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Marketing Operators
E047: Blending Brand Identity with Performance Marketing at the Highest Level
01:16:08
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- [00:00]
Connor
We are back with another episode of Marketing Operators. This is the first All Connor episode.
- [00:06]
Cody
Is it? Did we not have a. Do we. Have we not had a 1v1 yet?
- [00:09]
Connor
We haven't had a 1v1 yet, no. And. And, you know, to explain the, the. The catalyst for this All Connor episode, I feel like we should congratulate Cody welcomed a firstborn son into. Into the world last week. So an heir to the Jones Road beauty empire has been born.
- [00:26]
Cody
Yeah. Yeah, Cody's. Cody's doing the kid thing hard right now, I think. Well, he isn't. He is another baby already, so I'm curious what, what his plans are if he's gonna keep. Keep rolling right now.
- [00:37]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll see.
- [00:39]
Cody
So.
- [00:39]
Connor
Yeah. So. So for. For those listening, we'll have a. We'll have a number of guests coming up over the next couple weeks. We'll even expand on the All Connor episode. We're having Connor Dalton from Caraway next week. So a lot of Connor time over there.
- [00:50]
Cody
That's gonna be an insane Connor episode, actually. And we all spell our names the same way. There's only one way to spell Connor. The right way. And. And that is the true Connor Cubed episode.
- [00:59]
Connor
That was a part of the criteria for who we. We'd even consider having on. Yeah, awesome. I. I'll also say calling in from Brooklyn, I'll be in. I'll be in New York for the next eight days. I might miss Cody again. That's been an ongoing bit of this is that you and I keep coming back to New York and not seeing Cody, and it'll probably happen again with him being busy with the kids. So we'll see how it goes.
- [01:18]
Cody
I wanted to ask you about that. Are. Are you. Are you out there for a shoot with Marquez?
- [01:24]
Connor
We have a Marquez shoot next week. I came in like a week early just to hang out, so I got some friends and family I'm seeing over the weekend, some work people. Next week I got a great Airbnb. I got a sauna here, so that's pretty tight. So I'm just gonna camp out for a couple days.
- [01:39]
Cody
Dude, you've been on your health kick, haven't you?
- [01:41]
Connor
Dude, I've been on a big health kick, yeah. You know, in la, I didn't realize how much I liked having a sauna at home until the Airbnb in LA over the holidays. Had one. Fantastic. They're not even, like, expensive. They're like a couple grand. It's something like, at least when I have access to One I use every single day. So, yeah, I think it might have to be in addition to the. The Utah homestead soon.
- [02:02]
Cody
Oh. Oh, well, I'm coming out to. I'm coming out to Utah, the back part of March, I think. So how, how quickly can that thing get installed? I just, I just rejoined my gym. I went. I like, joined this nice gym unjoined. Realize the exact same thing that you realize. Like, it's so nice having a cold plunge in a sauna, in a steam room whenever you want it and rejoined it. So I'm excited to get back in there more regularly now that I'm like, settled back in Denver for a while. I've been like, all over the place for a bit, so it's. I'm. I'm excited for that again.
- [02:32]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, cool. So before we get into the episode, there's one thing I also want to, to shed some light on. No, I want to, like, bring to everybody's attention. You know, Cody and I did a predictions episode a couple weeks ago, and one of my big predictions was that the an1, at least one of the analytics tools that we use and love was will adopt better weekly reporting. This is like, this is my OCD coming out a little bit Sunday to date or Sunday to Saturday reporting, standardizing for day of week, year over year. We need that level of standardization in our analytics tools. This is how a lot of the retail industry runs. And Shopify and North Beam and Triple Whale don't support it. So I've been tweeting about it. We've had some motion, I want to call it lifetimely. They've adopted it. They saw my tweet, they built it out. Done. I've heard North Beam's working on it. I've heard Triple Whale's working on it. I've been DMing some PMs at Shopify, so we're going to get that done this year. I'm bringing the, the prediction to life. Just want to give everybody a status update on that. If you know someone who can help advance and support this cause at Shopify, let me know because we're, we're, we're. We're trying to get it done.
- [03:37]
Cody
Connor, what's the vocabulary you use to describe that type of year over year comparison? And could you even explain it? Because I think that it's like somewhat. It's simple, but it's also super important but also like, slightly confusing. It's like February 1st through 6th in 2025 does not equal February 1st through 6th in 2024 and, and so on and so on and so on. So that's what you're referring to here is like an accurate year over year comp. Can you like, explain that?
- [04:03]
Connor
Yeah, totally. An accurate year over year comp. I honestly, I'm not doing a good job of advancing the cause because I don't have great vernacular for it yet. There's a 4, 4, 5 calendar, but I'm, I'm pretty sure that's, that treats weeks as Monday through Sunday. But the general idea is literally just standardizing for, for, for day of week, year over year. So you just want to standardize in that way. When I look at Yesterday, the, the 6th, February 6th, I want to be comparing that to Thursday, February 8th, last year. I want to look at Thursday, Thursday, year over year, and then I want to do that week to date. So I want to look Sunday through Thursday, year over year, and I want to look. And then we standardize by Sunday through Saturday, year over year, which is a very American thing. A lot of, like the TV networks do Monday through Sunday and I even read about, there's an ISO, the International Standardization Organization. They actually support Monday through Sunday. Yeah, yeah, no, I went, I went, I went deep on this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, it's super cool. But their standardization is actually a Monday through Sunday week, which we don't support. We support the American Sunday through Saturday. It's how the financial industry runs. So that's what we're looking at. So anyway, that's the idea is you want to be standardizing for year over year. And the reason, the very obvious reason why we should do more of this is I, I tweeted about it a couple weeks ago, but I was, it was a Monday. I was looking at weekend performance. And if you don't adjust for day of week, year over year. I was comparing a Saturday and Sunday to a, like a Monday and Tuesday last year. So we were up like 50 or something. Weekends are bigger than Mondays and Tuesdays. People are working versus people are spending money. Super simple. You just shouldn't, it shouldn't be so easy to make that standard like to, to make that mistake because you're going to end up, you can end up 24, 48 hours behind making important decisions. If you're not standardizing for day of week, you think you're growing or you think you're shrinking, when in fact that's largely explained by just a difference in day of week. So again, can move on to the, the, the crux of the episode. We've got a lot to get to get into but wanted to to talk through that quickly because it's a, it's a 2025 goal of mine.
- [06:03]
Cody
I'm pulling, I'm pulling for Shopify to get it. That's, that's my. If I did choose one, I would choose Shopify.
- [06:09]
Connor
Yeah and I'll also shout out Google Analytics 4. Already had it. Don't use Google Analytics Analytics 4 for anything anymore. But I popped in there last week and I realized they actually do it in a really nice way so they can set the standard. All the analytics PMs can look to them for guidance as to how to implement this new sort of comparison reporting.
- [06:29]
Cody
Dude, that's so sad. That's so sad. Google Analytics is like widely not used. Like it's, it's pretty much used way, way, way less across the board and then they rolled out the, the nice year over year comp like yeah, sad. What a sad story.
- [06:44]
Connor
Look, they've got some, they've got some PR.
- [07:07]
Cody
Foreign.
- [07:21]
Unknown
So Motion just sent us their latest research on how our e commerce brands can make incredible meta ads in 2025. I've shared it with my team at Hexclad as this report is basically the jumping off point to guiding our 2025 paid media production roadmap. Motion, as you know, is the creative analytics and research platform used by brands like Hexclad, True Classic, Ridge Wallet, Jones Road Beauty, Vuori and many, many more. And they actually dug into over $100 million in ad spend, surveyed 500 DTC advertisers, and a deep dive with 12 legendary DTC experts to guide this report. Some of the people that contributed are Dara Denny, Savannah Sanchez, Barry Hot, Nick Sharma, Aaron Orendorf, Sarah Levenger, Joanna Wallace, Shadow Hexclad, Hannah Ho and Gil Chamofsky. This is an amazing resource to help guide your 2025 paid media production roadmap. So generally a lot of creative strategists.
