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Marketing Operators
E030: Reza Khadjavi, Motion Founder, on Building a Creative-first Approach to DTC Marketing
01:19:53
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- [00:00]
Connor McDonald
All right, welcome to another episode of Marketing Operators. We've got Reza Kajavi, the founder of Motion App. We talk about a bunch of stuff. He talks about how he predicted the rise of Performance Creative to build Motion. We discussed the AI workflows being used today by some of the best brands, and we all discuss our contrarian takes on where the DTC space is going. Thank you for listening. Make sure to subscribe, share to your Performance Creative strategist friends and as always, thank you to our sponsors Motion Prescient Enrich panel.
- [00:35]
Cody
So once Black Friday comes around, it's, it's basically pencils down at that point with your ad creative, you pretty much need to have all of your testing done, understand what's working, what's not working, so you can roll those ads out for for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday to execute on your biggest time of the year and just really be in execution mode during that time of the year. So at Hexclad, we are all about naming conventions. Connor McDonald often says naming conventions are the lifeblood of any e commerce business and we really believe in that. We set up our naming conventions in a way. So it is incredibly easy to visualize what is working, what is not working using a tool like Motion. So we are tagging static ads, video ads, ugc, hi Fi, Lo Fi, Seasonal Evergreen offer any variable that you want to test in your ad account as long as you input that into your naming conventions, you can then organize by your naming conventions in a tool like Motion to visualize data and compare those ads to one another and see which ads are performing above your benchmarks. At your benchmarks. Below your benchmarks, you can figure out which new ads are incrementally or marginally better than the aggregate performance of that similar category. So if you launch a new batch of statics or a new seasonal holiday ad, you can compare to all your statics or all your seasonal holiday ads. That is how we approach it at hexclad. It is so, so important for us optimizing our creative stack and just understanding what's working both in an Evergreen period and during a holiday offer period. So if you're ready to learn how the best DTC&E commerce brands use Motion to ship winning meta, TikTok and YouTube ads. Book a demo today or create a free account@motion.com Motion offers a monthly subscription plan so you can dodge those annoying annual contracts. And if you mention Marketing Operators podcast Motion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month. Check them out@motion.com foreign.
- [02:25]
Connor McDonald
Welcome to another episode. We've got a extra special guest today. We've got Reza Kajavi from Motion, our beloved premier sponsor. Reza, how's it going?
- [02:34]
Reza Kajavi
I'm doing well and great to be here, guys.
- [02:35]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, great to have you. You know, I wanted to start. I feel like I've only been podcasting for a couple months now, but I, I. The first ever podcast I went on was yours many years ago. Me, you, David Herman. I felt like. And it was then placed in the Lean Lux newsletter, which, like, if you were in D2C Twitter back in 2018, it was like the coolest thing. So this is a bit full circle for me. Thanks for coming on.
- [02:59]
Reza Kajavi
I forgot about that. That's such a long time ago. And that was so much fun to do. I'm sure we can link it or something in the show notes. I forget what we talked about. I bet it's still relevant because you and David are incredible, and I feel like everything you guys talk about is timeless. And so I bet that episode's probably still relevant today.
- [03:16]
Connor McDonald
That's very generous. That's very generous. Yeah. All right, cool. Well, let's get into it. What? So, you know, we brought that up. A good segue. Why don't you give us a rundown of, like, your background? We're obviously familiar with motion. Our listeners are familiar with motion, but how'd you get into ddc? Dtc? Give us a. Give us the rundown.
- [03:33]
Reza Kajavi
Sure, sure. It's been a long time. I, I, I just kind of put this together recently, realizing that I've been building in and around, like, e commerce enablement. Coming to about 10 years now. We, my two co founders and I launched one of the, like, very first apps in the Shopify app Store. This was in 2000, late 2015, I think. Shopify had like 50 or 60,000 total merchants on the platform at the time. So, like, extremely early days, they were just launching their app store and it was like, very, very nascent. We launched an app called Shoelace then, and it was interesting and, like, not only been building in e commerce, but like, building around, like, paid social this entire time. So like Shoelaces, when we launched, it was like helping you automate your product catalogs on Shopify. So it was like very early days of the first Facebook pixel and people were manually copy pasting their code snippets onto their Liquid theme file in Shopify. And, like, it was very clear that everybody needed to be advertising on Facebook. And so, so we built that and it grew really Fast for the first couple of years, but eventually, as Shopify and Facebook started to build their own native integrations with one another, kind of eliminated the need for software like ours. And then we, and then we spent a couple of years. This would have been around the time that we did that podcast together. We spent a couple of years pivoting across a number of different ideas. We ended up getting really excited about this idea of like trying to introduce a customer journey approach to advertising, if you remember that, that whole era. And so, you know, the idea was like in email you can do all this, like really cool segmentation around. I want people to get this message when this happens. And it was like kind of building out these like very elaborate schemes. And so the idea is like, can you introduce that into paid social? And that's what we worked on for, for quite a while. And everybody we talked to, including you, I remember, was like very fired up about the vision for that business. Like, it'd be how cool it'd be if you could like tailor your message across all of your paid social advertising based on like, where somebody is in the funnel and like what messaging sequence they would, they would see and all of that. And it's interesting because what we learned through that business has kind of led to like, obviously what we built with, with motion. But the big realization was that audience targeting was basically going towards its way out. And so the whole headwind that we faced trying to build that business was like everything Meta was saying at the time was like, stop trying to do this. Like, don't do this. Like we, you need to, you need to trust our algorithms. You need to stop tinkering with audience targeting and not like doing more tinkering with audience targeting. So we were going exactly against the grain. And so what ended up happening was that as algorithms just got really good at the audience targeting side of things, it just eliminated the need for humans to be tinkering at that level of audience targeting. I still maintain that that's, that's, that's a really cool idea. I hope, I hope it can be built on another, on another time because, you know, it's be really cool for marketers to have that level of control. But ultimately we ended up pivoting that business to becoming a marketing agency after like the kind of software piece didn't, didn't quite work out. But I personally felt like I wasn't done yet. I was still in love with software and I still kind of of had an itch that I wanted to build something. And then we went off basically and talked to a lot of our favorite customers and partners at the time and became pretty clear within, within the first few weeks of exploration that we were going to build something around Creative because as audience targeting started to become more automated and algorithm based, everything, and this is, this is around like the iOS 14 era, which really accelerated this, like all of people's like time and energy was going around creative. And so for us it was very clear that we were going to build something around creative. And we had all questions around what is the best place to start? And then I remember talking to folks like you and others and like understanding how people were approaching their creative. And it was a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of pivot tables, a lot of like trying to piece together the data side and the creative side. And that's where things were really falling apart. And so the first like MVP of Motion was very straightforward. It was just like, can we build an environment where you can balance the worlds of like the data and the art and like the creative and the media buying so that people can actually wrap their heads around how things are performing while actually being able to consume the content and see the videos and like, and wrap their heads around what they're actually looking at. Because like the spreadsheet environment was challenging for two things, two reasons. But the biggest one was that when you're trying to do creative analysis inside of a spreadsheet, all you're looking at is like rows and rows and data. You actually have to link somewhere else to go and actually play the video and see what's going on. And so those, those insights led us to build Motion. And it's just kind of been great, growing really fast ever since. We now have a couple thousand customers who use the product. We just recently raised our $30 million Series B A couple of weeks ago and like things are going well. We have a lot of really exciting views into the future and just kind of really double down on creative as a category and creative strategy in particular as the workflow that, that we're really excited about helping build out.
- [09:22]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, amazing. So you decided. Okay, audience start. And first, Shoelace was an incredibly interesting tool at the time. Cody, did you get the chance to use it at all?
- [09:30]
David Herman
No, I think I met Reza like right when he started building motion, I think pretty, pretty early on. So now because it was like, it.
- [09:37]
Connor McDonald
Was like the heyday of, of Facebook media buying when we, you could do these like very intricate segments and do all this Target now retargeting barely exists. So yeah, I look Back at that time fondly. But you decide audience targets. Audience targeting is going away, so you want to focus on creative. And what year is that? Like, when you really decide to explore that space? Is that like, end of 2020?
