E053: Our Takes on Saratoga's Viral Moment, Meta's Andromeda & AI's Role in Ad Creative

Summary

Marketing Operators Episode E053 Summary

Episode Title: Our Takes on Saratoga's Viral Moment, Meta's Andromeda & AI's Role in Ad Creative
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Release Date: April 1, 2025

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1. Introduction and Setting the Stage

The episode kicks off with the hosts sharing personal updates, highlighting busy schedules and the challenges of balancing work and family life. Cody humorously mentions waking up at 4:30 AM due to his newborn, setting a relatable tone for listeners.

• Cody Plofker (00:17):
  "When a six-week-old baby wakes up, you don't get to choose. And I'm so bad at going back to bed."

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2. Saratoga's Viral Morning Routine

The primary discussion revolves around Ashton Hall, an influencer with over 8 million Instagram followers, who posted a viral morning routine video featuring unusual activities like splashing his face with Saratoga water, using banana peels on his skin, and performing an ice bath. The video sparked widespread attention and debates on social media about its authenticity and effectiveness.

• Cody Plofker (05:04):
  "He splashed, you know, he did like a... an ice bath just for his face in this Saratoga water, which is going viral."

• Connor Rolain (07:51):
  "It was the ridiculousness of it... people saw that were like, what is this guy doing for four and a half hours every single morning?"

The hosts analyze why the video went viral, attributing it to its blend of "hustle porn" and "self-optimization," making it both relatable and absurd. They also discuss Saratoga's response—or lack thereof—to capitalize on the viral moment effectively.

• Alex (07:09):
  "It's the perfect blend of, of trends... It has the perfect amount of believability where it's like, yeah, you can make fun of it because you think it's really going on."

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3. Saratoga's Marketing Strategy Analysis

The conversation shifts to Saratoga's response to the viral video. The hosts critique Saratoga for not leveraging the moment fully, suggesting missed opportunities in engaging more organically with creators and amplifying the viral content through syndication.

• Connor Rolain (11:05):
  "I think that's the bare minimum. I don't know if there's a ton to do other than that... Maybe there is something to this organic social more like socially native content strategy."

• Cody Plofker (14:25):
  "I agree with, like, they should have done something. They should have reacted a lot sooner and it should have been a little bit more native to the current, you know, environment that's going on right now."

They propose strategies such as collaborating with influencers to create authentic and humorous content that continues the viral trend while staying true to Saratoga's brand mission of enhancing life's moments with premium spring water.

• Alex (20:31):
  "He is a caricature probably of the lifestyle that Saratoga wants to represent... It feels like we could remain true to the mission of the brand and participate."

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4. Meta's Andromeda and Its Impact on Advertising

The hosts delve into Meta's recent announcement of Andromeda, a proprietary machine learning system designed to enhance ad recommendation efficiency. Introduced in late 2024, Andromeda aims to improve ad recall and quality metrics by processing and recommending a larger set of ads more effectively.

• Alex (26:52):
  "They just announced it. So this is Facebook's, it's Meta's proprietary machine learning system... giving better recommendations and serve more relevant ads to users."

• Connor Rolain (29:18):
  "In theory, you should probably be dropping more ads under an Advantage plus campaign and that you should hopefully see a larger distribution of spend and impressions behind each ad."

The discussion focuses on how brands can adapt their campaign structures to leverage Andromeda's capabilities, emphasizing the importance of creative diversity and strategic ad placement to maximize the benefits of improved machine learning algorithms.

• Alex (40:40):
  "More creative team like really good creative flywheels and, and brands that have, that are going to continue to win like okay, so we'll just keep on the same path basically."

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5. The Role of AI in Ad Creative Development

Transitioning to AI's role in advertising, the hosts explore how tools like ChatGPT and advanced image generators are transforming the creative process. They discuss the potential for AI to enhance ideation, streamline research, and increase the volume of ad creatives, while also considering the implications for human designers.

• Connor Rolain (48:20):
  "AI can help with getting a really strong brief and then you have a real person to design and bring it to the finish line."

• Cody Plofker (54:03):
  "There's a ton of value in like today now where you can get that... think about the volume of assets that brands will be able to produce."

The conversation highlights the symbiotic relationship between AI and human creativity, suggesting that while AI can significantly boost productivity and provide inspiration, the nuanced touch of human designers remains indispensable.

• Alex (56:21):
  "It improves the speed at which we can create content like in multiples like 2, 3x or something."

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6. Predictions and Future Trends in Social Media Marketing

Cody introduces his prediction that brands will increasingly operate multiple social media accounts managed by paid creators, rather than a single account managed internally. The hosts observe that this trend is already gaining traction, particularly in the DTC e-commerce and SaaS sectors, as a strategy to amplify reach and diversify content.

• Cody Plofker (62:29):
  "Brands today have one social media account run by internal teams and pay influencers for distribution. We're going to see brands having multiple accounts that they pay creators to run for them."

• Alex (66:42):
  "An army of people creating content about our brand... you have affiliate stuff, you can just get a whole page just for that."

They discuss the effectiveness and potential risks of this approach, using examples like Stake.com’s viral strategies and the integration of ads in seemingly organic content to achieve massive reach through coordinated content creation.

• Alex (71:12):
  "An army of people, you know, creating content about our brand... It's like CPM arbitrage and just a very growth hacky way."

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7. Concluding Thoughts and Future Outlook

The episode wraps up with reflections on the evolving landscape of digital marketing, emphasizing the continuous interplay between innovative AI tools, strategic ad campaigns, and adaptive social media strategies. The hosts express optimism about leveraging these advancements to drive growth while acknowledging the challenges and adjustments required to stay ahead in a competitive environment.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Cody Plofker (00:17):
  "When a six-week-old baby wakes up, you don't get to choose. And I'm so bad at going back to bed."

• Alex (07:09):
  "It's the perfect blend of, of trends... It has the perfect amount of believability where it's like, yeah, you can make fun of it because you think it's really going on."

• Connor Rolain (11:05):
  "I think that's the bare minimum. I don't know if there's a ton to do other than that... Maybe there is something to this organic social more like socially native content strategy."

• Alex (20:31):
  "He is a caricature probably of the lifestyle that Saratoga wants to represent... It feels like we could remain true to the mission of the brand and participate."

• Cody Plofker (62:29):
  "Brands today have one social media account run by internal teams and pay influencers for distribution. We're going to see brands having multiple accounts that they pay creators to run for them."

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This summary encapsulates the core discussions and insights from the "Marketing Operators" podcast episode E053, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't listened to the full episode.

Transcript

[Alex]

All right, we are back. Another episode of Marketing Operators. I'm gonna ask you guys how you guys are doing Quickly. Cody, how are things?

[Cody]

Oh man. Another day, another. Another long day. Sometimes work beats you up, sometimes you beat the. Beat the word. Let me start that again.

[Alex]

Oh, it's one of. Yeah, no, one of those, One of those days.

[Cody]

Yeah, for sure. I started the day I think. Yeah. Like 4:30 this morning. You know, not getting that much sleep. Second kid trying to hit the gym. Busy day. So happy to be here with you guys but my brain is not completely there so.

[Alex]

Dude, wait. Okay, so we're going to get into this in just a second but 4:30am Wake up. Huh?

[Cody]

When, when a six week old baby wakes up, you don't, you don't get to choose. And I'm so bad at going back to bed. So if I, if it's like that time, I'm like I'm just going to get up. I'm not even going to try to go back to bed.

[Alex]

And then, and then do you, do you dunk your face in the, the bowl of Saratoga water before or after taking care of the baby?

[Cody]

Yeah. And, and can you tell how good my skin looks on my face?

[Connor]

That's not beef tallow, that's just Sara.

[Cody]

Maybe that's what I'm missing. Maybe I got to do that 100%.

[Alex]

Connor, how are things on your end?

[Connor]

Things are good, dude. We've, we've been chipping away at, we're getting better at getting ahead of and giving ourselves more time to develop these, these paid media production roadmaps that we've been fine tuning in the last three to four quarters and feeling good about how we've continued to improve that process. We just had like one of our final presentation calls on that today. So feeling good about the, the ad creative roadmap. It always feels good to kind of see a, see a bow get, get you know, put on a multi week kind of project or first part of a project like that. So good, good moods on the, on the paid media department here, dude.

