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Ep 481: Scaling Brand Awareness: BYLT’s Playbook for Upper Funnel Marketing (ft Mike Tyson!)
00:36:13
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- [00:00]
A
You know, a couple years ago and it makes sense, right? During the pandemic days it was like 100% meta budget, but we definitely migrated our budget and diversified channels. I hear it all the time. I see built everywhere.
- [00:10]
B
Can you describe a little bit about what goes into your creative flywheel?
- [00:14]
A
This is more of just like a mindset versus even just like super rigid, rigid process. But for us it's more of we were trying to figure out how to make as many creatives as we could and that just came from everybody being creative focused. And I think that worked for us for a while. But now we're really trying to refine what is a good ad. We believe in staying lean, growing slow, staying lean. We don't need to get bigger than we need to. You know, we're not public, we're not taking on funding. One thing that made my job super easy was I think most people watched it. But the Mike Tyson fight, we had the built logo right on the front of his short.
- [00:46]
B
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- [02:15]
A
First of all, doing good. Yeah, I know we were just talking about it off air, but unfortunately down here in Southern California. Luckily for me and my fiance are about 40 miles south of the fire. But yeah, it's really sad for the whole D2C community in LA. So my hearts go out to them. Shout out to all the firemen up in the area too. Never seen anything like this. Living in Southern California. Have a lot of friends who have lost, lost homes, lost schools, lost really important structures and you know, I'm just happy that everyone I personally know is safe. But yeah, I just wanted to give a shout out to them up there big time.
- [02:46]
B
Yeah, I was just, I've been watching Isaac's post. He lives in, I guess downtown la. Pretty, pretty concretized downtown la. But he's watching, watching the fires on the hills and just like what a scary feeling that must be like just seeing these encroaching in fires and not knowing what they're going to do.
- [03:02]
A
Exactly. Yeah, they're, they're starting to contain them now. But the winds are supposed to pick back up on Sunday. I know most of California fire community is all down in LA today, National Guard, everything like that. So starting Sunday, Monday, a lot of the other areas, Orange County, San Diego, the Inland Empire, they're all going to be back on high alert. So I'm really hoping that, you know, today, tomorrow they can get a lot of these under control before, before Sunday, Monday comes around. So they're not, they're not out of the woods yet, but it's, it's starting to look a little bit better down there today.
- [03:31]
B
Everyone pray for rain. Anyone listening? Just, we need to win some downpours. Okay, well on to sunnier topics here. So we last. I just was curious like first of all, how was Q4 for, for you and for built?
- [03:44]
A
Q4 for us was great. I mean we, we did hit some bumps last year at different times of the year for different reasons. One thing that made my job super easy was, I don't know, I think most people watched it, but the Mike Tyson fight, we had the Built logo right on the front of his short. That was a crazier story in itself of how that sponsorship and partnership came to be was supposed to happen over the summer. That fight obviously got moved back because Mike had some health issues. And I heard in like August when I found out that it was going to be November 15th, I was, I was excited. I know a lot of people like, oh, it's getting pushed back. But for me I'm like, that's right before Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We talked about TV last time. So that was the biggest upper funnel play I could have possibly had. So it made my job really easy. I believe it helped a ton with our success in November and December. But it's one of those things that just like you almost can't even plan. You can't even plan for that happening without spending a super pretty penny on it. But for us, it just worked out that it got rescheduled.
- [04:43]
B
Tell me how you. How it came to be.
- [04:45]
A
Yeah, so we had some people over here at Built that had relationships with Mike's team previously. And then once we actually met with Mike, our head of product. This guy just has a personality like you wouldn't believe. He met with Mike's team, he styled Mike, and the next thing you know, Mike is like, I love these clothes. Like, he just. He absolutely loved the product. I mean, that's. That's one of the things me and my director always talk about. We're always like, you know, if we can get you to the site, like, you're screwed. We're happy. You know, if we can get the product in your hands, like, we'll have it for your life. So once Mike wore the products and, you know, he wanted to be styled on it on his entire media tour, all built, that's all he ever wore the whole time. He wanted to have the logo on his front, on his front pant. The rest was history.
- [05:31]
B
He's got the thighs for Built shorts. I'm just picturing those. Those high inseams, those giant thighs. I remember the other. The famous picture that came out of that fight was him with his. With his hanging out in the chain. You need to get built across the back there as well. He's built. Built by built.
