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It's all killer, no filler. And for this week's DTC podcast AKNF episode, we're bringing you an absolute banger from our sister show Adventurous, hosted by the ever sharp Aves Valerio. It's called Adventurous Angles, and if you're running any creative at any level, brand or performance, you'll want to lock this one in. Every breaks down how most DTC brands stall at the same point, coasting on vibes and aesthetic without ever doing the deep work on angles, the strategic hooks that connect your product to actual humans. She shares how to build winning angles from scratch, what makes them tick, and how to scale them across your funnel. So let's get into it. On with the show.
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If you want to start really scaling and really growing, you're going to need to address the sort of elephant of not having substantial angles. Better to do that work sooner than later so you can create everything with your top angles and top Personas in mind. Angles are the point of connection for a brand or a product and their audience in today's media landscape. Angles need to be agile and they need to be sort of broader than ever before in their conception. I have a secret weapon for angle ideation, and no, it is not a custom GPT.
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This episode is brought to you by Contentful Marketers. You know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof, when your outside of the box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers. It's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omnichannel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels@contentful.com hi, welcome back to.
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Adventurous, the podcast produced by DTC and hosted by me, Aves. Today we're gonna be talking about an angles. Not the math kind, although I do like math. But we are going to be talking about the marketing kind. I feel like there's such a like high demand for content velocity right now that it's really easy to lose sight of real angles and sort of replace them with vibes and lifestyle content and really brand focused content. And that stuff does work and it can help you scale up your organic channels. And sometimes even when we bring that sort of like aesthetic B roll over to paid, it works well. But I've audited like a ton of brands who come through having done that. Exactly. So you have a Again, I don't want to overuse the word vibe. I feel like as a society we've sort of overused the word vibe. But if you have a product in a brand that just like is very esthetically pleasing. You may have been able to take yourself to like 3,5 mil in Rev A year without genuinely think about what the angles are that work for your product or your brand. So, number one, congrats. Lucky you. That's always really fun and it is really exciting when I do see brands in that position because what that means to me is it's like you do really have something there. You have a core issue that you're solving. You have an attractive brand, the product just fits really well in the marketplace. But if you want to start really scaling and really growing, you're going to need to address the sort of elephant of not having substantial angles. So better to do that work sooner than later. So you can kind of create everything with your top angles and top Personas in mind. So, yeah, if you're in that spot now, or if you're just starting off, or if you just want to get better at creating winning ads, this episode is definitely for you, I guess. Who doesn't want to get better at creating winning ads? That was kind of like a silly one to put in anyway. Typically when I see brands like I just talked about really heavy on vibes, really heavy on aesthetic and lifestyle B roll, they've gained a lot of organic momentum. We have to at that point, start talking and thinking about strategy. We need to really think about what we're producing. We need to think about who we're trying to attract with that content. And again, we need to just really ground it in some angles that are proven out to work. One of my closest collaborators and I, we always joke about coming into performance marketing. We both come from backgrounds in brand and and segmentation communication. So we've really seen in real time digital marketing. Advertisers really have to come around to some of our ways of thinking when it comes to capturing attention and demand in a strategic way. And it is very exciting. I think both her and I are very cheeky and we like being right, so we like being early and right about things. And one of those things is definitely strategy. So that stuff being like segmentation and Personas, why buys angle development, product development, all of that. For a while, like I said, digital marketers wouldn't really have to consider these things because the thrill of seeing something cool on your phone and then being able to buy it instantaneously was enough of a net new cool shopping experience that it really ballooned out what DTC startups could do with little to no strategy. I'm not saying that was a bad thing. It's like a fun golden era where so many cool brands were born out of that time. But now, oh boy, we all have to return to the roots of marketing and advertising and communication. We have to get a