[Alex]

Knock on wood. Yeah, knock on wood. Sounds amazing. We, we've also from a process standpoint been in a pretty good spot. Like a, like a knock on wood. Things are, things are going pretty well because we have said for years, I don't know if you guys are in the same boat. We've had so much stuff on our go to market board for years. We've said we're so close to like being ahead. We're so close to having the samples on time so we can shoot the content. We're so close to having the copy. We're so close to being ahead. And we said it this week and I said it's been prophesied for so long, it feels like it's, it's, it's finally maybe becoming a reality. But we'll see. That's at least how we're feeling for the next three or four days.

[Connor]

Well, you knock on wood too, over there. Let's. Yeah, let's keep, let's keep this good mojo going.

[Alex]

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[Cody]

Actually, should we ask, I know that you and I are much more online than Connor Roland. Should we ask if he's even seen it, if he knows what we're talking about? Hilarious.

[Alex]

Hilarious.

[Connor]

I do. I do, in fact know what we're talking about and I knew before I even saw it in the content plan. So I was, I was on top of this one.

[Alex]

When did you first hear about it?

[Connor]

I first heard about it this weekend.

[Cody]

All right, all right, all right.

[Connor]

So that's pretty. That's pretty. Like, when did the post go out?

[Alex]

This weekend.

[Connor]

I thought I was going to say I'm pretty sure I heard about it.

[Alex]

On Sunday, Cody, you want to take a pass at a brief explanation, a primer.

[Cody]

Yeah. So the thing. I can't tell. So this guy, Ashton hall, which I always think Ashton Wall whenever I hear the name.

[Alex]

Classic.

[Cody]

Yeah. One of our guests, one of our top episodes, had this video, and I don't know anything about the guy, but I don't know if he's an influencer. I don't. I don't know anything about him. He's jacked.

[Alex]

I can provide a couple more details here. I was listening to tbpn and they were going through, and he is an influencer. He. He mostly sells courses to people who want to sell courses.

[Cody]

Nice.

[Connor]

Right?

[Alex]

And he's got a team, so this is another interesting detail. He's got a team of creators around him. He thinks that's a really important piece of, like, building his brand and building his business. And he says he does millions of dollars a year, so. And he's over. He's got over 8 million followers on Instagram. I don't know where he was before this whole, you know, moment, but he had millions before, I'm sure. So successful influencers selling courses, you can go into the content.

[Cody]

Didn't know that. Thank you for the contact. So, yeah, just. He had this video that went viral. It was like a morning routine, I guess, and just a pretty ridiculous video. I still don't know if it was just like a meme, like if it was just a mocking thing or if it was serious.

[Connor]

I wasn't sure either.

[Cody]

Okay. I'm glad I'm not the only one.

[Connor]

Because he's doing all the stereotypical things, right? Like the nose tape, the mouth tape, you know.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Dara]

But he also.

[Cody]

Yeah, he rubbed the banana peel on his face.

[Connor]

I haven't heard.

[Cody]

He did this thing where he. He splashed, you know, he did like a. Just like a. An ice bath just for his face in this Saratoga water, which is going viral. And. And I think that they're way up and their Google searches are way up. What else did he do? I mean, he went to the gym. He went.

[Alex]

He wrote his journal. He open his journal to the very first page and started writing in it. That's where, you know, it's like. Yeah, it's probably a fake routine. It's like, you think he'd be on at least page three or four.

[Cody]

Yeah, it's like when LeBron, like, is reading a book in his press conferences.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Classic. Yeah. So just like, ridiculous video. This long morning routine where I think he woke up at like, 4:30 but didn't make it to the gym until 7:30. Just like a completely ridiculous video that I don't know if it's serious or not. I, I really hope it wasn't. But that I guess went viral. Why, why did it go so viral? Why do you guys think it went so viral?

[Connor]

It was the ridiculousness of it. I think people saw that were like, what is this guy doing for four and a half hours every single morning? Like, I think it was the, and the fact that you couldn't tell if it was him like joking and like trying to act ridiculous or if this is like truly what he, what he does and what he believes in, in doing. Like, I don't, I don't know, but I think the ridiculous of it and like the, the uncertainty of that piece really made people engage with it. And now if you go look at Saratoga's tagged content on Instagram, it's a bunch of people with like bananas in like the ice face bath thing going on. So you can tell that like they're, they also thought it was ridiculous whether or not this Ashton hall guy.

[Cody]

Oh, that's like the new trend.

[Connor]

Yes.

[Alex]

I think it's a, it's the perfect blend of, of trends. Two trends that people hate. One is hustle porn and then the other one is like self optimization. I mean, this is like quintessential like Gary V. Meets Andrew Huberman. Like a caricature of those two people in one. And then, and then the video was perfectly, it had the perfect amount of believability where it's like, yeah, you can make fun of it because you think it's really going on. It's, I think most people watch it and don't think this might just be a joke. And honestly, if I'm thinking about it, I, I don't think it is or it's like just the best, best kind of like rage bait content strategy. But I think that's what really does it. It's just, it's like a unicorn in that way. Yeah.

[Cody]

One, I, I thought it was a joke. I also, like, parents are, are always like, they clearly don't have kids to have that morning routine. Like, I think that's like what, what I see. And I'm just like, damn, it would be nice to have all that time. And it was like a pretty sick gym that, an apartment setup. He's got the, the other thing. I, I, I did think it was a joke, but also like, I have seen research from Huberman that like, if you can't do a Full body, cold plunge, just dipping your head in actually does have a similar effect. So I saw it. I'm like, you know, maybe everyone's giving the guy a hard time, but, like, there's actually something to it.

[Alex]

Oh, eat like, each individual, and then we can start talking about Saratoga social media marketing strategy. But, like, each individual thing is totally believable. Like the mouth tape, the nose tape. That is. Like, there's scientific evidence around that There's. It sounds like some scientific evidence around dumping your face in the. In the bowl. There's. People really, you know, are proponents of journaling.

[Cody]

What about banana peels?

[Alex]

So I don't know about that one. It's also just lining them all up back to back to back over the course of like, four and a half hours every morning or whatever. It's just like the absurdity of it.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

And then it. It ended with. So I didn't know this point about coaching, but, like, the last clip in the whole video was him, like, on this, like, coach or courses was on this coaching call, like, giving this guy some, like, motivational final one liner, like, all right, good job. Now you got to go do, like, even more. And like, Cody, you bringing that point up about him selling courses just, like, ruined that whole video for me.

[Alex]

Yeah. So, okay, so this. This moment goes viral. A very key piece of it is the Saratoga water. That plays like a. It's. It's in multiple parts of the video. I think he's dumping his face in Saratoga water, which is crazy. And the part that got E. Comm or brand or marketing Twitter into a bit of a. A frenzy was Saratoga's response or the lack thereof. So they went the whole weekend, they posted nothing on social. People were talking about them wasting this, like, massive viral moment. They got a couple Instagram posts up Monday morning, like, kind of loosely alluding to it, but largely, you could argue, it was largely undercapitalized on. So we got this question on Twitter. But if we, each of us were the CMO at Saratoga, what questions would we be asking ourselves as you think about the correct approach to this viral moment? And then how do the answers to those questions inform how to play out the rest of the hand? Connor, what's your take?

[Connor]

So is the question like, how are we reacting in the moment versus how are we reacting, like, longer term?

[Alex]

Oh, well, look, I think you can interpret the question however you'd like.

[Connor]

You're right. Okay.

[Cody]

If you were cmo, what would you do? What would you have done in the moment and. And after it as Well, I think.

