E055: Meta's Conversion Lift Testing, AI in Creative, and Product Seeding for Scalable Growth

Summary

Marketing Operators Podcast Episode Summary

Episode: E055: Meta's Conversion Lift Testing, AI in Creative, and Product Seeding for Scalable Growth
Release Date: April 15, 2025
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker

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1. Meta's Conversion Lift Testing vs. Geo Lift Testing with House

In this segment, the hosts delve deep into the nuances of Meta's Conversion Lift Testing compared to House's Geo Lift Testing. They explore the functionality, benefits, and limitations of each method, providing valuable insights based on their firsthand experiences.

Conversion Lift Testing:

• Functionality: Operates at a user level, allowing for incremental measurement by splitting users into treatment and holdout groups.
• Accessibility: Initially skeptical about its availability, Cody mentions, "I was very skeptical up front. Right. Like Meta. First off, when did Meta roll this out?" ([07:21]).
• Pros:
  • Smaller Holdouts: Jason highlights the advantage, "Pro of Conversion lift is smaller holdout, just more tests" ([18:55]).
  • Speed and Flexibility: Enables running multiple tests with minimal impact on overall performance.
• Cons:
  • Attribution Challenges: Connor notes a critical limitation, "If we're running something significant... I would not rely on meta conversion lift to do that for sure" ([20:25]).
  • Limited Cross-Channel Insights: Conversion lift doesn't account for purchases made across different channels, leading to potential attribution biases.

Geo Lift Testing with House:

• Functionality: Utilizes geographic holdouts, excluding specific regions from ad exposure to measure the incremental impact.
• Pros:
  • Holistic Measurement: Offers a comprehensive understanding of channel performance, including Amazon revenue ([15:50]).
  • Causality Over Correlation: As Barry emphasizes, "If you want to hit next level growth, you need to move away from correlation based measurement and move towards causality." ([14:13]).
• Cons:
  • Limited Slots: House restricts the number of concurrent tests, potentially limiting experimentation scope.
  • Larger Holdouts: May lead to significant portions of the target market being excluded during testing phases.

Key Takeaways:

• Complementary Use: Combining both methods can maximize testing capabilities, with Meta’s Conversion Lift offering user-level insights and House providing robust geographic analysis.
• Strategic Application: Use Conversion Lift for intra-channel testing and House for more comprehensive, cross-channel incrementality studies.

Notable Quotes:

• Cody Plofker: "We've run these like kind of overarching conversion list studies in the background... They've looked pretty similar to what we've seen in House." ([07:33]).
• Connor MacDonald: "If it's that big of a thing and I'd want to validate it via house, I would run it via House." ([18:55]).
• Barry Hot: "House is really the most controlled, the most scientifically sound way to do any sort of marketing testing and experimentation." ([15:50]).

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2. AI in Creative: Leveraging ChatGPT for Image Generation

The hosts explore the evolving role of AI in creative processes, particularly focusing on ChatGPT's image generation capabilities and their potential applications in marketing.

Current Applications:

• Ideation and Conceptualization: Using AI to generate initial creative concepts, which can then be refined by human teams.
• Content Diversification: Expanding existing creative assets by adding diversity through AI-generated variations.

Potential Benefits:

• Efficiency: Reduces the time and resources needed to produce a high volume of creative assets.
• Scalability: Enables brands to manage large-scale product launches with streamlined creative workflows.

Challenges and Limitations:

• Quality Concerns: While AI-generated images are improving, they may not yet meet the high standards required for all brands. Jason remarks, "I don't think any of them are good enough to put into our ad accounts, but it's just like, all right, man. It's gonna be there soon." ([62:05]).
• Brand Consistency: Ensuring that AI-generated content aligns with the brand’s visual identity and messaging remains a critical task.

Future Prospects:

• Integration into Workflows: As AI tools become more sophisticated, they can be seamlessly integrated into existing creative processes, enhancing productivity without compromising quality.
• Enhanced Customization: AI advancements may allow for more personalized and brand-specific content generation, catering to diverse marketing needs.

Notable Quotes:

• Connor Rolain: "It's almost as if I could see in the future, rather than our studio here in Salt Lake needing to deliver... we might only need to deliver four or five assets for a launch." ([58:51]).
• Jason MacDonald: "The possibilities really feel endless." ([61:18]).

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3. Product Seeding for Scalable Growth

Product seeding emerges as a pivotal strategy for scalable growth, with the hosts sharing their strategies, experiences, and metrics for successful implementation.

Program Strategies:

• Automated Outreach: Leveraging AI tools to scale product seeding efforts, enabling the distribution of thousands of products monthly with minimal manual intervention. Jason mentions, "We're going to start sending out thousands of boxes a month, you know, hopefully on autopilot." ([30:50]).
• Personalized Messaging: Crafting compelling and personalized outreach messages to maximize engagement and conversion rates.

Metrics to Track:

• Opt-In Rate: The percentage of influencers who agree to participate after being contacted. Connor highlights the importance of this metric, stating, "opt in rate" is key to understanding initial engagement.
• Post Rate: The rate at which seeded products result in content creation by influencers. Cody explains, "We're starting to do some things like, like measure hit rate." ([37:38]).
• Engagement and Impressions: Assessing the overall impact on brand visibility and content engagement through seeded posts.

Challenges:

• Scaling Efforts: Managing the logistics of large-scale product distribution without overwhelming the team or exceeding budget constraints.
• Maintaining Authenticity: Ensuring that product seeding retains its organic appeal and doesn't become overly transactional, thereby preserving the integrity of influencer relationships.

Success Stories and Insights:

• Connor's Experience: Successfully launched a product seeding program that garnered over 1 million organic views, emphasizing content generation as a significant value-add.
• Jason's Approach: Focused on automating influencer outreach to manage increased volume without compromising on personalization, aiming to enhance content richness and ad performance.

Notable Quotes:

• Cody Plofker: "The hook is, hey, you want some of this awesome product for free?" ([37:51]).
• Jason MacDonald: "Any brand can, like, figure out some angle into social proof." ([46:29]).
• Connor Rolain: "The value of the program's not just on a CPM basis. I'd like to think we're going to get a lot of value from the content being created." ([53:17]).

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4. Optimizing Product Seeding Programs

The discussion further extends into optimizing product seeding strategies to enhance efficiency and maximize returns.

Optimization Techniques:

• Social Proof Utilization: Leveraging testimonials, reviews, and influencer endorsements to build credibility and attract more participants.
• Content Quality Assurance: Ensuring that the generated content meets brand standards, possibly through selective seeding or creative guidelines.

Strategies for Improvement:

• A/B Testing: Experimenting with different outreach messages, product types, and influencer segments to identify the most effective combinations.
• Tracking and Analytics: Implementing robust tracking mechanisms to monitor post performance and adjust strategies in real-time.

Future Directions:

• AI-Driven Enhancements: Integrating more advanced AI tools to refine outreach, personalize engagements, and analyze content performance for continuous improvement.
• Expansion into Diverse Markets: Tailoring product seeding efforts to different demographics and geographic regions to broaden market reach.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason MacDonald: "We've been using their Rock thanks... it's been a no brainer for us." ([51:15]).
• Connor Rolain: "We're creating all this content... we have this apparatus that's creating all this content." ([48:36]).