- [05:45]
A
Oh, yeah. I was sitting at home and I was like, wow, I really wish we thought about. I wish I was smart enough to think about putting Built on a jock strap and telling him to go do that.
- [05:54]
B
But yeah.
- [05:54]
A
Yeah, I think that was all Mike. Like, he. He just did that himself. We didn't. We weren't ready for that. But that was. His short was a built short. We designed the short. We made the short as built material.
- [06:03]
B
Yeah.
- [06:04]
A
We had, like, 10 different shorts for him to choose from.
- [06:06]
B
So, so much attention on that. I was actually, like, I was at home alone watching it, and I was. I think I was on Tick Tock and I was watching with some random influencer who, like, had never watched boxing before. And they were just like. It just. It was just an interesting cultural event. Even though it was pretty much a dud of a fight, everyone knows it's just like, attention doesn't really know the difference. Right. Attention is what matters.
- [06:28]
A
Yeah. I mean, for me and for our team, I think we. Our biggest fear was that it ended in the first round. I Think every sponsor, anybody in marketing was like, let's hope it doesn't end in the first round. Let's hope it's a great fight. Right? But I was really hoping that not ending was, was my first thing. So the fact that it lasted the whole fight I was happy about of course the Netflix buffering the people, you know, people not being super entertained. Like that's more on Netflix, that's more on fight itself. But for me to have that exposure for 220 million people for that long, I felt good. At the end of the night I already knew. I was like, okay, Black Friday Cyber Monday, we're going to be good.
- [07:05]
B
It just, yeah, like I'm talking about awareness on this podcast all the time. We did a podcast recently about tracksuits report that they did. I don't know if you saw this with TikTok about the awareness advantage. Just about basically saying that one, once someone is aware of your brand there three or four times more likely to, to convert rather than see directly from an ad and trying to convert. And I feel like that's, that's just the name of the game is just getting, getting that brand awareness out there. Do you have any like, do you have any metrics that tell you that this, that it did help or was were people in post purchase surveys being like oh Mike Tyson or how do you, how do you quantify 120 million eyeballs on Netflix?
- [07:41]
A
I mean, yeah, I was. We definitely saw it in the post purchase surveys and we could see it in just the spikes. Even if you go back when you went back to that date, you could go on even something as high level as Google Trends type in Mike Tyson type in built our spike was, was neck. It was the same spike. His spike obviously was a couple days before, you know, you could see his going crazy for like the week before the two weeks before. But ours that night we had the craziest Google search spike that we've seen then. Same thing with our site traffic, same thing with post purchase surveys that, that for us at least. And then that's the same thing with tv. You know we've talked about it in the past. But taking those bigger bets on upper funnel for me with Tatari specifically and you know I love Tatari met with them on here last time we can see those spikes. So when you say we run like the Ravens Chargers game on a Monday Night Football spot in their platform, you can see if it spikes or not. And there's been times that we've taken a bet and it didn't Spike and we were like, oh shit, that was a really, really bad, that was a bad buy. But we see other ones where it's that you see that initial spike and not to say that that's the only source of truth, but for me that's always a good place to start. And then next is the post purchase surveys. Are you actually seeing TV attribution increase on your end? Are you seeing what channels they're watching? Like, did ESPN spike, did Lifetime spike? What, what channel did you run where it actually it spiked? And then your revenue and targets, like, does that follow is, are you actually seeing that you're hitting targets the next few days when you start to push D2C down funnel channels? Right. So when I start pushing on Meta, when I start pushing on Google, now that I'm actually putting those ads that are supposed to get you to convert, are they working better? And then the last piece, and this is the one that when I was doing billboards a lot at the last company I worked for, this was one that I would always talk with clients about a ton was basically, did you see it? Did you hear about it? And for us, when I first started to get some buy in, our founder was actually away on a trip and he texted us and he was like, hey, I just got like four text messages about that Monday Night Football spot. Or hey, I just got text messages about that college Football playoff spot. So I think that's the last gut check is like, are you seeing it? Are your employees seeing it? Are your friends and family texting you about it? Are you hearing about it at the gym, wherever you go to like, oh yeah, I saw a built commercial. I think that's the last piece, which is why I love upper funnels so much. It kind of takes me away from the growth hacky, building funnels, getting people to click, conversion rates. It's just pure marketing. Like, do you have a good ad? Are you placed in the right spot for the right dollar amount?
