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- [00:00]
A
Halloween has gotten really interesting more than ever. People are like shopping Halloween products earlier. They're decorating like they would for the holiday season. People care way more and they want to buy stuff. If you're selling yoga pants and you sell a black pair of yoga pants and an orange pair of yoga pants, starting to like, feature those in ads really heavily, can kind of do wonders for your click through rate around this time of year. Like, you don't have to be putting skeletons and pumpkins and decorative gourds on all of your products. But even just feature featuring those two things together tend to like, help elevate click through rate around this time of year.
- [00:46]
B
Let's just. We're doing our best. We're. We're trying our best here, people. It's all killer, no filler. And I'm trying my best here with Abes from Pilothouse's creative team, also host of Adventurous, the number one creative ad podcast that's just blowing up the charts. And today we're going to talk a little bit. We talk every year about spooky season. We talk a little bit about Halloween. How to actually build effective Halloween campaigns that both drive incremental revenue, but also probably train up your promotional skills for Black Friday Cyber Monday. Is that, is that how we kind of view Halloween a little bit as training grounds for the main event?
- [01:26]
A
Yeah, Halloween has gotten really interesting. I was actually just talking to a client this morning about this about like limited edition Halloween product and the concept of boo baskets, which are like Easter baskets but for Halloween and like the extra commodification around this holiday. And so we're talking about. Yeah, more than ever. People are like shopping Halloween products earlier. They're decorating like they would for the holiday season. I don't know, it's just got a different flavor to it. I find in the past, like two to three years, people care way more and they want to buy stuff. They want to buy, you know, their favorite products with like ghosts on them. Like thinking about a Stanley cup with ghosts on it. Like, they want that kind of stuff now.
- [02:07]
B
I was just seeing my buddy Brock Mammoster starting to advertise his spooky season chill cups or whatever. And already this was like two weeks ago he was starting to implant this idea because I think people just look for that sort of like warmth of the season. Fall is such an evocative season as it is just because the leaves are starting to fall. And then you've got this celebration of death and the macabre right in, in the middle of October, so there's lots of opportunity. But how do you, like. I have some neighbors who go too far with Halloween where they're like, it's like some Church of Satan altar and there's like babies hanging upside down with stitches over their mouths, Stuff like that. That's a bit too much for Halloween. How do you. How do you suggest brands approach Halloween in a playful way, I guess.
- [02:47]
A
Yeah. I think you have to think about who your target Personas are and how they think about Halloween. So if you are like a family friendly brand sticking to family friendly imagery and references, I find Halloween is almost more nostalgic for people than, like, the holiday season. Like, Halloween movies mean a lot to people. I saw. This is just a tangent. I saw Beetlejuice for the first time last year and I was like, this is incredible. This is a theme. How does this get made?
- [03:17]
B
When you watch that movie, you're like, how the hell did this movie get made?
- [03:20]
A
I know the plot was not what I was expecting, but I feel like Halloween has always been like that. It's like kooky, it's weird, it's off the cuff. So really understand understanding who your ads should be going to and what their experience of Halloween is. So, like, if you're looking at. I always use Millennials because I feel like they respond the best to nostalgia. I was like, what are the Halloween memories that impact them the most? What are they most excited about? And then trying to invoke that in your content. And it doesn't have to be like we were talking about. It's just fall season stuff. It gets people really excited. So even if you're not slapping pumpkins and skeletons on your product and making a limited edition drop, you can still take advantage of the season by just starting to sort of add in those leaves and those messaging about being cozy, getting inside. People love it, especially those millennials. They're obsessed.
- [04:12]
B
And there's always a way to. To. Pumpkin spice is such a ubiquitous cultural force that there's got to be a way. I remember one of my favorite articles was McSweeney's article from a long time ago, and it was called It's Decorative Gourd Season, Mother. And it was just basically this huge scribe about. About decorative Gourd season and what it means to everyone. So can you give me an example of a brand who's maybe not willing to change their product line, but would want to evoke these Halloween feelings in their ads and any examples that come to mind?
- [04:45]
A
Because I feel like most brands now, honestly like any typical ones that I follow do some kind of Halloween line. It's crazy work. Like everyone there, it's just as is like holiday stuff now, but like a.
- [04:57]
B
Boo bundle I guess you were sort of saying, right? Like just a specialized collection of products under the name of a Halloween thing.