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5. Final Thoughts and Future Outlook

As the episode wraps up, the hosts reflect on the evolving landscape of marketing operations, emphasizing the critical role of measurement, automation, and creativity in driving scalable growth. They express optimism about the future integration of AI in creative processes and the continuous refinement of product seeding strategies to achieve higher efficiency and impact.

Key Highlights:

• Continuous Learning: The importance of staying updated with the latest tools and methodologies to maintain a competitive edge.
• Collaborative Experimentation: Encouraging experimentation and collaboration within teams to discover innovative solutions and optimize marketing efforts.
• Strategic Integration: Seamlessly integrating various testing and seeding strategies to create a cohesive and effective marketing ecosystem.

Closing Remarks: The hosts reiterate the value of leveraging both Meta's Conversion Lift and House's Geo Lift Testing, alongside innovative AI tools and robust product seeding programs, to drive significant growth and achieve marketing excellence.

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Notable Overall Quotes:

• Barry Hot: "House is really the most controlled, the most scientifically sound way to do any sort of marketing testing and experimentation." ([15:50]).
• Connor MacDonald: "We want to make sure it's like a decently high quality post. We're creating all this content." ([48:36]).
• Jason MacDonald: "The possibilities really feel endless." ([61:18]).

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This episode of Marketing Operators provides a comprehensive exploration of advanced marketing strategies, blending analytical rigor with creative innovation. Whether you're looking to refine your measurement techniques, harness the power of AI, or scale your product seeding efforts, the insights shared by Connor, Cody, and Jason offer valuable guidance for marketers aiming to achieve sustainable growth.

Transcript

[Connor]

All right, we're back. Another episode of Marketing Operators. Good to see you guys. It's April 1st. We've got no pranks for the show, no jokes. Did you guys see anything good coming from Brands Day? Did either of you guys run April Fool's campaigns?

[Cody]

No. No April Fool's campaigns. I did. I did have Jason text me and say, are we running one? And I said, no, absolutely not.

[Connor]

Did he text you today?

[Cody]

He texted me this morning. He was like, hey, we have an April Fool's campaign going on.

[Connor]

Nope, too honest. Honesty is a core piece of the Ridge brand. So it's kind of. It's kind of outside of our brand values, our brand guidelines.

[Jason]

Dude, we did have an April Fools one. The most exciting part is I made it. I made the graphic. That was.

[Cody]

Founder mode.

[Jason]

So we're launching. Yeah, you like that, right?

[Connor]

CEO cooking up the.

[Jason]

Our big product. It's. I can. I can say because it'll probably be out by then or it'll be announced tomorrow. We're launching tinted moisturizer. That's like our big one for. For April the eighth. And so we're actually launching a brand campaign tomorrow. And this is a very like, lightweight product. And so our April Fool's joke was like, we're launching. We call it a way too heavy foundation because our product is called Just Enough Tinted Moisturizer. Just like a full coverage, like giant, like 48 hour long wear foundation. But I was just playing around when. When the ChatGPT update came out and our creative director and design team were working on it, they were using some of their AI stuff. They used visual Electric. It's like a really cool AI design thing, but like you can't get your, your, your logo or font in it. But then they put in Photoshop and I sent them what I did and she was actually like, I like that. And so we just, we just rolled with it. So it was kind of cool. First asset I've ever created.

[Connor]

Wow. Yeah. Yeah, dude. Big and successful past. Past the standards.

[Cody]

Yeah, seriously, I'm feeling inspired now. Now I want to like brainstorm with you guys. Do like, we could do like a Gordon Ramsay and Bobby. Bobby Flay become friends campaign. Right now I'll just get into Klaviyo. I think my return.

[Jason]

Did you guys see anything good today? Any. Any funny ones?

[Connor]

Dbrand. Dbrand, which is like they sell phone skins and then they came out with phone cases. You're kind of like an EDC adjacent brand. Did products called Touch Grass and it was like a phone case that had like Astroturf on the back and you could really buy it which I think is awesome and very. They're like, I like that.

[Jason]

That's cool that you could buy it.

[Connor]

Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, it's just like a really kind of funny, ironic product. It's. I guess it's not a prank. You can buy it.

[Jason]

No, but that's just how it takes the prank a little further.

[Connor]

Totally, totally. And it's, it's super on brand for them. They're like an extremely or a chronically online brand. This, this fit. Well, they were in their element today for sure.

[Jason]

Love that. Yeah. No, I didn't see. I saw a few things. Nothing that was like super interesting. I feel like a lot of it has. Has. Has been done before. But. But of want to see a roundup of all the things.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Dara]

Foreign.

[Connor]

If you haven't heard, Motion has launched Expert Agents, one of the coolest AI solutions I have seen thus far. It is a way to analyze your ads and complete creative research tasks using AI enabled workflows. Expert Agents right now are created and owned by different Experts in the D2C space like Dara, Denny and Barry Hot. You can think of them almost like apps in an app store. Whether you're an agency, a solo consultant or a talented brand operator, you can reach out and explore building your own expert agent with Motion for brands. If you simply want to speed up workflows and find hard to discover creative insights automatically, you should get Expert Agents working for you in your Motion dashboard. You can check it [e-mail] expert-agents to learn more. All right, before we get into the episode, I want to thank our sponsors. But even before we thank our sponsors, I'd like to ask you, dear listener, to like and subscribe and share this episode with your friends and team. We would very much appreciate it. Who would also appreciate his motion rich panel after cell prescient and House, our sponsor. So let's get right into it. We've got a little bit of a grab bag episode today. Cody, we're going to start with the questions you kicked over. Cody, Connor and I chat all the time. We haven't had a. It's been a bit since we've had the chance to catch up so we're going to do it here live and then we're going to hit some moparators hotline questions. So we'll get to that in a bit. But Cody, first point on the agenda. What do we have?

[Jason]

Yeah, first point. I think just game. Gotta recognize game. You've Been on like a heater with your tweets lately. You've had some bangers.

[Connor]

Yeah. Thanks, man. I really get on the timeline.

[Jason]

Brand guides are just prompt engineering for people. I like that one.

[Connor]

You know what's funny about that one? I, I, I, I fully believe it. It's the second time I tweeted that. I tweeted that exact same thing 18 months ago. And I was like, I had the thought. And I was like, yeah, I should tweet that again. And I'm like, I think I've tweeted this before. And then I was like, I don't remember. Nobody else will. So I just retweeted it. Got about twice the engagement. We're not quite there. We're early in the adoption curve. People will get it soon. It's going to be a viral tweet on the third time.

[Jason]

I don't know. It's a little too niche to go totally viral.

[Connor]

Yeah, fair enough. But yeah, appreciate it. I've been, I've been grinding on the X timeline also. Just.

[Jason]

Just what? Before we get into it, what's it like working with Sean now that he's not on Twitter? Not on X. Like, is he like way more active in Slack right now?