- [10:10]
B
Classic advertising. Are you. So you mentioned down funnel when you're actually retargeting or you're, you're, you're, you're using digital ads after these upper funnel efforts, are you tailoring your ads? Like, do you have Mike Tyson featured in ads? I don't know if, I guess that would be a whole other issue with, with rights and everything like that. But are you tailoring specific ads based on any of these larger bets that you're making up? Funnel?
- [10:30]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I've mentioned this one before too, but it's The Airbnb quote that I've heard where they were trying to find a way to get more people to come to Airbnb. They didn't know how to do it. And the CMO started thinking about, okay, we need to start picking sports events. When you start picking big moments like Golden Globes or whatever else where you get multiple people in a room, so it's multiple friends, multiple families that are all in a room. And then in that, on that commercial, in those big moments, we're going to show the pain point of you having to stay in a hotel by yourself with all of you guys separating for the night, or having to have your dog and not be able to bring your dog into the hotel. And then we're going to show you what it's like to have you all in a big old house cooking dinner, kids in the backyard, dogs running around, and then you all go to bed in the same place, all wake up in the same place. And it's kind of like those claymation style ads they have. I thought that was super, super smart because they're already thinking of the consumer behavior of what show is bringing people together. What is our biggest AOV that we get? It's usually when all people stay together and then book these big houses somewhere. So we try to do the same thing. If I'm doing sports, I want to use a tier one person like Gronk or Mike. If we have certain products that we know that cohort is going to like more, we're trying to use that product in the actual ad and then we look at that performance still. So you can work with Atari to see like what that performance looks like. I believe in it to an extent. I think it's a good directional marker. I don't think it should be your be all, end all truth. Of course. Lean into your revenue and your targets, your site traffic, your post purchase surveys, that word of mouth. But for something like Mike Tyson, that's one where I'm like, I don't care what the performance is. Like, we just ran. He's. He's the most famous guy in the world right now. Again, we have an awesome spot. We have the rights to it. We're running this for two months until we can squeeze every last drop out of it. That was like more of a brand play in my mind than it was like a direct conversion play.
- [12:23]
B
And he wants to fight again. That was in his post fight interview. And he's like, I want to do this again. So there will be another opportunity. I think I saw you guys also did F1. You guys also did a big F1 partnership. How did that go?
- [12:35]
A
Yeah, so that's actually a new partnership. We had Alex Albon for the last two races. He's with Williams Racing once again. Our founder, our president and then our head of design met with his team. They loved him. He loves the product. We got on his helmet. That was. That wasn't even really part of the agreement, I don't think. But since they like the team, like the product so much, they slapped on the helmet for the last two races. We have a lot of stuff next year planned. I can't say on this podcast what it is yet, but I'm personally very excited for what the future holds with.
- [13:08]
B
That, with that partnership and more partnerships that involve either athletes and then big distribution of those athletes. So big events and things like that.
- [13:16]
A
Exactly. Yep.
- [13:17]
B
So I just did a podcast with Preston Rutherford from Chubby's and he was talking about literally shifting. Like, basically he was. He was being a bit bombastic, but he was saying that like 90% of the budget that a lot of brands will spend on Meta, for instance, is really just about massaging the 10% of brand aware, problem aware people into a direct purchase and that a lot of that budget is often misspent and should be moved to these, to these bigger plays. Have you seen, I think we talked a little bit about this before, but has budget for you migrated from bottom of funnel to top of funnel, or have you just basically doubled down on top of funnel and kept similar budgets lower funnel?
- [14:03]
A
I think I would say it's a little bit of both. So we have definitely, you know, a couple years ago, and it makes sense. Right. During the pandemic days, it was like, I think like 100% meta budget, but we definitely migrated our budget and diversified channels quite a bit. And like, that's no secret. I mean, you can see built like you hear. I hear it all the time. I see built everywhere. But yeah, I wouldn't say we're cutting budgets or keeping them flat, but I would say that the share of wallet has definitely gone down a bit on Meta than where it was. And that budget shift would be going into the upper funnel. Yeah, that's going to be going into these bigger bets, bigger plays which are expensive. The creative is different, the bet is different. Right. Especially if you have, if you're like us and we have aggressive daily, weekly, monthly targets. You know, that one bet could set you behind for a couple days, but you're hoping that it's going to pay off for the month. You know what I mean?
