so we'll recommend a cell structure and a test design to best kind of answer the question you're...

Brett Curry (21:22.91)

Answer the question you want to get answered — that's going to inform how you design the test.

Olivia Kory (21:27.02)

Yep. And then we do basically all the data science work to help you understand how much should I spend? How long do I need to run for? How large does my holdout group need to be to kind of like sufficiently power the test from a statistical standpoint? And then we launch the test — and that just involves turning off YouTube in like some percent of the country — and we give you those regions, we do the market matching. And then because we're plugged into the data that I mentioned in terms of that data ingestion, we can start populating results pretty quickly once that test launches. And customers can kind of view how those results are changing as they come in day by day. And so that's like the tool part. Now we have like a pretty heavy services model that we attach to that to make sure — like, all right, how do I interpret these results? What do I do next? How does this compare to other customers? How do I really like operationalize this in a way where I'm...

decisioning on these results in a way that's going to improve business outcomes. And that's where like, I think the tool alone is fantastic, but there's still a pretty high touch services model here to help you like really extract and maximize the most value you possibly can with like, what do I do with this result? Like, how do I operationalize this? And how do I explain it to my leadership? Like that's one of the most underrated parts of incrementality — picture this, these companies have been handing leadership a Google Analytics report for decades. And now we're saying like, that Google Analytics report that we've been showing you, like maybe that number has been wrong. And so we coach our clients on like how to have that conversation in the most productive way and how to really like ease your leadership into this idea. And so that's like where the hard work happens, I would say.

Brett Curry (23:20.288)

Yeah, it totally makes sense. Yeah, data is only as good as what you can action upon. The last thing any DTC brand or any brand needs is more data. Like we've got data everywhere around us. It's — can you give me some clear insight? Like some insight into what's happening inside of my business, into my customer, and then help me do something. Like help me shift something. Either help me lean into a channel or lean out of a channel or switch creative or like something, but help me action towards it. And it's a really good call out where you say like, yeah, for leadership, a lot of times this is the first time they've seen an incrementality read, right? And so imagine the first time you saw Google Analytics, you probably had a million questions. You didn't really know what to do with it. And so I think a few things to maybe touch on is how do you advise people? And I've got to talk to now several of your strategists. They're awesome. They're very smart marketers. They know the tool. They've been in the game a while. So super helpful. Who's your favorite?

But the only name I can think of right now is Noah, and Noah's great. Shout out to Noah.

Olivia Kory (24:27.968)

Noah is definitely a crowd favorite.

Brett Curry (24:31.626)

Yeah, yeah. Great, articulate, smart dude. Doesn't mind if I pick on him. Yeah, good guy. So I like him. Hey, thanks again for tuning into the E-commerce Evolution Podcast. I want to take just a minute and talk about my agency, OMG Commerce. We've been helping e-commerce brands for 15 years, and that's like 100 e-commerce years. And our specialty is finding opportunities for growth that other people miss and unlocking channels that you're not currently maximizing. For example, YouTube.

Most brands are sleeping on YouTube and my belief is it's the biggest untapped opportunity for your brand. We're also good at adding up to eight figures in growth for Amazon brands. And so if you're looking for scale and growth profitably, that's what we do. We'd love to chat with you. We'd love to review your current marketing efforts, show you where there's missed opportunities and craft a specific plan for you. So visit us at omgcommerce.com. Click the Let's Talk button and we'd love to schedule a complimentary strategic review with you. With that, back to the show.

What do you advise people? Like probably the result they're going to get is going to be wildly different than they were thinking, right? So like how do you help them? Because it's not like we should get one incrementality test and completely change our business, right? We want to make sure it's actionable, but just one test is one test.

How do you kind of coach people — when you're doing your first test, here's what to expect or what to do once you get that read.

Olivia Kory (26:02.862)

Yep. So we, and we've learned a lot here as well of like, how long should you test for? Like a lot of these heuristics were kind of like updating as we have more information available to us. So like what we do is we really try to make sure the test is set up for success. YouTube is an example. I think I have it in a slide somewhere. Like in the beginning folks were running like two week YouTube tests and we've just had like —

Brett Curry (26:29.87)

Updates.

Olivia Kory (26:30.286)

Update, yeah, like — now we've have enough data and we've seen enough tests to know like, okay, well, that's not going to be successful. So if you don't have time to run this for four to six weeks, then let's do it another time. So just like making sure we're using these best practices to set the test up for success out of the gates. Results come back, they're not where you wanted them to be. Let's go test some other channels. Getting baselines on all of your channels is important. And then the question is,

Brett Curry (26:55.982)

Getting a baseline, yes.

Olivia Kory (26:59.982)

All right, how do I improve upon this? And that's where the fun begins. Like I think the brands who treat incrementality like purely as the report card are having a lot less fun and they're driving a lot less —

Brett Curry (27:15.694)

It's just like pass or fail, right? Like you get this report and you're like, I failed. I totally failed.

Olivia Kory (27:19.958)

Yeah. And like they're driving like a lot less impact honestly on the business than these brands. Like you hear Connor from Ridge talking about how many tests that he ran. They are constantly running a test and like all he's trying to do is like make that Meta number better. And he just posted about this as well where — got a Meta read, wasn't happy with it, made a bunch of changes, retested, saw a huge step change win after the improvements. And so that's where I'd say like the —

Brett Curry (27:28.942)

He's a legend.

Olivia Kory (27:49.838)

The first kind of moment a customer will have is they'll get all their reads back and like we might make some reallocation decisions of, all right, let's move budget from channel A to channel B based on what we're seeing. But then the next thing — and that's where we spend most of our time — is like, how do we improve each of these channels and how do we go in and kind of really make some big swings? And so that's always my guidance is like, all right, that's why would you expect incrementality to be great out of the gates? You've never optimized for it. So how do we make that number better? And those are the wins. Like we have this awesome success story of a brand out there — they 4x'd their YouTube iROAS over the course of like a year. And it's not easy. Again, this is not easy. There's no like simple switch you flip in YouTube to like make it incremental. But it's an always-on channel right now for them and it's like their number two channel. And it was definitely like worth investing in to unlock that. And StockX just spoke about this publicly so I can talk about it. But the StockX team was barely spending on YouTube based on MTA. They ran some Haus tests and now it's their number two channel. It's like one of their top acquisition channels. So that's where we try to take it — hey, like this is the baseline upon which we will improve.

Brett Curry (29:18.798)

Yeah, let's get some baselines and now let's continue to try to step up there. And one other interesting thing — you referenced Cody from Jones Road Beauty. I read his post today, it's an excellent post. But he also said that the Meta improvement they made — so they optimized to try to get more incremental with Meta. The changes they made, actually several of them looked worse in platform. So in platform and MTA, some of the numbers got worse, but the incrementality read improved, right? Because they were able to reach net new people. That's kind of what they were prioritizing just to like really condense it. But they got more incremental. And so yeah, it becomes a game you can play too, right? Which is really fun for me. Like we've been a part of these conversations on the brand side with the Haus team, with my team, about okay, why did this read turn out the way it did either better or worse than we expected? And what do we do next? And it's kind of fun.

Olivia Kory (30:10.286)

I think some of us are in denial that the in-platform number is not a good proxy for incrementality. Because once you kind of accept that, then the concept of an incrementality factor becomes a little bit confusing — if there's no correlation between the in-platform ROAS and the incremental ROAS, then the factor...

Brett Curry (30:42.424)

Yeah, it's a little dicey, right? How do you apply that with any confidence? Which actually let's do this. So let's define a couple of things that we haven't defined yet, which I think will be really helpful. So iROAS and incrementality factor, iCPA and other ones. So what are those? And then how are we using those in our business?

Olivia Kory (31:05.046)

Yep. The audience probably knows CPA and ROAS. This is what you see in the ad platforms in terms of KPI success criteria — cost per acquisition or return on ad spend, without the I. When you add the I into these acronyms, you are basically throwing away all the conversions that would have happened anyway.

