E042: Our 2025 DTC Predictions Review

Summary

Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators E042: Our 2025 DTC Predictions Review

Release Date: January 15, 2025
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker

---

In Episode 42 of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor Rolain and Cody Plofker delve into their predictions for Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) marketing in 2025. The discussion covers a range of topics, including advertising platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) in e-commerce, SaaS consolidation, media buying strategies, and shifts in the e-commerce labor market. This comprehensive review offers valuable insights for marketers seeking to navigate the evolving landscape of DTC strategies.

---

1. Applovin's Diminishing Role in Media Budgets

Prediction Overview:
Applovin, once a popular advertising platform, is predicted to see its hype fade, with its share of overall advertising spend dropping significantly.

Key Points:

• Skepticism and Incrementality Issues:
  Many brands are testing Applovin but find limited incremental benefits. The initial surge in spending may not be sustainable due to decreased effectiveness as competition increases.

• Incrementality Decline:
  As more brands invest in Applovin, the platform’s performance metrics, such as click-through rates, are likely to suffer, leading to reduced returns on ad spend.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor (05:11): "There’s just so much spend that’s gone into it that I don’t think that can be sustainable."
• Cody (05:20): "Applovin hype will fade. It’s really easy when you have the very first e-comm brands advertising to all these mobile game users who have only seen other mobile games for the first time."

Host Predictions:

• Connor leans towards Applovin capturing about 5% of overall ad spend.
• Cody estimates a slightly higher range of 5-8%, considering larger brands may continue utilizing the platform for retargeting and mid-funnel strategies.

---

2. AI's Transformative Impact on E-commerce

Prediction Overview:
2025 marks the year AI significantly enhances consumer brands by automating customer experience (CX) tasks and introducing innovative ad creative options.

Key Points:

• Automation in Customer Experience:
  AI tools are revolutionizing CX by handling vast amounts of customer interactions efficiently, reducing the need for large support teams.

• Advancements in Ad Creative:
  AI-driven tools are improving ad creation processes, enabling brands to generate high-quality, diverse ad creatives with minimal manual effort.

Notable Quotes:

• Cody (19:16): "2025 is the first year AI makes a decent-sized difference for consumer brands. It will come from automating CX and there will be some legit ad creative options for the first time."
• Connor (20:18): "AI is just evolving so rapidly."

Implementation Examples:

• Rich Panel Integration:
  Both hosts discuss leveraging Rich Panel’s AI capabilities to automate comment moderation and enhance customer support.

• AI in Ad Production:
  Connor highlights experimenting with AI tools like Recharm and FLARE to streamline ad creative workflows, enabling rapid production of ad variations.

---

3. Consolidation Within the SaaS Industry

Prediction Overview:
The SaaS landscape will witness increased consolidation as companies build or acquire horizontal solutions to offer all-in-one bundled services, enhancing competitiveness and reducing operational costs.

Key Points:

• Shift from Variable to Flat Pricing:
  SaaS providers are moving away from variable pricing models (e.g., based on usage or revenue) to more predictable flat-fee structures.

• Acquisitions and Integration:
  Companies like Loop acquiring Wonderment exemplify the trend towards bundling complementary services to provide unified solutions.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor (50:02): "It's a lot easier to do acquisitions because it’s easier to have less vendors and pay them a bit more than having multiple specialized vendors."
• Cody (52:16): "We're seeing consolidation there. Just like you have post-purchase experiences merging with other tools."

Future Outlook:

• Predicted mergers will focus on creating cohesive ecosystems where multiple functionalities are integrated, simplifying vendor management and enhancing data interoperability.

---

4. The Hedge Fundification of Media Buying

Prediction Overview:
Media buying will undergo significant transformation as allocators become trendy, software-driven processes that automate daily spend across various advertising channels.

Key Points:

• Automated Budget Allocation:
  Software tools will increasingly take over the allocation of advertising budgets, optimizing spend based on real-time performance data and predictive analytics.

• Challenges in Full Automation:
  Despite the theoretical benefits, fully automating media buying remains complex due to the dynamic nature of performance metrics and the unpredictability of future results.

Notable Quotes:

• Cody (58:17): "It has all these different cost curves and it's giving you optimal budgets."
• Connor (59:38): "It will happen, but not yet. It’s still very much theoretical."

Practical Insights:

• While automation tools are advancing, the hosts emphasize the importance of human oversight to account for nuances and unpredictable shifts in channel performance.

---

5. E-commerce Labor Market Evolution

Prediction Overview:
The e-commerce labor market is expected to undergo significant changes, with brands increasingly outsourcing operations to achieve higher leverage and reduce operational expenses (OPEX).

Key Points:

• Rise of the Agent Brand:
  Brands will increasingly adopt the "agent brand" model, outsourcing various functions to specialized agencies or global talent pools to enhance efficiency.

• Operational Leverage through Outsourcing:
  By leveraging global talent and AI-driven tools, brands can maintain high growth rates with smaller, more efficient teams.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor (40:59): "We've got to optimize our workforce to build operational leverage."
• Cody (42:06): "More than half of our performance creative team is overseas, reducing costs significantly."

Examples of Operational Efficiency:

• Global Workforce Utilization:
  Outsourcing roles such as creative strategists and editors to international teams reduces costs while maintaining high productivity.

• AI Augmentation:
  AI tools further enhance the efficiency of outsourced teams, allowing for scalable and cost-effective operations.

---

6. Meta's Struggle with Reaching New Audiences and Upper Funnel Strategies

Prediction Overview:
Meta (formerly Facebook) will acknowledge its challenges in reaching new audiences and subsequently focus more on upper and mid-funnel strategies to optimize advertising effectiveness.

Key Points:

• Diminished Audience Reach:
  Meta’s ability to connect brands with new, untapped audiences is declining, prompting the platform to seek improvements.

• Shift to Upper Funnel Objectives:
  Brands will increasingly adopt strategies that focus on awareness and engagement (e.g., view content, add to cart) rather than direct purchase objectives to counteract Meta’s reduced effectiveness in driving new customer acquisition.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor (32:11): "Meta is just not great at reaching new audiences... Brands will do more upper funnel stuff."
• Cody (39:20): "View content campaigns were some of our best during BFCM."

Strategic Adjustments:

• Optimizing for Engagement:
  Instead of solely driving purchases, brands will prioritize engaging potential customers earlier in the conversion funnel.

• Diversifying Ad Spend:
  Brands will allocate budgets to multiple channels like YouTube, Snapchat, and YouTube Shorts to mitigate Meta’s limitations.

---

7. Emergence of an Omnichannel Digital Brand Product Layer

Prediction Overview:
An omnichannel digital brand product layer will emerge, integrating various shopping platforms (e.g., Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shops) to streamline product distribution and management across multiple points of purchase.

Key Points:

• Centralized Product Management:
  Brands will adopt unified systems to manage sales across diverse platforms, enhancing efficiency and consistency in operations.

• Threat to Established Platforms:
  This integrated layer poses a competitive threat to dominant platforms like Shopify by offering more versatile and interconnected solutions.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor (62:42): "Commerce is changing, and brands need a central place to distribute across all shopping platforms."
• Cody (65:21): "There’s an opportunity for someone to compete with Shopify by offering a digital brand product layer."

Potential Market Dynamics:

• Consolidation of Sales Channels:
  By centralizing operations, brands can more effectively manage inventory, orders, and customer data across multiple sales channels.

• Enhanced Customer Experience:
  A unified product layer ensures a seamless shopping experience for customers, regardless of the platform they choose to purchase from.

---

8. Consolidation and Standardization in Analytics Tools

Prediction Overview:
Analytics tools will evolve to offer standardized reporting frameworks, such as consistent week-over-week (Sunday to Saturday) reporting, enhancing comparability and reducing the need for custom data adjustments.

Key Points:

• Standard Reporting Cycles:
  Tools will adopt uniform reporting periods to align with common business cycles, simplifying performance tracking and analysis.

• Incorporating Behavioral Shifts:
  Analytics platforms will account for changes in consumer shopping behaviors, such as increased weekend purchasing, to provide more accurate insights.

Notable Quotes:

• Cody (55:14): "I want to see Sunday to Saturday reporting natively by analytics tools."
• Connor (56:37): "I hope it happens for you. Yeah, really do."

Implications for Marketers:

• Improved Data Accuracy:
  Standardized reporting reduces discrepancies and ensures that performance metrics are directly comparable over time.

• Enhanced Decision-Making:
  More accurate and consistent data facilitates better strategic planning and budget allocation.

---

9. Potential Acquisitions in the Social Media Space

Prediction Overview:
Social media platforms like TikTok and Snap are potential acquisition targets, driven by strategic interests from major commerce and technology companies seeking to enhance their digital ecosystems.

Key Points:

• TikTok's Acquisition Prospects:
  TikTok may be sold amidst geopolitical tensions, with potential buyers including Amazon, Walmart, or Apple aiming to integrate it into their commerce strategies.