[Connor]

Dude, I don't even know what he's been up to. You know, he's getting married on Friday, so he's been locked into to wedding planning and stuff like that. He's been married for a long time. He's having his wedding ceremony on, on Friday, so he's been busy. But he called me the other night just asking what had been going on on the Internet. So I gave him a brief rundown. That's, that's good fodder for our, our daily conversations.

[Jason]

That's good.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Jason]

All right. We, we are gonna. Now we were gonna talk about something serious. What was it? Okay. Yeah, yeah, I was just curious. Was talking to a. And you know, they said they see very different results. So, you know, I guess just for the listeners, like conversion. Lift is a user level holdout in meta. I believe anybody can do it. You don't need, you know, reps to do it, but still it's an incrementality tool and measurement tool. But you're doing it on a user level and I think there's benefits. And then obviously House, our sponsor, those are Geo Lift. So you're actually holding out certain geographies from it. Not at the user level. Inside Meta. Curious. Do you guys run both? How do you. I, I know you guys obviously do Geo Lift. With House. But do you guys run Conversion Lift? And how do you think about like when it, when is it appropriate to do that versus a geolift?

[Cody]

So we're, I'd say we're pretty immature in our, in our, in our lift test within. Within Meta. I was always, I'll be honest, I was very spectac. Skeptical up front. Right. Like Meta. First off, when did Meta roll this out? And I didn't realize it was available for everyone. I. Cause I don't. I. Yeah. Is that true? Is it available for any ad account? No matter how, no matter how big, no matter how small?

[Connor]

I'm not sure if that's the case. I know that it was like, I think you had to be working with your rep in order to run Conversion Lift, at least for a while.

[Jason]

I thought I heard that it is available. I. I could be wrong, but I thought it, it is.

[Cody]

I have no. I don't know.

[Connor]

I don't know.

[Cody]

But anyways, I was, I was skeptical. Right. Like we're going to try to measure incrementality, the, the gold standard metric of whether or not a marketing effort is doing anything for your brand or not. And the number one channel we spend on is the channel measuring it. I'm like, all right, that's like, seems a little too good to be true. So we've just been running these like kind of overarching conversion list studies in the background for like the last handful of months starting in Q4. And what I was trying to basically validate was whether or not what we're seeing in Meta with the user based incrementality test is also what we saw in House when we've ran the. The same. The same tests. And they're actually pretty similar. Like the IROAs that we've seen between the two. They're not. They've never been like exactly spot on, but I've been pleasantly surprised that they are. They've looked pretty similar to what we've seen in House. So I am more confident in like using them now moving forward because of that. I think in terms of like when to use each, you know, obviously you're like limited in slots in House where you can run a test. So I think if you have like a very important test that you want to run in House outside of Meta, like maybe it's a channel level holdout. Maybe it's like a certain creative asset in YouTube. It could be anything. I think it makes sense to leverage House for that knowing, like I don't think YouTube or TikTok or any of these other ad platforms have the same functionality that Meta has. So in theory, and I'm, I guess, I think this is right, I guess I don't know if they would like mess around with one another, but you could be running say like a YouTube holdout test in house, a three cell or like two, two cells in non meta channels and then also run something in meta knowing since they have their own, you know, internal functionality. So maybe it's a way to like maximize the number of things you're testing. But I was also, I was talking about this with my team today. I was thinking, hey, we're running this view content test in meta right now. Could we also inside and it's a three cell so we're using up all of our slots in house. But could we also run a, let's say reach test using meta's native testing or would that mess with one another? Like could some users in the in meta test be also in the the house test and vice versa and like would that mess things up? I don't, I don't know.

[Jason]

It's a good question.

[Connor]

Yeah, it's a great question. I, I'm not an authority on this subject but I'll try. I'm a podcaster so. Yeah, because you know the, the limitation for houses, you don't want to be, you don't want to be creating too many overlapping holdout groups. So that's why they're like limiting your.

[Jason]

Ability to, and just to listen two at a time. If you're doing a two cell across any channels and then only one at a time. If you're running a three cell. Right, right.

[Connor]

Because you basically just get four cells. They don't want to split it further than that now and they're doing geolift holdout so you're, you're using DMAs like different, different geographies to, to hold out from the treatment which is showing people ads. Meta on the other hand is doing it at the user level. So like they're splitting the meta universe like in 2 so it's not geo related. So those are still going to overlap to some degree. I have no idea how meta's deciding to split them that them up. And if that could affect your house geolift testing because it's two different methodologies for creating holdout groups. I, I for sure at some point you're gonna start having some sort of overlap that like the way Meta does it happens to influence one of the tests over here. Like the more complexity that you're introducing. I think the greater the risk. Maybe something that Olivia from House can clarify. I know she's an avid listener, but that would be my first take. Is that probably less so than if Meta was also doing a GEO lift test, but still at some point it likely is going to begin to happen.

[Jason]

We're probably going to get like another response video from Olivia and Nick just like calling us out on what we did wrong.

[Cody]

Great.

[Jason]

What we said.

[Connor]

That's perfect. Yeah, they're experts, they're experts in the space. So I never thought about.

[Cody]

So, so not exactly sure if they would, if they would overlap. And then what about your thoughts on like the use case here between the. Because in theory, right, you can use Meta to test. You can use Meta and House to test anything you want to test inside of Meta. But what are your thoughts on like maxing other channels via House and then running the Meta tests within Meta's native testing tool?

[Connor]

So my initial take there, what we've talked about with our team is the meta. The, the native meta conversion lift tools might be best for like intra channel. Not even best, but like are a good option for intra channel testing. So maybe that's the introduction of Reach, but I'll talk why like some of my reservations around that. But if I'm thinking about like we're doing, actually this is an example of one that we're doing. But like if we're thinking about like testing different attribution settings or if there's something like really granular, we might just do that natively within Meta rather than dedicate an entire two cells hold out 40% of the country to try to test like something relatively small within the Meta account. That's where I think it might be best utilized. And then the reason I, I at least with my team have expressed concerns about something like Reach is I think those Reach campaigns can often drive revenue to other channels. So one things I one thing I value most about House is that it has a more holistic understanding of our business. We have Amazon revenue in there. I don't know if you guys do that, but like that's what I would want to see. Reach campaigns are way further up funnel. We're not optimizing for purchases so those purchases are likely happening across more channels. So that's why I would prioritize a House test like that. You're just probably, you're missing some amount of data by running it with the Meta tools.

[Barry]

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 VAL 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 that data. And we at hexclad have gotten some insane insights this year from all of our household out tests. So our core strategy this year has been doing channel level holdouts to really see which channels are driving the best and most efficient cost per incremental order. So we've tested YouTube, Meta, Google, PMax, TikTok. We're now testing AppLovin. We are getting a sense of which channels are driving the most incrementally efficient first time orders right now. And the amount of insights that come from that information is insane. It helps us inform where we develop creative. It helps us inform where we scale up budgets in certain channels and bring certain budgets down. Plus we are now able to use our incrementality results and actually plug it right into prescient. So not only are we getting causal data, that is actual data that we can trust and 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 IO operators to start your incrementality practice today.

