B (1:51)

Yeah, I hate that. It's all right.

A (1:52)

Wherever to get to you. But I got it.

B (1:54)

Yeah.

A (1:54)

And I think it's.

B (1:55)

Thank you for that. Secondly, about me, speaking of writing a book, I need to put out, like, a personal branding book.

A (2:03)

Oh, that would be a good one, because. Yes.

B (2:07)

Out to the Followers. But for the second time in my career, I was able to tweet out that I'm looking for a job and within 10 days get insane job offers. I don't have a resume. I didn't apply to a single job. Half the people I interviewed with listen to my podcast. Like, if you're an employee, you need to start taking this seriously, because I'm gonna make a lot of money just from set it up.

A (2:36)

It's unreal what you can do with a personal brand. And I know that that's kind of like a gimmicky term. It's like, very. Oh, personally. Yeah.

B (2:41)

No, it sucks. But, like, I'm not.

A (2:42)

I'm not even kidding. Like, the minority of my business comes from the fact that I just, like, post on Twitter a lot.

B (2:49)

Yeah.

A (2:49)

And, yeah, everybody can do it. Anybody could build what we built because it's just put your ideas out there, get them formulated in a way that you really enjoy, and then double down on a topic that you can't get enough of. Just keep talking about it and people will come. So, yeah, if you have that, give it to me, because I want to.

B (3:05)

Yeah, we'll do.

A (3:06)

Yeah. Okay.

B (3:08)

All right, what you got for us on this episode?

A (3:10)

So I'm going to give you an option today. Do you want to talk about something polarizing, like, right out the gate in episode 101, or do you want to do a case study or, like a. Like a study quiz today?

B (3:23)

Let's go polarizing. Let's start off hot, and then we'll go back to our usual case study.

A (3:28)

Okay. All right. This will be an interesting one because I. I was looking up some stats on, like, what consumers were doing this year, and I think you and I need to get to a Black Friday episode here pretty quick because obviously Black Friday is coming. Like, we need to get our strategies online. But first, before we get into Black Friday, I want to talk about where the consumers are mentally, because I just posted.

B (3:50)

Oh, Shook up right now.

A (3:52)

There. There's how long. It was like an 8,000 word newsletter that I just put out on Black Friday, and it got one of the lowest open rates I've ever seen on my newsletter. And I was like, I don't think so. I find it really interesting, though, because the. The entirety of the newsletter pretty much just broke down what's happening with consumers in their heads and what's going to be different this year.

B (4:14)

Yeah.

A (4:15)

Now this is gonna. This is really the reason why it's going polarizing is because the consumers are Doing stuff that I don't think the marketers are gonna like. Specifically the marketers who are running volume. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of volume.

B (4:30)

And I know, and let me clarify, because Sarah doesn't know how to explain this. Correct. She's not talking about highest volume as a no objective.

A (4:39)

No, no, no.

B (4:40)

She's talking about the marketers that are loading up hundreds or worse thousand thousands of ads into their ad account.

A (4:46)

It's too many, too, too many. And I think we are about to shoot ourselves in the foot. And I think I have a few people coming on board to kind of give us a. A wide view of this phenomenon that's happening. You and I are going to chat about it. Joanna. Really, really good creative strategist, creative director is going to come on and talk about it with us. And then Kevin Luby, who is also brand. I, I think he's the CMO actually for brand in the space. He's going to come on and talk about it because he had a very interesting experience that I think you guys are going to want to hear because they used to be precision focused and then they went volume this year. And I want to show you guys what happened because it was like, okay. Anyways. Outside of that, though, I found some stats. In the U.S. 61% of people say they're less likely to buy from an ad if they see the same ad again and again. 49% flat out refuse to purchase because of AD overexposure. 74% say there are too many ads on social media in general. And they call them repetitive and irrelevant is how they describe the ads they're being served.

B (5:44)

One in three repetitive and irrelevant, just like the marketers who run them. How's that for, you know, my headline format?

