E043: Creative Testing: Quality Vs Quantity - Does Chasing Volume Lead to Success?

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary: Marketing Operators E043

Title: Creative Testing: Quality Vs Quantity - Does Chasing Volume Lead to Success?

Release Date: January 21, 2025

Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker

---

Introduction

In the first episode of the new year, the hosts of Marketing Operators—Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, and Cody Plofker—reunite after a two-person episode last week. They kick things off by sharing their recent travel experiences, with Connor mentioning his upcoming trip to Mexico City to attend Sean’s wedding. [00:00-01:55]

---

Creative Testing: Quality vs Quantity

The core discussion of this episode revolves around the tension between producing a high volume of creative assets versus focusing on their quality. Cody initiates the conversation by questioning the commonly held belief that more creative leads to greater success:

"Does chasing volume lead to success? I hear a ton of people say it anecdotally, but haven't found any real data on it." [04:42]

---

Operationalizing Creative Volume

Sean expands on Cody’s question by highlighting the industry debate on creative volume versus quality. He references discussions between experts like Taylor Holiday and Jess from Fireteam, illustrating the polarized opinions within the marketing community. Sean emphasizes the necessity of balancing both elements, akin to needing multiple skills to excel in the NBA:

"It's like, to play in the NBA, you have to be really tall and you have to be athletic. Similarly, in paid social, you need a lot of assets that are somewhat good." [05:22]

---

Strategies for Balancing Volume and Quality

Cody shares his journey at Hexclad, detailing how their approach evolved over three years. Initially, the focus was on high volume to exploit untapped opportunities. However, as the business matured, the strategy shifted towards producing fewer, more strategic assets that align with long-term goals:

"I really want to cut down on the volume and spend more time on quality and bigger swings, because I think now that's going to have more impact." [06:51-09:44]

Connor echoes this sentiment, advocating for overproduction initially to identify successful creatives, then refining the process based on performance metrics:

"The goal is not to deliver 20 assets a week... The goal is for us to produce assets that result in Facebook Roas or Snapchat Roas." [09:45-11:25]

---

Measuring Success: KPIs and Hit Rates

The discussion delves into how to effectively measure the success of creative strategies. Sean points out the challenges in correlating creative volume directly with business success due to numerous influencing factors:

"It's hard to get anything concrete, which is why I think there's not a great answer." [11:25]

Connor suggests focusing on the impact of creatives rather than the sheer number, emphasizing the importance of aligning creative output with strategic goals:

"If you feel you're not producing enough creative, the best thing you could do is overproduce creative." [09:45]

The hosts also touch upon the use of relative KPIs, where creative performance is measured against core assets rather than fixed targets, providing a more dynamic and realistic evaluation framework:

"We want it to be relative, like 20% better than core video assets... It's a great way to set goals." [49:09-49:15]

---

Budgeting for Creative

Budget allocation for creative production is another critical topic. Connor reveals that their creative budget remains a small percentage of total spend—around 2%—but emphasizes the need for strategic alignment with revenue-generating products:

"We misspent a lot of time that could be better utilized... spending more time on evergreen products." [56:20-56:42]

Cody adds that aligning the creative budget with specific revenue targets ensures that investments are purposeful and directly contribute to business growth:

"We are getting better at mapping out the tactics and assigning a dollar value to them... projecting a million bucks in revenue if we spend 100 grand." [53:46]

---

The Role of AI in Creative Production

AI’s evolving role in creative production is explored, with the hosts discussing its potential to enhance ideation and streamline production processes. While acknowledging that fully automated ad creation is not yet feasible, they highlight AI’s capabilities in generating ideas, scripting, and supporting content diversity:

Connor: "AI can help us rapidly get to new ideas. It helps us brief, it helps us write scripts." [62:55]

Cody and Sean discuss specific AI tools like Para and UX Pilot, noting their utility in improving creative workflows and efficiency:

Sean: "It's frustratingly close... it's like text to image wireframes inside of Figma." [62:58]

They agree that AI will continue to play a significant role in augmenting creative strategies, even if it doesn't replace human creativity entirely.

---

Conclusion

The episode concludes with the hosts reiterating the importance of balancing creative volume with quality. They emphasize strategic alignment, effective budgeting, and leveraging AI to enhance creative processes as key factors for marketing success. The discussion underscores that there's no one-size-fits-all answer, and the optimal approach depends on the business’s maturity and specific goals.

Connor: "Ultimately, it's about being intentional and ensuring that creative efforts align with business objectives." [66:29]

The hosts thank their sponsors—Motion, Prescient, Rich Panel, and House—and encourage listeners to share the episode and subscribe for more insights.

---

This episode provides a comprehensive exploration of the creative testing spectrum in marketing, offering actionable insights and thoughtful discussions on optimizing creative strategies for better business outcomes.

Transcript

[Connor]

All right, we're back for another episode of Marketing Operators. First episode of the new year with all the boys. Connor, we missed you last week.

[Cody]

I know. I missed you guys. I was bummed. It was. I think that was the first. Was that the first two. The first two person episode the mops have had?

[Connor]

Yeah. And it was fantastic.

[Cody]

I don't know if that was backhanded a little bit.

[Sean]

No.

[Cody]

I'm like, we got some spicy takes coming on whenever that goes live.

[Connor]

It went live this morning. It went live this morning. Quick turnaround. No. How was. How's Tulum? You're looking tan. You're looking refreshed. How are you feeling?

[Cody]

Definitely. Definitely feeling refreshed. Mexico City was. Was, I'd say more enjoyable. Tulum is a little, like, the way I describe it is. It's a little too clubby and, like, there's a lot of, like, slummy kind of areas in between, like the areas people hang out in. And then there's just. There's too many dudes wearing tank tops with hoods on it that have a shaved head on the side with a big braid down the middle. Just like, not as. Not as my vibe, but it was fun. It was cool. It was good to be on the beach. Mexico City, though, is insane. I don't know if any of you guys have been there, but, like, that place has some serious brawl to it and serious scale to it and, like, it's very colorful. People are super friendly. The food's insane. I see now why people digital nomad there. It's like, it's. It's built for that. Like, the Roma Norte neighborhood was like, felt like every four shops was like a coffee shop with, like, ample room to sit and just like, post up and. And, you know, do work for a company that is far, far away. So it was. It was cool experience, dude.

[Connor]

Awesome. Yeah. I think I'll be out in Mexico City at the end of March, so.

[Cody]

Nice.

[Connor]

I'll have to get some wrecks from.

[Cody]

Yeah, dude. What are you going out there for?

[Connor]

You know, Sean is getting married in early April, so I was going to head out like a week early and explore a little bit, so.

[Cody]

Oh, that's a great idea.

[Connor]

Tentative plan, but that's what. That's what I'm thinking.

[Cody]

Nice. Well, my reco is Roman. Is Roman Norte. That was. That was the cool neighborhood, in my opinion. That was the. That was one of the few I went to, but I've heard that that's, like, the spot to go to. Perfect.

[Connor]

All right, well, Appreciate the wreck. All right, should we, should we get right into it? Cody, you feeling good?

[Sean]

Let's do it.

[Connor]

All right. So as you know, we all use motion, and they have been shipping a ton of cool new stuff. We wanted 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 best 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'd 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. So 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 in 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 Motion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month. Before we begin, we want to thank our sponsors Motion Pression Rich panel in house. Today we're talking creative testing volume. Some of people's favorite topics, tactical kind of performance, creative strategies and. And what we're doing across the board. Cody, you kind of kicked off this conversation. This was, this was a ways back, but we thought it'd make for a good podcast episode. You asked and I'll just read it aloud here. Does anyone have data that correlates creative testing volume with success? I hear a ton of people say it anecdotally, but haven't found any real data on it. Worried there's a lot of bad advice and thus action taken from only chasing volume. What were you thinking when you, when you, you know, lit up Twitter with that?