- [14:53]
B
What about Applovin? Have you jumped on the Applovin train?
- [14:55]
A
We are on the Applovin train. Yes, we are.
- [14:58]
B
And what's your verdict so far on that?
- [15:00]
A
My verdict I feel like is like a little controversial, but it's more of like I don't have enough information yet. Yeah, I think a lot of people got really excited. They saw that new percentage visitor just spike super fat right away for us. Same thing. It went really hard. I also think there's something with, you know, everybody tested it in November and December. Like, you know, everybody feels like a God in November, December, a lot of times if you do your job right. So I feel like Applovin is just so early that it's definitely a very, very, very small percent of spend. I'm very skeptical of it. I look at it more like a black box right now. Luckily we have it integrated with some of our multi touch attribution partners. I'm looking to do a GEO holdout with it right away. Like I want to know now. I'm also trying to get it piped in, trying to get be the first client to get it piped into some other creative analytic tools just so I could see the creatives better. Right now it's hard to really know, you know, unless it's just hard to tell what's working and what's not because I'm just trusting. It's almost like if you just had meta's analytics, right? You don't have anything else. All you have is metas but like you only have like 10% of what MediCan show you and you're just trying to get upsold like crazy. So it's like for me, spend a stand low till further notice. Things look good out the gate. I'm not going to lie. It looks, it looks decent on the one day click. Like that looks great, right? But like that's not what I spend money into off of that first version.
- [16:29]
B
It's a real blast from the past for me because I came up in like the mobile era of like the 2000s essentially. And it's mobile display. Like it's not, it's. It's being pitched as this like super sexy thing. But it's funny, mobile display has been around forever and I also. There's also a tendency with mobile display to get your cookie out there, like set your cookie on a lot of different things. So I think I'm really interested to see what your holdout tests and what your multi attribution kind of dictates because it's like, you know, they are seeing a lot of new users, which I think is amazing. But just making sure that you're not, that you're not taking, you know, from Peter to pay Paul essentially with, with Applovin.
- [17:05]
A
Oh yeah, no doubt. And I, you know, a lot of people don't know this, but I was running Programmatic at Weedmaps for years, you know, and then I was consulting cannabis clients on Programmatic. So I know that whole world too. And that's why I'm so, I always, I always tell the founders and our director, I'm like, dude, I just feel like I'm, I'm in Programmatic back in cannabis again, like black box. I'm not really sure. I'm taking bets and looking at site traffic and like using some gut and like click through rates and engagement rates and things like that. But it's not, I'm not convinced yet.
- [17:34]
B
It's a neat hybrid though too because it forces you, it's interruptive and it forces you to watch the creative like you, you can't scroll past it. You're locked onto that content. So it's got. For someone that has your top of funnel kung Fu, your content, you know, game kind of dialed, there probably is a really opportunity to storytell in that spot effectively.
- [17:51]
A
Oh absolutely. And that's, I think the other thing that, and most people know this but the, the platform leans female and yeah. Older demo. So it's.
- [18:01]
B
Yep.
- [18:02]
A
It's really that the holy grail, 65% like female. Which like dude, we're, we're 35 to 55 year old. Like 25 to 55 year old men's basics. That's like a majority of our business. So that, that audience definitely has a place for us. Like they're gifting people. We have a small women's line that's been picking up steam, but it's usually it's more for like a younger generation. But a lot of moms, you know, are buying stuff for, you know, their husbands, brothers, sons, you know, son in laws, all types of things like that. So it has a place for us. But that's another reason why I'm not like crazy bullish in our situation. Of course if that was my target demo, I would be taking a bigger bet. Even without seeing data. Right. I'd be like, okay, I feel a little bit more comfortable taking a bigger bet right now, but until I can see more, I'm not sprinting full speed into that one.
- [18:52]
B
I was looking at Some of your, some of the content you put out recently around AB or rather a Z testing and the sort of overall creative flywheel that you're, that you've built at build. Can you describe a little bit about what goes into your creative flywheel?