[Connor]

You gotta like engage with it more. I, I don't think you should just like. And they did, but they didn't really like. I don't think they like responded to him in any way, shape or form. I don't know if they like reposted his content in any way, shape or form. I see that they did their own. Yeah, they've done some of their own stuff, but even their own stuff that they did was very much in their like non social native content style. I was think so. So like, I think that's the bare minimum. I don't know if there's a ton to do other than that. Obviously the original content itself did its thing and I don't know how much more they could have like added on to that in the moment. What I would absolutely be thinking is, wow, maybe there's something to this organic social, more like socially social native content strategy. Like if you go look at their Instagram, they're clearly not doing that. It's all like whatever stage product shots, they have this like blue brand for it aesthetic going on. They're clearly not engaging with creators. They're clearly not engaging with socially native content. So that, that would make me just rethink he. Maybe there is an opportunity here. And I don't know if they're, if they saw their revenue surge. I mean, I don't know how quickly they get that data. It looks like their, their main online distribution channels like Instacart, but I would be thinking about that and like should we go be engaging with creators at a larger scale and trying to like replicate this top of funnel impression play that maybe they, they clearly didn't think was possible because I don't think they've been doing this before. It doesn't look like they've had a ton of activity prior to this moment. So I'd be thinking about that. I would, I'd be thinking about maybe like some sort of syndication strategy, like can we get. And it looks like that happened a little bit. But how can they maybe amplify that specific piece of content a little bit more through syndication pages just to like really maximize the number of eyeballs that are, that are seeing it. I don't think there's more to do with hall here. I think part of the reason it works so well, which we already talked about, was because you couldn't really tell if it was like a brand deal or not. From my research, it wasn't. I think the moment that you like cut a brand deal with him, you lose all that. So I don't know if I would necessarily go and like, interact with hall anymore, but I would definitely be thinking through, like, who are some other creators that we could go activate with and. And try to like, continue this me momentum, see if it's replicable. And also knowing that, like, if you see a bunch of creators, the moment in time, they're the most likely to post and tag you and use your content or use your product in their content is when this, like, cultural zeitgeist is happening. So, like, the sooner you do that to this haul video, the more likely you're going to show up in other people's content. So I'd be product seeding, like, as the immediate thing here and then maybe thinking through some, like, other, like, deeper deals potentially. But, like, overall, just really thinking about how we can leverage organic social more and like, create more socially native content.

[Alex]

Cody, what do you think?

[Cody]

What do you got? I kind of want to hear. I don't have. I don't have that much. I. I agree with, like, they should have done something. They should have reacted a lot sooner and it should have been a little bit more native to the current, you know, environment that's going on right now. But would love to hear what you got first.

[Alex]

Yeah, totally. Okay, cool. So Connor and I are on similar pages. I would say that. Well, let me actually. Let me actually talk to this a little bit quickly too. There was a group of people that were like, oh, my God, they're blowing, like, the biggest marketing opportunity ever created. Ashton Hall's video was reposted by an account on Twitter that was the tweet that went viral, ended up getting a billion views. And you can only imagine all the memes on top of that. Dude, I mean, honestly, honestly, many billions of views of this. Like, I probably saw 50 or 60 ads that were, like, related to Saratoga water in some way. Insane moment. And it's just absolutely going like, insanely viral throughout the weekend. So people are like, one of the tweets posed, like, do you fire your social media marketer on Monday because they didn't take advantage of this opportunity. There's another group of people that were like, hey, Saratoga water. Like, they've been in business for a really long time. They know what they're doing. They don't need to, like, bend over backwards trying to cater to this, like, flash in a pan viral moment. Which, like, I can also understand that.

[Cody]

Did you also see like, the, like, the E. Comm Drop shipping bros be like, yeah, you should, like, be rip and Spend as hard as you can right now. You know they don't even have like a website, right?

[Connor]

Their shop now takes you to Instacart.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. And that, I mean from that perspective, like I saw another thing that Amazon said they had like seven bottles of water left or something. So it was like I don't think they were positioned to take advantage of the moment from like a financial perspective. Unless you do try to drive a bunch of traffic to Instacart, which just seems like that's clearly not their business model and that's not the sort of thing you try to figure out on like a Saturday evening. So yeah, I don't think there's a way to like capitalize on it from like a performance or revenue perspective necessarily. I'm going to land somewhere in between on like how to, how to participate as a brand in the moment. I read Saratoga was started in 1862. So incredibly old, 150 years old legacy brand. Like obviously not socially native. Connor mentioned it, but like their Instagram is like incredibly esthetic. It feels very like 2012 or whatever or maybe like maybe like 2014. Just like very like purposeful and non social. Native is how I would describe it. So I think you do risk like overplaying your hand and doing something that is, that is not on brand for you.

[Connor]

Not like manipulative to the current audience maybe.

[Alex]

Yeah. Or just something that like you won't be proud of. Like a year or two from then you'll, you'll have felt like, oh yeah, that wasn't authentic to what we are as a brand. Typically Connor Dalt said this on our podcast with him, but I forget exactly what the context was. Maybe it was social strategy, but he was like, how are we advancing our mission? We have a mission as a company. It's like I forget exactly what it is. Something about like the healthiness of their pans or whatever. How we behave on social should support that. And that's ultimately, if I'm Saratoga water, I must know what that is. And then I want to try to participate while remaining true to that mission. And I think there's ways to do that. And frankly I think they did that in their post on Monday. I understand the critique that you should probably try to get that post up on Saturday. There's billions of views happening. There's so much brand awareness. You should just try a little bit earlier. I don't think there were any tweets I heard that, that they hadn't tweeted since like 2022. So it was like, okay, yeah, you, you'd hope they were a little bit more agile to take a brand first approach to responding to this moment and then doing it on the platforms where these conversations are happening. So that's like, that's my, that's my initial thought and that's pretty minimal involvement. I'm not like they should, they should have taken this as like this, this amazing opportunity and try to blow it out of the water.

[Dara]

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[Alex]

So a couple other things. One is I just looked up what their mission would be and it says this is what ChatGPT. But they says Saratoga water emphasizes that quote unquote distinction is in the details aiming to enhance life's moments with their premium spring water. So one thing I just want to call out is like, this guy lives a very, like, luxurious life seemingly, right? He's got this like, beautiful, like, penthouse suite. He's clearly taking care of his body. He's a successful businessman. I'm like, he is a caricature probably of the lifestyle that Saratoga wants to represent. But, like, I don't think it's all that off brand. If it was like some super weird fringe alt comedy, you know, trend, then I could understand Saratoga not wanting to participate at all. This feels like something that you could remain true to the mission of the brand and participate in over the weekend as well as Connor. I like your points around product seating where I'm like, if I try to turn this into more of a social campaign, I'm probably sponsoring like hyper influencers on Instagram or whatever. Like, I might look at sponsoring a, I don't know these people, you know, but like, Ashton Wall would be so much better at this. But like a Kim Kardashian a, a, you know, the New York supermodels. I'd go like hyper luxury. And I, I think you could do all those things. I think you could continue this moment while remaining at least relatively authentic to who you've been for the last 150 years.

[Cody]

Can we just move on to the next topic? I don't know how I top that.

[Alex]

My resume to be director of social media marketing in Saratoga.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, I, I, I think you're right. I think, you know, just judging by their social content, they're, they're clearly not trying to play the game of max virality or max, you know, max growth. Like, I don't, I'd be curious to see, like, what their earned media program is like. Again, no idea if this was a spot product placement or not. Maybe they're much more liberal about brand guidelines on, on earned media, but, you know, who knows? So, yeah, I think certain brands are just like, hey, we don't have to kind of completely Win the moment, by the way. They probably had the biggest spike in awareness that they've ever had. Like, maybe that's enough for them. They're like, this is crazy. We don't need to push this any harder because we just got a billion views. So. Yeah, you don't know. And I know you mentioned the social. I'm just in their ad library. They did launch a few things, like, I think, like, two ads with it. One just as a pairing we never knew we needed. Trendsetter at Ashen Hall Official. And it's a picture. Looks like it's like, it says an image of bottle, bucket of ice and a banana. It's a little bit more branded. It's whatever. It's like one. Right. So it's probably a little too little, too late. Not enough. But like you said, if that's. If that's it, I. I think, like, I don't even know what's. What's the banana company? I don't. I don't even know, like, who makes bananas. Like, yeah, don't.

[Alex]

Like.

[Cody]

Like, they should do a partnership. The problem is that would probably take, like, 12 months, right? Yeah, that's the things with companies like, these would probably take 12 months. And then, like, people are like, you don't want to be that company either.

[Alex]

Yeah, that's super fair.

[Connor]

It looks like this, like, whole face bath thing has started showing up on Ashton's page as of this year, too. And that Saratoga is pretty much in every one of these videos.

[Alex]

So, dude, it's baller. Like, wouldn't you want to hire a coach that just dunks his face in a bottle of glass water? Yeah, dude, that is. That is bougie. That is. That is enhancing life's moments with premium spring water.