• Snap’s Vulnerability:
  Snap’s declining stock performance makes it a more likely candidate for acquisition compared to TikTok.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor (66:51): "I think it'll go to somebody and... maybe Amazon, Walmart, or Apple."
• Cody (70:10): "The likelihood that Snap gets bought feels more likely than TikTok being sold."

Market Impact:

• Consolidation of Commerce and Social:
  Acquisitions could lead to tighter integration between social media and e-commerce, enhancing seamless shopping experiences within platforms.

• Competitive Dynamics:
  Major acquisitions may reshape the competitive landscape, potentially diminishing the influence of standalone social media platforms.

---

10. Additional Predictions and Final Remarks

Fun and Miscellaneous Predictions:

• Mainstream TV Figures:
  Stephen A. Smith is predicted to become a more mainstream media figure, expanding his presence beyond sports broadcasting.

• TikTok’s Future Stability:
  Concerns about TikTok's stability and ownership suggest a fluctuating investment landscape for advertisers on the platform.

Conclusion: Connor and Cody wrap up the episode by emphasizing the importance of adaptability and strategic foresight in navigating the rapidly changing DTC marketing environment. They encourage listeners to stay informed, experiment with emerging tools, and remain agile in their marketing approaches to thrive in 2025 and beyond.

Hosts' Final Thoughts:

• Connor (66:32): "Marketing operators becomes a de facto number one DTC podcast closely followed by nine operators."
• Cody (57:55): "We'll see how much traction [TikTok acquisition] gets in this coming year."

---

Key Takeaways:

• Diversification of Advertising Channels:
  Relying solely on platforms like Meta/Facebook may become less effective, prompting brands to explore and invest in alternative channels.

• Embracing AI and Automation:
  Leveraging AI for customer experience and ad creative can significantly enhance efficiency and scalability.

• Operational Efficiency through Outsourcing and SaaS Consolidation:
  Reducing OPEX by outsourcing and adopting consolidated SaaS solutions will be crucial for maintaining profitability amidst margin pressures.

• Strategic Budget Allocation:
  Automated media buying tools and standardized analytics reporting can optimize ad spend and improve strategic decision-making.

By addressing these multifaceted predictions, marketers can better prepare for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in the dynamic realm of DTC marketing.

Transcript

[Cody]

All right, here we are. Good or bad news, for better or worse, there's only two of us today. Cody, how's it going, dude?

[Connor]

This is fun. I don't know. I don't know if when I was out with surgery, you did one with just Connor or just with a guest, but this is my first one. Just two of us. We miss Connor. He's like. I don't even know what he's doing. Is he in, like, Mexico?

[Cody]

He's in Tulum. Yeah. He had a wedding this weekend. He's in Tulum this week. Crushing it.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Would rather be there, but I am very happy to be here and talk e commerce with you today.

[Cody]

You know what's also funny is you and I have only spoken one on one, maybe two other times. Two or three other times. It's a pretty. Pretty short list. Yeah.

[Connor]

Meet in person one day. So this year, it's on one of my. One of my bucket list predictions. It's going to happen. Operators in person.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Speaking of predictions, that's mostly what we're going to talk about. So it's. It's mid January. That's when this is coming out. Lots of people filled up the timeline over. Over between the holidays and early January with their 2025 predictions. We've got some hot ones. We're going to go over them today. So I guess we could just jump right into it. Anything else you want to cover before we. Before we jump into 2025, we got.

[Connor]

To have a way to, like, stay accountable to this. Because I feel like so many times people, like, share their predictions and, like, you know, we'll only be like, oh, I called it if they were right. But, like, we got it. Maybe, like, you can set a reminder if we're doing this podcast a year from now, we will be like, well, like, talk about these at the end of the year. Because I. I want to. I want to, you know, I want to stay accountable to everything we're predicting.

[Cody]

Totally. So, as you know, we all use Motion, and they have been shipping a ton of cool new stuff. We want to talk through some of it. Classically, the first new feature I want to talk about is something that we were already doing manually internally, and that's basically been a lot of Motion's roadmap is, like, figuring out what are creative strategists and the brands doing manually in spreadsheets and in figment, things like that, and how can they automate it and improve it. And a great new example of that is creative Highlights. It's a weekly creative leaderboard, kind of like a Billboard Top 10 chart of what's working in your ad accounts. We've been doing this historically, we'd say every week we'd send it out to the whole team. This is what's working. These are the ads that are new to working and these are the ads that have were previous winners and are continuing to work. So the fact that this is automated is really nice. As a pro tip, we start a lot of meetings this way. Just if you're ahead of growth growth you don't need to prep. You can just immediately pull in creative highlights to understand what's best performing. Some of the other new features that I've been excited about, there's a LinkedIn ads integration. So for the B2B marketers listening, you can check that out. And lastly, we've been looking at winning combinations. This is an advanced feature that lets you more easily extract big insights from all your creative testing variables. And there is a related new feature called naming conventions. One of my favorite things we haven't dug in here, but obviously this is, this is in my wheelhouse. It automatically groups ads and comparative reports and just helps you get those bigger insights with way less manual effort. 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 app.com and remember, if you mentioned marketing operators, podcast emotion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month. Before we get into it, we'd like to thank our sponsors, Motion Prescient Rich Panel and Northbeam.

[Connor]

Wow, this guy. For people just listening, Connor built a deck.

[Cody]

I built a deck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I figured. So we're we're Connor list today and we're a producer list today. So it's literally just Cody and I typically Sophie, who we don't talk about often, amazing producers behind the scenes making sure we sound and we sound good and look smart. We've got none of those people with us today, so we're really flying blind. And I said we could really use some visual support. So I put a couple of our favorite 2025 predictions into a little slide deck that we're going to click. So, you know, drum roll. This is our first operators yearly prediction review. And yes, I totally agree. We'll have to go back maybe towards the end of this year, see which of these kind of came to fruition or not. So we're going to jump around a bunch. We've got, we've got predictions from three different people. I've got them kind of grouped in ways that I think are good, jumping off points. But we're going to start with number four prediction.

[Connor]

Well, hold on, we should, we should go back a step. So like where these predictions came from.

[Cody]

Oh perfect. Explain.

[Connor]

So as always, it usually starts with Taylor Holiday doing a bomb Twitter thread where he did, I think he did 25 predictions for 2025. I don't remember how many he did but I was bored. It was like let me have my fun, let me do it as well. I think we did a similar episode around July 4th or something like that where there were some fireworks going off. So always a fun one. He responded which was really fun. But yeah, so that's where it's coming from. A few Twitter threads.

[Cody]

Yeah, it's a classic. It's a DTC Twitter tradition to throw out some predictions and we typically don't get a full podcast episode breaking them down. So this is maybe the first of that. We're going to jump around yours, Cody. So we're starting with number four but has been a hot topic on Twitter, Applovin. So you've got Applovin. Hype will fade. Many brands will still find success there, but many will not. I predict 5% of overall spend. What drives this prediction for you?

[Connor]

I think a, a lot of brands are going to test and I don't think they're going to be super pleased with the incrementality. I think people have gone in just a little bit of tulip Tulip mania on it for like good reason that we've talked about. But I think there's just so much spend that's gone into it that I don't think that can be sustainable. And then probably a little bit of the the law of shitty click throughs where it's like as everybody floods it, the performance is probably any arbitrage that was there is going to be swept away. Although I don't think it's purely like a low CPM arbitrage play. I think it'll exist. I think It'll just be 5% of spend. It's not going to be 50% of spend for, you know, the community like a lot of people are currently seeing or predicting. I don't know if you saw Olivia's tweet recently but she shared a bunch of the, the other tests that have come back and there were like eight tests and it wasn't like perfectly linear but from the beginning like the incrementality factor from like the first to the end was almost like a downwards tro slope. There were a few that came up but overall it's like as brands are spending more it just seems to be less incremental.

[Cody]

Yeah, I think that's pretty fair. I wanted to talk about our experience a little bit because one, I think, I think this idea, we talked about it a couple episodes ago but, but we discussed Applovin has been discussed on this crazy spectrum. One thing I can't believe the level of skepticism that everybody's approaching it with. Like people will not believe that it's possible to get good results on a brand new platform with you know, full screen video ad space. It's not skippable for five seconds. People just don't believe it. People are like this is a scam or whatever else. Every single result is like expressed with skepticism. There's my favorite one was the idea that in our post purchase survey which I'll talk about in just a second, people who say they came from a mobile game might have actually downloaded the mobile game from Facebook. So that in fact it's stealing attribution because someone saw the mobile game ad on Facebook, downloaded the game, saw our ad from Applovin, responded mobile game. When in reality that should be attributed back to Facebook. That was, that's what, what was implied. And I'm like we're, I think we're going crazy. I think it's, I think it's. Yeah.