- [09:57]
Reza Kajavi
This is exactly the end of 2020, probably summer of 2020. We started exploring and then we built our MVP and towards the end of 2020, we had our first paying customer in early 2021. And then just like the market's been ripping it out of our hands ever since.
- [10:19]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, that's awesome because we were doing that exact thing. I've mentioned this before, but we had a media buyer at the time where, like, we named our ads, like, very intricately so we could export all the data. And we loaded it into Data Studio so we could visualize. And you emailed me one day and you were like, yeah, we're thinking about doing this. I'm like, oh, that's so much better. And I looked up the email. I forget exactly what year was. It was many years ago when you asked me to invest and I said, no, big mistake now. But, but yeah, obviously I, I, I have in my notes here, like, I just think you guys were incredibly early to the trend around creative. I think, like you mentioned post iOS 14, I remember, like that narrative picking up, but, like, if you're thinking about it in 2020, I think you guys were way ahead of the industry.
- [11:02]
Reza Kajavi
Well, the, the thing that was really interesting was that the p. There were two groups that we talked to, and I think we were fortunate through the shoelace era of building relationships with some of the best marketers in the ecosystem. So when we went to, like, investigate and explore what we were looking to build, our customer interviews were with the best of the best. And like, that was really cool. And so, you know, partly it was, it was talking to people who were the best in the industry and trying to understand, like, what they're working on, what they care about, what are they're spending a lot of time on. And the thing that we noticed was that, like, some version of this workflow flow was actually being like, cobbled together already by these incredibly smart people. And, like, that's what gave us a lot of the confidence actually talking to people like you and like, understanding your workflows is what gave us the signal that, like, hey, here's what the best people are doing. And then we spoke to others who are obviously not as far along, and we're trying to improve and understand, like, where's the puck going? Where should I be spending my time? And it was clear that like, they had this vague sense, like, I should probably be doing more with my data. Like, I know that like a lot of the answers live in my data, but they hadn't gone the one or two steps to be like, oh yeah. And then here's what we're going to do. Intricate naming. Do these pivot tables export data studio. Like, you guys were like very far along in that workflow. And then we saw others who were kind of just like starting to scratch their heads but understand that that was the direction they were going. And when we built the first version of the product, what was really cool and what I think has helped us grow so fast is that the best of the best teams were like, oh yeah, this is way better than what we've been cobbling together. So like, obviously we're going to use this. And then the folks that were aspiring to be like the best and adopt those workflows, like, hey, we get to skip that entire step. We don't have to go and do all this crazy pivot tabling and, and all the stuff that's probably a little bit more complicated for us. And so it made it more approachable for people who are less far along and it made it like a lot more efficient for the people who, who were quite good at what they were doing. And so I, I give credit to one of the things. I mean, you guys are in E commerce and like you spend all your time in this category. But as motion now has like customers from a bunch of different verticals, we're still probably 75% E commerce, but like the 25% is all over. We have like a company that makes movies. We have like B2B SaaS companies. Like the problem kind of exists in a number of other verticals. And as we've started to learn the problems and the use case and other verticals outside of E commerce, I've come to really appreciate how incredible performance marketers are in E commerce. And I like, as I've Talked to like B2B SaaS companies, my biggest advice these days, like go hire your growth marketer from consumer because like, they're really good. And I think it has to do with the fact that in E commerce, the razor thin margins, it's like the fire that forges the best of the best. Whereas like in SaaS and others, you have these like big LTVs and these like long sales cycles and can't really tell if you're losing money or not. And so I feel really fortunate that our community was like the best segment of advertising. And then within that segment we were like, our early customer interviewers were like the best of the best in E commerce. And it was like, man, that's the reason why we were able to build motion is that the people that we spend a lot of time with were truly the best in the world. And we just built the software that they needed. And then turns out that like everyone else also kind of needs that and that, you know, everyone else is now starting to realize the things that you guys understood many years ago. And so I don't see the trend around creative slowing down anytime soon. So that's something maybe we can, we can talk about. And I feel like it's just going to get, continue to get more and more important. And so the tools and the workflows that we're hoping to solve for the ecosystem, we have a lot of cool ambitions around that. And I think there's still a lot left to build and a lot, a lot of value to add into the workflow.
- [15:16]
David Herman
If you want to come on again next week because Connor, I are happy to hear you tell us how good we are every single week. I don't have.
- [15:23]
Connor McDonald
Our listeners will be happy to know that we are in fact the best marketers out of all of them.
- [15:28]
Reza Kajavi
I mean it's like it's, it's, it's a small group, right? Like I think I've heard others talk about this, but you take, you take Shopify's ecosystem is probably like a couple million merchants, right? I think that's like maybe more, maybe 3 million merchants. I forget the latest number, it's in the millions. But the number of merchants that do over a million a year in GMV, I think that's like maybe over 70,000, something like that. And so it's like a massive drop of like the number of brands that even just cross the like million million dollar GMV per year. And then you start to count like how many brands are doing more than like 10 million in GMV or like 20 million 50 million GMV and that size like really, really shrinks. And so the folks who are driving the like tip of the spear performance advertising for that cluster of brands like Truly got to be the best. Otherwise you know, so much money at stake and you can, can light it all on fire. And it's very scary.
- [16:30]
Connor McDonald
Totally. And CPMs are increasing and privacy is getting more strict and variable costs are like, we're getting, we joke we could get squeezed from all ends. So we got to figure out how to make it work and for the last couple of years, it's been through, like, you know, bringing an analytical rigor to creative. They're pulling the ad read doc. So cool. So I want to get into some of like, the product stuff. But before that, you mentioned this role of like the Creative Strategist, which feels very new, like just. Just kind of springing up at least for DTC brands over the last maybe 18 months or so. Do you have a view on, like, what that role entails? I'd love to just hear you expand on that.