- [08:18]
Cody
A lot of teams, they come up.
- [08:20]
Unknown
With a lot of hypotheses about what isn't or is not going to work.
- [08:23]
Cody
And then they build ads around it.
- [08:24]
Unknown
And then they launch it and they use the data to inform whether or not that's working well. What this report allows you to do is instead of starting at ground zero, you're actually able to start at ground level 5 because this report is looking at a bunch of advertisers data and consolidating information about what has and has not performed well in 2024. So as an example this report concludes that ads are getting longer and longer and longer in 2024. And what does that mean? It means that education is becoming more and more prevalent in ads. There's some very, very natural next steps that you can action on for your brand based on this information. Another finding that generally ads as a whole under index on taking a comedic angle. But some of the top performing ads, 25% of them had some sort of comedic element in 2024. So what does that mean? Maybe you should introduce more humor into your into your paid media creator strategy this year. Maybe you should introduce more long form educational content into your paid media creator strategy this year. This is a great jumping off point. This is a great document to have pulled up as you're working out your production roadmap for 2025. By referencing this report, you're going to have a much better chance of having higher hit rates because you are leaning on 2024's actual data instead of just your gut instinct about what will or will not perform well. So this is a super tangible piece of research. It is based on over $100 million in ad spend and the surveys of 500 DTC advertisers. If you have not read it yet, this is going to be super valuable for you. I highly recommend reading this or having it open as you're building out your 2025 paid media creative production roadmap. It's just going to give you a much better jumping off point than not having a piece of research like this. So if you want to check it out, go to motion app.com forward/creative trends that is motion app.com forward/creatical-trends.
- [10:19]
Connor
Before we get into it. Well what one we are. It's February 7th now. The week or sorry it's the Friday before the Super Bowl. We're gonna go deep with Connor on the hexclad strategy. They're rolling out a Super bowl commercial, the first moparator to do it. So I'm excited to get into it. But before we be, before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors Motion Rich panel house Prescient and after Cell. So cool. Connor, maybe you could just give us a lay of the land. I mean you guys, you guys, you guys rolled it out. I saw it on Twitter. I've seen some stuff this week. So just like give a high level overview of what's happening during the big game this Sunday.
- [10:53]
Cody
So yeah, we're doing a 30 second TV TVC during the super bowl on Sunday. It is the first like non planned commercial break I believe is when we get it. So it could happen at like literally any time, which is really interesting. And yeah, we, we've already launched the campaign in a, in a big way like a lot and we'll, we'll get into this a little bit about like what we've already done. But like as you mentioned, like the TVC has already gone live. The 60 second spot on YouTube. There was a whole build up to that moment and a lot of like reasoning behind that that we launched it early like that. And if you go to our site right now, like you'll notice we're, we're pretty fully activated around the, the whole super bowl right now with, in a variety of different ways. So you know, the TVC is kind of like the, the peak, I guess. Like we really started doing like our first, our first activation for this entire campaign was on January 23rd. Our last day will be on the 17th of February. So it's really a, it's, you know, it's a what a three and a half week thing and you know, with the, the actual TVC on Super Bowl Sunday being the apex of it and then it'll kind of like go into the sustain mode. But yeah, keep an eye out for, for the hex cloud Super Bowl. I really wish, I mean the creative is really good and we'll talk about this. I'm kind of bummed we can't put the whole 60 second spot out there because it is really good. The 30 second TVC is amazing as well. But I was really somewhat bummed that we couldn't put the 62nd out there.
- [12:22]
Connor
So for those who haven't seen it, can you like, briefly, could you, could you explain the concept?
- [12:26]
Cody
Yeah, so the concept is that. So basically the, the TVC opens with Gordon Ramsay walking in like an underground facility with like an usher of sorts or like, yeah, like someone kind of like that works at Area 51. Like they're in Area 51 and this person is explaining to Gordon Ramsay that there's this like new alien cooking technology that leaked. And like Gordon's confused. He's never heard about this before. And then they walk up to the, to the wall and they see the hexclad there. And he's like, this isn't alien technology. Like this is hexclad. I have this at home. And then this, this like usher or this person that works at Area 51 is like explaining that it was actually alien technology that leaked a long time ago. And the alien ambassadors are there to meet Gordon and like talk about It. So this person's like filling him in, briefing him, you know, asking Gordon's asking questions and like, you know, subtle placements of Hexclad throughout. And then they turn around and they're. The woman's like, hey, the, the alien ambassador is here. And they turn around and like pan to a CGI of an alien. And Gordon's like, whoa. And then the usher goes, wait, that's not her. And then it pans right a little bit and Pete Davidson enters the shot and. And then he's like, oh, hey, dude. And like that's. The punchline is like, pete, the alien ambassador, that, that is there to meet Gordon. And then Pete and Gordon have like a few funny exchanges and then it goes into the end screen. It's like hexclad, highly advanced cookware. So generally the whole concept is like, it's this Area 51, you know, very old alien derived technology. But that's like the overall concept of it.
- [14:03]
Connor
Um, yeah, dude, and I, I love the concept. I. I think it's a really nice. Because, you know, the bits basically, like, yeah, they're seeing there's like a floating fried egg or something like all this crazy food technology. It's like, it's very like Hitchhiker's Guides of the Galaxy. And then they just have a hexclad pan and they're like, oh, yeah, this leaked eight years ago. It's. Oh, it's a great way to. Because I, I feel like some people, sometimes brands will just make it entertaining. Were you guys like, really like tied in value props into the concept natively, which I think was like, really thoughtfully done.
- [14:36]
Unknown
Yeah.
- [14:36]
Cody
And that's something we should probably talk about at some point during the show is like, especially for, like, we were very intentional about like, this is a brand marketing activation through and through. And like, I've actually, I've ended up thinking a lot about that throughout this process, like what that means. And all it really means is like, you're trying to do something super memorable that people like, it's going to stick with them and they'll always be able to connect whatever you're doing to your brand. But for us being like, you know, you know, we're not geico, we're not Coinbase, right. Selling like an abstract service or product, like, it's very physical, it's very real. So we, we were like, how do we make it like, how do we not pull away from any of the brand marketing components, but how do we pepper in like these direct response aspects?
- [15:18]
Connor
Totally.
- [15:19]
Cody
That's one that's one way, right. Is like there are very subtle, kind of more like product oriented kind of value prop stuff in the tvc. We did some other creative. Some extensions that are even more value propy that that you can see on our website on our Area 51 test kitchen landing page. But that's. That's been really interesting is to like, see that balance between like, brand and performance kind of like. And what that mix is here.
- [15:45]
Connor
Yeah. Did you see the Ramp commercial with Saquon Barkley?
- [15:50]
Cody
I have not seen that.
- [15:51]
Connor
Okay. Are you familiar with Ramp?
- [15:54]
Cody
Yeah, it's like a finance.
- [15:57]
Connor
Yeah. It's like a business expense tool and you can like spin up digital cards. It's a fantastic product. We use it all the time. Not startup. I think they're only four or five years old or something and they've been incredibly successful. Not the type of brand you'd expect to run a, A Super bowl commercial, but they did one with Saquon Barkley. And the reason I bring it up is because I think they do also a really good job of tying a engaging concept to like, the value props of the product. For them, it's about efficiency. It's about like making business expenses, like, more efficient. Right. Just like managing your finances internally. Now they're doing all sorts of stuff with Treasuries or whatever else. And with Saquon, it's like, would you take your best player off the field to submit expense reports? It's like, no, of course you wouldn't. If you have Saquon Barkley, like, you want him on the field doing his job. So they're like, I forget the exact line, but it's, it's. The other one that I saw was like, the only person faster than Ramp engineers is Saquon Barkley. Right. So they like, they just really tie in like his notoriety and his, like, and. And him being one of the best players in the NFL to like, the. The value of the product, which I think is a. Was another great example. I was like, oh, this crushes. It went like super viral on Twitter this week. That's this year. Yeah. Yeah.
