How We’re Iterating on Tentpole Campaigns & Structuring the Content Teams That Power Them

Summary

Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators
Episode: How We’re Iterating on Tentpole Campaigns & Structuring the Content Teams That Power Them
Release Date: August 5, 2025

---

Introduction and Weekly Updates

[00:00 - 02:33]
The episode kicks off with Connor and Cody discussing their current workloads and recent activities. Though Cody mentions being busy with a sweepstakes launch and onboarding a new VP of E-Commerce, the hosts set the stage for an in-depth conversation about their marketing strategies.

Cody: "I just feel like I had 180% of a work week so far. So that's where I'm at." [01:44]

---

Sweepstakes Campaigns: Strategies and Evolution

Launching a High-Stakes Sweepstakes
The primary focus of the episode revolves around the evolution of their sweepstakes campaigns. This year, they're elevating the stakes by offering a Lamborghini Huracan Stirrado alongside the existing high-value prizes.

Connor: "The sweepstakes were our top performing ads by a pretty solid margin." [00:02]

Cody: "We're giving away a Lamborghini Huracan Stirrado." [31:41]

Key Changes This Year:

1. Increased Prize Value: Transitioning from a gold-plated Tesla to a Lamborghini to attract a broader audience.

2. Multiple Winners: Introducing two winners instead of one to enhance excitement and participation.

   Cody: "Having two winners will make it more exciting." [31:49]

3. International Expansion: Extending the sweepstakes to Canada and the UK, thereby increasing their market reach.

   Cody: "We're making it international, so it'll be available in Canada and the UK." [35:34]

4. Strategic Content Integration: Leveraging high-profile partnerships and integrating sweepstakes into various content channels to maximize engagement.

Operational Insights:

Cody shares past experiences, highlighting the operational challenges of managing multiple prizes and the logistics involved in auctioning off unclaimed prizes.

Cody: "Last year... he [the winner] took the cash, so we had to auction off the Cybertruck." [34:26]

---

Structuring the Content Teams for Optimal Production

Building an Internal Content Production Function
Both hosts emphasize the importance of internalizing content production to enhance speed and volume. They discuss the benefits of having a dedicated studio and a specialized team to streamline content creation.

Connor: "I think the next big unlock for brands is building out their content production function internally." [21:42]

Cody: "Our performance creative manager... now more like full-fledged production of performance assets." [16:20]

Team Structure:

• Creative Director: Leads brand content and oversees high-level creative strategies.

• Performance Creative Manager: Focuses on performance-oriented content, including ad-specific production.

• External Contractors: Work closely with the internal team to maintain consistency and efficiency.

Cody: "We've got a similar structure here in Salt Lake. Creative director... part-time stylist... it's remote." [24:20]

Advantages:

• Consistency: Working with the same external teams fosters better collaboration and understanding.

• Flexibility: The internal team can quickly pivot and adapt to new content requirements without relying heavily on external agencies.

---

Leveraging AI and Tools for Enhanced Marketing

AI for Creative Strategy Optimization
The discussion shifts to the utilization of AI tools like Motion’s AI creative strategist, which analyze ad performance and provide actionable insights.

Cody: "Motion's AI agents... can analyze your creative using real data from your meta ad account." [05:16]

Connor: "It's saving our team tons of time... you can try these agents for free." [06:30]

Benefits:

• Efficiency: AI tools streamline the critique and improvement process for ad creatives.

• Actionable Insights: Provides next steps based on data-driven analysis, enhancing overall ad performance.

Prescient for Incrementality Testing
Both hosts advocate for incrementality testing using platforms like Prescient to allocate marketing budgets more effectively.

Connor: "House is built for marketers. The science under the hood is rigorous, but the platform itself is simple." [28:15]

Cody: "Prescient can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful." [29:50]

Key Takeaways:

• Granular Insights: Understand the true impact of various marketing channels beyond traditional attribution.

• Strategic Budget Allocation: Make informed decisions on where to scale or cut back based on scientific data.

---

Optimizing Ad Campaigns and Engagement Metrics

Balancing Performance and Engagement
Connor and Cody delve into optimizing sweepstakes campaigns not just for direct conversions but also for engagement metrics like shares and comments, which can drive viral growth.

Connor: "A sweepstakes is a viral campaign... why would you only optimize for return on ad spend?" [53:42]

Cody: "Sometimes it's not about reaching net new people. It's about finding a new message or angle that gets someone to click." [51:22]

Strategies Discussed:

1. Dual Campaign Approach: Running both purchase-optimized and view-content-optimized campaigns to balance high-intent traffic with broader engagement.