- [17:13]
Reza Kajavi
Yeah, for sure. We are, you know, I'm noticing Cody's wearing our. Our infamous Creative Strategist hat. We are, we are all in on this role. And it's pretty interesting of, you know, we are. We're kind of a growth stage company now and like, technically you want to go after this, like, really big market. And we're like, wait, Creative strategist, Like, how many of those even are there? And it's still a very nascent and like, early job category. And like, we'll see if the name sticks or not. And if people end up signing up to this job role and it becomes like a really serious function at companies. We're already seeing it. I think when we started talking about this, maybe like three years ago, started talking about this role, the first time we put out anything around this, there's a PDF I'll link. I'll kind of share. Share the link that you guys can share it. It was called Becoming a Creative Strategist, and it was like a PDF that we. That we wrote. I think it got like, I want to say over 10,000 downloads, and it just like completely blew up. Since then, we just been talking about this role a lot. And I have noticed that back then when we would talk about it, it was like barely anybody had that job title. Still today, it's very rare. But, like, the number of people that, like, I hear, are now either hiring a creative strategist or just became one, like, the growth that you're seeing in this job category, it's like very, very noticeable. And the way that I think about it is that there was a time where this, like, profile of person and, you know, everybody will have remembered this, but, like, you'd say, hey, I'm a marketer and I'm just as analytical as I am creative. And that person, that profile that is able to like, balance those two disciplines because they're so different. And it's like left brain and right brain, they're almost like at complete odds with one another. The Person that was able to balance those two is like a unicorn marketer, right? And worth their weight in gold. And like, everybody is like, oh my God, that's the best profile of all time. And I think that profile was rare. But I believe that we're now in an environment and like, I strongly believe in, like, market forces drive so many different outcomes. I think we're in an environment where the market is demanding the production of this individual at mass scale, whereas it's no longer optional to be like this, this rare breed of a person who can balance art and science, you know, rigor and creativity. I think it's becoming table stakes. And, and that, like, it is a critical function to balance. And so whether you call it the creative strategist or not, who, who is the person that is able to bridge the gap between those two worlds, between the media buying side and the creative side? Who is the person who can be extremely rigorous with the way that they look at data, but they know that at some point, you know, you got to stop looking at the numbers and you got to fly in terms of being creative. Like, you can't like, science your way to the answer. And so knowing how, how to balance both of those two worlds just enough to make serious impact, I think that's got to be somebody's job, right? Like, somebody's got to balance those two worlds. And I think the creative strategist, from what I'm seeing is like, that's the person who's stepping up to do that, to like, lead the charge on, on balancing those two worlds. And like, that's like a high level of what I think of the role. But then very specifically, it's like their mandate is to produce winning ads, right? Kind of think about it that way. That the, it's a very specific job function where the mandate is like, okay, what are we creating? We need to produce. I remember we had one conversation, Connor, a long time ago, and it was just around this idea of the volume of creative needed just to hit your, like, spend goals. Forget about any performance. It's like, hey, if I, if I want to meet these spend goals, I need to produce this much creative. Okay, what are they going to be? Who's who. Who's going to lead the charge on, on creating those. And I think that's, that's the creative strategist job and ultimately held accountable to the outcome of those. And I've seen people call it like, I feel like you guys called it like performance creative manager or something like that in the past. And like, you know, people use different terms to describe it and often it's like, and this is why we put it on a hat. Often it's like, okay, maybe I'm not hiring a full time role for this, but like someone on the team is just wearing that hat. Often it's the media buyer and the media buyers because of their growth background and they're always chasing revenue levers. I think they were the first to kind of understand that, hey, if audience targeting is becoming a bit more broad and like algorithm based, like creative is really where the big impact is. Like the early creative strategists that we saw were like, actually the media buyers who are saying, like, all I care about is revenue levers. I'm seeing a big revenue lever over here on the creative side. So like, I need to get in there. I can't just like sit back and wait for the creative team to like give me stuff. And so like the other function of the creative strategist, I think is to cultivate a culture of performance among the creative team. Right? And often on the creative team, it's interesting where, you know, they get a bad rap where growth folks are like, oh, you know, they don't care about revenue, they don't care about conversions, they don't want. I just want to make things look nice. And that's kind of been this animosity that's been had, I think sometimes towards creative teams. But we spent a lot of time talking to those folks and they were just as pissed off about the lack of clarity on like, wait, I'm creating all this stuff, like, what's happening to it? Is it going live? Is it not going live? Is it working? Is it not working? Like, what about it is working? Can someone please give me that information so that I can, you know, work it into, into my next batch of creative. And so I think that's, that's kind of the function is, is to bridge that gap, cultivate this culture of performance, but not forgetting that you kind of just need to be creative. Right? Like there is an element of it that it's not just backing into the numbers, but creating this like foundation of here are the things we know to be true and here are some hypotheses we have about how to extend this. Now, how do we be extremely creative about like different ways to approach this? And so like having that like unleash of creativity to really drive it home. And that's, it's not easy. Like, I think the brands who are doing really well are the ones who do a Good job at that. And whether they realize it or not, they're kind of following the workflow of the creative strategist. And whether they call it that or not. So like, that's kind of our outlook on this is a critical role and it's only going to get more and more important. As you know, one of our mental models for the world is like, audience targeting has already kind of been eaten by AI, right. Like now algorithms are pretty good at figuring out how to get in front of the right person. And then it seems like the same thing is also happening on the creative side, where soon enough, basically anyone will be able to create anything they want at the cost of zero. Right. I think that's happening in the not too distant future. And, and so that means like, okay, where does all the value accrue? Where, where, where do we actually spend time as humans? And our view is that like, it's, it's in the middle where you answer the question of, okay, what is it? What is it that I'm creating? And, and that's the creative strategist job, is to answer that question and you'll use whatever tools are out there to like, bring it to life and make it happen. But somebody has to drive the strategy and decide, like, where are we going? Are we going to use Gordon Ramsay or not as our spokesperson, or are we going to work with this other up and coming influencer or somebody else and like drive the strategy around what to do? And then our view is that like, executing all of that's going to be really easy and then distributing all of that is also going to be really easy. And like, all of the human effort goes into the what do we do question. And that's what Motion's trying to help with.
- [25:24]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, it makes total sense.
- [25:28]
David Herman
So we recently switched to Rich panel and I'm, I'm pumped. We're loving it so far. I just can't believe how easy migration was. It was super easy. We actually were considering waiting. We just hired a new director of cx and, and, and I was a little bit bummed at first because she was like, hey, you know what, I think we should wait till after Q4. But she got on a demo with them. I asked her to do it. She actually did one before where she used to work and she told me, she was like, I can't believe. Or I, I forgot how much I love it. I just, I want to do it right now. It's just so much better than what we're currently using. What, what she's used in the past and we've been super pleased with it. The support has been great and switching was super easy. I actually couldn't believe how easy it was. Our team picked it up super easily. I can't say enough good things. Just, just sincerely. I can't say enough good things about their team and here's how, why else I love it. Our response time went way down since switching. It was much higher than when you know than it should have been on other platforms we were able to add in some auto tagging, some rules, number of tickets has gone down, response times have been down. The UX is way cleaner is what I've heard from our team. The data and reporting is so much better, better than everything else I've used and we haven't even scratched the surface on the AI capabilities. We're about to do a demo. Their new kind of AI social moderation tool. Looks sick, looks awesome. I know Rich has been, Ridge has been using that so I'm really pumped about that. But just the migration, it couldn't have been easier. We're paying a much better price than we were with other ones and that's all in. We've got the self serve features which are awesome to help reduce number of tickets. I just can't say enough good things. It's really helped our CX team, our CX function and I'm super happy with it. So if you also want to be like us, like Ridge, switch over. Like I said, migration is a breeze. Just book a demo on ridgepanel.com.
- [27:07]
Connor McDonald
Cody I think you guys hired a creative strategist this year. Is that what you called it?
- [27:11]
David Herman
We have had one for about a year and then we'll, we'll likely build out that team as well just because it's, it's where all the alpha is.
- [27:19]
Connor McDonald
And what was their, what was their background? Rez is talking about this unicorn marketer that's like analytical and creative by the.
- [27:27]
Reza Kajavi
Way, just one, one note on that and it's, it's part of what we think about role that software can play and the role that Motion is hoping to play is that can we make the tools easier so that if you're a data person it's not this like ridiculously crazy leap to tap into your creative side enough to be dangerous or if you're a more creative person it shouldn't feel like you're moving the world in order to develop enough like analytical rigor enough to be dangerous. Right. And so I think that's, that's what needs to happen in order to lower the bar of learning to be able to tap into that other side, because otherwise it's like, you know, feels very difficult to. To be able to reach to the other side. So that's just kind of one thing I wanted to point out is that that's what we're viewing as our kind of mission, is that like, hey, which one of these two sides are you coming from? And how do we help you get enough XP on the other side to be like, know, very, very dangerous on. On the outcomes that you're able to produce?
- [28:26]
David Herman
Well, that's. That's what I've seen. I've done. We've. We've got a creative strategist. We'll. We'll probably expand and build out our team. And I've done a lot of interviews, talked to a lot of creative strategists and talk to a lot of. A lot of, you know, agencies. Talked to a lot of even like paid social people. And I find there's a few. A few backgrounds. I will say what I've learned is like a creative strategist role is actually existing and pretty common, just not for paid social. Um, and I've learned this kind of the hard way in recruiting. Like, it's kind of like a brand strategist, like a content strategist on like an organic social. Organic content side is. Is common, especially in some, like digital, you know, publishing. But in terms of like a paid social creative strategist, you know, totally. Right. That's. That's a very new role and one we're starting to see more and more. And I feel like most brands now, like eight figures and above, have one. I've seen paid social backgrounds where people like Adara Denny, I think she has like a paid social background will, you know, will be a paid social buyer, and then they'll just learn. It's. It's that important. And they'll kind of, you know, shift their focus and pivot towards that, whether it's at a brand or an agency. I've seen that. I've seen, you know, production backgrounds as well. So that's like the creative background. Or maybe they're a video editor. They're, you know, videographer, content creator or something like that. They're a little bit more on like the creative, you know, design side. And then I've also seen like, advertising backgrounds. And what I mean by that is like traditional, like, you know, like an Ogilvy agency or like a, like Vayner Commerce, something like that. Like, they're not Creating organic content. They're not creating organic social, but they're, they're working on, you know, traditional brand marketing stuff. But I think there's a lot of overlap with that. If they can, if they can kind of respect and learn the paid social side. So those are the three backgrounds I've seen.