[Connor]

Right? And. And that's. That's why I think, like, seating it with literally hundreds of people that are, like, filling that. That premium niche, whether it's fashion or health or food. Like, that's kind of what, like, nothing says bougie. Then I'm gonna dump out a whole bottle of water just to soak my face in it. So, like, maybe, like, capitalize on that culturals, like, guys in, like, continuing to drive that narrative of, like, every single way that these people are using this product is how you would envision, like, a premium water to be used, whether it's for a face bath or for the water you're using to cook your pasta in. I don't know, but I think that could be. That could be cool to, like, tap into different verticals. It's like you got the rip bodybuilder, but now you also have the, you know, the primo fashion lady who buys the nicest clothes and drinks the nicest water. And, like, you're hitting different audiences of people by doing that 100%.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Cody]

All right, so here's what I would do. If, let's say, like, ignore the brand stuff and. And let's say you can act quick and you have budget to do it. I would probably work with some pretty large influencers. Do, like, collab posts with them, right? Get, like. Get, like, a known biohacker. So get like, Huberman or get somebody like that to do, you know, just like, more morning routine, like, ridiculous stuff. Kind of like joking, like, making fun of himself, maybe get Brian Johnson, like, the don't die guy. And, like, get them doing like, these routines and like, adding just, like, ridiculous stuff into it, which could be the banana or the ice bath. And, like, get them using, you know, Saratoga. Like. Like, kind of, like, make fun of it and just build on top of it. That's probably what I would do is just get. Get a few people and get some influencers. And, like, how do you just, you know, create this ridiculous content where you're kind of making fun of yourself? You're kind of, like, being, you know, just a part of the joke a little bit and know that you were used in this ridiculous way. So those are, like, like, a few I would do. And then I think, like, what's next? Okay, like, this. The water was used in this ridiculous way for these ice baths, and it's, like, so overkill to use, like, spring water from a glass bottle for, like, an ice bath. But, like, what's the next thing? Like, do you do a commercial where you fill a full whole pool? Like, you probably get people mad at you for doing that if you're going to be that ridiculous.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Hopefully people can tell it's, like, clearly a joke. Yeah. Yeah, you don't want to do that. We also have April Fools coming up, so, like, you could do something funny there and tie it into that as well.

[Alex]

All right, I love it. We've got some. Some good ideas here.

[Connor]

We're gonna have some job offers in our inbox from Saratoga after this episode.

[Cody]

Yeah, consulting.

[Alex]

I don't get the sense they're marketing operator listeners.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

So we'll see.

[Alex]

All right, sick. Next item on the agenda here. Meta made some big announcements this week. I figured we talked through them a little bit. Had you guys heard of Andromeda?

[Cody]

Alex?

[Alex]

Heard of it.

[Cody]

Not super familiar.

[Alex]

They just announced it. So this is Facebook's. It's Meta's proprietary machine learning system. They announced it in at the end of 2024. And it's really like the machine learning engine underneath Advantage Shopping campaigns. And what's interesting, I think they had like an engineering post go out last week and there's a great podcast on Taylor Holiday's e commerce playbook. He'll be on in a couple weeks. Maybe we could talk about it more with him. But what they talk about is it's, it's this improvement, improvement of like the retrieval stage of its advertising recommendation engine. So like, just to quickly explain what that means, or at least how I interpreted it, is, you've got, you can imagine Meta's got like millions of ads, hundreds of millions of ads that they have the ability to recommend and show in someone's feed. And a really computational intensive step is figuring out when I'm deciding what ad to show. Connor Rolane is how do I choose between these millions of ads across all these different ad accounts? And what they're excited about with Andromeda is that they're doing that way more efficiently than ever before. So that's like the, the big takeaway seemingly is that there's been this like, step change in the amount of ads that they can process and that they can pull from like a much larger set of ads in order to give better recommendations and serve more relevant ads to users. And what they said is that this was at the end of 2024, and I imagine it's just been improving as quickly as everything else has. But they saw a 6% improvement in AD recall and an 8% improvement in AD quality metrics after deploying Andromeda. So what people seem to be interested in is that is how this changes. One, how brands are utilizing Advantage Shopping, and then two, how are you structuring campaigns and how much creative can you have live or have within a campaign now that Meta is better at viewing all these different ads and recommending the right one to the right person. So Tee ended up with that information. Connor Brolane, I'm curious. My question that I've got here is like, are you guys seeing any differences in Meta ad performance and are you structuring campaigns any differently or I'm just curious your interpretation of that change in the, the ad engine.

[Connor]

Yeah, well, I mean, I guess anyone utilizing Advantage plus then is leveraging this, right? If this is the machine learning that drives that, it's, you know, this isn't like, you know, there are certain changes. It's like, oh, you can now take advantage of this thing in the ad account, but you don't have to like this is not. This is not one of those things. Right? I guess. Is this only for Advantage plus or is this also for. But not for business as usual as well?

[Cody]

Well, isn't. Don't. Didn't. Maybe this is a rumor, but that manual campaigns are now the same backend engine as Advantage plus. I feel like I've heard that where they. They used to say these are the Advantage plus is like a different machine learning model and now I've heard they're pretty much the same.

[Alex]

The article I read, I, you know, I don't know. That's a great follow up point. The article I read was really focused on the ASC plus campaigns. It was really focused on using that. I also think Meta's gonna do away with business as usual at some point in time. Obviously not yet. But like everything's moving towards this future of Andromeda.

[Connor]

I think in theory you should probably be dropping more ads under an Advantage plus campaign and that you should hopefully see a larger distribution of spend and impressions behind each ads. You know what, what I would hope not to see if this is the case is that we have like 25 scaled ads launched under an Advantage plus campaign and two of them are getting spend and and from my interpretation of this change, we should see a more distribution of. Of of ads being served under a single campaign. If it's truly going to be say like you know, AD1 through 20 is all going to reach hopefully a different person and acquire someone different for you and you're going to get more value and have like more just cohorts being addressed that way. It also should over different periods of time theoretically like spend more behind an ad as it like taps into different cohorts, assuming that you might reach different people over different periods of So I think in theory that's what you would see.

[Dara]

We have zero customer support ticket backlog right now, which is awesome. And it's all because we switched to Rich panel at the start of Q4. Q1 is usually when we're absolutely drowning customer support tickets from Black Friday and holiday season, but right now we have none. So was it risky switching our tech stack right before peak season? Sure, but I couldn't be happier with the decision. Since switching to Rich panel, we've gone from overwhelmed to having an empty inbox, which is the place we want to be. Here are three of my favorite things with Richmond so far. Number one if you know me, you know I love saving costs. So we save costs on the actual software by 50% right away. Much better deal.

[Cody]

We also, I love it, the features.

[Dara]

We have better features, better support. I see our team going back and forth with Rich panel. Even the CEO Amit is in there all the time giving our team support, building out new features for us. Immediate impact. The analytics are great as the, you know, the automations are amazing. The AI social media moderator as well, you name it. There's just been so many features features that have we've been able to add on to either reduce our tickets or increase our efficiency, which is the name of the game. Second thing is we've actually had 1.26 million in revenue generated from our CX team in the last four months, literally turning CX from a cost center to a profit center. And third is getting early access to all their new features that are being released like updated analytics, dashboard, a bunch of AI stuff, AI Social Media Manager, you name it. It's been super helpful for us. You probably have a backlog of meta ad comments if you're one of the operators and spending heavily. And that's where I love AI Social Media Manager. You're able to set everything up, automate it. It's able to learn from your best agents, your best replies. People think it's, it's a human, it's amazing and it's allowing us just to.

[Cody]

Get back to everybody, offer a better.

[Dara]

Customer experience, answer questions to get our ads performing better.

[Cody]

So I love it.

[Dara]

If you want to join the 2000 plus, 7, 8 and 9 figure brands that switch to rich panel to save money, save time and keep your customer service team happy, I highly recommend it. We switched at a really important time and they came through for us. So if you want to slash your customer support expenses by at least 30% overnight while reducing tickets, go to richpanel.comdemo to book a call and learn more. That's richpanel.comdemo.

[Cody]

Do you, do you see different metrics on manual campaigns and Advantage plus campaigns in terms of like new visits, new customer percentage, incrementality.

[Connor]

We barely do anything any manual bidding. It's very rare.

[Cody]

No, no, sorry I mean like man. Just like business as usual campaigns. I I call them man. I guess meta calls a manual but just like you know, ASC to non asc.