- [19:06]
A
This is more of just like kind of an idea for like your, your brand or it's, it's even more of just like a mindset versus even just like super rigid, rigid process. But for us it's, it's more of we were trying to figure out how to make as many creatives as we could and that just came from everybody being creative focused in, at built. And I think that worked for us for a while where it's kind of just like make as many ads as you can. That's the challenge. Make. Everybody's just an, you know, an ad creator now. Make ads like crazy. But now we're really trying to refine, you know, what is a good ad. As you think of going upper funnel, as you think of trying to get new customers. As we talked about, like consumers are smarter now. They're not just like make these hacky ads, right? It's like the Airbnb style. How do we get people into a room? How do we get them to feel something? That flywheel is starting to kind of transcend and to just making the highest quality ads still with the quantity that you need and diversity that you need in order to have that rolling reach increase in order to find net new customers that we're all fighting for in the auctions.
- [20:09]
B
Are you actually running any non purchase objectives? Are you running awareness campaigns on platforms like Meta or do you stick with lower funnel objectives?
- [20:18]
A
Yeah, I would say it's a range, but we're not one of the people yet. That's like I've been seeing, I've been reading a lot too about people that are just going like crazy into awareness objectives. Like we need to go hit net new. The only way to do it is awareness. If we keep going down funnel, it's going to go after theoretically the easiest purchase, which could be a return person or somebody who's, you know, it makes sense. But we haven't yet tested going crazy into awareness yet. But it's something that once again I like. The first six months of this year in my mind is just like relentless experimentation like Black Friday Cyber Monday. Planning starts today. Building that funnel starts today in January. So it's something that we're definitely going to be looking into.
- [20:56]
B
And so you've just come off Q4 and now we're into new Year, new you, which I imagine in the built world of athletics and performance is. Is a thing. What are you. What are you doing to capitalize on, like, Q1, New Year, New you vibes?
- [21:10]
A
Yeah, I think it's definitely activewear. I mean, last year we were a lot heavier on, like, Bogos and all this stuff with activewear, but our activewear has become so good now that, like, people know they want to come back, they want to get it. So we try to capitalize on activewear early in the year. It's also your last push for outerwear. It's like right now is our last little push for it. Once you hit February, it's already over. But yeah, it's definitely. The idea is like education. We're going longer form video, want to have great branding, trying to figure out who our ambassadors are going to be for this year, who we're going to bring in for the summer and the fall. Tier one through tier three. I think that's, that's really what it's got to be even. Yeah, we're capitalizing on activewear and everything, but I think the biggest thing still is just like relentless experimentation, experimenting. Everything you could think of. Your channels, your account structures, your ambassadors. If you have a high SKU count, what products is it going to be? If it's international, really, anything that you can test right now, that's what I would be focusing on so that you're ready to go when the fall comes around.
- [22:12]
B
How do you. You mentioned ambassadors, influencers. How do I. We had Soral on a while ago, and they were talking about their, their pyramid structure that they think about for influencers. How do you think about your tiers of influencers? I think tier one, that's going to be. Is that Mike Tyson or is that like above tier one even? Is that. That's like a big brand partnership? How do you think about your sort of like, pyramid of. Of influence?
- [22:33]
A
I mean, I think it comes down to the. The followers. Like, at the end of the day, it's exposure and followers. If you're obviously the Mike Tyson's, the Shawn Johnson's and the Gronk that we have, that is our tier one. But then as you get down to tier two, tier three, sometimes those, those can kind of blend together, but it's still. You're trying to hit all the different, I guess, like verticals you can. So it's still like we, you know, we have active wear, we have adventure, we have travel, we have basics, we have modern professional, we have loungewear so it's like trying to find all the different ambassadors you can within there with different range of followers. And if they're just about the brand, right, and then are they good to work with, do they care about it? Because a lot of the stuff that we do like, yes, of course, we send them a script, we send them, we send them products that they like that we think is going to fit their vertical, but we also let them pitch it the way they want. And I see that work a lot better for us when we allowed them to do that.
- [23:28]
B
Back into Q4 here, what was the offer, what was your Q4 offer that you sort of, that drove the lion's share of the Q4 results? Were you doing discounting? Were you doing gift with purchase? Bogo. What was your strategy there?