2. Interactive CTAs: Encouraging actions like commenting to enter the sweepstakes, thereby increasing ad engagement and brand visibility.

   Cody: "We'll have an automation set up with Rich Panel where they'll get sent a link to actually sign up." [56:11]

3. Content Repurposing: Utilizing influencer-generated content across multiple channels to maximize reach and performance.

---

Sweepstakes Mechanics and Audience Engagement

Offering Choices to Enhance Participation
Cody and Connor discuss the mechanics of their sweepstakes, particularly the decision to offer multiple prize options to cater to diverse participant preferences.

Offering Cash vs. Experience:

• Pros of Cash: Broadens appeal by attracting participants who prefer monetary rewards, increasing overall participation.

• Pros of Experience: Captures compelling content for future marketing efforts, enhancing brand storytelling.

  Cody: "I would offer the cash, for sure. That's where I would land on that." [64:40]

Operational Management:

Managing prize distribution and ensuring that unclaimed prizes are effectively utilized to maintain campaign integrity.

Cody: "We always have to decide that. This year, we have two winners... we'll see." [34:21]

---

Future Plans and Continuous Improvement

Scaling Content Production
Both hosts express plans to further internalize and scale their content production capabilities, anticipating the need for dedicated studios and additional hires to support growing campaign demands.

Cody: "A year and a half from now, we've got a dedicated studio in LA just set up for video production." [22:38]

Connor: "We have a pretty senior level producer who plans the shoots... it's a well-oiled machine." [23:50]

---

Conclusion

The episode wraps up with a reflection on the importance of balancing operational efficiency, creative strategy, and audience engagement to drive successful marketing campaigns. Connor and Cody emphasize the value of internalizing content production, leveraging AI tools for optimization, and continuously iterating on campaign mechanics to meet evolving market demands.

Connor: "That's a wrap on episode 70... make sure to subscribe, like, comment, and share." [79:14]

---

Notable Quotes:

• Cody: "Our team is like super built out and it's basically like we have a single content team that lives under brand." [21:42]

• Connor: "If you can figure it out, you're way more efficient, you can get way more done." [21:42]

• Cody: "What I really want to be reporting on is just engagement metrics, share rates, comment rates." [51:22]

• Connor: "A sweepstakes is a viral campaign... why would you only optimize for return on ad spend?" [53:42]

---

This episode provides valuable insights into managing high-stakes marketing campaigns, structuring content teams for efficiency, and leveraging technology to optimize performance and engagement. Whether you're looking to refine your sweepstakes strategies or build a robust content production framework, Connor and Cody's experiences offer actionable takeaways for marketing operators aiming to scale and innovate.

Transcript

[Connor]

No Cody today, sadly, but we got the Conners here.

[Cody]

We're going to talk about sweepstakes a bit today.

[Connor]

The sweepstakes were our top performing ads by a pretty solid margin.

[Cody]

Ridge has done five sweepstakes. We started doing these in August because like we really don't have much going.

[Connor]

On in Q3 at a certain point. The next big unlock for brands is building out their content production function internally. What is the giveaway this year? Yeah, what are the major changes like from that you're making this year that is different from last year?

[Cody]

We're giving away a.

[Connor]

All right, we're back for another episode of the Marketing operators podcast, episode 71. No Cody today, sadly, but we got the Connors here. Connor, how's it going?

[Cody]

Dude's going good. I'll vent quickly.

[Connor]

Yeah, let's hear it.

[Cody]

No, well, we're gonna talk about sweepstakes a bit today. We've got our sweepstakes Launching Friday. Tomorrow, August 1st. Right now it's Thursday, July 31st. And this week I had. Okay, so part of it self induced. The last episode or two episodes ago I was in Reno because I was on my way to Tahoe. So last week got some, got some leisure in. But the by the byproduct of that is I got less work done. So like already kind of starting the week at a deficit and, and then what I had this week we started, I mentioned this many episodes ago but we hired a new E Comm leader. VP of E Comm. Started on Tuesday. So you know how much work goes into the onboarding there. So like that was a ton of work. We've got sweepstakes launching Friday. There's a ton of stuff to do that is, knock on wood, largely done. And we were shooting with Marquez Brownlee yesterday in LA. So like I just feel like I had 180% of a work week so far. So that's where I'm at.

[Connor]

Yeah, like, and then let's drop in some podcasts.