[Sean]

Always lighting up Twitter? I think it's. There are a few of these debates in our industry where, you know, people have very strong opinions on. I'm sure you've seen probably Taylor Holiday and like Jess from fireteam go back and forth on this, this volume versus quality thing and like, can you predict a winner and is it even worthwhile? But you know, as I'm thinking about obviously our year and our strategy and where I think we need to improve, I think we're significantly under resourced on creative volume and not just volume quality too, which we can talk about what that means, but I do think so. But it's like, I feel like you hear a lot of people say, yeah, you've just got a 10x your output of creatives. And I don't know if it's always the case. I think sometimes people focus so much on the volume that obviously they neglect a lot of things. And I think we've been in that direct in that we've had that mistake. It's really probably one of those things where it's like to play in the NBA, you have to be really tall and you have to be athletic. You can't just have one. And it's probably the same on paid social. Like you probably need a lot of assets and they probably have to be somewhat good. So it's probably a stupid argument, but I just wanted to see, I just wanted to see people at Data to say yes, there is some type of a correlation between how efficient your account is, how well the business is doing something like that, and number of ads. Because I'll look in like, if you guys use like Foreplay, they have like the spider tool and you can see how many ads are live. And I don't know if it's accurate or not, but like we just have so few compared to, you know, the competitors that we index and look at. And I look at a lot of these brands and they have like thousand. Like I saw somebody on Loot on Twitter today said loop has like 3000 ads live at any given time. And like, to me, it's embarrassing if I said how Few we had. So that's my, that's my thought. Excited to either have a debate or honestly just learn from you guys and see.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. The next question I had here was like, do you currently set creative deliver. Like, how do you currently set creative deliverable goals for the team? Which we've kind of touched on previously. But it sounds like, Cody, that's what you're looking for. Like, you've got these financial goals by category, by product, by market, whatever. How does that turn into productive assets that your team can create?

[Sean]

Well, first, what's. Before we even go into that and like how you operationalize and stuff, like, do you. What do you think? Because I'm not taking a stance, like, I'm literally asking question. But what do you guys think? Like, what is the right level of volume? How do you know how many ads you should be producing?

[Cody]

I feel like it. I feel like it. In our, in my experience at hexclad, it was. It's changed over the course of like the three years I've been working on this business. Because when, when I came into the business, or I should say came into it when I started working in the business, there were so many untapped opportunities from like, ad messaging and offer and destinations and just like angles and they just weren't launching a lot of volume. And like, the creative that was in the account was good, but I was like, there's. There's so much opportunity. So we were playing the volume game, right? And like 1 in 3 ads we would launch would be marginally better than like the account average control metric that we were looking at. And I felt like at that moment in time, the volume was probably not that quality wasn't important. It was, it wasn't only volume, but I do think volume was really important for us because there was so much opportunity. And I think that's. That's the case with a lot of like, immature ad accounts. When I say immature, just like in the sense that not a lot of levers have been pulled. Like, they have a good brand, they have a good product, they found product market fit in Facebook and. And then they maybe have plateaued. And if you go look at, you know, Hexcloud, Shopify from 2020 through 2024, it's pretty clear, like in early 2022 when we released, like, because they had a big 2020 during COVID But then I think Hexcloud on Shopify grew like 20 something percent from 2020 to 2021. And then 2022 came and we started Taking a lot of shots on that. And I would argue that the biggest variable in 2022 is just the amount of. The amount of swings we were taking in Facebook. But then you get to a point where, like, you see diminishing returns on your hit rate. And now I'm like, my. My thought has shifted. Like, we have a strategic filter this year. Fewer, bigger, better. Like, I really want to cut down on the volume and spend more time on quality and bigger swings, because I think now that's going to have more impact than just shots on net. So I think it changes over time. I think it's. It's pretty easy to go look at the business in 2022 and. And say that the volume of creative we launched was a big driver of now. This year, it's harder. It's hard to go back and, like, you know, we haven't seen that much efficiency drop in Facebook last year. It's hard to. It's hard to tell if we would have seen the same data if we would have launched half the assets. Like, I don't know exactly how we would. We would measure that. It's really, like, to your point, like, Cody, I think this is why you tweeted it. It's hard. It's hard to, like, actually connect it to that variable. But, like, I do think it's very dependent on where the business is at and how many shots you've taken. And I think it's changed over the course of three years for us and how we're, like, thinking. Thinking about it.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Sean]

What do you think, Connor?

[Connor]

I totally. I totally agree with Connor in that, like, the answer is going to be different at different times and ultimately is, like, tricky. I think if you. If you feel you're not producing enough creative, the best thing you could do is overproduce creative. So it's not as if you want to, like, throw a bullseye on your first shot. Like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna, like, pinpoint the exact amount. So, yeah, just get the team working and just, like, pumping out volume. That's how I would answer the question. For someone who's, like, looking to scale creative and looking for a number, I'd say. I'd say really just push the needle. Then you get to this point and, like, we hit this point around this time last year is, like, late January, we started having this conversation. Some people have heard me say it before, but we were just. We had a set of content deliverables each week, and the team was just working into that week after week. Super high Volume, but it wasn't like, strategic and it wasn't leading to results. So I was telling the team, I was like, the goal is not to deliver, you know, 20 assets a week or whatever. The goal is for us to produce assets that result in Facebook Roas or Snapchat Roas. That leads to success of the business. The deliverable is success. And I've joked that that's like a Sisyphusian task because, like, as soon as it's like, quote unquote successful, it's just going to be. We're going to grow even further. So that's where I think it is. You probably end up overproducing and then you get to this point where you're not strategically producing as much as you can, and then you refine it from there and that's ultimately like, then it's an ebb and flow and then you're like cutting down. Then you'll get back to the point where you need to hit new demos or you have new categories, you've got to scale back up again and then refine. So I agree with Connor that it's. There's a component of time that we have to think about here and that's.

[Sean]

There's also like, almost no way to really know the answer. Like, but unless you have, I think, the closest. I think you have some data looking at like the various data, but for one brand, there's just so many variables, there's no way to know. It's super anecdotal that Connor can say that. You know, hexcloud, when they're launching this number of week, like, the brand did really well. Who knows if you launched half as many or twice as many, you know, who knows how it would have done? So it's, it's hard to get anything concrete, which is why I think there's not a great answer. But I guess that's what I was looking for.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was going to, I was going to say you could, you could do something clever with like a household out split the account. You launch. You launch a hundred ads in one side and five ads in the other. Potential.

[Sean]

You, you know, you, you totally could. Yeah, we have. I, I think we're way under. I think we have gone in the position where I don't think we've ever been over volume. Like, I don't think we've ever been over resourced. I think we've been over resourced and over volume relative to our strategy. Kind of as you were talking, you know, before, I Think we had the wrong direction and we were just producing stuff for the sake of producing it, but it wasn't. There wasn't a great feedback loop and a great cycle where we were learning from it and then kind of pivoting and getting better. And so right now we just hired a new creative strategist, new senior creative strategist. So we're kind of like taking a step back and assessing because I think we've been a little bit off course and we're really trying to kind of hone in on the data and analysis and figure out what our strategy is. And then as we think we get that direction and we go in the right direction, then as soon as we feel like we have something like, then we'll just lock in on volume. But I just think you need the direction first, you know, I think, yeah.

[Connor]

I think that makes sense. You know, the other route. I talked to someone recently, they were an agency owner and they had like a super simple calculator for their clients where it's like, look, you have a revenue target, you have an M target, therefore you have spend. You're going to say, hey, 20% of our budgets going to testing have a certain CPA, you want a certain number of conversions by creative theoretically or by concept in order to make a call. And you could just back into, okay, yeah, for this person, we need to deliver eight new assets a month or something. So you could do something like that, but I think at like much higher, that's probably more actionable for a much smaller brand. If you're at nine figures, like, I think that would be. I don't think that calculator. Calculator is as applicable to us. We've got like a big team, you know, like just pumping out creative. But for. For people looking for that number, that might be one way to back into it.

[Sean]

So how. What do you guys test? Can you share, like, how. How many. Not individual ads? Because I feel like everyone defines them differently, but like concepts, like ad sets or concepts a week. Are you guys launching on Meta?