[Cody]

What I like about the Meta tool is we're doing just poking around. Like the holdouts we're doing are much smaller. It's like a 3% holdout and we're not running anywhere near that small of a holdout. And maybe, I don't know, maybe that's a, I mean this is what they've recommended and we have like a pretty sharp data science team via Disruptors. We're not doing any holdout that small in, in House. And obviously one of the downsides of House is if you're like running a 50% holdout and what you're doing is working well, you're functionally like not showing that winning tactic to half of the country which is going to hurt your top line business performance during that test. So I like that, that like if what we're doing in Meta is, is like working or not working. I guess if it was not working, we want the holdout to be bigger. But if it is working, the holdout's not that big. So we're not going to see any major impact, I don't think on performance.

[Jason]

Yeah, I'm with you. Yeah, I think I agree with everything you guys have said. That's kind of how we think about it. Yeah, I think so. Pro of Conversion lift is smaller holdout, just more tests. Right. I just think you can stack more tests throughout the year, which is probably a net positive. And so that's why I actually am a pretty big fan of conversion lift tests. There's also something to be said like sometimes to get credits as part of Disruptors program, you, you have to run them. You know, I think they're, they're doing a great job partnering with House. Like we're talking to them about officially partnering, you know, with House on some other test. But so it seems like they're, they're, they're liking House for, you know, the methodology which, which is really cool but sometimes like you just have to run it and, and being in good graces with your team and reps is, is helpful as well. We haven't ran that many tests that like we've ran the same thing with the conversion lifting House. So I don't know if they line up that well but, but definitely. But I think like the speed one is the biggest and it's just, I think reserve for Tesla. You don't need the same level of granularity. Maybe a smaller thing like Connor said, like an intricate, you know, change if you're maybe testing exclusions or an attribution window. But I am very curious to roll them out. I think the cons definitely like you guys said, I mean they're, they're fundamentally measuring different things where, where House is measuring Revenue and new customer revenue and it's not tied to any kind of cookie pixel event where meta, you are measuring, you know, a conversion event which is not perfectly one to one with, you know, main KPI new customer revenue. There is, there is some attribution bias in there. Like if you have your pixel double fires, that's going to affect that, you know, and obviously like you said, it won't, it won't get any halo lift across channels if you have Amazon or retail, you know, in there as well. I also don't believe you can run a look back on a conversion lift test. And so if you are doing something like reach most tests we run, we probably run some type of a look back. So even after the test is over, we'll keep the windows open and measure it. I don't believe you can do that. So yeah, I think definitely has its limitations as well, but I think I think about them the same ways just for speed. Have you guys ever ran a conversion lift and been like, hey, this is great, we like this, but in order to roll it out to bau, we need to validate this with the House test.

[Connor]

We haven't personally done that. And that's kind of like. Because I, because I would just hate doing that. I'd be like, if it's that big of a thing and I'd want to validate it via house, I would run it via House. Because I. You bring up 100, you bring up great points around there being a level or, or an aspect of attribution in the way meta does conversion lift studies. And that's actually a super important one. Like we have, you know, 20 to 30% of our customers are at any given time are women like purchasing as gifts and like some common customer journey or it's like a user journey, right? Is like I'm as a man see an ad for a wallet that I would like and my girlfriend or wife purchases it. For me, that meta would, would not be able to attribute that purchase that my wife made to me as having seen that ad. And that's kind of the problem. Now if we're in the same location, which we likely are, that would be measured via house. And that's because it removes that aspect of attribution, which I think is really super, super important. And that's why. So all these, all these caveats that we're identifying within meta is why I would just say, oh yeah, I would use it directionally for intra channel tests. And I'm like, do I think it can tell me whether Something's better or worse probably. Can it give me an accurate reading of. Of the the total incremental impact? No, because of the attribution because it doesn't have more channels. And that's why I would not test anything like big and significant that I'd want to potentially truly validate the impact of. I wouldn't rely on meta conversion lift to do that for sure.

[Jason]

And that's such an important point too of the intra channel stuff. The one of the beautiful things about House is you're it's apples to apples. You're comparing the same methodology across channels and platforms so there's really no bias or attribution bias. And you know, if let's say you ran a conversion lift on meta and then you wanted to see how you should compare how you should spend up or down on meta compared to Google. Like you're then going to be looking at different grading scales. So in platform totally makes sense. I'm with you. I think that's a really big one.

[Cody]

Have you done any of the like so going all the way up to the other side of the spectrum, have you ever taken any of the super granular like meta optimization window or like some of the really like granular settings in Meta and have tested that in house like saying I don't know, maybe it's like three cell baseline spend plus spend up in a seven day click in cell B and then like cel C is like baseline spend plus spend up in like a one day click like one of the like super granular. Have you ever done any of that or do you just usually keep it like larger swing.

[Jason]

We've never tested like a spend up in a conversion lift. We've tested on meta spend up in you know a house test. We've never tested like the small details. Probably the we've tested a lot of like different optimization settings in in in house. Probably the, the most similar like we just tested like a creative diversity test in House which I guess we probably could have done that with meta. So no different attribution settings. We did change how we optimized it because we were kind of optimizing ads differently in the business as usual versus creative diversity because we can't, we couldn't shut things off that quickly in it but we haven't done. When we tested attribution settings last year our default is a one day click. We tested a one day click versus a seven day click versus I think a one day click one day view. We tested that with a conversion lift and my plan was fully to then roll that out with a House test after it to be like hey, before making this big change because I thought seven day click was going to win or one day click one day view. We found our one day click was the best. So we didn't even get to House. But I think that would have been very interesting and not something I would want to do all the time. I think it would just be overkill. But maybe if it validated that they are pretty similar then I'd have confidence in a conversion lift for that stuff all of the time.

[Cody]

Do you have a Cody, do you have a lag window or like a discovery to purchase conversion window that would allow you to. I don't run like a two week test followed by a two week test and that's like the time window you would stack your test or do you feel like you need to give more time?

[Jason]

I think for meta we could go meta. A directional optimization setting would be fine with the two week test. I don't think meta is like a pure discovery channel for us. There's some of it happening and so even if there is a lag, theoretically it would be consistent across cells. I mean you could argue a one day versus a seven day click. It's a little different. But I think directionally we could get what we need. I'm not going to run a reach test for two weeks though. You know what I mean? Right?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

[Connor]

To answer your question, Connor, we're in the middle of testing probably the most granular stuff via House that we've done. We're doing two right now. One is the frequency bid optimizations where we are going to bid higher on people who haven't seen our ads in a while. And then we're also testing the incremental attribution. So we've got BAU versus incremental attribution. We're going to do those on House. We're doing that with House also.

[Jason]

I was gonna say one of my pros to running conversion lift was it feeds the model for incremental attribution. I didn't know that you could run House test for. For that.