So you're saying that the translation from the CPA to the iCPA is, okay, now I'm throwing away everything that wasn't a direct result of this advertising. And in some cases, like YouTube, it actually gets bigger because you're saying, no, now I'm pulling in a bunch of conversions that I didn't actually attribute to YouTube that were showing up elsewhere in terms of channel attribution.

Brett Curry (31:57.73)

Yeah, all my click conversion measurement tools in platform and MTA hated YouTube, but incrementality generally likes YouTube.

Olivia Kory (32:07.63)

Yep, so you're basically just looking — you're moving from attributed conversions to incremental conversions and you are recalculating those metrics based on that. And now the factor is: of the conversions that the platform is reporting, what percent of those are incremental? And so your factor can be below one, it can be over one of course, but that's just the equation of — okay, of those...

Or like a Northbeam — some people will do factors on an MTA or like a third party tool. Of the conversions that Northbeam is reporting, what percent of those are truly incremental. That's the factor.

Brett Curry (32:47.458)

Yeah. And so as a comparison, something that's not very incremental — which our friends at Google might not like us mentioning — is branded search, right? And there's a place for brand protection and things like that, brand defense. But branded search, not very incremental, right? By and large. I know I talked to my friends at Simple Modern, had Brian on the podcast. I think he said branded search for them was like 5% incremental, right? So if a reporting tool — I think this was on Amazon and on Google — showed that it drove 100 conversions, it probably actually only drove five, right? Like 95 of those would have happened anyway, it probably only actually drove five conversions. So then that incrementality factor would be 0.05, correct? For branded search. Yeah.

Olivia Kory (33:39.35)

And branded search is a fun one. We love to pick on it. A couple of things with branded search — it might just be so cheap that even if only 5% of it's incremental, it's so cheap that like the math works. And then the other thing with branded search, we actually published some data on this. It's one of my favorite data pieces, so we can link to it. We've seen it be incremental more than I thought in terms of success rate.

Brett Curry (33:48.877)

Exactly.

Olivia Kory (34:09.038)

There are certainly cases where branded search can be incremental and the number one case there is like when Amazon is bidding on your terms. And so there's this share shift phenomenon that's really annoying. It's like quite annoying that like you've got to pay the Google tax and the Amazon tax here. But when Amazon and some of these retailers are bidding on your terms, you like might want to incur that tax to take the margin back into DTC. So we've seen some interesting data here where it is not universal that branded search is always a failure.

Brett Curry (34:42.414)

Yeah, totally. And we, I mean, we almost always have branded search on for our clients. Usually I think the error is it's not as efficient as it should be, right? So again, Simple Modern's approach was, hey, if it's 5% incremental, then I'm willing to spend here as long as I'm getting a 20X return. I'm going to bid for a 20X ROAS, right? And if I get that I'll spend all day long, it's great. I think for other brands, maybe it's like a 10X ROAS or whatever, but if you're

bidding too aggressively on branded search, you're probably just giving too much of your budget to YouTube or to Google at that point. So yeah. But I think there's still a lot of people that will just click on whatever ad they see first, or if someone's new to your brand and there's not much loyalty there, you probably want to show up. Also a competitor might swoop in and grab it. So yeah, a case to be made there. But in comparison, the incrementality factor is way lower on branded search than other campaign types.

Olivia Kory (35:42.35)

Many Haus customers would say their biggest win was having the data and the evidence to feel confident turning off branded search and seeing like no negative impact to the business and just taking a bunch of money in terms of savings.

Brett Curry (35:57.294)

Right? Right. Yep. I think that's smart in a lot of cases for sure. So let's talk about something else — you mentioned this a little bit, but I want to unpack it a little bit more. So if I'm running a YouTube test, it's got to be longer than two weeks, probably four weeks or longer. If I'm running a Meta test, maybe it can be shorter. Non-brand search may be different. Describe treatment window, post-treatment window and how you're structuring these for success.

Olivia Kory (36:24.622)

Yep, and this is another area where as we learn, as we get more data, as we run more experiments, we're able to kind of like update our priors and just get smarter here. So in terms of test length — we have our test window. This is where you kind of like turn off ads in part of the country, and that's when your test is running. And then we'll say, okay, the test is done, go back, revert back to national, or let's end the test. But then let's just observe the behavior of these markets for some period of time to understand any lagging effects.

Brett Curry (37:01.627)

Observe the control in the test area. So still observe those after the fact.

Olivia Kory (37:05.858)

Yep. We'll still observe those as distinct test cells. But we're just going to watch what's happening to understand any lagged effects. We call that a post-treatment window. The industry has started just using like PTW as the acronym, which we're proud of, but like don't expect everybody to know that. So when we say PTW or post-treatment window, we're just talking about like — test is over, but we're continuing to look at the treatment and the control and see how those sales are changing over time. And with YouTube, as an example, that's just one channel where most of the impact is coming on the back half of that test window, in the treatment window. We see this with CTV as well, and we have some data on the delayed effects of these more view-based channels. So that is just defining the terms. We have the treatment window, post-treatment window. I'd say with something like a YouTube, you also want to factor in the brand's consideration cycle. Like we were talking before we started recording about a furniture company that is selling high-end rugs and sofas. Like you have to factor in the consideration cycle. It's about the channel, but it's also about the brand and their purchase windows. So we try to match those two things up as closely as we can in terms of like — big infrequent purchases get longer tests, these more impulse purchases can be shorter. We try to ask the brand if they have any data on like time from exposure to purchase based on post-purchase surveys. So any data we can get here to help us design the right test is helpful. But for a view-based channel like YouTube, I mean, we're typically running like six to eight week studies and we're seeing a lot of that lift come on the back half of that test.

It's tough because, you know, so like one of my strategists and I talk about this all the time — like the way a finance team is forecasting and the way that this business is running, you're not really modeling like spend today on March 5th as returning on like June 5th. Right.

Brett Curry (39:26.148)

It's not easy to do. It feels very risky to do that.

Olivia Kory (39:29.479)

So we're working with a lot of these teams to like kind of rebuild the marketing model because these channels have very different payback windows.

Brett Curry (39:36.984)

Yeah, it's really a really good point. Yeah. Every product life cycle is a little bit different. I'm really glad you mentioned post-purchase surveys as well. I was talking to like a disaster preparedness company recently — they sell like generators and stuff like that. And they were saying, you know, if you look at like their path to purchase reports, like how long after clicking or seeing an ad does it take someone to purchase? Almost all of those are going to still say within a few days or a few weeks or whatever.

But they did their post-purchase survey and said, hey, when did you first hear about us? And it was like 50% of the respondents were longer than three months. And a lot of them were a year. And I've even seen reports like for True Classic Tees where that's kind of the thing. And so probably whatever path to purchase report you're looking at is shorter than what's actually happening.

And so you do have to keep that in mind when you're running an incrementality test, especially for those channels like Meta for prospecting and YouTube and Connected TV where you're reaching someone really early in the process. It's going to take time, right? Like for home furnishing, you're probably going to have to discuss that with your spouse, there's probably going to be a little bit of shopping there to see, am I going to actually buy this sofa or this rug? And so you got to keep all those in mind.

Olivia Kory (41:00.91)

But the other thing — just the big thing with a channel that's more view-based — is if you're selling on Amazon, if you're selling in retail and you're not pulling those sales in, it's going to look like YouTube can't work. It's because people are going to buy where they want to buy. They're not clicking. So clearly you're not able to guide them to your store. So they're going to go buy where they want to buy and that's likely going to be Amazon or retail.

If you're not pulling those sales in, you're probably understating the effects of that media.

Brett Curry (41:35.734)

Yes, talk about that a little bit — and we'll actually reference, I've referenced on the podcast a few times but I need to fully unpack it — but like the YouTube study you did, like what were some of the findings there in terms of how incremental was it and then the difference between D2C and Amazon and retail? Kind of tie those together. And then we'd love to kind of compare that to Meta or CTV for any numbers you have kind of top of mind.

