E056: Redefining Your Ad Creative Strategy and Maximizing Meta Performance

Summary

Episode E056: Redefining Your Ad Creative Strategy and Maximizing Meta Performance

Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Release Date: April 22, 2025
Podcast: Marketing Operators

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Introduction

In this episode of Marketing Operators, hosts Connor Rolain and Cody Plofker delve deep into the nuances of redefining ad creative strategies to maximize performance on Meta platforms. Amidst discussions on team structure, creative diversity, and strategic alignment, they share valuable insights on navigating the evolving digital advertising landscape.

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Key Discussions

1. Creative Strategy and Team Scaling

Connor opens the conversation by highlighting the challenges of ramping up creative volume while ensuring strategic intentionality. He emphasizes the need to avoid getting lost in the sheer volume of content production without a clear creative direction.

[07:55] Connor: "We've been trying to take a step back and actually define our creative strategy, which took me a second."

Cody shares his approach to structuring the creative team, balancing internal efforts with external agencies to prevent duplicative work.

[14:19] Cody: "One thing we've done...is splitting it up between what we are doing internally and then what we are paying for from external partners is by categories."

2. Local Maxima in Ad Performance

The hosts introduce the concept of "local maxima" — points where ad performance plateaus due to limited creative inputs. They discuss how both Connor and Cody have encountered these plateaus and the strategies to overcome them through creative diversity and strategic experimentation.

[27:32] Cody: "Without diversity and sometimes without aligning creative and media strategy, you can find yourself in one of those local maxima."

3. Creative Exploration vs. Exploitation

Drawing inspiration from Rory Sutherland's Alchemy, the hosts differentiate between creative exploration (seeking new, innovative ideas) and creative exploitation (iterating on known successful concepts). They stress the importance of maintaining a balance between the two to continually discover higher points of ad performance.

[73:08] Connor: "Creative exploration versus exploitation... that's how we've thought about it internally."

4. Creative Diversity and Audience Reach

A significant portion of the discussion centers on creative diversity's role in reaching new audiences. Connor and Cody debate how Meta's algorithms can lock in on specific audiences, making it imperative for brands to provide diverse and strategic creative inputs to break out of these constraints.

[17:47] Connor: "Creative is the prompt and I think you'll just get what you prompt and you have to prompt it better for the action that you want."

5. Alignment Between Creative and Media Strategy

The hosts underscore the necessity of aligning creative strategies with media objectives. They argue that without this alignment, even diverse creatives may fail to unlock new audience segments effectively.

[29:30] Cody: "If creative and media strategy are not aligned, then it has no chance of breaking out of the local maxima."

6. Impact of Landing Page Cohesion

Connor raises the topic of landing page cohesion with ads, suggesting that mismatched messaging between the two can lead to a poor user experience and reduced ad effectiveness. They explore strategies for creating dynamic and value-aligned landing pages to complement diverse ad creatives.

[54:56] Cody: "We have zero customer support ticket backlog right now, which is awesome. And it's all because we switched to Rich panel..."

7. Incrementality in Creative Testing

Both hosts discuss the importance of measuring the incrementality of creative strategies rather than solely relying on attribution metrics. They highlight scenarios where traditional attribution might undervalue the performance of certain creative approaches, advocating for broader testing frameworks.

[42:52] Cody: "If you're measuring these things, you're totally right and we are on the same page."

8. Future of Creative Strategy Automation

Concluding the discussion, Connor and Cody explore the potential of automating creative strategy through platforms like Motion. They envision a future where AI-driven tools assist in generating and testing creative ideas, allowing human teams to focus on more inventive aspects of marketing.

[76:04] Cody: "We define it however they want, but what you described, I would think of as creative exploration."

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Notable Quotes

• Connor Rolain [07:55]: "We've been trying to take a step back and actually define our creative strategy, which took me a second."

• Cody Plofker [14:19]: "One thing we've done...is splitting it up between what we are doing internally and then what we are paying for from external partners is by categories."

• Cody Plofker [27:32]: "Without diversity and sometimes without aligning creative and media strategy, you can find yourself in one of those local maxima."

• Connor Rolain [17:47]: "Creative is the prompt and I think you'll just get what you prompt and you have to prompt it better for the action that you want."

• Cody Plofker [29:30]: "If creative and media strategy are not aligned, then it has no chance of breaking out of the local maxima."

• Connor Rolain [54:56]: "We have zero customer support ticket backlog right now, which is awesome. And it's all because we switched to Rich panel..."

• Cody Plofker [42:52]: "If you're measuring these things, you're totally right and we are on the same page."

• Cody Plofker [76:04]: "We define it however they want, but what you described, I would think of as creative exploration."

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Conclusions and Takeaways

• Strategic Creative Scaling: Scaling ad creative requires a balance between volume and strategic diversity to prevent performance plateaus.

• Aligning Creative with Media Objectives: Effective ad performance hinges on the seamless alignment between creative inputs and media strategies.

• Creative Diversity as a Growth Lever: Introducing diverse creative elements is essential for reaching new audiences and escaping algorithmic limitations.

• Innovative Testing Frameworks: Traditional attribution methods may not fully capture the true impact of creative strategies, necessitating broader testing approaches.

• Future of Marketing Automation: AI-driven tools hold significant promise in automating parts of the creative strategy process, enabling marketers to focus on innovation.

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By integrating these insights, marketers can refine their ad creative strategies to not only maximize performance on Meta platforms but also drive sustainable growth through strategic audience expansion and creative innovation.

Transcript

[Connor]

So, Connor, I didn't get the memo. We're wearing collars now. Is that part of the dress code?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. New dress code I'm implementing. No, I'm. I'm in Mexico City this week and I am completely out of clean T shirts. So kind of a. A self imposed sort of. Sort of dress up day. We'll see how it goes.

[Connor]

So did you just decide to stay there for like a week after. After the wedding?

[Cody]

Yeah. Sean got married in Cabo, which was fantastic. Very beautiful wedding. And then I was like. And I. It didn't even have a passport. I haven't done international travel in probably 13 years or something. So I figured I'd take advantage of the opportunity to extend the stay.

[Connor]

Awesome. I've heard Mexico City is great. Actually, I have not been.

[Cody]

Dude, it's almost. The reviews of Mexico City sound fake. Like every single person I've talked to just absolutely loves it. I'm, you know, 48 hours in. I'd say it's living up to expectations.

[Connor]

No diarrhea yet?

[Cody]

No, no. Hilarious that you asked me. I. I met some women last night at. At a bar that I went to and one pulled out a knockoff Ridge wallet.

[Connor]

Oh, that's awesome. That's great. All right. Or maybe not.

[Cody]

I was fine with it. We've got good coverage across, you know, North Central, South America.

[Connor]

Nice. I love that. Yeah, My brother got married in Mexico probably about two years ago, three years ago. And luckily everybody got there like a few days early. Five days early. Everybody got sick, like. Yeah, first him and his wife got sick, my dad got sick, I got sick the day of the wedding. I barely made it to the wedding. I like, had a bucket right next to me during the ceremony and I barely gave my speech and then had to go home right after that. Everybody.

[Cody]

Oh, dude. Insane.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Yeah. That's brutal. No, luckily I didn't hear about anybody getting sick, so it was pretty. Pretty uneventful from that perspective.

[Connor]

And then one other funny thing. My cousin went to a pharmacy. I guess they sell. I don't even remember what the pills were, but he was like, do you need a prescription? They're like, yeah. He's like, do you really? They're like, no. I'm sure you can get. If you want anything. Want to bring anything home? Obviously, be careful.

[Cody]

But yeah, perfect.