[Cody]

Drop in some podcasts. Yeah, we've had to do some rescheduling this week. We had another one tomorrow. Yeah, we're keeping things interesting for sure.

[Connor]

Yeah, we're, we're, we're putting the, we're definitely pushing the pedal to the floor.

[Cody]

Totally, totally.

[Connor]

How was Tahoe? Was it fun? You, you guys all made it back in one piece?

[Cody]

We made it back in one piece. Yeah. We did some wake surfing. Have you done that?

[Connor]

I have done that, yeah.

[Cody]

So we picked that up pretty well. We had a problem. We rented a boat this is my first time doing it. We rented a boat, like, with a driver.

[Connor]

Oh, okay.

[Cody]

And that was really cool because he had, like, some tips and stuff. Not everybody had done it before, so it was a really good learning experience. And then, you know, the trick to those things is actually the Dr. Driving up the boat. Like, how fast you accelerate really makes a difference how quickly you can pull yourself off.

[Connor]

You're not going that fast.

[Cody]

No. You're going 11 miles an hour. So, like, it's funny when you're. When you're on the. The wakeboard, it feels like you're flying and then you, like, see some other boat doing it and they're just, like, kind of chugging along and it's like. Doesn't look really all that impressive from a distance.

[Connor]

So who was able to get in the. Like, I've. I've wake surfed a few times. I'm not great at it. Like, I don't know if I could, like, sit there and just, like, let the wake kind of pull you along. You know, people throw in the rope. Totally. So was anyone. Were you or Sean or anyone else? Were you getting there? Were you throwing in the rope?

[Cody]

We've got a. So I was unable to. It was my first. It was my second time going and. And I really wanted to be able to drop the rope. I was unable to. Which, you know, I was really close.

[Connor]

You just gotta find that, like, it's like. There's like a groove in the wake that you kind of gotta find. Right. And then you're kind of like working it with your legs to stay in it.

[Cody]

Well, you know what I. My realization was we go with another buddy who works at an agency, a crowd equity funding, like, performance marketing agency. And he crushes. So he drops a rope and he's just, like, chilling in the wake. And he'll do it for, like, many minutes at a time. And he looks so casual doing it. And. And so while I was doing, I was like, oh, I just gotta, like, find the pocket where you can, like, you're sitting. But that's really not the case. Like, what I didn't properly appreciate is he's doing a lot of little micro adjustments to, like, stay in the way.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And that's just. I never. I never quite found that groove.

[Connor]

Sweet. Well, glad you had a good trip. Good luck with the. With the busy work week. All right, so we got a fun episode today. We're not only talking about Connor's wake surfing capabilities in Lake Tahoe. We're going to talk about content Production operations. We're talking about sweepstakes, we're talking about the merits of doing lead generation campaigns today. Really fun. Before we get into that, thank you to the sponsors, Motion Rich Panel House, Prescient and After Cell. And if you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe, like comment and share with all your marketing friends.

[Cody]

Sam, I want to talk quickly about Motion's AI creative strategist. These AI agents are built by best in class DTC marketers including Barry Hot, Jess Bachman, Marella Crespi, Alex Cooper and many others. And what's unique is that you get to use agents to analyze your creative using real data from your meta ad account. Connor, have you played around with these at all?

[Connor]

Oh yeah, absolutely. Our team's deep in there.

[Cody]

I wanted to pull up too. So for those listening, we'll, we'll talk through it quickly. One, I think the implementation beautiful. You could see our top performing ad creative. Last week what I pulled up was Jess's critique this ads messaging played that progress ran took maybe two minutes and then this is what we got. And I thought it was great. The good fast paced messaging, clean product demonstration, smart focus on MagSafe, what we can push. And I thought this was, this was funny. You know me as a marketer, I'm very precious about our ad creator. But he's like Apple's must have accessory is presumptuous and lacks credibility. The smartest wallet you'll ever own is empty superlative marketing speak. I'm like, okay, Jess. He definitely, he's definitely roasting the ad. And what I thought was really cool were some of the next steps. He says reframe around the actual problem. This solves the daily friction of wallet phone management. So the AI has generated what this ad is about and actually reframed what the problem could be. And I thought that was really powerful. 2. I ran Motion's Trek this month's winning themes and you see exactly what we're talking about all the time. Durability that lasts a lifetime. Ditching the bulk for minimalist design. Lifetime offers create urgency and cultural partnerships that expand appeal. And I'm like, yeah, look, you basically get what we're trying to do as an advertising business. I think this is really helpful for creative strategy and giving the team actionable insights that we can work on every day.