- [23:40]
A
Yeah, so definitely we had our 30% off. That's just what we have running and always repositioning that early holiday sale, Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale, end of year sale, New Year's sale, kind of just you keep repositioning that offering with the different, you know, creatives, branding things of that nature. And then, yeah, our gift with purchase, that is really there to help with aov. I know a lot of people do that one, but that's when we're rethinking as well. But yeah, gift with purchase, I would say bundles, things, things that you can offer extra discounts on it just to increase that. AOB during that time of year.
- [24:12]
B
I saw you make some posts about trying to grow the, the marketing team at bilt. Can you talk about how your team is kind of built out?
- [24:19]
A
Yeah, right now we have our growth. It's like pretty, pretty standard. You know, you got the growth, ecom, retention, branding, creative, all in a row at this point, like I said last year, our goal was really to see how we can produce the most creatives we could. So the creative team, brand team are going to get a bulk of kind of what we're trying to fit in and see. But we, we believe in staying lean. That's, you know, growing slow, staying lean. We don't need to get bigger than we, than we need to. You know, we're not public, we're not taking on funding. But yeah, we're not really trying to ever hire outside of our means. We like to be able to move quick, be nimble. You know, we also have agencies we work with that help us to even think outside the box, to bring more diversity to the creatives that we already have.
- [25:02]
B
And then what do you look for when you're trying to hire marketers specifically for your team.
- [25:06]
A
I mean, me personally, I'm just looking for someone that's super gritty and super hungry. I always say, like, me and my boss always say, like, we're not the smartest guys in the world, but, like, we work really hard and we care a lot. And I think that's something that you can't really teach. You could teach all the other stuff with D2C, with marketing. If someone's really hungry and wants to be the best marketer, if they. They want to move up in their career, they see the opportunity. And kind of like, for me personally, coming. Coming to Bilt, I was like, oh, that's like an Ivy League stamp of my resume, you know, Like, I want to work with those guys. Like, that's a cool brand. Like, I want that one. I might not be the most qualified guy in the world coming from cannabis, but they. They had seen that, and we're just like, oh, cool. Like, this guy's gonna get it. Like, we work a lot. We like it. That's. That's what I would look for personally.
- [25:51]
B
And a bias towards action. I feel like we're in a space where, you know, I talked to. I was talking to a young person the other day. They're talking about, I want to go to school for marketing. And I'm like, there's probably something to be gleaned there, but you could probably learn it all on ChatGPT in an afternoon, and then you could actually start running ads, right? Like that. We live in an era where the barriers to entry are pretty low for what do on these platforms. So it's like, get. Get your hands dirty. Show. Show bias towards action.
- [26:13]
A
Oh, yeah. I mean, I went to college for marketing, and I didn't learn anything that, you know, has. I mean, I've learned some, like, intangible things, you know, how to. How to build a deck, how to, you know, different. Different things like that. But I would say, yeah, my first. My first year out of college, I went. I moved to Venice beach and got paid like 40k to work 70 hours a week at an agency called Banff Media. And there is where I learned how to. How to buy ads. That was. That was crazy, but it's fun.
- [26:39]
B
Is that agency based on the sound that Nightcrawler makes when he teleports? That's what. That's a really nerdy comment. I don't know if you've got that, but.
- [26:46]
A
No, it seems like unfortunately I did get it, but it's. It's that one they stood for badass marketers and founders. There was a ton.
- [26:53]
B
Okay, so it's even worse.
- [26:55]
A
Yeah, even worse. It was, yeah, it was a good time though.
- [27:00]
B
I, I had, I, I found a note here on my ChatGPT research that Bilt prioritizes late night launches for new ads. Is that a hallucination or is that true? And why, why, why do you do that?
- [27:09]
A
That's crazy. That's on. I almost feel like I'm on like.
- [27:11]
B
Hot ones where they're like, yeah, straight or Nardoire.
