← DTC Podcast
Loading summary
Transcript43 lines
- [00:00]
A
Before we jump into today's all killer no Filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The DTC Podcast is brought to you by Pilot House, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing DTC brands in the world. Creative Media and Customer Journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade off. Every Friday we hand the mic to a Pilothouse operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilothouse. Head to Pilothouse Co. And now on with the show.
- [00:30]
B
There's like an old way of iterating and there's a new way of iterating where I think the biggest red flag is when I go into an ad account and I'm seeing a ton of small tweaks or repetition from the same ad. If you're going into your ad account and like 50% of your ads are like 15% off first purchase, and it's not doing any brand awareness or any like education or anything that is really important for building a sustainable brand, then you're probably in a lot of trouble and you're not setting yourself up for a good Q4 this year.
- [01:06]
A
If you're still making decisions based on messy scattered data bouncing between ad platforms, spreadsheets and dashboards, you're not alone. Most E commerce teams are stuck piecing together a story they don't fully trust. Triple Whale changes that it's a complete intelligence platform built for modern operators who are done guessing. Triple Whale centralizes all your data, equips you with measurement tools you can actually trust, and layers in best in class AI to turn that data into clear recommendations showing you what's driving growth, what's hurting profit, and exactly what to do next. It even takes action for you. With Triple Whale, you can quickly spot trends, catch issues before they impact revenue, and uncover opportunities you would have otherwise missed. It's about moving faster, making smarter decisions, and operating with real confidence. That's why brands like True, Classic Way, Press, Juicery and thousands of the fastest growing DTC companies rely on Triple Whale every day. They're saving time, increasing efficiency and unlocking insights that simply weren't possible before. And if you want to hear directly why users love it, here's your chance. Triple Whale is hosting the Whaleys, a one day summit designed for E commerce operators who want to make more confident decisions and scale faster. You'll hear from industry leaders and experts sharing practical, data driven strategies you can actually implement. If you're ready to stop guessing and Start growing. You won't want to miss it. Visit triplewhale.com whaleys that's T R I P L E W H-A-L-E.com whaleys to get your ticket today here with Abby and Taylor from the Pilothouse team or as I like to call them, the art and science of ads. You like that metaphor, Abby, right?
- [02:44]
B
Yeah, I thought it was funny.
- [02:45]
A
You're the art one and I think this podcast, the topic came from this idea that I'm hearing. It's kind of funny. There was even a debate on it a few months ago between some few players in the space and it was this idea that more creatives is better. You even saw it on, on an ad the other day, Abby from. From a brand that was saying that velocity equals from the art side of things. Do. Do you think that to be true? Abby?
- [03:10]
B
I think that is so easy for anyone to do that. I wouldn't call it a strategy. I think it like if you don't have the logic and the kind of the philosophy as to why you're building, you're just shooting arrows in the dark pretty much. Where with AI tools becoming more accessible. And I say this all the time when you add me on the podcast, but I don't know, it just feels like a game that like anyone could compete in. So you do need that like deeper strat layer with Persona building and messaging framework hierarchies there to understand what creative is actually going to. To work and move the needle in the account.
- [03:42]
A
So more is not necessarily better. It's. You can, you can fill it with more slot. I was actually just going through this. I've been running some ads or creating some ads for the DTC newsletter and I have this one ad that I created that's working and I, and I. So I was on cloud and I was like, okay. And I make a bunch of variations on this central theme and it ended up doing a lot of the same thing, changing a few words here and there. But I feel like the, the system is just going to read those all as the same ad and kind of throw them out generally. Right. You need to think through it a
- [04:09]
B
lot more than that probably, or your audience is going to get bored where, you know, you might. I know. Yeah, it's a text wall with someone and B roll.
- [04:17]
A
No, it's new. I beat the text. Well, I, we. I, yeah, we beat. Then I beat the. We had two ads that beat the text wall. It's the ad that's been running from for, you know, D2C for years now actually, but we've just beat it in the past few months. So you'll see those until we start doing more. But Taylor, to get you in on the conversation from a technical side, what do you make of that statement that velocity equals strategy?