[Connor]

Awesome. Well, before we get into the meat of the episode, want to thank our sponsors. As always, thank you so much to our premier sponsor, Motion. Want to thank Rich panel. After cell pression and north beam, we Couldn't do the show without you guys. If you've been doing scrolling DTC, Twitter or LinkedIn like me, then it's impossible to escape all the conversations that are happening right now. There's obviously a lot going on with AI image generation, ChatGPT 4.0, but there's also a lot of financial pressure, tariffs, economic, consumer spending, not looking great. So a lot going on right now at Jones Road. We're definitely feeling, you know, a lot of pressure, but we try to keep our team very lean. So try to enable our team to get more done with the amount of creative volume that we need to output and you know, to be honest, do as as little hiring as possible. And you know, again, I think there's going to be a lot more teams looking to do that and I really think AI is starting to get at a place where it can really start to automate and take over some workflows that you're seeing. So if you've been wondering about how you can make all of this non stop talk about to seem more practical, I highly recommend you book some time with the team over at Motion. I just got off a call with Reza, their CEO to go over their agents, what they're building. He showed me behind the hood and it's awesome. I honestly think it's going to change how DTC teams are going to use AI and agentic workflows to systemize ad processes. If there is a thing that your team is doing and they have it in their head and it's a process that they're doing, it involves data or creative strategy and they can write down what the steps are. It can be automated with emotion agents. So you might have seen the release of the expert agents which are the AR workflows created by some of the world's best creative strategists. People like Barry Hot, Dara Denny, Mirel Crespi, Alex Cooper, on and on. These are the AI agents that analyze your own Facebook ad data right inside Motion and they can, they can help you understand like Jess Bachman's where in the funnel you're probably putting your spend and have an opportunity, what iterations you can make. Is your creative diverse enough? There's some customer research stuff, it's just awesome. But, but these are all again super specific, built on your own data. But Motion has a lot more on their AI product roadmap that we've been lucky enough to get a sneak peek of. So whether you're a seven, eight or nine figure brand and you want an edge on this Stuff. I high recommend you go book a call with their team so you can get a private tour of what's coming next with their AI. You can get a first look at their next batch of expert agents and also see how they're going to help brands like Jones Road, Hexclad and Ridge to automate a lot of the creative processes with their AI agents. Also, if you mention you came from here, the marketing operators podcast, you'll get 50% off your first month. And it's all monthly contracts, so very little risk. They won't make you sign an annual thing. I'm excited. I think you'll be excited. Go to motion app.com and again, mention the marketing operator sent you. All right, so, Connor, I don't know if you know this because you're out of the country right now, but the world is kind of melting down right now, right? Tariffs, economic markets are melting down right now. So we're doing an emergency podcast. We are doing what all good marketers should do when the world is melting down. We're going to talk about Ad Creative and Meta. How's that sound?

[Cody]

Wonderful. Yeah. I could only think of one way to respond in such a crisis, and that would be it.

[Connor]

Exactly. It's actually funny. Yeah. Olivia from House asked me on, like, Friday if we were doing an emergency po. Like, I think we should leave that to the operators. And, like. And then jokingly, you saw, like, a tweet about creative testing yesterday, and you're like, we should do an emergency pod.

[Cody]

Oh, hilarious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Met Meta saying that you should have a creative testing campaign is. Is some of the biggest news to drop. And we've had a lot of big news dropping over the last, you know, week and a half.

[Connor]

It's all about priorities, 100%.

[Cody]

I was joking. We. I was joking with our. Our podcasting agency that we work with about how just volatile it's been with all the tariffs, and I was like, luckily, no taxes on audio content. And same with. Same with Ad Creative. So we'll stick to the stuff unaffected.

[Connor]

Exactly. Definitely stay in our lanes is what we'll do.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Cool. So I want to talk about, you know, I mean, I think this is probably like our fourth podcast about creative testing, creative production volume and also creative testing. So want to talk about that. But I feel like things always evolve. I think it's probably a huge focus for all of us. Um, there's always discussion on it, but. But there are a few things I think we'll touch on, which is, you know, I know we talked about Andromeda and some updates. I, I was like, hey, does this really change much? I, I, I think it does. Um, I've been trying to define our creative strategy, which I shared. I, I think want to go over, I want, I want you to kind of go on a rant about local Maxima. I started listening to that podcast that you shared. Uh, the Rick, the Rick Rubin one with Rory Sutherland.

[Rory Sutherland]

Rory Sutherland, yeah.

[Connor]

So, so I want you to go off on that because I, I totally agree with that. And I guess we can talk about meta's updates, to how they recommend people test creative. How's that sound?

[Cody]

Yeah, I think that sounds wonderful.

[Connor]

All right, so to kick it off. So I've been thinking about, like, defining our creative strategy. I've just been thinking about it because, like, volume is really important. And as we've been trying to ramp up volume and bring on agencies and build our internal teams or offshore teams, it probably hasn't been as strategic or intentional as possible. And I think it's really easy to just get lost in like, all right, volume, like, do more. We need more resources, but we want to make sure, like, each pod that we have is focused on the correct thing and we're getting the right output. So been trying to take a step back and actually define our creative strategy, which took me a second.

[Cody]

Yeah. Can I ask you a question on this? Because I actually just want to talk about that. You sent over like an awesome little slide of like 10 bullet points. We're going to talk through them that you made for your team. So one, when did you. I'd love to hear briefly about how the team is structured now. And then two, like, how did you decide? Oh, I need to create like the ten commandments of the, of the JRB Creative strategy.

[Connor]

Yeah. So our team, we hired a senior director of creative strategy from Tube Sciences. She's great. She's excellent. Hired her in January. She. We had one creative strategist before they pretty much transitioned at the same time, so she was really the only one. We had probably two remote editors, one like full time US freelance editor. And we've been ramping up editors. So I think we have probably some combination of maybe like four to five editors all overseas. Currently we have, we'll call it two agencies probably we work with at a time. So they're kind of like a podcast, different deals. And then we have one, we have one agency that kind of like functions as an internal team. They, they really just like, are giving us like a few editors and like part time strategist, but we're kind of functioning a little bit more like a, an internal team. So we'll call that a second pod. So we really have like two pods and then using agencies for one or two others. And we're, we're launching less concepts per week than we really should be and need to be. So, you know, I really would like to get four to five different pods in there and would like to get, you know, we'll talk about volume at the end. I mean, I talked to a similar size brand last week who's launching, you know, 70 concepts a week. We're, we're well below that. I don't know if we need to be at 70, but we're well below that. So we're trying to get there. So we're trying to ramp it up. And one of the things I tweeted the other day, I'm like, I will take on, I want to take on a few percent of spend agencies with no flat fee because I don't necessarily have all the budgets right now to be like, hey, I'll do a 20k a month minimum on four different agencies. Um, but I have no problem taking on five agencies at a percentage of spend. But I want to make sure that their work is not duplicative and what they're working on are all different things. And I think it's really easy, especially for me, to just be like, let's, we just need creative, right? We just need things in our account. But I think it has to be much more strategic. So that is the impetus for doing this exercise.

[Cody]

Bf.

[Connor]

So we're bringing on another strategist right now, you know, kind of mid level junior strategist. And then, um, probably, you know, we'll, we'll go, I think and, and want to hear about your guys team. But we'll probably go like three editors per strategist and then one to two designers. We also have a few static agencies that we work with, some that we give full briefs to, some that are pretty good at coming up with their own thing. Um, so have kind of been, been doing that as well.

[Cody]

Okay, got it. And then. Okay, so a lot of hiring, a lot of transitioning. And then you decided at some point in Q1 you were like, I actually need to create a playbook for the team now to like better set, set the course here.

[Connor]

No, that was this morning. That was like 15 minutes ago.

[Cody]

Oh, all right, Wonderful.

[Connor]

That was perfect. I just, I've been thinking about it a lot. You know, it's one of those Things where it's like, I feel like my best work comes where I, like, I think about something for like, two months and then it just, like, hits me at once, like, out of the blue.

[Cody]

Yeah. It's actually taken you your whole life to create this creative strategy playbook.

[Connor]

Pretty much. It's all led to this moment.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

[Connor]

What. What's your team look like these days?

[Cody]

It hasn't. It hasn't changed too much. We've got the two strategists, we've got probably four editors now. We have two designers on the team. All the editors and designers are overseas. The strategists are onshore. And yeah, we. We. For a long time, we had a dedicated strategist, at least one editor and a designer by our three different categories. That's shifted over time, and now we've just got kind of this. A larger. A larger team that kind of works across our different categories. We're getting closer to it. Really? You're not like, we're not potting it as much? Like, if you'd had. Has me this time last. This time last year, we had, like, strict pods. We had it like, we had it, like, bulleted out in a spreadsheet. Now it's a little bit more fluid and sometimes, like, the type of content will dictate it. So, like, we've been focused a lot more on. On horizontal video, like. Like YouTube or linear and things like that. We're launching a streaming test this week that ends up getting handled by the same creative strategies, whether it's for rings or for wallets or for travel or something like that. So we kind of. We're fluid going back and forth between, like, who's talking about it from a category perspective versus, like, the type of content that we need.

[Connor]

Okay, cool. That makes sense. And then how many concepts are you launching? And do you guys have a lot of agencies like that that also supply and creative or. It's mostly you guys internally?

[Cody]

It's. It's mostly internal. We have Tube Science right now. We had another one in Q4. We've got our product seeding program, which is a form of content creation. And also in Q4, we had an international creative agency briefly. So we're kind of ebbing and flowing, but right now just Tube Science and the internal team.

[Connor]

Got it. Okay, cool. Makes sense.