A (5:53)

1 in 3Americans block them all together because they just don't want to see them. And now we're seeing programmatic platforms like Amazon Prime. You can, even if you paid for Amazon prime, they still have ads. Now they've just switched this where you'll still still see an ad regardless of how much you're paying. So I find this really interesting because we're kind of fighting a little bit of, like, permanency in consumer emotions when it comes to, like, apathy. They don't care about ads, they don't want them, they don't want to see them. They're indifferent to them. And now it's kind of bordering on frustration. It's irritating to see this many ads.

B (6:29)

Well, and I think much worse. Like, consumers have always been really, really good at detecting ads. They can tell in your hook that this is about to be an ad for something.

A (6:40)

Yeah.

B (6:41)

Now. And I'd say this wasn't true six months ago, but it's true now. They're very good at detecting AI slop. Yes, it's very obvious. It stands out very clearly in the feed. And you dumping a hundred AI generated ads in your account weekly is insane. Insane. No one likes them.

A (7:01)

Don't do it. Don't do it. And I don't know when creative volume.

B (7:06)

Became a metric to, like, optimize your business for.

A (7:08)

Oh, I do. This happened probably at the beginning of the year. I started seeing it happen more and more where people. We had a bunch of tweets that went out from some of the bigger brands that were talking about, we're winning with volume this year. That's how we're winning right now. The toughest part is there was no context to what went out on Twitter. All these big brands were just saying volume equals winning, but none of them talked about the fact that, like, okay, maybe you just weren't making good ads for a minute and then you bumped a bunch of new concepts into meta and it was like, yes, this is winning, but it's not necessarily the amount that you put in. It's possible that you just opened up a bunch of new doors. Yeah.

B (7:45)

It's incredibly.

A (7:45)

Which you could have done as well. Yeah. You just increased diversity over everything else. And diversity, for anybody who doesn't understand it, does not equal void. Diversity is not equal void. Diversity has more to do with how you're communicating the message. You're changing up things like format, visuals, things like sounds, those type of stuff. It has nothing to do with like, volume of number.

B (8:06)

Yeah. Well. And like, that's what I think is so crazy about how some people are doing. It is like they're launching a hundred ads a week, but they're testing four angles.

A (8:15)

Yes.

B (8:16)

And it's like, what are you doing? Like, you don't need 25 iterations of the same ad.

A (8:21)

When I see this in every single account, because I go through and I do, like this valence and intensity breakdowns of, like, what type of messages are in this ad account? Which valence and intensity is already in here. What are we over indexed on? Is what I'm trying to figure out. And almost everybody that's come in the door in the last couple weeks, couple months has all been in like this zone two or zone three issue, where it's like, we're real, real hypey. Or we're trying to shame you into changing something and nothing else. We just don't test anything else. So I'm going to get more definitive with this this year because I had somebody come in and be like, sarah, you need to tell people what you actually think. They were chastising me for being too neutral on the podcast, which I found really funny.

B (8:59)

Are we bringing hot takes to the pod?

A (9:01)

Sarah is neutral on purpose because again, people, I might be wrong. Like, I'm just thrown out here. I might be 100 wrong about everything I say. Well, I tell you though, this is what I see and I. Oh, it's everybody.

B (9:15)

I think there's think there's an important couple things we need to acknowledge. One, there are lots of different ways to win. There are brands that are launching a thousand ads a month that make a ton of money. There are brands that launch 10 ads a month that make a ton of. Of money. That's not what we're talking about. No, what we're talking about as when you are getting advice from people who are selling creative services and they say you need a thousand ads, maybe that's not the best advice to build your entire marketing team around.

A (9:47)

It's so stressful.

B (9:48)

That's all I'm saying.

A (9:50)

I've seen some of the ads that are in these ad accounts from agencies who are trying. It's not like the agencies are like terrible, horrible people. They're full of good creators and good media buyers and good people and humans in general. Some, however.

B (10:03)

Some sure.

A (10:04)

Some of them, however, they all.

B (10:06)

That'd be crazy.

A (10:07)

Most marketers in this industry are literally standing face to face with the other marketers next to them and they're just staring at each other.

B (10:12)

Yeah.