little Freudian with it to think about the psychology of these angles. Personally, like I said, as someone who came from that background and also as someone who is kind of a nerd, I love that. That's really fun for me. That's a good time. So back to angles themselves, which are a really small part of this overarching strategy that we're talking about. I want to talk to you guys today about how I go about developing angles that actually work across an entire suite of Personas that work from sort of the very top of the funnel. We're talking meta, we're talking Snapchat ads doing pretty well. We're talking things like Applovin, all those really top of funnel platforms, all the way down to how to consistently bring those angles out in any kind of bottom of funnel marketing you're doing, whether that's retention efforts, website, all of that stuff. We're going to talk about how to take your best angles first, how to make them, and then how to spread those angles out all over your E Com strategy. Let's just get into it. I feel like these tactical episodes, I really don't need to be like yapping so much. I'm just going to give you guys the goods, give you some tips and tricks. But before we do, quick little shout out. I am going to be talking about a tool that I made again on this episode. So if you're interested in seeing the tool visually, you can head over to LinkedIn where I'm just a Ves Valerio V A L E R I O. I'll also be posting it on TikTok if you like to rot your brain like I do. And the username there is Add, so you can check out the tool on either of those platforms. After you listen to the episode, I'll be posting some like short forms, form video content and links to the tool there. So what is an angle? Let's just start there foundationally. To put it very simple, an angle in this context is the positioning you use to attract a customer to your product. An angle in sort of older school marketing would be the very core of a large campaign across digital execution. Nowadays in this media landscape, an angle is usually what drives the creation of an ad. Hopefully that makes sense. As a breakdown, it's basically like I said, it's just how you position your product out there in the world. An angle can basically be driven by one of two things in my opinion. A product feature or a product benefit. So it's like the steak or the sizzle, if that makes sense. An example of this could be the mug itself. Keeps things warm for very long. That is a product feature focused angle. But one of the product benefit angles could be my make believe mug brand. Let's pretend everyone loves it and it gives you a sense of belonging because it's like bigger than Stanley and if you don't have one of these mugs, you're out. So the product benefit would be social status and belonging. So that's just like a very quick, weird example of how I think about those two things. But especially in today's media landscape, I think an angle has to be tied to one of those two things because you need to to create a real value moment in all of your touch points with users. Angles most of the time when we develop them these days are for top of funnel channels and audiences. We're looking to attract new customers. We're looking to get more eyeballs on the brands. For me, when I think about bottom of funnel or returning customers, I think about why buys more than I think about angles. Because a lot of the times, especially depending on sort of your SKU matrix and mix, they're already really familiar with the angles. So blasting them with campaigns about like the mug keeps things warm for very long isn't going to necessarily work because they already understand that angle. So why buys being product news? Sort of like discounting info if it's relevant. Urgency, scarcity, that's where that stuff kind of lives rather than angles. So hopefully that breakdown makes sense as well. But let's really sort of take things back to our roots here today, guys. The subject of the very first episode of Adventurous was my own favorite ad of all time, which was the Aaron Burr got milk ad. I am, I feel like maybe you can hear it in my voice. I am smiling because I love that ad so much. It's so funny anytime I think about it. I'll probably watch it after this. But in case you missed that episode, go listen now. Or maybe don't because it was like 24 episodes ago and it was my first time ever recording like a full episode of something. So who knows if it stands the test of time, but if you missed it, here's a quick recap of the actual spot. So basically there's this guy, he's got a bunch of Aaron Burr merch all around his home. They've dressed the set really well for the ad. You can tell this guy is, like, weirdly obsessed with Aaron Burr and Hamilton. And so he's listening to the radio, maybe it's the morning, who knows? And he's making himself a peanut butter sandwich. And. And he takes the world's biggest bite of this sandwich, which looks like a really bad sandwich. It's just white bread and, like a ton of peanut butter. It looks really nasty. But as he takes a bite of this sandwich, they announce on the radio that the big question of the day, that if you answer, you win a ton of money. The question is, who shot Alexander Hamilton? And obviously a guy obsessed with Aaron Burr knows the answer to that. So this guy is super panicked. He starts, like, calling. He gets on the