- [04:39]
C
Yeah, I think it's interesting, right, because when I'm thinking about that from the technical performance perspective, my mind goes to what is velocity? If we're saying velocity equals strategy. Right. Velocity is supposed to be a combination of speed and impact. I think there is an element of truth to it. But at the same time there's a lot of nuance there when it comes to do you trade? Because you, you often can't have everything at once when you have finite resources. So do you trade more, higher impact for more volume or speed? Do you trade volume or speed for more impact? And I'd argue that there are decisions that have to be made when it comes to that that then will mean that it's not as simple as saying is it? It, it equals that. Right. Because each brand is going to be at a different point in understanding how they're connecting and acquiring cost customers at the end of the day. And there's a lot of planning and work that has to go into making that as impactful as possible. So I think. Long winded way of saying no, I generally disagree with that statement as well.
- [05:44]
A
Just to take it to stick with you, Taylor, on the technical side of things, what is the preferred account structure these days? Is it really keeping it simple like where you, is it all under one campaign? Do you have. I think what we're doing in the DTC account is we have a testing campaign and we graduate things up into a scaling campaign and then we just. But I'm wondering from, from your perspective, is there best practice at this point into how campaigns should be structured to, to accommodate, you know, dozens of ads every week?
- [06:13]
C
Yeah, and that's, I mean it, it's, I would argue it's still the golden question. Brand to brand and account to account. Generally the rule of thumb is you want consolidation. So the standard best practice is scale campaign, testing campaign and then some sort of like tactical or other kind of breakout campaign, like a catalog campaign. Right. However, it really again varies depending on the needs of the business. Like we have accounts where they have the classic inventory constraint. Right. Or, and then when you're starting to work with bigger brands as well, where there can be a lot of range within the collections of products they have, you might have entirely different Personas or segments that you're going after based on the product line you're advertising. So you might need a custom structure that then enables the use of things like value rules to bid up on that Persona that you are seeing, and that's backed by both data and your strategy. So it's a tough one to answer, but generally, yes, there's a best practice. And then at the same time, there's still a case to be thinking critically through marketing fundamentals when it comes to structure and setting that up based on the needs of the brand.
- [07:27]
A
So hypothetically, in that case, would it be a situation where you're setting up different ad sets for each avatar, keeping them separate that way, or would you be even looking at potentially doing different campaigns for each of your customer avatars?
- [07:38]
C
Yeah, it really depends on how you, how you want to organize it and the level of complexity. I'm a big fan of separate campaigns for the sake of being able to quickly analyze it. But when it comes down to it, that's still part of the art and science blend of an ad account is kind of determining what makes the most sense based on all the signals you're seeing and how, you know, like that's ultimately what our delivery team really thrives at, is determining what are we going to do that's going to drive the most momentum based on the business goals and constraints of our strategy that are
- [08:13]
A
in place from the art side or the creative side. Abby, when you come into a new account, and let's say, let's say it's an example of a client who did have a decent amount of velocity, they were testing a lot of creatives. What, what do you look for in those creatives to determine whether they are, you know, spamming the, the button or actually being strategic in their, in their output?
- [08:38]
B
I think there's an old way of iterating, which is what I learned everything on ads about, and it really had to change in the last year. And there's a new way of iterating where I think the biggest red flag is when I go into an ad account and I'm seeing a ton of small tweaks or repetition from the same ad like two years ago because it was a long standing winner. And I'm like, okay, well now with Andromeda, you're going to experience ad fatigue and Meta's going to ping you for rising CPAs because you're, your account looks the same and also your consumer's gonna get pissed because there isn't like a very pleasant customer journey. So it's the first Thing I'd look for. The second thing I would look for is copywriting. And I think a huge red flag in kind of signaling someone's just dumping mass creative into an ad account is doing almost that backward science of like, what is the copy? And can I trace logic based off of who I think their target Persona was. So if it's something that isn't ownable to a brand, that's a flag to me because it's probably AI slob if it's something that is very much doesn't answer a consumer question. Where the consumer like you would think of, like, what questions would they have about my product based off of their Persona type? Am I doing the proper job as a brand to answer that head on and try and win the click so they learn more, then that's another flag. So I think copywriting is a really important one where it can kind of like slip through the cracks a little bit. A lot of people on the creative side care about visuals and like art direction, but copy's just as important when auditing a brand as well.