- [17:12]
Cody
Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna check that out. I just added a reminder to. To review it today. Yeah, dude, it's like, how do you make it? Because the last thing you want it is to be like, so it's so swung brand that like, you're like, oh, wait, we actually didn't even say a thing about the product. Like, no, like, you still want people to go to the site and have like, if you like, you watch our super bowl ad, it's very clear that we are high end premium cookware. You might not know everything about the technology. Like, you don't know about the hybrid nature. You don't maybe know about like the interplay of like stainless steel and non stick. But that's fine, Fine. We don't need to explain that there. But like, you do understand that it is premium cookware. It's high end cookware. It's for people that like care about their food. So like we checked that box and, and that was something I was like, not worried about, but just curious how it was going to come together knowing that we are, you know, a very direct response driven company.
- [18:02]
Connor
Yeah, totally. No, I'm super excited to see how it goes. Why we're recording this episode to begin with. So I'm curious, like, when did the process start? When did you guys, like, when were you guys kicking around this idea? When do you side. When do you decide to actually run a bull ad?
- [18:16]
Cody
Well, I think, I think Danny has been chewing on this for a while. Danny's our co founder and CEO, so I think him and. Him and Jason have been like noodling on the idea of a Super bowl ad for the last couple years as they've seen our growth trajectory from really 2022 through today. I guess like during that time, it's kind of like the seed starts planting is like, when's the right time? When's the right time? And we just felt like we had the, the growth rate and the profit margin to go, like, take a big bet on this. Which, you know, what if, you know, you're sitting at like break even or something like that. I think it's a lot harder to go invest, you know, what we invested into a Super bowl ad. But yeah, I don't know. I don't. It's hard to say, like, when is the right time? I don't know. Like, I think you look at our like Facebook ad account and you see our rolling reach going down and like we're having a harder and harder and harder time reaching net new people with our core top of funnel Ch, you know, top of funnel channel. It's like, well, what are some things to, to like combat that? Well, one is certainly buying a Super bowl ad. Like, this is very top of funnel for us. So I think that's an interesting data point that kind of maybe pushed Jason at least to like be confident in, in making the decision.
- [19:26]
Connor
Totally. Yeah. And then, and then. So I want to talk you hit some notes on like what teams were involved in pitching the process. And then I'd also love to talk like when did that start? So we're going to talk a little bit about the agencies and things like that. But yeah, did you guys decide, hey, we're going to do. Was it last July, Was it last December? Like that's timeline. I'm curious.
- [19:45]
Cody
Yeah, it was in the summer, I think if I'm. It was like late spring, I think early summer. Like we had made the decision like we are going to do this or at least we're going to like take a very serious look at doing it. So yeah, in the summer basically. And we made that decision and then, you know, really the first thing you do is get pitched by agencies. So basically are a couple of key members of our brand team were really leading the charge here. It was Danny our, our head of content, Matt, our chief brand officer, Christiana, basically kicking this process off. So a bunch of agencies come in and pitch you a handful of concepts. I mean these are literally like two pagers, right, that they're pitching you and you just kind of narrow it down. Narrow it down. And then once you decide the agency, you narrow it down even more on the concept. So yeah, this started back in, yeah, summer. I think we had four agencies pitch us. I was a part of like not like the early, early process but like once we had like kind of narrowed it down a little bit more, started getting looped in more and more on, on, you know, some of these pitches and some of these ideas. So yeah, I mean it was a pretty long and you know, very thoughtful and very intentional process.
- [20:56]
Connor
Were there, were there any other like notable concepts thrown around? Was it a tough decision going with the Area 51 idea?
- [21:05]
Cody
It was. Rosewood definitely had like the concepts that stood out the most. Like they clearly. So that, that part I felt like was like fairly easy, not easy, but like we like their concepts the best right away. It wasn't like we had two agencies that like we were really having a tough time choosing between. But what I will say is within, you know, they pitched us, I think two or three concepts. There were two concepts that we were, were noodling on and we decided to go with the Area 51 route for. For a variety of reasons. Yeah.
- [21:36]
Connor
Yeah. Fantastic. Cool. So we're at the point you guys have a great concept. You said you, you bring on Rosewood. We get this awesome one minute spot, you get a 30 second cut down for the super bowl. You've nailed down the hero video. When we Talk about like the larger playbook. I've seen a little bit, I don't know what you can or can't disclose. We've seen a little bit shared on Twitter. There seems to be a seating component to it. You, you mentioned the web component. There's a, there's a sale live currently. So these are very like explicit pieces of the super bowl campaign. But like, how do you think about the, the overall playbook for the super bowl commercial go to market?
- [22:14]
Cody
Yeah, well, first off, like, this is every marketer's dream to work on a Super bowl campaign. Like, I was so pumped to hear that we were doing this because I was like, just so excited to be working on it. But like, this is like truly an omni channel full funnel activation and we are expecting good, like direct response performance. But this like the super bowl spot in many ways is an impression play. Like, we are trying to cast a really, really, really wide net and reach as absolutely many people as possible. And all of us, like, our strategy is very much geared around that. So, like, yes, there's the super bowl, which, you know, we'll get like, you know, the super bowl itself will probably have like 100 million to 120 million viewers. Now that's not obviously the impressions we'll get, but like, we'll probably get a hundred million or more impressions in like the stuff we're doing outside of the super bowl as well. Like all the organic influencer stuff we're doing, you know, the earned media stuff that we're doing. So basically, and Alexa Kilroy actually nailed the breakdown of this. We basically did this influencer stunt leading up to the February 1st launch of the Super Bowl. So basically on like February 23rd or whatever, Gordon posted a very like non descript photo of like him sitting in a, in a plane and the mini pan was like placed in his cup holder and just had like very vague messaging around it that like, started to get the, you know, people's brains turning. And then a few days later, geoguessr, people that don't know geoguessr is this dude on, on TikTok and social media that basically, like, geoguessr is a game where you're supposed to like guess where people are based on like a photo. So geoguessr comes on and like, is like, hey, what's going on here? Like, and he's like doing this like crazy cool video. Go check it out. If you haven't seen it, it's really cool. Got like 30, 40 million impressions last time I looked. I'm like, Where's Gordon? What's he doing? Like, what's he up to? So, like, we're basically like. And then. And then we had two to three more posts. Like the flight attendant that was on the plane with Gordon posted, and then Expert posted. It was actually Ashwin was a marketing expert, forgetting his agency right now and his, like, Twitter handle. But he's. He's the one that does, like, those, like, really awesome brand breakdowns on Tick Tock. I'm blanking on his name. And then we had, like, an alien expert. So we basically did this, like, big ramp up and then the super bowl spot launched. So, like, basically the. The creative narrative is like, very cohesive. Like, there's a lot of stuff that built up to that Area 51 test kitchen spot going live and, like, making that narrative make a lot of sense. So that started basically a week. A little more than a week prior to the actual spot going live was there.
- [25:12]
Connor
So I missed a lot of this. It sounds rad and super, like native social storytelling. Right? Like super native across channels, across platforms, across people was there. So Gordon's on the plane, and then you have the geoguessr figuring out where he is in the world. Is there something about where he was that was teasing? Was he like, in Arizona, around Area 51 or something?
- [25:36]
Cody
Yeah, exactly. Like, so you like the. In the. In the image of Gordon, like, you can see out his plane window, and it's just like deserty, like. Yeah. So the geoguessrs, like, he's like, looking at the shape of the mountains actually in the background and being like, well, it can't be this place because, like, here's how these mountains are shaped. And he's like, oh, I found it. Like, here it is. And he's like, basically deducing that he's in. I think it's. I forget exactly where Area 51 is. I think, like, Nevada maybe.
