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E038: Is AppLovin Living Up To The Hype & How We're Scaling Creative Partnerships
01:07:33
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- [00:00]
Connor
Connor, how old are you now? Happy birthday, by the way.
- [00:03]
Cody
Oh, wow. Yeah. Thank you. Dude, I haven't thought. Dude, I didn't think much about my birthday before leading up to or after. It was.
- [00:11]
Connor
It feels like a crazy timing.
- [00:14]
Cody
Yeah, yeah. No, I turned. I turned 31 on Friday. I had dinner with. With Sean Ridge, CEO. So not too much different. Well, you know what's funny is our buddy. We started an agency together years ago with another guy, John, and John was in town, so we were all planning on getting together, and I'm like, yeah, guys, we should get dinner Friday. This was, like, early last week. And then I was leading up to it, and I was going to tell my wife. I'm like, hey, I'm going out with the boys. And then I was like, oh, man, Friday's my birthday. I'd accidentally made birthday plans, so had to, like, pivot. Pivot plans, get more people included, you know, things like that. But, yeah, ended up being great. And, you know, more than anything, this was. This was November 22nd. So Friday, last week. This will come out in a couple of weeks. Sales for everybody just seemed to start ripping Thursday, the day before. So Thursday and my birthday, Friday were great sales day. So everybody was like, I hope you had a great birthday. I'm like, look, sales are up. I'm having an incredible birthday. So everything that could go well did.
- [01:18]
Connor
I would say, where'd you go for dinner? I know you're in L. A.
- [01:21]
Cody
We went to a place in Santa Monica called the Golden Bull, which is in, like, kind of the. The most northern point in Santa Monica. It's almost the Palisades. And one of the pieces of lore that I like about the Golden Bull is it's where they went to dinner before creating caa. So Michael Ovit started Creative Artist Agency. I think that's what CAA stands for. And they, like, scheme that up. They were leaving their previous agency. They did that at Golden Bull. I think that's really cool lore. So that's become a tradition when going out with John and Sean.
- [01:51]
Sean
What is Creative Artists Agency? What's the. What's the deal with that?
- [01:54]
Cody
They're one of the biggest talent agencies.
- [01:56]
Sean
Oh, got it. Okay. Got it. So just connecting with, like, creators of all types.
- [02:02]
Cody
Yeah, Yeah. I think they're like, what, like, Ari.
- [02:04]
Connor
Gold works at an Entourage?
- [02:06]
Cody
Yes, exactly.
- [02:07]
Connor
Like every. Like, they rep, like, every athlete. And.
- [02:09]
Cody
Yeah, Ari Gold is kind of. No, he's based on Ari Emanuel. Ari Emanuel used to work for Michael Ovitz at one point. So, like, anyway, yeah, there are ties. What Ari Gold does is, is more or less caa.
- [02:22]
Sean
Interesting. Interesting. So, so your birthday gets somewhat, I would imagine like dwarfed with the time of year with work. But if you guys have a good Black Friday then you get to celebrate and like be doubly, doubly good vibes with the good sales and the, and the birthday.
- [02:37]
Cody
Yeah, totally, totally. And, and usually it's much closer. Not this year though. But yeah, overall solid day.
- [02:43]
Sean
I feel like I don't know about you guys. I'm like, I'm feeling that, that like Chris Christmas Eve 10 year old Christmas Eve feeling with, with Thanksgiving being two days from now. I'm, I was. We've been going back and forth about some projections and I'm excited. It's like, it's, it's a little more uncertain. At least when you're 10 on Christmas Eve, you know you got, you know you got a bunch of cool presents coming the next day on, on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. You're like, I hope I hit projections. I think we're going to, but we'll find out.
- [03:11]
Cody
Yeah, I think that's a good, that's a good metaphor. If you were 10 on Christmas Eve but you weren't sure there were going to be presents.
- [03:19]
Connor
You don't know if you're getting presents or coal.
- [03:22]
Sean
Yeah, yeah, exactly is the truck.
- [03:24]
Cody
But this, this will come out in a couple weeks. So let's all. We could just all channel. We're going to have awesome Black Fridays, awesome Cyber Mondays and we, we'll be, we'll be just cruising through mid December when this, when this episode comes out.
- [03:37]
Sean
It'll be great.
- [03:41]
Cody
Foreign.
- [03:47]
Sean
So when I took over as head of growth at Hexclad, one of our biggest priorities in 2023 was to grow our revenue, our top line revenue by scaling paid social specifically through more creative testing. Everyone knows that as you spend more on Facebook ads using the same creative, the same landing pages, the same offers, your efficiency gets worse. That is a nature of, of scaling paid media. As you spend more, you reach more people. As you reach more people, quality of traffic degrades. One way to offset this is by enhancing the amount of creative that you're testing. And like I said, that was a huge strategy of ours in 2023. It continues to be this year and it's ultimately what let us spend over 50% more year over year while maintaining our one day click ROAS. We probably 2, 3, maybe even 4x our creative output in 2023. And that allowed us to scale our Facebook account efficiently. Now, Motion allowed us to understand out of that enhanced creative output what was actually working the best. You know, shots on net is great, but in order to do it effectively, you still need to understand which of those shots on net are doing the best so you can scale it up effectively in motion. Let us understand what was working exactly while 3,4Xing our creative output and ultimately allowed us to scale our Facebook account very efficiently in 2023 compared to 2022. So if you're in the process of setting up your creative flywheel and you're about to really enhance the amount of creative testing that you're putting into your ad account, then you also need a tool like Motion to understand which of those creative tests are working and which ones you should be spending more on, which and less on and doing more of and less of. So if that's you and that's the stage that your brand is at, then you need to be booking a demo today or creating a free account@motion app.com Motion offers a monthly subscription plan so you can dodge those annoying annual contracts. And if you mention the marketing operators podcast Emotion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month. Well, today we got some fun topics, some hot button talk topics. I think Cody's got probably the most sought after data set in all of E commerce right now. The data point that everyone's interested in. So we're going to talk about the hottest new ad channel app Lovin a little bit and kind of what each of our experience has been advertising there. I think we are all officially live there now. I think Hex guy was the last one to the party and then we're going to switch gears a little bit and talk about some new partnership creative campaigns that Ridge has got going on and kind of dissect that a little bit. So got a fun one today. Thank you to the sponsors Motion Rich panel and prescient. Let's get into it. Yeah, App Lovin. So we're all officially live. Cody. When I say Cody has the most sought after data set in E commerce right now on the hottest channel e commerce, I'm saying that because Cody ran a holdout test. I think a lot of us have been running it and kind of using the MTA to, to validate and sort of compare what we're seeing in Applovin with some of our other top channels. Cody actually concluded the holdout test I believe. So Cody, I want to kick it over to you and just like let us know a, like what was the test and b, what are you seeing? And see, is it aligned with what you're seeing in mta?
- [07:05]
Connor
Yeah. Great question. Before I share, just question for you guys. Do you guys ever get in trouble for stuff you say on the Internet, either on the podcast or Twitter or anything like that? Because I do all the time, and I'm probably about to right now.
- [07:18]
Cody
I typically get praise and glory.
- [07:23]
Sean
I was going to say it seems to be more positive feedback, but every once in a while, every once in a while I'll say something and Jason or Danny will be like, hey, you shouldn't, you shouldn't say that about, about our business.
- [07:32]
Connor
I'll say something that I think is like, totally innocent or like a joke. And I'll get like one of our like channel reps. They'll call me, be like, hey, leadership was asking about this. Like, what's going on with that? I'm like a joke. Like, it, it didn't mean anything. But I don't know in my mind, like, no one listens to me or follows me, so I'm always putting my foot in my mouth.