station, they pick up his phone, and he's ready to answer. He has the answer. And he can't do it because he doesn't have any milk. He tries pouring some from the carton. He's out of milk. The peanut butter is like, sealing his mouth shut. So he can't answer. He loses. He doesn't make the money. And so it's a big bummer, right? It's like, no milk. Oh, no. What are we all gonna do? What is the angle there? It's very interesting to think about. What is the angle there? I'll pause here. I'll let you think. Come up with your answer based on that description. Okay, this is the angle. The angle is to not mince my words. I guess it's like a massive pain in the ass when you run out of milk. That is the angle. The genius of that angle is that the angle is not the product. It's actually barely even a benefit of the product because milk itself. I talked about this in that first episode. It's like a horrendously and hideously boring thing to market. Everybody knows knows about milk, especially at that point in time. I think this context is really interesting when we think about gut milk as a spot at that time. Like the sort of main angle to get people to buy milk was milk does a body good. And every single person at that time knew that about milk. That it supposedly. This is also coming from someone who does not drink milk. So take this with a grain of salt when I say supposedly. But anyway, supposedly milk was like, good for your bones and had a lot of calcium in it. That's neither here nor there. The main angle for milk at that time was like, it's good for you. You have to Drink it. But milk sales were going down, right? So there it wasn't working, it wasn't resonating anymore and they needed to think outside the box. And so really with milk, the main thing is when you don't have it, it's annoying because you're not gonna go out in the middle of making your coffee to grab milk. It's just genius. If you want to know more, listen to that first episode. But I wanted to re dig into that ad because I think it's a really good example of how angles are the point of connection for a brand or a product and their audience. How you express those angles, we'll get into that in a little bit. Is where you can really start to deploy some brand fundamentals. But the angle itself is really, like I said, that point of connection between you as a brand or a product and your audience. So for the gut milk campaign, goodbye. And Silverstein. Love them. That point of connection was so interesting because they found it through research and just figuring out like, why do people buy milk period? When do we notice milk? What is interesting about milk? And that's how they came to that angle of you don't want to run out of it. So yeah, really try when you think about angles to frame it through that piece of connection point of view. Because I think that really helps you understand your audience and what they want to hear and what's going to make a successful angle. So that is some sort of ground laying around. What is an angle? How do we think about angles over here at Pilothouse? But I want to chat a little bit about how to develop angle as well because that's obviously a really big part of everyone's day to day job. I do have a secret weapon. I don't know why I didn't use it at the beginning of the episode as like a hook so that you listened longer. I do work in marketing so I should know better. But I have a secret weapon for angle ideation. And no, it is not a custom GPT. Do not be silly. It is a hand drawn graph of an upside down triangle. And to be super fair to me, I have since recreated that upside down triangle as a document that can be used and I will like I mentioned, be posting it on LinkedIn and TikTok. So check it out there. It's no longer just one scrap of paper that I use, it's like fully available. So back to the secret weapon. I created this little angle ideation triangle because I found that within the context of DTC and startups and digital Marketing as it stands today, I needed to consistently come up with angles that worked across the funnel and across my suite of Personas. I needed to come up with ways to reuse the same angle for different platforms and for different stages of awareness, which is massively different. When you compare the work that I do today to the work that Goodbye and Silverstein were doing with Got Milk because they were making a single spot, they knew where people were going to see it, they'd be watching tv, they knew all of this other stuff that we just don't know. So very different. And the requirement of angles is sort of just as high as the requirement of content as well. So that is why I created this again, just out of like pure necessity. And it works really well. Angles used to be these like big sweeping things. Like I mentioned, the best angles previously would create culture that sort of made them more relevant. But nowadays I think the strongest angles are more of a reflection of culture and they do less actual culture building. In today's media landscape, angles need to be agile and they need to be sort of broader than ever before in their conception, which I'll get into in a moment when I'm onboarding an account and I'm starting with sort of next to nothing in terms of creative strategy. This is my exact process. I feel like this is hopefully going to be helpful for you guys to figure out sort of