- [30:06]
Reza Kajavi
You mentioned Dara. I wanted to just mentioned something pretty funny about her. So Dara recently joined Motion as our chief evangelist that we're really excited about. She's just been like, probably the person who's talked about this topic the most, more than anybody else we've seen. And recently when we were kind of introducing her to the team, I remember we talked to Dara many years ago when she was just starting her YouTube channel. And I went back and anybody should go do this. It's really fun to see the timeline of Dara's YouTube channel because you'll see around like 2019, she's creating all these videos around like how to create like lookalike audiences that are going to convert. And like a lot of her content was like audience hacking. Right. And so Cody, yes, you're definitely right. Like, she definitely comes from the more kind of paid social media buying background. And then you see the kind of evolution of her videos. And at some point it's around this like 2020 Mark, all the content starts to shift towards creative and like driving creative that converts and how do you do creative strategy? And like it's, it's. I think she, she represents like a perfect timeline of what our industry went through and you can kind of visualize that in, in the content that she's created over the years.
- [31:17]
Connor McDonald
Totally. We, we've hired, we have two strategies. Both of them are from like the content creator background and then. But in the hiring process, we were looking for people who were like, comfortable dealing with data because I think it's super easy to find someone who's like an amazing creator, but eyes will just glaze over when they have to start thinking about like harder metrics. So like, I remember the first person we hired, he's been here now three years or something. Awesome content creator, had a TikTok with like tens of thousands of followers. Like just understood like content that performs to some degree like a KPI and followers. And then he told me that he did his own taxes and I'm like, that's good enough. I like, I think, I think you'll like be comfortable enough like crunching the numbers with the team. And yeah, I do see the vision around Motion helping alleviate some of that that friction on both sides. Either someone analytical becoming more creative or someone creative becoming more analytical. I think it's a cool space to be playing in.
- [32:09]
Reza Kajavi
You know, the we, we've often thought about, like, where are, where are the, like the crop of the creative strategists going to come from? Like who, who are the people that are likely to kind of take up this role? And the media buyer is obvious because like, you know, they realize that creative is such a big lever. And so it's a very obvious path for a lot of them to start kind of dabbling on the creative side, especially the ones who have a bit of a creative itch. But I think the content creator, the UGC creator group, and there's like hundreds of thousands of them, our view is that like, and if any of you are listening like strategic career advice, you should definitely consider getting into more of the creative strategist role for a couple of reasons. One, AI is kind of coming for that UGC category quite a bit. And so like the ability to monetize there is going to be difficult and there's just a lot more value to create around helping people figure out what to do than there is in actually doing it right. And because those folks like have a really good understanding of social and what really good content looks like, it's not that crazy of a leap for them to try to understand some of what's going on in the data side and help brands like figure out strategically where are we going. And I think that group is like very, very ripe to kind of take on this creative strategist role. And before kind of AI starts to get too crazy on, on the content creation side, which honestly I think it's coming, I think it's, it's, it's not too far away for that to be a meaningful part of how like teams produce content.
- [33:46]
David Herman
I, I agree with that. I think I've talked to a lot of people recently just create strategy discussions and one theme that, and I'm curious your guys take on this that is coming up is like organic and paid social used to be viewed so separately and siloed and it seems like, and I think meta even shared, it was either an agency or meta shared with me recently. They're like, well they're actually seeing like the same stuff per se form and they're kind of like sharing those learnings and I think especially with like you know, the TikTok ification of everything in reels and like no longer organic social being just about followers, but this like, this like viral nature of, of Organic Social where like that the top of funnel hooks are more important and stuff like that. I think there's, there's less of a divide between like what's working on Organic Social and paid Social. So I totally agree with that with that background. And that's kind of seems like what Ridge has done even, even kind of going back a few years, like getting people that know these platforms just content on the platforms and teaching them the ad side.
- [34:42]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, well, I think we've like, I'm speculating a little bit here, but we've moved away from social and the follower graph, right? Like a couple years ago it was like you would organic Social, you would post and it would get served like most of your followers and it was like, okay, great, now you're competing in the interest graph. So now you're competing against the rest of the world as it comes to content. So like, yeah, even organic you have to be thinking from a performance mindset. Otherwise you just don't get any distribution. You get no likes. You see, like, you see, you know, older brands on Instagram with 500,000amillion followers. Bridge is kind of like this. Like we don't get great organic engagement because we don't get served to our, to our followers as much anymore. So in order for us to get even organic traction, we have to take a more like performance mindset and that ends up yet looking a lot like paid social, just with maybe softer cta.
- [35:31]
Reza Kajavi
Well, that's the cool opportunity with organic. Like we've thought about the exact same thing around the, the fact that Organic Social actually represents a distribution channel today. Right. And that was not the case in the follower graph that you're talking about. It was never really the case that you can get like distribution on organic. Like you're just kind of broadcasting to the people that you managed to find some way to get them to follow you. But the fact that Organic Social is basically a distribution channel, I still think it's like even under underutilized by brands as like a performance channel. But it's like you can get meaningful distribution there if you get, if you get the content right? And so I think, I think there's, there's enough incentive for people to spend more energy on Organic Social than they have ever had in the past. And then yeah, follows the exact same kind of approach because you need, and thing that's common is like you need to be blessed by the algorithms, right? Like you need to figure out a way to, to ride, ride the wave of the algorithms and slightly Different. And I think there's slightly less data available on the organic side to figure out, you know, what, what are the things that are actually working or not. But the principle is the same. And so I do believe that someone who's really good on the organic side of creating content could like, very, very easily make the switch to crushing it on the paid side.
- [36:56]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, 100%. So cool. So we've been, we've been teasing like some, some future predictions and things, so maybe we could jump to the product, I think a little bit. And what I'm hoping to talk about is like the maybe mid to long term roadmap. You mentioned $30 million Series B. So you guys, or flush with cash. And you mentioned the creative research tool, which we haven't talked about a lot on the podcast. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the vision there as well as, like, you've talked about the grander vision of motion, but how are these things working together? And what can we expect, you know, what does motion look like five years from now?
- [37:28]
David Herman
I want to, I want to take credit for the creative research, so if that's, that's possible. I remember Evan, like a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, and this was when, when foreplay was getting really popular and I was like, you should build that. Just don't call it that. I was like, that's like a billion dollar product idea right there.