Olivia Kory (41:58.21)

Yeah, man, we've done so many meta reports since — like I'm using meta in the other sense right now, not the ad channel Meta — but we've done so many reports, I have to dust off the YouTube data. High level, high level summary, do you want me to?

Brett Curry (42:18.68)

High level's great. Yep.

Olivia Kory (42:21.166)

Okay, so the big headline coming out of the YouTube report — this is now almost a year old, so I think we're due for a refresh. You can refresh it for your content in the usual sense. But the big bombshell was that YouTube, the incrementality factor that we discussed — based on what the platform is reporting, what percentage is incremental — was actually 3.42x. So that means if you

Brett Curry (42:30.018)

Yeah, you guys gotta reboot this.

Brett Curry (42:48)

Yeah, yeah.

Olivia Kory (42:51.342)

thought you were getting a one in terms of ROAS on YouTube, it's more like 3.4. And so that completely changes the calculus on like whether you decide to build this channel. So that was huge. And then the halo effects across physical retail and Amazon basically doubled the lift. So you were seeing a one in terms of ROAS on D2C when we pulled in Amazon and retail, that one turned into a two.

Olivia Kory (43:20.654)

So basically assume that you're under-reporting by around 100%. And then most of the effects were actually happening in the second half of the experiment and into the post-treatment window. So if you're running a two-week test and you think it's a loser —

Brett Curry (43:43.362)

You're going to hate them. Yeah.

Olivia Kory (43:45.134)

For sure. And there are also some insights around Demand Gen. I think at the time we published that data, Demand Gen was very unpopular. People didn't like that Google was moving people over from Video Action campaigns. And Demand Gen ended up looking really good in our data. And I think it continues to look good. So I think maybe we owe Google an apology for being upset.

Brett Curry (43:58.936)

Totally.

Brett Curry (44:10.721)

Yeah, yeah. What's interesting is, you know, we noticed this actually before I even knew about true incrementality studies. We had a hair regrowth client and we got them from zero to a million dollars a month in spend on YouTube. And over time they had a data scientist team, a couple of wicked smart guys. I remember one day they came to me and they said, hey, so these numbers look pretty good, but

we believe that for every one sale we're getting D2C, we're actually getting two on Amazon. And we were actually helping them on Amazon. So we're kind of able to help cross-reference that. But yeah, just a reminder that like people buy where they want to buy. Especially for view-based campaigns, you've got to look everywhere. And that's what you guys do. If you're not, then you're missing a good chunk of the results for sure. So how does that compare to Meta? Because I know Meta maybe is a little more mid-funnel so you can structure the test a little bit differently. Post-treatment window can look a little bit different. How are you approaching Meta?

Olivia Kory (45:13.218)

Yep, and this is what — when I mentioned like having to rebuild the marketing model to kind of model out a channel paying back over a longer time horizon — Meta is the opposite. And that's why people love Meta so much, it's really easy in that model because it hits quick. It is a very immediate impact. But we actually see like that can hurt incrementality often because when you're looking for kind of like a short-term outcome, you tend to over-deliver to people who are really down funnel and already in market for your product. You have to be careful. Like Cody and I — referencing Cody from Jones Road — we nerd out about this all the time. We talk about how like maybe Meta's conversion optimization is too good. What's great about YouTube is like, you know, it's prospecting. You're introducing the brand to new audiences. You just know based on the nature of that channel.

Brett Curry (45:59.062)

Yeah.

Olivia Kory (46:09.038)

With Meta, you could get stuck in this like pocket that you can't seem to break out of. It's like, well, Meta's optimization model is like seeing a lot of opportunity here because these people are going to buy. But the problem is your ads aren't influencing them to buy. They were going to buy anyway, and you're just spending on them. And so that's the challenge. It's like the blessing and the curse of Meta — that system is so good at identifying intent, but sometimes it might be too good at identifying intent and you have to be careful there. But like yeah, we see pretty short-term impacts there and we don't see as much of a halo on Amazon retail and we don't see as much of a lagged impact either.

Brett Curry (46:53.26)

Interesting. So then that shifts the way you do the treatment window, the post-treatment window, shifts your expectation, all of those things. Let's talk about some surprises. So now you've gotten into — you work with a ton of brands, you guys have done these big studies. What have been some of the big surprises for you? Either things that are very incremental or things that are not incremental. What have you found?

Olivia Kory (47:17.794)

YouTube wasn't surprising for me, but I know it was surprising for a lot of folks. I came in with the — we were spending as much on YouTube as we did on Meta at Netflix on the acquisition team. We had proven that out time and time again. So none of what we've been seeing with YouTube lately has surprised me, but I know it has surprised many who've been evaluating it on MTA.

Brett Curry (47:39.301)

In the D2C space, yeah, just was kind of a bombshell.

Olivia Kory (47:41.612)

Yeah. So that one's been great. AppLovin — I came in super, super suspicious of AppLovin. You just think about the inventory itself and just the nature of like a programmatic ad network.

Brett Curry (47:56.695)

Videos in mobile games — seems kind of like, sometimes when you're running those ads on Google you like avoid that placement.

Olivia Kory (48:03.18)

I, at least coming from ad tech, just have a lot of baggage and kind of trauma of like what I've seen on the open web when it comes to ad networks. And so I was skeptical. It's looking really good. And I know that's an unpopular opinion with the short sellers, but data doesn't lie. And it's another channel where —

Brett Curry (48:20.686)

That's what I've heard across lots of clients.

Olivia Kory (48:30.254)

The impacts are short term, which these performance marketers love, and it makes their lives easier when you can see that impact pretty quickly. On the other hand, TV has been interesting. I think a lot of brands will come to us in this moment where they're on Meta and Google and they're about to go diversify into YouTube and television. And almost all of them start with TV with one of these partners who does like — it's like a TV ad network for all intents and purposes. It's like linear remnant cable inventory or CTV. And what I've seen there is like results can be really mixed. And the reason there is because you get what you pay for. So many people say like, we're buying linear remnant cable because it's like a $1 CPM or $2 CPM.

And again, I'm here to say that that will show up in the results. You get what you pay for in terms of quality. And so I think it's really interesting when folks are testing not just these more remnant-based TV buys, but they're also going direct to the source. And you see that with YouTube — there's no intermediary here, you're buying YouTube on YouTube. If you go to Hulu, to NBCUniversal, to these networks directly, I've seen a lot of interesting results when you go direct to the source. And you just see what that looks like as compared to a more programmatic remnant buy. So I'm seeing just inventory type on television really swing the results quite a bit — like I can't make generalizations the way I can with YouTube.

Brett Curry (50:16.566)

Yeah, super interesting. So really the game here is we're creating baselines, we're understanding how incremental our different channels are, right? And we're comparing them. And then we're saying, okay, how do we improve these? How do we improve these scores? Because if we action on this data, we're going to get more and more incremental, we'll get more from our ad dollars month in and month out. And so what are some of the biggest levers to pull? So I've got my baseline numbers. Sure, I'm never going to be satisfied with the baseline, but maybe I get disappointing baseline numbers. What are the biggest levers we're pulling to get more incremental on our key channels?

Olivia Kory (50:54.126)

Yep, so far and away, the biggest lever you have is creative. That is where we see the most kind of like step change performance improvements — like 30, 40, 50% wins. Creative is your biggest lever. But I'd say there's a lot you can do in terms of how you're buying the channel. We work with a wide range of brands in terms of size. We work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies.

And then we work with like these kind of smaller, more nimble DTC teams. And so with the smaller teams who really pride themselves on media buying, this isn't as big of an issue. But sometimes when we're auditing accounts, we'll see that like 60 or 70% of the account is retargeting. Like that's very low hanging fruit.

Brett Curry (51:44.302)

And maybe somebody didn't know that. Maybe they were just doing it.