where I gaps are. But number one, I create a really highly curated playlist based on the vibe of the brand and I'm pretty sure that's just a me thing and it's actually not that helpful, but I find it very helpful because then I listen to that playlist as I get into my research mode. I did want to share a fun personal anecdote. Once that hyper curated playlist for a brand was Life is a Highway Only and I listened to that song on repeat for days. And then I'm not kidding you, I did some of the best like brand development work I've ever done immediately after. It's like something broke in my brain listening to that song so many times, but I really got it in the end. So maybe try that. Maybe don't up to you, but onto more serious applicable tools when you are onboarding or starting with a brand or kicking off your own brand or if you just want to validate if you're doing it right. Number one, the real number one, not the playlist number one is I dig into all the market research the brand has done previous to me and also any sort of market research for relevant brands. So I like to again start with what has been brought to me. I look over, you know, whether it's a post purchase survey, whether it's actual consumer insights research. I take in everything the brand already has and then I start combing through things like reviews, I look at Reddit, depending on the brand, try to figure out how people are thinking and talking about this product and I try to find a couple of key points in this research period. First of all, I try to really understand if the brand is a little bit delusional or not. And I'm being really serious when I say that because sometimes brands come in or brands are founded with this idea of who their target Persona is and sometimes they are completely off base and other times they might be missing a huge sort of central audience where there's a lot of potential for growth. So I try to just almost gut check and make sure that we have accounted for everyone who is a potential customer and we kind of understand a full scope layout of what our segmentation should look like instead of just a broad idea or too specific of a like 25 to 30 year old woman making X amount of money per year. Like usually it's not going to be that niche. So really making sure that I understand and the brand understands who the highest yield audiences are, what the size of the prize is and then sort of going from there. I'm not going to dwell on this whole process of figuring out your Personas too much today because this episode is not about segmentation, it is about angles. But I do really like talking about Personas and segmentation so we can do a deep dive app if you guys would find that helpful, let me know in the comments. Also, if segmentations and Persona sort of categorization and product matrix aligning to your Personas, if that's something that you're curious about. We do have a whole team of strategists over here at Pilot House who every day wake up and work on this type of stuff specifically with our partners. And I think, you know, something I've seen now with a lot of years of experience talking to brand owners auditing brands with Pilot House, is that when this core sort of foundational strategic work in terms of segmentation and Personas, when it isn't done or it's incomplete or it hasn't really, really been validated, your chances at reaching that next level of scale are slim to none. It needs to be done before you need it so that once you do need it to reach that next level of scale, you're cooking. So yeah, if you want to see an episode on this, let me know in the comments on sort of segmentation and Personas. But also another cool fun option is to head over to the Pilot House website and fill out a lead form. Tell them you've come from Adventurous and we can chat really different directly. We can set up a call right away and chat about your business and what's going on with your segmentation and your Personas and just figure out if we can help at all. It's also really fun for me to chat to brands. I love it. I don't know if you can tell. It's very fun to like problem solve in that way. So yeah, if you're curious at all about how we go about it and want a more detailed approach, go over to the Pilothouse website, fill out that lead form, tell them you came from Adventurous and we can chat directly. But back to this process and my secret weapon. So once I've gone through and validated that brand strat component and really looked at the growth strategy behind a brand that I'm going to start working with, I then break my thoughts into a bit of a Persona and angle matrix. I start looking at angles that are already relevant for the brand and I want to find what people actually like about the products. And I try to be very objective as I do that. I try to find really big angles for the brand and for top performing products specifically. And then I start sort of scratching down how I think these angles are relevant to the Personas that I have. And this is when I grab my secret weapon that I call the triangle. And that is such a funny name. And like most of the best jokes that you've ever heard, I'm now going to explain to you why it is so funny. It's like you like try because I split it into three parts. The top, the middle and the bottom. And angle because it houses your angles. And also it looks like a triangle. It's