[Connor]

First touch was really Facebook.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. I, yeah, I just, I've just been kind of amazed about it because I ultimately think Applovin hype will fade. I said the same thing. I'm like midterm bearish or like I think we'll, we'll like what do they say it like we'll come back to reality over the midterm. That's not a hot take. That is like an incredibly mild take because it's, it's really easy when, when you have the very first e comm brands advertising to all these mobile game users who have only seen other mobile games for the first time. You get this like novelty factor. You get this super high quality ad space. And I think the more important thing that, that I could talk about now is like the post purchase survey and people realizing that I do think app love and success is probably more mid funnel than people realize. You saw that and we talked about that many episodes ago that you saw a surprising amount of revenue coming from returning customers that was attributable to Applovin. It was incremental but it was returning. You didn't like that. We similarly saw really low percent new visits and we used our post purchase survey to validate some of that. So what we looked at was of people who on a click basis came from applovin. So in November, December we had thousands of these people. Where did they say they discovered us? And you actually do this by channel. So if you look at click attributable Facebook purchases. Click attributable, Snapchat purchases, whatever you say. Where did you first hear about us For Facebook we saw like it was a really high percentage came from Facebook. 75, 80%. If they were click attributable from Facebook, they said they they heard about us from Facebook. Makes sense. From applovin. It was like a total mixed bag. Only half of people who on a click attributable basis came from applovin had discovered us from a mobile game. 30. I think it was 30, 25, 30% of people had initially heard about us on Facebook. With all that's to say that it is like very clearly middle of funnel. We are reaching new people. That's what that 50% is. We are, we are new people are discovering us via applovin. But you're still getting a lot of that like mid funnel audience converting from those ads which I have no problem with in the short term. But does it mean that it can maintain a large percentage of our budget six months from now? Probably not. And I think that's where you're coming from here too.

[Connor]

Yeah, I feel we have a pretty, pretty similar take. I'm even reading mine and it's like it's not that hot. There are definitely some hotter takes just to be provocative. But I'm even saying many brands will still find success here but many will not. So I'm pretty as 50. 50. So what's your over under on? You know, I said 5% of overall spend for brands. What's your over under on that?

[Cody]

So we'll jump. Perfect segue. Thank you. Cody hasn't even seen the deck yet. This next slide for those listening is it's Taylor Holiday. His 10th prediction was applovin fades into a small percentage of media budgets. His 11th was share of wallet year end. Looks like he's got a bunch here. Met at 72%, Google at 14, YouTube 6%. It's a pretty good thing he's got applovin down at 2. You're saying 5. He's saying 2. I'm definitely taking the over on 2 because I think if you Have a hundred million users in the US and you have a decent ad product. Like there's enough ad dollars out there that it's, it's relatively, there's enough ad dollars to spend that it's pretty easy to be over 2%. The tricky thing is like the sophistication of brands, I don't know the basket of brands that we're looking at here to get to this share of wallet. If it's a bunch of smaller brands, it's probably less people being on Applovin. I think larger brands will find success even if it is just a retargeting channel or a like you know, upper to middle of funnel channel, something like that. For us, I bet it ends up 5 to 8%, something like that. So I take the over on 5 to the over.

[Connor]

Okay, okay, I'll take, I mean I said 5%, so I'll take the under.

[Cody]

And you'll take the overall. Taylor's 2%.

[Connor]

Yeah, exactly. So I'll play it right in the middle. Conservative.

[Cody]

Yeah. So I think we're, I think we're all on the same page. I saw another one from Dave Racook, also CTC adjacent at Bamboo Earth. He said that of brands spending dollars on Applovin in Q4, 2024, in 2025, that same cohort, it'll be a, it'll be a lower percentage which I think for us that'll totally be true. We spent a large percentage of our budget, I want to say. I mean at times like 30% of our budget went to Applovin. It for sure goes down year over year. That is that new channel kind of like activation arbitrage.

[Connor]

For sure, for sure. Totally. I'm looking at Taylor's Google search. He has something against Google, whatever it is, he's just not a Google fan.

[Cody]

Well, number 12 is Google search loses serious ad dollars.

[Connor]

That's what I'm reading.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. I, I mean what, what has your guys's experience been with like search and shopping?

[Connor]

It's just not that scalable. It can definitely have some good performance. We don't run anything branded. We just haven't found it to be incremental. Pmax what we haven't ran in a long time, we haven't tested incrementalities but we haven't ran it and didn't love some of what we are seeing in mta. But I think we should test it again. We've got some decent performance out of like non brand search. It's just, it's just not that scalable. I always go back to what you said in an episode a few back where you're like, I'm just not that interested in any channel that you can't spend like serious money on. It's just, it's a few thousand a day and it does pretty good and it brings in new visitors. But it's just, I don't know, there are probably some people that have cracked it and maybe it's by industry or maybe where it's not good enough at Google. Um, but it's, it's just doesn't seem like you can really pump it and scale it that hard. So for that Google side, that's where all of our focus really goes to YouTube. How about you guys?

[Cody]

Have you guys. Well actually first, have you run many. I know you've done House tests on branded search. Have you done House tests on non branded search and what's your experience been with both those?

[Connor]

We did on branded search, we've done two. First one, no incrementality on new customers, slight incrementality on returning. We decided to keep it on because we weren't spending that much on it. This was before we launched tv so this was like a year and a half back. And then we launched TV and brand search spend shot up and so we were spending, you know, some, some, some good money on it. So we were like, let's test it again, see if it's any different. No incrementality on anything. House said it was a clean read. We shut it off. I haven't ran brand search and you know, a little bit over a year. Definitely, definitely want to retest it at.

[Cody]

Some point though because when you're saying no incrementality, like no lift like the, the branded search revenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally just you are lighting that money on fire.

[Connor]

Which is crazy because we're. It was, you know, multi six figures a month. Yeah, no that retested though because it's been a while.

[Cody]

Yeah. And it makes sense and I would totally have. If you start launching top of funnel channels like TV or YouTube or partnerships, things that drive branded queries, I would think that, that that's showing up like ensuring that you're showing up at the top of the search might be incremental at that point, but yeah, obviously varies brand to brand. But interesting to hear.

[Connor]

You know we saw 66% of brand search traffic go to organic search. So even if it was incremental, which it wasn't like there was probably overspend on it, you know. And so I think that's one of those things where it's like you really don't know for your brand. It's so dependent. I've talked to some brands where it is very incremental to them. Um, I actually thought it was gonna be for us a with like because there was a lot of tv, you know, search from that. But also like we had a lot of like competitors or we had a lot of like Amazon resellers, stuff like that bidding on our stuff. It's just like, like the Google shopping service looked pretty crowded so I thought that we would have had to be there. But I do think we should retest.

[Cody]

And you guys are not on Amazon.

[Connor]

No.

[Cody]

Yeah, because I, I, we haven't, we have tested non branded heavily. So actually let me start with like I think an easy win at least we had this easy win is probably 2019 where it was like I'd been at Ridge for maybe a year and a half, two years and we were running branded search and we were running it at like a 15x roas. And I'm like dude, this is fantastic 15x roas. And that was like not an insignificant amount of budget. And what we found is like we could just, we could literally capture the same amount of clicks. We could bid on like we could bid max CPC is capture the same amount of clicks and get a 50x roas. Like it's one of those things where you actually there's opportunity to just save money. You don't even have to think about like whether it should be on or off or not. Like just bidding smarter and more strategically can like unlock some value. So I would say for brands listening that's worth thinking about and being hyper aggressive there. And it's also simple to do. And the second thing that I was going to say is we're on Amazon and we'll see at certain times of the year and it's always like going into holidays or going into Father's Day, something like that. Amazon will start bidding heavier on our brand terms. So that's when I can imagine we might get better incremental results by ensuring that we're showing up above Amazon. And obviously you guys don't have to worry about that. There's, there's one place online to buy Jones Road.

[Connor]

There are a lot of resellers. We're working on trying to get them down but so they actually will show in Amazon.

[Cody]

Oh really?

[Connor]

Okay, what have you guys found? I can share after but what have you guys found for non brand?

[Cody]

Non brand can be we can drive a Profitable incremental roas. So we get plenty of lift. Just ends up being a large. You talked about the, the tweet that Olivia shared earlier. House talks about this incrementality factor. If Google is reporting a 2x or let's say if YouTube is reporting a 1x you might measure that the, that the incremental rows is actually more like a 2x. That would mean your increment, your incrementality factor would be 200%. It's, it's twice as high as what the platform is reporting. Um and that's what we typically see for like top of funnel channels is you actually get a multiple on what the platform is reporting at least at times. Non branded search we found it's always a discount so we always have to be like we have to be running at a 2 and a half x 3 x non branded ROAS to really like that. That low actually. So I'm, I'm listing North Beam numbers. I don't know exactly what Google would be off the top of the head but our north beam Target is like a 2x or 2 and a half x one day click. And we know that is incremental and profitable and something that we're comfortable with. And typically the channels are reversed. Other channels are reversed. We get like a multiple.

[Connor]

Oh, interesting. So it's real. How is your percent new in North Beam on non brand?

[Cody]

On non brand it's probably like 60, 70%.

[Connor]

Okay. Okay. Wow. Interesting. Okay. We see higher percent new. I haven't checked in a while but we're probably up in the 80s and like we really struggle with percent new on most channels. Meta. So I think we have like a slight discount but it's pretty much more of like a one to one on like a one day. That's interesting factor.