- [07:49]
Cody
I got a nerve from some, from some channel reps as well. I said, I just made. It was very much like an offhand comment. It was on one of motion's or no, sorry, Aaron Orndorf's live events made some comment about a certain ad platform's reps during the holidays. And our media buyers who like interface with them all the time, they were like, dude, they were, they were kind of bummed you said that. And I was. But it comes with the territory.
- [08:13]
Connor
I'm sure Sean must get it.
- [08:14]
Cody
Sean's for sure gotten it. Yeah, yeah.
- [08:17]
Connor
And like, I always feel bad, but like, I'm also like, besides our sponsors, I love you all. I'm not paid for by anybody. You know what I mean? I'm a, I'm a free man. So I'm going to share the good, the bad and the ugly with any channel.
- [08:29]
Sean
I think it might be a SaaS rep problem. Maybe it's not a marketer, a marketing operator's problem. It's a SaaS reps problem. That, yeah, I'm seeing the pattern here.
- [08:38]
Cody
I was gonna, I, I just to talk about Applovin quickly. I wanna hear about the test, but could we maybe tee up for people not chronically on direct to consumer Twitter? Like just the, the state of it. Cause also, Cody, you were kind of patient zero. I mean, we brought up Applovin at least a month ago or something. It was a while back. And then it really reached Like a frenzy over the last six or seven days.
- [09:01]
Sean
Yeah, yeah. So. So Applovin, first off, if you want an awesome background on Applovin, the my first million with one of the founders of, of Applovin is awesome. I think Connor, you actually told me about that and then I listened to it a month or so ago and that's an awesome like you want to talk about a good episode that like gets behind like the day to day operations of how a billion dollar company came to be. It's, it's really cool. But yeah, Applovin is a company that originally I believe started in developing games, right? Like developing iPhone games, Android games. Do they do, do they both? Do they do both or is it mainly iOS?
- [09:36]
Cody
I'm sure they do both.
- [09:37]
Sean
They do both. So that was their initial. I forget exactly like what their unique angle was there, but they had some sort of insight into like these games that were working really well and they're developing games and all of a sudden they realized with all the users that all of these iOS and Android, you know, gaming applications have, there's a, you know, a pretty big opportunity to develop an ad network on top of it. And that is what's happening right now. I think they rolled that out. I don't know if they rolled the ad network recently or is it just more accessible as of late? Like I wasn't sure it was available.
- [10:08]
Connor
To like app events, but wasn't available to e commerce events.
- [10:12]
Sean
Right, got it. Okay, so now recently a bunch of E commerce brands are hopping in there and starting to advertise there. It is very early days. It's all managed service. You just tell them the budget, you give them the creative and they launch it for you. And yeah, now everyone's kind of in the, in the early days of, of trying to validate the channel and a lot of the, of the data points look really promising, like you know, really incredible MTA based return on ad spend numbers. I think varying spectrums of net new visit rate. And I'll tell you what, I'm hearing stories today. It was the, was the largest I heard of brands spending six figures a day on apploading. So seems to me like a lot of brands are finding a lot of scale out of it. But yeah, it's still, still very early days.
- [11:01]
Cody
And what surprised me a little bit about like the conversation so far is it's like spanned a whole spectrum of like people incredibly skeptical about how it is like a scam or like how like the promotion of it is, is nefarious in some way to other people being like this is going to rival meta ads. Like they're like this is, this is like the saving grace for ecom. So we're really as I think as a community trying to navigate what feels like a really wide spectrum.
- [11:30]
Connor
Where do you guys stand on the spectrum? One being you're extremely skeptical, you think it's fraud or just won't work and 10 being like this is like you know, the second coming. Where do you guys stand currently?
- [11:45]
Sean
The second coming. 10. No, I'm not a 10. We're not spending 100k a day. If we can get there then maybe. But I'd say I'm five. We launched this literally on Friday. And yeah, we can get into like what we're seeing in our data but I'd say I'm like I'm five out of five based on the initial data. But the other five is I'm, I'm like bullish. The, the five that's bullish is based on the initial data but the five that's not is like oh, we're not going to show you any of the networks that we're serving ads on. Oh, you don't have like any control over what we're doing. Um, which seems a little sketchy to me. Um, so we'll see. I'm five out of five. What about you Connor?
- [12:24]
Cody
I think, yeah, I think five's really conservative on that scale. Cuz there is no scenario where it's like a one or like a two even like it is objectively working unless.
- [12:33]
Connor
You found out it was just like bought traffic that was somehow buying or whatever.
- [12:37]
Cody
And I saw people, I saw like yeah, I saw people like entertaining that idea and like I, I think we could really rule that out that there are undoubtedly people clicking through and purchasing at a very high rate and then so I don't think I'm highly skeptical of the idea that it is some like super scalable like meta comparable channel. What I think is also true because we've been through this a bunch of times being really relatively early, particularly from a, from an E. Comm brand perspective to new channels is one. It is a. I think it's a high value audience. We know it skews a bit older, we know it skews more female and we know it is high quality ad space like it is. It is full screen vertical video. If you have a product offer and content that works. If you just show that to new people and new people who haven't really been seeing direct to consumer ads in this Network they've typically just been seeing like other Candy Crush knockoffs and things like that will work initially. So like I actually have very little skepticism and I think a lot of the house tests validate that to some degree that these are like real impactful results early on. Everything I just described though isn't. Aren't the attributes of a network that you're going to be able to spend 100k on forever. Their network would need to be growing a lot and they'll. And I think it'll need to get more sophisticated over time. So jury is still out in my opinion on the scalability of it. So. So given those two things I'd give it like a seven. I'll also say we've been on a lot of new ad networks and we're going to spend like 70k a day over the next couple days. So we're ripping over there. And I've never spent 70k on another ad platform. Like we've never gotten Reddit or Twitter or Snap which I'd all put in the bucket of like initial results. Really good. We've never gotten to 70k a day. So in that case, yeah, I think seven, eight, something like that. I think it'll be a really meaningful kind of peripheral channel in, in D2C brands Marketing mixes real quick.
- [14:38]
Sean
You called something out Connor, that I think is interesting of like the, the low hanging fruit component. These people generally have not been getting E commerce ads, so there's just a bunch of people there. Like the same way that you often see a massive pump through Canada. If you've been building a brand in, in the US for like multiple years, like is there just low hanging fruit ready to convert? They're, they're prying. They've, you know, it's the. As you spend more, as there's more advertisers, the more you have to pay to get a, a cpa. Like that's, you know, most people are aware of that if you're a media buyer. That's how Facebook ads work. Are we just in like the glory days of this channel and a year from now the, the low hanging fruit's gonna be all swept up and CPAs are gonna go up and ROAs will come down. Who knows, right?
- [15:18]
Cody
Yeah. And then does it become a channel that you can spend 10 to 20k a day if you're a really big brand? Like that seems highly likely we. Which is great for everyone and super bullish rap lovin. I just don't, I don't think it becomes a. I Don't know if it becomes like a true meta alternative. But again, we're just like. We're just. We're just discussing the spectrum of opinions that have been kind of thrown around over the last couple days. Cody, you can tell us where you land or if you want to talk about the test first, maybe how that informs your opinion. You. You could do that.
- [15:47]
Connor
I think one. One thing I'll say before the test, but, yeah, I think people are gonna be super pissed. Cause we're just like teasing the test and then not getting it till like, 40 minutes in. Um, yeah, the.
- [15:55]
Cody
The.