Olivia Kory (51:46.85)

Yeah, and like we audited an account the other day and their Demand Gen campaign was delivering like primarily to Gmail placements.

Brett Curry (51:56.206)

Traffic composition — that's why we almost always turn off Gmail in Demand Gen. It can work for remarketing, not as much for prospecting.

Olivia Kory (52:04.718)

They thought YouTube wasn't working and then we went in and audited it and it's like, you weren't buying YouTube, you were buying Gmail. I just didn't even know there was like that much scale on Gmail. So that was a learning for me. So like the account structure, depending on the team and how much time they spend in the ad account, can really make a big difference. I'd say that one thing on Meta is like the conversion optimization we talked about can kind of get you stuck in a bottom of the funnel hole where you're not prospecting for new users. So the teams that we work with are doing a lot to kind of figure out what is the right event to point Meta toward to get these like net new customers and introduce our brand to new people. On YouTube, I think it's you know, it's probably playing with these different campaign types and settings and the types of placements that you're buying inside of YouTube. And of course, spend level is huge as well in terms of figuring out where you sit on the point of diminishing returns.

Brett Curry (53:13.09)

Totally. Yeah. All those things are huge. And we've seen this play out now with test results that were good and then maybe follow-up tests that weren't so good. It almost always ties back to a big creative shift — either just new creatives or creatives focusing on a different product. Maybe a brand was focusing on their hero product initially, then they moved to some secondary products and it did not work as well. So yeah, totally agree. And then that traffic composition piece is so important.

If you're running YouTube, run YouTube. Don't look at Gmail and some of those things with it. So we are officially out of time, but I do want to hear from you. A lot of people ask me — hey, should I use Haus? Is it time for me to use Haus? Am I too small to use Haus? You guys are releasing a new level of service, correct? That's more widely applicable to DTC and other brands. Can you talk about that?

Olivia Kory (54:10.298)

I can. Yeah, it's on our site now, live. So if you go to our pricing page, it's called DTC Basics. And this is because we want more companies to be able to access Haus. We've heard that it can be expensive relative to other SaaS tools. And so this is a lower cost, lighter service starter tier where you can measure D2C and Amazon across your core ad channels, the ones we're plugged into.

And you can really get your feet wet here. You can see like a really nice side-by-side comparison in terms of what it includes and what it doesn't. But we just want — if our mission is to make incrementality testing more accessible and to really democratize it, then I think this is a first step toward that.

Brett Curry (54:54.446)

It's a huge step. I've been waiting for it. You talked about it on the Andrew Ferris podcast. It's finally here. I'm so excited. So I'm recommending this a lot, talking about this a lot. So Olivia, this was super fun. This time went by so fast. I really wanted to nerd out on more. So I'll have to do a follow up.

Olivia Kory (55:13.166)

Pencil me in for a part two. Maybe when we have our next YouTube report, I can come share it with you.

Brett Curry (55:19.19)

Yes, next YouTube report. All right, we're penciling it in, we're planning on it. Next YouTube report, we're gonna talk about that here. So super excited. Olivia, you're also an amazing follow online. So X and I believe LinkedIn as well. Where can people find you?

Olivia Kory (55:32.622)

On X and LinkedIn — Olivia Kory.

Brett Curry (55:36.317)

Awesome. All right, Olivia, thank you so much. This was super, super fun. Awesome. As always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you found this show to be helpful, please share it with someone else. With that, until next time, thank you for listening. Hey, as we wrap up this week's episode, I want to mention — if you're a great brand, if you're scaling high seven, eight, nine figures in D2C or omnichannel, we should potentially talk.

Olivia Kory (55:40.27)

Thanks, Brett.

Brett Curry (56:04.194)

We've worked with some of your favorite brands and we'd love to consider working with you as well. We are masters at unlocking new channels like YouTube, unlocking new scale on platforms like Amazon where we can add up to eight figures in new growth. We've got multiple ways we can work with you. We can do the full service thing and work like a partner with your team and really run everything. Or we can offer consulting. So maybe you've got an internal team that really knows their stuff, but there's an area they don't know really well and they'd like to get some consulting — we can do that. We also have tons of free guides, free resources, free materials you can check out. All of that gets started at omgcommerce.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.

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Scaling an eCommerce brand isn’t just about ads, creatives, or new channels.
Often, the biggest growth unlock comes from how you treat customers after the purchase.

In this episode of eCommerce Evolution, Brett sits down with Kristin Keys, VP of Customer Experience at Baseball Lifestyle 101, to break down how CX can become a true growth engine.

From empowering support teams to turning angry customers into loyal advocates, Kristin shares how great customer experience drives retention, increases LTV, and fuels word-of-mouth growth.

If you’re struggling with churn, negative reviews, or rising CAC, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you turn CX into a competitive advantage.

—

Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

—

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction: CX as a Growth Engine with Kristin Keys
(03:12) Why Good CX Drives Retention, LTV & Word of Mouth
(07:00) The Baseball Lifestyle 101 Origin Story
(14:02) Reducing Refunds, Chargebacks & Negative Reviews
(20:04) Empowering Your Team to Resolve Issues on the Spot
(24:10) Going Above & Beyond: Community Stories & Surprise Moments
(30:51) Key Metrics: Return Rate, Repeat Purchases & Sales from Support
(36:50) Biggest CX Mistakes D2C Brands Make
(41:46) Parting Advice: Build a CX Team That Loves Your Brand

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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/
• Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact

Relevant Links:

• Kristin’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristin-keys-bl101/

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, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

Transcript:

Kristin Keys:

If you do a good job at giving them accurate expectations, this is what you should expect from top to bottom at every level, then they're not going to be disappointed when it happens.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we are talking about a topic we have never dived into on this podcast before. We're talking about CX, customer experience, customer service as a growth engine. Yes, I love talking about new ad angles and new ad types and open up new channels like YouTube and distribution like retail stores and all of those things. But I am here to tell you that the right customer service experience can mean so much to your marketing and growth and retention efforts. And conversely, a bad experience there can undermine what you're trying to do through the rest of your marketing. And so today I am delighted to welcome to the show Kristin Keys. She's the VP of customer experience at Baseball Lifestyle 101. Baseball Lifestyle is a client of OMG Commerce.

We hope on the YouTube and the Amazon side. And it's been so fun getting to know them and see what they do. And I truly believe they're one of a kind. Just the way they build community, the way they've created an amazing fan base all across the country. I live in the center of the Midwest. I go to the store. I go to a soccer game. I see kids wearing baseball lifestyle gear all the time. What they've built is truly amazing. And they've gone from just 2021, a couple million in sales to this past year surpassing 150 million in sales and growing. And now they're in Dick's Sporting Goods and Academy Sports and a number of others. Check out the full podcast on the operators podcast, Bill Rum. And Josh Shapiro laid out the full story on that pod where we're going to go deep on customer experience right here.

And so with that, Kristin, welcome to the show. And how's it going?

Kristin Keys:

It's great. I'm excited to be here. I'm very honored that you would consider this an important topic and I'm happy to get this information out there for everybody.

Brett Curry:

Absolutely. So we got to hang out in Miami just a few weeks ago. We were both presenting at the D2C Growth Summit. Shout out Johnny, Hickey and Michael Alt. But as you laid out this topic, I'm like, man, this is so good. This needs to be shared to a broader audience because I think a lot of people just view customer experience and customer service as an expense. It's just an expense line item and you don't handle it properly. It is. But if you handle it properly, it can be a growth engine. And I want to unpack how you guys look at that right now. And so I guess maybe kind of from a high level bullet point style here, Kristin, how can customer experience be a growth engine for a D2C business?

Kristin Keys:

Sure. I mean, so this is obviously something that is very I'm passionate about. I think that a lot of companies just, like you said, look at it as a cost. It's something that's there to fix problems, to fix issues, to just respond when a customer reaches out. And by being proactive, by being above and beyond what somebody is expecting by really giving them the time and the effort on your end to not treat them just like a problem, to treat them like somebody who is invested in your business, that you're invested in them. Showing them that you're invested in them is going to make that connection and that loyalty for that customer just deepen. And you can take any situation, this is something that we talk about all the time. There's customers that come that are so mad. And when you're dealing with that customer, one of two things can happen.