[Connor]

Oh yes, absolutely. Like way more middle bottom of funnel for asc. Return on that spent is. Oh yeah return on ad spends typically higher because of that. Just because it is generally a much Lower net new visit rate. So these people are. Are folks that have been in our funnel for a while. So we still roll these out. Right. Like, there's a time and a place when we do. And like, especially during a sale period, we make sure we have ASC campaigns live at any time. But yeah, very different. Like soft metrics and performance metrics that we see in.

[Cody]

That's so interesting. We don't. We. We don't. If anything, we see better with asc. Actually. It's new visit and yeah, new visit rate, rowers, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's not that ASC is that good. It's that all of it is that bad for us. But yeah, but we don't see a big difference. So we're like complete, almost completely on asc. Now.

[Alex]

When you say that bad. You've talked about this before, but you guys are hitting 60, 70% new visits.

[Cody]

Yeah, like 65 is like, probably where we're average at, which I think, you know, there's a lot of creative fatigue in there. There's. There's other stuff. But yeah, I did, I did. I did see Olivia from House tweet that she has like a theory that, like, accounts do well either with manual, like BAU or asc, like not having like a huge split. It's just like what she's seen from, I guess, tests she's been across kind of ridge. What do you guys.

[Alex]

Oh, being committed to. To one or the other.

[Cody]

Yeah, that was like her theory.

[Alex]

Huh.

[Cody]

Just like Meta seems to prefer that.

[Alex]

Yeah, I could see that. We, we do use ASC in some of our conversion optimized or purchase optimized campaigns. And then as I've been talking about on the podcast last couple weeks, we do a lot of the view content optimized is like 20 to 30% of our account right now. And those are BAU. Right. I don't, I don't. I don't actually spend that much time in the account, but so that's probably the biggest difference. So because of that, we do have a split. So yeah, we are. We are leaning into asc. We've got manual campaigns optimizing for view content. That's where we stand now. I am interested to see, like, what I'm doing with my team is just figuring out if this is the case, if we can have more ad creative in a given ad set. Like, how does that change our account? Or I think it goes back to. Because not even so much. I guess they're kind of one in the same. Right? But it's not necessarily about like, oh, I have 30 ads in my ad set and now Meta knows which one of those is served to which people. It's actually like, just how many ads do we have available to Meta across the account? Like, it's just, it sounds like we can just have more. And it has become increasingly likely that Medic can find some deep cut from our ad account and say, we're going to recommend this to this person, so we might see. I would love to get more value out of diversity because that's not something we've typically seen. Like, if we're really speaking to different types of Personas, different types of people, you know, whatever, we're highlighting our different campaigns between NFL or MLB or whatever else. I'd love people to just have a ton of content live and met is that much better by recommending that to the person. And I don't know what that means in, in terms of ad creative in an ad set, but I like that future. I'm here for it.

[Connor]

You know, I actually, I was looking at the, at our ad account right now as you were just chatting and actually like, what I was guessing should happen in an ASC is definitely happening in our account. Like, I'm looking at the ASC campaigns that we do have running. These are generally like, we're not testing in an asc. These are scaled campaigns. Like, I'm looking like, you know, we have a top new creative. We have Some like, I'd say 35 of our spend in the last 30 days is going into ASE. So still mainly business as usual. But in the ASE campaigns, we just have like a bunch of ads dropped in there. And it actually is a very even distribution of spend. We're not seeing like a single ad take up 80, 85 of the budget here. So I guess that would like, that does fall in line with this idea that this is going to serve the certain ad to the right person more effectively here. Which is, which is great, I think, especially if you're a brand that can produce a creative. And I've always hated when you drop like 25 ads in a scale, a scaled campaign and it's like three ads are getting spent. You're like, why are we even producing all these ads and even trying to scale them? It's just like the machine learning is not like working in our favor. So yeah, I would, I would want to go in and see if like how that ad distribution looks and some business as usual campaigns.

[Cody]

I guess my, my question is like, how, how Is this different? Because I feel like for the past like year or even two met, like Meta has been preaching creative diversity and will, will show your ads to the right person at the right time and you know, all of that stuff. Like have they just seen that this is coming and it's, it's been the same thing? Or is this something new? Like, does this seem like something new to you guys or is this just a small tweak on the back end model behind it? That's what I'm not understanding.

[Alex]

So my interpretation is that this was announced in late 2024. I don't think it had just launched, so I think they had been rolling it out. They announced Andromeda in, in 2024 and I think it was like October or something. And then I really think it just comes down to it continuing to improve and that's where it's like, and that doesn't surprise me at all. Like it's, it's some sort of like partnership with Nvidia. So it's like deeply AI related and hardware related. So I imagine it's benefiting from the same sort of like increase in quality that we're seeing from ChatGPT or Claude or any of the other AI tools. So I, I imagine it's really hard for us to like quantify and know for sure, but that just seems to be the trend here, is like, hey, this is what it's doing, which I think is interesting. This, hey, we're gonna get way better at analyzing tons of creative and then recommending the right ones to the right people so you can get sort of different distribution and we're just gonna get better and better and better at that. And it's gonna increase ad recall and it's gonna increase ad quality and advertisers don't have to do anything different. Like, like Meta is literally just getting better at their job of matching users with content that they'll find interesting.

[Cody]

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, yeah, I'm, I'm super skeptical of that. Obviously we'll take any improvements that Meta can give us and, and I do think it continues to go in that direction in terms of, you know, we do the work, you just make the creative. Like, like it's just going to get more and more like that. So it. How, like what are the recommendations that Meta is giving behind this? Are they saying like, are there any, you know, they've got the, the, the Power five and the performance five and whatever five now we're on and all that stuff. Like, are there any New best practices that they're kind of recommending based on these changes.

[Alex]

I haven't gotten anything directly from meta. The, the D2C brain trust was talking about more creative, embracing broader targeting, more hands off media buying essentially like just load up a bunch of creative. And then the third point that was forget this came from some sort of article was talking about optimizing post click experience where it's like okay, yeah, load up a ton of content, let meta do all the work. Going from content to driving someone to your site and then focus on improving.

[Cody]

The site makes sense. So it's, it's. And I'm not trying to be like a Debbie Dan or anything but it's really like the same, it's more of the same. It's just the same direction we've been going in which is like AI of all the media buying Creative is the targeting and you know, conversion rate is part of your, you're a bit in the algorithm.

[Alex]

100%. Yeah, true. Yeah.

[Connor]

I mean they're trying to build like it's like they're just trying to continue to like the advice has changed the same. They're just trying to make the technology make that advice even sounder basically. It's like right, yeah, more creative team like really good creative flywheels and, and brands that have, that are going to continue to win like okay, so we'll just keep, keep on the same path basically.

[Alex]

Totally. Everybody should just get better at their jobs, brands get better at content, they embrace more tools. For Meta, we all start making more money. That's what, that's what Mark Zuckerberg wants us all to believe. I do think it is kind of ironic that the other side of this conversation is all about having to optimize for non purchase events. So it's like, so that doesn't instill a lot of confidence, right? It's like oh my God, we got this engineering article about how much better it is at matching users to content. And at least from ridges perspective we've never gotten less incremental results from Meta. So it's like and, and, and I'm sure it's different for, for brands of different sizes obviously like we might be facing a, a different problem set than someone at 10 or 20 or 30 million dollars a year but hopefully they begin to address more of that and they're working in that direction with like incremental attribution and things like that. But yeah, as it stands now I'm, I'm kind of with Connor Rowling where what seems best for Our business is actually not embracing ASC at all or at least having a significant percentage of the account not utilizing it, which does not seem like a meta best practice.

[Connor]

But, but I could see how this is like a lot of brands I talk to that are like, you know, maybe not stuck, maybe stuck, but they're at 10 to 20 million. I think this is actually very empowering for a brand like that because I think the advice for that brand to break through would be not to go to a different channel and try to unlock that channel, but to just get better at creative within that same channel. So you're not. It's like, I think that's an empowering piece of advice to a brand that's like we got to 10 million or we got to 20 million through Meta mainly like what do we need to do to keep breaking through? It's like, well with this new change in theory you should just be able to like make better and more creative and that should be the lever within the same channel that took you to 20 million. But it's just now get better at the inputs and maybe that can take you to 30 or 40 million which I think's like a lot more empowering than being like hey, go try to unlock YouTube and go try to influence or like a new channel that you aren't like necessarily competent in. So hopefully this is a good thing for, for a low eight figure brand trying to take it into that, that next phase of growth.

