A (2:43)

Yeah, it was good. I think if anything there was a lot more emphasis on the actual Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend in comparison to when brands started their sale a little bit earlier. I think buyers this year were just holding out just to see if discounts were bigger on actual Black Friday.

C (2:59)

So what surprised you most about the 2025 landscape? Who wants to jump in on that one?

B (3:05)

Just how important, like email and retention and like what your baseline revenue was. I feel like the last couple years previous it was all about, you know, explosive growth, acquire new customers at all costs. It's pretty, relatively speaking, easy to get like funding and, you know, loans to take out for ad spend, like all these things for startups. And like this was the first year really where it really, really hit, where it was like, you know, make or break and kind of all these like phony businesses really, really got hit. Where it's like how many businesses and brands actually have reoccurring what we call like triggered or baseline revenue versus just paid revenue, where you're spending on the same people every single month to get them to purchase again and how many are actually coming back because they like have an emotional connection with your brand and you've built that through like your retention channels. And I think it was like the year of which brands legitimately have those systems set up where they're self sufficient, not reliant on all this funding and paid media.

C (4:05)

Yeah, I was just talking with the Amazon team and they were just talking about how much of the success in Q4 on Amazon was determined in Q1 when it came to the year long keyword strategy, the year long bid strategy, all of these things. There's a lot of things you can do in the moment, but so much of it is a long haul. What about from your side, Abby? What were some of the most surprising things about the landscape for you?

A (4:28)

I think the biggest thing was just how much AI has really shaped like our job. And it's actually crazy if you look back at like how AI was in 2024 versus how streamlined it is this year, it's shocking just how it's changed our day to day, but also how brands that come in through our sales funnel are asking, how do you use it? But not in a negative way anymore, in a positive way where like they want to be getting the most value from Pilot House, where they want to see what are our capabilities in using AI and also with that, how can we spend more time on strategic thinking and less time on building spreadsheets and doing simple ad creative.

C (5:05)

For example, give me some examples about the ways that you sort of feel you most effectively used AI this year.

A (5:11)

Oh, it's crazy. I'm very anti AI when it comes to creator scripts or when it comes to headlines and things like that, because I do think there's room for original thought. But where I'm pro AI is when I'm pulling like two years worth of ad spend, data, net sales order, new customer count, and just without having to do like, figure out trend patterns with formulas anymore. You just click the Gemini button and you're. You say analyze the data and it just spits out the facts for you and you can just see out the gate, like, what those trends are. So kind of a random answer, I think.

C (5:41)

No, I love that answer because it's like I haven't checked in for a while. Like, I've been using AI steadily the whole time for the podcast, for summarizing it, for the notes and things like that. But the other day I just tried to take like our entire subscriber database and sort of the answers that have been given on our intake form. And I remember previously when I was doing a podcast, I would have to upload it in like five chunks. I had to go to a special tool and upload the text to five chunks. But now I can put in this entire subscriber database thing and then pull out learnings from it in seconds. So it's just amazing how much it's evolved to be able to just. Just the chat window and how good it was. You were saying, Gemini, Abby, is that your weapon of choice mainly, or do you have a bunch?

A (6:18)

No, I mostly use chat, I think. And then I'll build out like custom GPTs for brands too, so you can learn like, you can feed it brand guidelines, PDP information reviews, do like a review analysis and things like that. And it's less of a like, I, I hate AI slob, but I love when it just makes pulling data simpler. But on the creative side of things. And when it comes to concepting, I try to always take a stab at it myself.

B (6:45)

Yeah.

C (6:45)

How about you, Grayson? What were some of your AI use cases this holiday season?

B (6:49)

I think I'm one of the people who probably use AI the least out of this company. I think I don't really use it that very often. I know that how the teams are using it is all the ways that Abby said transposing lots of data. We've actually been using it for media buying quite a bit. Just from an efficiency standpoint and accuracy standpoint. There's some help there. But I don't use it that often. Honestly, I don't even use it for like my meetings that much. I just like taking notes the old fashioned way. I haven't really found anything that actually saves me time.

C (7:24)

Yeah, note taking, that's. That's like the. That's. I like that you're. You're hardcore.

A (7:29)

I do not use the note taker either. That's where Grayson and I are similar. I. I'm anti AI when it comes to creative ideation, but I just love it for spreadsheets because I hate spreadsheets.

C (7:41)

So one of the other questions we have here is just about sort of bad habits or outdated playbooks. This is, it's funny, this is a question that I brought up with Nick Sharma. When I was chatting with him, I was like, what. What was operative this year that wouldn't have flown three years ago? And the main thing that he pointed to was not having a strategist. And he was talking about how whether you're working with an agency or whether you're internal at a brand, having that position where it's not just like run ads at something and have it work, that you really have to be thinking strategically about where everything's pointed to Grayson's point that your retention is all dialed so that you can take bigger swings and know that you'll make it up on retention. Anything other comments from you guys about the ways the market has shifted? What worked this season that. That we hadn't thought of in previous seasons? Maybe Abby kick it off?