They're going to stay mad because you're not fixing that issue for them and they're never going to purchase from you again. And likely they're going to tell a million people about their experience, how bad it was. Or you're going to get on their level, be direct with them, identify their issue, fix it, and then give them a reason to keep coming back. And when you do that, you turn all of that, what could wind up being churn, what could wind up being negative publicity for your company or your business, you're turning that person into an ambassador, somebody who's going to go and tell other people, yes, they made a mistake, but they fixed it. We live in a world right now, I think, where everybody has so many more choices than they used to. There's so much information out there. And one of the big things I think is that setting yourself apart from another company no longer is just a product quality.

That's not enough. You have to have the whole package. You have to, from top to bottom, give them a great experience and be there for anything that they need. I mean, in 2026, I think just with the ability to connect on such a quick level, you have to basically be just a concierge service. It's not just a, "Hey, I have this issue." It's fully comprehensive. I mean, so we make ourselves available on multiple platforms and not just as a reactive service, we're proactive. We have a Facebook group that has over 10,000 members in it now. And we post in that Facebook group daily and answer outside of our customer service hours. I mean, that's something that I'm on my couch at night and I'm watching TV and I'm in my Facebook group and I'm responding to people. And not because my job tells me I have to, but because I'm invested, I want to make sure that we are delivering that top-notch service so that our customers do feel like we care about them because we do.

It's not just lip service. I don't hang up my hat at five o'clock and say, "I'm done. This is an all the time thing." And I think you mentioned that you're in the Midwest and you see people out in public wearing our gear. And for all of our employees, when we see people, we call it baseball lifestyle in the wild. And when we see people, we get so visibly excited, we talk to them, we pick their brain. And that is a genuine desire from us to let our customers know that they're important to us, that they're not just customers, that they're part of our community. And I think that's where baseball lifestyle really sets themselves

Brett Curry:

Apart. It's so good. It's so good. And I want to talk a little bit about the community aspect and also hear from your perspective a little bit of the baseball lifestyle story, but just to frame things and talk about where we're headed, GoodCX drives retention, drives LTV, right? It drives word of mouth, it drives brand forgiveness and operational clarity. We're going to dive into all of those. Those are points directly from your talk in Miami. And I'm just so excited to dive into that a little bit, but back up just a bit. And for those that don't know, I gave a few highlights of the numbers and we talked about the gear in the wild with baseball lifestyle, but how was BL 101 built and how did we get to where we are today?

Kristin Keys:

So one of the biggest things I think that sets Baseball Lifestyle apart is that they built a community before they ever asked for a sale. And this is something that we talk about often when we speak about the brand. And it's something that started as a 13-year-old boy posting, looking just for an outlet to share everything baseball because he himself was passionate about baseball. And he wound up connecting with- And

Brett Curry:

That's co-founder Josh Shapiro, right?

Kristin Keys:

Yes. A 13-year-old boy posted every hour on the hour. I mean, he is one of the most driven and meticulous people that I've ever had the opportunity to meet or lucky enough to be working with. And I think that him and his co-founder, Bill Roman, I was about to talk about how they got connected, but they really are two of the most genuine people that you've ever met. 100%. Extremely intelligent, extremely good business sense. And just how I say, as a company, we care about our customers, as founders, as CEOs, as C-suite, they care about their employees and they don't just expect their employees to do a good job. They want to make sure that their employees are happy doing that. And that's one of the things I think is one of the biggest takeaways. So real quick, just I started with Baseball Live Sell in 2021.

When I started, I was within the first 10 people who were hired, I think it was probably around seven. At that time, we were very, very small. We had one customer service worker. It was me. We had one distribution center. We were not in wholesale, we were not doing any retail. We were doing, like you said, just about $2 million in e-com. Four years later, I mean, the growth has been just exponential. We have over 300 employees, and now I manage a team of about 20. We're working with three and a half distribution centers. We're opening in retail locations across the company, and our wholesale and e-commerce are kind of really just exploding from where they were. And so I was brought on in 2021 as a part-time customer service agent at that time. I think our plan was under 360 tickets a month. And now we close probably about 13 to 15,000 on a normal month and over that on a busy month.

So obviously, I mean, the growth is just crazy. But within that time, I think the company has really never lost that, what you would call a small town feel. Josh and Bill are in the office every single day. They are walking the halls, talking to people. They're not CEOs that sit in their office with the door closed where we talk to everybody and two times a week we have full company meetings and people are encouraged to talk. It's not like everybody is muted and they can't share what they have to say. They want to hear from all of their employees. They want to know everything that's going on. Our Friday call starts with shout-outs and you can't shout out anybody in your own department. So it just really encourages that cross-departmental recognition, but also just reminds everybody just how important everybody is. People who you don't normally work with, when you get the opportunity to do that,

Everybody at our company is amazing. And I know that sounds so silly to say, but everybody is just so invested and it starts at the top with Bill and Josh. And the example that they set and the way that they carry themselves, it just really carries down to the newest employee that we've hired. They make that effort to meet them, to know them, to involve them. I mean, the company as a whole, I think just really does a good job of making everybody passionate about what they do. And that shows top to bottom in all of our work performance, I think.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. It's so good. And I've gotten to interact with some of the marketing team and the retail team and the team that's kind of assigned to the Amazon initiative. And then of course, getting to hang out with Bill and 100% agree with what you just said. And what's so cool is if you want to turn customer experience, customer service into a growth engine, you can't just flip a switch or you can't just send an email to your team and say, "Do this, do this better." We're doing this now. It does start with culture. And the more you take care of your team, the more they will take care of the customer. I know BL 101 believes that, you believe that, Bill and Josh believe that and it's happening. And so that is a great setup. You've got to have that in place first. Happy customers, happy employees who are equipped with the right tools, with the right information, with freedom to kind of make things right, they won't make for happy customers.

And so you guys are doing a great job there for sure. So awesome. Any other highlights on the BL101 story? Otherwise, we'll dive right into customer experience.

Kristin Keys:

I mean, it's kind of all a highlight, Brett. I mean, it's really like we talk about living a baseball lifestyle and for most of the employees, they mean that. I would say probably 80% of our employees played baseball or are avid baseball fans. So there's really no better place to work. I mean, it's kind of like a dream. I mean, we're working with influencers, they work with pro athletes, they work with all of these people and they're doing events that revolve around baseball. I mean, opening day of MLB is an actual company holiday. I mean, they don't play. I mean, they are invested in this sport, in this community and in this company ultimately. I mean, unequivocally, there is not a day when they don't actually do what they say and say what they do. And that's so important, I think, to really just not waiver and just be the same person that you are when you were in 2021 and you were small to now that you're in 2025 and you're big to know everybody to talk to you.

Yeah. Everybody's talking about

Brett Curry:

You now. All over the D2C community, everybody's talking about baseball lifestyle for sure.

Kristin Keys:

We're so thankful to be a part of this. I mean, sometimes we just look back and we laugh and we're just like, "This is a crazy world we're living. Did that just happen?" And it's really just exciting and fun. And I think everybody that works for the company is just so invested and it shows really that's what it is.

Brett Curry:

Love it, love it. And there's this concept that I heard years and years ago. It was one of my favorites in all of business, ties to marketing, ties to culture. But really yet two sides of any business, right? There's the inside reality, what actually happens inside the four walls of a company that's virtual and could be global and all that stuff. But what happens in the company, and there's the outside perception, that's branding, that's your marketing messages, that's what the marketplace believes about you and what the narrative is about your company. But I've always believed that eventually that inside reality will influence the outside perception. Eventually, that's going to come out good or bad. And so you guys have built a culture and a setup that's just truly remarkable and it's showing in the results. I think so too. Let's dive in a little bit to what are some of the things you do differently from a customer service point of view?