- [37:48]
Reza Kajavi
Yeah. When you look at the. So our goal is, like I mentioned, we're, we're all in on the Creative Strategist. Like, we're very, very focused on that. I think that's, that's one of the things I'm the happy happiest about Atmotion is that we have absolute laser clarity on who we're building for. It doesn't matter if the person goes by the title of Creative Strategist or not, but like the person who is doing this workflow, that is who we're building for. And so the goal is we want to be the command center for the Creative Strategist. Like, what is, what is their center of gravity? What is, what is the place that helps them do their job the most? And so then in some sense the roadmap becomes very easy and very obvious to understand. It's like, take the job of the Creative Strategist and try to help them as much as possible with everything that they need to do. And the job basically has two inputs and it has an output. Right. The two inputs are like the qualitative side and the quantitative side. The quantitative side is what we started with the analytics. So like I need to look at the data, I need to know what's working. And no, it's not working. Like hardcore quantitative, very kind of data centric. Obviously the creative visual element is, is part of that. So you can review the, the, the data as in, in parallel to like looking at your own visuals and assets. But the more qualitative part to the role, you, you could basically call all of that research. What are my competitors doing? What are other brands that I admire doing? What are, you know, people who are influential, like Dara Denny, what, what are some like ad trends that she thinks are really interesting? And so there's a lot of like qualitative non obvious learnings that you need to kind of pick up and collect. And you pair that with your own performance data and then you use that to come up with like new concepts and figure out like, what am I doing and where am I going next? And then close that loop and see, okay, how did that all do, etc. So on the research side it was like very obvious that we should build there and the workflow that, you know, we launched, Creative Research, it's entirely free, people should definitely check it out and you can track your competitors, you can like build a swipe file. We have these expert collections that are curated by our team and like experts in our community around, you know, what, what is this month? Like what is, what does Dara think are like the coolest ads this month? So like there's an element of that and you know, we have a lot of interesting plans just for research, like things like, I know people spend a lot of time in their product reviews to understand like what are people saying? What are like different value props that my customers might be resonating with. People probably spend a ton of time and like Reddit and other places really just trying to understand the different signals that is not present in their own data that might be really helpful to coming up with like really good winning ad concepts. And so research is a really critical part. So you take the research, take the analytics, and then I view that as like basically the inputs and the next part, which the output, like you basically can't talk about that without talking about AI and where actually software in my opinion is headed entirely. So I think just take a brief kind of pause on that to set the context of where we think our product is headed. Where actually I think any software company that will survive is headed is that software used to be about helping you visualize and do workflows right? It was not going to do stuff for you. It was not going to create, create outcomes for you. Like you, it basically helped you facilitate your own outcomes. But it was like a workflow accelerator where I think software is headed, because AI is now like a very, very critical part of software is that I think people will come to expect AI to deliver outputs for them and not just say, okay, help me facilitate my workflow, but, like, I'm actually trying to achieve something and I would like you to get me as, as far along that journey as possible. And for our customers for the creative strategist is that they need to build a creative roadmap, right? Have a creative plan around, like, what are they doing, what are they producing? And they need to list all of those out and actually say, okay, what is it? What is it that we're creating? And so the goal for Motion is to help very much with that part of the problem. And like, our view is that you take the inputs of the first two and then we can help quite a bit with getting people 80 to 90% of the way there on what it is they should be creating, right? And I think that's the part of the workflow that people spend a lot of time on. And, and so that's, that's the goal for Motion is like. And a lot of that just maps back to the workflow of the creative strategist. And what is it that software can do to really accelerate this person's job? And that's our roadmap. And so that's how we, that's how we think about it. And so pretty obvious to see where we're going to go next after the analytics and the research side is to, is to figure out we already have like, some of this in our product today where it's surfacing like opportunities and saying, like, hey, here's some things that you should probably look at. Here are some things you should probably consider. And a lot of our, like, future roadmap is investing like, even more in that area. And so that becomes like the whole kind of flywheel of creative strategy and a lot of our marketing and content. By the way, a lot of listeners probably familiar with a lot of our content, but like, we do a ton of stuff around this topic. We had our creative strategy summit. I know you guys talked about that a few weeks ago. That drove 18,000 registrants, by the way, which is like, absolutely wild. Like, this is a topic people really, really care about. And in a lot of our content, we like, paint out creative Strategy flywheel on how do you go from research to analytics to the output and actually build this iterative creative sprint cycle? And so we've talked about this workflow for a very long time. And so internally, the roadmap has always been very obvious. And that was part of the reason to go and raise some capital is that once we realize that we have some. Some capital, well, the thing is, like, you actually want to be careful with capital. You know, it's like, it's. It's fun to go and raise money, but, like, it puts on a lot of stress. And if. If you're. If you're not ready for it, then a lot of people can suffer. Employees can suffer. Your customers ultimately suffer because you get, like, whiplash and get, like, investor pressure to do xyz. And. And so for a long time, we actually raised a Series A last year, and we didn't even announce it because it was so tiny. We. We're, like, very oversubscribed. We could have raised, like, a big Series A round. I think we ended up raising, like, just over 5 million, maybe $6 million. Series A. I think it's probably, like, the smallest Series A of all time. And, like, we're very proud about that because, like, we didn't need the capital and we didn't. We didn't. We didn't want to raise more than we needed. But this time, once we got, like, perfect clarity around what exactly we're going to build and a lot more confidence that, like, wait, the market is real here. We have enough, like, revenue growth and customers and everybody we talk to, it's like, have a lot of confidence that. That the market is there to build this product. Then we're like, okay, no more. No. No need to wait anymore. And so I think part. Part of the reason to raise that capital is expensive. Accelerate this roadmap and build a lot more of these features faster to be able to just, like, close the loop on the entire creative strategist workflow and. And do it with. With real rigor. Because sometimes, you know, we. We were. We were very focused. In the early days, there was a lot of. I remember the. The space that we were in. Like, there was a lot that you can build around, like, attribution and, like, marketing dashboards. And, like, there was a lot of different things going on in our space that we could have kind of gotten tempted into, but we were very focused on, like, this very specific problem throughout all of that. And the. And the reason is that, like, if you start spreading yourself too thin, Then you can't actually create something of value. And so once we realize that, like, wait, there is actually a lot more that we want to do, but we don't want to sacrifice on, like, the depth and the value of those things. And, like, also again, made it very obvious that, like, hey, we should go raise capital so that we can go wide and deep on this, on this entire kind of creative strategist workflow. Because there's a lot to do here and. And we just want to get there fast.
- [46:23]
Connor McDonald
One thing I love is, like, it seems like there's a series of bets happening, right? Like, end of 2020, you're like, I think creative is going to become more important. We're going to focus on that now. It is. We're actually. We think that there's a role that very. That exists at very few companies. We think that's going to grow. And I totally. I love both of those bets. The creative ones clearly working. Creative Strategist, I think, only gets more popular. And then you mentioned. I'm just kind of like, wrapping my head around this. Only 20% of clients are outside of D2C. So now we're talking about, like, all of those things kind of line up. Creative's getting more important, therefore Creative Strategist gets more important. And then eventually all these other industries are going to catch up. B2B SaaS and everything else. So it's like all of a sudden, I looked it up 20, 23, there was $130 billion spent on Facebook. And it's like, every one of those dollars should be looked at through some creative analytics tool. Like, that's. I wouldn't. I think that's a. That's a compelling case to make.
- [47:17]
Reza Kajavi
100%. Like, it's like you're looking at our, at our investor deck. Like, that's. That's definitely our outlook. And the thing that's interesting, though, is that in a lot of our category and a lot of commerce, like, you've actually not seen a lot of companies that ever actually expand outside of commerce. Klaviyo is only starting to do it now, right? I think they're starting to get into, like, health and wellness and restaurants, but for the most part, a lot of, like, commerce tech stays, like, very, very focused on commerce. And something that we've been kind of thinking about is that, like, we. We don't want to get distracted by other categories because, like, commerce is so big and there's so much more to grow. Like, many, many, many years of growth, growth for us just in Commerce, but our product, because you don't have to have like a Shopify integration to use Motion. Like we have all these other industries that are already using it. And so it's like, huh, interesting. Like what, what's going on here? And I, I 100 agree with you that the use case is exactly the same across the board. The only thing that's different is that Commerce is like years ahead of everybody else in terms of like the way they think about the world. And so if things go the way we hope, and I'm saying this on a commerce podcast, and I want our Commerce customers to kind of know this, that like, we will prioritize Commerce as like the core segment forever because like, this is the group that basically understands the future.
- [48:46]
Connor McDonald
Right.
- [48:46]
Reza Kajavi
And so we're committed to this category for a very, very long time. But like, yeah, can't help but notice but like this should probably work across all of advertising. And that's kind of what makes, makes the case that it is a reasonable idea to raise a lot of capital for Motion. And it's not a bad idea because sometimes when, when a market is not big enough and you raise too much capital, it's just, it's just bad. Like it's, it's a really bad outcome. And ultimately the customers suffer because what you try to do is like squeeze. That's what happens with every company that raises money in a market that's not big enough, they'll just go like 10x their prices. Right. And I think there's this like joke like, oh, here we go. Like this company just raised money and then now they're like 10x more expensive. And like that, that's the kind of pressure that happens. And you know, Motion plans to raise our prices as we add more value. And I think that's kind of what a software business is, should be doing. It's like add more value, build more things. Sure. Charge, charge for them over time. And so I think there's a healthy way to do it. But when a market is not big enough, that's like the only lever that you can pull. And it's just like, it's not right. And so I think that that's one of the things that gave us confidence. That Motion has like probably a decade of growth ahead of it. And so it's, it's a reasonable idea to, to raise money and not be stressed about the pressure that comes for that.