- [05:04]
A
Totally. Yeah. I was thinking like homeware specifically or even apparel. Like something that I've done in the past. When we're maybe not doing that actual launch is just like if you have, you're selling yoga pants and you sell a black pair of yoga pants and an orange pair of yoga pants, starting to like feature those in ads really heavily can kind of do wonders for, for your click through rate around this time of year. Like you don't have to like I said, be putting skeletons and pumpkins and decorative gourds on all of your products. But even just featuring those two things together tend to like help elevate click through rate around this time of year.
- [05:43]
B
Super cool. And just, just using colors like if you've got that, if you've got that orange color, if you've got something ochre or like falling leaves, put that front and center.
- [05:51]
A
Yeah, yeah. I think a couple years ago a client that we were working with, I wasn't on the account personally, but they were just add adding the leaf emoji like the falling leaves emoji to content and it started performing better in like September, October. No change to the messaging, no change to the product itself. They just threw in those little leaf emojis and it worked. So it's a good like exercise.
- [06:14]
B
That might have been me. I, I was back in the day, I did a, I was doing these jewelry ads and we sort of had rings with the price and the price and a timer on them for some reason. And then we, I just threw falling leaves on those ads and they performed 20 to 30% better. We did the same with winter when it started to snow and it was less effective than the evocative falling leaves which must make us think of our own mortality as the leaves fall and return to the cycle of life.
- [06:45]
A
It is an interesting time of year like psychologically because a lot of people like you're locking in again, right. It was the summertime. You're just kind of kissing around, hanging out, hitting the beach. Lots of people have like summer Fridays going on and then everyone kind of locks in and so we're all inside more obviously because the weather but also there's just like more opportunity to buy things I guess because you're not going on trips, you're not going like up to the lake. You're just staying at home. Life is boring. You're back to the 9 to 5. So I feel like that also like we have seen across accounts at least on the meta side, like a bit of an uptick already after Labor Day weekend where performance just increases because people are at home more, less to do, kids are back in school, you're back in that routine of like your nighttime scroll where in the summertime you're maybe not thinking about it as much.
- [07:36]
B
Yeah, it definitely feels my daughter just back to school yesterday. It definitely feels back more in the routine. Even though it's crazy hot here in Victoria. It's like 27 degrees today, which is just wild. Can you speak at all to how you are thinking about these Halloween promotions in the broader context of Q4 preparedness?
- [07:55]
A
One big, big, big, big, big thing I'm focusing on with Halloween with the brands I work directly with this year, is using it as prep for holiday drops specifically. I also think, like I've been talking about this on Adventurous, but like realistically, if you weren't prepping for Q4 through Memorial Day sales or Labor Day sales, like if hallo time offer testing, that is actually really scary and I don't want to talk to you. So you should kind of have an idea of what your Halloween promo will look like in amongst your entire promo calendar. I will say it's one of those things that I think sometimes on the client side I see people hype up more than necessary because it's not really like a shopping holiday. It is more about the limited edition launches beforehand and people shopping for things to have in their home in the fall. And like Halloween season, it's not as spicy as Black Friday because people are doing things Halloween weekend. Like if you're running a flash sale Halloween weekend, you're probably not going to have like the best results because people are probably out and about either trick or treating or at party. So it is an interesting one where it's almost like the opposite of Black Friday because the lead up is so important. It's like buying things for the holiday is what matters. And in the actual, you know, if you want to run a flash promo, that's fine. It's probably not going to be that incredibly successful because like I said, it's just not one of those shopping holidays and everyone knows Black Friday is right around the corner. So it also sits in a really interesting spot in the calendar where it's like, why would I buy this now instead of waiting a month and saving on it.
- [09:34]
B
I saw this podcast I just did that'll come out soon with my friend Chris Urthell talked about. We may talk about this in Q4 preparedness podcast in the future, but how important it was if you're going to do a Black Friday sale and start it early, like November 1st or something like that, that you the either the ad text or in the ad or on the landing page, you make it very clear that this is the best deal that there will be to have so that people will can feel like they can buy early and not risk getting sniped by a better deal in a couple weeks.