[Cody]

Yeah. I mean the thing for us is like there is no, there's not really not much of like an in market wallet audience. Like not like a lot of people looking for wallets are like kind of already looking for Ridge like metal wallet for a long time was like one of our best like non brand terms. It's like yeah those people are looking for Ridge wallet. That is brand adjacent.

[Connor]

Totally makes sense. That's a perfect example of why everybody should test this stuff for themselves and their own brand, right?

[Cody]

Yeah, 100%. 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 CX 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 richpanel.com book a spot for their weekly migration webinar and get your team a spot too. All right, so we think Applovin is going to be a smaller percentage. Hype's going to fade a little bit. We talked about Google a little bit. Awesome. Let's see what else we got here. All right, so this is the first one that you and I agreed on. It's your first prediction. For those listening, Cody said kind of.

[Connor]

Agreed on the first one.

[Cody]

Oh yeah, 100%. Yeah. But this was also so I didn't, I didn't publicly post any classic. This is, this is how I do everything. Classic Connor style. I didn't post any predictions. I had a tweet drafted with just like ideas. So I threw those in here so that some of my predictions are properly documented. They are now canon. So this is one that we both had on our lists. But you said for those listening, 2025 is the first year AI makes a decent sized difference for consumer brands. It will come from automating sex and there will be some legit ad creative options for the first time. I similarly, but also a little bit different. I said consumer facing AI powered E Com tool gets traction. We see very few examples of like consumers interacting with an AI feature while shopping. And I think that might begin to change in 2025. But let's start with yours. You've been talking more about and automation there Is that at Jones Road what you guys are largely focused on applying AI to?

[Connor]

Yeah, I think that the two areas like the tweet says, I think CX is the number one that will be disrupted quite a bit. And then I think Ad Creative, which we can chat about as well. Cx, we both use Rich Panel. I really like what they're doing with AI so we're leaning in with them. I saw Maytab tweet something about how he reduced tickets and stuff like that by working with the meet from Rich panel. So I like, I like hit up with me over the break and he's been great. He like sent me a deck and they did, they did a presentation and so we're just going super hard at it. But like we are testing adding their AI stuff with some of our agents and it's just accelerating the like multiplying the number of tickets that we can do per hour. So it's not like completely self serve but I really like the approach. But it's like doubling efficiency. Right. And then I think you guys are using like the, the AI social stuff from them. Are you guys using that? Yeah, we're about to test it. But I think it's pretty, it's pretty crazy what some of it's doing. And it's just as everyone says, AI is just like evolving so rapidly.

[Cody]

Totally. And actually I don't think I have it in the deck. You had another interesting one and we shouldn't talk about it too much because it might be here but SAS tools going more horizontal and that's really like, I think what Rich Panel is trying to do, which I find really interesting. So it's like if you're, if you're really just trying to tackle like the typical tasks you're handling inbound tickets, there's a self serve component on the website. You're moderating social things like that. So how do you ultimately just do that in a decent way and then how can AI kind of augment and automate some of those systems? So I totally agree. We're, we're, we're seeing success there as well. The social media automation tool is like nothing sexy. Right. It's like, it's just you get the same types of comments. There's like five types of comments that you get on our social ads. And like you can pretty quickly train AI to automatically hide them or respond to them with the canned response and like understand what someone's trying to say and feed them the best answer. And that saves us, you know, that saves one person 30 hours a week or whatever.

[Connor]

That's pretty awesome. Yeah, we're going to implement it and try it out. Yeah. Because I think we have like two, two and a half people on just. Just social. Just social between social and ads right now. So if we can cut that in half, I'm. I'm happy.

[Cody]

Totally. Totally.

[Connor]

What. What about. What about Ad Creative? What are your. What are your thoughts there? I'll let you start there. Is AI going to make a difference yet? Is it doing anything yet? Is it soon? Not at all.

[Cody]

Well, yeah, so. So I think people are all across the spectrum here. I talked to Peter. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but he's from an agency called Flighted.

[Connor]

Dude that gets, like, good threads on it.

[Cody]

Yeah, Insane threads. Yeah. And he was talking about how they'll. I forget what the tool's called, but, like, they'll build, like, a template, basically, or I will build a template and then they'll pull a spreadsheet together with, like, all the headlines and all the captions that they want, and then it'll, like, quickly spin it up and, like, I play some role in, like, formatting that. So, like. And he'll talk deeply about, like, automating literally the entire process of. Of creating an ad. We're nowhere near there. And I don't know. I don't know if we're, like, really missing the boat there. I don't think so. Where our focus has been is really just, like, augmenting our creative strategist work. So they use Chat, GPT, Chat, GPT and Claude a lot for, like, ideating new concepts, writing briefs, writing scripts, things like that, which is great. You just get, like, the creative juices flowing much easier. Nothing groundbreaking. We'll use AI voiceover quite a bit.

[Connor]

Oh, they're almost indistinguishable now.

[Cody]

They're so good.

[Connor]

That's probably the biggest one. If you're not using that, Most people use 11 labs. Is that what you guys use?

[Cody]

I believe so.

[Connor]

It's. You can't even tell for. For the majority of it.

[Cody]

Yeah. We. When we have, like, our. Our founder, Daniel, we have enough audio clips of him that we can load those in and get, like, great, great ad reads from, like, our. Our founder. And I can always. I can always tell when, like, we don't have it because we're, like, cutting the B roll or something like that. But it's like, it's seamless and it, like, it really just expands the options that we have. It's like, create different ads. So that's where most of our tooling has been focused. And then in 2025, like, how much literal, like, creative will we use? Either statics or Video, like, I have no idea. That's still like, very much tbd. I don't know where you land on that.

[Connor]

Totally, totally agreed with, with all those. I think Voiceover is actually the one where it's made the biggest impact for us outside of ChatGPT. But I'm thinking, like, more like specific, like ad creative, specific software. Because everyone knows ChatGPT. So I think Voiceover is. Has made a huge impact. It's so much easier to just chop up B roll and put some stuff on it. I know we were both talking about Icon. I think that's the name of it. I spent some time, honestly just. I just spent a lot of time over the break as I was bored, playing around with different things. That, to me is the most impressive one yet. Able to get some very close to, like, usable ads out of it. And I think with a little tweaking and spending time on it. I don't know if you've used recharm before, but we used it in the past. It's almost like what I wanted recharm to be. Where Recharm, like, maybe they have AI now, but it was before they would, like, clip your videos up and then, like, you could go in without really knowing how to edit and, like, move things around. That's almost what it seems like. So I am going to have our creative strategist and team leading there and see if we can produce more ads quicker with that. I think. I think that one is Tickets. I played around with a few others, I think, like, creative I. And there are a few other ones. It's close. And then. And then statics. I. I don't think they're entirely. I played around one called, like, Flare, and it was more of like, Right, put your product image in. Have you seen that one? Any thoughts? I thought it was kind of cool. I didn't think it was there yet, but it was pretty cool.

[Cody]

Flares. Flare. I believe I might be getting this wrong. The founder's name is Mickey and I spoke to her years ago and she's been like. That tool's come an incredibly long way. Because they were. They were probably. She probably started that in 2022 or something, like, really early. But yeah, now it's gotten insanely good. The models have gotten better. Like, the lighting's gotten better, the whole thing. So it's definitely. It's definitely all coming along, I think.

[Connor]

I think we have very high, like, brand standards. So it's not there yet, but I think for a lot of brands, it's usable totally I think for a lot of brands, it's totally usable. You could put a good background behind it and props, and you can't tell. I did, I did connect with one dude on Twitter who has, like, a service where they're doing it a similar thing, and he has all send them in chat. He has made some images in Miracle Bomb that look really good. Like, at first glance, you couldn't tell. So I think it's not quite there yet. But it's so close, and it's going to be really disruptive to be able to just get all of these images. It's. It's very close. And then the simplest one, I've seen one person working on it, but the simplest thing I want is like a figma tool. So, like, what we'll usually do when we make statics, we'll want to test one headline across four different images and we have to have a designer going and manually do it. But, like, that should be the easiest thing to have. I do.

[Cody]

Right.

[Connor]

So something like that I would love to see.

[Cody]

That's what. That's what Peter was telling me about. So there's some sort of, like, workflow that will do that, I think. I think it involves like, Zapier or something. It's like a little hack.

[Connor]

I think he's using like, Zapier to, like, a Google sheet to, like, Canva.

[Cody]

Yes, it's like something like that.

[Connor]

Got it, Got it. Okay. That's really cool, actually.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah, it's fun.

[Connor]

I think close, though, man. I think six months, maybe a year. I. I really think it'll be pretty legit. What do you think will happen? Let's say it happens. And, you know, brands can now create a hundred statics, you know, in half an hour at, you know, $0.10 per static. Like, does that help brands? Does that even hurt? Do you think any of those will perform? Like, like, what do you think will happen? Do you think consumers will, like, have different expectations?

