A (0:00)

I was so annoyed by seeing the same issues in audits that I decided to hop on a podcast. The first big mistake that I see is what makes a beautiful, good, functioning, scalable ad account from years of testing and trying different things is what I say when I mean too much content is too much like spaghetti at the wall content. One telltale sign of this for me, I'll let you guys in on a secret. I used to kind of suffer from this, where it's like I'm building excitement, I'm building tension. People are going to want to watch the rest of this ad because they're going to be so curious. That was not the case. I was being a little bit delusional. It's wild to me how often I see this. And again, I definitely see why it happens. It's often.

B (0:54)

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A (1:49)

Hey, it's all killer. No filler. Special solo episode with only me. Just aves today because I was so annoyed by seeing the same issues in audits that I decided to hop on a podcast and put it out there so that maybe I stop seeing these things come up. Still a bit selfish, but also I think very helpful because these are common mistakes I'm seeing all the time during the sales process. On the pilothouse side, I feel like they're just common mistakes that a lot of y'all are making. So hopefully there's some value here. Hopefully you guys stop doing this so that I stop losing my mind when I go into accounts to audit them and see these mistakes. But I'll jump right into it. Because I'm going to make this super value packed and don't want a bunch of fluff, just want to get to the good stuff again selfishly so that you guys stop doing these things because it's making me crazy. The first big mistake that I see is a very limited creative range. What I mean by that is basically you either have too much branded content in your ad account or too much unbranded content in the ad account. What makes a beautiful, good, functioning, scalable ad account from years of testing and trying different things is balance between those two things. I will say that if you have more sort of CGC organic looking content than branded content, you're probably in a better place to actually push performance. But sometimes I do audits and I see like just branded statics over and over again that maybe say the name of the product and you've got really good product photography and that's fun, that's really cool. But it's not going to be enough to actually grow your business and your ad account. So it's the number one thing, really limited creative range. I mean that from like a creative type point of view, like I just said so you've either got too much branded or too much unbranded content in the account. What you want is a really good, healthy, balanced mix. I also mean that from a point of view of content for content sake versus ad content. So sometimes when I go in and audit a potential client with Ballot House, I'm looking at an ad account that's almost just made up of what I would call like creative content, which is what we typically think. So it's CGC creators talking about the product, it's sale ads, things like that. And what's lacking is sort of a lack of identity through content for content sake. And I know that feels a little bit like, whoa, what are you saying? We're paying for these ads to be placed, so we want them to be like ads. But things are really shifting right now in the general landscape. So it's really important to make sure that we're thinking about brand as well as actual conversion focused ads, if that makes sense. So number one is limited creative range in terms of actual creative types. And number two is a limited range in terms of like exploration and brand identity. Focused content just focused on telling the story of who we are as well as like pushing the sale focused content. This is the first one. Limited creative range. I don't want to see it anymore. Cut it. I don't want to talk about it ever again. Stop only producing Reddit statics or cgc and expecting your ad account to be healthy and thriving, because it won't be. Next one is an underutilized founder story. I just did another sort of solopod about founders content in general. This one really pisses me off because it's really easy to make this type of content. And I see so many brands with these like incredible founder stories. And I'm typically when we're pitching, I'm talking to the founder themselves and it's like, pick up your phone and make a quick video of yourself and it's probably going to do very well. But I don't say it like that. I try to say it in a little bit of a more friendly tone. But yeah, the underutilization of your own founder story I see as a huge Achilles heel for a lot of DTC brands looking to grow. One of my good pals, Eugene Healey, he talks a lot about the end of the millennial brand, which I think blends really nicely into the rise of founder stories. So millennial brands were very like, contrived and earnest in the way that they spoke to people. It was very like, hey, we're pals too. We as a brand are a person and we're fun and we're funny and we're putting cute little like messages in with your order. And that's really dying off. And what has replaced it is this gravitation towards people who have these really exciting founder stories. So I have this proprietary piece of technology that I built because I had a needle for it and I wanted to fill that need. So I worked really hard for years. I came up with different prototypes and here I am with this shiny, beautiful product that's going to solve my problem as well as your problem. And that is a really common story across DTC brands. But often I see people shy away from that type of founder story and putting that content into an ad library because they think that it's not enticing or they think that it's not actually going to drive sales. But it is fundamentally just storytelling, right? Like when we're telling a founder story, we're just crafting a great tale scale of a hero who developed a solution to a problem they had and you had. So it's really actually basic marketing. It's just repackaged a little bit differently. And like I said, it pisses me off because it's a really simple thing to do and it takes almost no time. And you are typically, when you're growing a DTC business, you are the person