- [15:56]
Connor
The reaction that I thought was the funniest and I think is just really interesting. Like, psychology is like, everybody thinks that people are shilling this and getting paid. And usually, like, when you see people start talking about something on ddc, Twitter, they're getting paid. I'm just saying it. Like, you'll see a new app come up out of nowhere, and people need this new SaaS and like, everybody's getting paid and they're not disclosing. And so I think that's what's happening. I think that's what's usually happening. That is, for the best of my knowledge, that's not. Not what's happening here. It's like that meme for. What's that movie where the guy's like, you guys are getting paid and like. Like that, that, that, like, drug movie where he got, like, family.
- [16:34]
Cody
I. I know the reference. Wait, you guys are getting paid? Yeah.
- [16:38]
Connor
Yeah, right. I don't remember it, but that's almost maybe what it feels like here. But credit. What's that?
- [16:44]
Sean
Is that we are the Millers.
- [16:46]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one. Good, good classic movie. So outside of that, I think there's two things. I think people like being influencers, and it's kind of, you know, funny, but I think people like to say that they're early to something, and I think that's just kind of normal psychology. So, you know, it can be. Definitely be annoying, but I just think that's like a natural human thing. And then I think number two, and this is more important, I think it just shows how starved for a second major acquisition channel we are. I think TikTok had promise a few years ago. I think that was more of a CPM arbitrage. And I don't think the scale was there. And I think the timing worked really well where the user base was growing pretty rapidly. So there was available inventory, but the costs were pretty cheap. I think now the user base is not growing the CPMs are higher and they've pivoted to shops. I think shops is working for some brands but you know, you have to go fully into that. I have concerns about that being short lived and so you know, besides YouTube for some brands, TV like they're not, there is not really a rival to Meta and you know, we'll talk about TV after this with Connor. But like TV you can spend on, I don't think you can spend meta amounts. You're not going to spend $70,000 a day. But you know, you can get it to work and scale but it's so much harder on a creative and measurement standpoint. I think the reasons why Applovin is so attractive, first of all it's very low lift. There's a lot of scale. Like we talked about, you know, last week where Connor was like I'm not interested in any channels that you can spend $2,000 a day. There are brands spending six figures a day. There's brands spending you know, 50k plus like pretty easily. And so I think that's super attractive for the right brand. I saw data from Jeremiah, from Noah's, shared some really interesting stuff. It's a very, it's, it is a more mature customer base. So it's, it's probably skews, you know, older compared to any of the other channels. So for some brands that, that's actually a great thing for us it probably is. You can use your existing creative like Connor said, you get, you know, full ad unit that captures attention. So I think there are a lot of reasons to be really bullish about it. I do. I also don't think it's a CPM arbitrage thing. I don't know about you guys. We have a $44 cpm that's 30% higher than Meta, you know, at least. So I don't think that's a CPM arbitrage thing. There might be some of that, you know, a lot of law of shitty click throughs where it's going to work a lot better and then people are going to get, you know, numb to it and it won't work as well. But I don't think it's like a CPM thing. What I don't know, I don't know anyone, I don't know anything about ad tech. I don't know what walled garden means. I still have no idea. So like I don't know if they have any proprietary where I've seen some stuff where like people are like, well they own the demand side and the supply side, I have no idea what that means, so I have no idea if that does anything for them. But yeah, what are your thoughts on some of that?
- [19:36]
Cody
To connect two points. You just made everyone starve for a second channel. I also am biased and am so down to spend more money on short form vertical video. Like I talk about that all the time. But the fact that we can invest more of our time into short form vertical video and that will work across placements on meta and YouTube shorts and snap and TikTok and now app Lovin. It's like I would like, I would like all advertisers to align around a format so we could just hone in like certain types of creative and then spend on them everywhere. Um, I think it'd be fantastic. And it's one reason why Applovin's like there's been such a meteoric rise is because startup costs are zero. It's like that's how it was described to me. Hey, just take your best performers from meta, put them on Applovin. It works pretty well so it's incredible. So anyway, I just highlighting both those points I think, I think are super key to its success.
- [20:25]
Sean
Yeah, you're definitely, you're definitely in a better place if you have a flywheel to produce short form video. I mean you're, you're definitely ahead of the curve on Applovin. If that's the case, Cody, we're seeing the same thing. CPMs are not higher than Facebook. They're actually, they're a little lower but about the same. The, the click through rate is what's like insanely high our, our cost per click because of how high our click through rate is like, I mean shit, our click through rate probably triple what it is in Apploven compared to what it is in Facebook which is like actually over triple. I'm looking right now since we launched, which is insane. So it seems to be a very engaged audience. Again, maybe that's just because these consumers aren't used to seeing e commerce ads and they're like, wow, this is different than that shady knockoff app that I'm, that I'm seeing. Like if you know, you put a, put a video of like Gordon Ramsay endorsing a pan right after, you know, an ad push into like some kind of cheap looking app. Like that's going to, you know, feel really legitimate and I don't know, maybe there's something to be said about that. Who knows?
- [21:27]
Cody
Yeah. One point that I would make there is like, I think I, I Just said it's short form vertical video which like equates it to other channels. There are differences right? Like Applovin isn't immediately skippable so you guarantee more watch time, you're getting more seconds watched and that makes a really big impact. Right. So if you look, I haven't looked at this but like in theory you can have a much higher CPM from Applovin and you can have a lower cost per three second view because you're retaining that many more people. So that's really like, that's a big difference. Like somebody can immediately skip through an Instagram reel but they've got to watch a couple of seconds of Applovin and like obviously that should come with some sort of CPM premium because they're not equivalent.
- [22:10]
Sean
Yeah, that's true. What about Cody, you said something that I'm, I'm curious about. What is the size of, of Applovin's user base and like do you guys know what any of their like growth numbers, their user growth numbers are?
- [22:26]
Connor
I know they're probably so it's probably available. I know the number I've heard is 140,000 apps on their network. Um, I don't know user base and, and that would be definitely something to look into. I think one other, one other point of why it's taking on taking off, it's click based. Imagine if all of the same attributes we said but like it was more of a YouTube kind of feel where like people search for it later. Like I think that was a challenge with TikTok. TikTok was probably mid funnel but it probably drove more discovery value than, than meta in terms of views so it was harder to quantify and see the value and I think especially for most brands that are seven and eight figures that don't have access to something like a house, it's going to be hard to justify that if you don't see that see it in you know some type of direct click attribution. And I think that is another reason where you know it's not always perfectly accurate especially at our scales but people are able to see the value in their tools and dashboards of choice which I think really helps to give them confidence to spend there.
- [23:28]
Sean
So that's interesting. So do they not. If you are playing Candy Crush and you see an app, love an ad and you just let it play through and then you keep playing Candy Crush and then you go buy a ridge wallet within 24 hours, is that not attributing? Because I actually when you Said that I just went and bounced from our clicks only to clicks and views and our one day was the same.
- [23:49]
Connor
So I don't know about you know, north beam. I primarily just look at clicks but in app loving my understanding the only attribution setting is a seven day click.
- [23:57]
Sean
Got it, got it. Yeah, I've yet to be like actually.