A (10:13)

They're not trying to keep track of what's happening in the market. I had to go through for two different brands this week and show them this is what changed in your market this year that you didn't notice or pay attention to. And that's why the six agencies you brought in here couldn't fix it because they are trying to go after stuff that's over indexed already. Of course it's not working. Like I'm, I'm going insane here, people. If you don't keep track of it, there's no way for you to know what to shift to secondary thing to this that I'm going to predict right now. I think because volume isn't working, the idea of, what's the word? Very, very elaborate creative campaigns is going to come back. Meaning we're Going to see a lot more of like the most interesting man in the world. We're going to see a lot more of like the man your man could smell like. I think we're going to see brands shifting that direction of, let's just build one big ass campaign this year that launches something that's just drastically different than everybody else and double, triple down on it because I think that's the only way you're going to get attention.

B (11:20)

Yep. Yeah, we talked about this yesterday and it'll be the last thing I do at OG. Like, our Christmas campaign starts October 1st.

A (11:31)

Yeah.

B (11:31)

And we're going to be advertising this a very different way than we have in the past. And in our October, we're not going to mention the Christmas sale. We're not going to, we're not even going to really try to sell watches. But we're going to start to get people primed and then continue that story we're going to tell through November, Black Friday and Christmas. And like, yeah, that's the thing that I think has frustrated me most about volume is that nobody is telling you you should get better. They're just telling you you should do more, more. And it's like, what is your problem? Like, would you rather a thousand Coyotes or a couple Bentleys?

A (12:12)

But my thing is I'm like, you're already doing the work and a lot of you are doing double the work because right now your designers are so overloaded that they can't possibly get to the 40 to 100 ads that are on their stack tick today. So they're just dumping out designs that are have no rhyme or reason to have no strategy in the built at all. And then we're like getting mad because they don't work. I'm like, you can't overload creativity, especially the creative people. We're going to talk a little bit deeper about like teams and stuff. Creative people need time to recharge. The creative brain is taxing. Those people typically need a lot more time to recharge their batteries every single day so they can come back and hit it again. There's no way we can sustain, sustain this. It's unsustainable workplace. Okay, I digress.

B (12:54)

Yeah, no, I'm with you. I think the discussion on this has gotten so dumb that, like, it like actually pisses me off a lot. Like, how are we not talking about building better, more memorable, more persuasive ads, building more. And it's like, all right, have fun with that.

A (13:14)

More is never better. More is. Unless it's Just like cookies. I understand there's some places in life where more is better.

B (13:20)

This is.

A (13:20)

No.

B (13:20)

And I can say this as a bigger guy. Give me seven great cookies. Don't give me 50 bad ones because here's the problem. I'm going to eat all of them. I don't feel like.

A (13:29)

You don't want. Yes, you don't want anywhere cookies.

B (13:33)

That's the title of this episode. Seven great cookies.

A (13:37)

Okay, so I don't want this to become a whole episode on volume because obviously you guys know. Let's. I want to split off now into talking about what you do. Well, like Nate does this better than any marketer I've ever seen in my life. Which is half the reason why a.

B (13:50)

Year ago I was like, hey, hey, perspective employers. I'm open for work.

A (13:54)

Nate's really good at what he does. I want to know how hell does Nate prep for brand focus marketing in a paid advertising environment? Because you run some campaigns that I've seen with like the comedians that you partnered with or like the, you know, country singers, whatever it was that was like specific to og, you ran some campaigns that were like, that was such a freaking good campaign. How do you come about that?

B (14:21)

It all starts with when I go.

A (14:23)

Back to that when.

B (14:24)

To that episode. Is it just called when change your life.

A (14:28)

I will post it in the notes below because it doesn't. It's not titled when, which I feel bad. We did a poor job. It should have been titled when, but yes, I'll find it for you.

B (14:37)

So for a little perspective on og, if you guys aren't aware, we sell watches to middle class America and these people think about their purchase for a long time. We see a third of our customers hear about us one year before they ever buy. Which makes it asinine to judge my like July marketing performance stats based on revenue that comes in in July. All we're trying to do all year really is prime people to buy for Christmas.