[Alex]

Yeah, 100.

[Cody]

Yeah, they, they, they keep saying things are getting better on their end. I don't know many advertisers that are seeing that right now. So. So I really hope it's gonna happen.

[Alex]

Same. Yeah, I mean it's also uphill battle. I think I saw a stat this week, consumer sentiment at like a 29 month low or something. Yeah, look, it doesn't really matter how many ads you can reference in your recommendation engine when people don't want to spend any money.

[Cody]

No, it's not all meta's fault right now. It's, it's a struggle.

[Alex]

Yeah, cool. There were a couple other updates in the I want to talk about chat GPT and, and AI image generation because it's highly related. Did you guys see any of the other meta anal announcements and did you want to talk about any of those?

[Cody]

I did see them. Any, any that you think are noteworthy?

[Alex]

The one that I liked the most was, and it looked like they were gonna first roll it out in like Australia and like, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, Australia and some other country that we're not, we're not doing any business in but shops experiences but that have call to actions to. You could build your cart in a in platform shops experience and then check out on our website and I thought that sounded awesome. I think that would be much better than the full integrated Facebook shops experience. And you know they've had the. You can toggle that on and allow Meta to choose whether to drive someone to your site or to shops which we saw some like just really weird data around. We saw Meta driving a ton of people to shops which I can understand how that's a quicker and like more native experience. But like I was highly skeptical that it was actually like driving incremental revenue for us. So this idea of native fast experience where you can explore the catalog, build the cart and then the checkout's happening on Shopify and then you're just entering all of our other systems in the way that you would if you were shopping on ridge.com I thought that was super exciting.

[Connor]

That is cool. That's like. I feel like that's a perfect balance of like reducing friction and trying to take someone from the social platform to the site. But also there's a lot of baked in trust with each typical checkout process on someone's website. So maybe that's a good balance of like we're reducing friction but we're also increasing trust.

[Alex]

Totally.

[Connor]

That's cool.

[Alex]

It's like a, it's like a native landing page basically.

[Connor]

Right.

[Alex]

They also had, they had another announcement around that where you could, you could capture an email and then give someone a promo code which I remember talking about that with the. The Meta Shops PM in San Francisco in 2023. We were like, yeah, I'd really like an email capture in the Shops page. And they got it going. It'll be live in 2025. So big stuff in the works. If you're running an E comm brand, you know the game of maximizing AOV and that's exactly what Aftercell does. Over 35,000 e commerce brands, including all of us at marketing operators trust after sell to power their upsells and increase their AOV by 30% on average. Their upselling suite works from checkout all the way to the thank you page. Here's a few things that help after sales stand out. One, you've got one click post purchase upsells which we talked about on episode 40 with Shane and 33 with Zach stuck. It's a great way to drive revenue without adding friction or expecting the customer to re enter payment. Two is you get checkout upsells which we use heavily at Ridge and they have the ability to monetize your thank you page with their free rocked thanks formerly known as network offers some real numbers from after sale users up to 35% increase in conversions and over a 16% average conversion rate. If you're not optimizing your upsells with after sale you're leaving easy money on the table. Book your free demo today and get after sale for 60 days free. Go to aftercell.com operators to claim the offer. I thought this was a good transition. We're talking about Meta being really good at taking a ton of content, picking out the pieces that are recommending and then recommending that to a given user chat GPT just rolled out new image generation in their 4.0model which should make it in theory way easier for brands to create ad creative. So like it supports text really well, various styles, it understands the context. You can give it good prompts. People were creating cartoons around Ridge ads. I created one for marketing operators. It was like incredibly good. I fed it our podcast cover and just said make this fun and it was great. It was like a very high quality image in illustration. So we're moving towards a world where Meta is able to process and recommend from a larger set of creatives. And then on the flip side is there's technology coming out that means we can generate a ton of new creative. So people were asking about our thoughts on that, on meta. So like just predictions around how workflows change, how teams change. If you guys are seeing any of that today or what you think that looks like over the next three or six months when you guys want to take a first pass at that.

[Connor]

I mean we're, we're, we're using static ad designers. We have real people designing all of our emails, all of our ads. I think that, I mean I think there's always been so much power and a really strong brief like and I think that's what, that's the job of a leader of like, of a marketing org to do right is like you need to be able to write a really strong brief and like work with your team to bring that thing to life. And like I don't know about you guys but most of my like doing time now is, is like spent writing briefs and then reviewing assets along the way. So I think this is just an extension of that. I think the power, this like puts even more power in the hands of the person that can write a really Strong brief. Now at it. Like, I don't know if this will ever totally take out the need for a static ad designer. Maybe eventually. I don't think we're there yet. Maybe this is like a really good inspo thing for like hey, I, I am, I have an I. I'm like the, the marketing leader of an org. I have a concept in mind. Maybe I go into chat GPT and like beat it up a little bit to get it to like a point where like now not only do I have a brief, but I also have some like examples where previously like you wouldn't have had that. So maybe it's effective to like make these briefs even stronger to then hand to a real like, like person to design like bring it to the finish line. But like not. I'm not saying it also can't give you final assets put in an ad account or in an email either. I just like, I don't, I see it at least in today's state being more useful for like getting the download to someone that is going to bring it to the finish line versus getting it all the way to the finish line.

[Alex]

Which part were you agreeing with, Cody?

[Cody]

I mean, I, I have, I have some parts I maybe actually disagree with, but the part about how like if you're a marketer and you're not a designer, you know, maybe don't expect it to, to create a finished asset and like replace your designer, but you can just kind of use prompt it or some type of AI to create like almost a mockup or a wireframe that then you can give to a designer. And it's just like, hey, here's where I want it because I think some part of the brief that's just challenging is like communicating your vision to the person. And I've used it like, I've even used like replit or lovable to like dev out a page just to be like, hey, like this is what I'm trying to do. The same way I would almost like sketch it out in the past just like, like on a piece of paper. So just to kind of bring your vision and idea to life and then you can go and give that to a designer who can actually make it look pretty and nice. So I, I think there's a ton of value in like today now where you can get that. I think here's, here's how we're using. I, I've been playing around with, with the Sora stuff today, so definitely want to, you know, chat about it. But the biggest thing is, is Research, like that's, that's the biggest one that has made the biggest difference. Motion's got some cool agents. I think deep research is just, you know, off the charts cool. Hopefully I can say this on here. So Meta actually gave grants to like a few different companies, mostly agencies I believe. I don't know if you guys have seen this at all. To build some AI tools. And I have a pretty close relationship with the owner of one of these agencies. And so we've been kind of like a design partner, beta access to one of their tools and it essentially synthesizes reviews. So the same way you could upload your reviews in ChatGPT, but it's, it's manual, you have to keep doing it. There's also probably some training of the model that they've done. And so like one thing that in the past I've done and it's really time consuming. If you want to build a new landing page and a new listicle and you want to figure out what content you should put in that, what should all your bullets be? You go to your reviews and every time you see somebody talk about dry skin, you tally it off and you just go through that over and over and over. Like that's something AI can do automatically. And again, ChatGPT can do it. This tool can do it really easily and really well. So we don't write any brief without, you know, research anymore. And we don't write it without, you know, AI research. So like just trying to compile all that stuff in one place. So any agency we onboard, we give them all that stuff. All of the Persona research we've done, all of the review synthesizing, things like that. But yeah, like we're working on like a new landing page brief today. Like all of the bullets, all of the points were really all that. So we know what you know, this tool has like Persona attributes, value props, barriers and problems. And so we hopefully now know a bunch of those things about our customers.

[Alex]

Okay, so quickly you're synthesizing all this data into the platform and then the platform, like you can click around in there and you can see Personas, value props and the syncs you mentioned.

[Cody]

Yeah, yep. Which I mean, honestly, you can do this with ChatGPT. You just have to, you know, upload a CSV reviews and then just prompt it for a little bit and tell.

[Alex]

It what you want. Right, right. And then, and then there's a chat interface in there so that when you need to go, if I understand this correctly, you need to go build a Landing page. So you're jumping in there. It already has all the context that it needs. It knows who your customer is. It knows what your value props are. You say, I need landing page for our Mother's Day campaign.