[Cody]

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, probably what happens is, I think if you were a brand and people feel different ways about this, but, like, at least for the last. For most of the last couple years, I felt you've been at an advantage. If you can create content at a high scale, if you just deliver a lot of ads, like, you could win. You could. You could make yourself more likely to win by. By providing volume. So volume all of a sudden becomes commoditized. It seems unlikely that that in and of itself will allow you to win. So then it just goes back to like, well, what's the actual strategy behind it? So you might see like. And this was, this is why we were excited about Icon. We have a. Our performance creative manager who's been here for a couple of years. At this point he was like, yeah, I think with Icon I could create 100 ads a day. And I'm like, oh, I think that's exciting. Not that we can create 100, but that Chris can. Chris, the performance manager, I think he has the ideas that 100 ads would benefit. So I think that's probably where like the leverage kind of builds is with the people actually ideating, having the ideas because the production and development is completely commoditized.

[Connor]

I totally agree with that. I. When I was on the plane, I had like a three hour plane ride to Miami and I. We're working on redoing our PDPs and we got a first design back which I liked, but I like wanted to get feedback on it and I started like playing around with it in Figma and I can't design for shit, right? And I was playing around with it and I was like, I wish there was like an AI design tool. So I looked for it. I didn't find one. I don't know if you've seen Replit, it's an AI code tool. And so I made an account and I played around with it and in three hours, I don't know anything about code. I. I was able to make a PDP that it didn't have our css. I think I could have gotten there if I had more time and uploaded all of our fonts and stuff. I do think I could got there. But it was a proper layout, mobile responsive PDP where I was able to get all the sections in there. And it was really cool for me because I was able to get stuff. You ever have something in your head and you just need to get it out of your head and see it on paper, but I don't have those design skills. But I was able to actually create some of these sections and like with how I prompted AI, it almost made them better and it like allowed me to get an output that like I wouldn't have even thought of in my head. Um, so it was really cool and I was able to take that and give it to our director, E. Comm. And be like, hey, give this to our agency. Like here, here's the order of the sections. This is what I think this section should look like. So that, that was really cool.

[Cody]

Yeah. All right. So. So you, you might be a CEO.

[Connor]

And CTO just had too much free time on my hands.

[Cody]

One thing we talk about on marketing operators all the time is measurement. How am I as the CMO of Ridge logging in and understanding what our performance was yesterday and last week and last month compared to different time periods? Our go to solution for that is North Beam, a multi touch attribution tool that we rely on every single day. We really like it for two reasons. One, it is a standard form of measurement across all channels. We know deterministically that if someone clicks through we're tracking in Northbeam that that user is measured in the exact same way between Meta and Snap and TikTok and YouTube partnerships if we're clicking through from there or TV if we're clicking through from there. So we get this foundational layer that we know is measured in the exact same way over long periods of time. So I have full confidence that we know that we are comparing things accurately and honestly. The second thing I like about Northbeam is its data management tools. We tag incessantly. I talk about naming conventions all the time and Northbeam is where we benefit greatly from that. Every day I can log in and divide my spend and sort it across different dimensions so I know exactly how much we're spending across categories, across different demos, across different offers or asset types. So it's our go to tool. If you want to hear more about North Beam, make sure to visit Northbeam IO and make sure to tell them that the marketing operator sent you. All right, let's see what else we got. Do you want to read this one aloud?

[Connor]

I'm gonna get in trouble for this one. Meta admits they suck at reaching new audiences and they find a way to fix it and help brands actually find new audiences on a purchase objective.

[Cody]

And then I felt like the, the one behind it that was number eight, number nine related.

[Connor]

Yeah, running these are like eight, I believe. I can't say too much. Nine I think is kind of like a purposeful, spicy hot take. But I, I still do believe it. Run of mid or upper funnel strategy becomes de facto best practice for eight and beyond eight figure and beyond brands. So yeah, I think that you know the problem really from the, the first prediction is Meta is just not great at reaching new audiences outside of a certain scale and level. And so I think they will find a fix to that and they probably aren't admitting it's a problem, but they probably know it. And then, you know, I think the really part of the other effects is brands will do more upper funnel stuff. I'm Just seeing more people talk about it as well.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

What do you think you're, you're probably. I can tell you disagree with that one.

[Cody]

No, no, no. I mean I have felt many different ways about this over, over the years. I was going to say. Well, yeah, let's start there. I think I want to talk again about our experience because I've talked about this on, on previous episodes. One of the reasons we spent 20, 30% of our budget on Applov sucked in Q4 like we have had and we validated that with House. We like lined up our testing calendar so that we got a readout going into BFCM week so that we knew like hey, you know, meta saying one thing, North Beam saying another thing like how can we validate that as, as clearly as possible? We lined up a test in order to do that and it was not good. So we spent most of BFCM week trying to spend money other places. And that was Applovin and that was YouTube shorts and Snapchat crushed it. It.

[Connor]

How much can you spend on YouTube shorts? We don't spend a lot there.

[Cody]

How much? I think, I think, I think we had a day where we spent $70,000 BFCM week.

[Connor]

That is a lot more than the thousand we're spending a day.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, there's, there's a lot of people on YouTube and it's. And it's really affordable. So if you have good short form vertical video, we've at least seen some success there. And that's a channel where we see. And we've run probably we ran a number of holdout tests or we got a number of readouts throughout November and December on YouTube because we knew that that was going to be a big channel for us and we wanted to continue to validate that. We had a number of readouts that validated that it was incremental and the Multiple off of Northbeam was massive. It was like an 8x multiple based off of what north theme is reporting on a one day click basis. Which should.

[Connor]

Have you, have you tested. Sorry, have you tested like shorts isolated or you just test it all together?

[Cody]

Um, yeah. So the like campaign structure has changed a lot. I know we've consolidated but we largely serve in shorts placements.

[Connor]

So you're running kind of short. It's irregular. In the same campaigns now.

[Cody]

Some of them are like that and then some of them are shorts exclusive. It's like some mix. I wish I knew the campaign structure off the top of my head, but it is largely shorts because One of my goals going into 2025 is to better crack like true in stream YouTube. I think that's like a completely different placement that we have to approach differently. Try to hit YouTube, TV, things like that.

[Connor]

Well, yeah, yeah. And that was my hypothesis. And we haven't tested shorts together. When we've tested YouTube, it's either we weren't running shorts or we just, we just tested all. And shorts is just a very small percent of our budget. But my hypothesis is less. It has a lower incrementality factor because it doesn't have, it doesn't show on TV where 39% of YouTube sessions show on a TV. So you'll get incremental orders from people seeing on TV and not clicking. That wouldn't show up in like a one day click.

[Cody]

Yeah, that makes total sense.

[Connor]

You don't get that.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes total sense. But also with shorts like you're getting, you know, two dollar CPMs or whatever. Like you're just serving so many impressions for every dollar that I think just that awareness can lead to more incremental results as well.

[Connor]

For. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. That, that's awesome.

[Cody]

Yeah, we're. Yeah, yeah. A little like post rationalization. But, but our big focus is. And anyway I say all that we were in that position November, December. Our goal going into 2025 is to get better results out of meta. So it's like, how are we introducing more mid and upper funnel strategies? I guess my, I go, I go back and forth here because I think I've heard other people say you should be running, you should always be running reach campaigns and nobody and too few of brands will validate that. And I think Facebook can really just like, if you want reach, it'll exclusively give you reach. It'll exclusively just give you impressions. That's always my concern with that for a brand of our size. We've spent $100 million plus on hundreds of millions of dollars on meta. You know, we're doing hundreds of millions of, of dollars a year. Like we have to be mid and upper funnel. We're doing that with new channels like YouTube. We're doing that with different bidding strategies on Facebook optimizing for view content. That's what we're focusing on right now. But we're going to test reach as well. So I think that probably becomes more effective because I do agree with number eight where it's like, I think meta has gotten worse at reaching new audiences. I think they, I think asc, I think a lot of these like Changes in Ads Manager have moved Meta to being more middle and bottom of funnel.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I agree and by the way I said kind of mid or upper funnel. So like I don't mean just reach or video views. Like I think some combination. So maybe brands start running add to cart or view content. I think everybody's got a test and we found some success on both. I think sometimes people think my like kind of hot take on it. I think sometimes people think reach is like the worst quality because it's like the highest of in funnel and like the lowest. Right. It's like the furthest from a purchase objective. But I also think sometimes when you remove that purchase objective and that intent that then you really need to just go really wide with the cheapest CPMs. Like if it's not going to convert regardless, then you have to get like cheap enough CPMs to make that really low conversion of impression to purchase. Makes sense versus if you go with a view content maybe it doesn't convert that well but you're still paying A$10 cpm or something like that.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

I could be wrong. I think everybody should test though.

[Cody]

Totally. No, I mean I agree with the logic. That's why when we look at. I've talked about this too, our linear TV strategy is like C tier networks. We'll hit male dense C tier networks. Motor Trends Fishing Network, American Heroes. That's coming at $2 CPMs. That's coming at $2 CPMS. We get some clearance at like sub $CPMs and it's like that's relatively low intent. I mean frankly those do end up converting pretty well but it's coming at such a low cost that we're serving great impressions, we're reaching people who are not reaching on meta often and they don't have to convert at a high rate for that CPA to begin penciling out for sure.