A (15:09)

Yes.

B (15:10)

So when I think about how to reach people and how to start getting people into our funnel, I think about what they're doing on a daily basis. What shows do they watch, what podcasts are they listening to? What are they doing on a Friday night, what are they doing on a Saturday morning? And thinking about that and surveying customers on that is how we get to a lot of the campaigns we run with different country artists, with comedians and pods. Like yeah, we just want to start getting slowly and subtly integrated into our customers lives so that when they see our ad for our Black Friday sale We've already done the convincing. We've already become something in their minds that they want to buy one day. And I think that is like, so missed in this industry. And I don't think it's just for brands that have a longer consideration cycle.

A (16:03)

Yeah, like I, I would agree with that. Yeah.

B (16:06)

I bought a T shirt the other day that cost $30. Okay. And like, not to flex too hard. I can afford it. Okay.

A (16:15)

A $30 T shirt.

B (16:17)

Oh my God. I'm not waiting for payday to make that purchase. But the first time I saw that shirt was on an influencer I liked probably 90 days ago.

A (16:28)

Oh, interesting.

B (16:29)

And like.

A (16:30)

Yeah, I just, Yeah, I just wasn't.

B (16:33)

That motivated to buy it until the other day. I'll wear it on the next episode.

A (16:37)

You're going to love it.

B (16:38)

It's so good. But it's stuff like that where like, even if your AOV is low, even if this should be an impulse buy, that's just not how people work.

A (16:48)

Yeah.

B (16:48)

Like, I'm sure you could think of 10 things in your head right now that you know for a fact you will buy one day, but that day is not today. And I think we got to start advertising like that because it's just not.

A (17:02)

How people work 100% well. And I'll say two things here. First, I would 100% agree with the fact that like, when it comes to really, really driving good value from a brand standpoint, there's like a lag. Basically. There's always going to be a lag between when they saw your ad or your organic or, or your billboard or whatever you put out there and when they buy. It's never immediate. The way that like paid advertising has taught us to think.

B (17:26)

Yeah.

A (17:26)

This is why I hate paid advertising these days because it used to be there was very little lag, like a seven day click type thing inside the ad account. But that's not what was happening in the real world.

B (17:37)

Yeah, well.

A (17:38)

And like, very bad habits.

B (17:39)

I launched new ads for a brand this week that has never advertised. They're like not brand new, they're not traditional E comm, but they've been around for 13 years. Interesting. So like they've been in business, they're on social, people know who they are. We launched ads and day one we got a purchase. But it's like, no, hold on, that has nothing to do with that ad.

A (18:03)

Yeah, that has to do with like.

B (18:06)

Someone saw this thing months or years ago and grew to like it. And the ad was the final catalyst. But the Ad was not why they bought.

A (18:15)

Yeah. Well, for brands everywhere, reducing that lag depends on how well you connect with somebody emotionally.

B (18:22)

Yeah.

A (18:22)

If you can connect with somebody pretty emotionally, say for a $30t shirt or for whatever it is you're selling, that lag can be reduced just depending on how many emotions have stacked in the right order on that particular day. Maybe Nate just had his coffee and was well rested and like wasn't feeling a newborn on that particular day and he was like, I'm ready. Like, here we go, like time to buy something because I feel good today. On the next day, maybe something different. So you can't tell your customers when they can buy because the only thing that can do that is their brain and their body chemistry. That's it. Secondary thing to this that I was going to call out, what level of. What would you say? Like budget, I guess. Do you commit to both? Because you have to have gross marketing and you have to have brand in place. Do you have like a general. Here's the foundation where I start kind of.

B (19:10)

I don't even want to say the percentage because I think it's so different than for every brand. We have something we shoot for and then what we also try to do that I think a lot of D2C brands could benefit from. We commit to things that we know our brand place. We're like, hey, this is a branding thing. That's what it's for. Let's do it. Then we try to figure out how to make it perform as best as possible from like a performance growth standpoint. So like we're still doing the thing, working with a big influencer artist, whatever and we're like, cool, this is going to be great for brand. If it doesn't pan out on a 90 day return on ad spend, that's fine, we're doing it anyway. But once we do it now, how can we get that to perform? Can we put that creative on meta? Can we put him on the site? Does he deserve a landing page with a quote from him on it? You can like do all the growth tactics after you commit to the brand thing.