- [10:13]
A
I don't know if it was you. Someone on this podcast said that they like to run the squint test on an ad library. So that would be the opposite. You're talking about diving in deep and making sure that your content and the ad text is telling a story to an avatar at a certain point in their purchase journey. But just from a. To make sure that things are visually different, that you should be able to go into your ad library and squint real fine and still be able to sort of just see that everything looks a little different or that there's diverse, diverse appearance in your. Did you guys ever run the squint? The squint test?
- [10:43]
B
I don't know who said that, but I love it. Something that I did that I guess is kind of similar for a brand last month is it was, you know, I'll own up to it. It was an error on my side where weekly and reporting I was showing the same top scaled ads and they were like, don't you make a lot of ads? They were like, are they out there? Do they exist? And in like the new age of Andromeda, a lot of our ad spend is divvied up between a lot of ads now. And it's really hard to show a really good visual representation of that without using motion or triple whale. And I just should have in that moment. But what I did for them was went back and did an April snapshot where I pulled all of the ads that we ran in the account and it was a really good reset for us on the creative front because we were like, it did pass the squintest where we were all like, whoa. We're doing a really good job at executing on a lot of different angles here for the type of Persona, but also visually, like, it's cool to see something look very on brand across the board, but very contrasting in nature because we know that we need it to be contrasting to win and meta this age. So I didn't do like a squint test, I'd say, but what I did was more of like a mood board of like, what is our brand, what's running out there? And like, when I zoom out and I have them all in a collage style, what are my thoughts and what does it look like? And it was a really fun exercise.
- [12:01]
A
Very cool. What do you think about the squint test, Taylor?
- [12:04]
C
The squint test is really nice for looking at the important parts of the messages. We, we agree we need to cover knowing all of the strategic process we go through with our brands. So a huge part of onboarding a brand we work with is understanding like, who is their core customer and how are we messaging to them. Using the squintest is a great way to see do we feel like we're amply doing that based on performance trends or potential gaps? You know, maybe we're not covering certain objections a certain way. We might be able to see where that might live by then cross referencing the ad library with what we know about the brand and what we know drives either drives someone to purchase or holds them back from purchasing. I'm a huge fan of it conceptually as well for that because sometimes as something as simple as like getting the right write message in to address a roadblock, stopping a ton of your, your prospective customers from purchasing can totally transform an account's performance. And that's easy to see it with the squint test when you're cross referencing reviews on site, things like that, right as you're researching, I think that's a
- [13:09]
A
really effective way to think. We're, we're just going through that with agency, our, our community business where we're just trying to think of the questions that are coming up all the time in these interviews to see who wants to join us. And then we're just making, you know, that people want to know the kind of people that are in the room. So we're going to create ads that kind of speak about the quality of the people in the room. They want to know what the forum groups are like. So we're going to have Jeff, you know, come out of his forum group and talk about how exciting it was and what was kind of discussed and everything. So I think it's a really effective way to. To think about it. And even, I guess in that world, like, even if an ad isn't. Doesn't become a screaming winner, it can still become a really important part in the customer's journey in a way.
- [13:45]
C
Right.
- [13:45]
A
It can become like an assist point kind of on the. On the account.
- [13:48]
B
Well, I think that's where attribution really matters too. Right. And that's why we use MTA tools, because sometimes we might feel really confident about the messaging. We're like, yeah, this is answering all the right questions and speaking directly to who we want, but maybe it's not very direct and go buy the thing. So having lifetime attribution using a tool like triple Whale and looking at clicks and views, or first click, if it did want to click, but maybe it took a longer window and like a crazy path for that consumer to make a purchase is definitely important in dictating, like, did the ad do its job? So attribution is definitely important how you look at, like, creative winners now as well.