- [26:01]
Connor
Yeah.
- [26:02]
Cody
So he's like, producing the location or something. It was really. It was an amazing. He did an incredible job on the video, and that was definitely the video that got the most impressions and views from the. I think there was like four or five posts that we did leading up to the super bowl going live.
- [26:18]
Connor
Dude, I think that's. I think that's super cool. Have you guys done anything like that before? Like, this kind of like, it's almost like a. It's like decentralized, distributed storytelling. You're creating all these characters that are working towards a single campaign.
- [26:31]
Cody
Not in this way. Not. Not in this. Not like in this type of like very brand forward, brand marketing forward way. Like we've done it with you know, product drops right like we dropped, we launched a pizza Steel last year and we had Nancy Silverton who's like known for her pizza do it like in a really amazing post about it. But not, not to this level. This is certainly the most like connected, slash, you know, deep I guess thing that we've done that's like connecting the story.
- [26:59]
Connor
Totally, totally heavily coordinated.
- [27:03]
Unknown
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.
- [27:22]
Cody
That is exactly why all three of us use House.
- [27:24]
Unknown
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.
- [27:45]
Cody
It's rigorous.
- [27:47]
Unknown
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, Metta, 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/formators that is spelled h a u s.IO/operators to start your incrementality practice today.
- [29:26]
Connor
All right, can I go on a little tangent here about something that I think is really interesting and related? Okay, so are you familiar with Polymarket? Oh man. Okay, okay. All right. We'll have to start from the beginning. Polymarket's just like this online betting site and it's like kind of crypto related. It was really popular during the election where you could just say who you thought would win and then you're, you can, you can use like USDC coin and stuff like that. And it totally like grasped the zeitgeist. So anyway, there are these like online betting markets going live that are increasing in popularity. For what it's worth. Like they ended up predicting like state by state votes really accurately. So in hindsight it was like, oh yeah, this is actually like a really efficient market. So regardless, Polymarket's the big one. They're international. There's one in the US Note now called Kalshi and Kalshee partnered with Robinhood so you can bet on the super bowl through Kalshi in Robinhood. So it's just this thing that's like taking off. We're seeing like the, the financialization of everything. Right. So like these are both examples highly competitive entities. So I'm setting the stage here. It's going to get to like native social storytelling. But one thing that came to light last year that I thought was like fascinating from a marketing perspective and like driving the online narrative is the CEO of Polymarket. His name's Shane. His like house was raided. And this was after the election. And then what came out afterwards was that the head of growth at Kalshee actually took news. It was like a thread that had been posted on Twitter about the Polymarket CEO being his house being arrested and like something sketchy about it. He'd been like meeting with politicians just like kind of, of like kind of like conspiratorial Twitter fodder or whatever. Right. But it was negative about Polymarket and these two entities are like highly competitive. So the head of growth at KI takes that sends it to Antonio Brown, ex NFL wide receiver who's like just posts crazy stuff on Twitter has a ton of followers. He sends that thread to Antonio Brown and he's like, hey, could you, quote, tweet this with something? Like, this guy seems guilty. It was like, something like that. So. Wow. But. And. And so that it was those texts that, like, came to light, and then it was, like, really negative for call she. Because that's, like, not a cool thing to do. But my point being, it reminds me a little bit of what you guys have done in the sense of, like, you have these characters across platforms or across, like, interests. Like, Gordon's way different than geoguessrs and polymarket. Kind of like tech, you know, finance is way different than Antonio Brown, former Steelers wide receiver. But you can connect them and you can, like, tell a cohesive story together and kind of amplify those things one after another. I've been fascinated about the. The Poly Market example because I think it's a really cool example of, like, organic marketing. Essentially. You're kind of, like, constructing this virality and then what you're describing, which I said earlier, I, like, I missed this week. I didn't catch a lot of this news is another great example of that. You're tying all these, like, disparate pieces together to tell a story that's really interesting. Sounds like a rad activation.
- [32:31]
Cody
And. And I think you nailed it with the, like, vertical of creators. Like, that's why I'm so pumped about the impressions we're getting, because, you know, presumably geomarket and who he's reaching are not who we're reaching. We're running, like, a whitelisted ad from a chef that we're partnered with. So there are all these different people in these very, very different verticals that I think we're hitting a lot of net new people with. I love that Poly Market example. What do you think they paid Antonio Brown for that dude?
- [33:00]
Connor
I bet, like, nothing is what I would guess. I mean, I'm sure they, like, worked with him in the past, but, like, I don't get the sense that he's charging 30 grand for a quote tweet or whatever. Like, I think it's more. It's probably more of a relationship thing at that point, but there's. There's a lot of that going on. I. I'm. Yeah, there's a lot of that going on, particularly on Twitter, where you find the right accounts that can help amplify certain stories and then you.
- [33:23]
Cody
Yeah.
- [33:23]
Connor
Seed stories and. And do that. I've got one more that I've thought a lot about recently. There's a company called X Tech, and they do a humanoid robot, and they. They paid for a deep integration with Kaisenat. Are you familiar with him?
- [33:42]
Cody
No.
- [33:43]
Connor
No. All right, cool. Kaiser. That's, like one of the biggest Twitch streamers right now. And he's like, you've probably seen clips. He's had, like, Kevin Hart on his show. He's had. He had Kyrie Irving, like, all sorts of basketball players and rappers and things like that.
- [33:57]
Cody
But what is this. What is this brand called?
- [33:59]
Connor
Oh, Kaisena is a guy. He's a Twitch or.
- [34:01]
Cody
No, the.
- [34:02]
Connor
The brand humanoid robot is. Is X Tech.
- [34:05]
Cody
X dot Tech. Okay.
- [34:07]
Connor
So they pay for a deep integration with. With Kai and, like, the. And Kai's streaming with a humanoid robot for, like, hours. And, like, at one point, he's taking a shower, and the humanoid robot's just, like, cruising around in his bathroom. And so you. You seed this content, and then what they did was they partnered with, like, a ton of people who clip that content, and then they distribute that on Twitter even further through meme accounts. So. Exact same idea. Like, what is the notable moment for you guys? It's a Super bowl commercial. For them, it was Kai Sonat in the shower with a humanoid robot. And then how do you. How do you, like, build on top of that? And how do you proliferate that further? And how do you do it in unique ways? There's just, like, less unique. It's like, okay, you got meme pages retweeting, you know, little clips from Kai's stream for you guys. It's way more thoughtful and I think a bit more interesting, but similar.
- [34:56]
Cody
Yeah, was. So theirs is more of, like. Because ours was unique content. All leading up to this apex being the TVC dropping was there's more, like, syndicated content. So they have this content of this influencer using their product in this way. That was like a big moment and cutting it up in different ways. Or was it actually unique content leading into that, like, bigger piece?
- [35:21]
Connor
Totally, totally. So in this case, with. With X Tech and Kaisen at. It was the integration on his channel, the stream becomes clipped. So it's just syndicated content. It's not unique content. So I guess, yeah, in. In your example, it's Gordon's post, then becoming content for GeoGuessr would be the correct parallel.
- [35:43]
Cody
Right. And. And like, we did. We did some of that too. Right. Like, part of the. Like part of the strategy was Gordon doing a response video being like, you're crazy, geoguessr. Like, you don't know what you're talking about. So that was part of it. And we also like, we also sent, like I said this was a big impression play. So like we, we also did a big syndication strategy that cam our head of ads led up that got us like another like tens of millions impressions just syndicating this content, turning it into memes across I don't probably not hundreds of meme pages but like many tens of meme pages across Instagram, TikTok, Reddit just like get give this thing more and more and more life. So we definitely did a, a similar strategy to that across all these pages. And it, the CPMs have been like the CPMs on the, on the, on all the organic influencer stuff. Whether it's the, you know, the lead up like the stunt we did or the cool influencer box or the meme page stuff has been insane. Like crazy CPM arbitrage.