[Cody]

You know, we actually do, like Connor, that. That general process you just outlined is like, that actually is roughly how we do our starting point. Like when we were. When we were meeting as a team and saying, hey, how many ads do we want to. How many net new ads do we want to make for the holiday sale? That is. That's basically what we did. We said, all right, here's our. Here's our top line revenue target. Here's our target. Which means we're going to Spend this. Okay, we know our media mix from our media mix model. We're going to spend this much in Facebook. Let's, let's look at Facebook as the example. Okay. We know that we want as much into creative testing. We know that based on like our in platform CPA and how many CPAs or conversions we'd like to get in a certain window of time to conclude a test. Like, that's this budget per day and, and thus like, all right, so that's how many like creative concepts we can launch. So that's like, and then we'll, and then we'll move it around based on, I don't know, all sorts of nuances, like business objectives. Like, I don't know, whatever it is. Like maybe a certain product offer was under index and we might move that one up to, and move something else down. But like that is generally our launching off point. So with that being said, like the number of creative concepts that we're launching any given week changes based on our total amount spent. Like if you go look in December, I mean, shit, we were probably launching like 10 different concepts every every week because we had the budget for it. Where, if you go look in, in January where our budgets, you know, a fraction of what we spent in December, it's way less. But I do think that's, this is also very much driven by, you know, all these agencies that you work with. They want predictability and production. So that's generally how we give. Like if we work on the tube, science. And I don't blame them for doing this. Like they want to, they want to manage their resources because they're a percentage of ad spend. So the last thing they want to do is go in, produce 10 batches of ads, be like, oh, wait, we only have, you know, capacity to run two or three. So this is like why we do a lot of this thinking. But it's also been really helpful to like map out the overall. Yeah, just the overall like testing plan and create a production volume plan.

[Connor]

Yeah, we're, we're, we are, we don't back into it from a spend number or at least like looking at percentage of spend going to testing and then the cpa, we don't, we don't do it quite that way. We've got like historical deliverables that we've done and we'll try to stick to that. So when we have a category, so we have like EDC is basically a focus category for us year round. And then travel and rings kind of pull state. So like right now it's rings. Come May, it'll be travel. Come fall, it'll be rings again. And then we'll back into. We. We end up delivering like six net new concepts and then, and then each of those concepts will be two or three variants.

[Cody]

And then we'll do.

[Connor]

That's per week.

[Sean]

Okay, so six across each category that you're running.

[Connor]

Yeah. And then typically we'll do like two categories, our focus at any one time. But then also, and I was going to ask this later on in the episode, but then we'll be thinking about like we have a women's business that we're trying to grow and that's a focus at different times this year. It's like April, we have Mother's Day, we have some product launches. So like we're going to be dedicating two or three of those concepts to acquiring a women customer. So we end up kind of splintering it depending on what our objectives are in a given time of the year.

[Sean]

That's. I'm not going to. I would have thought more. I don't know. It used to be more. Huh? It used to be more. Tell me more.

[Connor]

Well, no, like that, that was, I mean we used to, we used to do way more. And that's all. That's also all video concepts, what I just listed. So then we have new static ads on top of that. So it ends up being like, when you think about unique ads, it ends up being like 40 plus, 50 plus a week by category. Like it adds up pretty quickly. We used to produce more and I think they were like less strategic and we were basically building a backlog. Like we were producing more content than we could test essentially. So then we were at this weird spot where it was like, do you institute like an editorial decision where it's like, hey, we're just going to kind of cherry pick the ones that we think will work or do you just work through them like kind of first in, first out sort of deal? So we've instead landed at a spot where we're producing fewer net new concepts, but it is better aligned with our content strategy or, sorry, our, our spend plan. And we think the concepts are like a little bit more thoughtful. What I stress with the team is like, I want the concepts to have basically like a thesis around them. Either it is a, it is building on what we know to work and is the best performer or we're coming at it with like, I want to test this new unique angle for a person or a value prop or a piece of content.

[Sean]

I like that a lot. Yeah, I, I think being really intentional, that was, that was for us, we just weren't intentional with stuff. So it's just let's ship stuff to get it out the door. But have you seen that conversation where like Taylor and Jess have kind of gone back and forth and debated of like, can you know if an ad is going to work ahead of time? Have you guys seen that?

[Cody]

I don't know.

[Sean]

Cause, like, I think Taylor, I don't want to like misquote anybody, but I think Taylor is of the camp that like, you need a ton of creative. Obviously they, you know, they run manual bids, but they're like, you need a ton of creative and, and just it's, it's, it's arrogant to think that anybody knows what's going to work ahead of time, you know, of what a good ad is. It's just, you just don't know until you test it. And I, I think he thinks and, and other, you know, manual bid people think that like meta is going to know with a small amount of spend. And then I think people like Jess from fireteam are like, no, like, you know, you can learn a lot and a. We want to force spend on to things to get learned. But also like, there are objectively good ads and bad ads that like, you can tell ahead of time and that can be like trained by the creative strategist. And so I think that's kind of where, you know, the volume side is almost like the kinship as well. It's like, let's get all of this ugc. We have no idea what's going to work. Let's just put in an account on a manual bid, hundreds of creatives a week. Let's see what gets spend. Then the other side is like, let's produce some. Like, it doesn't have to be hi fi stuff. Like, let's be really thoughtful and strategic about producing stuff. And we're not going to produce as much, but we're going to make really good content that we think is, you know, very engaging and is going to work and follows best practices of what we've tested across the account. And it's, they're kind of at odds with each other. You could make the argument that they're not always, but I feel like that's kind of like the argument and like both sides from what I've seen from that debate.

[Connor]

Yeah. And I think, I mean it's like you just described the spectrum and like, frankly, I think different brands will land at different parts of the spectrum I would like to land somewhere in between. I don't think we just need to brute force our way via volume. I used to kind of believe that, but now, now I think no, like we could be way more strategic. I've also, this goes back to like spending more time reflecting on content. I'm like, I'd actually like to deliver less content and I'd like all the creative strategists to deeply understand what worked, what didn't. Have more time, spend less time briefing, have more time doing analysis on the creative. I actually think you can learn and strategically produce ads that will become winners at a higher rate. I think that's totally possible, but it's like halfway in between. I don't want them producing like, you know, two ads a month. And we're just trying to like, we're just trying to throw bullseyes exclusively. Like there's going to be a big error rate.

[Cody]

I mean, both are right?

[Sean]

Yeah, right.

[Cody]

Like, I like that's. I would actually say that we were more in Taylor's camp with our non cookware this year, whereas the first time we built acquisition funnels around it so we had no clue what was going to work. Like, I don't know if it was going to be like beautiful static images ugc of like people that are of with people that are unrecognizable versus like influencers in our studio. Now headed into this year, I feel really confident because I can go into my ad account and really like point out what worked best. And now this year, like we are going into it with a lot more intention. We're not planning to cast as wide of a net because we know the one or two ads that really scaled well at the best efficiency. So now I'm going out, I'm going to say like, hey, let's slow down and do more of that and scale that concept out because I don't even think we've come close to reaching the local maximum with that concept. And then maybe when I feel like we have or we've taken a good enough swing at it, we'll kind of go back more back to Taylor's approach again and say, okay, great, we've mastered this concept that we validated and we've scaled it well. But we haven't cracked, you know, static ads yet or we haven't cracked like the comparison ad yet. So let's go like past a wider net. So I think you kind of like come and you come back and forth to it depending on like the maturity of your Business and like based on, you know, different business units, like I'm sure luggage for you guys. Connor, you were probably more in Taylor's world and his take versus maybe wallets, you're more in, you are more leaning towards Jess's take. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So you're doing both, like we're doing both approaches for different business units.

[Connor]

Yeah, 100%. So what another way to look at this that we've done is I've heard it described as share of assets. So like if we deliver, let's just say 100 assets in a month, like how are they broken out? And, and for us that might be like, you know, 50% wallets, 25% rings, 25% travel. Let's use that as an example. So we have share of assets and then we have like share of spend and honestly we're spending way more on wallets. So basically our dollar per asset delivered is much higher on wallets. And that is because we are, we have to be more experimental. We have to over index on content created for these new categories. We just want to over produce to the point that we understand what's working, what's not, what are the formats that we can get reliable performance from and we can refine it from there. So yeah, that's, that's another way, like a little more quantitatively understand, like at what part of the, the, you know, journey are we in?

[Cody]

Yeah. Which can be a hard pill to swallow sometimes. Like if you're like, hey, we spent a month producing Aprons assets. This is only going to take up a fraction of a percent of our total revenue for the year. But, but this is a long term investment for the business. Like, you know, it's hard to swallow that pill sometimes in real time when you're like, well, I could go make a cookware ad and put, you know, a million bucks in it over the course of three months. Like, I know I'm only going to get a hundred grand at max into this Apron app, but sometimes you need to, you need to zoom out and look a little bigger picture to, to swallow that pill.