- [14:30]
A
So the impetus of this podcast is we've got brands coming to us being like, okay, I'm making a lot of ads, but I don't really feel I have a creative system in place. And they come to us looking for something like that. What goes into making a creative system rather than just spamming creatives?
- [14:46]
B
I think this is really probably, like, fundamental marketing. So, like, I'm not sure how groundbreaking it is, but I definitely look at your ad account and, like, what's running currently and see if you can do an exercise where you bucket it out. So what's driving a brand awareness and like, what is brand and storytelling? And then what captures people once they're in that consideration phase, so they've learned about you at a high level, you resonate with them somehow, or they remember you. You're. They're in the funnel now, like, how are you educating them and nurturing them? And then finally what are you doing to, like, convert them and get. And get them across the line? So I think if you're able to look at your ad account and easily, like, bucket a good amount of ads between those windows, then you're in a great spot and you're doing really good storytelling. But if you're going into your ad account and like, 50% of your ads are like 15% off first purchase and it's not doing any brand awareness or any like education or anything that is really important for building a sustainable brand, then you're probably in a lot of trouble and you're not setting yourself up for a good Q4 this year. And then also looking at how you measure those because you could have really good, like I said, like really good awareness ads running, but if you don't have the right attribution tools, you're probably going to look in there, see a 0.5 ROAS from on platform and you're going to go, well, this is awful. I don't want to do this anymore. But if you go into North Beam or Triple Whale and use like a lifetime window and you start to see those results come through like after 60 days, then it gets to be really exciting. I worked with one brand that over Q4 invested a lot of money into like a partnership with Nick Digiovanni, like the biggest cook YouTuber, like hundreds of millions of followers. Right. So obviously that was like a big one to nurture. And on platform his partnership ad was awful. Like it had really good engagement but no conversions. In North Beam, it had like a six row as we were like, well there it is. Like this was valuable and we want to keep using him going forward in the next year. So yeah, I would do that exercise. Like try to break them out in each stage of awareness and see if you have a good, good library.
- [16:56]
A
And then at what point are you saying, okay, actually half the people buy us and it's say a person who buys us for them. And then half of our purchases come from being gifted from, you know, this, the product is gifted. And so are you then building out sets of creative that speak to both of those people's journey, like the look on their face when you give them this present for instance. Or are you, are you tweaking your creatives to speak to two different avatars? And when do you know when it's worth evolving your lifestyle, you know, your life cycle creative into multiple lifecycles. So you're speaking to each person, maybe
- [17:33]
B
gifting some really interesting one and I'm, I might go too niche with my answer. So Taylor, I'd love your thoughts too because like my world is very much in jewelry and apparel with a lot of brands that I work with. And when Valentine's Day comes or when Christmas comes and there's gift shoppers, you still look at our targeting and it's not like in the jewelry space we start Going all in on men or like, you know, away from women and hitting them with gifting messaging because it's never worked. But what does work is like someone like me getting hit with a strong gifting jewelry ad and me DMing it to my partner. I would love if you just went and bought this and nailed Christmas this year. So I find it's kind of interesting for gifting in particular, where sometimes it's not actually that technical and sometimes it is just like thinking of the customer journey in a very niche way, like outside of the ad account as a whole. Like, how are like partners interacting in real life? Is it that DM and is it that post share that you're looking for? Or is it trying to target men who actually don't really care about the guy who is a jewelry ad and they're not going to stop and be like, yeah, I'm going to go buy this for my girlfriend. So.
- [18:42]
C
And I see generally the same pattern
- [18:44]
A
on my end where.
- [18:45]
C
And again, this is why I'm still a huge proponent of building social proof up through ads, right? Because a lot of the time what will happen is you've got an ad that is a concept for a product that someone wants to buy for themselves. And then as soon as you hit the gifting period, as you start to build that social proof, you know, people are tagging their partner in the comments, things like that. We see it time and time again. The algorithm starts shifting the budget to the other gender or something like around Valentine's Day or Mother's Day or things like that. And then it those ads pick up and they get like an extra lift in momentum. So there are ways of building your creative roadmap to do both and grow with the rising tide rather than having to, you know, crazily change your ad account or anything like that during those moments.