A (8:29)

Yeah. When I read that question, the first one that came to mind with me was the changes on meta. I feel like we're way more drastic than what we've seen with how we manage other platforms. And I feel like people use the term like Andromeda, like it's this big scary thing, but it's really reshaped how we test creative and how we view creative. I know I chatted on it last time I was on the podcast, but just like we really used to pride ourselves in creative velocity and quick iterations, but now your Meta ad account will flag you for ad creative fatigue and because of that, you'll see a decrease in performance if you have too much creative fatigue going on. So something that we've had to like somewhere where we've had to pivot or Rethink like how we view meta is in creative diversity, not just with quick iterations, but more so with net new creative concepts that are outside of the box and original thought. So it's harder work. Now even though you have AI tools that can pump out 50 ads, you need like the heavy lifting of good creative that's net new and a high velocity. So you really do need like a stronger content engine. And then for us, I'd say like the last note on that is just when I started here at Pilot Host maybe three and a half years ago, we almost had a playbook going into Black Friday where we could roll out things like do a box shot, a meme, a repeat text and guaranteed one is going to hit and you'll be able to scale this Q4. Now you have to have like your segments and your Personas and you need to build concepts within them and make sure that you're absolutely resonating and with the right person that you're going to to try and reach and have like a strong LTV with. If you don't do that hard work and you're speaking very broadly, then meta won't be able to target your creative properly anymore because now with open targeting is strongly encouraged. And some of our best media buyers said that open targeting was just the way to go to help scale up Black Friday. But with open targeting, you have to trust the AI to go and find the right person. And if your creative and copy isn't speaking to the right person, your AI is going to be confused and do a bad job. So that's my take.

C (10:32)

Or if all your variations are just border colors or button colors or really slight tweaks, the system's going to view them all as the same and discount them, I guess. Right. Whereas you need to have all these.

A (10:42)

Mad at you because it will be like you're boring this like funnel and you're showing everyone the same thing and then it will penalize you with higher CPAs. Allegedly, that's what I'm reading.

B (10:54)

The way we talk about it too is like targeting with creative. Just building on what you were saying, Abby. Like we call it like targeting with creative where it's like the creative that you end up making is the product of all the strategist Persona segmentation work. And it should be very clear within the creative who you're targeting and you should see the strategy through that creative. And if you don't, then you know your creative probably won't be like targeting the right people. And that's so crucial. Right now is like, your end product needs to actually resonate with people in a deep way. I think that's why, like, the strategist is so important is the variation of all the ads that the other stuff that's like, table stakes and that's abundant now, but, like, thinking and intuition and experience is scarce. And so that's why a strategist is, like, so key for us is having the. The end product is creative. That actually drives an emotional response. And so when someone buys something, you're actually creating a purchase that will stick around versus, like, oh, they bought it because it was cheaper, convenient. Like, those aren't customers that actually add to your baseline or trigger revenue. Those are people that bought the cheapest thing in the moment, and they'll probably buy the cheapest thing in the moment next time. So if you. Unless you wanted a discount and pay for them again, that's not really a customer. That's building your brand.

A (12:05)

With one of my brands, it's a jewelry brand where we identified, like, one of our Personas is a millennial mom. And typically, like, what I would have done two years ago is I would have taken a sticky note. I would have plopped it on, like, the box of the product, and I would have put 30% off. And I would have ran that as a Black Friday ad, and that would have scaled this year, the way that creative spoke to that millennial mom a bit more clearer is I asked the brand if they could take an iPhone photo of a Christmas card. And the Christmas card was two. We picked a mom name that was the most popular millennial mom name in the U.S. so, first of all, there's, like, thought behind the name that we choose. And then the writing is from two kids that are talking about how thankful for the. For her they are and chatting through, like, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. And then it ends with the two most popular kid names that that mom would have chosen, like, one boy and one girl. And then we layered the necklace over top. We held it up in front of a Christmas tree, took an iPhone photo of that, and put an overlay that said Black Friday sale, 30% off. That was one of our winning Black Friday ads. So you have to identify, like, who your Persona is. How are you going to tug on their heartstrings and, like, sell them your brand and get them to convert? Because even though it was like a gift to that mom, guaranteed that mom probably DM'd it to the husband, said, get this from the kids for me, because I want this for Christmas. And we actually saw a lift in our post purchase survey over the past month where friends and family as like, how did you hear about this brand? Started to increase? And I actually do think that's from like seeing post shares increase on meta from ads like that.