[Connor]

I agree. I think you'll see it more. I think not to like always talk about incrementality but I think this is one that the, the one barrier, the one kind of like devil's advocate here is you have to have a way to measure it. And I think it doesn't have to be incrementality and criminality is probably the best way but you're just not going to see any attribution even on like a view content. It's just not going to look good. And so most brands aren't going to be able to leave it running if they don't really have a good way to validate totally.

[Cody]

And that's the, that's the tricky thing. You know it's super weird for us and what I think is really concerning but like some of our. Through bfcm one of our best campaigns was view content optimized that like all of it for whatever reason like we were actually driving some of our best performance not optimizing for purchase. So yeah, all brands different for sure.

[Connor]

I have heard that one though it hasn't worked for us but we have definitely tried it. I think. You know Meta's theory there is like during Black Friday like conversion rate Byron 10 is so high anyways.

[Cody]

Right.

[Connor]

But CPMs are so high that you can kind of take advantage of lower CPMs with the view content but you still get high enough conversion rates to pencil out.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. And that's what we saw. All right, cool. We can, let's see. Keep rocking here. All right, so we got another one from Taylor, Holiday and Cody. There's some, there's some overlap here. Also kind of a common theme on the pod as of late. Taylor said E Commerce labor market implodes. A little bit of a doomer post E Commerce labor market implodes. Labor composition of brands changes dramatically. We see the rise of the agent brand and continued outsourcing overseas OPEX expectations dip below 10% amidst margin pressures. And Cody, you said brands will continue to hone in on low opex. The best brands will outsource a lot of manual work. It's happening but will continue happening at scale. I want to include here that we just had Dan McCormick on from Create Createin Gummies and they'll do like $40 million with six employees and you were teasing me that I'm so jealous that there are these high leverage brands out there that are just crushing it. So a little bit self explanatory but any, anything you want to add on this front?

[Connor]

Yeah, I'm also jealous when we talk to him and we talk to Zack, stuff like that. And now as, as part of being CEO mode just you know we've, I've obviously been in, you know the last few months have been obviously 20, 25 planning, performance reviews, bonuses, comp, all that stuff. And it's expensive. It's. It's expensive running a brand and, and costs add up and then also with expanded distribution and growth, there's, there's margin pressure from a lot of places. You know marketing as a percent usually gets worse. It doesn't usually get better. You know there's obviously there's, there's tariff pressure and all that stuff on gross Margin. So yeah, you know, that stuff gets more challenging as you scale. You have to spend more to acquire customer. And really one of the only, you know, if, if you have to spend more on marketing to create the same revenue as you grow, really the only way to keep the same EBITDA and offset that is to, is to get some operating leverage.

[Cody]

Right.

[Connor]

And really the best way to do that, you know, our big, biggest cost is personnel and team. And so I think, you know, it's, it's nothing new. It's new for us. I can share what, what we're planning, but there's all of these, you know, agencies that are doing all these overseas recruitment that have blown up for a reason. There's incredible, incredible talent all over the world and a lot of really smart brands have taken advantage of it. And you know, in a lot of roles, I think, like outsourcing CX is very common, but it's, you know, it's, it's not just that. I think you guys have, have people all over depending on the role.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I had this conversation recently. Like, the way that we've built out our performance creative team is we've got two creative strategists onshore, we've got three offshore editors, and then we have a. She's kind of like a pseudo editor or a hybrid editor and strategist out of Ireland. And it's like, so, yeah, more than half that. And then there's like a project manager out of the Philippines. Way more than half of like the performance creative team is overseas and I think we'll see more of that. And then, and then this like awesome overseas talent and domestic talent are just further empowered by AI. It's like everybody's becoming more efficient and you're reducing costs by having more of a global workforce. Yeah, you're definitely building some, some operational leverage there.

[Connor]

I think so. And it's like a, it's almost like a Darwinism thing. Like, I think brands have to, I think brands will kind of have no choice. They can't, they can't be at, you know, 10, 15%, you know, payroll to revenue with all of the other margin pressure they have. So I think people are going to just, just have to be forced to, you know, look, we're doing overall very well as a brand. We had a great year, but just, just, you know, it was a little bit sober and looking at some of the stuff. So we're, we're going to make some changes and take more advantage of it. So I'm like, totally Red pilled on it and you know we'll definitely have updates but maybe it's more of a, you know me projecting because this is what we're doing and so just everyone else will.

[Cody]

No, I mean I think like all the talk around I. All the talk around outsourcing is all like hitting on this point. A slightly different point that I think is interesting is like why I think the create business is so interesting or Holo sock so that stands Creatine gummies or Zach sock brand. Like the business model in and of itself is high leverage. Like I think what will also. What also seems like it is going to be increasingly hard to operate is like seasonal or like fashion oriented brands where you need far more labor when it comes to ordering and supply chain management and planning and like managing sell through and managing multiple channels. Like all of that is essentially like reducing leverage further and further. And a lot of the brands that seem to be scaling the most effectively you look at like there's just so many like all the coffee alternative brands are like largely single SKU so that you reduce all the complexity in the business model. You're getting operational leverage from a lean like empowered AI empowered team or whatever. Like that seems to be just a very. It's a very beautiful business in my mind and I think like different brands will adopt all different kind of pieces of that operationally and like you know with AI and outsourcing overseas, that's one. But also like just simplifying the business model. Completely unrelated but I spent a lot of time at Dunkin Donuts over November and December because the only cafe near me that opened before 8 8am Dude, I couldn't. I didn't have a cafe near me before 8am Aside from Dunkin Donuts. So I spent a lot of time there and they have a streamlined menu. They serve a handful of snacks and they serve coffee and it's like someone at some point came in and cut that down to just like to get leverage to be like we're gonna be.

[Connor]

You were in la in and Out Burger. That's like the best example of this.

[Cody]

Yeah, 100% in n out burger too. So we'll see more DTC brands act like in n out.

[Connor]

That's a good point. I haven't really thought about that that a ton but that's a good point. It's not, it's. Yeah, it's almost like everyone tracks payroll as a percentage of revenue. It's almost like skew to revenue. Like what's your like revenue per sku? Something like that. Just, just to see how high leverage you are. That's a really good point.

[Cody]

Or what I talk about often, and maybe I've said this before, but like we were reviewing product launches for 2025 and we were looking at, in addition to our ring business and we were looking at a product that would appeal to a new demo. And I was just making the point that it was, it was part of this like merchandising call. Like, which one did we want to prioritize? And I said, well, one of these is like giving us more leverage in an existing part of our business. Rings is already an eight figure business. It grew, you know, almost 100% year over year last year. If we just add something in addition to that business, we're just going to put it on the site. We're going to start selling it in 10% of orders, 15% of orders for launching a product, for a new demo. We have to rebuild whatever engine is going to sell that thing. And I think people forget that and like, and they'll overlook the thing that, like, it's not sexy, it's an accessory to the ring business or whatever, but it's just going to chip away and it's always on and nobody has to pay any mind to it. That's actually where building leverage comes from. And I think people might be readdressing parts of that within their different brands.

[Connor]

That's a really good point. It's a very good point. For us, launching International was super high leverage. We didn't have to add anybody to do it. We just, we just went with our initial strategy. I don't think it'll be as high leverage as we grow and scale it because now we will to grow past a plateau. We will have to localize more as you guys have done.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

But yeah, just another example of like one. One where we were able to get some leverage there.

[Cody]

100%. 100%. Yeah. It's a great example. All right. Boom. I got a short one here. Cooper flag to Utah Jazz. I just had to get this on the record because I think it's going to happen and I didn't tweet it, so I'm, I'm saying it now. Cooper flag, number one high school recruit. Is it Duke right now? Utah Jazz are tanking. I've become a Jazz fan over the last year and a half, so I think he's going to the Jazz. I think it's written, I think, I think Adam Silver's behind the strings trying to put Utah Jazz on the map. Are you a basketball fan at all, Cody?

[Connor]

I am, I'm not. I'm terrible at like college so I never know like the top recruits and stuff unless somebody's like really, really popular. But I am an NBA fan.

[Cody]

Yeah, Cooper Flag's gonna, he, he's awesome.

[Connor]

We've been talking about upper funnel channels a lot, especially leading up into, you know, peak moments. 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 and 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, 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, 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, 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.

[Cody]

All right, we'll go to the next one. I wanted to talk about this more, this is from you. We see further consolidation in the SaaS base. To stay competitive, companies will build or acquire horizontal solutions to become all in one bundled solutions.