- [27:17]
A
I mean, we, yeah, we. It is a strategy we do have. It's not like, I don't know, it's nothing, it's nothing like insane. But yeah, I do have a late. The late night special that I, that I do run some ads during. But it's just, it's an opportunity for me to switch up the messaging. That's it. So it's just for me to give a little bit more of a concentrated message to people that may be on their phones from 8 to 12. And I can make the ad look a little different. Like just for example, the ones that I had during Black Friday Cyber Monday, they looked like neon lights that they would have like neon lights and it would be like, hey, like you up. Like a type of U up text thing. And it's like, you know, here's our offering. Late night offer, whatever it could be just to. Just to tailor that message very.
- [27:57]
B
I remember watching late night TV and seeing on. It was on like Adult Swim or something and it was like dead air. And then all of a sudden too many cooks came on. I don't know if you know too many cooks, but it felt like just late night, like when you get, when you get, when you can. I think that's an interesting idea because you got people late night, they're like, they're in a weird, like liminal state. So you can hit them with some interesting stuff.
- [28:17]
A
Yeah, I mean, we don't. Like I said, ours isn't built out like anything crazy. I wouldn't say it's like a. Yeah, a massive strategy that we have this secret, this like big secret we have. But it just gives you an opportunity. But I guess to your point, I'm interested that you even brought it up. Like you could take it really far if you wanted to.
- [28:33]
B
I'm sure you, like, make people think they're hallucinating. The little like character that pops out on your ad or something.
- [28:38]
A
You can take it really far.
- [28:40]
B
That's interesting. So you've mentioned Atari and I've seen you've done some stuff with Motion. Are there any like tools or SaaS products that you're loving these days that are really helping your workflow?
- [28:49]
A
Yeah, I would say, I would say the tie for my two favorites is going to be Motion and no Commerce.
- [28:55]
B
Nice. What are you using no Commerce for?
- [28:56]
A
That's post purchase survey. So that is something that's just like I feel like helped us out a ton. A lot of I, I know it was all the rage last year. A lot of people talk about post purchase survey. It's kind of come back with a vengeance. But for us it's, it really is like for attribution. It helps me out so much to be able to get to the last and final source of truth to see kind of like my percentage of spend. And then we, we break it out for new and return customers. So I have two separate surveys running at all times. One for new, one for return. And then I give the whole company an opportunity to ask questions. I mean it's. The closest you're going to get to that customer is whether you have retail associates, you have your CX team or you have post purchase survey. And post purchase you're going to get the most answers out of for sure. You know. So once a month the coordinator on my team, she sends out a full report on what we've seen and then we revamp the questions and we keep Attribution stays the same and then the next set of questions we're asking them, anything from product to brand, E comm, retail really anything that we want to learn, we're asking them and it's getting blasted to the whole company. It's a really big priority for everybody to be involved on that. Just to try to be a little.
- [30:07]
B
Bit more customer obsessed and it allows you to be more creative and to be more aggressive. Top of Funnel, I guess. Right. It's sort of a must with your top of Funnel strategy to have that backend attribution piece.
- [30:18]
A
Oh yeah. And they're, they're, they're great partners. Like we love them over there. So yeah, similar to Motion2, two SaaS platforms that I think are super undervalued and overlooked. But yeah, they helped me a ton.
- [30:30]
B
Describe how you use Motion.
- [30:31]
A
Yeah, Motion is, makes it easy for me to be able to track all my different ratios of like UGC versus how much am I spending on like. Yeah, UGC versus Lifestyle versus Studio. What's the performance between those at any given time? Video versus static versus Carousel. What's the Performance and how much am I spending the different ambassadors and then I'm able to deep dive into every single campaign and ad set with North Beam and Meta's metrics side by side with it with the creative. So the fact that I'm able to see the CPA from both my multi touch and from my end platform side by side with each other, plus seeing like different metrics that I can make up in there with like thumbstop and sustain rate, it allows me to cut ads at a faster rate. Like it's more for like the low performers. It allows me to cut those at a faster rate so that I can traffic more new ads at a faster rate. Like I said we wanted to make more ads. So motion without motion I don't think I would be able to competently be cutting ads that fast.
- [31:34]
B
Very cool. You mentioned the post purchase survey and the amount how you're disseminating information to your company. Are you using ChatGPT at all to collate that information and if not, what are you using ChatGPT for these days?