- [10:06]
A
Yeah, that's something I've always done and the team does as well because it's like every single year I think 9,000 people say on this on a podcast that Black Friday is getting earlier and earlier. But it's true and consumers know that. So you need to like really lock in around pricing. I think that like making that guarantee that this is going to be the lowest price for 30 days, it does start to matter because like we were saying, people know now that sales are going to start earlier. But there was kind of maybe two, three years ago, I did notice more of a holdout. Even with brands that ran the same deal from November 1st to December 1st, there was still that holdout, even with returning customers because they were waiting for the actual weekend to make that purchase. So I love that. Yeah, being really upfront about it and just saying this is the lowest price we'll go in the next 30, 60 days. It'll definitely secure conversions and help you plan things a little bit better as well.
- [11:02]
B
What are some recent highlights on the adventures podcast or episodes that you're looking forward to release? What's how's your experience been with the podcast?
- [11:08]
A
It's been really fun. It's been really exciting. We've been doing a lot of really like tactical episodes because we are in a really important time for brands. So I do love digging in and talking about like Dolly designing a lollipop logo. That is really fun and I feel like it does get a lot of exciting engagement. It's fun to talk about, but I've really been kind of locking in about like, how to actually navigate creative fatigue. Is next week's episode like little tips and tricks that I've learned from, like working with massive accounts where it's like, how do you deal with not running the same version of ads when you have a bunch of products going on? So getting into the actual nitty gritty of what it takes to win in this season, I think is fun to kind of go back to. It's weird to say, like, go back to my roots, but it feels like that's what we kind of talk about here. So it's been fun to talk about those really tactical pieces we were talking last week about. Again, we've kind of been like Labor Day checklists, Memorial Day sale ideas. Different ways to use audio was a recent one. I see that mistake a lot because I do a lot of audits where people will just like not pay attention to the audios they're using in short form video because people used to scroll on desktop and no one had their sound on. But now everyone's watching on reels and we're like trained to watch short form videos sound way up. So that was a fun one. But getting back to kind of like do these things tomorrow and you will see better performance is kind of going to be mostly the content from here until Q4 is over.
- [12:42]
B
As a lead creative strategist at the company, how are you using AI right now? Are you using, like. I'm just curious, how are you using it a lot to. To construct ads, to conceive of different concepts and then get a creative team to do it? How are you using AI in. In your day to day right now?
- [12:56]
A
Yeah, that's a good question. I use it mostly for, like, clerical work. So I do a lot of different things in my day. Like, I do a lot of creative operations, training of staff, but for my actual, like, conceptualizing ideas, I still just do that by myself. It's your own brain also.
- [13:15]
B
What?
- [13:17]
A
I have, like, insane phobias around my brain, like, not working when I'm older. So I really do a lot of, like. I remember even as a kid, I used to play games on my Nintendo DS about like, keeping your brain up, like those puzzle games. So I like to use my brain. I like to use it to think critically. And I also think, like, I think it's a muscle. And I'm really nervous because I am someone who does a lot of like, conceptualizing and creative direction. If I don't use that muscle, it's gonna stop working.
- [13:48]
B
It's like an E break. If you use it, you lose it.
- [13:51]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was gonna compare it to my knees. Like, heading into my late twenties. My knees just don't work like they used to. And I'm nervous that's gonna happen to the creative parts of my brain if I slow down and stop working with it so much.
- [14:05]
B
So I learned so Meticulously to write, to like I might to develop my vocabulary and then to learn how to write a sentence and how what exactly. Each word in the sentence and what it's doing and then how to turn that into a paragraph and then how that it turns into an essay. And I feel like it really informed how I think of ideas, how I express ideas. And it's like all of, like, I was kind of a student, but I got good grades because I could write really well. And I feel like that skill to learn how to actually construct my thoughts via writing is something that ChatGPT just goes right at because it's like writing is the number one thing that it removes the need for. So that's. That's my little worry about the future.
- [14:49]
A
Yeah, it is really interesting to think about, like, the skills. And that's actually the episode of Adventurous that's coming out this week. I don't know when this episode will come out, but talking a lot about, like, what skills are necessary when people start using more AI. So you kind of got a preview to this at our leadership chat, but I was talking about the difference between taste and discernment, because taste is not. Taste is so subjective. And I think there's this really muddy conversation right now where people are talking about taste being the marketable skill of the future, where in my opinion, it's probably discernment because we're thinking about, like, should I be doing this with AI or should I be doing this with a person? And that's more important, in my opinion, than just like, having a high taste level. It's more marketable as an actual skill.