[Connor]

Yeah, this is saving our team tons of time. Motion's also giving teams an AI adoption cheat code. It's not like they're just throwing this new technology at you and saying go figure it out. And they are really giving teams what they need to utilize this and get the most value out of this. And last but not least, you do not need a motion contract to use this. You can try these agents for free, test them out, see how they fit into your workflows and start getting value out of them without even needing a motion contract. So if you want to try out some of these AI agents, go try them@motion app.com. i'm excited to see. What were you shooting with Marquez? Are you able to share anything on that?

[Cody]

Yeah, so he came out. I can't share. It worked out really perfect because we hadn't been able to get him with the, the cars that we're giving away in the sweepstakes. But last minute he's shooting with a very big celebrity for their new show out here in la. So like last minute they were like, hey, we'll be in LA for. We have a three hour window. Do you guys want to shoot with the Cars in la? And I was like, yeah, perfect. So I flew out for that. So we hired a like a contract. Videographer came in. Our performance creative guy was there. We mostly shot social, native kind of performance oriented stuff.

[Connor]

Nice.

[Cody]

And it was great. It was one of those. It was like from a production perspective, easy. Like there was in total me, performance creative manager, videographer Marquez and then one guy from his team. So it was like five people in total. We shot for two hours. We just like super productive. And what I was, what I was telling the rest of the team was I think we got very functional content.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

It was scripted in a way that's modular. We can cut it down. We've got it for our different categories. So just like highly productive. We're not going to win any con awards or whatever for advertising, but. But I think we'll get some good Facebook ads out of it.

[Connor]

What are you when you're going to like you specifically when you're going to those shoots, like, what's your role at them? Like, how much, how much directing are you doing versus your. You said it was your VP of Performance Creative. Like are they really kind of running the show or what's that look like?

[Cody]

Performance creative manager. The answer is it's all across the board. Like, we did our hero video sweepstakes shoot here in Utah. We have a creative director. We hired a producer. We hired who was considered the director who's like a videographer. There's like a little bit of a team. I went to that shoot, barely did anything. I was like, I was there for like moral support, basically. Fantastic. Like the. This is the best position to be in.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

The Yesterday. Yesterday was a little bit different because it was so on the fly. And also the original plan was to have our founder Daniel there with Marquez. We were going to do some founder ads plus Marquez. It was going to crush last minute Daniel. Daniel can't come now. So now like the plans shifted like three or four different times and our performance creative manager who'd prepped a lot of like the scripts and kind of like what we wanted to shoot and the, you know, objectives of the, the few hours that we had, we had to pivot a lot at the last minute. So we worked most of the morning and then really my role was just to kind of like guide everybody through a little bit. I've worked with Marquez a number of times now so like getting him on board with what we were doing. We made sure they had launch all just like coordinating the day. I was like way more involved than I typically am, but held it down.

[Connor]

Nice. Nice. Yeah, I asked because I was just. I've like our content team has, has gotten built out a bunch in the last really three years and it's just like such a different world than a marketing team and like the day to day operations. Like you, I go to some of these shoots that we do and we're shooting like you know, four or five days a week. So when I'm in la, I'll go and just stop by and see what they're doing. And a lot of time it is for pay. At other times it's not. But I'm just always blown away by like the level of production, the different people doing different things and you know, we're. There's like you know, three people cooking food and a videographer, a photographer, like a. It's just like it's. Our head of content's done a really nice job building that out. It's been fun to watch. So I'm curious to like dig into it more with other people.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. No, and it sounds like a fantastic resource. The other thing is it's been extremely valuable being on a number of shoots over the last two years. So just seeing different. Whether it's our creative director direct or you know, we've worked with a handful of different agencies over the last couple years and seeing the full process of concept to script, to pre planning, to production, to post is then all of a sudden if like yesterday I need to like create a semblance of that over like a 48 hour period. Like we can kind of get that done.