- [31:47]
A
So no, I'm not using ChatGPT for that. I'm using it mostly I feel like for just quick ideas. If it has to be like copy or scripts or most I'd say copy your scripts for the ads, hooks, things like that I would say. And it's not like I'm taking them word for word but it's just giving me quick rough ideas on what I could use. I think in a world that I would love to know how to use it is that I could train it on how to optimize the budgets within all my intra channel budgets. That's one where I could teach it how to read it and just be like hey, here's how you best spend, you know, 20k today. Like these, these ad sets, these channels, dah dah dah. These are the ads you should cut. Like I think in that world where that gets invented or if I am able to just give it a bunch of ad content and it is able to build the ad and metaphor me just it's done.
- [32:37]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:38]
A
I think that's a scary world, but it's a very efficient world.
- [32:40]
B
Are you going to any events this year? We're planning some events this year. We're trying to figure out which ones to go to. You going any?
- [32:45]
A
So the ones that I, I love to go to is I love to go to grow la.
- [32:48]
B
So good.
- [32:49]
A
They're really cool over there. They have a cool house in Beverly Hills now down there they always have a Cool. A cool venue, really cool sponsors, awesome marketers always show up, great conversations. And then the other one that I love is a league of originals. That one's been around for about two years now. I think they've done Toronto, I think they've done Austin. That one is like the most hip one I've go to. I go to. It's like all the really trendy brands. The setup is amazing. Carolina is running it. She's really talented, really big in the LA D2C space. So that event is always really fun and cool as well. And then I got invited to DT Ski.
- [33:28]
B
Oh, nice. So good. It kills me that I didn't do that. Someone else did that first. That's so good.
- [33:34]
A
Yeah, I know, it's awesome. So I got invited to that one with the no commerce team. So I'm excited to see what that one's about. But yeah, league of originals and grow. I recommend anybody that wants to get tapped into the LA D2C space to go to those guys.
- [33:47]
B
Where are you skiing? Do you know?
- [33:49]
A
I don't know where. I don't know Aspen, like that. I grew up going to Mammoth, so like that's my hometown mountain. But I'm excited.
- [33:57]
B
Super cool. At the end of January, I'm going with the Ecom north guys that put on a conference in Toronto to a founders retreat at Whistler, which will be my first time skiing Whistler, which I'm super, super jacked for.
- [34:06]
A
Nice. You ski or do you snowboard?
- [34:08]
B
Yeah, I ski.
- [34:09]
A
Okay. Nice. Yeah.
- [34:10]
B
You're a border.
- [34:10]
A
Yeah. My first, my first marketing gig, I was the marketing lead for Burton flagship San Francisco.
- [34:17]
B
What a brand.
- [34:18]
A
Dream job in college. It just fell in my lap.
- [34:20]
B
So pretty effing sweet. Okay, so then terms. I know there's some partnerships and big things that you can't talk about for built, but what in 2025 are you most sort of like looking forward to in terms of testing out?
- [34:32]
A
I think I'm just. I'm looking forward to testing out a lot of different incrementality things. I really want to get to the bottom of pmax and shopping and Google. I want to get to the bottom of Applobin. I want to get to the bottom of YouTube. There's a lot of things that just from my side, I just am excited to test and see what's. What's the source of truth and just get us ready for the end of this year. But as far as all the partnership, exciting brand things, I can't share any of that stuff. That's the fun stuff.
- [34:59]
B
Yeah.
- [35:00]
A
It's going to help make my job even easier. But I'm excited for everyone to see what's cooking for us.
- [35:06]
B
A lot of nerds love getting to the bottom of things, I gotta say. And I know all of these platforms they're designed to take, like pmax, for instance. Like we did a podcast with the pilot house team just about how if you're not really careful, it's set to. It'll overbid on your brand, probably to. To get to. To get great results. It'll overbid on branded keywords, for instance, to get the great results. And so being able to use holdout testing, being able to use, you know, really isolate various elements to see what is actually making that. That clock tick.
- [35:35]
A
Yeah, no, exactly.
- [35:36]
B
Nice, man. Well, this has been sweet. Thanks for coming on. You gotta follow Spencer on LinkedIn if you do any more webinars or whatnot. Those look like they. They did really well for. For those awesome partners. And man, great to reconnect again.
- [35:47]
A
Yeah, likewise, dude. Than always a fun conversation.
- [35:57]
B
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at directtoconsumerall. One word co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.