[Cody]

Oh, and, you know, one. One thing I'll say quickly on the point of. And. And because I'd love to touch on this, you said you guys have. It sounds like a lot more partners in the mix And I totally agree that it would be easy to be like, okay, everybody just deliver content and they're all going to sniff out like the formats or the concepts that are going to work best for you. And then I do think there would be like a ton of redundant work across these different partners. One thing we've done, or like some of the examples of how we've split it up between what are we doing internally and then what are we paying for from external partners is one by categories, which is super simple. These aren't super applicable to you, but we have licensing deals. So, like, everybody wants to create NFL wallet ads. We only do those internal. I was like, those work. We understand what winning looks like there. It's why we brought on the international creative agency. It was like, okay, we want that to feel like local content. We've also been trying to acquire women wallet users, which is different than like a woman gift giver. And we actually have both of those as different ones. So we're like, hey, we would like you focused on gift giving for women or, sorry, women as gift giver ads versus women as wallet user ads. So we're like slowly kind of piecing it out depending on like, what our objectives are as a brand. And that's been helpful just to make sure there's as little redundant work being created across the different partners.

[Connor]

Totally. I think that makes a ton of sense. And I think that's. That is how it has to be done. And we haven't been doing it that way. We've been bringing on these guys and they've been like, all right, what do you want us to make? And I'm like, oh, just. Just focus on our Hero products. But, but I think, like, we can be so much more intentional. Even if we do want them focusing on Miracle Bomb, we can be like, hey, this is like a new Persona that we want to try to reach. Like, right, crack that. Or this is, you know, a category or a product that, like, we're not doing a ton of. We haven't had the bandwidth, like, scale that versus just, hey, here's a Hero product. And then the ads end up looking very similar. So, yeah, 100% agreed. And that's what we're thinking about. And I think that's that. That's that local Maxima game that, you know, you can get into.

[Cody]

Oh, you want me to hit that now?

[Connor]

Let me. No, no, no, We'll. We'll tease that. Let's go kind of create a strategy. Maybe I'll talk about that. And. And then we'll we'll go. I want to warm you up a little first. All right. So yeah, I mean I was thinking about it. I guess I'll just run through some of the lists. You can just tell me your thoughts, feedback, what you agree with, what you don't. But I've just been trying to define it. So what is our creative strategy? Just like blank page. I have like a figjam thing open, you know, and just some other questions like what is to be true for it to be effective? You know, what, what do we believe to be true? Like really, like what's our principle? What are our principles? So really just a bunch of notes. Volume is important. Duh. Creative does the targeting right. Like everybody knows that.

[Cody]

Love it.

[Connor]

I think these, you started out with two.

[Cody]

Two bangers. Undeniable.

[Connor]

Yeah. The system is mostly incredible at giving you what you ask for with the right inputs you provide.

[Cody]

With. With the inputs you provide.

[Connor]

Yeah, I've been, I've been on a lot of like calls with people and like Meta has been organizing some and you know, on like their roundtables and stuff. And the one, the one theme, there's a few themes that are really consistent. One of them is, you know, everyone is trying for creative diversity and reach new audiences and, and people seem to be really struggling with it. And I think that this is kind of what led to really this, this entire thing, this, this thinking about what defines it. And I think the notion is that like Meta is really bad and the system just gets locked into one audience and it's really hard to break out of that no matter how hard people try. And I believe that's true. I do to a degree. But I also think that it also is just evidence that brands aren't giving it the right inputs to break it out. You're telling Meta optimize for the most number of conversions and if you give it creative and a product and an offer that Meta thinks the most number of conversions are going to be on a 50 year old audience, it's not going to serve to a 30 year old audience. And you know, you could put 30 year olds in your ads and hope that it will, but I think that's just underestimating the magnitude of change that we have to do. And that's probably not enough exploration in there. And I think there probably are some system things where the algorithm gets trained and you have to force spend to it or go different pixel or upper funnel, whatever, but I also think that you have to do the right inputs and main thing about it is like I treated this morning like creative strategy is prompt engineering for right brain people. Like it's essentially ChatGPT is only as good as a prompt that you give it. And I think your creative is the, I think your creative is the prompt and I think you'll just get what you prompt and you have to prompt it better for the action that you want.

[Cody]

Yeah, okay, I agree with all of that.

[Connor]

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[Cody]

I actually so this is one of my favorite points. I want to read it one more time for those listening. The system is mostly incredible at giving you what you ask for with the inputs you provide. One, I love the phrase mostly incredible.

[Connor]

There are times where it's not like, I do think it gets oriented too far that way and sometimes you do have to try things to break it out that are like not creative but that it's more of like a media strategy.

[Cody]

Totally. So I think this look, I think I'm actually going to go like super, super wide scope here. Most of the DTC industry was built on Meta. Meta is, does exactly what you're describing. It's an incredible system for giving you what you ask for with the inputs you provide. And I think, and I've said this maybe on the podcast, probably at some point, some of the best, some of the biggest success stories from the DTC industry are the simplest businesses. This actually, we've talked about it more recently with like Low SKU, High LTV, like highly leveraged D2C 3.0 brands. But even if you go back and you look at someone like an AG1 or whatever or a Dr. Squatch or like a Ridge Wallet, it's like, okay, these, these brands were built selling a single product online because Meta is extremely good at figuring out how to do that. One thing you have given it the input of, I want to sell this widget online. And it is incredibly good at doing that. That's the input you, you put in. And it's really good at giving you an output. There's a lot of variable there in terms of like product market fit and economics and how you're running the business and things like that. But largely that's what Meta seems extremely good at. What I don't think there's a lot of examples of is once you have like multiple inputs or like multiple objectives, meta is not out of the box, great at giving you those same results across the board. And this is where, this is where we've been extremely experimental in like, I've talked about the different pixels we have across our different categories, the different ad accounts. It's like, it feels like there's a lot of alpha to create, to like split out. So you are, you are, you are almost creating separate silos for all your different inputs and then you can get that output that Meta is so good at providing. So I think it's really true and has like shaped the DTC industry in terms of what brands are successful. And I think it's all the way True down to like, if you give it an image, like what output is it giving you?

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I mean I agree and I think it's very good at that one thing and it gets fine tuned on that one thing. And I know we've talked about like a few episodes ago, reach campaigns and needing that, but I do think, I know you said it like there are brands that are significantly larger than we are that are on conversion only. And I talked to, you know, talked to somebody this week that shared a brand that they have access to who's probably spending five times what we are on meta conversion only. But the thing that they're doing that is the biggest difference is they're just being incredibly specific and intentional with their like Persona funnels and targeting and just scaling that as widely horizontally as they can to reach new audience. And so I think that that's where like to me that's the input. And again, I do think meta gets locked into the right one. But I also think if you're optimizing to get the most number of conversions and the input that you give it is not wildly diverse and going to appeal to these new audiences, like meta would actually be wrong to deliver to those audiences. It would have worse performance. So I think meta is right and I don't think it's not completely right, but I think I've been probably to a fault being like meta's wrong, meta's over delivering. Like we're doing all the right inputs and we just need to take a more media approach to it. And I really think we can probably scale a lot more on conversion only if we get the right inputs which are truly diverse, creative. And then I think it goes into. My next thing that I work on is like what does creative diversity mean? Like I. And how do we actually reach those audiences?

[Cody]

But okay, so, but, but before we hit that point, I would even say like, okay, so this idea of horizontal expansion I think is like a really interesting point because if, let's just say theoretically your goal is to spend as much money as possible as conversion optimized campaigns. Uh, yeah, the, the, the, the right strategy is not to just continue increasing budgets on the same ASC campaign. Like you have to be able to figure out how to expand horizontally. Ridge is done that via new products which is like maybe a stand in for Personas. Maybe there's a path. And honestly with us suspending into women wallet users and trying to get more into tech and trying to nail this like we call them everyday, dad, like we're trying to do horizontal demo expansion within our categories but also category expansion. So then you're getting all this horizontal expansion and then now you're creating all of those you're thinking of as like different inputs that are resulting in.