[Connor]

Totally. You know what I'd, what I'd add to that, the way I've described it is like for us, we want travel to be, I think travel can be a nine figure category and it doesn't get there unless we over invest today. So you almost have to like discount future success to like what you need to invest in today. So it's like, yeah, aprons are a long term strategy for you, so it makes sense to you have to do. You know, it's not illogical, but it's like unintuitive. Like you want to over over invest from a time and energy standpoint.

[Cody]

Yep.

[Sean]

It's been really cool to see Prescient this year just emerge as one of the leading, you know, trusting solutions for brands to measure their media mix. You know, now more than ever, you know, triangulation, having no source of truth, but really it's best practice to have multiple methods to be able to figure out, you know, what is performing. And one of the things that we love in our toolbox is Prescient. But it's been really cool to see a lot of brands onboarding with them and having a lot of success. Onboarding is super quick. It's the quickest I've ever seen from an mmm. It's been great for our upper funnel channels. Things like TV and YouTube has really given us confidence and it's very hard to validate and test tv. So they have great integrations. We use Tatari for all our TV buying and, and so it's the best way that we're able to understand how our upper funnel channels are working. We're not on Amazon, but if you're on Amazon, you can get really cool halo sales impacts of Amazon as well as retail channels. So it's awesome. You can forecast revenue and acquisition costs across all your channels, optimize your media mix to improve your profitability. They've always got new channels coming, which is, which is really cool. It's really played a really big role in us scaling and having the confidence to, to increase our spend in things like TV, both both linear and streaming and YouTube as well. We wouldn't be able to do it without them. So there's a reason why Prescient is trusted by Jonesboro Beauty, Hexclad, Holo, Socks, coterie and over 100 more. And so if you want to be like one of us, like Jones Road, like, like Connor from Hexcloud, check out Prescient, which I highly recommend you should go to prescient AI.com operators to book a demo and see for yourself. One thing I have learned because I, at least I'm not smart enough to be able to predict an ad that's going to do well. So I can't spot a winner always before we launch it. I wouldn't say always. Like I can't spot a winner. You can definitely spot a loser though. Like that is clear. There are objectively bad ads. I don't think there are objectively good ads. And I want to talk about, like, what quality means, because I think that's a part of it. And like, Taylor's take is like, what does quality? Because it's not production. It's not how much you spend. It's not what camera you shoot it on. Quality is really, does the ad perform or not? But I, I do think objectively you can look at an ad and a media buyer, creative strategist can just learn that ad just has no chance in hell of working. And I think to get volume sometimes in the past, we've been like, oh, well, we don't know, let's just test it. And now I'm trying to be a lot stricter about that and be like, that ad is just not even good enough to get to the testing point.

[Connor]

I totally. And that's that kind of like, there's like, this editorial taste that I think a good creative strategist has. And it's not as if you're going to catch all losers. You just got to catch. I mean, if you catch 10% of them, like, that's pretty good. And, and even you could even act some winners, like, you could accidentally call what would have been a winner a loser. But if you can get that down to a small percentage, it's a net benefit. You just save so much money not testing all those bad ads.

[Cody]

Cody, do you think that, that, that take is. Is that referring to a. A category or like, funnel that you guys had taken a lot of swings at? And the reason I ask is because our best performing sweepstakes ad this year. Which sweepstakes? First time we ever ran it, like, very big swing funnel. Our best ad was this, like, static ad of a menu showing what was included in the sweepstakes. No product shots, no Gordon Ramsay. And like, when I first saw it, I was like, oh, that's fun. That's creative. But no shot in hell that I was like, that's going to be our best performing sweepstakes ad. And it was. So I'm curious, like, are you talking. Do you feel that way about, like, an established category or funnel or offer? Or do you feel that way in. In general about just like, anything?

[Sean]

Probably. I think I was thinking more of our evergreen stuff. One of our, like, hero skew, you know.

[Cody]

Right.

[Sean]

We have a better feel for. I will say I'm trying to think of a few times where I was wrong. Like, for me, influencer content. Like, some. Sometimes we'll get some. Or get, you know, organic influencer posts and like, hey, let's run that and sometimes. Or we'll. We'll brief somebody and sometimes it'll have like, no hook, kind of slow, kind of boring, and it'll crush. And it's.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Sean]

If we launch 10 pieces of influencer content, it's never the two is. Let's say we get two out of 10 that hit. It's never the two that I think, but I don't think they're objectively bad ads. I think, like, maybe there's no hook. Maybe it's not Dr. But like, they. Maybe that's why they do well. But I think so. I think that that's kind of one time. I think occasionally that's usually what it is when, like, I think something is not upper funnel enough and it's just like going straight into the product. But I think, yeah, I think as you get more similar, like, one thing that I've realized it doesn't work for our ad account is just like, very straightforward, what I'll call a product push. It's like, here's this product. Here's why it's so great. Here's what it does. Like, it's. We never has the best performance, never has the best data metrics. And so now I can look at an ad and I can say, like, because when we get. We used to, like, start working with a new creative agency and they would produce something like that, I feel like they don't take big swings off the bat. They're trying to be safe and they just do this thing. Here's miracle bomb. Here's what this product does. And like, now I look at it, in the beginning, I'd be like, all right, fine, let's test it. Like, we brought in these guys as the expert. Maybe they know more. But now we get them from agencies, and I'm like, that's not going to perform. Like, we have tested this so many times. We've been through so many agencies, and their first two rounds that they always do is just the same thing. And it's just like, I just can tell at this point it's not good enough. Like, 20, 25. Like, the bar is so high. For paid social, you need to be super engaging, super entertaining. You need to be, you know, have a very, like, not even a product differentiation. Like, you have to have, like, engaging content. It can't just be a sales thing. And so when I see something, I just, here's this product here. So it's great. Buy it now. Like, I just know it has no shot to perform.

[Connor]

I like it. The other thing that I Wanted to talk about that. I think is a big piece of creative volume is like different dimensions of the business. So I guess we kind of talked about this. But 2025 is going to be different. So. So Connor, you were saying last year was the first full year you get non cookware categories. You guys are like over investing. I'd love to hear one like any how that went. Any learnings from 2024 and then how are you applying those for like 2025 goals?

[Cody]

Yeah, well it went well. You know our non cookware growth rate like you know in by big multiples outpaced our total you know shopify growth rate. Like if you look at knives and hex mills. So and if you look at like first versus repeat first order specifically even outpace repeat or the total growth. So it was, it was really solid. We also just like generally saw like we found winners in non cookware from a one day click performance perspective that were you know just as good or better than than our like core cookware ad. So we like prove like all right, we can, we can create ads that are as efficient in platform performance as cookware. Like that's a great signal. Seeing the repeat order revenue growth was a great signal. The last data point that we really liked and I got this tip from I think Zach Doyle from Alpha Lion. He was, he was showing me how to set up these like custom events using Elevar. So not only can you go and see like what how many purchases a campaign or ad got but you actually see the breakdown on product. So what I was most bullish on is that and it varied per, per category. But first off these are a lot of net new first time buyers per north beam. And second of all, especially on the hex mill, high percentage of people buying the product that we were advertising. I think, I think hex mills was like 80% of the orders were actually on a hex mill and they were first time orders. So to me that's a good signal that these are like incremental orders we probably would not have gotten. And we are going to do a holdout at some point on just like first orders of those products. So that was, those were really good signals as far as creative goes in those categories. We were just, we, our whole goal was to launch and I use this terminology a lot with the team. I'm like I just want to launch like the best minimum viable product funnels we possibly can. So that means we're hitting all the messages we want to hit that you know are selling this product well we have all the asset types, right? We have, we have statics, we have, you know, certain types of statics. We have, you know, native ugc. We have higher production value, review style content. We have these like product hype reels. Like, are we taking a good, like broad swing here? And then same thing with landing pages. Like, I think for mills and knives, we did at least one landing page test for each and found some learnings there. So that was, that was really the approach last year is it wasn't really about, you know, volume. It was just about, let's make sure we're checking all these boxes because I mean, we've talked about this before. Like sometimes you, you try something, it doesn't work well, but you didn't take a very good swing and you might, you might turn the page on something when in reality you just didn't take a very good swing at it. So that was my biggest concern. I'm like, I want to, like, I want to either prove that we can do this or can't do this. And so we took a good swing. We, at the end of the year really saw that revenue come through. That was another big learning is like, we got to clear that revenue more frequently throughout the year. Like we really waited until the very end of the year to take a really good swing on, on non cookware offers and just like merchandising of those offers. Like we talked about the collection page we built. Like, we didn't roll that collection page out until November. So like the previous sales, we didn't have very good merchandising of those offers. So it was a little backloaded, which I'm, I'm trying to avoid this year. But yeah, that's, that's basically was our approach last year. Now we'll kind of transition more into the same approach I talked about this year. Like, I know how much total we're going to spend on a category based on like an efficiency target. I know how much I want to roughly spend on creative testing of that budget. And we'll kind of back into it on like a daily spend amount that again is, is mainly rooted in like the, in platform CAC we're seeing. Because if we're only spending enough to get, you know, five conversions a week, I don't want to wait a month and a half to see if this ads working. Like, I want to get, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 per week, hopefully. So we'll start to kind of transition into that now that we've proved out this idea that we, we can in fact grow profitably acquisition in non cookware categories. So net. Net. It was, it was a positive. I'm very excited about what that means for our like, diversification because, you know, cookware is, is great and it's always gonna be the breadwinner, but we need to, we need to like add to that and come up with new ways to grow our revenue and our business.