- [50:13]
Connor McDonald
Yeah. Awesome. Cool.
- [50:14]
David Herman
I don't know if you were going to ask us to get into it, but like, specifically like when you think about that, that money and kind of putting it to use. Like how much of it you think will be like product? Are you, is it, is it building AI stuff? And that takes a lot. Is it, is it team? Is it marketing? Like how, how do you think about that? Very curious.
- [50:32]
Reza Kajavi
Yeah. So our, we are, our go to market is extremely efficient and we actually don't need external capital for our marketing because a lot, a lot of what we do and we've kind of taken the kind of B2B SaaS version of this where we've emphasized a lot on creating really valuable content for our community and that works really well as a go to market machine for us. And when we were thinking about what we need capital for actually was not marketing. We have our enough capital to, to spend and like our paybacks are pretty rapid. It's, it's all kind of thinking about product and engineering. Like that was, that was the bottleneck that if we didn't raise more capital actually like motion was going to be profitable like in a couple months, basically very, very close to profitability. And the bottleneck was that like we probably can't grow our engineering team as rapidly as we like. And so that was like the really big, really big reason to raise more capital. And so that's one really big reason for it. And then on the marketing side you could think about, yeah, I mean we're going to make more investments there as part of the capital. But a lot of how we're thinking about is like, can we grow the content team? We already have. It's funny, we just hired our head of growth marketing and we got to like the size that we got to with basically just the content team we, which I think is extremely rare for SaaS. And our content team is probably around like I want to say six people right now. And like that's a team that we're going to keep growing and keep, keep expanding. Like those are the kinds of things that we could invest more in that we probably wouldn't do if, if we didn't have the extra capital. And so I would think about the two areas are, number one by far is like accelerating our product roadmap by growing the engineering team. And number two is like spending real dollars evangelizing the category, talking about the problem, like building. Can we think about like training the next 100,000 creative strategists? We talk about this idea of like we actually really do think about the UGC community, UGC creator community. We'd love to go and like help like CERTIFY them and like help become, help them become creative strategists, like things like that. And so that's, that's how we're thinking about the kinds of investments we would make.
- [53:04]
David Herman
So one thing we talk about a lot on this podcast is upper Funnel investment measuring, YouTube measuring, TV measuring, you know, out of home, all that kind of good stuff. It's something that's top of mind but it's not very easy to do. Recently Jones Road turned to pression AI to help us as our new MMM media mix modeling tool and we have been super impressed, no joke. It's really helped to quantify some of the things that we thought were true, some of the things that some of our tests, you know, showed us, but especially TV was very hard to measure. We were spending about 10% of budget on TV and we just weren't really sure how it was doing. Spoiler alert, test of the week. It's actually looking great. It's actually looking like our most efficient channel. Thanks Depression AI. So we are in the midst of scaling it up and results look good. We are very happy with it. YouTube looks great, great as well. You know, been been spending and scaling up YouTube a lot based on this data. So we are very happy with it. It's actually not something that we were getting. We didn't feel like we had confident data back from other MMM providers that we worked with before and so we are thrilled with some of the prescient data that we are getting. We're getting halo effects. We're actually able to see, you know, how much value are we driving directly from clicks on channel versus how much is coming through Organic Direct and it's quite a bit. Being able to measure TV has been really difficult until now, but it feels very accurate and it's giving us a lot of confidence. Things are volatile and DTC were able to build these new optimizations, these new scenarios, you know, within days. Setup was super easy, unbiased cross channel, you know, measurement. We're not on Amazon but I know brands like hexcloud will use it to also measure and validate, you know, spend going to Amazon. And so we're thrilled, we're super happy with it. Couldn't believe how easy it was and the team is getting a lot of value out of there. Those are used by top brands like of course Jones Road, none other than Hexclad, Good American, Symbiotica, Timbuktu and many many more. Mike the co founder hits me and Connor up pretty much every day just telling them about Some of the new brands that signed a lot of them from listening to this. So we are thrilled with prescient. It's made a huge difference so far and it's really going to help us leaning into Q4. So if you want to be like us, like Hexcloud, like Jones Road and many more, go to pressure.com operators to book a demo and see for yourself.
- [55:13]
Connor McDonald
Awesome. So I've got a. I've got a question here. You said you talked about inputs, creative research being the qualitative input. Totally agree. The quantitative input with the creative analytics tool currently. And then we talk about like actually leading to output. You say AI is a big piece of that. You know, you gave the example of years ago when you started building the creative analytics tool. You saw these brands doing like these gnarly naming conventions and spreadsheets and all this manual labor. Are there any processes you see people doing today with AI that you think you guys have the opportunity to productize or maybe not even go that far, but anything you see happening with AI around content production that you find interesting?
- [55:52]
Reza Kajavi
Yeah, Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people are dabbling, right? A lot of people are. For example, I think most people are doing something with ChatGPT these days around just kind of like a. A brainstorming thought partner. A really good example might be, hey, here's an ad that my competitor is running. Here's a transcript of that. And like, here's some things that we've done in the past that has worked. Give me like three new ideas based on. Right, right. And like, you know, even today, anybody goes to Chat GPT and does that, like, it's not bad. Like, it. It'll kind of. You probably can't take that and just go like, run with it. But if you're sitting by yourself and you're not kind of in a room brainstorming with other people, it's a really good. It's a really good complement to your own kind of solo brainstorming. So I think that's probably the number one use case that people have. I've seen things like, you know, uploading a bunch of your product reviews and asking it to like, find themes and value props and things like that. And the problem though is that like, Chat GPT is not trained on being the world's best creative strategist. Right. It's kind of like generic. And I think that's where a lot of opportunity is with AI is how do you kind of help teach it what the best in the world are? And what the best in the world are doing. And ChatGPT also doesn't have access to like your past performance data and a lot of those things. And so I think there's, there's like obvious applications for how you accelerate that workflow for folks is to like, you know, make, make the AI smarter around what great creative strategy means and help give it all the context that it needs about your business and like what's worked for you in the past and like the things that you find inspiring about maybe what your competitors are doing and other, other trends and things that kind of fall into the research side. And then I think that's the sort of thing that makes the output really, really different to what you might be able to kind of get out on your own with, with Chat GPT. And so I'm kind of talking about like where our heads are at. The thing is like, when we talk to a lot of our customers, this is what they expect us to do next. Right? And so we kind of talk about some of this plan, like, yes, like, of course, like this is, this is what I want from you guys. And so that's definitely where our heads are at and we want to be able to help with the output side. And so. But yeah, I think most people are like dabbling and recently I think people are starting to play around with some of the generative AI solutions as well. I don't know if that's picked up as much, but like it's getting there and people are kind of having fun with those. So those are some of the areas that I've seen people playing around with.
- [58:43]
Connor McDonald
Yeah. Cool. Cody, are you guys using AI in your creative processes at all?
- [58:47]
David Herman
Very little. Definitely a little bit of research, probably not to the extent that we should or could be, but definitely a little bit of, you know, doing surveys and exporting them and asking Chat GPT to do the analysis or doing reviews. But I think I'm very bullish on the research component more than anything. I think I'm very skeptical. And we are, we have definitely experimented with a few things. Again, most I just don't think are ready for prime time yet in terms of Gen AI and actually making stuff. The quality just is not there yet from what I've seen. But it's, you know, we, we record this in a year and I'm sure we, it will be. But I think the research component, yeah, I'm pretty bullish on just being able to get all of those insights that Reza talked about, all of your AD data, all of your Reviews, stuff like that I'm big on.
- [59:31]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I love the research component because I'm a huge fan of copying. That's like I. When it comes to. There is a type of creative strategy that is just like, unsexy. You ask people for like, good ad ideas or whatever, and everybody wants to do like, I'm being a little mean, but people will act like they're like SNL writers all of a sudden.
- [59:51]
Reza Kajavi
Right.