- [36:45]
Connor
Yeah, like you've got one linked here. So you've got geoguessr his tick tock of finding out where Gordon is at. Area 51 is reposted on Reddit. High strangeness. It's got 2.2 thousand upvotes and 500 comments. I mean, yeah, that's like, that's a ton of impressions.
- [37:03]
Cody
And, and the best, the best part about the this is, this is like getting, you know, impressions are good but like engagement is, is like what you really want to see. Yes. The coolest part about all this is like you go and look at the comments on all of this content, whether it's the Gordon post or the geoguessr or the flight attendant or the, or the meme stuff. Like people are like having tons of conversations about what the hell is going on. Like there have been some crazy comments like all the conspiracy theorists are coming out of the woodwork and like commenting on these, these posts. Which is exactly what we want. Like we wanted to buzz up this conversation and just like get amplification of it. So that's been really cool to see. Like if you're, if you got 30 minutes to burn one day, just you know, go check out some of the content and kind of see what the comments are because it's really interesting and it's like doing exactly what we wanted it to do, which is just build up this narrative more and more and more and more. Not to mention there was all this like, I don't know if you remember this like 3 months ago there was this like alien stuff happening.
- [38:09]
Connor
Dude, of course I was just gonna ask. Yeah, that was, that, that was, that was you guys. That's a part of the campaign. You guys were. You guys were flying the drones over New Jersey. Yeah.
- [38:18]
Cody
Yeah, actually, that was us. That was us. I learned how to fly a drone. Yeah. Good timing.
- [38:23]
Connor
Yeah. So. So you guys just must have been stoked. You're like, oh my God. Aliens are having a moment right now. This area 51ex hit in February.
- [38:31]
Unknown
I'm like, I'm like sitting in the.
- [38:32]
Cody
Office one day looking at like, just working in like, God, when was it? September? Maybe it was a little later, like November was it? I can't remember. And I just look at Cam. I'm like, this couldn't have been more perfect. Like, the, the timing here is really, is really working out.
- [38:48]
Unknown
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 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. 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 prescientai.com operators to book a demo and see for yourself.
- [40:23]
Connor
Oh, I had, I had a question. So you mentioned Rosewood earlier, like pitched the concept. Did they manage a lot of this like influencer seating campaign? Like tying all these different characters together?
- [40:33]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. So their scope of work was the tv, the influencer stunt and the like kit we put, like the influencer kit we put together, which I retweeted this yesterday. Like we put together this insane influencer kit. When I say we, I should say they. They put together this insane influencer kit that's like, has a screen in it. Like you open it, it's a video of Gordon. So that was their scope were those three components. And they did an incredible job. Our internal team, like I said, Matt and Christiana on the brand side, we're managing a lot of that and on the influencer side as well, did a really nice job like working with them on it to like collaborate. But that was their, that was their kind of like three pronged scope of work. And it's actually, it's like a totally. I didn't realize this. One of the coolest parts about this experience was actually being able to go and be on set when we shot the Super Bowl. That was so awesome. Just to see like how that comes together. But it's a totally separate production company. Like Rosewood does not produce it. They're there obviously giving input, but like totally separate company that's actually producing this thing. I'm blanking on the name of that company, but it was just really cool to like see all the different players and, and how they work together to, you know, bring this thing together. Like, you have the creative agency, you have the production agency, you have a whole slew of internal team managing this and like driving it, guiding it, giving feedback, you know, just countless rounds of revisions. So it was really fun to see those, those pieces come together. Cool.
- [42:06]
Connor
Cool. And the meme amplification you said was your team?
- [42:09]
Cody
Yeah, that was Cam, who's our head of ads ran, led that up because we've done some, we've done a lot of work with these, with these folks in the past because like the distribution they have is insane and the CPMs are insane. So it was just like a no brainer to, to activate like a syndication strategy. So yeah, that was, that was Cam and our, in our paid team working with them.
- [42:30]
Connor
Shout out Cam. That. That's one of my favorite pieces of it is the, the 2000 upvotes on Reddit is just such a cool, it's awesome addition, dude.
- [42:37]
Cody
There's so many, like, he has a full, you know, list of all the content. This is, these are just two of them or this is just one of them, actually. Um, yeah. And the impressions we're getting from that is, Is insane. Yeah, they crushed, he crushed that component. And so did the, I think they're called Heave that. That owns a lot of these pages that we work with. Yeah.
- [42:55]
Connor
Awesome. Um, okay. So, so cool. One of the questions I had, which I feel is somewhat answered, I, I, I wanted to know, like, from an execution or like, I have channel comprehensiveness perspective, is this comparable to anything? Like, is it Q4 in nature? It kind of sounds like it's maybe completely different. So maybe there aren't any good comps. But how. Have you guys thought about it internally?
- [43:19]
Cody
Yeah, it's certainly, I mean, this is certainly more robust than any campaign we've ever done before. If I had to compare it to anything, I would say it's most similar to our sweepstakes campaign. And then I would say, as the second comp, our Q4 campaign. So I, I think that it's the most comparable to our sweepstakes campaign because there's a very strong brand marketing component. We also have that in the sweepstakes. There's a very strong direct response component. We also had that in the sweepstakes with like, the points and the, in the merchandising of products and having different points and the blitz periods. And then there's a very strong, like, I don't want to call it gamification, because it's like, I wouldn't say our Super Bowls, it's not gamified, but we've, we've like, basically taken some of the brand marketing components, some of the narrative of the super bowl, and we've almost like, direct response. If I did a little bit, like, if you go look, if you just go click around our site and you look at the offers, like, you'll see. Yes, we have, you know, product offers because we wanted to make sure, again, like, this is the performance part coming in. Like, we want to have a really good product offer. Like, we are, we were running our big game sale right now. We usually are running a President's day sale during this time, but with cooking and food. And it just, it, the narrative worked perfectly to rebrand it as, like, a big game sale. But then we also have offers around parts of the tvc. So, like, part of the TVC and like, Part of the. Actually, I don't know if the mini. Yeah, the mini pans are in the tvc, but part of the, the creative is like there, there are these mini pans to cook for these like tiny aliens. We actually produced a bunch of those mini pans and it's an offer on our site that you can actually get one if you spend over a certain dollar threshold. So, you know, that's kind of comparable to the sweepstakes in the sense that it's like kind of a brand marketing forward. Like, this is a great example of like brand marketing and direct response marketing. Like coming together like that is a very direct response play. It's like, hey, spend. Spend this much. You're going to get this cool memorabilia from our TV commercial. And then there's layers on top of it. A hundred of them are signed by Gordon Ramsay. So hey, maybe, maybe the mini pan enough isn't, isn't good enough to get you to spend 700 bucks or whatever it is. But you are, you're stoked about the idea of getting one signed by Gordon. So yeah, there's, there's all those components that I think make it a good comp to. To sweepstakes and then, you know, comparable to Q4 holiday in the sense that it's very omnichannel, very robust. But like, obviously that's more of a direct response moment in performance marketing or. Sorry. And brand marketing is a little on the back burner. This is kind of flipped where brand marketing is more, more front and center. Performance marketing is kind of like, you know, maybe 25% of it.
- [45:58]
Connor
Totally. Yeah. It makes total sense. I like your description earlier. Brand marking just being. You want to make impactful, memorable. You want to make an impactful, memorable impression. The doctor Portion is like, while that's happening and it's. You're never going to make.
- [46:10]
Cody
You're not.
- [46:11]
Connor
You're. I don't think you're going to serve more than 115 million impressions at once many times. Right. So like, while you're doing this, how do you make the most of that? And that is like some of the more.
- [46:20]
Cody
Yeah.
- [46:20]
Connor
Dr. Kind of tactics within that.