- [19:27]
A
Question should I be pausing ads that are not working or does Facebook not like that?
- [19:32]
C
Great question. Facebook generally doesn't love that. Usually what I would do is under Andromeda we see more even spend between ads. But at the same time, there might be some ads where you're like, I think there's a lot of potential for this to scale and it's not getting spent. We still do a lot of what we've always done, which is evaluate the leading indicators of why we think meta thinks that because there's going to be a reason that it hasn't become the top spender, and then weigh that against the risk of a breakout and understanding what the decay line usually looks like. Those kinds of methodical processes, those are the kinds of ways we look at that. But generally speaking, Meta wants more, wants to keep feeding it. It's better for my POV to just keep adding more in alignment with what you know about your customer and your strategy and keep going from that way to fuel the whole system and add more, more gas to the engine.
- [20:23]
A
You mentioned social proof, Taylor. You actively, like you say you're a big fan of driving social proof on ads and I've seen that we were talking about the NAT text wall. I think it's got 300 comments on it or something. And that's one of the reasons it was so hard to displace. How are you facilitating that? Are you actually running engagement campaigns early on winners in order to build their social proof or what does that actually look like?
- [20:43]
C
Yeah, no, usually it's an integrated part of our strategy where we don't really use engagement campaigns because we'll typically use conversion campaigns. But just make sure that there is a certain amount of delivery, a controlled amount, so you're not overdoing it. Going to essentially a retention campaign on Meta. It's great for like a product drop ad is perfect, right? You're adding a new product, existing customer might get excited, you build their lifetime value and because they're excited and they love your brand or your product, they advocate for you in the comments and then it starts to build and then you move those up funnel or you run them in flexible campaigns where they start. Usually Meta is getting smart enough that it'll start there and then start to go up. You just have to be careful and with, with the ability to view segments. If you're using an mta, you can see pretty quickly like whether it's incremental to new customers or not as you deploy it. But it's a huge part of like at the end of the day, one of the biggest advantages of paid social is just the social part, I think, and the fact that you can get real comments with real reviews in there from past customers. And, and it can, it can really fuel everything for those new people looking at the ad and wondering if it is legit or it is worth the investment on their end.
- [21:50]
A
Very cool. So final words are you do want creative velocity, but you want to be strategic about your velocity because iterations don't work. You need a strong MTA to make sure you know where all of this is going. Any. Any final words on the art side of things, Abby? For, for these creative systems, I'd say
- [22:08]
B
final things is there's like some fun exercises that we chatted through. Like go to your ad account and go do the squint test. Go to your ad account and try to bucket based off of stages of awareness and then pull your top spending ads and look at the ad copy in them and see are you like overly dependent on a sale? Are you answering common questions that your consumer might have? And I think if you do those three things and you're just like not, not there, then go get an audit or yeah, do something. Get ready for Q4 and from the
- [22:41]
A
science side, any final words?
- [22:42]
C
Taylor Keep thinking critically, keep measuring critically and keep evaluating, keep testing, keep AB testing, keep trying different levels of velocity and seeing what lands the best. And I think it's going to be an interesting period now that Andromeda feels like it's starting to settle in after a lot of turmoil the last couple of couple of years.
- [23:02]
A
Nice. Turmoil is the name of the game here in the media buying world. And I think most importantly, if you guys want to come meet Taylor, Abby and I, you got to join us in Los Angeles for the Whaley's that this is going to be coming out next week. The Whaley's? That's on the 19th? The Whaley's is on the 19th. You can come join D2C and Pilot House, who will be there in force. Actually, this year we're also doing a dinner for DTC Brands following the Whaley's on May 20th in LA. So you can get at any of us if you'd like to join. Otherwise, thanks for your time today, guys. Keep on keeping on.
- [23:37]
B
Yeah, thank you.
- [23:38]
C
Thanks Eric.
- [23:45]
A
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.