[Connor]

And then, so I'm curious because. And then, Cody, I was gonna ask you the same thing after. At what point do you start thinking about like a diversity of content for non cookware categories? Obviously you guys crush the like big sexy hero videos with Gordon. You've got ugc, you've got static. Like, what does that diversity look like for hex mills or aprons? And then do you think that changes this year?

[Cody]

Yeah, so, so this is. I was thinking about knives when, when I was mentioning this earlier about like, you start. We started off with more Taylor's approach and then we were moving now into more of Jess's approach this year where like the first thing I want to attack in knives is that winning concept. Like, I want to go scale that in like 10 different ways. Not that we'll, not. That will not take net new swings. We will. But like I. It's so clear when you go into the ad account the type of content that's performing best for our knives. And it's also very clear from our landing page test, like what was working best in some next steps there. So that's where we're starting this year is just, you know, we, we cut a, we cut a hole 10ft wide, 10ft deep. Last year with all these categories and now at least in the first quarter, we'll kind of make that we're going to cut a new hole that's, you know, a foot wide and 50ft deep. So that I'm stealing that one from Matt, from Lomi, by the way. He, he, I, I first saw the 1 inch, 1 inch wide, a mile deep analogy, I guess from him. But that, that's the approach is like, let's go do what we know works well. First and foremost, get those in market in the ad account. Scale out of those. They're the most, you know, I can. We have the highest confidence in those. And then we'll transition into doing some more like, well, what about this ad like narrative that we haven't tried or this asset type that we haven't tried? And we'll kind of go back into, you know, what I think you've called like creative exploration.

[Connor]

Totally Cody, you're thinking about creative volume. How are you thinking about like diversity and assigning goals? Because, and the reason I'm asking this is one selfishly because like I think we also overproduce. We've gone through periods of time where we've overproduced in too similar of a style. So it's like it's not only about volume, but volume means less if it's not diverse. So like how do you actually break that out further and get a diversity of content?

[Sean]

Can I, can I, can I just make a point about what Connor said about like minimum viable, minimum viable product? Yeah, it's such a good point. But I think it's such a, it's such a tricky line because like you, you need minimal viable product means you have to, you don't want to do too much and you don't want to over invest because like we had a launch one time, we had a bronzer launch and new launch, thought it was going to be a pretty big thing. We did good, you know, new landing pages, good amount of creative, lunched it, found out it's just not going to be an acquisition product for us, you know, but put, put a decent amount into it. We definitely gave it our all where I feel like if we were going to get it to be an acquisition product, like it would have worked or at least it would have worked better than it did. But we, you know, we gave it a good effort, good investment and it performed that poorly. Like it's just not all of our products. Like we have, you know, 30 products. Like we run ads for three, four of them.

[Cody]

Right.

[Sean]

Really year round. But on the other end we've had some stuff. This is more like a concept. Let's say we want to do like a mom in a car concept. We're like, we try it twice, probably without the best execution and it's like, oh, that didn't work and you move on. But you're like really what we should be doing or a listicle, right? It's like we should really be doing, you know, five different creators that our moms shot five different ways, probably having 50 ads to do it versus like doing two and not getting work. But I feel like it's such a fine line between like did we really give it enough of an effort or not? And then also did we over invest before we really had any proof of concept? So I feel like that minimal viable product, that sweet spot is really important to hit.

[Connor]

You know, I, I, we're interviewing for a VP of marketing right now. And I had an interview today and she had an anecdote that like, I found scary almost. But she talked about she's at a previous brand and they launched a product that was like, DOA. She said, @ least the way she described it, like, totally underperformed. The only thing that they changed was the, I mean, the thing that they changed was at first she said just the creative, and then they relaunched with new creative and it was like night and day that it like worked really well. And I was like, oh, that's going to keep me up at night now. Because it's like to your, to your bronzer example, Cody, I'm like, we, we have things like that. Like, we'll launch new experimental stuff. We're all about like new product development right now. A lot of these things are not like, coming out the gates hot. And it's like, oh, yeah, what does just need slightly better creative now. She, she went on to expand on it. And I think this is probably the bigger point is they repositioned it as being complementary to their hero product. And I'm like, okay, I totally get that. That's a massive shift if you launch to your customers and they might misconstrue it as being a replacement to your hero product, when instead it's actually a compliment. That's actually a massive difference in positioning that, like, I could understand. But the point around creative I could believe being like a real make or break type deal and not knowing whether you've nailed it or not or nailed it well enough if you've hit minimum viable quality, creative is going to be something that I think about a lot.

[Sean]

Think about, I'd probably rather over invest, you know, I'd probably rather put a little bit more money into it and then I can look back and be like, you know what? I, it didn't work. That was a waste of money. But like, we gave it our best shot versus, like, it sucks to be like, I don't know if we really did it enough. It's kind of like when you launch a new channel and you only spend a few thousand, you're like, I don't really know, like, does the channel not work or do we just not really give it a good enough effort?

[Connor]

But yeah, true. But also the tricky thing is it's not even about like dollars invested necessarily. It's about like the concept of the creative. Like, oh, yeah, did we shoot it with the right people? Did we shoot it in the right environment? Was it exciting enough? Like, yeah, we, we, we, we, we. I'll Talk about one specifically for us. We relaunched. We wanted to like reinvigorate our leather products last year so we did like a $30,000 photo shoot and it was a beautiful photo shoot and it worked to a certain degree like leather performed well in November and December. But that is so subjective. Like it was like so like we, we paid $30,000, we got great creative but there was a hundred different directions that that shoot could have gone and it is impossible for me to tell you. Yeah, we chose the exact right one, that product the best that we could and that's like the, that's what I found scary about the anecdote was just.

[Sean]

The, the unknown keeping you up at night. So we switched CX softwares right before Black Friday. Normally wouldn't be the best decision but we were looking at Rich Panel and it was just so much better than what we were using. Our contract was up and honestly it was. I'm so happy we did. It was the first time ever that we made it through Black Friday and holiday period with no ticket backlog and I really owe that to Rich Panel. First of all it's, it's cheaper, it's, it's way less. We're, we cut our cost compared to what we were paying before by 50%. It's the first AI CX platform I've seen that's really built with AI in mind and we're not even fully maximizing what we can do with AI yet. So I can't wait to see how much more efficient we can be. But it's really the first one I've seen that's built in this new era of, of commerce and, and AI tech. It's you know, already being used by over 2,000 brands like us, like Ridge as well. One thing that's been really cool, we were able to leverage a lot of their automations and routing so our average response time went way down when we switched them. Our efficiency with AI went way up. We also just implemented their, like their self serve help desk reduced our tickets by 30% without affecting anything. We're able to take care of 60% of those interactions without actually having to route them to a person. So obviously there's financial components to that that have been really helpful. The team is great. I see our team going back and forth with the Rich panel team all the time in Slack. They all, they want feedback, they want feature requests. You're just not going to get that from some of the old legacy players. So it's going to be cheaper. You're going to have better use of AI that everyone's trying to catch up on. The UX is way better. The tagging is better. It has the best analytics suite of any of the CX tools I've used. So we're super happy. So if your help desk costs are too high, if you're not thrilled with your outdated software that is, you know, you feel like is robbing you, I highly recommend you switch to Rich Panel. You can reduce cost red, reduce ticket volume by 30% and honestly that's pretty conservative. Highly recommend you get a demo and see for yourself. Go to rich panel.com to check it out. What was your question? Me?