- [59:51]
Connor McDonald
And it's like, yeah, like, what you should do is like, look at the best brands in the space, identify what you think the ads are that are working and like, why does it work for them and how could that be applied to you? It's like a very simple, like, methodical approach to like, creative strategy that will get you far. There's. And then we, we talk about this other one where it's like trying to find like, true Net new ideas, which obviously has its value too. But a balance of the two, I think is really key. And things like the creative research tool is just a great home base to house all of those ideas that already exist that you could kind of borrow from.
- [60:27]
Reza Kajavi
Yeah, especially if you have. I think the combination is really powerful because if you've spent time looking at your own data and as a team, you. You're kind of like building on this, like, institutional knowledge that like, hey, these kinds of themes or these kinds of value props really work or like, these kinds of hooks seem to really work for us. And like, there's like, hits and misses and sometimes like, you think something is working and it's not like. But as you go through the cycle, there are probably going to be some things that, like, they're just like, known truths at the company. And like, that's kind of the benefit of like, staying on top of your data and like, being very rigorous around like, understanding performance week over week. And I think when you have that paired with understanding what other people are doing and like you said, like, some of the, some of the best brands and, and others you respect in the space and understanding what they're doing, it might be subtle, but once you actually go and execute on that, you're kind of paring in the little nuances that you know really will work well for your brand and you're adapting it to the themes or styles that like, others have done that are. That are really interesting. And so I think that's why we're like, very, very bullish on the combo because in some sense, one without the other is incomplete. If you're just like living in your own ad account, looking at your own data. Like you're just not going to get inspired enough with like new ideas. And if all you're doing is like looking at what other people are doing, like kind of missing some of the foundational rigor to know the things that have moved the needle for your own brand. And so yeah, it's like peanut butter and jelly. It's like they, they, they really do go hand in hand too.
- [62:08]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, totally. I love it. All right, cool. We've got a couple of questions here. We covered product. I was going to say we've got a lot of like smaller brands. I, I just talked to someone recently and their main questions were two people. Both their questions were like really getting started with performance Creative. So how do you recommend brands who are just beginning to invest in Performance Creative? Maybe they, they want to start thinking like a creative strategist. Where would you, where would you say they start? Aside from the awesome content on motion app.com.
- [62:38]
Reza Kajavi
Honestly, like the, the reason we worked on all the content we did is that like there was just not enough stuff around, around this category. And so like, definitely follow our. We have a newsletter that goes out every Sunday. It's called thumbstop. Should definitely check that out. We're probably doing a few virtual events every month and so definitely check all of those out. But I think the best place to start, it's very rare for like a brand who's just getting started, like they probably shouldn't go and hire a full time creative strategist. And so I think there's probably two paths. It's like, you know what's going on with your paid social, whether that is like an agency that's handling that. And so you probably want to pick an agency that is like kind of leaning creative and they kind of have a team that is like doing a lot of creative strategy as, as someone you can lean on. But probably the best place to start, even if you are working with an agency is like, pick somebody on the team. Maybe it's like the media buyer, maybe it's the head of growth. Maybe it's whoever it is, whoever cares the most about the problem. Somebody just needs to volunteer and we'll tell them to email us, we'll mail them a hat just like the one Cody's wearing. And like they just like put on the hat of the creative strategist and say, you know what, like, in addition to my job, like, I'm just gonna be the one at the company who's gonna like, take this role seriously. And I think that can be the best first step because you want to. I really do think that it is the kind of skill that you want to have as a core competency in a brand, just because creative is really important. And then you want to pick your partners who are also, like, thinking about the world this way. But it really is a core competency and someone on the team has got to start walking in that, in that footstep. And so, like, once you designate a person who's going to kind of wear the hat, then the rest kind of becomes clear. I think they just need a little bit of curiosity around and it's kind of fun, right? Like, if you are, if you have the inclination towards this question, it's like, what makes an ad perform, right? What is it about that that works well? And, and I think just having the curiosity to go and like, try to find the answer to that question for your brand. Someone just got to do it. And then there's a lot of, we talked about, like, training and resources and things you can find online around it, but just jumping into probably a really good place to start. Obviously use motion is, is a, is a good solution, but whatever you do, it's like, how do you, how do you get inspired by what the best are doing and how do you gain an understanding of what's worked for you in the past? And like, we obviously built software to facilitate that, but, like, you don't have to use software for that. You can just have an eye towards, hey, what's cool and interesting that other people are doing and being a little bit more deliberate about trying to understand your own performance and what's worked in the past. And I think once you start to do that at different scales of a brand's life, it starts to become even more critical. We've noticed that, like, somewhere around the mark of like 50,000 or 100,000amonth and spend, this starts to get pretty critical, right? And every dollar above that starts to get even more critical. But, you know, if you're, if you're under that, it's good to start kind of spending time here. But understanding that it really starts to get impactful to put a lot of calories into this problem. Probably after the kind of 50,000amonth in media spend range.
- [66:22]
Connor McDonald
Yeah, that makes total sense. I think it's a really important point to hit. I don't think there's any way around performance creative becoming a core competency for brands. Someone's got to wear the hat. I didn't realize the hats were metaphorical as well. Cody, do you have any, do you have any advice for aspiring brands looking at performance creative?
- [66:44]
David Herman
I'm, I'm curious what, you know, what Reza would say about some of this, but I'm a very big fan of, of you know, being really thoughtful about your messaging and testing what works for you. And I would be really hesitant to, to get too much ideas from what's out there and the competitors. Um, so I think, you know, tools that, you know, you can kind of look at competitors ads and, and view them are, are great and it's a great starting point, but I wouldn't put too much stock in them. I think, you know, it seems like most brands are spending like 75% of their time there and maybe 25% of their time analyzing past research, but also, you know, going really deep on understanding their customers, whether that's reviews, Reddit, Amazon reviews, things like that. And I would just invert that. You know, I'd probably go 80% of your time on understanding your customers past performance data reviews. And again, if you're trying to explore new audiences, it's, it's probably not your customer reviews or your ad comments. It's probably, you know, looking at things like Reddit is a gold mine, TikTok comments, stuff like that spend a lot more time there and probably less time thinking about, you know, competitor what they're doing. Because if you're just trying to do the same thing your competitors are doing, you're going to look like them and you really have no idea how your competitor ads are doing. And also you don't want to look, you know, if you're a brand new makeup brand, you don't want to look at Jonesboro Beauty. You know, four years later and it just might not be the same. You might not have the same awareness or the same product market fit. So I just would be really hesitant to do that.
- [68:20]
Reza Kajavi
Yeah, I think, I think it really depends on, I think it's a very good point because people need to be self aware about like where they are in their brand's journey, right? If, if they're a brand that like the concept of like fast paced direct response advertising is like foreign to their team, then it's valuable to like look around different ad libraries and see what like performance creative teams are doing just to kind of get a sense for what that style looks like. Like what does direct response advertising feel like? And like, but assuming you've, you've understood that and you really just kind of, okay, I understand direct response I'm trying to figure out like what to do. Then I think Cody's point is spot on because if you don't properly understand your customers and the value props they care about, like the things like the key points inside of your product that really trigger purchase behavior from, from your customers, then like you might create a lot of like catchy, fast paced content. But like you're not. And this is why actually to the point we were talking about, Cody brought this up, that like some of the Ogilvy old school advertiser types could be good performance creative types. Is that thinking about like the messaging and the copy is a really core part of like building a good creative asset. Because it's like what message am I trying to communicate? Right? And you kind of need clarity around, around that. And then part of direct response advertising is like, I know that I'm going to appear inside of this like very cluttered, very fast paced, like low attention span feed. And so I need to solve for that. But like there's this, there's this like message that I'm trying to deliver around a problem statement or a solution or comparison or solution, something like that. And if you don't have clarity around what that is probably going to be like spinning your wheel. So I like that idea of basically maybe one way to frame it. What Cody is saying is like you got to get your fundamentals right, you know, and if, and if those are not in place, then like kind of just wasting your time going and seeing what other people are doing.