- [46:23]
Cody
Right, right. And like, not. I mean, it's not, not a lot of E Comm. Physical product brands run super bowl ads. So no short list. Yeah, it's like, you know, Farmer's dog, they took like the very emotional like, we're going to pull out your heartstrings angle. But, like, from what I saw, they didn't do like a ton of like on Site stuff. I could be, I was just looking at like Wayback Machine so that could be wrong. There was like Dollar Shave Club and I'm not exactly sure what they did for their activation. Dr. Spots.
- [46:57]
Connor
Did one back in, did they? 2022. Yeah.
- [47:00]
Cody
Okay. Okay, got it. Yeah. I mean there's not a ton. So we were kind of like, we definitely like looked at those and, and you know, chatted with people that had experience. Like Olivia from House, our beloved sponsor has been involved with a couple of super bowl spots and she gave me some really good advice. But it was, it was fun to like, we were very careful. Right. Like we wanted to like make sure we were looking at what DTC brands in the past have done without letting that like skew what we wanted to do too much. And I think we struck a good balance of like putting our unique lens on this thing and also taking kind of some of the advice and you know, historical data from what other brands have done.
- [47:39]
Connor
Cool.
- [47:42]
Unknown
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 cheaper, it's, it's way less work. We cut our cost compared to what we were paying before by 50%. It's the first AI platform I've seen that's really built with AI in mind. 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 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, 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 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, reduce ticket volume by 30% and honestly that's pretty conservative. Highly recommend you get a demo and see for yourself. Go to richpanel.com to check it out.
- [49:32]
Connor
Yeah, so I was curious, I saw Olivia's tweet and maybe we could talk about it right now. Do you know what super bowl commercial campaigns she was a part of?
- [49:40]
Cody
Yeah, she, she worked on the Quibi campaign. I forget exactly when Quibi ran one and then I want to say her other one was Netflix, so. Yeah, yeah, it was Netflix and they were like positioning it around like the drop of a new show. So very different. Like very, very like direct to consumer, like a consumer facing play. I guess all super bowl are consumer facing plays but very, very different than what we're doing with, you know, consumer product brand.
- [50:10]
Connor
Totally, totally. Yes. Okay, so, so she hits a couple of points and I'd love, I'd love your thoughts on them. First one, she goes, remember your why when you measure it, it is not reasonable to expect payback from immediate sales. Be prepared to look at search volume, site visits and social conversation to understand the impact this gets to. Like I wanted to talk about what are your expectations? Like are you taking that advice literally? Is there anything else that you guys are like, oh, we want to see some other metric how that will be affected by this 100 million impressions.
- [50:39]
Cody
I would, I'm. We're definitely taking that advice and we've had, you know, conversations a lot of people and for the most part it's all been like the same variant of that advice. Where we differ is I do think that we will see more and like, yeah, it's not all directly related to the actual ad spot itself, but I do think like we have a really awesome offer on site right now and like we launched it yesterday, had a really good first day. So I actually do think we will see pretty Good. Not Black Friday numbers or like even holiday numbers, but I think we'll see pretty good performance in terms of sales and efficiency and acquisition costs and all that from yesterday through, through the, you know, 17th or whatever. And I think that Sunday will be a really high performing day. So I think we are going to see strong performance. I'm not expecting to like throw up like 30 million on Super Bowl. Right. Like you think about consumer behavior. I don't know about you. I don't ever for the most part I'm not like watching super bowl spots and then immediately going to the brand's website or googling them. So totally am expecting a site traffic spike. But again for that reason, like again I'm not expecting to get like every person that watched the ad. You know, if that's a hundred thousand or, or however many people 100 million people are, I don't know how many will watch it. I'm not expecting to see like a massive, massive website spike. We're going to be really measuring Google brand search queries period over period. I think that's going to be like one of the top KPIs to see how that changes pre and post super bowl spot. Definitely very. We have like, we have a, you know, a bunch of filters built into one of our social listening tools to understand like how, what's the, what's the amplification of people on organic social like mentioning this. So we've been measuring that just straight up like period over period. How many, how much tagged content are we getting mentioned in on social will be an interesting data point. You know we have some like attribution type stuff in the works like post purchase survey. So we'll be measuring that over a long tail of time. We have a bunch of social extensions that we're running in Facebook so it'll be really interesting to see like all the performance metrics on that. Like how does one day click roas and you know, longer windows compare to our evergreen creative during that time. So a variety of things that we're measuring but certainly expecting a long tail on it is, is the hope that this will kind of play out through the whole year.
- [53:03]
Connor
Yeah, yeah. So for the post purchase are you just, are you just putting super bowl commercial back there?
- [53:07]
Cody
Yep, super bowl, yeah, super bowl commercial basically. And yeah, and I think you know, and all this, this is very valid, I think a very valid critique of post purchase survey. Best attribution is like do you really trust your consumer to remember and like give you that accurate data? I think there's one, you know, top of funnel activation that people will remember. It's like in, in seeing you for the first time, it's probably the super bowl ad. So I'm hoping that we get, you know, pretty trustworthy data from that. But yeah, I think that'll be an interesting one.
- [53:37]
Connor
Do you guys. I, I think it's a great point that like, I don't expect the common customer journey to be like, I'm gonna see the 30 second ad. I'm gonna Google hexclad. I'm gonna spend 700 on pans. Like, it probably use capture value over a much longer period. So are you gonna have. Have you guys talked about, like, changing your Memorial Day sale projections? Like, I'm just thinking, like, I have no idea what happens, but it's like, oh yeah. Do you just end up getting like some percentage lift on like your next biggest sale period or something?
- [54:06]
Cody
Yeah, I mean, if you look at our projections, like, a lot of it is based in long tail performance of the super bowl spot.
- [54:14]
Connor
Yeah.
- [54:15]
Cody
100. Like, yeah, our, our, you know, months following this are very much with that in mind in that bet. So. Yeah, totally. And you're in your. You're spot on. Like, I'm very curious to measure that response in the following 12 months and see how it changes over time. And like, especially in Q4, like when we roll out our best offers of the year, like, how, how. What's going to be the volume of people selecting, you know, super bowl ad or super bowl commercial during a big offer moment that happens, you know, at the, you know, 10 months later? Like, I think that'll be really fun to track over time.
- [54:51]
Connor
Yeah, totally. You know, one thought that I had while you were talking is you guys have done big TV spots before. Obviously nothing close to the super bowl, but I think there was like a NBA Western Conference final a couple years ago. I remember seeing it during the Lakers game or something, which is, I just looked it up. That's like maybe 6 to 8 million viewers. So a 15th the size of the Super Bowl. But like, yeah, are there any. Do you guys have learnings from how to measure big TV spots that you're applying here other than, hey, we know it's a brand moment. We want to make impactful impressions. We're going to try to measure it over time.
- [55:24]
Cody
Yeah, I mean, yes. But like, I wouldn't say in a way that's like the net end all be all of that spot, especially with a spot like that where it's a little less or, you know, harder to track it over time. So we're like, we're absolutely like, we've, we spent a lot of time because what you're talking about is we did a bunch of like, we've done a bunch of like one off linear TV buys on you know, MLB games, NFL games, NBA games. So we would basically measure the hour over hour lift from that spot in site traffic, in revenue. And then we were really using it like for a comparative analytics reason. Like hey, we did an NFL spot, an NBA spot and a. Whatever it was. Let's go look at the hour over hour lift in website traffic and revenue and calculate a cost per incremental web visitor. Like a cost per incremental order a row as like a, just a one hour row as. And then like the same way that you would go and compare one day click roas between ads and then like scale the one that worked better. So that's, that's really how we have looked at it in the past. And then we're really using like our MMM tools to validate linear as a channel as a whole. So that, yeah that's, that's what we'll, we'll be doing something and then CPM obviously. Right. Like we know what we paid for, we know what viewership was like, was it a good CPM arbitrage for us. So we'll definitely be looking at it similar in that sense. But I think the ability to read the entire performance over a longer period of time will be hopefully a lot easier compared to like you know, round three, game three NBA playoff spot that like might not be able to measure that as well over a long period of time.