[Connor]

Well, we're gonna set up. Cause you could. I. I think you can. I don't spend a lot of time in the ad account but I think you can choose. You know this is you, you have bau, which is like just your general attribution and then you have incremental attribution where it's trying to optimize for incremental results. It wouldn't have happened otherwise. That is, that is from what I understand and what they've said, trained on existing conversion lift data, but all we're doing is we're running. I don't know if it's one campaign or two campaigns in each cell. The. The bau. Yeah, it's just one versus the other. We don't. It's not a three cell, so it's just bau. Typical attribution versus that same. Those same campaigns duplicated over with incremental attribution. So we're going to see via House. We're not going to get a. We don't have a holdout, so we won't understand like the total impact, but we'll understand directionally via House whether one of those is driving better incremental results. Maybe we're kind of developing the playbook as we go here, but like, maybe that's the best use case for conversion lift within meta is like just run channel wide holdouts, get more data to feed incremental attribution and then you're validating that via House. That would make total sense.

[Jason]

I'm so excited to hear how those go. Those. Those are ongoing right now.

[Connor]

They launch today.

[Jason]

Awesome. Awesome. That's super exciting. Have you guys ran profit optimization? Have you tested that?

[Connor]

We have. Not yet.

[Jason]

Okay, so we did. We switched to our account to a custom event for optimization for new customer with bloodout and for whatever reason our purchase event just stopped working. Like we just could not be profitable on it. So we were on new customer for like a year. We, we just got purchased working again. But I'm excited about that. We had to hack stuff and it took forever and a bunch of testing and I'm excited about that because now we can kind of test some of these things that you have to be on purchase to test. So we tested profit. It didn't go well. We're going to retest profit optimization, which is exciting, and we're going to test incremental based attribution, which is also an exciting one. But I'm most excited about that frequency one because that makes so much sense. And in one of my predictions for the year, I was like, I think meta is finally going to admit that there is a problem reaching new audiences and they're going to come out with a solution for it.

[Connor]

Ooh, dude. All right. Banger prediction. I hope I'm right. We crushed that episode.

[Dara]

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[Connor]

I honestly think Meta is doing a great job of trying to align what they do with a business's goal, like I. And that's not true of all ad platforms. They, they truly realize that marketers and brands want to drive incremental, profitable outcomes. And like they are trying to do that. And they're saying like they are acknowledging to some degree that they're not reaching new customers in the same way that they used to and now they're building in tooling to help us do that. They're encouraging conversion lift. I mean it is I impressed by the way that they've been developing the ad platform.

[Jason]

No, I, I, I totally agree with that. And I even noticed that around like a year or two ago, like they were also the only one that was like, hey, go and go and run mmms, go and run holdouts.

[Connor]

Totally.

[Jason]

They were encouraging that. And to me that showed a ton of confidence. I think, I think like, I know, like Google is starting to love House as well because there's a lot of that YouTube data that that House is starting to show. So it's making them look good. But I feel like Meta regardless was like very confident and was kind of encouraging it. But yeah, I think you're right. Profit optimization, incremental based attribution. Like, they're clearly listening to the market and trying to be like, okay, what do businesses care about? It's not just maximize conversions, like growth at all. Cost is over. Like, oh, they care about incrementality now. They care about profitability. Like, how do we actually orient our systems towards those things?

[Connor]

Yeah, that was, I was going to make the point around profit optimization. We're super in the weeds here of meta ads at this point, but we're in a similar bucket where, you know, we run multiple pixels for our different categories and therefore we don't have capi set up because we, we had difficulty setting up capi to conditionally fire on certain purchases. So no capi means we can't do profit optimization. So now we're going back to the drawing board and I think we're going to be able to figure it out with Elevar. I'm sure there's some sort of solution, but yeah, it sounds like we've both been dealing with fun, like pixel implementation problems.

[Jason]

Dude, it's like the worst. It's like one of the least fair things about dtc.

[Connor]

Yeah. All right, sick. Anything else you guys want to cover on meta conversion Lift versus House?

[Jason]

No, I feel like that was good. All aligned. But yeah, I think it would be interesting for one of us to bite the bullet and maybe test some of the same things with a House versus a conversion lift just to see if we get similar things or not.

[Connor]

100%.

[Jason]

I'll do it.

[Connor]

Cool. Cody, you were talking about a new ambassador program that you're launching that you wanted to jam on?

[Jason]

Yeah, man, just AIs heating up. Got a lot of fun stuff. Hopefully we'll be able to share what it is soon. But somebody who has built their own D to C brand exited it. Built it with community. Grace Clark. I think she's friend of the pod, I think she listens but Grace is awesome. Kind of hooked me up with this person and so yeah, I mean I've been looking for, for this year, been looking for like an AI influencer sourcing tool and I've definitely seen a few. I just feel like it's one of those tasks that makes so much sense. And this, this one I found is a lot more powered than I was expecting. So it can do all the sourcing, it can do all of the outbound outreach, it can do a lot of things. This one's a little bit more like affiliate driven. So it's really trying to make it a little bit more of like a trackable performance channel which I'm very interested in. It automates all. Like right now what we do for our influencer program and mostly seating, you know, is so outbound. I think we're a little bit behind in technology in certain places of our org. So like there's a lot of stuff with spreadsheets, there's a lot of manual things and it's just, it's, it's not a very easy channel to scale because of that and so I'm just excited about this. So we're, we're going to start sending out, you know, thousands of boxes a month, you know, hopefully on autopilot and then be able to have the ability to actually re engage these people and follow up with them just with AI. And it's probably one of those things where like any AI solution right now there's probably, you know, people wherever they are, kind of duct taping it together, doing a lot of behind the scenes work. So they were transparent about that, which is great. But yeah, we're going to make a pretty big test and push for at least a quarter, maybe six months and see if we can really scale our program because I think we can do a way better job at EARN Media, creator, marketing, whatever you want to call it. We tried YouTube sponsorships, Agentio, very mixed success, definitely some winners but you know, I think it would take a lot, a lot of time to crack it. So we'll probably continue at just a very small, small amount for, for them. And we tried just like influencer paid stuff and I just, I just don't know how to justify that. I'm not gonna lie. Like, I don't really know if I care enough about earned me value. Be like, hey, like this, this is worth 5k. Like I, I know, but I, I get, you know, growing the brand long term. So I think a. How do we automate it so we can really just like ramp up organic seeding a ton and then how do we make it a little bit more of like a trackable performance channel is the goal.

[Connor]

So you guys do a lot of product seeding now? You guys both do, yeah.

[Jason]

But I don't think our volume is enough. I don't think we have the resources to scale it so where we're do. We're not doing thousands a month. And I've seen like other brands have like some crazy, crazy automated like hack systems with like zapier and airtable and stuff like that where they're sending out like thousands of month. And I think otherwise it's just too manual right now for us to hit the volume that I think we should be having.

[Connor]

Yeah, it does seem like a great use for AI. Like all that, the manual outreach, the crafting emails, a lot of the back and forth, like super repetitive. It sounds like a really cool opportunity. Connor, are you guys doing. Where are you guys at with product seeding?