[Connor]

It was around creative diversity. So you're thinking about creative volume. How do you're thinking about like number of asset amount but how are you thinking about like the diversity within those assets?

[Sean]

Yeah, this is one of those, like show me the incentive and I'll show you the, the outcome things because right, it's like, hey, I want you to launch 50 concepts a week or something like that. It's like they'll, they'll do that. You'll get 50 concepts. You'll probably, or if you, or if you said, even worse, if you said ads and you said number of ads, then you're going to get less concepts, more variations. So I think you have to be really intentional and clear with how you set them. I think you need constraints with any KPI. We are, we're, we're actually in the middle of redoing because we just hired this new creative strategist. And so we're, you know, when anybody new starts, we're, we're really thinking about like let's work together to build these goals. We stole your like cornerstone thing that you guys do at Ridge. So we have like big rock goals. And one of our big rock goals is be best in class at creative diversity. And for all of our goals, we have three things. Why is it important? Or why does it help the business? How are we going to measure it and how are we going to do it? And so we've got to, we've got to be able to answer those and communicate those to everybody. You know, and obviously we know why it's important, why it's going to help the business. We have a plan for how we're going to do it. I think getting aligned on that. There's parts of it that are more objective, there's parts of it more subjective. But we know we need a lot of creative of different types. So one of the things I'm doing Just because I sometimes like to see things visually is I'm building out or I've built out like a figma board, figjam board with screenshots of all of these different types of assets that I want because I want to make it very clear to the team and to the new creative strategist. I don't want to just find what's working should. She came from one of the very popular creative agencies that Connor has mentioned on the show. And so like creative agents are usually really good at one style of content. I'm like, great, I know you crushed that thing. I want to do that thing. You know, I want to do just typical direct response to gc. But I also want static. I also want, you know, we've had a lot of success with studio produce things. We've never gotten a short, you know, nine second just product only video to work. I'm determined to get that to work. Statics, I think should be way bigger part of our spend than they are. I want like influencer whitelisted partnership ads that you see from like trying to think who does a lot of them. Like Seed does a lot of them. Like Seed probatic or stuff like that. Like, I want that to work and I'm not. At least this is my vision for what I think I want Our end state 12 months from now, what our ad account should look like. That's like the ideal creative diversity. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, maybe the, you know, lo fi 9 second video just never works. But we're gonna try. We're gonna, you know, test 40 different concepts and try to get it to work. Ideal status. We have all of these things working and you could measure it. I mean, you could. I was talking to her, I was like, you could do a holdout and be like, hey, we're gonna run, you know, we're gonna run one style of content here, we're gonna run 10 styles of content here. Let's test it. I don't know, it is kind of subjective, right? It's like, or do we just look in our ad account at the end of the year and we're like, hey, we. It's clear we have a lot of different assets and ads that are running, you know, so I think that's like the more subjective component. But we'll definitely have KPIs of number of deliverables, number of concepts per week. You can put some constraints to make sure that they're spread amongst different asset types, right? And then, you know, do you guys track hit rate or anything like that to make sure it's not just like do you have a KPI for number of concepts? And then do you also track something about how those assets are performing? So it's not just volume.

[Connor]

We do not have a KPI for hit rate.

[Cody]

We don't either. We'll do, we'll do quantitative like in platform based KPIs if we have a like initiative in a certain area. So a good example of this Q3 I. I felt like we weren't producing good enough quality with micro influencers so I basically our. We kind of assigned this manager London who's a very talented media buyer and creative strategist and he kind of bounced around or paid media creative. But he had a quantitative KPI that was like. I forget exactly what it was but it was basically like get the micro creator like aggregate one day click Roas to be like a certain percent above our like total video creator. I forget exactly what the control metric was but he, he was basically chasing an aggregate KPI and then it was like find three that are like a certain percentage above the average of that so we can really find like three winners. And then, and then he did it and like, and then like all the like the project and that's how we like do our, our like key result and initiatives. Like some of our quantitative. It's like hey you're. You have to go and grow hex mills one day click row as by 10% this quarter. Like I don't really give a shit how you do it but like that's your. Which I think is think you need a mix because you know to the conversation we had earlier in the episode, you can kind of like end up you know, pushing that rock up the hill and having it roll down over and over again if it's purely deliverable based and you kind of lose sight of like the why behind it. Like why are we even doing this? Like what's the actual objective we're going after here? So, so yeah, no hit rate. I like the idea of it but yeah we'll. We'll basically and this quarter same thing. Like he has, he has key results in Hex mills aprons and NY's one day click roas knowing that we're gonna go and produce a lot of. A lot of ad creative there.

[Connor]

That's awesome. I also really love and I think you guys, you guys, I always hear this from you but like the relative goals are super cool and like way more applicable than like oh yeah, you need, you need micro influencer Creative to be like, whatever, a 2x roas or something.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

It's like, oh yeah. We just want it to be a percentage better than core video assets. It's a great way to set goals. So I'm going to steal that.

[Cody]

Yeah. I think otherwise it's just arbitrary. It's like, why. It's, it's how I think. Cody, you mentioned, you mentioned this with, with. I think you put out a tweet about planning for like you were looking big picture at Jones Road Beauty's revenue growth targets. You're like, we don't have to answer to anyone. Like, we are not, we are not backed by pe. Like, there's no one coming to you, Cody, and saying, hey, if you don't, you better hit this revenue target or else. Like, you're. That you're the one deciding what that is. And that's like a very powerful position to be in. Like, I think that what you just mentioned, Connor, is kind of like that. It's like, well, why does it need to be there? Like, well, why do we need to grow 150% this year? Like, why shouldn't we just grow 50% for the next decade and in, you know, march down that path versus trying to grow 100% at all costs? Like, I think these can become arbitrary and it's, you know, to the extent that you can avoid that, I think it's always better for team morale and just having the team feel like they're marching towards something that's realistic and practical and, and, and there's rationale behind it versus, like, hey, here's the number. Good luck. Like, you know, call me in a year.

[Connor]

Yeah. And it's a goal that makes sense at all times.

[Cody]

Right.

[Connor]

Since it's relative, it's like, oh yeah, if things get super difficult once you're, you know, in an off season period or something, like you're not holding yourself to the same, like rigid gold.

[Cody]

Right. We definitely would find no winning ads in October then if that was the case. Right. It's like, right. And the, and, and our. In our MER targets follow the same trend. It's like, all right, we might optimize for three in October, but a five and a half in November. And it nets out into our total year end goal. And you know, we treat the. That's why our control metrics are always like, if we run a creative test from October 1st through the 14th, what we compare to is from October 1st through the 14TH. So it's, it's controlling for time, which is like one of the biggest variables in any business in any channel too.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Sean]

How do you guys budget for creative? I'll leave it super open.

[Connor]

Yeah, so we, we. Because I've asked this a couple of times too like what is a reasonable percent of budget going to creative? And I'll just say what we do is not scientific but it ends up as an incredibly small percentage of our total spend. We're spending between like 15 to 20k a month on UGC Creative and our team sources most of that ourselves. We do have some agencies who have come in and like augmented our our efforts and that like basically doubles the budget. But 15 to 20 with agencies 40k, that's UGC. And then we have a different budget for like go to market stuff. Like we just launched our peanuts collab today and we have a couple more coming out you'll use.

[Cody]

Right.

[Sean]

Like you'll take statics that Ecom team gets or Creative team gets. And it might not be directly in that ad creative bucket, but yeah, that's. Yeah, we do the same and then.

[Connor]

For the year we end up sub 2% of, of total spend going to Creative. Like right around there.