[Cody]

No, no. So there's no chat. There's no, like, Gen AI. This is essentially just training based on the research. So it's not connected to any, like, generating anything. But it'll just be like, okay, here are. Essentially, it's using AI to. To cluster the reviews. And so if you get, you know, a hundred reviews and twenty of them have this sentiment, it's really just doing sentiment analysis and just kind of clustering things. So it'll just say, hey, of the 10,000 reviews you have for Miracle Bomb, you know, your top Personas are this. And it's creating Personas based on those clusters. So that's what it's doing with AI. Or it'll say, hey, the top barriers that people have are price. And then number two is smell or whatever it is. Like, it's just kind of doing the sentiment analysis based on it.

[Alex]

Got it.

[Cody]

But. But it. But. But it's been helpful, so that one's helpful. I think deep research is insanely helpful for research. And I think, like, things like what came out today, have you guys played around with, like, the. The Sora stuff? I know that guy Jacob kind of tagged all of us and used some of our.

[Alex]

I just did the prompt around our podcast cover.

[Cody]

Nice.

[Alex]

And then my team was starting to do, like, some ads and stuff, which was cool.

[Cody]

Yeah. I'm curious if, like, you know, people more. More skilled at creative than me maybe could get more out of it. Like, I think that's the funny thing. Everybody's like, this is replacing designers. Like, I actually think the more skilled you are, the more you can actually get out of AI with some of these things, it's kind of. Kind of just 10x is your output. And if you don't have the skills in the beginning, like, so I. I haven't. I've been playing around with this thing. I haven't, like, gotten anything out of it that I'm like, oh, I could launch this. I think it would be. It could do what Connor said, which is like, hey, here's a format, here's a layout. Like, can you go design this? I think that would be cool. 1. We started playing around with one. So it's called Visual Electric. To me, it's the most photorealistic AI, you know, Gen AI thing. Like, our April Fool's post is going to be made with it. I gave it to our, our creative director and, you know, gave her the initiative to really start playing around with it. It doesn't do like, you can't get.

[Dara]

Your products in it.

[Cody]

It really can just do like prompts or anything that you know you can do, but it's the most photorealistic. So, like, if we're doing like a Persona listicle and we're talking about like, why Miracle Bomb is great for moms, let's say we don't have that lifestyle photography like this I think you can do. And it's like unnoticeable. Maybe chat GPT now you can do it. But like, this is the best I've seen. So. So, like, I don't know if you get. There's this guy, Kyle, runs a brand called Jack Henry. It's like a men's skincare brand, a figure skincare brand. And he, I learned about this tool from him because he posted some of the stuff. Like the props are just like, you would never know that they're AI. So again, I don't. You still have to. You take the props, you create the props with this thing and then you have to like put them in Figma or into Photoshop and like add your product stuff in. So it's not like it's like completely generating assets. I think it's helping with 20% of the process, I think. But to me, what the exciting part is is like the speed that it's happening. Like, I could totally see by the end of the year, you know, there's going to be one of my big predictions. There's going to be a Ad Creative static Ad Creative Builder that like, I do think can replace designers.

[Alex]

Yeah, it does feel like we're pacing towards that. It's March 25th now. We've had nine months. I mean, it feels just. It's gotten insanely good in the past. Like, like two, I feel.

[Cody]

And then like think about just the volume of assets that brands will be able to produce. Also if, if, if you get the, the connected or the, the generating assets connected to the thing that's essentially doing their research and prompting and like coming up with copy. Like, then it's probably an endless loop of, of static ads you can make.

[Alex]

And then imagine just feeding all those assets into Andromeda Life on Easy Mode.

[Cody]

No, no, but seriously, I mean, I'm not saying, like, I don't think it's going to crush performance, especially if every brand is doing this. Like, yeah, how. How do you compete? But it's not that far away.

[Alex]

Yeah, totally. My. My two takes here are one. I'm excited in the very short term just from an ideation perspective. Like that's what we were talking about in Slack today when my team was working on it. Someone sent one and they were like this is a great idea and it was a good idea. But I'm like dude, we could just spend like 10 minutes on this and it could be like actually really good. So it's like, it's like augmenting the design process so it's like everybody can start ideating and contributing visually and then I do think at least for a while we're going to put it through some design lens and that just might be me being like Pearl clutchy about the quality of the static ads. Like in this case I was being really nitpicky about some details. Regardless, it probably improves the speed at which we can create content like in multiples like 2, 3x or something. And then the second one is, I do think it will, I. I just don't know how. I think right now we can succeed in the meta auction because we can produce more high quality content than other brands. But if that cost of content goes to zero then it's really, it's not about the design at all at that point. I'm not quite sure what winning looks like at that point, but maybe it is a matter of like prompting diversified assets. Like a lot of what I saw on Twitter today was like, oh, just looks very similar. You're placing products in, you're doing the value prop call outs, you've got some headlines. So it's like it's no longer about just the content existing and you having been able to create it. It's way more about like the what is the unique perspective behind the content because that's what you'll have to be winning on. And, and if that is the future, six or nine months from now, 12 months from now, the team will probably just have to look a little bit different. Like our creative processes will be will be more around unique ideation versus less ideation and more focus on production.

[Connor]

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 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 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 app Loven. We are getting a sense of which channels are driving the most incrementally efficient first time orders right now. And the amount of insight that come from that information is insane. It helps us inform where we develop creative. It helps us inform where we scale up budgets and 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 forward/formators, that is spelled h a u s dot IO operators to start your incrementality practice today. Do you. Do you think that. So Cody, you were saying that that tool can create like really compelling lifestyle imagery. I wonder if there's like an ever an in between here where it's like like what winning looks like from a production standpoint is giving the AI tons of raw assets to work with. You have lifestyle ads, you have product shots, you have like, you just have this insane raw asset library. And now your briefing is like, I want like a, like a product shot overlaid on this like this type of headline and this type. And like, they're like using all the raw assets to kind of put together the most compelling piece of creative it can versus having to like, generate all of that with the AI too. I wonder if there's like a middle ground here that, like, having a better RAW asset library make gives you. Makes you more powerful with the prompting. And what you can produce is like a final. A final asset versus having a less filled out raw asset library.

[Cody]

That's a good point. That's a good point. I don't know. Yeah, I wonder if it'll get to the point where you don't even have to produce the raw assets because you can also do them just with a, you know, a product rendering or if. Or if that's really your main input that, you know, then you can create variations off of.

[Alex]

Sweet. All right, last piece on the agenda here. Cody, you had a prediction this week. You want to talk through it?

[Cody]

Yeah, I did had a prediction, some of those predictions, and everyone hopped in. They're like, dude, you're an idiot. This is already happening.

[Connor]

That's how you know it's a good prediction.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, it's already coming true. All right. Yeah, I. My prediction. I said brands today. I have a typo and I just realized brands today have one social media account. For the most part, it's run by internal teams and they pay influencers for distribution. We're going to see brands having multiple accounts that they pay creators, not influencers, to run for them. And. And so, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, what do you. What do you mean? Or whatever. And then a lot of people are like, dude, this is already happening. Either we're already doing it. And it seems like, definitely want to get your guys take on this, but it seems like it's happening a little bit in DTC E commerce and happens much more often in SaaS. It seems like.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that's a really interesting trend. I was talking with a VP of growth at one of the big, like, B2B SaaS companies, and he was telling me that they did it. And I was surprised by that. I think it was. I think Bill.com did a good job of it, like a year ago or something. And I don't know. I don't know what has kind of caused this. Maybe it's just what I was describing is it's been affiliates who are like, on the forefront of marketing strategies and then typically like DTC brands and then B2B SaaS is like way behind and it feels like there's certain types of marketing. The software is just further ahead on and Organic social seems to be one of them.

[Cody]

Do you think it's because they're less precious about brand? Because like there's so much to me like this whole like, like, like all at Matt Jones Road, like we're, we are very outdated in our approach to Instagram. I think we're, we're living in like 2022, maybe of like best practices, maybe even early where it's like pretty feed based, like creating content for your followers and it's just not how it works anymore. And now obviously the algorithms have changed so much and it's, it's, it's merit based and it's content based and engagement based and there's obviously it's essentially the same, you know, to bring it full circle, the same like AI model behind it. I'm sure it's different, but it's, it's just bringing people relevant content. And if creative testing and volume is so important, right on paid social, like maybe it's that important on Organic social and maybe you could just from your same page be posting 10 videos a day and seeing what pops off. But you can post 100 videos a day from 10 pages. You know, if you have 10 total pages and you just get more, more shots at that on it. But I wonder if brands are just still too idealistic about their feed and their profile and what it looks like and these SaaS, companies that really, really don't care as much about brand or are playing the game the right way.