- [24:00]
Connor
Inside but I mean even I guess I'm more talking about like the user behavior is like I don't think that this is a channel where it drives a ton of discovery and then people search for it later. I feel like a lot of the value it seems like are showing up and in clicks it it seems and Jeremiah has shared some data and I'll get into our test eventually. I promise that it seems to be less of a discovery channel and more of a last touch channel. Yeah, Jeremiah shared just some of the data that they have from know that you know they're not seeing it show up that much on discovery. Even though spend is going up across you know, their data set. You're not getting that much like here's where I first heard about you but especially I think when there's some like clickbait use teams attached like what brought you to our site today? Question. A lot of people are saying, you know, they're not saying Apple oven, they're saying some type of mobile gaming app and so it doesn't you know that would obviously have a higher proportion of of clicks if it's like a lower funnel channel. We've been talking about upper funnel channels a lot especially leading up into, you know, peak moments and, and honestly it's been one of the biggest unlocks for us as a business is you know, helping us reach net new customers and getting them into our funnel. But the challenge is historically the stuff is very difficult to measure. You're not going to see it, you know, in platform roas clicks. So one of our secret weapons this year has been prescient AI. We onboarded with them about midway through the year and it's been a game changer in helping us to measure some of these very difficult to measure upward funnel channels like tv, like linear tv, like streaming. They've been able to move really quickly, the team's been great and actually get betas up with new channels that we've been testing. So it's been great, we've been loving it. We're able to to see and forecast if we were able to scale and spend on some of these channels, you know what our incrementality would look like. Pression has become a really important part of our marketing workflow. It's. It's one of the main tools that we use to set our budgets every month. And yeah, it's just become a really important, you know, part of our stack that we feel like we can't live without at this point. We love the unbiased cross channel measurement. It has also love the halo effects where we're able to actually see how it's impacting. You know we're just on D2C but I know brands that are on Amazon, they're able to get halo effects to actually see how their upper funnel spend and their D2C spend is impacting Amazon. So it's just become a really big part of our workflow and I can't recommend it enough. We're using it. Hexclad is using it. Symbiotica Coterie and dozens more impressions blowing up from everyone I talk to. Can't say enough good things about it. If you want to try it to measure some of these upper funnel channels that we're talking about oppression AI.com/operators to book a demo.
- [26:33]
Sean
So I think that's a good transition into. Another important data point topic within Applovin is how top of funnel is it. There's been a lot of conversation about net new visit rate and net new customer order rate. What are you guys seeing for net new visit? Is this top of funnel? Is it driving first time web visits or is it more remarketing to people that have already visited your site or. Or a pretty mixed bag.
- [26:59]
Connor
Let me, let me finally share the test results.
- [27:01]
Sean
Yeah, go ahead.
- [27:02]
Connor
Yeah, you gotta be a good way to answer that one good way to teed up and then definitely want to hear what you guys are seeing in North Beam. So ran a test November 11th to 22nd, so about two weeks. You know we were probably spending 10k a day on average. We actually bumped it. You know you can kind of. You can't spend less than your original plan for a house test. As you guys know, you can spend more. So we did bump it and you know, for the majority of it in platform, sorry in, in North Beam looked really good. The one call out and I've seen some other people talk about this. The percentage of new visits actually decreased over time. Um, so I've seen a few people kind of say this lately. So for us it started pretty in line with Meta and I'd say like October, early November are like one day click roas on like all which is like the main. The thing we look at first was, was better than meta and then when we looked at like one day click on for new it was probably like similar. So like more efficient on total, same efficiency on new which means less percentage of new. And over time we just saw that new visitor rate, new customer rate go down. So I had a feeling that it would be plus with it there data Jeremiah shared I had a feeling it would be incremental for us, but not as incremental on new customers as we would like. And that's what we're finding. So it was incremental on both like a 3% lift on new customers, like a 4 or 5% lift on total. So overall great a number where it is still profitable. I think it was like a 40 something dollar cost per incremental order. You know on a $100 AOV, $100 plus $AOV like that's, that's great. But new customer, you know, cost per incremental new customers is above 100, well above. So it was not nearly as incremental as we want, not nearly as efficient as we would want. So ultimately for us like that's, it's hard to justify it. And this is, I don't know if you guys ever do this where you, you get a question that you can't really answer like the way you want it and you think you know it and it's kind of frustrating. But somebody, you know, somebody asked, they're like well it's still incremental. You're still producing contribution margin, like why do you care if it's new or not? I'm curious how you guys would answer that one, but that's what we're finding. So I'd say a little bit bummed. We probably were spending up to 40k like this past weekend on it and I don't really have the confidence or want to spend that much to reacquire or get purchases from repeat customers. I would rather, you know, put that money into more of a new customer acquisition play. But that's what we're finding so far.
- [29:42]
Sean
So. So you're saying the, the cost per incremental first time order is still profitable, but comparatively not as efficient as some other channels that you ran holdouts on. In terms of the cost per first.
- [29:57]
Connor
Order, the cost, we're losing money on new customers. It's incremental, but it's incremental where it's still, it's like $150 cost per incremental. So we're probably never getting paid back at that. I mean On a, you know, we probably have $150 lifetime revenue over the first year. So with cogs and fulfillment like we're probably not getting paid back on that. So that's, that's not within our acquisition targets. Yeah, we are seeing a total, I'm going to pull up a total cost per incremental that is profitable. But you know, we don't normally think about spending media spend and significant media spend to, for repeat customer revenue.
- [30:38]
Sean
Right.
- [30:38]
Connor
That kind of breaks the model. I just am having a hard time kind of explaining to people why. But I would rather put that money into acquisition.
- [30:46]
Sean
I mean there's more cost effective ways. Right. Like, I mean for us, we think about it, we, we love repeat driving repeat orders through own media, through organic social. I mean we've already paid. There's, there's not no cost to you know, sending those, I mean texts and emails cost money to send out. But it's certainly more, it's, it's marginally more cost effective than spending, you know, dollars on a loyalty audience probably. At least that's how, that's how I.
- [31:11]
Connor
Think it just breaks your model. Like if you have an LTV to CAC model and you're accounting for things you have to account for, then that reacquisition spend in your LTV model and that may, you know, significantly impact things because then you're making less contribution margin on these repeat orders and so maybe you, that changes what you can spend to acquire a customer or vice versa.
- [31:33]
Cody
Yeah, I don't know. It's tricky. This is not, this isn't applovin specific at this point. It is. Yeah. How do you think about the cost of reactivating a customer? I agree with Connor that it feels weird to spend money to reactivate a customer because you think there would be more cost effective ways like whether that's email or SMS or direct mail or you know, something else we don't in house. But the flip side is in house we don't, we don't filter or we don't segment new and returning orders because if it's incremental, I'm like, I don't really care. Like we're proving out that these orders would not have happened otherwise. We also don't really have. We, we are built on acquiring customers anyway. So it's not that big of a difference. So that's, that's the other side where it's like if it is incremental, the best way that you could, you could think about it. The best way to reacquire a customer tomorrow is applovin reactivating. Sorry. The best way to drive an incremental order tomorrow could be applovin reactivating a customer long term seems like a silly way to grow your ltv. You're going to spend a bunch of money on on a mobile ad network but like in the very short term you're proving out that it's incremental. I would let it rip but I.
- [32:46]
Connor
Guess you know like a lot of, a lot of the house tests will look directionally meaning like what is our cost per incremental on meta versus YouTube versus TV at different spend levels. Where's my next dollar best spent? I. I would have to then test all of these. All of these options on repeat customers is direct because I can probably get a repeat purchase. I know I can an incremental repeat purchase on direct mail for better than $45 or for SMS or for email for better than 45. So I think directionally there's probably better. So maybe not the most efficient use of our spend. But I agree with you. It also like depends on what your definition of the repeat is. Like maybe we're reacquiring customers that purchased over 180 days ago and I'm more okay with that than like or was this a completely net new customer? Sorry, was this somebody who just purchased within 30 days?