[Cody]

Yeah, we don't, we don't. I would say historically it's been like what do we need to make? If the number doesn't seem outlandish, I'm like okay, let's go do it. Until you know, the finance team comes and hits me in the head with a rock and says dude, what are you doing? The numbers have never been that high. And then from that we'll basically set guidelines where it's like okay, I'd roughly know how much we need to spend on user generated content. So hey Joanna. Or paid media team, like if you're ever going to go over this like come let me know because we should talk about it. What we are doing better at now is especially for new products with the, you know, we have some, we have some big like what I call a launches coming. We are getting better at mapping out the tactics that roll out in assigning a dollar value to them. Like hey, this web component is going to cost this much to design and develop. You know if we want to work with like a big influencer on some ads, it costs this much. We want to work with like 10 micro influencers. So we're getting better at being like creating line items and then going to finance and saying hey, you know, what do you guys have outlook wise and revenue. Here's how much we think it's going to cost to build up our initial funnels and then. And then getting sign off that way, like, all right, well, we're projecting a million bucks in revenue. If you're going to spend 100 grand to build it, like, that's fine. So we're getting better about doing that, but historically it's been like, well, what do we need to make? What's that cost? And then averaging it out and just like, if we're ever going to go way over that, let me know. But it's something we need to like, we need to do a better job of budgeting for existing product categories and not having it just be like, well, I haven't gotten yelled at yet, so let's go produce the shit that we want to go make.

[Connor]

Yeah, I, I do. One thing, one thing that Connor said that I really liked was assigning like a dollar value. That's one thing we're trying to get better at. Is last year was our first full year of like a. A ramped product development system. So we had like, basically weekly launches. We spent a lot of time and energy producing content on things that commercially weren't incredibly successful. So basically we have a. That we realize that the dollar value of these sets of assets for any given launch are not as high as maybe we expected. So we're just trying to like, realign that. So let's like, cut back our time and energy on lower leverage items and spend more time on evergreen products, core products, things like that. So that's also I'd like to use. Our budget will go up year over year, but I also think those dollars spent can go much further if we just apply them a little bit more strategically.

[Cody]

So can I ask you a question, Connor? Because first off, like, hat tip to you and the team, because the, the cadence and the quality, like I texted you about this last year, I was like, I can't. Like, I don't. I don't know how you guys are doing this at the. At the frequency or. Cause it was all like so well thought out and well rolled out and the content was really high quality. But are you. So you're looking at it like. Cody, I know you often look at. You inform your employee count as like, what's our salaries as a percentage of. Or opex? Maybe as a percentage of revenue.

[Sean]

Yeah. Payroll. Yeah.

[Cody]

Yeah. So, Connor, are you looking at like content production costs as a percentage of revenue in a category and using that as like a starting point?

[Connor]

I'm thinking about it more as. I'm really thinking about it more from like a time and energy perspective.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Because we have, you know, the studio here in Salt Lake, we have an in house photographer. So it's not really a cost thing necessarily. But if you look back at 2024, we spent a lot of time preparing to launch products weekly and spending a lot of time producing assets, designing assets, designing ads. I got what I was told yesterday was we thought 40% of our static ads were related to go to market items, which is just go to market items were nowhere near 40% of our revenue.

[Cody]

They were like probably, oh, I see.

[Connor]

15% or something, I should maybe have that number. But like our revenue is still coming from black wallets, gray wallets, carbon fiber wallets, like the core stuff. So how do we reorient that so that our time and energy is better aligned with where revenue is coming from? Because ultimately it's not as if we misspent a bunch of money last year. I would just argue we misspent a lot of time that could be better utilized. Refreshing the stuff that people are buying on a day to day basis.

[Cody]

Yeah, got it. Okay. So it's like if 80% of your revenue is coming from, you know, some sort of makeup variant or some sort of wallet variant, like make sure your team spending 80% of their time on that, whether it's content or tactics or strategy, just like totally keep it. Okay.

[Connor]

Or it doesn't even have to be one to one. Right.

[Cody]

But like, like yeah, we're roughly ballpark.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It goes back to our earlier conversation where refreshing like our gunmetal wallet is probably super easy. We know what works for that customer. So it doesn't take a lot of time. But I'd argue we spent our, our time was just misaligned. We didn't spend enough refreshing those products.

[Cody]

Yep, yep. Okay. If you want to hit next level growth, you need to move away from correlation based measurement and move towards causality. There is no better way to test your channels. Your levels of diminishing return certain tactics within a channel than using a geo based incrementality testing tool. And that's exactly what House is. That is exactly why all three of us use House. House is a self serve experimentation platform that allows you to configure regional test and control experiments to measure incrementality and identify points of diminishing returns. House is really the, it's the most controlled, the most scientifically sound way to do any sort of marketing testing and experimentation. These things are very, very hard to set up on your own. It's rigorous. If you have one little variable messed up all Of a sudden your data is not trustworthy. That's why House is such a valuable partner. All you need to do is go into your ad accounts and add exclusion or exclusion list, run the data or run the test. And not only do they set up the test for you, but they also help you interpret all the results. So they're handling experimentation, design and experiment analysis and also even going as far as helping you make sense of what to do based on that data. And we at hexclad have gotten some insane insights this year from all of our household out tests. So our core strategy this year has been doing channel level holdouts to really see which channels are driving the best and most efficient cost per incremental order. So we've tested YouTube, Meta, Google, PMax, TikTok. We're now testing AppLovin. We are getting a sense of which channels are driving the most incrementally efficient first time orders right now. And the amount of insights that come from that information is insane. It helps us inform where we develop creative. It helps us inform where we scale up budgets in certain channels and bring certain budgets down. Plus we are now able to use our incrementality results and actually plug it right into Prescient. So not only are we getting causal data, that is actual data that we can trust to make decisions off of, but now the media mix models and the probabilistic data from prescient is even more accurate because they're using actual data to inform their models and the readouts that they're giving us. House is an essential addition to your measurement stack. Go to house.IO/forformators that is spelled H A us.IO/operators to start your incrementality practice today.

[Connor]

Cody, did you have another question?

[Sean]

Oh related to it Connor, I think we talked about a little bit last time but like how beginning of the year I know we talk about predictions but like how do you see AI playing a role here? Obviously I. It's a leading question because I want to chat about my take on it because we've been playing around with a lot but I'm curious you guys if you think there's anything that's going to meaningfully make a difference even if it's just like chat cbt helping spit out copy for. For statics to produce more like I'm curious your thoughts on that.

[Cody]

Well, para. Para. I really like para. I think it's a really cool tool. Para is that voice note.

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Cody]

So when we actually did that with Gordon for the sweepstakes, it there was A massive revenue per user bump because we split that segment. We did a static tax versus first the voice note. And he actually, that was not AI powered. He read that. But I think if they can, if, if like the quality can actually. If they can actually take samples and make the message that is custom and AI powered, like sound good and like normal pacing and intonations and all that jazz, I think that could be really cool. And I don't know about you guys, but I send voice notes daily. Like, I would much rather send a minute and a half voice note than type something out, especially if I'm like, busy. So I think that. And I, and I know people like that. So I think generally, like, voice notes from brands will become more of the norm over time. So I think that's. That's a really cool one. Maybe not as much like upside revenue growth. Knowing that it's probably, you know, it's an own media play so that, you know, it doesn't. But I think it's really cool. I think it could be really effective. I think copywriting is like the one that comes top of a. Let's plug in some inputs and like write a script and then like, I can send that to a creator or I can send that to a landing page writer or whatever it is.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah. We're in the same bucket. Like, we don't have. How will. How will AI contribute to creative volume for us? It's just the efficiencies will gain from an augmenting what we currently do. So, like, there's an exploration piece to it. Like, I, I had a fun thing today. I don't know if you guys saw. It's like a bit of a trend. I've seen like three posts now of the people sitting in chairs and there's like a rope tied to them. And then the rope's piled up and then it's tied to a truck and the truck's driving away. Have you seen this? No.

[Cody]

Okay, so the truck's dark.