[Connor]

More margin pressure, man. I mean, you know, brands are just going to feel it everywhere. And I don't know about you guys probably, probably more Sean's thing going crazy mode, but I've just been just looking at every software we use and just kind of going, you know, full doge mode on it and trying to figure out what do we not need, you know. So the way I'm thinking about it, anything, I might have some in there later but anything that is a variable cost, a variable fee, you're going to a flat fee or we're finding an alternative. Like I think a lot of people used to use rebuy which was a fine tool but then after sell came along built just as good of a product, if not better but it caps at a much lower amount. So it's become insanely popular. So I think you'll see a lot more of that. I think you will see more of the consolidation. For example, like Loop just bought wonderment, you know.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

And so somebody who we are Loop, you know, customer now it's a lot easier to have tracking and not have, you know, a big additional fee for that. I know. You know there are a lot others that tried it. I think it depends. But I think you'll probably see more acquisitions because it's a lot easier to probably do that than, than to, to build it. So I, I do think you'll see more of those kind of multi solution SaaS versus just having a bunch of different ones. Just because I do think it'll be more economical for everybody to have less vendors and pay them a little bit more. But it won't be, you know, I think if you have a vendor that's doing three things and you know, you might pay 20% more than if they just did one, but you're going to pay a lot less than if you had three different vendors for all.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah, I, I agree with that. We also are like I don't have it in here. But yeah, you talk about the removal of variable pricing from software providers because we did go through this crazy period where all of a sudden everyone wanted to charge on a percentage of ad spend a percentage of revenue or percentage of or for every ticket answered or whatever. We're totally going away from that. That was like, that was kind of like the, the, the dead cat. The dead cat bounce off of COVID right where it's like you did see, I mean there were, there were software vendors that were making a ton of money because brands were growing at a really fast rate and weren't as budget conscious, weren't tightening the belt like they are now. So that's definitely coming out. And then you bring up some good.

[Connor]

Examples, SaaS CEOs about that specifically how like it used to be people wanted flat and then Covid, after Covid they went and now everyone wants flat again. Totally, so totally agree there.

[Cody]

Yeah, you bring up Loop and Wonderment. I think that's an awesome acquisition. Wonderment's a great tool. We're also users you mentioned after sale which got bought by Rocket or Rocked or whatever. Like so we're seeing consolidation there. Just like you have post purchase experiences. I've always thought this was really interesting because historically, I think I historically wanted to like consolidate more and the space wasn't consolidating. Like I always thought it was super weird that you know, six or seven years ago it was like your, your ESP was different than your pop up provider, was different than your SMS provider. It's like, why do I need three tools? It feels like these should all be the same. It was one of the reasons we'd moved to Wunderkind, which we've since moved off of. But like I always thought the Privy business was awesome. Privy got bought by Attentive and they were like, they were pop ups, they were on site, banners and email. I think it was just like a very nice consolidation of tools. So I'm hoping you're right here. I would love to see fewer solutions and tools that talk better. The tools talk better to one another because they're from coming from the same company.

[Connor]

Yeah, that's another plus you, you have less, you know, less API, less integrations you have to build. Even just if you have, you know, a services component, you have less reps that you have to work with. What, what, what do you think? If I want to put you on the spot, what would be like one you'd want to see or like an acquisition? What's like a. I was going to ask you.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, let me think of it.

[Connor]

Let me think of one. I've, I've always thought, who will launch a product? Who will launch a new, a new set of products?

[Cody]

Well, let me say a couple of things. One, I think PostScript and I've talked about this with the PostScript team because they stayed as like a single SMS product for a long time and they are now very thoughtfully, I think building out A better suite of tools. They launched their pop up, which I think will be the preferred pop up. Once Amped fully gets rolled into mailchimp, people moved off of amped. I think a lot of that business goes to Postscript. Postscript also bought fondue in 2023. So that was good. Like they have an interesting suite of tools. They've done a good job. Um, to ask them to.

[Connor]

I want them to build email. I've asked them to build email.

[Cody]

It would make sense. Like it doesn't seem crazy that they would, you know, they would try to acquire someone in the space. I was two places that I'd like to see it. You mentioned after sell and rebuy. And like maybe rebuy is an example of this. I've always felt there was an opportunity for a tool that would better roll out just all the different upsells, like different product recommendations, cart upsell, post purchase, upsell, things like that feels like it could be a more unified experience. And then the other one is maybe more analytics roll ups. Like I love Elevar and like tag management is great. I'd love to see like a North Beam buy an Elevar, something like that. And I've got, I've got no inside info there, but like that's a place where we're using a bunch of different vendors to track people on our website. Feels like that could be one thing.

[Connor]

I like that. I like that. Those are good. I could totally see that happen. I think those are very synergistic. Yeah, I've definitely thought that postscript should do email. I think they have a great reputation. They do. They do SMS so well. It's such a great team. People love their products. So I could totally see them doing email and killing out the park. I don't think Klaviyo. I know Klaviyo has tried to roll out a bunch of things like reviews or cdp. It seems like they've botched all of them. But like to me, like the reviews one seems like just such an obvious one because it's, you know, it's not. It's commoditized enough that it's not like a standalone. You know, I put you on the spot. I really don't have any. Let me, let me think about it and get back to you.

[Cody]

All right. Yeah, let me think about it one more. I meant to bring this up earlier. We were talking about AI playing larger roles in ad creative. I set a consumer facing tool and I think postscript, just while we're on the topic of of them I think has done some really thoughtful consumer facing AI features and tools that brands will use and I think that gets more popular in 2025. I don't know exactly where consumers will be interacting with AI as they shop, but SMS seems like it's a growing one and it's text based medium. Like it makes total sense that they kind of crush that for sure.

[Connor]

Totally makes sense.

[Cody]

All right. An analytics tool. This is for me an analytics tool will adopt weak based reporting. I wrote this one down and I'm more just trying to manifest it.

[Connor]

I don't think projections are just projecting.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. 100% in analytics tools up week based reporting. I think this is a no brainer. What I want is to standardize looking like Sunday to Saturday reporting. So when I say last week analytics tools know what I'm talking about. Week to date is Sunday to yesterday and when I say week to date, year over year, it's adjusting so that I'm looking at like last week started on the 29th, 1229, 2024, the year before started 1231, 2023. I want my analytics tool to know that so I don't have to do all these custom things. Because lastly, and I don't know if you've noticed this, but I feel as if shopping behavior between weekends and non weekends is like increased over time. I think through Covid maybe like more people were working at home, more people are spending money all the time now. It feels especially for different kind of for different categories we'll see buying behavior concentrated on weekends. So if you look at yesterday year over year, you're comparing a Monday to a Saturday and it's like that's no good. That data is dead. Like it doesn't mean anything to you. So I'd like to see better adjustments for that natively by analytics tools.

[Connor]

I hope it happens for you. Yeah, really do.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, it will. Clip this. We'll put it on Twitter and we'll try to peer pressure someone into doing it.

[Connor]

Harley.

[Cody]

Yeah, 100%. All right, cool. We've got one from Taylor Holiday which he had some good ones that like I kind of geeked out on. But he says the hedge fund ification of media buying. Mmm. Allocators become trendy software that automates daily spend across channels. I've got some thoughts here but any, any initial takes from you?

[Connor]

No, go for it.

[Cody]

Okay. Because I do think and this has always been like, this has always been, this is how my media buying team should work. Right. Like if you are, if you're spending money across all these channels. This is how an MMM should work in theory. Right? You're spending money across all these channels. You're validating results for certain periods of time throughout the year with geo tests. You're feeding those geotests into the MMM model. So it is. So it has all these different cost curves and it's giving you optimal budgets. The like fully realizing that is someone ultimately saying, hey, I've got. You know, I actually don't even know if you'd need to set a budget necessarily. Maybe initially say, I want to spend $100,000. Now just go allocate it for me the best you know, how given what we know about all these channels and these cost curves and things like that, it makes total sense. I think it's really hard to do. We're going to.

[Connor]

You said everything right there. It makes total sense. It's probably really hard to do.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I don't think, I don't think this gets popular in 2025. It's. It's a. Something in the 2000s. This, this decade probably. But this, this getting any, any real traction, like the full automation of it, I don't think happens.

[Connor]

I'm with you there. I think, I think it will happen. I just don't think it'll happen yet.

[Cody]

I talked about this with. I'd like to do a semblance of this. I talked about it with Jared, who was on many episodes ago. He's the executive vice president of marketing at Nectar Mattress, because they do. They do budget rebalancing twice a week. And this is what I would like to emulate where we just say, hey, on Mondays we're going to review last week's data and on Friday mornings we're going to review week to date data. And what we have is we have performance by channel and then we have an understanding of, given that performance from North Beam, or it could be channel performance, like what that true impact is. And we've, we've measured that at different times via House or whatever else. Given what is over or underperforming your targets or where you're at relative to the budget you want to spend. Theoretically. Like you could just calculate how you want to reallocate. Hey, Facebook's underperforming. There's like a bunch of like kind of logical steps. Let's say we are exactly at our target. We're spending exactly how much we want. Revenue is right where we want. Facebook below our target. TikTok's above our target. You could theoretically say, hey, we want to reduce Facebook's budget. We want to allocate that to TikTok. And that is an example of this happening. But it will be totally kind of gut feel. It'll be very manual and we'll maybe do it twice a week and not daily. But I think there's. I think there's alpha to achieve here in the short term.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I agree. And I think the biggest difference Taylor always talks about with even like manual bids and cost caps versus lowest cost is like, past performance does not predict future. And I think, you know, that's where usually humans will be looking at past performance. Hey, how's our last three days of Meta on, you know, compared to targets against YouTube? Where should we. Where should we push, you know, spend on? And it's not. Doesn't mean that just because meta has been performing better, Meta will continue to perform better. Where maybe these models might be able to predict it better, who knows? But that would be slight difference. But it's. It's obviously all theoretical.