[Connor]

Oh for sure. I think that's like the biggest lever if you, if you were to do your like hierarchy of like creative diversity, like offer is probably your biggest lever.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

That's even been like again this is just like a meta focused episode. But like that's been one of my big learnings because a big initiative for us this year is a younger demo and I don't think marketing alone will do it. It's like duh. But I think I was overly naive about it and it's not going to happen with, with just Park. We launched our new product yesterday that like big one and we think that'll appeal to a younger audience. So we'll get a lot of data. We decided to not do any like upper funnel or any like specific age targeting on it and just creative and then we'll, we'll look at the data and see we have like a conversion lift running. We're actually running like a brand and you know, consideration lift on that as well to see. So I think we'll have a lot of different tests that we'll do and I think we'll have to align. I think really it's like what is more important. It's really offer media strategy and creative are all probably like the triangle of success. All of them are super important, you know. Right, yeah, no, no arguments for me on that.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. I just think I, I, I've kind of derailed the, the creative specific conversation here because I think this point is so crucial and the way that Meta operates and other ad platforms, you can say the exact same thing about Google or YouTube has shaped how D2C brands should be built. And I think there's just like a really wide scope with which you can view that. So anyway, yeah, sick point number three.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I think in general, just like, especially when you're like in your office and you're doing the same thing every day, it's very easy to just lose the focus and be very locked in on one thing. And when you make changes you feel like you're making a much bigger change, but it's very, it's still very similar. So one of the biggest things I've learned is like we think we need like a small change. Like here we really need like a 90 degree change. Like if we're trying to reach A new audience. It has to be like so much different. So like such a bigger swing than like what we perceive to be totally so. Same on the note, but the system will definitely find a local maxima of variant inputs are not given. Frequency will just balloon if you're just doing the same thing and trying to scale more, spend more. Once you hit like a tam. Do you agree with that?

[Cody]

The system will definitely find a local maxima if varied inputs are not given. Yeah, 100%. It's kind of like a sub point to the one that we were just discussing in that meta is. Or all the ad platforms are really good at finding one outcome. What is it? It's mostly incredible at finding a pretty good outcome. So if you. If you're not having any sort of horizontal expansion, then you're gonna. You're gonna reach that one, that one place for sure.

[Connor]

And then next one even is related to some of what we're saying. It may still find the local maxima if varied inputs are given, which is where you need creative and media strategy to align and offer strategy. But it has no chance of breaking out of it without the creative diversity.

[Cody]

Okay, so let's talk about this. And maybe I actually, I love that you use the local maxima.

[Connor]

I'm trying here. I'm trying.

[Cody]

Okay, so for those listening, I think we covered this on episode three. So it's been like 54, 55 episodes since we've talked about this. But I was a calculus tutor in high school, so this is like an extremely nerdy way to think about it. But you can imagine a graph, like some sort of. Yeah, a graph. And it's got like multiple different. It's a curvy graph and there's multiple different high points. And some of those high points are lower than others. Right. So the local maxima would be one of the lower high points. And the point being without diversity and sometimes without like aligning creative and media strategy, you can find yourself in one of those local maxima. And we find ourselves here a lot where it's like we have a certain system that we found to be pretty good and we are just like nailing that idea and we are sticking in the local maxima. And then it's like you need to be providing more diversity and more new interesting ideas to find a absolute maxima that's that highest point on the graph that like you otherwise won't find. So that is what. That is what Cody's adopted here.

[Connor]

I wasn't a chemistry tutor, so I would just say it's like the tallest midget. That's how I would describe it.

[Cody]

The tallest midget.

[Connor]

Yeah, perfect. But yeah. So, so, so again, I still think you can find that and you can kind of plateau with diverse creative because either the system just. I do think there's a chance the system and the algorithm can get locked into a certain audience or, you know, whatever it is. But I think you have no shot without the diverse creative. So before you go and try to force spend on reach campaigns or bid multipliers or target different ages, you know, make sure you have the creative to really support that and like give it its best shot.

[Cody]

Totally. So 100%. And I think this is an interesting one. You can give it diversity and it may still only find the local maxima. If creative and media strategy are not aligned. That is something you'd agree with.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

Can. Do you have examples of ways in which you can align creative and media strategy to maximize the chances that you're, you know, creating the most value from this set of inputs?

[Connor]

Yeah, that's a really good question. So we, we have a launch today. Yeah, Yesterday we had that launch tinted moisturizer. So it's like a Complexion product, but it's less. It's. We think it'll, it'll do a good job reaching younger people. And so, you know, we hypothesized like, should we run upper funnel for this? Cause I think in the past we've also been like, hey, we are rolling reaches down, our frequency is up. We need new people in our funnel. But it wasn't very specific. Who do we want to reach? What's the message we want to reach them with? And I think, you know, and, and I think this happens a lot. Like, oh, let's go do out of home. But it's like, what. Let's start with the message. Let's really start with like the business, the product and then the message and then the medium. Right. But I think right now we have the product that we want these people to know about. We know who we want to reach. We haven't done a good job reaching them in the past. We have the creative for it because we've been intentional. Right. So I think we have the offer, I think we have the message and creative that we want. And now we can go on a media strategy and be like, okay, we can't just go bottom a funnel. Like, if we just try to go conversion optimize, like meta isn't going to reach these younger audiences because they don't even know about us yet. And I have, you know, data that supports us. This is why we ran a brand lift test. It's a power lift test where it shows us, like, what's our aided and unaided recall of different age demographics, and it's significantly lower in those than others. So, like, maybe we have to go play a full funnel approach where we have to first reach them and then we can hit them with the conversion stuff. That's, that's, that's our theory. But I think to me that would be aligning, like, offer media and creative strategy together.

[Cody]

Right. Yeah, 100. And I think it's what we talk about literally all the time. That's why I like the notes so much, is like, you have, you have all these kind of different, like, hypotheses in terms of, like, just on the creative side. But then at the end of the day, if you're not properly taking that, you know, what did you just say? Offer and product and like, really structuring it away from a media perspective where you're going to extract that value, then it's all kind of wasted. So. Yeah, anyway, I like, I like the point so far because I think it encapsulates like, the entirety of running marketing at a DDC brand.

[Connor]

Yeah, it's, it's not, you know. Yeah, it's not different. I'm just trying to, like, get it out of my head. And it's like some of it is so obvious and sometimes you get like a really. You think it's a profound thought. And it's like, creative does the targeting, but, like, you have to for 20 hours and you're like, that's deep. Because, like, obviously, like, the systems behind that are, Are really powerful with AI. And then like, actually what that. What does that look like? And breaking it down, you know, like, the next one is also, like, is just what we're talking about. Scale happens from reaching new audiences, and reaching new audiences comes from creative that speaks to those audiences. Like, duh. Right? I'm like. But just trying to really just break it down. Think of how you do it. Right. I think hooks should very clearly call out and indicate who the creative is for.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally.

[Connor]

Just obvious, just painfully obvious in your face. Like, we're, we're working on like, busy mom funnels and stuff like that. But like, just like the, the. I gotta add this one. And I've thought about this. I didn't add it. The creative does the targeting, but also the creator does the targeting.

[Cody]

Okay, can you, can you expand on that one?

[Connor]

I think partnership ads are really underleveraged for reach and targeting. I think I just got a sneak peek. I think Meta's gonna talk about this at the, at the performance summit, but it seems like they're really investing in partnership ads and seeing, you know, success with it. And I think a. There's just the, you know, like attracts like. And if you want to reach young busy moms, partner with a bunch of young busy moms, you know, and have people be like, oh, that's me. I get them, you know, totally, I get them. But I also think there are audience targeting signals at the page level that if it's not just the piece of content in the creator, there's also some signals there from the page level that might help to give Meta some signal to kind of bust it past a certain, you know, plateau.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would totally agree with that. I mean like the, the creator's online profile is the ad unit itself. Like if you're running partnership ads from mommy blogger, you know, 1, 2, 3 or whatever. I'm clicking into her profile, I'm seeing what her day to day life is like and you have aligned with them in some way. Like my experience of your brand is like one with the, with the entire like presence of this woman. That's totally true. I think that that's probably, that's something I haven't thought all that we're doing more.

[Connor]

We're gonna, I'm just trying to figure out how to ramp it up and scale. So our top few ads right now, not our top, but like our number two ad in our account and then a few others, are partnership ads. We've had not a lot of success with them to be honest, prior till now and we've been very cheap and we've, we've worked with just like micro people. Um, and we have definitely had some success, I just think just not at the hit rate that we wanted. And we're having a much higher hit rate now because we're partnering with people that are a lot larger. And I don't think it's a one to one correlation to followers. Like I, that's just not the most important metric. I don't remember if you said this or if it was somebody else, but like if they got large because of the making good content, maybe there's more of a correlation there versus if they're just like a celeb. Oh, did you say that?