who's kind of at the helm of doing that. So not just picking up the phone and allowing yourself the space to tell your own story as a founder is a huge, huge detriment to the brand and a huge miss that I see see across a ton of different types of DTC brands that we're auditing and a ton of different stages of growth as well. Like a founder story can work with a 50 plus million dollar a year brand, but it's also going to work for Joe Schmo, who's just starting his mug business week one. You know, like it's one of those things that's so transferable and it scales up with your business and it's never going to go out of style. It's never going to, unless I guess you sell a brand where you're still a founder, but like it's never going to be obsolete in terms of a concept. So really important from the jump to start developing that content so that you can kind of have it scale up with you. The next the third thing is too much content. And I know I come onto this podcast all the time and I say, you're not making enough content. You need to make more. Everyone needs to make more. It's scary all the time. 911 Red flags going up all the time that you need more content. What I say, when I mean too much content is too much like spaghetti at the Wal. So one telltale sign of this for me, I'll let you guys in on a secret, is when I see a ton of ads running in an ad account. But what tells me that it's not the right type of content and we're kind of suffering from too much content is when there's no through line going on in the ad account. So I can see something that looks like it's hitting the benchmarks of the brand, but it's not really replicated anywhere else. Like you'll see these like huge winners, which is really exciting. But you can tell that there's no effort being made to recreate what's winning about that ad. Something that we really believe in here at Pilot House is using data to guide our creative decisions. So when I say too much content, I mean too much random content that's just being thrown into the ad account with hopes that one of it picks up. And usually, like when you take that approach, you will find things that work, but it's not a sustainable way to scale an ad account. What you want to do instead is take what's working and then drill into it and find out why it's working so well. And that's something that I see a lot of brands not actually do. So this is what I mean by too much content is we're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, but we're never stopping to taste the spaghetti, ruminate on the flavors, figure out if there's like oregano in the sauce, if that makes sense. We're just throwing the spaghetti constantly instead of considering the spaghetti as we should be. So too much content is the third point there and it just means too much random stuff, too much action without any strategy, too much spaghetti at the wall. That's it. Very simple. Fourth one. So incredibly tactical, but really long videos. I cannot complain enough about the amount of times I have been auditing a client and I go in and there are extremely long video ads that don't perform and that don't really have a point to them. We have like three to five seconds. I also say this all the time on the podcast, so really list three to five seconds of time to really capture someone's attention and get the click. So what really frustrates me is when I see an ad that's like 60 seconds long and we don't even see the product or understand what it is until the like 15 second mark. You've already lost someone and you can see that in the data. You can see how these ads don't perform. And sometimes there is going to be a unicorn where like the concept is so exciting and it's more of a branded piece of content rather than a very scrappy ad. And it does sometimes work and just pick up momentum, but that's more of a reach play. And so if you are like a DTC brand that's looking to really scale, I don't think reach is necessarily what you're looking for. It's probably actual performance to fund your business at this stage. So really investing in those long videos that, that aren't going to actually reach the audiences that you need them to is kind of an absurd thing to be doing. I think sometimes this comes from like a lack of support on the like post production side and we're just filming something, we're throwing it in there. But there are lots of different ways to storyboard and cut ads down so they're quick, they actually grab attention. The hooks are strong. So long videos. Fourth point, cut it out. I don't want to see anything super long. It's also absurd to not show your product in the first couple of frames. Like that also goes hand in hand. With this long video faux pas is that when you give yourself like 30 seconds needlessly, you're going to use the whole thing. I used to kind of suffer from this where it's like I'm building excitement, I'm building tension. People are going to want to watch the rest of this ad because they're going to be so curious. But that was not the case. I was being a little bit delusional. What actually works is showing what the product is, explaining the like benefit through a hook right off the bat and then just getting them off platform, getting them onto a landing page that you've created, something we love to do as well and actually getting them off platform as soon as possible. Creating buy in on the post click side instead of again this very delusional take that you will have someone watching these 60 second spots and being complete brand ambassadors after next point is also very tactical and very simple. But it drives me up the wall not editing your content for specific placements. I see this a lot and I get it because a lot of times brands will come to us in this period of really exciting scale and growth, which means that oftentimes we are not equipped, we being the brand to give creative the TLC that it actually needs to be successful. So I often see people just plump, you know, reel that was working really well from organics or maybe like an organic TikTok that started popping off and they just pop it right into their ad account. Don't really pay attention to the placements and then like 70% of your text is cut off. It's wild to me how often I see this. And again I definitely see why it happens. It's often brands that