[Cody]

We're not, we're not doing anything. Like, I mean, we're not send. We're not sending out thousands per month. I mean we're definitely selling out, sending out hundreds per month. Um, and I think the team's got it to a point where it's, it's like a really buttoned up process. It's certainly not 100% automated by, by any means I know they're doing. I forget the name of the tool off the top of my head. I'll have to ask them. I know that we have a pretty robust tool that I think is using AI technology to power a lot of the, the prospecting and like the outreach that like we're plugging our comms into it and then they kind of go into this like ClickUp workflow where they can select their products and then it goes to our team and they put the order in. So it's definitely not, it's still like, it's certainly not 100 automated. But also we're not trying to get it to that point because if we were spending, if we were sending thousands of products per month, we'd be spending way too much on product seating than what we have allocated for it. And at our current. We're pretty happy with like the current impression volume we get at the current spend volume we get. So it just hasn't really been a need but like totally think that if you're selling like a 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 product and you are like, like trying to send out thousands of these, these products per month that like we would not be able to probably do that with our current setup or in, in team. We'd have to figure out a way to make it a little less person dependent.

[Connor]

Awesome. Yeah, it sounds really interesting. So we just launched our product seating program. We just crossed 1 million organic views. We're stoked on that. So it's top of mind for all of us. We got a moparator's hotline question on it. So I could have started with this, but let's go through it. All right, this is word for word. We'd like to know more about tactics behind well run product seating. What's your hook when reaching out? How are you scaling this channel? What type of influencer do you see working? Well generally parentheses, micro slash, large influencers. And what do metrics, what metrics do you track to measure success? Thanks. So I guess we just hit kind of the, the process point. Connor, you guys have a great workflow and ClickUp. We outsource all of it. So we have an agency that, that runs that aligned growth does a good job. So they've, they've got that all buttoned up for us. And then Cody, you said you're focused on maybe this new AI tool, but any of the other ones around, like do you guys have hooks when reaching out or any advice on like how to improve a product seating program?

[Cody]

I mean, I, I, I, it's been so long since I've looked at the exact messaging. But the hook is, hey, you want some of this awesome product for free? Like I think all of us here believe in the products we sell and I think anybody would be stoked to get a free one or free multiples of our products. So that's the, that's the general hook that we're, that we're ultimately going for. I do think having some sort of social listening tool ready to go before you start seeding is pretty important. The last thing you want to do is, and this is not unique to product seeding. This is every single tactic you ever do as a marketer. But the last thing you want to do is go seed a thousand products to a thousand creators and then be wondering whether or not it worked and you're like trying to pull in like manual data. So, like, we use archive to track content. You can basically create collections where as you seed someone, you add them to a collection and then you can go into that collection and see if that person posted.

[Connor]

We're.

[Cody]

We're starting to do some things like, like measure hit rate. I'm pushing our team on that now to, to measure hit rate. And I think that would be a fun metric to track and see if we can manipulate our process to improve hit rate. But I.

[Jason]

What do you consider hit rate? Like what percent post? What?

[Cody]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know off the top of my head what it is right now. I think it's like 1 in 3, 1 and 4, if I had to guess. But yeah, I think outreach.

[Connor]

That's. Sorry, but outreach to post is like 1 to 3, 1 to 4.

[Cody]

Seeded. Seated to post. Seated to post, yes. Not outreach to post. I don't know what our outreach to like accepted product is. That's another good one to track. But yeah, I would at baseline, some sort of social listening tool. I guess if you're doing it on a small scale, maybe you don't need it if you're like, hey, I'm gonna product seed 20 people and just like keep a really close eye on them. But if they post a story, you might miss it or something like that. So I think that's, that's the hook. That's the, I think general requirements from a tooling stack. And you just need to be able to track these things. And then what was the last one? KPIs.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Barry]

Yeah.

[Cody]

I mean, we're just, we're just impressions and, and CPM based on cost. But I think that that's not necessarily the way to go about it for everyone. I think at our scale, like, we look at this as a top of funnel. You know, we want to feel like we're everywhere play. I think there's probably a way to set it up in a more performancey way, but then you're kind of on that slippery slope where it's like, okay, product seating kind of the. The magic of it is that it's not like a super contractual setup between the brand and the creator. So if you try to performance, if I had a little bit, you kind of lose some of that organic magic that is getting your product seated or placed within the organic nature of this creator's content. So slippery slope there. We don't do it that way. So I don't have much to speak to about how to like balance that.

[Connor]

Yeah, 100%.

[Dara]

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[Jason]

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 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 team in the last four months, literally turning 6 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 like one of the operators and spending heavily. And that's where I love the 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 get back to everybody, offer a better customer experience, answer questions to get our ads performing better. So I love it. If you want to join the 2000 plus, 7, 8 and 9 figure brands that switch to Rich 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.

[Connor]

I'll talk a little about our experience because we actually haven't gotten great opt in rates. So we've talked quite a bit about this the last couple of weeks. The key metrics that we've looked at which are. I'll start with that is opt in rate. So like outreach to someone says they're interested in and then post rate which is once they are opted in. How, how, at what rate are they actually posting now? I was given a number, there was a brand. This is the highest that I've heard. They had like a 40% opt in rate and then the post rate that I was told was like 70%. So they're getting whatever the math is on that like a third of everyone they reach out to is, is a post is going up. Distinction that I'll make is who we talk with actually makes the distinction between unique posts and total posts. So they see some in like some people get the product, really love it, become ambassadors, post three, four, five times or whatever. So that will drive up you get to 70% non unique post rate because you have people posting multiple times unique post rates. Probably closer to what you said Connor, like 25, 30%. So those are the metrics we pay attention to. Ours have been low opt in rate. In particular we're doing it with men in the UK and women in the US so it's like not our core demos. I think if we went men in the US we'd get a much higher opt in rate. It was a kind of outside of our core demo so we were focusing on the hook and what we said was I love the email that we crafted. I'm not going to remember it exactly, but we did one of those things where we said hey, you know, my brand manager asked for me to reach out because we loved your content or something where it's like, it's almost like some of the, the more tried and true like sd. Our outreach strategies I think will work incredibly well with product seating. It's the sort of thing like I was down to like do the whole forwarded message thing where like the manager could be like hey, reach out to this account and then we forward that.

[Jason]

Over Ridge that asked me to reach out personally.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah. So I would actually love to try that because I think it would absolutely work what we do.

[Jason]

Okay, I'll let you finish and then I'll share a little bit of ours and our message might, might have some good tips in there for you.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, okay. I'd appreciate it. So we, we Start that at the beginning. And then our original message just like really wasn't like compelling at all. Like I didn't read it and be like, oh man, Ridge is a cool brand. I think we were a way cooler message than we were kind of making it sound. So then we just nailed like we've sold millions of wallets, we've got all these customers, father some found a team. We bring up mkbhd, we bring up some of like the famous people we've worked with. It's different depending on the market. So we talk About Women Creators vs Men Creators depending on who we're reaching out to. And like those, those things together I think became a much compelling, more compelling position. We ended up driving up the opt in rate and if you drive up the opt in rate and post race stays the same, you're going to get way more posts after every for every email sent. So that's where we're at now. Still not particularly happy with it, but that's been the order of operations. What do you think, Cody?