super funny. It works on like every level. It's peak comedy. I'm sure Joe Rogan is shaking in his boots. I'm the premier comedian with a podcast. Anyway, the triangle, it's upside down, which is very important. I use this triangle to workshop each individual angle. As I am saying that, that sounds like a lot. That is what I do. I workshop each individual angle and how it relates to a specific Persona in the mix. I do this because I want every angle that I am running for a brand. I want it to work and be relevant at each stage of the Funnel, I want to challenge myself to make sure that it is relevant and represented across every single platform. And I also want to make sure that I am representing it in a way that that is communicated clearly to the Persona I am targeting. So like I said, it's kind of a lot. But acting like a psycho and doing a lot of planning does create better content. I hate to tell you, if you're looking to hack your way into making relevant hype cool content for a brand, it's not going to happen. You just have to do this amount of work. So get that out of the way. The first layer of the triangle I'm very excited to announce is where I store variations of the angle that I think is every single person should just be able to relate to. So it's like top, top, top, top of the funnel. Anyone on any platform should be able to relate to the notes that I have in there. So I'm going to use my like typical fake coffee cup brand to give you guys a more practical example of how I actually fill out the three sections of the triangle. So let's say I am filling out this triangle exercise under these parameters. The angle I'm looking at is that the travel mug keeps coffee warmer for longer and the Persona I have is trend focused Gen Z women. So in that first layer, I'm going to fill it up with reasons and ideas and pieces of copy around why every Gen Z woman needs a travel mug that keeps her coffee warmer for a long time. I usually do build my triangles in platforms like Milanote or Figma so that I can also add an actual add examples of how I'm going to execute this. I do that in each layer, but I start, like I said, very top of the iceberg. And obviously I know this, you know this, not all Gen Z women are the same, but there are going to be a lot of overlapping similarities from person to person. So I will make sweeping sort of assumptions. It's like maybe I don't think this is true as someone who is inside this Persona myself, but maybe it's like Gen Z women are very busy. The demand is to wear a lot of hats in a lot of jobs. So they're all very busy and they don't get to drinking their coffee at the office very quickly. That is something that most people can just relate to not being able to get to your coffee and that nice relaxation point very quickly. So running with things like that that are just someone who is completely cold to your brand is going to understand like being disappointed when they go to take a sip of coffee, and it's cold. Every single person can kind of relate to that experience. So the very top of the triangle, that's where I put all that stuff. The middle layer is very interesting because it houses two central ideas. The first group is that people inside the fold will understand this problem or this benefit. And the other part of this in the middle is people outside of the fold will be genuinely curious about what we're saying. So I want every idea that I put into this middle layer of the triangle to tick both of those boxes. Essentially. I want people who are already sort of aware of coffee mugs to know exactly what I'm talking about. And I want people who don't think much about what they use as a travel mug to be genuinely curious about what I'm presenting around this angle. So that middle piece really is like true middle of funnel marketing. But you should really, like I said, break down your angle into. How would you actually describe it under those two parameters, which is people inside the fold will understand this, and people outside the fold will be curious about this. Something that I find really interesting when I'm working with brands is that a lot of the times when we assume that we're speaking to someone who already knows the brand or is already very educated on the product, we start to use a lot of sort of like insider baseball lingo, and we start to lean on crutches. And I think that a big mistake is, you know, we all spend a lot of time thinking about the brands that we work with or thinking about digital marketing in general. And so it's really a good note to think about the second part, which is people outside of the fold will be curious about this. Are you actually sparking substantial curiosity? Are you getting people to click through, if we're using that, that those parameters of the angle is the travel mug keeps your coffee warmer for longer, and the main Persona is Gen Z women. Some variation of that angle within this middle part would be, like, really centered around problem agitation, I guess, and we'd be really thinking about, like, how do we visually demonstrate cold coffee? So that is the middle layer of the triangle. I do find this one the most challenging, personally, to kind of fill out as much as the other two parts of the triangle. But it is where the most value is, because most products, unless you are really engineering something different, most