- [33:38]
Cody
Like I don't want to pay 45 on that 100%. So that was the other thing I was going to say is like at some point you probably just get big enough and you have millions of customers who are many years old at this point and they just won't reactivate themselves. They're just not necessarily coming back. We faced a little bit of that this year launching travel where it was like, I mean we thought of as, as an issue because I don't like this as the strategy. But running exclusions on meta like the full thing, running travel ads on meta would still drive back returning customer revenue that we could see in North Beam. Now I don't think those people are necessarily going to convert. I don't mean to say that's not incremental that those. I'm not saying that those orders would have happened otherwise. I don't think those people are engaging with our email and SMS in the same way. But it's not something that excites me because again it's not, it's definitely not the most effective way for us to reactivate those people.
- [34:30]
Connor
That's a really good point though. I think a lot of times it depends what your goals are. But I think people equate incremental to new customers. You can still be incremental on repeat customers. And you know, this has shown that we are.
- [34:42]
Sean
I also think people sometimes equate incremental to like profitable. Which you know, what you're showing right now is you can, you can drive incremental orders. That would not have happened otherwise. That doesn't mean it's done profitably. And I think that's a good call out Cody, that like and we do the same thing. Like we're looking at, we're absolutely looking at house data for like net profitable acquisitions, right? Like taking our first order aov, you know, subtracting out our cost data and that and that cost per incremental order across for incremental acquisition. But then we're also doing the same thing as you, like where we're going and saying all right, what's the CPIA on channel A versus B versus C versus D? Which also has its own set of complications but and then deciding like how do we scale up because of that. But I think, I don't know. That's an interesting. What I've seen kind of almost used like incorrectly in like replacement for one another is like oh it's incremental like in people. Meaning it's profitable. It's like well is it both? Is it incremental and is it you know, profitable? It. They're two very separate things which is. I'm glad you called that out Cody, because it can be, it can be incremental and unprofitable or ideally incremental and profitable.
- [35:52]
Connor
No, you're right about that.
- [35:53]
Cody
We've had the dream.
- [35:54]
Connor
Yeah. We've had very few tests that are not incremental. Like I think only Google brand search was not incremental. We have a lot of incremental stuff and not all of it would be good media spend. You know, if our goal was just new customer acquisition, Applovin would be a bad idea in its current state. We've had, you know, YouTube reach. I think we had an incremental result on that but it was like a $260 cost per incremental. Like that's never going to pay back in a 10 year lifetime, you know. So yeah, agree with you there.
- [36:24]
Cody
I Cody, I'm assuming you guys have like a post treatment window because I'd also say you just got like you ran it through the weekend or something. You got the results back today. I mean you're just about to have a massive week. I could I could really see a lot of people prospected from. From Applov and converting over. Over bfcm.
- [36:43]
Connor
Yeah. Yeah. Two week post treatment window and then.
- [36:46]
Cody
I will have to follow up, follow.
- [36:48]
Connor
Up then and then I think that's a good point. Like so you've One of the thing with, with incremental incrementality testing is you can't generalize, earn or infer. Like I think a lot of times people will run a test and they're like this channel is incremental or this channel is not. But like if you run the same exact test at a different time of the year, right A channel and the customers on that channel might perform very differently in December and January as they do now and it could go for the other way. Like you also might get a really great result and then in a peak period and you test it later and it might not make sense. So especially anything that you're like you're not entirely sure of. I think sometimes it's worthwhile testing multiple times. There are no. Let me know if you guys know about this. I think Connor you, you have some data but there are no customer exclusions on Applovin currently I think and I've told Applovin I tweeted about this like this will be the biggest piece of feedback. I think that's the biggest thing that I'm seeing and really just like the only negative is that there are none and so people are seeing. I want to hear what you guys are seeing. But lower percentage of new visits and by the way this tracks very similar to what we're seeing in North Beam. So I'm not entirely surprised because our percent of new visits is lower than what we're seeing on meta. It's. It's sub 50% and that's not great. And that actually tracks very similar similarly with what we're seeing with the house test. What. What's your guys kind of like new visits or new percentage rate look like in North B?
- [38:12]
Sean
Where are we sitting at? We are at. So new visit rate is at. So new customer percentage is at 81% so it is for us mainly first time orders which you know we're happy to see. I am interested to like run that hold out and what sorry, what's the percent 81 new customer percentage?
- [38:33]
Connor
How's that compare if you can share it to like another similar.
- [38:37]
Sean
Yeah, I mean it's pretty in like Facebook's even higher. It's actually lower than. It's lower than Facebook. It's lower than YouTube. It's lower than TikTok. Like all of our, all of our paid media channels are very heavy acquisition. Luckily we're happy about that because we have a similar business to, to Ridge where like we have to be first order profitable. So it's lower than that but it's still, it's still pretty high, right? Like if it was at 50% I'd be a little, a little more worried. The new visit rate is lower. It's at 50, 55% which again is like a little bit lower than some of our other like top performing channels. But not that far, not that far off. It's not like, like if it was like 30, 40% that'd be much, much lower. So honestly that, you know, those are, those are bullish signals for me. I'm, I'm looking forward to like also seeing what Precious says about its like mmm reported roas and comparing that to the MTA and, and like just like layering these different data points on top of one another. The one thing I would add, Cody, that I think is, would be really insightful and there's probably some actionable things from it is understanding like which games your customers are coming from. I think there's probably some sort of, I don't know what it is exactly, but some sort of like follow up if you know that all of your people are coming from like Farmland, Candy Crush and like, I don't know like there's like four games. That's driving 85% of your revenue. I don't know exactly what you would do with that, but I feel like there's there's some like deeper digging to do to see like what other spaces those people are spending their time and I'm not sure but I would love to see that information which I don't think anyone is getting right now.
- [40:17]
Connor
Connor, how are you? And you guys just launched a few weeks ago. How, how is that looking? The new vs repeat split on Applovin for you guys?
- [40:26]
Cody
Yeah, similar to Connor, we're at, we're at 90% plus new customer revenue. That's all, that's all our channels which again is just, we don't have a lot of people buying a second or third wallet. Like that is a, I think that's a category thing. Yeah, 92% plus. And that, that's basically the same across all channels. We do see low percent new visits so I don't know exactly what to make of that. We're, we're scaling into it this week. We're seeing great CPCs, we're seeing great Roas, we're seeing great lift on that. Roas. It's another thing we're looking at. Typically if you just drive more traffic you'll see a larger delta between 1 day and 30 day and then we set our, our, our, that helps us set our one day targets. So again we're seeing it work currently. We'll see how, how it pans out over, over the longer term.
- [41:13]
Connor
And I wonder with these differences to, to our business is if this is one of those things where you're going to get a different read, a different incrementality read not because the channel is any different but because the business is different and there's a chance maybe Applovin is great for you guys because you don't exactly have that signal. Like again I don't, I'm speaking out of my ass here.
- [41:35]
Cody
Right.
- [41:35]
Connor
Know anything about modeling. But like Applovin is going after more repeat customers because that's a signal that it has based on us and they can't exclude new. But if you guys don't necessarily have that repeat base and that signal then it's, it's going after more of a new thing.
- [41:51]
Cody
Yeah. I mean that's when, when literally all of our channels are driving 92, 93% plus new customer revenue. It's because they're, I mean to a certain degree we like set up campaigns across channels to drive that but at the same time Applovin with no exclusions is still 90% plus. That's on like a quarter million dollars in spend. I mean there's nobody to acquire but new customers. That's the beauty of the Ridge business.
- [42:14]
Connor
Yeah. No, I just really wish people were like 40 minutes in will get this part because I think people are just going to take the headline like Applovin doesn't work or Applovin works.