A (20:06)

Yes, yes, after you. To see if it works. We want to test so many different things in an ecosystem that the most expensive like planet to test on.

B (20:18)

Yeah.

A (20:18)

Why are we not testing in, in like communities?

B (20:21)

Yeah.

A (20:22)

Why are we not testing on organic? Like why don't we test for free first? That makes most sense to me.

B (20:27)

So like one of the things that we were. That I was planning on before I put my notice in, we're going to sponsor like a big sports league. And we were going to have signage in the stadium. We were going to be on the Jumbotron and it's going to be like this piece of the event is brought to you by OG Purely a brand thing. If that's all we did, it would not result in one attributable purchase. But we thought that audience was right for us, so let's do that.

A (20:56)

Yeah.

B (20:57)

Then once we decided to do that, we were like, now what if we send 15 YouTube creators to that event to create content of it, then post an episode about it. That episode is sponsored by Original Grain. There's a link in the description and that would pay for the whole thing.

A (21:12)

Oh my gosh, that's so smart.

B (21:13)

So I think that's how we have to marry kind of branding and performance in E Comm. Because most of us don't have the budget to throw six figures somewhere and say, that's for awareness. Stay over there. Like we need to make everything work for us a little bit.

A (21:28)

Yeah.

B (21:30)

So I think you should commit to the brand things purely based on they're a great brand thing. And then you should tell your performance team to figure out how we can squeeze more juice out of it.

A (21:39)

We might have to get some tactical episodes. Tactical and practical episodes.

B (21:43)

Yeah. By the way, this last three minutes was the best part of the episode.

A (21:46)

Put this first clip it to the front. Tactical, practical episodes on specifically, how do you turn brand or awareness focused marketing into something that could possibly turn some revenue for you within a couple weeks? Right. So it's not like immediate, but it's going to come back double or triple fold for you at the end. That might be interesting. All right. We might have to pick a brand and see if somebody wants to be the guinea pig and come on and we can do some, some brand focused stuff for them. Okay. This is such a good episode. Anything else you want to add? I, I, I personally think brand is where we're gonna head. This is like the future of gonna be D2C.

B (22:23)

Yeah. And like, it's so frustrating me that we have to be the ones to say this. Like, build a cool brand that.

A (22:30)

Build a cool brand. Yes.

B (22:31)

Maybe that's a good business strategy.

A (22:33)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's hard. Like for some of these brands, how do you source somebody who knows how to build cool? Because cool is a vibe. And for, for you, on the OJ G. OG side at least they had so many good pieces. Like they had a lot of really good ingredients that all they needed was a chef, Master chef to come in, stick it in a pot, make something delicious. Right. It's hard if you're. If you have a bootstrap team or if you're a founder that's running all the ads or if, like, you just don't have the bandwidth for it. But, yeah, I mean, to Nate's point, I personally believe that you don't have to go overboard to build something really valuable and really interesting. You can honestly do it with smaller brands a lot easier than the bigger ones because there's not a lot of red tape you can pivot. Like, for instance, last year, I decided to randomly put, like, a red dinosaur at the front of Tether. Now, he's not on everything, but he's a part of our emails, and he's, like, involved in social media.

B (23:26)

By the way there.

A (23:28)

Oh, God.

B (23:29)

By the way. Your little Dino guy.

A (23:32)

Yeah.

B (23:32)

I'm in a job interview the other day because in case you guys haven't heard, I'm open for work. I talked to this prospective employer of, like, hey, hiring Sarah to come do a CIM is, like, basically a pre. Prerequisite to me working for you because, like, I don't want to. Yeah, you're welcome. But, like, I was like, I want her because, like, if I don't have the customer research and knowledge to start this, like, it's going to take me three months to figure it out on my own. We can pay her a little bit and have it done on day one for me. And he said, oh, is that the girl with the dinosaur everywhere? And I was like, let's go. It's working.