products will kind of live in this middle territory where people understand them fundamentally, but you need to make them see how different your product is. So this middle part is probably the most beneficial. The Last part of the try angle is people inside the fold will be curious about this. So this type of content, I will say I don't like running as paid ads. I like putting it on organic channels and I like, you know, using this as a jumping off point for email. But I don't think that the content that you develop at the very bottom of the triangle, which is basically just an iceberg, but the very bottom of the iceberg triangle, whatever you want to call it, this idea that people inside the fold will be curious about it, it is better suited for organic and it is better suited for building community rather than performance marketing. So there's a caveat there. I think it's important to understand the full triangle because like I said, you really want to know how you're activating angles across the entire business. So it's helpful to do it all at one time so you can really start to see how things connect together and what that customer journey could ideally look like. So people inside the fold will be curious about. This is a really interesting way to frame this, at least for me. I like to think about it as what I mentioned before. Really focus on building community through your content that you're developing in this section. So thinking again in the parameters that I set up, which are the travel mug keeps coffee warmer for longer and we're focused on Gen Z women, we might look at creating content on the organic side that is aimed at specifically Gen Z women. So using a lot of sort of visual signals to them that we're talking to them, maybe throwing in like a rode lip balm next to the coffee mug, but it's really about signaling to that group of people that you are talking to them and then softly introducing the product. This type of content is really good to brainstorm around when we're thinking about trying to get new people into the fold. Or say you are an established brand and you have a new product launch that's going to reach out beyond your typical Persona. This is a really interesting place to brainstorm that and again, think about how it relates back to things that are going on at the very top of the funnel because this is not, like I said, necessarily going to be specific to performance, but it is going to open up new doors to talk to new people. Which is why I think it's really well suited to do this type of content on organic channels. So showing maybe like I said, you got the road lip balm, you're holding that in your coffee mug and you are just like running to the office and having Like a joke from the Devil Wears Prada or something as the overlay. It's not a good ad, but it is signaling like, she's running late. She's like, doing stuff that I like to do as a Gen Z woman. So that is interesting to me, and maybe I'll give it a like on TikTok. What's really interesting to me about how I think about angles through this triangle contraption that I've built is that it doesn't necessarily mean the very top, which is everyone can relate to this. That's not necessarily just for top of funnel activations. As you can see now that we've gone through the whole thing, the bottom is quite specific and mostly to be used off of paid channels in owned channels, such as Organic or your email program. So it's not about, like top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, so much as it's about really creating a journey for people and really making sure that your content is reflecting your angles across every single platform and to every single type of person. I mentioned this before when we were going through the example, the Gotmilk example, where it's like we used to come up with angles and that angle will be central to a campaign like Gotmilk, and we knew that that campaign was running on TV and then maybe billboards eventually. And obviously that ran away and there's like, TV shirts and people riffed on it and became this, like, substantial piece of culture. But the difference I'm trying to highlight here for you guys is that nowadays angles and content need to work everywhere and they need to tell the same story, which is why I made up this little triangle and why I put all my angles through this framework. Because I want to make sure that people are getting a unified experience, even though I wish I did. But I have no control over what they're seeing first, what channel they happen to come across the brand, to intro them into the brand. Like, we just don't know that anymore. We don't have control over that. So instead of running the same copy paste content everywhere all the time, I do this to differentiate myself in the market and differentiate the products that I work with and the content that I'm producing to make sure that, like I said, it does its job across every single platform. And once you really start to get into the, like, nitty gritty of strategy, which I love doing, you really start to understand what Persona lives on what platform for your brand, and you also start to understand their purchasing habits. So you can, once you do these triangles, once you have your Persona segments, you can start to layer in info like whatever your best NCAC product is, you can start focusing on that on these