- [42:23]
Cody
It's, it's, it, it's, I mean it's so dependent. Right. Like yours is a very nuanced answer in that it is. You are driving very profitable incremental orders. They just happen to be a lot of returning customers which is I, I, I think reasonable to be skeptical of. Olivia from House on Twitter has been sharing like a number of results. So it's like clearly like the, the takeaway should not be. We're going to take Cody's results as gospel. Right. Like the point is you can validate it on your own. It's very different by business and we're acknowledging that here as well as these additional tests that the House team is publishing. So yeah. Tricky to make sense of. But more than anything I think it's interesting to see collectively us all work through this problem together at once. I think that's a really cool. I'm thinking about that now and I guess you could probably say the same about TikTok a couple years ago, but there's been very few instances where we've seen like millions of dollars pour into a platform and everybody's trying to make sense of it at once while we're going into, you know, the busiest shopping time of the year.
- [43:25]
Connor
Have you guys seen. I guess, I guess not because it's not self serve yet. But as soon as they go self serve, we're about to start seeing some Apple event agencies pop up.
- [43:33]
Cody
Yeah, first of all that was, that was the other thing. Like there's, there's not a lot to do in the platform. Right. Like it's, it's. They're basically managing all of it. You give them creative, they've got like the post ad experience but there's not really like tips to have right now.
- [43:50]
Connor
No, there's not much you can do. Test creative, I guess. Give them new creative to do.
- [43:54]
Sean
It'll be fun to see if anything comes out as like a unique style of creative that works specifically for applovin. I don't know what that would be but like, like maybe like positioning your product within like a game. A more like gaming type experience. I don't know.
- [44:07]
Cody
Who knows you were talking about like, I mean there's a bunch of like really addictive like restaurant games where people are like cooking up the burgers and like serving their customers. Like you can make that a cool little hexcloud ad.
- [44:19]
Sean
That'd be so cool. Dang. I got to do some research about what like the top food games are right now. It's a really good idea that's going into my ClickUp to do list for sure. Yeah, I like that. Connor, can you. Do you mind sharing if you can, what your net new visit rate is?
- [44:32]
Cody
Oh yeah, so, so that is really low. Like I said 93% percent new visits is like at first it was in the 60s and then when I looked at it over the weekend it was in the 50s which is super weird for us. I mean we drive 80% plus from Meta. Like we think of 50% typically is like it's, it's just retargeting. So yeah, so we're, we're seeing some odd, odd kind of changes over time as it relates to that.
- [45:04]
Sean
And then I'm. One other question. I'm curious about because this whole like black box thing is like, I, I don't know if that should make me weary or if that's simply just because they're a, like, like, is it self serve for all the, all the apps that have been advertising there? Like, is it still self serve for them? Is it only self serve for econ brands? Because it's a different like conversion objective where other, like, I don't know, I don't remember when Facebook first started like allowing advertisers to participate, but was like, was that also a managed service from the jump? Like, I'm trying to like go back in time and remember if some of these other ad channels were initially managed service and then as they just got, you know, know, more developed, they built out the self serve, self serve side of it. Like, do you guys have any thoughts or feelings or like historical knowledge on that?
- [45:51]
Cody
What I can say? I don't, I'm not like, I don't know if you're expressing skepticism. I'm not skeptical of it at all. Like, I think there's a handful of examples. We were on Live Intent for a while and Live Intent was also like a big ad network that was like, quote unquote, managed service, which basically just meant like they weren't doing anything sophisticated back there. They just didn't have the portal that you could do it yourself. So we would, we would give them budgets, we would give them creative. I think they'd do like some light targeting, but like, it really wouldn't do much, frankly. I think that's often a sign that you were early enough that there's like some opportunity to take advantage of.
- [46:24]
Sean
Yeah, I, I, I lean more that way too. Cody, what do you think?
- [46:28]
Connor
Do you guys know why they don't, why they can't have customer exclusions? I guess they don't get emails. Like when somebody signs up for Facebook, they give an email. But when you're gaming, you're just downloading it, but you're not giving an email. Is that, is that why?
- [46:43]
Cody
Yeah, honestly, I have no, I have no idea.
- [46:46]
Sean
But can't they get that through? Like if you're, if you download a game, you gotta be logged into your Apple account, right? Or your Android account, which has an email associated with it. So I feel like, but maybe that's like one step to remove. Like with Facebook, it's like you're logging into Facebook the same channel you're advertising in with, With Applovin, you wouldn't be doing that. You'd be logged into Apple. You would then download the app from the iOS store. So maybe there's no, like that, that bridge is not like crossable. Maybe.
- [47:19]
Cody
Yeah, I, I, I would assume. I mean, they've been running ads for a really long time before. I don't know what it's at today. But like, even before people started talking about it, applovin was a $40 billion company. So I don't, I think they'd have figured it out. And I'm sure there's just like, what they say is they just don't have access to all that much data. I mean, if you sign up for. I was playing Fruit Smash with my wife a couple weeks ago, which is a very addicting game. And yeah, they don't, you're not creating a profile, you're not giving them any information. I mean, it is just. And it's on Apple, it's on iOS so it's like the privacy phone manufacturer. I'm like, they don't know anything about me other than I'm not very good at Fruit Smash.
- [47:57]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. I, you know, yeah, I was just looking at their stock right now. I mean, in the last month they're up 98%. I started a conversation at dinner last night. I was like, guys, tell me if this is insider trading or not. And like I got everybody's attention. Like, they're like, oh, what did you do? I have, I don't have any stock. I haven't bought any. But I was like, hey, I know some of these house test results that, you know, haven't been public yet. Like, if I did know that and bought the stock, would it be. And they're like, no, like it's from a third party. It's totally fine. It would be like if you knew like proprietary information about the financial performance of the company. So if you're listening here and we're talking bullsh about apple oven and you want to buy it, not financial advice, I think that's fair to do. But yeah, I don't know. I think if there is a way, my, my prediction and my thought would be I'm like a 6 out of 10, I think for the majority of brands, which is probably 60 of brands, I think it's going to be a good channel. I think it's going to be a good 10% of spend channel which, which would be great. Like most brands, if they can get that, that's, that's huge. I think certain brands that will do better than others based on this new customer thing, just based on the early data that I've seen and if they can figure that out then, you know, I'm an 8 out of 10. If they can figure that out somehow, I'd be super bullish on it. But some brands don't care. Some brands are like a, like you guys and you know, they're just a new customer business so they're, they're going to deliver new anyways. And then there are brands especially, I think as you get larger, they just care about incremental revenue. So it's not going to be, it's not going to be new versus returning.
- [49:29]
Cody
Dude, a lot of brands don't even care about incremental revenue. Right. Like at some point it's like, yeah, you just get, you just get the Johnson and Johnson money or whatever. Right. And they just, they've got billions to spend. Yeah.
- [49:40]
Connor
But I think Apple is like completely performance. Like I think the only thing you can do is optimize for conversions. Like I don't think you can buy anywhere.
- [49:48]
Cody
Yeah, I guess it's true.
- [49:49]
Sean
Yeah, that's pretty badass to go right to purchase conversions.
- [49:53]
Cody
Like I love that and add network apps on my own heart.
- [49:57]
Sean
Yep.