- [57:09]
Connor
Totally, totally.
- [57:10]
Cody
Yeah.
- [57:10]
Connor
Yeah. Nothing quite like a Super bowl, but millions of viewers. So I'm like if you, if you guys have done that before, if there are any takeaways.
- [57:18]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
- [57:20]
Connor
Well, awesome. All right, so I've got. This is kind of a broad question. I don't know if you'll have an answer to it. I think it's, I think it's my last one. We're getting towards the end of the agenda here. I said if a week from now I told you something ended up going surprisingly well, what do you think it could be? And we, we think about this sometimes as like, is there potential surprise to the upside? And I don't know if you guys have, have thought about that or like how. What's your initial answer to that question?
- [57:49]
Cody
It's just revenue, I think.
- [57:51]
Connor
Yeah. Yeah.
- [57:52]
Cody
Seeing like, like if you go look at our February projections and we're not including. This is actually kind of a key in like a fun like tidbit of how we're allocating budget. Like we're actually not allocating this to our like typical direct response paid media budget. So it's not included in the denominator when we calculating myrrh. Like if you go look at our February projections, like they're pretty, you know, aggressive. But that's because we, we have the super bowl spot going live.
- [58:16]
Connor
Yeah.
- [58:17]
Cody
So that's the big one, right? Is. I wouldn't be surprised. I think we're going to see good performance throughout this moment. It's just to what extent like we beat projection pretty handedly on, on day one of the sale yesterday. So that was a good start. But we also have some pretty big revenue numbers projected for like the middle of the month. So if we can like hit those or even be a little above them, I think that would be the, the surprisingly well piece that I would be really happy about.
- [58:48]
Connor
Awesome. I just, I looked it up. I'm sure you can't tell us what you guys paid chat. GPT says a Super bowl commercial cost 8 million bucks. So you guys, you guys get to press a button and you spend $8 million in, in, in 30 seconds. I think that's exciting. Do you have like, do you have a thought on like what, what a shorter term roas would be like? I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if you guys attribute like over a 1 to 1 in, in over a couple, a couple days. And I think that would be incredibly. That amount of impressions, that amount of brand awareness. You get close to a 1 to 1. I personally would feel fantastic about that. I think.
- [59:26]
Cody
Yeah, I be, I think that. And it depends on how you look at it. But let's say, let's say like we took the, let's say we took the super bowl like responses from post purchase survey that say they found out about us that way. Let's say we like, let's say we multiply it by a multiplier to like correct for the survey completion rate. So it's like all right, we had 100 entries, 50 do it times two to get like 200 to get to 100 completion and then we like export that and like look at the revenue. Like yeah, I think we could get to a one to one over the course of a week. Absolutely. And I think that'd be amazing. That'd be, that'd be a huge win for us. That's actually, I'm glad we chatted about that, because that's an interesting way to. To think about it, but, yeah, I think that's. I think that's very reasonable.
- [60:10]
Connor
Yeah. All right, cool. Well, I. I hope that's how it pencils out. You know, I was also gonna say, like, just in terms of. Because in the February productions, you guys are booking, like, you guys are amortizing the entire cost for February of the super bowl spot. Yeah. Because that's also aggressive. I mean, I guess it's February 9th. It's aggressive. I mean, you're. We're all saying you're going to get value from that over months. So, like, you know, booking your projections. Hey, we're going to spend this amount in February. Is. Is. Yeah. A conservative way to do it. I think we. We talked about this a couple episodes ago with Cody, like, around influencer spend. Right. That's the same sort of deal where it's like those. Those are very impactful, memorable impressions. I think the value happens over a very long period of time. How do you want to amortize those costs? I think what. We do it, like, how you guys are doing the Super Bowl. We just say, hey, we spent it on Sunday. Like, that's how we want to do it. But I could see other. Other brands thinking about it differently.
- [61:10]
Cody
Yeah. And I think we probably would if we were looking at it from, like, if we were including the super bowl costs in our m calculation. I. I don't think we would. We would just pump it all into February because then our mirror would look like. And I think it would, like, mess with our. Yeah, it would just mess with our projections and how we're tracking performance. So I think it might. It would maybe be different if we were doing it differently. Like, you know, any other. Any other channel that we're paying a lump sum, but it's distributed, like, in actuality throughout the duration of the month. We amortize it like. Like Live Intent, for example. It's like, all right, here's the. Here's what you owe us. But like, that in reality, came across the duration of 30 days or podcast or whatever it is. So I think it would be very different if we were not, you know, if it. If it were not like a. A brand marketing content line item on the. On the P. L. It was an ad spend line item. And you could argue either way. I don't think there's a right or wrong answer.
- [62:11]
Connor
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- [63:26]
Cody
I, I think one thing I, I, I think turned out just so well is our, and I think our team like over the last 18 months has gotten so much better at this. Like our web team in general, like we've been building that team out more like just in the last like a great head of website. We hired a senior UX designer. In the last like four months, six months, we've hired a CRO lead. Like our, the web experience that we built for this is amazing. Like I think it's, it's really well done. Our content like teams collaboration and shooting for web experiences and just that collaboration's gotten really strong over the last like half year. So if you go look at like our big game sale page, our Area 51 page and then there's a bunch of like additional components layered on to like evergreen pages, like collection pages, product pages. Just so if you land there without seeing the, the commercial or the Area 51 page, that you know what's going on. Like I just think that is we just, I think the team did a great job with that and I'm really proud of how that all came together and we did it in like in a relatively short period of time. So I think that's, that's a cool component and I think that's to me is the Most like that's what makes it very direct response is the web experience. Like you hit the website and that's where we're trying to convert you in all these different ways. We have the product offering, we have like the mini pan offer. We have a bunch of really engaging content around it. We have like progress bars that are like, like if you go look at our cart, our collection page, our product page, we have these progress bars that are branded but still very much like, you know, driving you subconsciously to spend into the $700. Like that just came together so well. Our web team crushed it. And I think that's one of my favorite parts about the whole campaign is the, is the digital experience. And that's like, you know, anytime you're doing a very top of funnel campaign that's going to amass, you know, hundreds of millions of oppressions across all channels, you got to go deep and like turn every stone over on your digital experience because you got to give again. Like that's. People see the TV commercial and they come to our website and we are just like continuing that narrative. Like it's so congruent. And I think that's the most. If there's one, like, if there's. If I could distill everything down into like what does it mean for an E Comm brand to run a run a Super bowl cam campaign? It's two things. It's creative's got to be super cohesive across the entire channel mix, you know, organic influencer, the TV seed of the digital experience. And then you got to find that right balance of performance marketing and brand marketing, like period. I think if you can like take that. Those two lenses to a campaign and like check those two boxes, that's basically what we try to do. So fingers crossed it, it works out.
- [66:09]
Connor
Fingers crossed, yeah. Well, well, luckily we'll be able to circle back on on a future episode. Well, cool.
- [66:15]
Cody
And by the way, Connor, Connor Dalt's been involved in I think a couple super bowl ads as well. I think he was at Quibi as well when they did theirs and I think he was at Dollar Shave Club. So that could be an interesting piece to bring up with him.
- [66:28]
Connor
Get it next week. Yeah, 100. All right, cool. Yeah, I think that, I think that was great coverage. I got a test of the week. You want to talk about it?
- [66:38]
Cody
Yeah, let's do it.