platforms through these triangles. It just opens up a lot of doors. And like I said, a lot of the times we'll sort of stop at the coffee mug keeps my coffee warmer for longer. And we just assume that's kind of all we need to do because previously like with my main guys, Goodbye and Silverstein, they noted that milk missing from the fridge was the most exciting thing about it. And they created content around that that they knew people would absorb in a specific way. But like I was saying, we just don't have that luxury anymore. So it's really important to create a like full bodied living experience for people when it comes to content and specifically when it comes to representing your angles. Well, we at Pilot House, we do have a very fun, cool way of testing our angles, especially on Meta and I won't spill the secret sauce because it is secret. But when we go about testing things and testing angles, I think a mistake I see other people make often is they might test one iteration of an ad for Gen Z women talking about the mug keeping your coffee warmer for longer and it doesn't work and then they just throw that angle away. It is so wasteful. Here at Adventurous, we believe in reduce, reuse, recycle. Rihanna, I think that's like four Rs, you know, those are the pillars that we live by. It's a good angle, but you just might not be testing it well. And you also might not be considering all the different ways that it should be and could be represented across platforms and across different stages of awareness. So that is the triangle. It's a very cute name. It's very fun. Like I said, I will post it on socials so that you guys have a visual reference. I think that makes it a little bit easier. But the main takeaway from today's episode should be that you should workshop almost angles within your main angles. That's just what is required of us in today's media landscape. It's really important to dissect every little thing and figure out what actually makes that angle work or not work. It might be a dud. Who knows? Thanks so much for listening today. This was a very fun one. Like I said, I love this little triangle. It's very helpful to me in my work. I use it on like a weekly basis still. And if you haven't yet, please remember to subscribe and also give a rating. Drop a comment. Like I said, if you want to see any episodes on anything sort of specific. I'll see you guys next week. Thanks for listening.
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Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the D2C 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.
Host: Aves Valerio
Date: January 9, 2026
This episode, hosted by Aves Valerio (from DTC’s sister show Adventurous), dives deep into the concept of "angles" in direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand marketing. Aves argues that many DTC brands plateau around the $3M–$5M revenue mark because they rely solely on vibes and aesthetic, neglecting the hard strategic work of defining and deploying strong marketing angles. The episode presents a practical, repeatable framework—the Angle Triangle—to identify, develop, and scale strategic angles across brands, funnels, and audiences.
Aves introduces their "Angle Triangle"—a hand-drawn (now digital) upside-down triangle to systematically build and deploy brand angles ([19:00]).
Sections of the Triangle:
Process Steps:
Top Layer: Universal situation (“You hate when coffee gets cold before you drink it.”)
Middle Layer: Problem agitation/visual demo (“Busy mornings leave you with cold coffee—here’s how we fix it.”)
Bottom Layer: Niche community touch-points (“Pairing your mug with trending lip balm, Devil Wears Prada reference—hyper-relevant on TikTok.”)
Quote: “Acting like a psycho and doing a lot of planning does create better content... You just have to do this amount of work.” — Aves Valerio ([27:00])
Angles aren’t “set it and forget it.” Test across platforms and creative; don’t discard an angle too soon if one execution fails ([33:00]).
Different angles and their expressions perform differently by channel and funnel stage; iterate relentlessly ([32:00]).
Quote: “Reduce, reuse, recycle—Rihanna... those are the pillars that we live by.” — Aves Valerio ([33:15])
Testing methodology is nuanced (some secret sauce held back), but main lesson: Many brands waste angles by poor testing, rather than lack of good strategy.
On the $5M “Vibes Plateau”:
“You may have been able to take yourself to like 3,5 mil in Rev a year without genuinely thinking about what the angles are… But if you want to start really scaling and really growing, you're going to need to address the sort of elephant of not having substantial angles.”
— Aves Valerio ([05:11])
On Foundational Brand Research:
“I try to really understand if the brand is a little bit delusional or not… Sometimes brands are founded with this idea of who their target Persona is and sometimes they are completely off base.”
— Aves Valerio ([22:40])
On the Angle Triangle’s Utility:
“It’s not about, like top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, so much as it’s about really creating a journey for people...”
— Aves Valerio ([31:40])
Want to see the Angle Triangle visual or explore further?
For brand operators stuck on the “vibes plateau,” this episode offers a blueprint to break through—and build marketing campaigns that connect, scale, and endure.