- [49:57]
Cody
No, no reach campaigns, no nobody. Yeah, everyone knows ad comments are super important for social proof, but they're a mess to handle. Spam trolls, customer questions, good reviews. At Ridge, we had four full time people to moderate all of this, which was expensive but necessary. One of the reasons we moved to Rich Panel is we knew they'd be launching new AI tools and they just launched their AI social media manager that handles all of our ad comments. It's built right into Rich Panel, our help desk software, which no other help desk has anything like. In the first two months, AI handled 11,000 comments, saved us 760 hours of work. It's like four months of one person's time. And the best part is it didn't cost us anything else. It came with our regular subscription. If you want to learn more about Rich Panel, you can join one of their weekly migration webinars. It's 40 minutes. They show you the platform, how to switch from your current system and how much money you can save. It's great for teams to evaluate Rich Panel and see if it's a fit for your business. If you want to add social media superpowers while becoming more efficient, go to rich panel.com book a spot for their weekly migration webinar and get your team a spot too.
- [51:04]
Connor
Saw Sean tweeted that you guys are doing some new TV campaigns with with none other than Marquez. Yeah, tell us about that with the shoot, the shoot, the media plan, like everything. We want to know everything.
- [51:18]
Cody
Oh, yeah, yeah, no, so we could talk about it and I want to hear from, from Connor as well because the plan is in nascent stages is what I would say. I mean, I went out to New York in October, end of October, so we could shoot content. We got a bunch of stuff done. We shot content for our travel launch. We launched a new backpack and a carry on with him yesterday. So that will have been out for a while. We get content there. And then we wanted like higher quality horizontal to hit more streaming networks. And this is really a part of our plan going into 2025 is twofold. One, I want to take our kind of business as usual and just like move further up funnel. I think both of you guys are great examples of brands moving into. Cody, you broke it down a couple months ago, but like you're on streaming, you're on linear, you're on YouTube. Like I, I think we can really crack that. And obviously channel diversification is like really key for growing the wallet business from here. So we want to do that already. And then two, we want to be appealing to new people and we signed the Marquez deal earlier this year for that reason. How are we hitting a new demo and appealing to someone who we might not otherwise have been appealing to? And then now we're taking that onto tv, which Sean's tweet was about how it's kind of ironic that Marquez became a YouTuber. A very meritocratic platform, creates content for 14 years, never has to get sign off from, you know, a TV network or something like that. And now we're going to be, you know, putting his face on, on linear television. So I think that will be cool. I think the things that are still kind of TBD is one. How will Marquez resonate on linear tv? Like I think that will be a. Which I say the plan is in nascent stages because we have a lot to learn, right? Like how are we testing into new networks? How are we testing into new demos? I've talked about this before.
- [53:07]
Connor
You have concepts of a plan.
- [53:09]
Cody
We have concepts of a plan, yeah. Literally our linear TV strategy right now is awesome. We crush motor trends, we crush fishing network, we crush American heroes, we crush the History Channel, things like that. It's just male, dense, C tier affordable networks that just like have reliably worked. Now I don't think we're going to put Marquez on those channels and it just works. So we're going to have to test into a whole new type of channel strategy. But that's where the upside is, where if all of a sudden we can crack linear streaming, you know, YouTube by appealing to new demos with our flagship partnership, we want to do that. And this content was really just our first foray into that. In our deal. We get multiple production days a year and I think we're going to be dedicating at least probably 40% of our time to just creating really high quality content for these more like brand awareness channels.
- [54:01]
Connor
You guys tweeted about looking for like a production partner for, for something a while back. Did you end up hiring somebody you found through Twitter for all this stuff?
- [54:10]
Cody
We did, we did. That's awesome.
- [54:13]
Connor
That's great.
- [54:14]
Cody
Yeah, we talked to a lot of people. These came. It kind of came through Sean's like open call. They'd also worked with some friends of ours as well, so they were like referred to some degree. But yeah, cool New York agency. That's another thing is it's got to be local for Marques. We have a lot of partners that we like in the LA area, but had to source some new people. So it went well. I mean, we've got a number of days next year we're looking for new partners. So if you do awesome video content. This is, this is a CTA to DM me on Twitter. We're always, we're always looking.
- [54:45]
Sean
And is that going to be. Sorry if I missed this. I don't think I did. But you said like TV creative. Is that specifically linear? And then are you going to be rolling this out across other channels? Like, what's the. How are you going to like, cut and mix this to get legs across everywhere?
- [55:02]
Cody
Yeah, so the. We're going to start with linear. That's what we're running on now. We're just going to start working it in, see how it, see how it works. And we're going to kind of chip away at identifying the channels and targeting that, that this will work with. And then the plan is, that's what I. The general plan is for us to expand into more of those channels going into 2025, I think. And I hope Marquez can be a big piece of that. I'm not, we're not putting all of our eggs in that basket. We also got. I said, I said this was many months ago, but I said a hack that we had done was. I'd looked up spec ads on YouTube. There are these like, kind of creators that are, that are producing ads just for fun and then posting them on YouTube called Spec Ads and you can find some amazing people who will do fantastic work very affordably. They're the team, one of those people that I found whose name I'm not giving away because I like them too much. They also produce content, not Marquez dependent that I also think can help us kind of scale into those other channels. We've got a lot of iron in the fire as it comes to channel diversification because that type of content is just something we haven't built a flywheel around. So whether it's new partners in New York or you know, new creators off of YouTube spec ad, that's kind of, that's what the strategy is so far.
- [56:19]
Sean
How are you going to measure it?
- [56:20]
Cody
Let me. Well right now the way that we measure TV is really with we use Tatari. I like their, I like some of their. In platform reporting I think you can get a lot of signal out of it. The way they measure users like minute to minute I think is actually super valid. So we'll use that, we'll use post purchase surveys and then we have vanity URLs and QR codes and things like that in the TV ad. So we are able to track some Metaclick. So those have been the points that we triangulate with and that'll be the plan for the short term. What we're definitely not doing is we're not like launching a seven figure TV budget with this new ad. Like we'll, we're rolling it out over the next couple days. We've been on linear for like a month now. We'll see how it goes to the end of the year with the plan being like we'll hopefully really scale it up in 2025. But I want to turn it around for you Connor because planning for this Marquez shoot, I watched the hexclad ad. Like I say the hexclad ad, the one that starts with the renders and then it cuts to, you know, cook the perfect ribeye or whatever and then it's Gordon and you guys beautifully hit the, the value props of the brand. I think it's really, really well done. How has your TV strategy shaped up over. Over the course of the year it's.
- [57:33]
Sean
Really just become more scale. We actually haven't produced. Well, I take that back. We actually have produced some new creative. It just hasn't gone live yet. So we're in a similar boat with you guys where we're about to actually launch for the first time ever differentiated creative, which I'm very excited about. I'M very excited to like get like intra channel reporting UTM data so we can get like a comparative analytics look on the actual creative will be really interesting. But for us it's, it's mainly been all right. We validated this working for all the ways that you just mentioned. So we you know, post purchase survey, look great in platform, perform in platform, look great. We'll even do some like hour over hour analysis on Shopify when we did these like one off TV buys. Our MMM likes it a lot. It doesn't pull into pressure yet. But like we also use north themes. Mmm and they really like linear tv. So we've just, it's, it's overall just taken a larger chunk of our budget and then we also signed the Fox deal which this is all public knowledge. Like part of that Fox deal was a ton of media value over the course of three years. So we've, we've really cranked up our budget when you consider that component of it. So we kind of look at our linear TV as like we kind of delineate like there's the Fox deal and then there is the kind of everything else that we do on linear TV outside of Fox. So yeah, I mean for us it's just been like tracking the signals and scaling up. We've really used that same TV creative for really ever since we launched it and like the back end of 2022. So I think where we're now headed is what you're starting to think about I think which is just like diversity of creative. Right. Let's get more assets in the mix that should lift the whole channel up. We'll get insights into like which. Which assets are working best. We did a seasonal spot last year for holidays which is now in market again for the second year with it's like a Gordon is like making Santa Claus at beef Wellington. So that's. That's mainly it, right? Is like more creative. It's really no different than Facebook.