[Jason]

Yeah, no, I love that. I mean it can be, it can be all tested and would definitely do it. Like you can just go cohort and be like, all right, this month this is what we're going to send. Or you can go like a b test it. So I think that's great. Most teams do email. We dm, so. So I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there's a different. You know, it's email too. Yeah, I've seen way more people do email. We dm for some reason it seems to work a little bit harder to automate. So we're gonna have to go over to email for a lot of the. The AI stuff we and this was maybe an old one, but I just found one Instagram. Hey, this person names Kira. Hey Kira. Hope you're having a great day. So get their name in there. We love your content and think Gens road would be a great idea routine. We'd love to give you some of Bobby's favorites. No requirement to post, just for you to try them out and tell us what you think. If you're interested, please share your best mailing address and we'll get your gift shipped asap. And then this one, at least we have a picture with it. I know we've a B tested. Does it have like a picture of the products? I believe we continue to do that. So we test the boxes like what products we're sending. We test copy. We test versus image or not. And yeah, don't quote me on the stats but we, we track opt in rate, we track post rate, all of those types of things. Definitely. I think all three of our brands can do this. But mentioning Marques, Gordon or Bobby can make a huge impact. We will definitely for like a macro if there's somebody who's got like a million plus we will definitely say, hey, Bobby loves your content. You know she asked me to reach out and then occasionally if it's, you know, I don't know if you guys would be able to do this but for somebody who's like very large that we really want to work with, we'll just DM from Bobby's like we'll get her permission. Yeah. We have like a large ambassador we're considering working with right now. So we had her reach out and, and you know, but yeah, but, but I think definitely, you know, all of that can can be tested where some people just give them straight to a form and they're like, hey, if you want it, fill in this form. Other people get their, you know, their info from there. But I agree with that. Can. Can all be tested.

[Connor]

Yeah. 100 so step one to any successful product seating program is get a celebrity on the team.

[Cody]

Team, yes.

[Jason]

Celebrity but also brand. Right. Like if a random brand reaches out, you're like I don't know. But if it's like a brand that you've been seeing all over and seeing people talk about like it helps. So like it success compounds in this area a lot.

[Connor]

Totally. And I'm, I'm obviously teasing. Like there's, there's ways to make yourself sound compelling without from day one.

[Jason]

Yeah. I like what you said about who you've worked with, who's posted it before. Like even if they're not still, I'll be like, hey, loved by this person.

[Connor]

Yeah. 100 or even like if you have some sort of founding story, like anything that has like a little bit of substance to it, I think can really go a long way. And, and, and I think the biggest point that we're all saying is like really at every step there's like room for optimization. I. Cody, you said what's in the box is super cool. Like we haven't gone that far. We have a selection of products that are available to them but like it's a, it's a funnel. There's like a, a number of different touch points that you can just ideate and run tests and improve over time.

[Jason]

For sure.

[Cody]

Any brand, I think I, not everyone has a Gordon or a Bobby or a, or Marquez. But any brand can, like, figure out some angle into social proof. It's like, hey, we're a, we're a new brand and we, we have, we only have 300 orders so far, but our, our average review is 4.4.9 out of 5. Like, there's. I think there's, there's ways to, like, make it compelling no matter the size that you are and whether it's a celebrity or your review count or a video from someone who knows what it is. But there's. I think you got to lean into that social proof in some way, shape or form.

[Connor]

And even so, like, that's something that we actually did for the, the women's outreach is we were like, look, we've sold to millions of men now, like, I forget we phrased it really nicely, but, like, now we're launching a women's program and we'd love for you to be a part of it. Like, the newness was the interesting piece of it, which I think will work for some brands and won't work for others. But there's. There's a lot to kind of experiment with there.

[Jason]

So, Connor, how rich, how I know you guys have done, obviously a ton of paid influencer. So influencer is not new for you guys. How will you guys think about meas the seating program? Knowing. Knowing if it's working for you. What are your, like, main KPOs?

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I mean, look, you guys sold me on product seating last year. It's really just. Oh, this is. I, I feel pretty strongly about this one. I don't think we're gonna measure, like, roas on it or whatever. Right. We'll get a CPM on it. And that's cool. Like, we just crossed a million impressions. Like, okay, we feel good about that. One of the reasons we're doing it for men in the UK and for women in the US is so that we can also use it as, like, a content generation engine. So if we can do all those things, if we can, hey, we drove this many impressions. We're looking at engagement and things like that. We want to make sure it's like a decently high quality post. We're creating all this content. Some of that content can get funneled down to, you know, organic, social. Like, even the ability for us to be resharing posts every single day, I think is of value. And I don't know if those impressions, when we reshared our story, get tracked back into, like, an archive from the original post. But, like, it's just, we have this Apparatus that's creating all this content. It's hundreds of pieces of content a month. How are we extracting value in multiple ways? And then we just feel good about that at the end of the day, I guess we're trying to do that cost benefit analysis, but it's not quite scientific. It is. We're spending X amount of dollars. We're getting all these things from it. We feel pretty good about it and there's a lot of ways we can use it. So I think it's relatively easy to justify.

[Jason]

Yeah, for sure. No, I totally agree with that. I think the hard thing for me is like, all right, we're sending out 500 bucks this month. Like, should we be sending out 4,000amonth like that? I don't know. And unless you just go and send it and double or triple it and see kind of like do it. Cody, the effects. I mean, we are, we are. That's why we're automating it so we can do that many. So nice. We're probably about to triple what we're doing and I will, I will let you guys know.

[Cody]

That's awesome. That's really cool to like see that at. At scale. I'm excited. What are you expecting? Like, do you think there'll be like the same way when you scale meta spend, you know, efficiency goes down because like the traffic quality goes down. Do you think that that's the case with like a product seating program? Like, do you imagine that like tripling your product seating will make your CPMs go up?

[Jason]

That's a good question. Yes, probably. Probably. I think so. Because you have like, it's not all incremental. Like if you, let's say you like divided your like earned media value divided by like how many boxes you've sent. Not all of that is like incremental or like marginal. Like some of those people would have posted anyways. And so just by like let's say you double the number of boxes sent, you're probably not going to double your emv, if that makes sense. That next I was hold out of.

[Cody]

Product seating, you know, you know what.

[Jason]

I mean by that? So I do think it'll probably be, you know, become less efficient over time. And one of the things I've seen from like Tribe Dynamics just showing their data is like EMV retention and creator retention is extremely important. I mean it's really the same principles that, that I've learned of, of just like customer journeys and marketing. And you know, if you are going to ramp up acquisition, you have to make sure you have some type of a retention strategy in there as well where you're re upping people, sending people things, building relationships. Like what happens if someone posts twice? Like then where do they move to in your program? You know, do they go to affiliate, do they go to a special community? Are there challenges? So I think like having that backend in there is, is probably really important and we're just trying to make sure we have like the right strategy There.

[Connor]

One point that I wanted to make on that, I could see it going both ways. I could see it being diminishing. I could see driving up organic frequency actually having a compounding effect. Like people having the thought like man, I see Jones Road everywhere. They have thousands of people posting every month. I can see it go both ways. I have no idea. But yeah, Cody, you'll have to report back.