[Cody]

Totally. It is a very theoretical prediction. I like it. I think I've got a dumb one next. Yeah, Stephen A. Smith becomes a mainstream media figure. He went on Sean Hannity a couple months ago and crushed it. And yeah, I just think I could see him getting more into, like, general politics and being on CNN instead of ESPN all the time. So that's one of my 2025 predictions.

[Connor]

Like these, because I like these random ones because I don't even know what you have in this deck.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. All right. I think we've only got two more and then what we could wrap. Oh, this is another theoretical one. Not a 2025 prediction. Not a good 2025 prediction. No offense, Taylor. Also, we have to recognize Taylor's never been on the show, but we featured his tweets on two different episodes now. So he's kind of like a shadow member of the team. But what he says here is there's an omnichannel digital brand product layer that sits on top of Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, Ulta, TikTok shops. You put YouTube shops in there. Like, I'm sure the point is a distributed point of purchase across the Internet, that there will be this product layer to manage your brand poses a real threat to Shopify unless they can get there first. Agree or disagree.

[Connor]

This is kind of like when you asked Harley on the pod, you know, where the vision is. This is kind of similar to what he described, which is like, they started as a website builder and, you know, they Recognize that commerce is changing and they're not. You know, they'll still have a website, but they also just want to enable, you know, commerce where people want to shop, whether it's TikTok shops, YouTube, you know, shops with their, their integration meta, they have an integration as well. So I don't know they have the biggest head start. I think this is probably a little bit more of a 2026, 2027 thing. But yeah, that only parts I disagree with is I think it's a little bit later. I think it is Shopify.

[Cody]

Yeah, I think I'm totally with you. I think there's an opportunity for someone to try to compete with Shopify being this like digital brand product layer. But I think it's most likely going to be Shopify. I'm like deeply passionate about this trend in particular and why I asked Harley about it because it seems like it's inevitable people will just be purchasing more places. And as a brand, I actually just want to be where people shop with a few exceptions, right? Like we won't be on, we don't want to be on Walmart, but if Ulta would have us, we'd be there or we're on TikTok shops. Like we are a brand that is we want to be where people are buying. And I think there will be more and more brands like that. So we need a central place to distribute this. I'll actually go a step further because I was thinking about this a lot in like 2021. I thought that we'd see a rise in online multi brand retailers like niche marketplaces. Huckberry comes to mind, which is like Huckberry is an awesome marketplace. Essentially they're, they're a third party retailer. And it just seems inefficient to me that we get our products, we order them overseas, we land them in the US we unpack them, then at some point somebody's got to pack those back up, ship them to Huckberry so that they could unpack them so that they could fulfill some order that someone clicked by by clicking the Huckberry shopping ad on our branded terms. It's like it seems silly. Those buy buttons might as well be right next to one another. And we've shipped these products all over the place. And it's actually something Harley said before that like dropshipping is ultimately a process improvement. It's kind of got negative connotations with people like selling cheap products and shipping them directly from China. But in a lot of ways it's a process improvement. And I think that's kind of united with that where you just get more like centralized brand management than distributed points of purchase. And I could see people also just shipping from fewer. I'm selling across all these different channels, but just shipping from our warehouse. So I think that becomes more popular as well. But again, yep. I'm probably thinking this decade. Yeah, because already, dude, we're in the back half of the decade.

[Connor]

It's wild kind of. Yeah. I mean on that note, I think the. What is Shopify? Call it like Shopify Collective. I think that's cool. Where it's kind of like they're like affiliate kind of drop shipping thing I think is awesome. I also know you're bullish on like brands monetizing, you know, other aspects of their site, other things like that. So it's kind of like one of those things that might all fit in together 100%.

[Cody]

100%. And that's just under the assumption that like, hey, it's going to become more and more cost prohibitive to reach people on Instagram. When I talk about this before, a lot of people are like, oh yeah, Instagram is where I discover brands and that's awesome for now. But there need to be more places where that happens because Instagram is just going to get more and more expensive and privacy is going to get tougher and tougher to actually track purchases. So like that just becomes a more difficult channel to make work. So we need to kind of distribute and cooperate. And that's where you look at like Rocket plays into that future or a disco Commerce or Shopify Collective or Convect Convictional is like this dropshipping tool. So lots of cool stuff. We'll see how much traction it gets in this coming year. I think I got. This is the last one, this is yours.

[Connor]

You know, just, just had to, I mean I had to come up with 25. That was hard. But here is my boldest prediction. Marketing operators becomes a de facto number one DTC podcast closely followed by nine operators.

[Cody]

I think that's a good way to end it. I think we got it in the bag.

[Connor]

I'm just kidding, guys. No, I do, I. Can I add one more in here?

[Cody]

Sure.

[Connor]

Tick tock. What do you think happens to TikTok?

[Cody]

You know, we just talked to our TikTok rep who's, who's a very nice woman and you know, is probably just kind of like a mid level manager and I asked her a couple of weeks ago, I'm like, so what's, what's like what's the word from, like, what are you guys supposed to say to me? Like, I'm under the impression that you're supposed to be sold off or you'll be shut down in the next, like, two weeks. Why would I invest further in TikTok shops from here? And she said that they would. That kind of, they're talking points or they will just take it up the court system. So it will just get dragged out for a long time and then Trump doesn't seem to want to spin it off at all. So it seems like there's going to be less pressure from the incoming president. I think probably nothing changes. I mean, I don't know what it looks like two or three years from now, but in the very short term, I think it just kind of fizzles out again.

[Connor]

Okay. Okay. I think he has gone back and forth on it, which is interesting. I think it'll get sold. I think he's got this, like, really strong stance on foreign policy and I think he, he wants to, you know, prove to be strong and he's obviously gonna do stuff with Putin and try to end the war there and, you know, already got Trudeau out of, out of office there and by calling him, you know, the governor of Canada. But I think, I think he. It'll be a for sale and I think it'll go to somebody and I think it'll go to somebody that normally would, would be considered, you know, like they would block that acquisition because maybe it's, you know, monopoly. But I think in this scenario they'll consider it the lesser evil compared to China having our data. So I would say I don't think it'll go to a social company like Meta or Google with like a social network. I think it'll go to either, like a commerce company. I think it'll go to either. Amazon, I can see doing really well in crushing it. Walmart, because they're trying to do a really big commerce play and they've got some catching up to do. Or Apple, I think would be an interesting one. Those are my three hot take. I think your take is a lot more likely, but mine's more fun.

[Cody]

Yeah, it is. You're. I agree with that. You think that happens this year?

[Connor]

I think so. Could take a while, but I think so.

[Cody]

Yeah, we'll see. I mean, there's just so many, there's just so many factors.

[Connor]

So how, how heavily are you guys investing in TikTok overall right now?

[Cody]

I don't think we're, I mean, we haven't ever done TikTok. We haven't done TikTok shops very well. We haven't done like product seating very well in the sense that like we've never seen success. We've like seeded hundreds of products but like hasn't gained traction in the way that you'd want. So we're actually. My point kind of earlier on, like, where are we building leverage? I'd like to consolidate more of our efforts into higher leverage projects. So we're going to reduce our focus on TikTok, but I don't think that has anything to do with whether I think it's getting sold off or not. I think it's a better use of our time.

[Connor]

Yeah, TikTok could go away and like it wouldn't affect our business.

[Cody]

Right.

[Connor]

We're, we're spending an amount on TikTok right now that is just not worth it. That like, it's just not a good leverage thing. And I'm like fighting with my team. I'm like, why are we even spending money on TikTok?

[Cody]

Yeah, 100% and it's been, it's just been super, super hit or miss. So. Yeah, so we'll see what happens. I like your prediction though. Those, those, it would be good. Do you think, do you think Snapchat gets sold?

[Connor]

Are they trying to.

[Cody]

Well, they're just like the stock. Stock super weak they're getting. I mean if you look at Snap compared to Applovin, it's just kind of embarrassing. I mean like, like why would, why would Snap underperform app lovin so dramatically? So you think that's maybe an acquisition target? Especially if M and A starts warming up a little bit.

[Connor]

Hey, my pickup. Maybe.

[Cody]

I think. I bet I. The likelihood that Snap gets bought feels more likely than TikTok being sold.

[Connor]

Okay. All right, I got. We got one bet. I really wish we could do like Poly Market on all this stuff. DTC Poly Market. We have one bet on TikTok being sold. One on Snap being sold.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. All right, dude, I think that's a great app. That's a wrap on episode 42 of the Marketing Operators. Thank you for listening. Make sure to comment like subscribe. Share with your friends. If you've got 2025 predictions, share those with us. We'll make sure to circle back and figure out how the the moderators listeners perform. Formed in2025. Thank you as always to our sponsors Motion Prescient Rich panel and our newest sponsor Northbeam. Thank you. We'll see you again next week.