- [59:28]
Connor
Right.
- [59:28]
Sean
It's like scale creative horizontally. That should allow you to spend more over time you should be able to spend more. I do want to run a holdout on it at some point. We have not done that yet but I would love to get that set up and, and that's really it, right? Is like more spend more creative and just like continued validation with more layers of like measurement.
- [59:45]
Cody
Basically you're saying end of 2022 you guys launch like that hero piece of creative that I described. That's basically where all media spend is gone. That's really what I want to find like I actually don't want to go. We're forced to diversify creative right now. And then what I would love to do is find that 15 second AD, that 30 second AD that we can just scale because I think that's probably. You can't do that on Facebook right now. I think it's really hard to get like one ad that you can spend $3 million on but on TV it's just a little different.
- [60:14]
Sean
Yeah, our team internally and externally just nailed that. That first piece of creative which has really allowed us to scale. Like the value prop came through in a, in a like not too direct response of a way but just enough to peak interest. The Gordon social proof really came through and like they, I feel like just nailed the marriage of those two things. So we kind of got lucky. I feel like in many ways with that first tvc. I'm excited to see how we can diversify but it's going to be hard to. I do think we have the team to do it but I think it'll be, it'll be hard to kind of top that one because that I think the. We use two different agencies. We had one agency that like wrote the, the ad and then we had another production company. So it was like a pretty big involved. And then we also had our internal team like giving a lot of feedback along the way. It's like very involved process. So yeah, we'll see if we can kind of recreate that magic a little bit.
- [61:03]
Connor
Yeah, always going to say the same thing. So we've been live on TV for 11 months. Exactly. We just did our second shoot. So we did a one day shoot last year. I think we got eight concepts out of it. All Bobby, all miracle bomb. So talking about it, we probably run. Don't quote me exactly. We're probably still running like four or five of the concepts. Just the better performers we've iterated once just did a little bit of a creative style but there's really no creative fatigue like at least from what I'm hearing from our team and our TV buyer we work with like we don't need to, you know, refresh them yet and it's been a year and pretty significant spend on them. So like that's awesome. That's. That's you know, again it takes a big shoot to get this stuff going but it's awesome. So we just did a second one just for new products. We have a big hero product launch in April so we did that. And then for our foundation that we don't Currently have ads on but it's our top meta spend right now. So it's just to kind of get some incremental new creatives and hopefully new spend. But yeah, I mean I love that we don't have to refresh these things every month because that wouldn't be sustainable because obviously a TV production is a lot bigger.
- [62:07]
Sean
And what's your, what's your measurement stat? Cody? I think you know that's one of my favorite questions to ask in the context of linear because I think linear can be often one of the more challenging ones to measure because it's, you know, it's not a click based channel, you know, somewhat similar to YouTube in that sense. So what's your measurement stack looking like.
- [62:23]
Connor
When we launched mostly post purchase. I love that like trend report where you can see and you can kind of calculate a, you know, how did you hear about us roas? So that was it, you know, CPA and then looking at that trend line as we increase spend. Looking at Tatari, definitely I am skeptical of, of theirs and just my general philosophy is like never trust anybody that has a financial incentive to make performance look good. But I think directionally it's really helpful. It might not be the source of truth, but directionally, especially when comparing across creatives and networks, that's very helpful as I'm further removed like I don't go in there much anymore but, but I, but I do think that there's a lot of value in that. And then mmm. So we buy our LINEAR through Tatari. So we are, you know, we're able to get Linear and CTV in their impression and so that's been really helpful. And then we were able to run a holdout on ctv. It's technically possible on linear but you pay such a premium on CPMs that it's just not worthwhile. We still had to pay a premium on my ctv but it was less. So so that's, that's the majority of it is, you know, mmm's kind of the main one now. But looking at all of those, all those factors, a lot of triangulation going on over there.
- [63:37]
Cody
Yeah. So with Tatari their measurement's kind of funny. They, they measure minute to minute traffic on your site and then they know when their ad spots go live and then they're measuring the spike in traffic. So like we did. I forget what it was. But like, I mean we do like Yellowstone all the time. I've joked our strategy is typically just buy as much Yellowstone ad inventory as possible. But like you'll See a Yellowstone ad go live and you'll see this spike. And it's not a ton of people, but it's like clearly it's like 100 people above the baseline. And it's like, okay, we think we drove 100 people. They're able to, I forget the exact details, observe some amount of conversions and then they apply that at conversion rate across the lift in people. Then the part that I don't like, which we like account for, is they say for every one person we drove, we'll drive 1.3 more people in the future. So then they, so then they, they, they extrapolate that out. And for some brands, I'm sure that's, that's super valid for us. It's probably true as well. But we like remove all of that and we're just looking at what is our CPA essentially on that first spike of traffic. And I think that's like, I think there's validity in how that's measured and it's a solid data point. And it's like very, it's also very conservative. So that along with post purchase with some North Beam data is our stack. But just I wanted to, to talk through some of that because I, I think that's one of the funnier ones. Just like, yeah, the 1.3 more people take that out and like, then I'll look at that number.
- [65:05]
Connor
That was my challenge. Yeah, it was like there were just like forecasts and conversions that didn't even happen yet. And calling it a cpa.
- [65:11]
Sean
I would like to see a white paper of sorts. I think that would actually like be a really good idea for them because I don't think I've ever heard a marketer hear that multiplier and be like, wait, what? Why? It would be really probably helpful if they had some sort of white paper to like or like data, I don't know, whatever. We did this for like 50 brands and like the average, like in some way they validated it. Who knows? It would be, it would go a long way.
- [65:36]
Cody
Well, they say that you can, you can engage with the data science team and then they'll like, they'll find a lift specific to your brand so it can get more personalized over time.
- [65:47]
Connor
So yeah, Atari will, the one that you buy TV ads through will find a lift if you ask them to do it. And then that Lyft will tell you that you should spend more money with them.
- [65:58]
Cody
Yeah.
- [65:59]
Sean
Yeah.
- [65:59]
Cody
Hey, look, I get it.
- [66:00]
Sean
What could go wrong?
- [66:01]
Cody
What could go wrong? Yeah.
- [66:03]
Connor
Awesome. Well, I'm excited to see them. Hopefully I'm in the target market for them. I would imagine those will be like. Any idea what networks you'll be testing on?
- [66:11]
Cody
We have a plan. I don't know any networks off the top of my head, but I mean, honestly, I don't watch a lot of linear tv. I think we'll hit a lot more like news channels, things like that. There will be, we go for a younger demo, as you can imagine, American Heroes History Network, Fisher Network, Older crowd over there. Um, so we'll hit a younger, more, you know, tech adjacent demo, I think. And I think it'll be cool. So. And seeing there's been two cool things. One, I think seeing Marquez on TV is, is interesting and that's what Sean called out in the tweet. And then a couple weeks ago, we launched the MKBHD fixtures in Best Buy, which is another cool, like, somewhat ironic thing that you've got this like very, you know, self made creator from this meritocratic, meritocratic platform. Now, like in traditional retail, like the biggest traditional tech retailer is, is a really cool thing. So there's more of just kind of a, a nerdy perspective on it. But it's been exciting to see kind of both those come to life.
- [67:09]
Sean
I'm excited, man. I'm excited to follow up with you in like a month and see what, see what you're seeing on the back end to be cool. Yeah. That's a wrap on this episode of the Marketing Operator. We had a really fun one today. Thank you as always to our sponsors, Motion, Prescient and Rich panel. If you're enjoying the show, please like subscribe and share.