- [70:31]
Connor McDonald
I could not have said it better. I was trying to figure out how to, how to say that message exactly. And I think you just nailed it because, because yeah, it's like you don't want to copy the message. You want to, you want to have clarity around what the message is you're trying to send to consumers. And then when I said I liked copying earlier, I think, I think in terms of formats and styles you can be inspired in how you want to deliver that message in a way that resonates with people on any given social platform. And it could be different between Twitter and TikTok and you know, the Instagram feed and Facebook stories or whatever. So like making that distinction I think is really key. And people like, I think mix that up all the time. I, I just told it to my team over the weekend where I was like, we have to edit this ad for Twitter. It doesn't land on Twitter in the same way. The message is resonating. It was working on Facebook. So I'm like How do we, how do we adopt this message to resonate with people on Twitter? And that's like. That is a question around style and format, not necessarily around that, that having clarity around the point of it.
- [71:28]
David Herman
Totally agreed.
- [71:28]
Connor McDonald
I think we've got. I've got one more question. Code, if you've got anything else. I'm hoping to get a contrarian view you hold around DTC marketing today. It can be creative. It could be something else. You've been working in D2C for a long time. You've been ahead of the curve on many things. So do you have anything any contrarian takes for us?
- [71:44]
Reza Kajavi
I feel like I got to say something around cost caps.
- [71:50]
Connor McDonald
Any, any take on cost caps, you know, feels contrarian.
- [71:54]
Reza Kajavi
The thing, the thing that's really interesting about our ecosystem is that there are people advocating for all of the ideas, right? All parts of the ideas. I think that's what makes the ecosystem really rich is that I actually don't know if you can articulate a contrarian idea that someone doesn't hold somewhere and is kind of saying it, but one that I felt for quite a while and I think we're past that now. I think it was a lot more contrarian 2 1/2 years ago. I was very bullish about this with my team, but I think people put way more calories into attribution than was necessary. I don't, I don't think that is like contrarian anymore these days. But, you know, one of the things I feel like happens when you obsess too much about attribution and we've kind of. We practice this in our, in our own go to market is that the more obsessed you get about, like trying to be able to predict every single little thing on a spreadsheet, you might be able to achieve that, but it's going to turn very expensive and not have a very big scale. Right. If you want to do something that is like very cost effective and works on a very big scale, I think you need to be able to leap a little bit around from the obsession of I need to be able to draw the dollar back to every single little thing. And so I think that's the part around the rigor that might drag our ecosystem down a little bit is that sometimes you could, you could get. You could get really bogged down by trying to be able to measure every single little thing. It's like, how do you measure the right things and focus on. I think Taylor Holiday put this midwit curve out where it was something around like Just kind of look at the bank account. Yeah, right. And like, there's something about that that's very cool. I like that idea of if you're monitoring the right thing and that right thing is moving in the right direction, isn't that all that matters, like, at the end? Like, that's kind of really all. All that you're trying to solve for. And I think there is, because we are an ecosystem that is like very rigorous, we can get a little bit lost in that part of. In that part of the world workflow, which is why I think it's very important to balance. It's like what obviously can't not have, like, rigor. And you got to be like looking at data obviously is spending like the amount of money that are. That our ecosystem does. But where is the limit of that and where do we need to just like, fly from a creative standpoint? And I think being able to balance those two things would help people unlock bigger scale and cheaper costs. If they're able to let their creativity fly a little bit, not be too obsessed with every little. Every little detail on what. What can be measured.
- [74:51]
Connor McDonald
I think that's a great answer, Connor, what's yours? My contrarian take. I wasn't prepared. I'm not getting interviewed. I. Not so much a contrarian take. I would have told you this years ago, and it hasn't picked up in the way that I expected, but I think drop shipping just gets way more popular. Dropshipping's had this like, very negative connotation, but you kind of see it now with like social shopping. Like TikTok shop in a way is drop shipping and YouTube affiliate like. I think that the, the, the point of purchase just gets distributed so far online that everything gets drop shipped. I'll give you the example that I talk about all the time is like, we sell on Huckberry and we sell the Huckberry. We order stuff from overseas, they ship it over, we get it in our warehouse, we unpack it, we repack it, we ship it to Huckberry, they unpack it. Then they ship it to a customer. That seems really, really dumb. And, and I think that all goes away over time. So that's one of mine. Harley Finkelstein said it at one point. He said drop shipping is a process improvement which like people in E commerce don't really think about it that way. We think of drop shipping is like people, you know, just shipping stuff from China for dirt cheap and, you know, growth hacking Facebook ads. And I just think it'll become more Commonplace. So that's the first thing that comes to mind.
- [76:02]
David Herman
I like that. I like that. Definitely very contrary.
- [76:04]
Connor McDonald
Have you got one for us, Cody? Are we closing out with contrary all around?
- [76:07]
David Herman
I was thinking about it. I, I agree with what Reza said. Like a lot of the, the takes, you know, you've seen somebody else have. Right. If you're like cost caps or attribution or stuff like that. So it's hard to think of one.
- [76:19]
Connor McDonald
Could I. Well I'll give you a second to think because I do have a comment answer. We had Jared Brody on from Resident Home who does Nectar Mattress who are like, they were the ones that I was like oh, they understand performance creative. We were working with them years ago and I was like that is what it should look like. Incredibly analytical, incredibly data driven. They're doing MMM and MTA the whole thing. But he said on our podcast he goes look if I want to show a connected TV ad to everybody who has been on our site through connected TV because that's just good marketing. Because I'm not going to let like our inability to measure this two day period get in the way of good marketing marketing which I think is, yeah, maybe he said something like that. But it's a really nice balance because we totally, I do, I think many people do get hung up on yeah. Attribution and ability to, to justify and measure roi when in reality we know what good marketing is and we should, we should be able to do that. And what ultimately matters is the bank account. So you got to make sure that's penciling out. But I, I, I'm hearing from very smart people that that's a compl, common theme. Something I'm picking up on. But Cody, hit us with your contrarian take.
- [77:27]
David Herman
I like it. I think if I had one, one that like is maybe it's controvert, maybe it's contrary, maybe it's controversial. It's, it's my use and belief in upper funnel campaigns on paid social. I think that's, that's an out there one that a lot of people don't agree with and you know, have seen it work for us. But also it's just like yeah if you understand, you know the, the, the machine learning, the optimization engines and stuff like that and just like buying, you know, buying cycles like perform conversion optimized stuff has a lot of benefits, don't get me wrong. But you know, it's not the only optimization, it's not the only way to, to do things. I think a few years ago it was like I thought, you know, for us, like, UGC never worked and we did a lot of studio stuff and, and I thought that that was, you know, something that was really overlooked and, and people were really dogmatic about just ugc. I don't know about you guys. I'm feeling a shift back to that. I feel like more people are, are kind of advocating for, for some more high def stuff, but hopefully in a few years I'll be right about this one.
- [78:31]
Connor McDonald
I like it. All right, cool. Reza, anything you want to leave the audience with, you know, Sign up for the newsletter. Follow you on Twitter.
- [78:39]
Reza Kajavi
Yeah, I mean, sign up for thumbstop. I think you should definitely sign up for Creative Research. We built it as a free product. It's kind of our product gift to the ecosystem. We think about it similar to our newsletter, where we built the newsletter to like, add value to the ecosystem and we think about Creative Research in the same way. And so you should definitely sign up for the product, use it, try it, tell us what you think. And join Motions by Virtual Events. They're really good. Evan, who who hosts them does an incredible job and I've been to a bunch of like B2B SaaS events and can tell you ours are really good. Proof is in the pudding. I told you. Our last one got 18,000 registrants. And so go to motion motionapp.com events, see which ones are coming up and you will not regret attending one amazing, awesome resident.
- [79:33]
Connor McDonald
Thank you again for coming on.
- [79:34]
Reza Kajavi
Thank you. Thanks for having me, guys.
- [79:35]
David Herman
Thanks, man.
- [79:36]
Connor McDonald
All right, that's a wrap on another episode. Thank you again for listening. Make sure to subscribe, make sure to share, and as always, thank you to our sponsors. Motion Prescient Enrichment.