[Cody]

I don't think so. But like there's a, there's such a, there's such a large difference between a Celebrity versus a content creator. In my opinion, one like the, I think the best content creators, like, I mean it's really about community. It's like I'll use Philip DeFranco as an example. Philip DeFranco has been making YouTube videos for over a decade every single day. And people tune in and watch it every single day. And it's like, yeah, getting an endorsement from him means more than Zac Efron to at least those 1.2, 1.4 million people who are daily watchers. One interesting thing we've seen on the partnership side which kind of backs us up is if when we're sponsoring YouTube creators we'll look at their engagement on Instagram. And this is really not all that scientific, but there seems to be a correlation between if they have cross platform appeal that their YouTube ads will do better. Which is like, that might be a way to quantify that. It's like do you have people that care about you enough to follow you across platforms? If so, that audience is extremely bought in and therefore ad integrations will perform better.

[Connor]

That makes sense. No, that makes a ton of sense. And on that note of like Zac Efron versus you know, the, the more the, the, the niche creator, like that's that same horizontal scale mechanism. Like I don't think the scale comes from, you know, and maybe I'm wrong, maybe it does. But like Kim Kardashian and like putting you know, $1 million into a Kim Kardashian bed and just scaling that, I think it comes from, hey, let's work with 10 people across these different niches that we want to reach total and still big. Not, not a micro but like let's scale that horizontally and instead of trying to spend, you know, a million on paid media to Kim Kardashians as like more general, like let's go very like niche culture and like let's go and can we spend six figures a month on, on you know, this mommy creator and six figures a month on this fitness one and things like that. And like just that like really like horizontal scale mechanism is, is kind of what we're trying for 100%. So that's going to be a big bet of ours. Like I think we want to start spending like 50k a month just on like the creative behind these, trying to figure out how we're going to scale it because we have an influencer team. So we'll probably do. We're doing most of it with them. Not sure if we're, you know, but that's, that's probably what we're working on and I think will be a big bet because I'm, I'm pumped about the success we're seeing there already.

[Cody]

Yeah, awesome.

[D]

So North Beam just released this new attribution model called Clicks and Views Enhanced and I am really excited about it. I think it is really, really game changing for brands measuring the performance of view heavy channels like TikTok. So I want to explain first, what is the difference between this new model of attribution and Northbeam's other models of attribution? North Theme's other models of attribution are probabilistic and they're probabilistic because they're doing machine learning to make their best guess about where purchases, where revenue is coming from. What's different about this Clicks and Enhanced Views is that because they're working directly with the platform, it's now deterministic. They're actually able to connect a real impression to a real purchase. Which just means that ultimately this data is, is real data. It's not modeled data that has really serious implications. What it means is that now instead of only getting a 24 hour look on view based attribution, you now get just as long of windows that you're getting on clickspace. So now if you go into, if you go to Clicks and views, you'll notice that no matter how long you extend the Clickbase window in North Beam, that view based always stays at one day. When you now go into the Clicks and enhance views, you'll notice that whatever time window you're selecting is for Views and clicks. So now in TikTok you can actually measure a conversion 30, 60, 90 days from that impression, which again is really important for brands that have a lot of top of funnel happening through videos and really important for brands that have longer consideration periods where that conversion often is not going to happen within that first 24 hours of seeing that video. I was just looking at this last night. I was simply selecting the same period of time and clicking back and forth between the 90 day click one day view and the new enhanced Clicks and views window that has 90 day click 90 day view and the amount of attribution in ROAS increase and revenue increase that I saw was, was really, really insightful and I can't emphasize enough how important this is for channels that don't garner a click as much as a Facebook or Instagram ad or Google Ad and are a lot more video view heavy like TikTok. So right now the Clicks and views enhanced only covers TikTok and it's still in beta, but this attribution model is rolling out to other platforms very soon. If you want to check out the incredible results of the TikTok beta and just get more information on it in general, check out North Beam's landing page at northbeam IO clicks dash and dash views enhanced.

[Connor]

All right, Creative diversity needs to be defined. That's like, my next step is really trying to define creative diversity and like, what that looks like because the term gets thrown around so much.

[Cody]

Creative diversity needs to be defined. Yeah, I think creative diversity, I mean, it can become just kind of hand wavy at times. Um, and then, and then our experience has been like, creative diversity, we can produce it. Getting meta to spend dollars on it is hard. And then also finding diverse creative that actually performs better than you're like bau creative, whatever you want to call that is also extremely difficult. And I guess there are examples. It's actually maybe I'm like, I'm like steel manning my own argument here. But I guess one way to think about it is creative diversity will create excess. If you are producing diverse creative, you should be finding losers const instantly and just whittling away. So, like, yeah, this would. This kind of tracks for us. When I first started at Ridge, we ran one type of creative and it was like a static ad that was like a bulky wallet versus slim wallet comparison. We would do that like all day. And now it's like, okay, we've got four or five or six concepts that are like, tried and true that we're exploiting consistently in terms of reiterating with partners or via static ads or with, you know, some of our new colorways and things like that. And now we just have a toolbox of. It's not a ton. Like our diverse creative is like, not particularly diverse. But it's taken so much production and so much experimentation to even identify like three or four or five more concepts or formats or however you want to define that that we can kind of come back to.

[Connor]

Do you think it's worthwhile? Do you think it's effective? Like, do you see any signs of like, hey, we're reaching different audiences with, with these different things?

[Cody]

Well, I think it's for sure effective. I think it's necessary. Like, if we were still running static ads, it would be bad. Yeah, I think. I mean, look, this is the job of, of all marketers right now. But like, I think we could be doing it better. I think we should be finding more winners. We haven't seen a ton of success with partner ads. I'd like to be trying more whitelisting. We're going into Father's Day. I'm like, look, let's get seven or eight like really strong women content creators. Let's crush gift giving. Let's whitelist those ads. I'm like, that is something that theoretically should work. We should like that is, that is a win that we should be able to find. I think we just need to kind of chip away at it more.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I mean same same here that we, we got a ton of work to do. We're starting to see some wins, but got a ton of work to do. One of my hypotheses is that, you know, crit diversity should be tested with incrementality because I think part of it is like the system will go based on, you know, like a last click and if you're looking at like a North Beam or even like meta attribution and you know, it might be one of those things where we just need to in one campaign and let meta deliver it and we might, it might look like we're having, you know, worse performance, but it's probably reaching a new audience so it probably will be worse click attribution. So that is one of my thoughts that maybe has been holding us back as well.

[Cody]

You're absolutely right. And we see lots of examples of this. I, I'll get, I'll give two quickly. One is obviously I've talked a bit about our top of funnel optimization and it's like, oh yeah, that on a click basis is significantly worse. It's like 60, 70% worse than our conversion optimized click ROAS stuff. But we found it to be extremely incremental. So it's like, okay, great. We would not have, there was no Meta Ads Manager north beam. Like nothing was telling us that that was performing better other than a Geo lift study. So that's just an example of how there might be no data that points to this working, but that it actually is. Which is kind of a scary thought because it's like, do you have to test everything that you don't think is working? So that's, that's one. The second one that I would say is we've had a bunch of new colorways and those launches are typically like extremely successful from a click based ROAS perspective. And my concern was actually, hey, we're sending emails to like millions of people. We're sending a million SMS's. It's on our homepage. The audiences are so warm that like meta ads or Whatever else is just like kind of sweeping up on a bunch of demand that already exists. So I was concerned, I was like, I was like these, these results are so good I actually don't quite believe them. So we helped, did a, we did a study on that one that actually ended up also being extremely good which has been made my life much easier knowing we could scale behind some of the newness. But it just goes back to like whether it's new product launches, whether it's different optimization strategies top and bottom of funnel. You really have to be like measuring and defining what success looks like for each of those. And I think that goes down to creative strategy too. I would love to test, I would love to do a Geo Lift holdout for whitelisting ads because you might be totally right that even though those are 40% worse than our other conversion optimized campaigns, that they're actually twice as incremental. Because it is, it's just a different ad unit and a completely different customer we're acquiring.

[Connor]

No, I totally agree. That's been my thought lately. It's like if we believe and we have data, all of us that incrementality does not equal attribution on different objectives. Why isn't it like right like a purchase versus a view content or something like that? Why is it not? Why isn't that true amongst within a purchase objective as well? You know, just because it's totally subjective. Like you might get a point five Ross on a, you know, a whitelisting video and a one on a static but the whitelisting video could be way more incremental. But I know what we were doing is we would shut off that whitelisting video at the 0.5 because it didn't hit our success criteria. And I think, I think that that has been a huge mistake for us and that's something we're testing and we're going to continue to ramp up into.

[Cody]

Yeah, okay, so you say mistake but also I don't see any way around it given the data that we've had. I'd also, I also think, I mean because what's the alternative, right? You're just gonna. I guess, I guess the alternative is not being a data driven marketer and you're just like, you're just vibe, you're just marketing off vibes. You're like yo, I like, I like the creative. Like let's just promote that. And you, you could be correct. You have no data that tells you that you are except maybe that your business is, is growing.