- [66:40]
Connor
Test of the week. I, we. We have been finding some pretty solid wins on like the CRO front. I'm really excited about this one. I'll take A step back though, one of our goals for this year, I wrote about it in the operators newsletter, so I'll give that a quick plug. That came out a couple weeks ago. We obviously we want to, as all businesses do, drive better incremental results and we've got a number of kind of steps to that. We want to do more top of funnel. We want to make sure our like top to middle of funnel, I'll just call that meta is as incremental as possible. So I think there's a lot of media buying tactics that we've been testing there and then like as we are growing brand awareness and driving traffic to the site, we've been calling it internally extreme offer testing. This is not an example of an extreme offer testing, but what I wanted to do was just how do we offer more value to shoppers and how do we do that in a more seamless way? We have about 20% of our EDC revenue coming from wallet kits right now. And historically, shopping kits has not been all that unified of an experience. So actually, let me pull up two things here. I'm sharing my screen for those listening. Okay, cool. Yeah, this will work. So what we're looking at here is a Ridge pdp. And what's new about this is what's new about this is this tab system here. So you're shopping the Ridge wallet. We're looking at a carbon fiber Ridge wallet. You're seeing the $150. Then we have two tabs. You have wallet only and then you can tab over to full kit and you get the flare with the full kit that says save 25%. So basically from the same PDP. And this is going to sound like super intuitive, but it's new to us and it's a test I'm very excited about. From the wallet only tab, you can obviously navigate between all the different colors super seamlessly. So we've got a bunch of options here. You can tab over to full kit and then you're immediately in this experience where you have the wallet, you have the key case, you're saving in this case 26% off. And then you can tab down a little bit further. You can add a pen, you can add a knife. So we've unified this kit building experience. It's not really building, it's a kit selection experience in a really seamless way directly from the single wallet pdp. And my thinking is, before we even get to extreme offer testing, the value that we currently offer, how do we just make that more obvious to consumers and this was kind of the first, the first pass at it. I'll also shout out and then Connor, I'd love your thoughts. True classic. Who we took some heavy inspo from, but they have one of my favorite like kit building pages and you can see a similar sort of toggle where you do custom packs you could select. This is all from the same pdp. You have a quick pack toggle selector at the top where you can go from curated packs to build a pack where you can select your own T shirts all the way to just a single T shirt. So basically distills the site down. This would otherwise be like dozens of PDPs into a single PDP. Almost feels like a one page site that you can quickly navigate between. So we're testing this right now. I'm not even going to talk about results. I've been trying to stay off intelligence as much as possible but. But one of our, one of our larger kind of like site architecture tests we've run in a while.
- [69:42]
Cody
This, I love it. It's such a seamless way to get people into a, into a bundle and I love that you can like. And maybe this is the Valentine's Day sale, but I love that you're able to like position. I, I love positioning discounts in the context of bundles because to me like that, that was actually something I wanted to change when I came to hexcloud is like we were using strikethroughs all the time and I didn't like that brand perception. So I wanted to like think through how can we position all of our discounts to like be through the lens of oh, I'm getting this offer because I'm bundling. Is that what's happening here? Like that 170strikethrough, is that an evergreen offer, is that a bundle offer or is that Valentine's Day?
- [70:23]
Connor
Yeah, yeah. So there's like, there's a couple different prices here. This is basically the evergreen offer and then you go down to like you get 41 off the aluminum gunmetal daily driver kit right now. So this, this is. We talk about with this, we talk about this with the merchandising team. There's like evergreen bundle pricing and then at certain times of the year, like Valentine's Day sales, certain bundles will be marked down even further. I know you guys do the same.
- [70:45]
Cody
Yep, yep, exactly. Yeah, I love it. How are you got. I'm already getting ideas on our, on our page. Right. If someone's like in a starter bundle product page, like how can we toggle them into a six piece set or a 12 piece set. Yeah, and like position, that discount is even stronger. What were you doing before this to get people from a wallet into a full kit? If anything below the fold.
- [71:11]
Connor
We had like product recommendations and the first one would be the daily driver kit. But like you can imagine maybe 50, 60% of people were actually making it that far down the page and even that's probably being generous. This is like 100% of people. If you were on the PDP, you can tab over to the full kit. So like what we'll be looking at here is obviously like conversion AOV changes, revenue and profit per site, visitor changes and intelligence. But what I'm also super curious is just how many more people are we driving to a daily driver kit page? I think it will be like 200% more or something. I think it'll be a massive change.
- [71:48]
Cody
Yeah. And the former ux you're like, I don't like that because you're showing them the Ridge wallet but then you ultimately want them to get the, the, the kit. So you're basically saying like actually skip the product that you're on right now in the fold and scroll down and add the, and add the kit. Whereas this one is very clear. It's like no, this is like a one or the other thing. Like you shouldn't have the wallet and the, and the kit. It's like we want you to buy the kit but it's, it's, it's just a better. To me this is a way more like clear, intuitive experience to like drive totally home versus stacking it 100%.
- [72:24]
Connor
It feels like, like in this case it just, it feels like you're shopping the wallet. Hey, I'm interested in the gunmetal wallet. I can get the wallet only I can get the full kit. If I tab over the full kit, I can add the pen, I can add the knife. So it's just, yeah, way more intuitive. I'm super with you.
- [72:38]
Cody
Can I ask a adjacent question but like what's your team stack? That's, that's bringing an idea like this together. Like are you CRO lead designer? Dev is like kind of the, like what's your resourcing look like that to bring something like this together?
- [72:53]
Connor
Yeah, great question. We have, we have an E comm manager who does some of like the, the, some of the product management stuff. He'll brief in like certain features. He runs all the ops as well. So just like implementing the test, getting this all set up across, you know, we implement it with MetaFields largely. In this case, I brought in an external designer, like specifically for UI ux. We have a great design team, not super well versed in like UI UX elements, so we brought in that. So I actually briefed this one in initially to the design contractor, brought that in internally. We built it out with our internal dev team.
- [73:28]
Cody
Nice, Nice. And how often are you. Yeah, go ahead.
- [73:32]
Connor
I was also going to say the test is super clean because just basically in intelligence, we're just show. We're just showing or hiding this like, tab element. So it's like super, super clean test. We'll get a really easy read and we'll be able to see the changes in the metrics I talked about, as well as how people are navigating the site differently.
- [73:48]
Cody
How often are you the one coming in and like driving a strategic test and like pushing that first 10% forward versus like your Ecom manager? Are you driving a lot of these tests?
- [74:04]
Connor
Like on a, on a test basis, it's probably a relatively low percentage. But when it's like, hey, we need to take bigger swings here, like, I want to try this, then I'll like, maybe I'm, I'm pushing, pushing the needle more on those. But like, we're doing tests all the time that are like, frankly a little bit smaller. But like, we're stacking a lot of wins that way. And I'm like, largely uninvolved there.
- [74:28]
Cody
Nice, Nice. Cool. Cool. Yeah, I think the, the whole digital, like the whole digital product team stack is so interesting to me because it is very, again, it's like just like the Super Bowl. It's very cross collaboration. Like, you have a designer, which is more brandy. You have a CRO, like strategist, which is more growth performance. You have a developer, which is usually, you know, totally different world, like very technical. So it's kind of like you know, three, you know, three different minds coming together. So I'm always curious what the team stack is to. To facilitate that stuff.
- [75:01]
Connor
Totally. Yeah. And actually speaking of, we're talking about Connor Dalt a lot, I think Caraway. And then where was he at Sunday? It was like someday lawn or something. They've always had like, great. I mean, his title's like VP of Digital Product or something. And growth, like we should really jam on that with him as well because I think that's a relatively new. It's obviously incredibly important in traditional tech and software, relatively new to ecom brands, to like, truly treat your website as a digital product. So I think we're all kind of figuring out what's the right team setup, what are the right workflows.
- [75:34]
Cody
Totally. Yeah. Yeah, let's dig into that with him.
- [75:36]
Connor
All right. Let's call that an episode. Great one. All right. Thank you, as always, for tuning into another episode of Marketing Operators. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel house, Prescient. And after Sell, make sure to, like, subscribe, comment on YouTube. If you have questions, we've got them. Operators hotline. Submit stuff. We'll do an episode soon in the future, and we'll see you next week. Thank you.