And I think maybe a place to start, and happy for you to reframe this if you'd rather, but good CX, it reduces bad things like refunds and chargebacks and negative reviews and social escalation and stuff ended up in Bill or Josh's inbox as founders. What are some things you do differently that kind of reduces the negative side of customer experience if it's not handled properly?

Kristin Keys:

Well, I mean, kind of just going back to just talking about how invested the employees are at this company and starting with myself, and that's been ... I don't just consider it a job. I'm very passionate about what I do. So it's never like a, oh, that's outside the scope or I'm off ... I mean, I'm online on weekends, I'm online on nights, I'm doing stuff outside of what would be considered my normal scope. And again, this is not because anybody's asking me to do this, it's because I take pride in what I do. I mean, I get that feedback and a lot of it I take very personally, as an executive at this company, I know that that perception lives and dies on my shoulders. So I don't ever want anything to come across Josh or Bill's desk. I don't want negative reviews to be out there.

I don't want any public perception to be, "Well, they dropped the ball on this. " I take all of those failures personally. So I'm never going to ignore them. We don't hide comments and don't address them anytime I see

Brett Curry:

Anything. And just a quick note, Kristin, for all the D2C founders listening out there, if you're creating a job description or you're looking to hire a VP of customer experience, take that little snippet of what Kristin just said, plug that into AI, get that working as like, "This is who we're looking for. " Anyway, continue.

Kristin Keys:

No, I mean, just to touch on that, I agree. And that was something that I said in Miami, you have to find the right person for any job. One of the big things right now is right seat, right position or right person. And it's true. And I think looking at customer service, a lot of times we just consider it a reactive, like they're there just to receive your complaints. And if you treat it as an actual skill, somebody who is going to be passionate about making sure your customers are happy, you really are going to wind up with a lot better customer service perception of how your company is running. So I mean, I think it really starts with not ignoring anything that's ever happening and always trying to improve. So we have our frequently asked questions on our website. Anytime anything is kind of like a gray area and we get a question about it, I'm immediately reaching out, working on that with our team to edit that, to get that updated, to make it more clear.

We don't want it to be a fine print type of company. We want everything out there because I think the biggest way that people can fail our customers is just not meeting their expectations. So if you do a good job at giving them accurate expectations, this is what you should expect from top to bottom at every level, then they're not going to be disappointed when it happens. I think that's really where people lose their faith is when they think that something is going to go one way and it doesn't. And then when they reach out, they're met with just these stringent, too bad, so sad kind of mentalities. So of course, we have posted policies and we uphold those posted policies, but I think allowing for there to be real human interactions, connections, mistakes that customers can make, because very often it is on the customer.

They're not always right. They did not do or expect what we told them to expect. And they should not necessarily be punished because of that. And as a company, I think a lot of people operate under the assumption that it's black and white and it can't be with customer service if you want to have that retention, that loyalty, that deepening of that brand, it's a relationship just like everything else. And everybody on both sides, if we want them to forgive us when we make a mistake, if we send you the wrong item or we do something, we're outside of our standard estimated shipping time or whatever it is, if we want the customer to forgive us, then we have to forgive them when they make a mistake. So if they order the wrong size or they order the wrong item, but it's outside of the 30 days, there's no harm to allow anything outside of those guidelines.

So we try to really just look at every situation as, "Hey, was this an honest mistake? How can we meet them halfway on this? How can we take care of them and how can we ensure that they're satisfied with that resolution?" And I think top to bottom, we really do that.

Brett Curry:

Hey there. Thanks for tuning in to the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I want to take just a minute and tell you a little bit about my agency, OMG commerce. Now we work with some of your favorite eight and nine figure D2C and Omni channel brands and our specialty is profitable scale. We love taking great brands and amplifying their growth profitably. We've helped a number of brands go from zero on YouTube to spending as much as a million dollars in 90 days while hitting a CAC or CPA Target. We've also helped multiple brands launch on Amazon or just add scale to Amazon. We took Boom Beauty from zero to almost $6 million in sales their first 12 months on Amazon. So if you're not satisfied with your current level of growth, if you're looking to diversify channels, maybe you're a little too dependent on Meta and you want to add YouTube or you're not pleased with your Amazon growth, then we need to chat.

So visit us at omgcommerce.com, click the Let's Talk button. We'd love to schedule a complimentary strategy session with you. And with that, back to the show.

Kristin Keys:

One of the other things I think that's important or at least is working very well for us is I talk with a lot of other customer experience employees and they treat their intake kind of on a tiered basis. And I'm going to escalate this to my supervisor or I'm going to bubble this up to whoever. And we don't really do that at Baseball Lifestyle. All of my team is trained and knowledgeable and empowered to fix any situation, borrowing anything crazy themselves. Nobody has to wait for approval from me to offer a gift card. Nobody has to wait for approval from anybody to refund shipping to do whatever it is to make that customer

Brett Curry:

Happy. Trained, informed, and empowered. I love that. And so basically you were saying a ticket comes to a CX associate or whatever you call them, they should have the knowledge, understanding, and the authority to make something right right there.

Kristin Keys:

All of them. All of them. And really, again, talking about employee experience and how you value them, how you make them feel. And that's how I make my team feel. That's how the company makes me feel. That's how our C-suite makes me feel. I feel empowered. I feel important. I feel like the things that I say make a difference. And why would I not pass that on to the people on my team and say, "I'm no better than you. You know how to handle this. You know the correct SOPs for what we expect." We talk about that. It's a constant dialogue. Like I was saying, to improve the customer experience, I'm in real time, I'm editing FAQs, I'm making things more clear. I do the same thing with my team. So as anything comes up where they're like, "Hey, I'm not really sure how to handle this or whatever." I'm explaining that to everybody and I'm talking about just the company's per opinion on how we should handle things like that, what our core values are, how we want that customer to feel.

And so they know that and they're going to deliver that stellar customer service without having to jump through hoops and make that customer think like, "Ugh, I'm going to have to wait and see if they say yes or no." No, it's going to be a decision for you right there. You're not going to have to wait and nine times out of 10, maybe 10 times out of 10, we're making sure that that customer is happy before they walk away.That's kind of just our unequivocal goal.

Brett Curry:

And that's so powerful because we can all think of times when we reach out to customer support, which none of us want to do. None of us want to make that call or send that email to customer support, but we can all think of times when we were extremely pissed about something. But then customer service makes it right and all of a sudden a switch is flipped and we are now an advocate for that

Kristin Keys:

Branch. Within my team, that's the ones that I say like, "Don't bubble it up if you're not sure or whatever." Bubble it up if they're angry. I want the angry ones because to me it's like a challenge. Can I make them happy? I mean, it's really fulfilling and rewarding because literally I know that I am saving that customer for our company and for me, that's the utmost importance. Me making a difference.

Brett Curry:

And it's like meaningful LTV, right? You're doing drops once a week, you're always launching new products. People buy your products religiously. And so to lose a customer, that's a big deal. You want to save each one of them.

Kristin Keys:

Absolutely. I mean, and genuinely, I mean, it's something ... This is my career. This is something that I'm very passionate about. Like I said, I kind of run it as if I would if I was owning it. So I don't want that negative connotation out there. I don't want people unhappy. I don't want that to be something that people say. I want when people talk about the company for it to be their amazing, their clothes are amazing, their customer service is amazing, their content is amazing. All of us really just want everybody. We care. I think that's the biggest difference. And we take that care right down to the very bottom, the smallest issues and the biggest. I mean, everything is important to us if it's important to you. So I think that's

Brett Curry:

Something- Any favorite BL 101 stories of how you made something right for a customer and what that did for you and/or for them. And I know some of those you maybe can't share, but any favorites that you can share?