[Jason]

I agree with that. No, I, I totally, I totally agree with that. Um, one thing I'm excited about is obviously just the content and, and getting more paid content. We had our largest, we've been trying to do a lot more like whitelisting, partnership ads, influencer ads. Not like UGC but like influencer ads. We had the lar, one of the larger ones that we've done to date, probably the largest one Go Live about a week and a half ago. She has about 3 million followers and again it's not all about that but it's crushing. It's doing really well. We've probably spent like 50, 60k on it so far. So I'm very bullish on the style of content and we'll ramp it up. But you know, my hope is we'll get a lot of content that we can then get into our ad account from just ramping up this.

[Connor]

Yeah, 100%. So that's, that's what, that's a main deliverable of the program. The value of the program's not just on a CPM basis. I'd like to think we're going to get a lot of value from the content being created. So to the person who asked the question, that's how we're thinking about it.

[Jason]

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[Connor]

Sweet. You guys ready to move on to probably our last topic?

[Jason]

Let's do it.

[Connor]

All right, this one's more of an open ended question, not a moderator's hotline. But let me plug my operators hotline quickly. We should have a link in the description of the podcast. If you've got questions or comments for us, submit. We'll talk about it on the show. So appreciate people participating. My question for you guys, we recorded last week chat GPT4.0 image generation had just taken over the timeline. It was, we discussed it after. It was maybe like 75 minutes old. It was like really initial impressions. We've had another week to sit on it. Any new revelations? Anything you guys are experimenting with that you're excited about with either ChatGPT image generation? Aside from the cool April Fool's prank? Yeah, anything come up but maybe Connor. Okay. KKC you?

[Cody]

Yeah, I'm not, not within Hexclad. Like I've had some buddies that I'm, you know, I'm just chatting with and they're like launching brands and stuff and they're like, you know, hey, check like what do you think of this product? Like I just like made this lifestyle image and like with put the packaging art on the actual product jar. Like what do you have any feedback? So just stuff like that, which I think's cool. It's kind of like a way to validate what he was working on and whether or not it'll look good and it's end state. So I thought that was like a kind of a fun like intermediary use case. I wouldn't say we're, we're not like going gung ho at Hexclad with the technology, so I wouldn't say there's any major updates, but seeing some stuff like that which directly involved me. But nothing at hexcloud. Exactly.

[Connor]

Yeah. Interesting. I'm trying to pull up my notes here. Dude, I'm not gonna find it super annoying. I had a call like, so I had a tweet actually that I think is like, honestly a pretty mid take. But I talked about how. We've talked about this on the show a lot. We've had Dan McCormack on, we've had Zach stuck on. These are guys who have built businesses that are doing 4, 5, 6 million dollars in revenue per full time employee headcount. And that's extremely impressive. And there's this whole like new cohort of brands who are able to do that. And, and what we've discussed is like there are certain attributes of that brand that are really important to being able to get that sort of leverage. High aov, high margin, low SKU count, high LTV is like typically what you would see you hear a brand doing. They're doing $50 million a year with 10 employees like some of these guys are doing. More often than not they have some sort of economics. It looks like that what I thought where I went with the creative generation. If I like extrapolate out a couple more months. When I look at a business like Ridge, we're launching hundreds of new SKUs this year. We've got 122 go to market items on our board. There's just massive complexity in time and energy coordinating the production of assets across all those different things. And the image generation felt to me like an early example of how we might be able to get a similar form of leverage that we probably won't get to the place where we could do 50 million with 10 people. But like, instead of being at two and a half million per person, can we get to three and a half or four or something? And that, that, that path seemed like way more feasible. So we, we also haven't implemented anything in the last seven days that's going to like, monumentally change the business. But we had a, we had a, A jam session with.

[Jason]

You're sleeping, dude. If, honestly, I don't know what you're doing if you haven't monumentally changed the business in.

[Cody]

Are you ready? Are you even an operator?

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah. But no, we had a. We had a meeting on Friday. Our creative director, our performance creative strategist, some of our paid media team, just so we can, like. My main point was like, let's just stay in the mindset of like, how can we leverage these tools to continue being higher leverage and more efficient? And I don't know. I guess the one thing that I'll say there's like a ton of. There's. There's a ton of ways that it can be applied. But one that I'm excited about is actually like, we have a lot of existing photography we really like that serve as great, like, templates or starting points. So it's almost as if I could see in the future, rather than our studio here in Salt Lake needing to deliver, you know, 2530 assets for a launch, we might only need to deliver four or five assets for a launch. And then we have someone else in the workflow who's just prompting that into more diversity and kind of expands on it from there. So we're gonna start experimenting with that. We'll have. We'll have campaigns go live in May that like, I think that will it. We'll have at least experimented with that as a piece of the workflow. So that's kind of where. Where our head has been at.

[Jason]

Yeah, I think pretty similar, I think. Yeah.

[Dara]

The.

[Jason]

Check out this tool, Visual Electric. Kyle from Jack Henry showed it with me. But that's kind of like what we've used for some stuff. I think like the props that you can generate in that are like super realistic. So like, for example, we. We have a launch. It's actually a relaunch of something that we launched originally in the winter and it's going to come back in the summer because we just have extra inventory and it makes sense, but I don't necessarily want it. We don't have that many units where I Don't want to do like a new production, but we can't use like the wintery assets. Like, to me, that's a perfect use case for it.

[Connor]

Right.

[Jason]

And I think we'll be able do some stuff again. Just take like standard product photography and add some props and, and backgrounds. And I think it's totally in a place where we can do that and get some usable stuff out of it it which will be cool. I feel like the, the hype for the chat GBT stuff is like, at least from my perspective, it's not that it's like, okay, I'm gonna go and, and create 100 assets right now. Like, I don't think any of them are good enough to put into our ad accounts, but it's just like, all right, man. Like it's gonna be there soon. It's gonna. I don't know if it's 6 months, 3 months, 12 months, but like, it's not that far away from being able to do that. And then I think the possibilities really feel endless. Like you said.

[Connor]

Yeah, 100%. I also, I've gone back and forth. When we discussed it last week, I was like, yeah, you know, it looks like a good idea for like ideation. Like our. One of the founders prompted something, sent it to the team and I'm like, that's super cool that he could actually come with. Like, I could imagine an ad looking like this and now he can participate. Like visually, I think that's super valuable. And I thought that's kind of where it would stop. I've seen some great examples and then the more I get into it, I'm like a little less enthused with the quality. So I'm kind of with you, Cody. I think we're probably a couple months out, but just a matter of time before. Like I said last week, life on easy street. We're just prompting great ads, loading it into Meta Andromeda. We're serving it to the right people. We're optimizing for profit. I mean, that is.

[Jason]

That is utopian there. I also, and I don't mean to be like judgmental or anything. Like, I think for certain brands with maybe not the, the highest standards for like brand visuals and guidelines, like, it's probably fine for, I think for like a cheaper looking brand or like a newer brand and stuff like that. Like, I would totally launch some of these. I just don't think for our brand at this time I would be comfortable launching some of them yet.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah. All right, guys, well, look, we'll call that an episode. A little bit of a grab bag style. Thank you to those submitting operators hotline questions. I encourage everyone else to do so. So Cody brought his own today, so that was fun to jam on. As always, like and subscribe. Share with your team, share with your friends. Thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel after Self Prescient and House and we'll see you next week.