C (13:44)

It seems like this is the year where strategy and scrappy meet because it's still, you still have some of those, those attention grabbing, thumb stopping elements and we're pivoting in the moment. Like I've been talking on the podcast, like watching the feed from, you know, our clients and some of the funny ads that were being created for this prime Millennial. Like right, prime millennials are 35 right now. So right in the, you know, that consumer's par and just the way that humor was being used to connect directly to that person for these brands and, and, and how big of a is that? Was humor something that you guys saw work well across the accounts?

A (14:17)

Yeah, actually I have a lot of funny ads win this Black Friday, but they all differ in who you're speaking to. Right. Like another brand that I worked on, one of their top Black Friday ads was a Justin Bieber sound bite where he's like, it's not clocking to you. I'm standing on business. And that's what speaking to a millennial mom, that's speaking to a gen zer that understands that reference finds it funny. I'm not saying that that's deep strategy work. That is just me knowing how to speak to someone a little bit younger because that is a quick trend that will probably die in a month. But there are those quick wins that you can do on top of that. And there's always room for humor no.

B (14:55)

Matter what the brand is and for cultural relevance.

C (14:58)

There are a lot of what I'm in Gen X and I know all about that quote. I know that that's a very 2025 quote. What I wanted to ask earlier was with all of this, with the new, with the developments in Andromeda, with this, this, the gem lattice going out there and picking the right ad for the right person, do we end up seeing the same sort of distribution that we would have seen in previous years, where it's still 10% of the creatives driving 90% of the value, or is it more diversified because we're taking all of these sort of diversified shots downfield, or does it still end up netting out to 9010?

A (15:27)

It's diversified and that was probably one of the toughest sells with some of my brands. Going into Black Friday was being like, no, trust me, we do need this much content. I know you spoke to Amy from Wildfang and she was talking about like we've never seen a Black Friday with decreased CPMs and an increase in our click through rate and actually just like paying for cheaper traffic. Because everyone says every year competition rises, but by going in with like an Andromeda mindset this year we actually beat the algorithm. We were really proud of it. Where we were like our CPMs dropped and our click cost dropped in the most expensive time of the year when you're. We were looking year over year when every year historically they do go a little bit higher. And that was because we had such steady spend across such creative diversity that also spoke to their group and was net new, but also played on winning elements that we had gathered from the year. So we knew what type of videos to do. We brought new ones to the table, did like a Black Friday exclusive drop. But it's crazy. You look at like their ads and there was one of them that was just a text wall and it was black, white and red. But when we started talking about it and digesting the color and like the messaging on that creative and why we chose the font, the way we chose that font, it was just like from four different use cases of ruling things out and then mushing them all together into a winning Black Friday ad and it cranked for us. So yeah, definitely saw like way more spread out spend this year. But with it we saw improved results.

C (16:58)

Increased efficiency, I guess. Right. With the idea that it's able to serve not based on segments and broad demographics, but finding the individual right person that each creative is speaking to. What about what I think it was like three years ago? We're like UGC is dead on podcasts. We like to be bombastic. What was the state of the use of UGC and partnership ads like in the, in the meta environment this year?

B (17:21)

I think the way that like UGC is dead and that still is true is like just like everyone's like pretty aware, you know, at this point that it's like, yeah, everyone pays money to have people just talk about their thing, even if they don't really like it. So like that's where like the UGC and like the content planning goes into that Persona work again, where you know, if you're getting people who are already like embedded into the Persona's interests, it then becomes authentic. And so it's just that next level of thinking. Like instead CGC or UGC used to be like, oh yeah, just as long as they get A video of somebody saying they like this thing and going through the talking notes of the top aspects of this item, then it will sell type thing. And we've checked our box for having video content and now it's much more like again, yeah, is this person a known person who is tied to an interest in the millennial mom niche and they have an established kind of trust or they are part of the tribe or like group themselves that's like recognizable. Like that's kind of the level you have to go now to create that authenticity. It's not just there for you naturally. So it's still a huge, huge part. There's just like kind of another layer of thought that goes into it to make that investment worthwhile and not make it not come off. Like, you know, it's like a infomercial type thing.

C (18:41)

As the head of E Commerce, Grace, and this wasn't on our question list, so I'm springing this on you, but I haven't talked about anyone with the sort of the state of post click this year. Was there a lot of work work going on behind the scenes post click with various custom landing pages that speak to these specific avatars or what. What was the, the mindset post click going? I'm sure it's different for every client, but give me some, some thoughts on, on the post click world.