Kristin Keys:

I mean, not even necessarily something that was wrong. We get messages all the time, and a lot of times it's just kind of sent out to everybody, sponsorships or donations. And something that really touched all of us, I think was a few months ago we got this message and it was somebody who was talking about the socks that we had. And his parents, they were in a car accident with a cement mixer. They're like a hot asphalt mixer. And the socks protected the sun's feet from getting burned. I mean, his legs were- Crazy. It was an insane story. And we shared this with our team and I mean, we went over and above to just reach out to him to talk about this, to send him some stuff in the hospital. I mean, so it's not just the problems that people have, it's everything as a whole.

When we see something, we don't just auto delete it or macro it out. We read everything. Another thing, just again, this isn't necessarily what you asked for, but somebody on our team, we kind of just send everything to her that we get like this. We'll get messages from people who are like, "My son loves your company. He has designs. He has ideas that he wants to send you and they'll send us pictures of new products and they're crayon and they're marker and they're whatever." I love that. He reaches out to our creative director and he will write them back personal notes to just kind of tell him, "Stay with it, keep on it, follow your dreams. This is really awesome." So I think just not necessarily anything about making an issue because I mean, we will always do that, but it's the above and beyond.

If we mess up, we will always fix it. And that's kind of where we live and die and we talk in our Facebook group and we'll always say, "We will make mistakes. There's never going to be a world where we're not making mistakes, but we will always fix them."

Brett Curry:

We're never going to get those mistakes to zero, just

Kristin Keys:

Not

Brett Curry:

Going

Kristin Keys:

To happen. You can't, you can't.

Brett Curry:

We

Kristin Keys:

Will send you the wrong size. We will make an error, but we will never not care. It will never be a, "Well, you're just stuck with it now. We will always work with you. " So there's not ever a doubt in my mind, so there's nothing in particular to share about that, but it's those above and beyond, I think that really sets us apart.

Brett Curry:

Making fans for life. And again, that only happens if you care about community externally, but also that you built it and built the right team internally, which is great. So I love that, I think the team has to be trained, equipped, empowered to make decisions, to make things right. You want to prevent things from escalating to the owners just because you want to handle that. You want your team to handle that.

Kristin Keys:

100%.

Brett Curry:

But there's a lot of information that comes in. A lot of insights that come in, there's the touching stories and stuff that you definitely want to share, but you don't want CX to be an island where nothing gets outside of that group. You want to share insights, right? Share insights are going to help operations and inform marketing and inform the social team for community building and things like that. So how do you guys do it? How do you recommend that you do it? Take good information from CX and inform the rest of the company so that they can improve based on that information.

Kristin Keys:

Sure. So we recently started distributing and compiling a voice of the customer report and it's done monthly and it's going to just touch on all those high points. So everything kind of that lives in my bubble is going to be reported on, and that's going to be

Brett Curry:

A reason to the customer report. I love that. I love that.

Kristin Keys:

So it's going to be some insights from obviously our actual ticketing, our phone calls. We also do live chat on the site, but it's also going to include stuff from our Facebook group, returns and exchange data that we're pulling and just trends that we're getting from that. So there's a lot of different areas that we're able to pull information from. In reality, like we've said that we were so small for so long that we use Slack. When I see any kind of product feedback, I'm immediately Slacking. I'm not waiting for that report to come out. I'm letting product development know, "Hey, we're going to teach the team immediately." Exactly. The fabric is itchy or the ankles are too tight or whatever it is. I'm giving that information in real time. Same thing with marketing, because they'll run promotions all the time. And really, at this point we've asked and they've responded, they send us over what they're going to be sending out so that we can kind of scan it for any loopholes that a customer is going to say, "Oh, well, you didn't say it was only on Sunday." So they let us know like, "Hey, this is what we're going to be running.

Do you have any feedback for us?" So we really all just work back and forth together sharing information to ensure that there's no lapse for that customer because ultimately that's the goal. Marketing doesn't want there to be any ambiguity. They want the customer to get exactly what they're telling them they're getting. And as CX, because we see all of the feedback, I know what to look for. And so we want to say like, "Oh, make sure that you put that that's online only. Make sure that you put that that is 48 hours, we get the start date so we know. " So sharing information cross-departmentally is the only way that you can really have a great customer experience. And it starts again, like we said, just with them valuing the information that you're giving them and actually making changes and taking it into account with ops like, "Hey, people are saying when you send the hats in this, they're getting smushed, so they get sent in better packaging now." So anything that we hear, we're immediately just sharing that information so that on all levels we can improve for the customer.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And just one of the pieces that's missing in a D2C Or omnichannel company where if you guys were a small retail store only and you could see every customer and see how they're interacting with the product and hear their feedback, that's one thing. But now you've got giant departments that never see or hear from the customer. And so you guys are that portal. You are the connection to the customer, the voice of the customer. That information is absolutely precious and it's got to be shared. And so I know you guys are doing a great job of that. And so can you talk about any numbers where like, hey, as we've been focusing on these initiatives, we've seen return rate drop or we've seen other numbers improve. Paint a little bit of a picture for us of when we get this right, when we invest in it like you guys are, what could that mean for our business?

Kristin Keys:

Sure. And so for 2025, I think our return customer rate was 43% and we're not satisfied with that. We want it higher. I mean, we wanted to double that. So that's our goal all the time is why would we not want that customer to keep coming back? Like we've said, LTV is going to be such a driver for sales, for revenue, for growth. So making sure that those customers are coming back, taking away any roadblocks that would prevent them from coming back, making sure that their experience is perfect so that they are coming back. And really just taking care of the customer and making sure that there's no roadblocks for them to do what they need to do. We talked about return rates. Right now we have a 4% return rate in theory. And of that 4%, we retain about 60% of that overall return rate.

So of the 4% that is getting return, 60% of that, we're keeping that in- house, whether that's in direct exchange or a store credit. And that's not by accident, that's from us. Again, on every level, ensuring we have great products, ensuring that they're not getting them and saying like, "Oh, I don't like this. I want to return it. " They're not doing that. They're only returning or exchanging if it doesn't fit or there's an issue like that. So just making sure just on every level that there's just nothing that would prevent them from wanting to purchase again. And we all just kind of support that same metric. And there's something

Brett Curry:

So powerful, Kristin, about seeing those numbers and everybody measuring against them. So if I understood the first metric correctly, 43% of customers come back and buy again.That's a good number for an apparel brand. They want to hire. But you want to hire, right? So you've got-

Kristin Keys:

100%.

Brett Curry:

X team is looking at that, product is looking at that, marketing is looking at that, retention, department's looking at that. Everybody's looking at it. You're looking at those numbers and then you're discussing why. Why is it up? Why is it down? Why is this changing? And you're able to action on that and that is so incredibly powerful. And then yeah, looking at that return rate, how do we get the return rate down? Or it's apparel. There's always going to be a return. You're always going to order the wrong. I order the wrong size. I'm a pretty tall guy and it's like I just get the wrong size sometimes. And so that's never going to go to zero, but can you retain those customers and get them to do store credit or exchange or whatever? But measuring those is critical. And those mean real dollars of growth, real top line, real bottom line numbers.

And so that's huge. Any other metric that you're focused on and what that's doing for you?

Kristin Keys:

I mean, yeah. So the platform that we use will track how much sales are generated from support, which means anytime they've had an interaction with customer service, if they make a purchase within the following 48 hours. So that's a big metric for us. We want to position ourselves as there at the time that the customer's making that decision and ensure that they're fully knowledgeable to make that decision, to push checkout on that item. So like I said, we don't just offer email. We're on phone, we're on live chat, we're on every level just there for the customer to make that decision. And so we're really proud of our sales from support numbers. I think- Because I can probably

Brett Curry:

Offset or maybe cover a lot of the costs of the CX department. If you guys really focus on that number, sales driven by customer support can offset a lot of the costs, I would assume.