[Connor]

Well it's, it's the same way like, like if, if you're running YouTube, right? If, if it's just what you're optimizing towards. I'm not saying go no data, I'm just saying maybe change the data source.

[Cody]

Oh yeah, no, no, no. Sorry. No, my point going forward, if you're measuring these things, you're totally right and you and I are on the same page. What you described, this was an example but like turning off the white listing ads because they're 20% worse than the BAU ads. You said that was a mistake. And my point was like, I just don't know what the alternative was a year ago for you guys. And same with us. If you're going to be a data driven marketer, if you're going to use data, you, you should probably listen to something. So, but you can't in this case look at Meta Ads Manager, you can't look at North Beam. You're not doing a geolift holdouts. You have nothing that points to those white listing ads having worked. So you have to turn it off or you're a, you're, you're just marketing off vibes.

[Connor]

That was my point and I think it's also probably a time and a place like that probably was the right strategy. Just a last click or North Beam approach is probably the right strategy for eight figure brands for our first $100 million a year, you know, and then you need kind of to pepper in other things and I think we've all done it pretty successfully with other channels and strategies that are less click based and top of funnel, whatever you want to call it. But I think even within kind of these middle bottom of funnel tactics strategies, the same principles might apply. But you're right, but it's not something I think you know, you need to be concerned about at the beginning.

[Cody]

Yeah. Oh yeah, you're totally right. Let me ask you this because this is another thing that like I find daunting at times. But what we just described is that there are just multiple dimensions that you should be measuring your marketing on. Whether that's platform, whether that's optimization, whether that's ad format, like video versus images, whether that's demo. Right. Whether or whether it's, whether it's. Yeah, whether it's demo. Like we, we might want to, we've got this like in the queue. We don't have it planned yet but like we should be measuring our women ads differently. Like why would we have the same click row as targets for women than we do Men. So you have demo. There's just an infinite amount of things that you'd want to be measuring on. So which do you prioritize?

[Connor]

It's so hard. It's like anyone who thinks they have like the answer or the, or the right thing because it's like there's so many variables and you know, I think we're both pretty successful brands on like we're up here like not even knowing what the answer is and there's so many different ways to look at it and we're not even talking about tariffs yet because that's another thing that's thrown into it. I feel like everybody's got to be different. So it depends. It's got to depend where you are at in your cycle. I think creative strategy is very important and probably what the creative strategy looks like for every brand is going to be different because we might be saying, hey, we need to do these things. We need to spend 50k a month on partnership ad creative or we need this high production quality stuff. Maybe you guys don't. Maybe you need to go the other direction. Maybe you need to invest more in statics or you just need to keep doing what you're doing and expand product offering. I think it depends. Which is a terrible answer.

[Cody]

Yeah, no, no, I, it, it, it, it obviously depends. And I'm, I'm almost just putting you on the spot trying to get an answer out of you. I think like me thinking through it a little bit more, we have chosen to expand the business via category expansion. So what we have prioritized is like channel and category. So like we're definitely we, and we never did this expect to hold our luggage ads to the same row as, as our wallet ads. They have different margin profiles, they have different buyer journeys. So like we are clearly like those are probably the two dimensions that we're measuring on the most and we're building out our understanding of performance around that. And then, and then there's almost like a, like a maturity curve where it's like for wallets when now we feel we truly need to be expanding demos. That's when I begin to think, okay, maybe we're, maybe we need to layer in some new dimensions within our wallet category to see does white listing or women's wallet users or you know, whatever else top of funnel, like all these things. Like we can actually get a little bit more nuanced from that perspective. So that's probably, that's probably a pretty good answer.

[Connor]

I agree. Quick question and then I want to move on to look at Maxima. Why do you say that new categories like women's wallets, like, why does that not need the same return?

[Cody]

It's not that it doesn't necessarily need the same return, it's just that it might be measured differently by a north beam or a meta. I'm like, those are just, they're way colder audiences. So the, the buying journey might be longer, it might be shorter. Like, I, I really, I really don't know. But it is just from what we've seen so far, it seems different enough that it would probably make sense to measure separately.

[Connor]

It makes sense. I agree with that. I agree. I think that next dollar spent is going to be, you know, less profitable than the last dollar and the, the new audience is going, know, harder to convert and will take longer. So yeah, totally agree with that. And my payback later even, yeah, 100%.

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[Connor]

All right, let's talk. I know you want to rant. I know you want to go off local maxima. Creative exploration versus exploitation. You want to just run with it.

[Cody]

Can I say one thing quickly? Have we moved off? I think we hit all. I don't know how many points are here, but we hit your whole dock pretty much.

[Connor]

I think one or two that just kind of passed, but I feel like we got the meat and potatoes of it. Any. Were there any other ones you wanted to touch on?

[Cody]

Well, yeah, actually, we'll backtrack quickly and then, and then I want to make it comments about the whole thing. There's a landing page one here that I think we skipped over. I'll read it. There should be as much cohesion between ad and landing page as possible without being overkill. I know you were asking Connor and I in text a couple days ago, where are you guys at with this?

[Connor]

Yeah, I don't know the answer. So I'm very curious, you know, how you guys think about it. I think in our industry there's a ton of talk about ad creative. There's some talk about landing pages. I don't think there's as much talk about like cohesive funnels. I love cohesive funnels where it's really offer ad landing page. You can even go media strategy into that where you see an ad about something and there's a few brands I think do this really well. But you see an ad about something, right? And it's a supplement for hair. I'll give you an example. Right. Because this is all public stuff. You can find an ad library. I think AG1 does it pretty well. Right. If you think about the value props of AG1, it can help a lot of different things. It can help energy bloating. It can reduce your other, you know, your, your Supplement stack. And so if you see an ad about shortening your supplement stack, you don't want to land on a landing page about bloating. Like, that just wouldn't make sense, I think.

[Cody]

And do they. So I'm unfamiliar with their. Their ad library, but do they have those funnels built out? So those are all kind of unified.

[Connor]

Like three or four kind of. You know, I don't think you want to go, like, overkill and crazy with it, but it seems like they have, like, probably their main value prop, so they have a bloating one. So any ad that's about bloating, does that they have. Shorten your, you know, routine, things like that? They have some. That's like talking about value as well. And then they might have a general one. I don't know. And so that's kind of the approach we're taking, like, trying to figure out what we consider a funnel. Like, when is it worth investing in? Because I don't think every ad you want to make a new landing page for, but I do think, you know, I think that's for us trying to get a little bit more strategic about who we're trying to reach and when is it worth to kind of build that funnel. But I think in the past, yeah, one of our, again, our limitations is we've been very general. Miracle Alma does all these things. It's versatile, shortens your tomb, trying to cram it all into one. And I think one of my points here is meta delivers personalization at scale, and that's really what the audience is doing. So I've been trying to take, let's say, Miracle Bomb and what are all the five value props, different Personas, and, like, even down to the shade level, even, like, different shades will give a different look and trying to just, like, much more volume by focusing on all of them. So don't try to spend a hundred thousand dollars a day on just one general ad. Try to spend, you know, $20,000 a day on five different ads that are totally each of those. So that's kind of the playbook. And trying to figure out when it's worthwhile to have a new landing page when it's not.

[Cody]

Yeah, I think it's. I'll tell you where we're at currently is we have kind of core landing pages. We don't do a lot of landing pages. I'll start with that. We've core landing pages for all our different categories. We have a separate landing page for women wallet users, so that looks significantly different. And then we have some more landing pages for. They're largely tied around different offers. But like, we'll have like something like a Smart wallet landing page where we're hitting on RFID blocking the air tag attachments, things like that. Like just little bit more like modern features versus the kind of the basic five reasons, which is 30 plus colors and styles, lifetime warranty.

[Connor]

That's a good example though, of like a different value prop funnel.