[Alex]

It's got to be something like that.

[Connor]

They can't be like if you're, if you're Tabs Chocolate or if you're bill.com and you have, I don't know, let's say 20 different pages, all with a different creator making that content, all with different styles of content. Like they're certainly not reviewing all of that. I don't know what it, what their review process is, if any, but they're saying any, any negative brand connotation is going to be one like, like infinitely outweighed by the impressions we're getting and the different audiences that were, that we're hitting. Because we have different creators representing our brand in different ways.

[Alex]

Yeah, 100%. There was I, I sent a tweet today. It was some, it was an app that Nikita Beer was an advisor for. And they had 26ambassadors. They were posting 52 videos a day. So each was posting two videos and they had Thousands of posts up. Like, yeah, nobody's reviewing that. They are just thinking. And that's kind of like the Nikita beer growth marketing strategy, right? Like that is just a CPM arbitrage it. Yeah, it is because we have things like reels and TikTok today where you can post organically and if you post with the right format, with the right hook, you can just get organic impressions. And there's, there are certain types of brands and I don't know exactly why it's the case because it's not the typical, like cutting edge, you know, industries in terms of marketing. So something's shifted there. But clearly, clearly a lot of value to create. I like it. Cody, personally, as a prediction, you're getting a little bit of shit for it, I guess. But was I.

[Cody]

It's besides people being like this is already happening.

[Alex]

No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, that's all. I mean people being like, yeah, this is happening. But like, but for 90% plus of people, they have no idea it's going on.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. Do, do you got like, are you guys interested in this approach? Do you think it's something that you guys would do or have considered or not really for you?

[Connor]

I like it. I mean like especially our Instagram where it's a lot more higher production value type content. So I think it's. I like it because a, it's an opportunity for us to like veer from that. I also like it because cooking is a vertical with tons of different sub Personas in it. Like we could activate 50 people that are all reaching a. We could have, you know, the, the 23 year old in college, the 30 year old male that's a bachelor, the, a 55 year old like housewife type lady. I think it's a really cool opportunity to like create different content for different niches. Now that's my growth marketing brain. If you asked our chief brand officer or head of content, I'd be curious if they, if they agreed with me. But I think it's a really cool strategy for. And it's like a fun. If you can crack the content in the creator. It's like all of a sudden you've just found a way to reach, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of people that's not paying Meta $20 per thousand impressions.

[Alex]

Yeah, I would love to do it. I would love to see. I think it would work for all of our brands. I feel like cooking and, and beauty lend themselves so well to short form social. Like you could totally imagine having 10, 20 creators who could create awesome Content on a daily or weekly basis. I don't know what it would look like for us. The way that we would probably try it first is we'd have a couple guys just out shooting the wallets like every day.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Seeing what stands up against, you know, some sort of rifle, a handgun, whatever. Like that is probably the content that we could consistently create and generate views around. And I would be totally willing to try that.

[Cody]

I mean, dude, you could do a whole, a whole page just for that. Just, just guys shooting guns at things.

[Alex]

100. Yeah.

[Cody]

I think the only reason obviously there's an investment behind it. Really the only reason that, you know, maybe a brand wouldn't or we wouldn't is if you're just, you know, that precious about brand and it feels like it's like a brand risk or something like that and you just want, you know, your one one feed. But outside of that, I think it makes a lot of sense and it's, it's something I'm very, very, very open to and very interested in and we'll, we'll be close to. Will be interesting to watch. But yeah, it definitely feels like even like Nikita doing it like a very growth hacky way. It's like, like you said, a CPM arbitrage and just like very, very growth hacky. Not caring about brand at all. But it's, it's, it's that whole like TikTok affiliate algorithm. It's just like how do we just get an army of people, you know, creating content about our brand? And, and yes, you have organic seating, you have affiliate stuff you can pay people to post. This is just another way. It's just a little more centralized. It's kind of like right in between like brand and earned media.

[Alex]

Totally. Yeah. So I like that as a strategy for talking other organic social strategies. I saw a really interesting example. I've been talking about this one quite a bit. The like astroturfing that companies and brands are doing. It's the, it's like the Kaisanat one that I mentioned where 1x humanoid robot sponsored Kaisanat. They get an hour integration and then they, they cut that content down and they like promote the clips all over Twitter. Right. So it's like that all appears very organic. Those aren't, those aren't tagged as ads or anything like that. Those people are making a CPM payment or they are getting paid on a CPM basis. But it feels very organic and it can kind of. You can brute force your way to virality. I think I saw it Again over the weekend where there was a video of Shaq. And they're like, shaq got an Es. Shaq forgot he bought an Escalade. That was like, the viral clip. And it's like some guy showing up to Shaq's house being like, shaq, you just got the Escalade IQ or whatever. And he's like, oh, dude, I totally forgot that I ordered that or whatever. And it's like, it's such, like, a baity. It's such, like, a baity video. I didn't think anything of it until I started seeing Escalade IQ ads during the Laker game that I watched the other night. And I'm like, oh, I think that is a coordinated approach. Like, I think they were like, what is a. A stunt. Like, a little stunt piece of content that we think could go viral on Twitter? How do we integrate the escalated iq? Because they specifically called it that. And I'm like, that's the part that I thought was a little bit odd. I'm like, they're saying the full name. So that's also the sort of thing that certain types of companies I'd put, like, crypto and gambling and apparently Cadillac or, like, like, really good at. And I would like to experiment with more. Yeah.

[Cody]

Do you ever see those? Sorry, go ahead.

[Alex]

No, I was gonna say, also just seems like an arbitrage opportunity. If you can create content that can go viral, you can kind of brute force your way there and get super low CPMs and impressions.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Do you ever see those. Those Twitter ads? I always see them. Community noted. It's. It's a gambling. Yeah, yeah. Wait, what's the site?

[Alex]

Stake.com.

[Cody]

Yeah, exactly. And they'll even be in the community notes, and it'll. They'll just do some, like, very viral clickbaity things. And people, you know, in the community notes will be like, this is like a state.com ad. And it almost, like, helps them. Like, the community notes almost helps them. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if they're having people from the brand community note it at this point.

[Alex]

I absolutely think so. Stake.com, those are funny ones, because the product is not integrated into the video at all. It's literally just a viral video. And then they just overlay a Stake.com video in the corner, and then these, like, meme pages are, like, just pumping it out on Twitter and. Yeah, and then they always get community noted. And I am positive that the community note is part of the ad that, like, they are purposefully doing that because it just stands out way more. And then most people wouldn't even notice that there's a Stake.com logo in the video until you read the community note. This is a Stake.com ad, so that's 100% all coordinated. And another one of my favorite forms of marketing going on right now.

[Cody]

Yeah, I just wonder how like, because like you said, the, the content is, you know, not at all related to, to the ad and the company. Like it's obviously probably the lowest quality impression that you get. You know, at a certain point it's, it's still worthwhile if the impressions are that cheap and there's enough arbitrage in it even if like the conversion of like impression to actual customers is like abysmal. But yeah, I wonder like at what point you go too far and it makes sense more to do like, like, you know, you're probably paying like a cent per CPM on those versus like a YouTube integration. You might pay a $40 CPM, but it could be just like the most qualified audience.

[Alex]

Well, dude, 100%. I mean Stake.com is going like scorched earth. Stake.com Stake.com owns Kick.com so they used to sponsor a ton of streamers. Super high CPMs. They would stream on Twitch, them gambling online or whatever. Twitch banned gambling. So Stake Stake.com just created Kick.com so like that is their version of, of sponsoring YouTubers. They actually created their entirely own streaming platform so that they could get like super high quality also probably very expensive CPMs via streaming.

[Cody]

That's genius. And that's, that's how soap operas were created. Do you know that that Procter and Gamble invented soap operas literally has places to run ads on?

[Alex]

Yeah, dude, kick.com is the modern day soap opera. That's good. All right, thank you for listening to another episode of Marketing Operators. As always, make sure to share with your media buying friends, your ad creative friends friends, your ecom operating friends. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Prescient Rich panel after cell and House. And make sure to like subscribe comment on YouTube. Always appreciate your support. We'll see you next week.