Kristin Keys:

Easily. And again, that's something that has never been taken for granted from our founders. That's something that they've always known, again, because I think they're so intelligent, so smart business wise. They have recognized that since day one, and they knew that making sure that the community fully supported, fully backed us, fully invested in them, and they did that by investing in that customer. And I say it all the time to them, because they would say, "Oh, you're doing such a great job. Our numbers are great." And I'm like, "It's so much of it is that you guys have empowered me to do this, that you have put..." And because how many times, even at a high level, "Well, I have to check. I have to run this by them. I have to put it in a proposal." And I don't necessarily ever really have to do that.

They have trusted me since day one to really just know what the customer or what the company wanted their guidelines to be, like their persona to be to the customers. And they've always just said, "Make it right." Surprise and delight, go over the top, make sure that they know that we're so sorry that this happened. So we do that all the time. I mean, it's not just something we say or 50% of people get a yes, 30% of people get a maybe, whatever it is. No, everybody has a potential to be a yes. There's no parameters to be like, "Well, you can only refund this many shipping fees or give out this many discounts." There's nobody looking like, "Wow, you gave out a lot of gift cards last month." No, if I gave it a gift card, they needed it and the company trusts me to make that decision.

And not having to jump through those hoops really just makes a difference. And it shows in the support that we're getting from that community because they know that we're going to make it right and they're not going to have to wait and go through all these different channels and wait for somebody to from high above to give the go ahead like, "No, I can do it right in that instant. We can take care of you. We can get this done." And we do it happily. I mean, we all love our jobs.

Brett Curry:

Yep. It's amazing. It's amazing. I'm sure, Kristin, because you're in this game all the time, and because you guys go above and beyond and the experiences great, when you have to reach out to other customer support from other companies you're buying from, I'm sure you are all kinds of frustrated, you're critiquing what they're doing, you're saying, "Hey, you should have done this or that or whatever." But stepping back a little bit, as you experience other D2C brands, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see? The biggest customer service mistakes you see D2C brands making that they need to be aware of and need to fix?

Kristin Keys:

Sure. I mean, I convinced myself and my husband that this is actually market research for my job description to online shop. I love that. I have to try this out and see. So I think really where most companies miss genuinely as an overarching thought is that they just treat the customer like it's a black and white issue and they don't allow for you to ... It's just a macro. It's just, this is the answer, there's no wavering in it. And to have to jump through hoops to get a, let me talk to a supervisor, is there anything else you can do? And so I think they miss the mark on that. I'm not treating each interaction like that person is special. And again, that comes at a cost, but that cost, like you just said, can be offset by the work that you're doing. So it's an investment in yourself, in your company, because when you have that customer who comes back and they have this issue and you make it right immediately, they're going to purchase again, they're going to tell other people.

There is so many times that I ... And truthfully, I'm the customer that probably those companies love because when they make me have to jump through hoops to return something, I don't do it. I literally, I'm

Brett Curry:

Laughing

Kristin Keys:

Because I'm in my office. I have three boxes right now on my corner of things that I should have returned because I wanted my $90 back and I just didn't do it. I'm too busy. I'm the same way. They didn't make it easy for me, so it's just sitting there. I'd rather give it to a trend than jump through. I look at those and I'm like, damn that company. And so we don't want anybody ever being like, "Damn that company." No, we want to be that company where they're like- Because

Brett Curry:

You'll never buy from them again. You didn't go to the return. And so the company's like, "All right, we didn't get a return." But you do have the customer forever.

Kristin Keys:

Oh, no. I keep notes, Brett.

Brett Curry:

And that would be a list I would like to see at some point in time. We will not publish that list, but that would be a great list for sure.

Kristin Keys:

Yes. And to that, I don't publicly blast them because it happens to us all the time. I mean, they're loud on, so if you don't do it, we're going to go blast you on social. Okay. Yes, it's going to get attention and yes, that may make us look at it a little bit differently, but you're still wrong. I mean, a lot of times, and so I'm not wrong in this situation and I still don't blast because there's nothing to gain. Let them live. I just will take my business elsewhere and I don't want anybody taking- And that's reality. ... baseball apparel business elsewhere. I want it all staying here. I want everybody coming back. I want them buying for their friends or family until they're retired. So yes, this is not a short-term game for us.

Brett Curry:

What other mistakes are you seeing brands make or mistakes that we need to be aware of so we can fix?

Kristin Keys:

I mean, again, I order a lot off of the internet. I think in 2026, it's very easy to Google a company and see where they're at. I think companies should do a better job of investing in that public persona, ensuring that their reviews are cleaned up, that if they're bad, they're being responded to. And that's something that we do. We're responding to every review, whether it's negative or positive. We don't even want people to post something positive and us not reach out and say, thank you. You should be thanking them for that. So I think customers don't take care of their own reviews as much as they should. I look and that's the first thing that I'm going to do. I'm going to Google a company and get the reviews. And so when I look and I see terrible reviews and no responses from the company, that speaks a lot to me.

So I mean, I think that's important. And then really just making sure that the information is out there and there is no bait and switch. There is not. And when they get you with the automatic renewal, that's something I am not a fan of. I want that option. I don't want you automatically putting me in because again, I'm not going to remember to cancel it, to turn it off, to monitor it. So don't automatically enroll me in anything. Make sure I opt into it with my full chest. If I'm getting on a subscription, I want to know I'm getting on a subscription. Don't auto-ship me a second one when I didn't want it.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. So good. And just such a good reminder that poor customer experience- That's just not worth it. ... follow you. It will haunt you. Those negative reviews, those negative comments that they will haunt you for years potentially. But if you take care of it, if you're proactive and then you also fix things quickly, you're going to reap dividends from that for years to come as well. So any other thoughts, tips, suggestions that we didn't cover, Kristin? Anything we left out, any parting words of wisdom you want to leave the audience?

Kristin Keys:

Sure. I mean, and you said it before when you said take that and make it a job description. Make sure that your customer service team is in love with your company. Make sure that that customer service team is speaking about the company, using the words that you would use to describe that company, invested, making sure that they fully understand who you are as a company, what you want to do for your customers, and making sure that they're actually putting that into practice. Not just doing the job, because this is not ... Accounting, you can do a job. You can punch in those numbers, you can look at those numbers and compare and contrast. Customer services, there's a lot of soft skills involved, and that's not always easy to ensure that you have the right person. So make sure that your customer service team really wants to be there, really is passionate about what they're doing, and really is invested in your brand.

I think that that alone would make a huge difference for a lot of these companies. And again, comes at a cost, and that does necessarily mean that you're not using AI, you're not using offshores. You have people who are proud to be an employee and are proud to be working for this company and are going to speak about your company in a good light. And I think that's really one of the most important things.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. There's a cost to doing it the right way, but I believe there's a greater cost to not doing it the right way. And so totally agree, just go so far to have people on your CX team that love the company, love the product, love the mission, love what the team and the brand is all about, and it makes just a huge, huge difference. So here's what I recommend. I recommend you go buy something from baseball lifestyle, see for yourself what the experience is like. And yeah, if you have kids, especially, man, they're going to want some ice cream shorts or some cotton candy, hoodies, or some other of the amazing weekly drops of new baseball gear at BL101. And so with that, Kristin, thank you so much for taking the time. This was super fun. I appreciate having me insightful. And hopefully this inspired a few people to say, "You know what?

I'm going to think about CX differently." And I think the online shopping community will be better for it. So thank you.

Kristin Keys:

I appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you found this episode to be helpful, share it with somebody else you think will benefit from it. And if you've not done so, please leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you consume podcasts. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening. That'll do it for this week's episode. One final mention. If you feel like you've stalled out with your growth, if you feel like you've missed opportunities and if you feel like your current team or agency, they just don't have that buyer anymore, or maybe you feel like you've outgrown them, we would love to chat. You may be missing opportunities and we don't want to miss an opportunity to work with great brands. So if you'd love to scale on YouTube or Google or Meta or Amazon or email and SMS, or just look like a second set of eyes to look over how you're growing right now, visit us at omgcommerce.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.

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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!

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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

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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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