[Cody]

Yes, 100%. We don't have a lot of those. Like, literally we have Smart Wallet and then like may maybe a handful of others. But I think it. It probably aligns with what I talked about earlier, where at least our experience has been we create a. We have to generate a lot of creative diversity. We're testing all these new concepts and like, reasons to buy and reasons to believe. And really I don't feel we have many that we can then exploit. Like, it is just kind of a. It's probably less than 10, like reasons to buy. And for each of those, we probably have a landing page. We're not. And we're not running all of them all the time. But if we were to say, hey, what. What did we go as far as in building out a landing page for? It's like that. And then we're within those, those landing pages, we'll do a lot of iteration over time and we'll test copy and we'll test like web features and things like that. But it ends up being not even close. You can imagine. For each of those, let's say we have 10 concepts that we can fall back on for reasons to ridge. For each of those, we have hundreds of ads. So we probably have 10x more AD. No, we probably have a hundred times more ads. And we do landing pages, something like that. That's. And that's at least how we've approached it from how many. How many ads can, like, service a single landing page? And I think it's like a. I think it's like a massive difference.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I think it makes sense. And I don't know if there's a right or wrong. I think, I think that ties into your creative strategy. Well, and just your growth strategy, which is like category expansion. So that's where it makes total sense. And that's kind of what we've done. Like, we have one landing page for Miracle Bomb. We have one for what the foundation. We have one, you know, one for face pencil, one for mascara. Like, so all of our main things, all of our main offers we have. But I think now as we look to want to scale one offer or one thing, like, is it worth splitting that into a few? That's at least what we're testing. You know, I'm not entirely sure you know who does it this. So armor does it pretty well. The Colossum supplement.

[Cody]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I've seen a number of their badges.

[Connor]

Loop earplugs. They do it probably best in class because if you think the earbuds like, right. That can be used by, you know, by parents, that can be used by, you know, things like that.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

So they, they do it very well. But yeah, no, they're not. Like, it's not a one to one. I think, like, I don't know the number. I don't know if it's 20 ads. Like I would imagine they, they might have 10 ads per.100 ads per landing page. They just, I think have like a such a crazy amount of volume from what I've heard that like, like they have 10 different funnels and maybe you. The shitty thing is maybe you test 10 different funnels and only like five of them work.

[Cody]

Oh. Or like two. Yeah. You know, like, yeah, 100. And you know, I've also heard it all comes down to like, yeah, what, what dimensions do you care about? I guess and I, because I've heard other people are like, they're all about demo. And it's like it may, it might not even be value prop based. It might just be. This was a different headphone company, but they were like, yeah, look, we have the, we have the tech worker, the person who's like working at their computer and needs headphones. We have the athlete and then we had like some other one. And that's probably. Loop probably looks a bit like that. And it's like, okay, then you have these demos. Now your creative strategy is kind of also aligned around that same dimension. We're creating our athlete ads over here. They're going to go to the athlete landing page and that's where they create that cohesion. But I, I think personally I don't, I'm not a big. I, I don't. I think cohesion between ads and landing pages is often overrated because people will sometimes think of it more like aesthetically like, oh, we're showing like the ad looks like this, so the landing page should look like this. And it's like, oh, that is, that is. You are going to drive yourself crazy trying to align like aesthetics if cohesion can happen from a demo perspective. And that's actually a really nice one because it's loose enough where you can create so many ads and drive them to that page. And I think that will feel like a very cohesive experience for customers. And I think people just sometimes take that too far.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I agree. I think that's kind of why I asked. And what I'm trying to be conscious of is not going too far and being like, all right, we're going to make 10 landing pages, and, like, they're not even going to get any spend, and we're going to realize it doesn't perform any better, you know, and it's also a hard thing to test because, like, you're. You're inherent in the strategy is you're changing multiple variables. You can't run an A B test and be like, which landing page performs better amongst the same app. You're kind of being like, hey, I have these 10 new ads that are going to go to this new landing page. Like, and if that funnel works, was it because the ads. Was it because the landing page, like, I don't know, but maybe those ads would have performed just as well with the existing landing page.

[Cody]

100%. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I think that's a slippery slope for, like, matured brands as well, because you. You think more is more. You're like, look, we're hiring people. Like, we. We're producing more ads. We should be producing more landing pages. And you end up getting caught in this cycle of like, oh, yeah, we are just producing to produce, and we don't have an understanding of the incremental value that that creates.

[Connor]

Yeah, but, but. And then on the other side of it, though, you can create all these ads and be like, hey, we want to reach. I'm just gonna say moms again, right? And. And then you get to a page and you're like, this is why this is the best product. Just like, in general. Or like. Or like, let's not even say moms. Let's not say demos, but maybe value props, right? Let's say, you know, you want to do all these bloating ads and you're. You're create all these ads, work within an agency, produce all them. But then the one landing page you has have is about how it, like, shortens your supplement routine. Like.

[Cody]

Right.

[Connor]

I don't think that's a very good user experience.

[Cody]

100%.

[Connor]

It's also pretty easy to make. Like, you don't have to, like, design and develop a new page. Like, if you have the right template, like, you're just switching out an image and a Headline and maybe like spots of copy, but like a lot of it can stay the same.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. That's one of those things I wonder if we don't also see. So now I'm. Now I'm arguing a different point. We are. Are very conservative with the amount of landing pages that we produce and are driving to at any given time. But as we've talked about, it seems with the. The ability to create content at scale, you know, for something like Meta Andromeda, which we talked about on a previous episode, being able to reference 10x more ads than it used to. So it should be able to utilize more ads in your account and serve those to the right people. That. That doesn't also lead to. Yeah, we should probably have like 50 landing pages. Like if you told me three years from now, if you told me right now, three years from today, you'll have 50 landing pages that you're driving to because you have a thousand ads live in the account. I wouldn't think that that's crazy. But the way that those landing pages were developed also probably has to change. Like, I wonder if there's not also if Replo or Shogun or whatever doesn't build out some sort of like programmatic landing page builder that can just very quickly align with. With your different. The. The dimensions that your ad concepts are built on.

[Connor]

Oh, for sure. Even from like, like old, like local business days, like Google ppc, it's like, you know, you use an unbalanced page and you could do like dynamic keyword insertion. So if it's like totally plumber in, you know, this area. Right. It's the head. The headline Autumn on the land page automatically says plumber versus if they search for like toilet repair.

[Cody]

Right.

[Connor]

And that's the keyword they click on that gets inserted into the headline. So it could be as simple as that. Like based on a utm, which is probably something that can be done now.

[Cody]

Yeah. Yeah, I guess you're right. Maybe it's just something like highly dynamic landing pages. Yeah, I like it.

[Rory Sutherland]

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 Rich panel 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. We also, I love it, the features. 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. Given 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 CX 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, dashboards, 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]

All right, all right, we can talk about more. Yeah, but I want to, want to make sure we have some time for you.

[Cody]

I've got one more point. I've got one more point because I thought about this earlier. No, it's a quick one. I was so stoked when you sent over this list and I was like, and I, I said earlier, I was like, hey, so you must have been thinking about this for weeks sometime. Q2, I was like, you had to Start planning this. No, you said you did in 10 minutes this morning. So it reminded me that Lao Tzu supposedly wrote the Dao de Ching in one sitting. So one of the most. So this is, this is the, this is the Dao Te Ching of creative diversity. That's what I'd like to think.

[Connor]

I. Unfair praise, but I don't even know if this is any good. But yeah.

[Cody]

All right, cool. No, what do you want to hit?

[Connor]

Local maxima, exploration, exploitation.

[Cody]

This came up on the timeline this week. Yeah, so I talked earlier about local and absolute maxima and the kind of a nerdy example for like how successful we are with things that are known essentially. Like we have known inputs that we can kind of. That we can, we can create more content around and ensure that we are reaching some like outcome that we are relatively happy with. Finding the absolute maxima is. Is how are you approaching with new ideas in order to find a completely new spot on the graph that is higher than you are otherwise? Kind of working towards a better, like, more a nicer way to say that was Rory Sutherland on Rick Rubin. Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy. Like, what's his. His book's called Alchemy. Fantastic book. Just like incredibly interesting thinker. But he talked about this idea and he framed it as creative exploration versus exploitation. And that, that's, that's kind of how we've thought about creative internally at Ridge for like two years now, where creative exploitation is ideas that we know work. And I said earlier, we've got maybe five or six or seven kind of concepts or reasons to buy. And that could be smart wallets, that could be the bulky to slim concept. That could just be kind of the social validation of some sort of partner. We have ideas that we know work and we can exploit via additional content creation. And a lot of our workflows are built around exactly that. Another way that we do creative exploitation is our media buyers actually are analyzing the account and they're doing it by category and they're showing up with like, hey, this is what we're testing in the account. This is what's working based on that information. Like, let's make these iterations. Whether that's new hooks or new headlines or just the ongoing production of that content. Those are all examples of exploitation and how we've kind of built our teams and meetings and workflows around it. The flip side is what does creative exploration look like? And we go into these meetings and we say, hey, we are not. We really don't want to. This isn't the meeting where you say, hey, I've got an interesting idea for like a bulky Islam concept. This is, this is, these are net new ideas, crazier, more interesting stuff, larger swings that we want to try so that we can hopefully find new ideas that we can exploit that are at this like higher maximum. So anyway, so that is kind of the, that's kind of the broad strokes of how we've talked about it and those are the two concepts that we've done and how we've structured our workflows around it. What do you think?