A (24:10)

It's working. Brand. Thank you. That dinosaur literally cost me no money at all. I don't run ads to him. I don't build content around yet. I don't build content around him. It's literally just so that people recognize that I'm a thing. That's it. I'm just trying to generate a little bit of familiarity so people remember I exist. Yeah, I just added a dinosaur to everything I do.

B (24:30)

Did you see the guy who tweeted about, like, how much he hate, like, D2C Twitter right now? And he said the only guy I like is a guy who drinks whiskey.

A (24:39)

Yes. Oh, my God.

B (24:40)

Like, all right, personal brand working. That's good to know. He doesn't know my name, but he knows who I am.

A (24:45)

Gosh, I can't tell you how easy it actually is to build brand. Like, again, the only thing you're trying to do is provide value outside of somebody actually purchasing from you. You.

B (24:55)

Yeah.

A (24:55)

So that's. Yeah. As long as it's consistent. Right. Or like a little dinosaur emoji at the end of your emails that's just there every single time you sign off. As long as it's consistent. As long as you keep posting pictures of steak and whiskey, people will eventually start to know you as a steak and whiskey guy. They don't have to know your name. They just know they like your post.

B (25:15)

Yep.

A (25:16)

Brand people. Because now if Nate wanted to, he could probably go run ads towards that audience. Steak and Whiskey style marketing. And somebody would know what that is and come in and convert because they've seen it enough times now they're just attached to it.

B (25:30)

Steak and whiskey solutions would be the name of my agency.

A (25:35)

Can you please start this agency? Oh, my God, that'd be amazing. Oh, you would get so many people.

B (25:40)

No, I won't be starting an agency.

A (25:42)

That's hilarious. Okay. This episode turned into, like, a really nice ending. I know we started out like, real angsty, heavy on like, the volume side, but that's why I pivoted because I'm like, here's the solution, guys. We're just gonna give it to you on this particular episode.

B (25:55)

Yeah.

A (25:56)

Be more interesting.

B (25:57)

Seven great cookies.

A (25:59)

Seven great cookie. Don't go for 50, like mediocre shitty ones. Give me seven great, delicious, amazing cookies. Reduce my choice architecture in here so I don't have to get overloaded and then just be funny. Stick a dinosaur at the end of your freaking emails. That's it, guys. It's not difficult. It does take some, like, strategic thinking though, which means you have to slow down. Slow down marketers and DTC especially. Slow the fuck down. Okay. Anything you want? You want to add?

B (26:29)

No. We should do a whole episode on like, consideration timeline too, because. Yeah, like, yeah. Hey, your customers do not operate on a 7 day attribution window. They have lives.

A (26:38)

Oh my God. I feel that. My soul stuff.

B (26:40)

And like, it's a reason why I take 90 days to buy a T shirt that I can definitely afford, by the way.

A (26:47)

Yeah, like, yeah, exactly. It's not a money to do with.

B (26:49)

How much I wanted it. It had nothing to do with the price or the offer or the value. I just wasn't gonna buy it yet.

A (26:56)

Yep. Emotional lag, people. Emotional.

B (26:58)

And you guys are still running cost caps to judge an ad's performance on its intraday cost to acquire a customer. It's the most asinine thing I've ever seen.

A (27:06)

I'm so scared. Oh, the industry. The industry.

B (27:09)

Sorry I got anxious.

A (27:13)

Along here. This is a good start to season three of Brave Brands. We're excited you guys are here. Thank you for letting us vent on every episode.

B (27:21)

All right, fine. Follow us I guess. Whatever. I don't care.

A (27:27)

If you want to follow us anywhere on social media. I am Sarah Levinger. He is a Legos. Appreciate you listening to the episode today. Follow us for more like and subscribe. Subscribe. If you guys want to share it with your friends, that would be super helpful. Also, leave us a very kind, nice, polite review if you have time. Mostly because we don't. We only have one and we would like to have more. Check us out. Can't wait to see you. Have a great week.