[Connor]

Yeah. So that. Well, Mr. Beast did it. And then. And then I sent it in our chat. And then, and then the team sent me like two or three more that they'd seen recently. But it's funny though, right? Because you see this truck driving away. You see the, the pile of rope getting thinner and thinner, and it's this amazing hack for video retention. I'm like, how do you not watch how that ends? Yeah, and Mr. Beast was just talking about how Lunchly is available in all the targets. I'm like, dude, genius. I'm like, yeah, you're getting millions of views. Everybody's watching the whole thing. Everybody's hearing that. Lunchly is now at Target. I went into chat GPT and I described exactly what was happening. I'm like, this is a great hack for video retention. What are some other ideas that we could implement? So like, that's just the sort of thing where it's really hard to quantify how that leads to more scale. But ultimately I think it can help us rapidly get to new ideas. It helps us brief, it helps us write scripts. You look at something like icon, which Cody and I talked about last week, leading to maybe faster editing, like more quickly getting to new iterations. That's really where we'll see it. I don't think we're going to be like pressing any buttons and like, you know, generating a bunch of ads this.

[Sean]

Year at least I do think so.

[Cody]

You do?

[Sean]

I do think so. I'm. I'm so impressed with some of the things and it's so close. It's like, it's like frustrating. Really close because it's like I found this tool the other day. It was like, I think it was called UX Pilot or something like that. And you can literally. It's like, it's like text to image wireframes inside of Figma and you get a pretty sick wireframe. We'll have like the cta. Hey, I want a hero module like you. I literally briefed out a landing page and I can show you guys. I want a hero module with an image on the left, headline on the right. I want reviews above the headline. I want CTA under it. Next section I want press brag bar and it'll do. The whole wireframe exports it to Figma. And so you just have to go in and drop images. But I'm like, if it exists for that, like it should exist for, you know, for, for, for static ads as well. Yeah, it's, it's, it's frustratingly close, I think.

[Connor]

All right.

[Sean]

And I, I think then the volume will just, you know, I, I don't know if that's a bad thing. And maybe it just gets super commoditized where it's like now every brand, even on low budgets, can produce 100 ads a week.

[Connor]

And well, yeah, what, what my prediction. I forget who I was talking about this with. But like, what ultimately happens is the benefit of, or the advantage of volume ends up getting commoditized. So it's like anybody can prod. So then, then like the actual leverage accrues it like the concept and like the strategist, like, who's actually coming up with unique ideas that are going to cut through the noise because you're going to get fewer wins from just spraying and praying because that's what everybody will do.

[Cody]

I. The. I've been seeing a lot of like. Like the. I was in New York over the summer and I and my friend Sterling introduced me to the founder of. Is it Noon Brew? Is that the like nighttime hot cocoa drink? I think the founder's name is Andrew. Yeah. But he was like, he was like playing around with some new brands and he like wanted to test out this concept. He's like. He was. So he was showing me it and the whole brand identity identity was built through just back and forth feedback with. I think it was a Dahlia at the time. But now Chat GPT, like bought it and it's just part of Chat GPT but like literally saying, like, hey, I want like this product with like, I want the colors to be like this and I want the brand to feel like this. And he just did a bunch of iterations until he got the brand identity he was confident within and he. He had launched it and I'm pretty sure was getting decent acquisition costs now. Now he didn't use AI to like build all the ads and everything, I don't think, but like, at least the core brand identity, which obviously comes through all marketing channels, was. Was built through that. Which is pretty dang cool to be able to do that with just, you know, typing words into a chat platform and see it spit out, you know, the branding and the images and all that jazz is pretty sweet, dude.

[Connor]

Yeah, I totally agree. There's a bunch of crazy stuff going on. What's ironic about that? You know, I. I had this thought, this was a while back, but like, brand guides are really just prompts for humans.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah, very true. Yeah.

[Connor]

That's all. So it's ironic that he made the brand guide with AI.

[Cody]

Yeah, he. He prompted to the guide and now the guide will be a prompt to.

[Connor]

The people, to all the designers, to all the coppers. Yeah.

[Cody]

I think what Cody's saying, circle the prompt. The. The brand guide that is a prompt will now become a prompt to other AI tools instead of people to produce the assets.

[Connor]

It's just computers. All the way down.

[Cody]

All the way down or fired.

[Connor]

Yeah. Anything else you guys want to cover on the creative volume front?

[Cody]

I want to. I wanted to ask Cody about. About something he said as I was thinking about it, because Cody, you said you could do a holdout test and you could say all right, so one give them one ad sell to give them 10 ads in theory. Could you just do like, could you do that on a. Could you go into Facebook and say all right, I want to test this out. I'm going to commit this much budget to a campaign. One is, you know, one campaign, one ad set, one ad campaign two is one campaign, 10 ad sets, 10 ads. And then go and like compare net new visit rate first time order rate and then ultimately like efficiency and scalability and maybe, maybe not as controlled as a holdout test, but that could be a good, I think that would be a fairly reliable way to set up a test like that. Maybe you could.

[Sean]

I would argue that if you're taking the time to do it, you should probably just do it properly because there's probably some level of, especially now in the asc, but really not where it's clear that meta is doing some level of prospecting and retargeting within the same ad set. And just like with. With how like the, the AI models are changing, you might not necessarily get the outcome that you're looking for on a click basis because you. It might be doing great prospecting, but maybe another campaign, like there's just so many other variables in there or maybe another campaign is picking up the retargeting so that'll actually have a better one day click and you can look at, you know, you also could look at percent of net new. Maybe you have more diverse creative and percent of net new is higher but you have a lower one day click. But maybe that better one day click gets picked up by you know, a different ad set that has more statics in there. Like I feel like there are so many variables that I feel it would be better just to hold out whether it's a household out or meta conversion lift. Because one of the theories is by having this diverse creative a, there's better like liquidity, like there's better like optionality of the algorithm to show the right ad to the right person at the right time. You're able to get more total reach by just appealing to more people and you're able to get more, more reach and lower frequency by showing at the right placement at the same time. So I feel like if you could but I feel like to do it properly. Did you guys see this house case study that they did with Javi Coffee? I forgot if we've talked about that. Have you seen this one? Pretty wild. Nick told me about it a few.

[Connor]

Months Back the videos versus images. Yeah, yeah, go for it.

[Sean]

Like, pretty wild. So, yeah, for everyone listening. So I think it was. It was like a public case study that House did with Javi Coffee. And they. They ran two campaigns. I think it was the same exact, like, setup. I don't know if it was manual or asc, but like, same settings, same targeting, same optimization. But one had videos what they would call like upper funnel videos still purchase optimized. The other one had what they would call like lower funnel statics in them. And they just ran a holdout and they found like a completely different incrementality factor. And so if they were just going off of, you know, one day click or Facebook row, it's like they would have just been like, well, we're just kind of run these lower funnel statics.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Sean]

But they were way less incremental than the videos. And so maybe create the creative diversity thing has that same same thing going on there. That would. That would be my only concern.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah, it's a good call. I was. I was. We were reviewing our rolling reach reports with our Facebook reps today, and I was shocked looking at the percent of our total reach that was net new. And then also looking and looking at our net new visit rate, which is generally like, very high across the board. Like, it was. It shocked me. It's like, wow. So we. We only reached, you know, 10 net new people, but our net new visit rate was still 70%. So like, we're. It's still heavy, heavy, heavy remarketing. We just finally got them to click through the site, which, like, you know, that's kind of what. At least that was. One of the points you made, Cody, was like, you know, it might look very top of funnel, but maybe like, one part's more remarketing than other. And it's hard to tell based on like, the. Just the net new visit rate that. That shocked me today looking at that.

[Connor]

We. We. Yeah, we've seen that before too. We were. We were running some. We had a new ad ripping. I. We might have talked about it on the pod, like August last year. And we found that exact thing where we saw like 95% new visits coming from this ad. And I'm like, dude, this is nuts. This is so top of funnel. These people have never seen us, et cetera, et cetera. Then you look at the rolling reach report, and we did it for that specific piece of content, and it was hardly reaching any new people. It was just earning clicks for the first time, which is like, yeah, I think that's a very nuanced thing that is easy to miss. You don't necessarily need to reach new people. You need to appeal to the same people in a new way.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Beautiful. All right. I think that's an episode that's a banger. All right, thank you again to our sponsors, Motion, Prescient Rich Panel and House. Make sure if you found today's episode interesting, valuable, noteworthy to any degree, share with your friends, family, co workers, etc. Like, and subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts. Give us a comment on YouTube. Thanks again. See you next week.