B (19:04)

Yeah, so much going into post click. I think like two main, two main things. One is like all the even post purchase data that Abby was talking about that's like that like shapes our next steps as far as like, like getting customers feedback and insight into like okay, we converted this person. Is this someone who's actually contributing to like the long term health of the business, like going that next step further versus just like, oh yeah, our CPA was this, our AOE was this. But are they actually contributing to sales in that Persona group and are we gaining market share in that segment? Like that was really huge. And the other thing is like kind of the classic, I think where you're probably going with the question which is just like how are we doing post click and aligning it with all the strategic work which is really huge for bundling and improving aob. Definitely conversion rate was a huge issue this year just across the board where people were waiting to see the best possible sale this year to the very last moment. Generally people are in an economic state where they're not just spending willy nilly, they're spending on the brands they really care about. And so obviously every, you know, inch we can get on Conversion rate. And one of the main ways was like how we were thinking about it was trying to get conversions really early in Q4. And then when Black Friday came around, getting people on like higher AOB items like bundles. So imagine like you know, you were to buy a consumable product in September, October kind of timeframe. And then we were setting up like custom funnels and campaigns both on the triggered side and the paid side where we were then pushing people to. Because we were hitting people that were actually in the Persona and they were converting for the right reasons, not just because it was a sale. Then we were following up and using Black Friday as a way to turn that person into a lifestyle consumer. So it's like here's a bundle where it's like this now becomes your day to day routine versus Black Flag is an opportunity for us to get a bunch of net new customers. So that was a huge thing. This year too is using Black Friday to improve our triggered and baseline revenue, not just new customer revenue.

C (21:13)

This is going to be our last all killer no filler released of 2025. Are there any resolutions that you have professionally? We'll keep them professional. Any professional resolutions to things that you want to do? More focus, go deeper on.

B (21:28)

Focus more on trust, intuition. Like again, I feel like so much of kind of the old way of doing things is just like testing a bunch of stuff because like, hey, we don't know what's going to work and we have the ability to just make a ton of creative and try it. And I think that like trusting your intuition and what you think is actually going to resonate at a very human level in your creative and trying to put yourselves in the shoes of the Persona that you're targeting. And also showing, going out and showing it to people who are in that Persona. Right? And getting real people's feedback and getting the reaction and thinking like, oh, if I was that person, would I look at this and think that's that's really sweet. Like I want to be part of that community or not. So intuition around the human element is the resolution for next year.

A (22:12)

Mine would be like finding new ways to spark creativity where like we were just, I was just talking to our new EP of Creative. That's its title. But just trying to figure out like how to put myself in different situations where I can come up with creative concepts outside of just the world that I already live in is something that I think is really challenging. And if you can just have that in your mind at least, then yeah, you could be more Creative AI is.

C (22:39)

Not going to replace humans. It's just going to free us up to do more human things, I think is the idea. And I think you guys are giving great examples of the ways we can all be more human in terms of the world of advertising in 2026. Thanks a lot guys. This was a unique perspective on this stuff I would love to do. We'll have to set up another podcast in the future where we go a little deeper on post cl Were there any hero apps this year? Any apps that we were running on the E comm side of things that were absolutely game changing or that made us a lot of additional revenue?

A (23:10)

We love Rebuy. I know we're a partner with Rebuy, but over the past year and a half our agencies really understood how to like gamify Rebuy and figure out like how to get the most out of using it because it's also an expensive tool. I was pulling numbers for one of my brands and seeing just items per order increase where we had one brand go from one to two items and it was a 30% increase year over year. Year our AOV is up year over year and bundles are up year over year. Like it just one of the craziest stats was 40% of purchases on one of my brand's websites doesn't even hit the PDP anymore because of smart search. So they just see it in the search bar, they add to cart and they convert. So we're now taking a whole extra page and a whole extra step out of the purchase path, which is making it easier and limiting people from abandoning the site. So Rebuy's done amazing things for the brands that I've been on and we've got like a lot of great case studies on Pilot House too, so.

C (24:06)

And then this was our first year all committed and tied up with Triple Whale. How. How did that go?

A (24:11)

Triple Whale is great too. We're. We're a partner now and I've just been using it for a long time anyways and I really like that tool just for creative reporting. I think out of all of the attribution tools, Triple Whale has some of the strongest creative reporting and I see it getting stronger. So I feel like I'm talking about creative a lot on this podcast. It's great for other things too. But I feel like it's going to be really exciting having most of our brands on Triple Whale and being able to set up custom reports across all of them and be able to just quickly hop in, see top statics videos, partnership videos, sort by angle, sort by DPAs and then sort by what stage of the funnel they're in and just have that view for someone who's more creative and less technical to be able to report on will be really fun. It also has a built in AI called Mobi and you can give it an ad name and ask it to spit out insights. So like if you're on the brand side too and just want to use it for your own benefit, there's some really cool tools in there as well.

C (25:09)

Nice. Well thanks for taking the time today guys. We'll connect again soon.

A (25:12)

Awesome.

B (25:13)

Thanks so much.

A (25:13)

Thanks Eric.

C (25:20)

Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe 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 D2C podcast. We'll see you next time.