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I, I like it. I, I think totally. Right. And it's very easy to get caught up in the exploitation and hey, let's, let's iterate, you know. And I think, yeah, you'll see people industry talk about how much we should iterate versus net new. But even a lot of the net new ends up feeling very iterative, if that makes sense. I don't know if you've seen that across like your business or, or others. Like it might be new footage and a new creator and a new brief, but it's like really more of the same.

[Cody]

Yes. Yeah, 100%. I mean it's really, I think it's a tricky thing to nail also. I think creative exploration is one of those things that. It's what I said, it's kind of what I said earlier. Like, I actually think as long as we're putting ourselves in the headspace of we would like net new ideas. So like that, that should be like rule number one. You're still going to come up with ideas that are like kind of iterative and maybe not as net new as possible, but as long as you're in that headspace, I, I do think it's ultimately just a volume game. You have to continue to have those conversations. You have to continue looking at examples from. We send, we send. More recently we've been sending a lot of organic social concepts. Like what's going viral on TikTok? Yeah, 100. So it's like we send a lot of other ads from different brands and different industries and that's super helpful. There's other ones. Like, oh, we, we did the one. I've talked about this before, but we. One of our ads during Q4 had the headline upside down. And there's a call, Jacob.com who's a famous injury attorney, Angeles, he had a billboard where it was just upside down. I'm like, oh, that's funny. I sent the photo. I'm like, we should try this and ad so that is. That is actually an example of, like, not being all that net new. It was a. It was ultimately like a holiday sale ad. But just this idea of, like, how are we taking inspiration from very different places? And if we do that at a high volume over long periods of time, we're at some point going to identify the seventh concept that becomes extremely valuable to us over the next year and a half or whatever.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I was going to ask where that comes from because I think a lot of creative sprints, creative strategy is really coming from iterations. We've been calling that horizontal scale scale. So, like, if we find something, I don't know if you just. But find something that works on one category or product, we're like, how can we apply this to our other products? If it works in Miracle Bomb, how can we apply it to the Hero Kit? You know, and it might just be the format, might be the messaging, right? If it's like, I don't want to wear foundation every day, like, all right, that works for Miracle Bomb. Can that work for this other kit or something? But it's. They end up looking very similar. But it's just a way to scale. One thing I've actually wanted to do so because again, with that horizontal scale is like, I want to hire a designer. And we're kind of in the process of working on it, who doesn't need to be fully briefed and can just like, almost get strategist slash designer. I can like, yeah, go in the library. And they would be remote. So a few thousand a month, go in the library, go in motion, see, like, what we've done, what's worked, and just like, all right, cool. Like, so, like, one thing that we've had work, and this is, I think, an example of this, like, iteration exploitation, like, product with the quote above it. Like, simplest ad you could ever think. Like, all right, if this does work, this can just be scaled so laterally. Obviously it takes a lot of focus and a lot of bandwidth, but it's like, all right, we know a quote with a value prop and then a picture of the product works. Let's just go and make as many possible variations of that. And again, by variations, I don't mean like, let's just change the background color. But, like, what are all the different value props? We can test across that to reach different audiences. But, like, to me, that's an example of something that's like, not net new. Maybe you're trying to reach some new audiences, but, like, just. Just trying to exploit the crap out of something that's working.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. And like, this goes back to the dimensions because there is a. Like, in that example, you're exploiting a format, but like, you could theoretically be exploring like very different actual, like value props and you could be appealing to extremely different users in that same format. And then it's like, oh, so that, that's one way to think about it. And then the other way to think about it is like, hey, I actually want to try to sell to women rock climbers or whatever. Like some. Someone we've never sold to before. That is exploration from a demo perspective. And then maybe we're. We're layering in or. No, actually I want to use a different example. We did, we were. I think we were one of the first brands to do the fake podcast ads. That is, that is okay. We're doing a wallet ad. They're talking about the general value props. But the, the exploration was in the format.

[Connor]

Yeah, there's so much more creativity required in exploration. Like, I feel like that's like traditional advertisement. Like you have to sit back and stare out a window and like spend some time deeply thinking about it. It's much more Right brain and exploitation. Like you said, it's driven by your media buyers even. It's much more analogous.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally.

[Connor]

You got to have a little bit of both.

[Cody]

You got to have a little bit of both. Is right brain the creative thinking side.

[Connor]

Yeah, I looked it up this morning before I tweeted just to make sure.

[Cody]

All right, good. Yeah, I've been saying that wrong for years. In that case. Got it. Got it. Right brain. Creative side. Cool.

[Connor]

I'm just gonna be honest about it. I'm not even gonna pretend. Yeah. Anything else you want to share on that?

[Cody]

No, no, I think that's. I think we covered it actually.

[Connor]

Yeah. So. And like, I don't know if you guys use like review data, you know, come up with ideas and stuff. I think, I think a lot of the creative strategy, a lot of like the research that people are doing, it's very. It's very exploitation based. You know what I mean? Like, if you're looking at your reviews and you're seeing, oh, what are people saying about it? Like, you're not really going to come up with that many net new ideas. Now granted, you might think find things that are maybe under explore. Maybe I don't want to use that word, but like, maybe under you're not doing a ton of. But it's probably still showing up in your marketing. And I think like, you Said if you want to reach, like, a completely new demo or something like that, like a rock climber, like, you kind of have to, like, just go off a hunch and go off some creativity, be like, hey, I think this is a person. Like, I think this is what they care about. There are research things that you can do to try to reach them, but it's not going to be looking at, like, your customer reviews or your, like, Facebook ad comments.

[Cody]

Yeah, look, I would, I totally agree with you. It is totally a spectrum. The way that we think about it, I would say. And I think this is, I like the phrase that you just said. Unexplored ideas that are like, those things exist. Like, people talk about reasons they bought the ridge in, in comments, in reviews that your team might have not explored. I think of that as creative exploration. I'd put that in the bucket of, like, this, this is, this is explorative enough that we're going to try it, because, yeah, if you're given the task of, like, truly, like, invention, that's extremely difficult, I think.

[Connor]

Sure.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

No, I, I, I agree with that. And I kind of stopped myself as I was saying it. But I think, like, if you're just looking at your reviews and you're like, all right, like, this is our top review, like, this is the main thing people are saying, let's make more ads around that. Like, that's, you're only going to get really more of the same thing.

[Cody]

Yeah. So one thing I'll say here quickly is I thought this is where you were going with it. Is even so, I would. People could define it however they want, but what you described, I would think of as creative exploration. But it is, It's. There's certain types of creative exploration that are very formulaic. There's a workflow for it. Hey, go and look at all of our ad comments. Go and look at all of our reviews. You know, go email a bunch of customers. We just did a bunch of surveys and, like, that's very interesting. And then we can analyze all that data. And I think so it's like, big pivot here. But that's what I think is really cool about what Motion is doing from a, A creative strategy perspective. They're like, hey, look, a lot of these tasks are like, if you can spell it out in an sop, we actually think we can build the workflows and automate a lot of that work. Where now my team, you could argue we could just do 40% more creative exploration because we're doing what we're currently doing. And then we'll be auto. Or we would automate some of our workflows with something like emotion. So we could be showing up to meetings and it's like, hey, we analyzed all your comments. We looked at all your reviews. Here are a couple ideas that you may not have explored. Based on what we're seeing in the ad account now, that would be super cool. And then my team can maybe spend time, like, you're saying, being more inventive. And now they have the headspace to do that. So that future is also super, super cool as we think about, like, what is truly going on under the hood here? What can be Automated? What is AI's role in that? And then in that scenario, where are humans spending their time? And maybe it is being, you know, more inventive, which is just, like I said, extremely difficult.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, I agree. I think you should take the motion I read today. We'll just build it right into that one.

[Cody]

Yeah, perfect. No, you just cut this. Cut this right out. It's great.

[Connor]

Awesome. All right, should we wrap?

[Cody]

Wrap Banger episode A good one.

[Connor]

Very good one. All right, that wraps up another emergency pod. If you're coming here expecting to hear about tariffs, I'm sorry, you're in the wrong place. Go to nine operators for that. But if you want to know what you can do to protect your margins by making better ad creative reach new audiences, obviously maybe less important with what's going on right now. You came to the right place. Hope you enjoyed it. It was a fun episode talking about ad creative, AI, creative strategy, everything behind it. Once again, we want to thank our sponsors, Motion Rich panel after Self Prescient and North Beam. And if you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend like and subscribe everywhere you can.