- [15:35]
B
And the more discernment you have, the better you'll be at using the AI tools as well and understanding, like, what's acceptable and what's not.
- [15:43]
A
Yeah, yeah, because it's like, it's really unavoidable. Like I was just saying, I don't use it for a lot of concepting. I only use it for, like, taking notes on meetings. But it's completely unavoidable. Like, you can't just bury your head in the sand if you're going to work in this industry and, like, not use it at all. So I think it's, yeah, really interesting to think about that discernment piece and how it looks different for everyone in different roles and. Yeah, just deciding what's appropriate and what's not at the brand level, I think is really important. And we're already starting to see people make the wrong call and then get called out and get all this backlash for using AI for like an AI creator or. I think there's a. Right now J. Crew, they've recently used a bunch of AI to like, recreate their old catalogs and people hate it.
- [16:32]
B
Yeah, it's like very like Will Smith in his viral concert that it was terrible new music that he's making and he got busted using AI to. To show happy fans because no one could be happy with I Like Pretty Girls or whatever that song is.
- [16:46]
A
Yeah, that was. That's tough. That's a tough watch. And it's, yeah, really interesting to see people, like, think that they won't be caught using it. Where I feel like going back to Halloween, it's like if I see a brand and they make a ad that's like Frankenstein drinking out of their water bottle and it's obviously using AI, I don't really care because Frankenstein's obviously not using that water bottle in the first place. But then he's not really even. Exactly. It's like there's no. There's no way for that to be real. But then things where it's like, you are. It feels tricky. I think that's when people don't like it. Like, it feels like you're kind of pulling the wool over someone's eyes. That's when you should maybe stop and think twice.
- [17:28]
B
More treaty than tricky. This holiday season, I think Frankenstein is a great show too, because Guillermo del Toro just received a 14 minute standing ovation with Jacob Elordi playing the titular monster. Frankenstein's monster. Anyway, so I feel like there could be some good Frankenstein content created this. This year.
- [17:49]
A
Yeah. In the Zeitgeist. I also have to say this isn't relevant to marketing, but what is with those really long standing ovations? And like, the headlines are always like, it was a foreign standing ovation.
- [18:01]
B
I think it's because the movie industry is having so much trouble, so they're just looking for feel good and everyone's self congratulating themselves on a job well done.
- [18:10]
A
It's so funny to me.
- [18:11]
B
I'm actually. I just created a brand where we're working on a new project here because I. I don't know if listeners are aware, but we've. We've started a community for agencies called Agency. Oddly enough, that's the brand that we chose called Agency. Maybe a little on the nose, but we're.
- [18:24]
A
We're.
- [18:25]
B
We're working on another brand for something a little bit similar. And I came up with a brand identity for it yesterday that I'm really happy with. And I used ChatGPT on a single prompt and I think it, like, absolutely nailed the brand. So I'm going to send it to you and I get your. Get your feedback on what it thinks. Because it's getting better at those kinds of things.
- [18:41]
A
Yeah, I think it's like if you give it the right inputs, but that's kind of like everything. I think, like, the interesting thing to me is always like. And we talked about this, I will talk about this in the podcast. But it's like when it comes to actual taste, which is not something that you can bring from brand to brand, like, my taste is specific to me. It, like, won't ever be able to hold that. So when you're talking about, like, creating products, it's really necessary to, like, use your human brain. But then if you're talking about, like, positioning or Persona strategy, then taste is not really required in that conversation. So that's when it's like, knock yourself out. I don't know. I was gonna say knock your boots off, but I don't fill your boots.
- [19:24]
B
I think it's fill your boots.
- [19:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, fill your boots or knock your socks off.
- [19:27]
B
Or knock your sock. Knock your socks off or knock yourself out. Yeah, well, that's a third idiom, actually, that has to do with being really impressed. So I don't know. It's trick or treat. You win either way here on the All Killer no Filler podcast. Thank you for coming on today Aves on short notice. Look forward to your next episode of Adventurous. And until then, keep making ads.
- [19:51]
A
Thanks.
- [19:58]
B
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe to for free at directtoconsumer. Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's All Killer no Filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.