are scaling really quickly and we're just taking things that are working, we're putting it into our paid efforts but it looks terrible and it doesn't usually work and it's a really simple fix to just sort of remake that video and make sure that you're paying attention to where it's going to be and what, what you need to do for specific placements where the safe zones where is like the most optimized place to put your text. Those are all really important things that do have an impact directly on how an ad will perform. I often say like we're just trying to make the message and intention of the ad as easy to access as possible. So if, if like a bunch of your text is cut off that is not easily accessible to someone who's quickly scrolling. So another very simple tactical one, but another one I'm so sick of seeing because it's a really simple fix and it just takes a little bit of time to actually edit things for the proper placements. And like I said, it's actually really important. I don't think a lot of people think that it is, but if you put yourself in the scrolling facilities of someone just being introduced to your brand for the first time, they can't even read the text. They might not be able to see the product very clearly because you haven't edited for that specific placement. It's not going to make the best first impression and it's also not going to capture a lot of attention because there are a ton of dropshippers out there who are ripping those types of ads all the time who might have a more exciting product offering than you. So when you're thinking about building an actual brand, you got to pay attention to those kind of things and they do matter. The last one is sort of connected to the first one and it's a little more up there up the kind of strategy wheel. But very soulless ad libraries have really been upsetting for me lately because we are entering a period where your actual brand is getting more important than ever. And also exercising the art of sort of brand marketing is getting more difficult than it ever has been before. It's basically impossible now to understand where someone is going to come in on the funnel if you're running sort of a full media mix across paid socials. So if your ad library is boring and if you can't find a way to tell me who you are through ads, the understory is a great way to do this as well as broadening your creative range. But if you're not doing that, and we're simply running very TEMU style ads that have no vibe, no aura, no soul, you're not making a sticky enough impression in people's minds. And I think another, another really important point right now in human history is that the cost of living is going up for average people. And so your window of consideration might be a little bit longer than it was a couple of years ago because people are humming and hawing on their purchases a little bit more than they used to. Which isn't like, I'm not saying panic and freak out, I'm just saying that a solve for that is actually through brand and adding a bit of life and soul into your ad library. Because people will remember ads that genuinely tickle them and make them laugh and get them giggly or inspire them in some type of way. People will remember that and while they might be weighing the cost of different necessities in their life this week, they will remember that ad later down the line when they do have more purchasing power and they do feel comfortable making those purchases. So it's a really interesting thing to think about and evaluate. I think that there's always a really tension filled conversation between brand and performance and I always want to shut that down because I think that brand is performance and performance is brand. So very soulless ad libraries where I can tell that the brand is severely underdeveloped. Also something that's a very common mistake because I think that a lot of people who have now started brands kind of grew up, quote, unquote, pretty iOS 14 and have a different expectation of what paid socials can do for them. But the reality post iOS 14, which was many years ago so we should be touching grass feeling reality. But the reality is that you do need to have a strong brand and you do need to consider what people are actually feeling about your ads rather than just knowing that this thing's a bit of a cash grab. Put money in, put money out as it used to be. It's really not that that anymore. So we have to think a little bit more strategically about how we're presenting our brand through ads. Yeah, that's the last one. Just keeping it not overly branded. I don't want you to think that when I say brand, I'm talking about like the most polished experience you've ever seen and everything is finely tuned and the buttons are turned to perfection. I mean like who are you and are you accurately telling that story across your ad library? I often see accounts that aren't doing that. And like I mentioned before, that just comes from a sort of lack of maturity and almost knowledge around what the brand is because you obviously can't convey something if you don't know what it is. So that's the last one. This is my list of grievances. I hope everyone really enjoyed listening to me complain. And I also hope that some of these, if you are currently doing them, you stop doing them because all of them do have a negative impact on performance. And I do see them when I am doing audits and I do complain about them. Not maybe as boldly as I did here on this podcast. I am nice when presenting this information and these call outs to people, but there are some that I'm getting very sick of. For example, not editing for specific placement placements will be cranky and annoyed if I do see that on any audits moving forward but yeah, that was a very quick one. Hopefully there was lots of information that can actually help you guys. I think that's like what I'm always hoping to do. Give you a couple of fast tips you can just take away and execute on like the very next week. Would love to know if anyone has any questions about any of these specifically. I went through them super quickly but kind of intentionally to get you guys chatting away. Yeah, that's it. Thank you so much for listening. If you made it to the end of my rant, congrats and hopefully that was a little bit helpful. Helpful.