[Connor]

Yeah, I think the, the, there's a much stronger appreciation at least in like going from you know, not. I mean hexcloud's like the first brand I've been at where like we internalize production for the most part.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

It gives you like a whole additional layer of appreciation for the con, the content flywheel. When like all the net new production you're doing is also in that flywheel. It's just like such a big layer, a big like variable to throw into the mix outside of just like you know, producing ads with creators where you're not actually doing or, or like simple shoots. Like when you're shooting all your own stuff. It's just the flywheels. Like if you can figure it out, you're way more efficient, you can get way more done. But it's like it's, it adds a lot of complexity. I mean there's a lot of moving parts to that, to that like process.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. It's interesting. So to talk about content a little bit further, we're in a pretty nice groove right now where we're basically only producing video content in two ways. Actually. I would call this like we still do and I've talked about this quite a bit. Like the briefing to external creators is how we're creating a lot of our like UGC more doctor type stuff. But we've gotten to the point where we need like a little bit more thought through and produced concepts and that comes from one here in Utah when we need to do like hero video stuff. I mentioned the sweepstakes. We did the same thing for. We expanded our travel line in April. We're shooting at a rodeo on Saturday so I'm going to that too for, for a launch in October.

[Connor]

When?

[Cody]

Saturday.

[Connor]

Nice. You got your cowboy hat out.

[Cody]

Yeah, I gotta, I gotta find some good boots, a belt, you know, the whole thing. But so we, the, the team that we have in Utah is external. Technically we hire the external producer, the videographer. But we've used the same team now like three or four times. So we're like, we're like gelling and everybody loves working together and you spend five days shooting, you know, for the sweepstakes out in the desert. It's like, it's pretty, pretty good bonding experience. So that's one. And that leads to like really fantastic content. I've been really excited about that. And then the other one is our performance creative manager in la. We have a separate videographer. Way leaner production. It's just him, camera A couple mics, whatever. Like that's as far as like generating the content. That's the only person doing it. And then sometimes we'll throw in one creator and like they went down to Comic Con on Saturday with the sweepstakes cars to shoot content with. I'm disclosing a lot of information here, but we also have a Pac man collaboration coming out.

[Connor]

Nice.

[Cody]

So on Saturday they were at Comic Con with the cars with the Pac man mascot. And that is just like a completely different type of shoot. Way more social, native, doctor focused, short form, vertical video style. And we just have a kind of a lean, tactical team that can do that now in more iPhone. It's not on an iPhone, it's shot on a dslr. But a lot of time we're shooting it vertical and I've just found that to be really valuable and that team's like super scrappy and can. They could travel around and get down to LA and Comic Con, that whole thing. The San Diego shoot will have cost probably $1200 in total between like gas and the videographer and the creator. So yeah, anyway, we're like, we're finding, knock on wood, a nice little groove in terms of content production.

[Connor]

So. So your internal content lead, not just on, so that like that it's paid media creative managers. Is that the title? Performance creative manager's creative manager. And that's like your internal like content production lead. Are they also doing production for like brand marketing type things or is it purely performance?

[Cody]

Like it's really purely performance. And then like the, the quote unquote, like brand stuff like we're preparing for. We launched phone cases this year, relaunched phone cases. So the iPhone 17 launch in September will be a big period for us. And our like hero video for that, which I would consider more like brand content. The creative director leads.

[Connor]

Okay. Okay.

[Cody]

So you do have a.

[Connor]

So you have a creative director and.

[Cody]

A performance creative manager.

[Connor]

Oh, I see. Got it. So and. And both of these people are like content product content production is like one of their leading skill sets.

[Cody]

Kind of what I will also say because this is also interesting. Our performance creative manager has been around for probably almost four years. Maybe four years.

[Connor]

Is that who was at the, the meta Summit? It was, it was Jimmy and Chris. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

Chris was at the Meta summit.

[Connor]

Chris with the cool, with the cool Ridge shirt.

[Cody]

Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the, so the thing that's interesting and kind of our development, our development of the role which might be helpful for other brands to, to hear or emulate is when. When our performance creative manager came on board, he was exclusively taking existing assets. We didn't produce any new content and he'd brief that into editors. And we did that for like the first almost year, probably maybe nine months. Is like we didn't need a single piece of new content. We could just get a lot of value out of like re editing it in like more performance oriented ways. Then you get to the point where we're briefing out concepts to creators. So that's almost like a async remote form of content development, but you have less control, which has pros and cons to it. Sometimes you just get great stuff from creators, but it's also limiting in many ways in terms of the type of productions that you could do. And then now he's kind of developed into more like full fledged production of performance assets.

[Connor]

Got it. Okay. And did you say you guys do have a studio?

[Cody]

We have a. Yeah, we have a photography studio here in Salt Lake, but we don't have any dedicated space for shooting performance creative.

[Connor]

Got it. Okay. I keep hearing the same things from people lately. I'm being asked to do more with less. I have big goals to hit, but my budget is tight and every marketing dollar needs to work harder. I know I'm hearing this at Hexclad. I'm sure a lot of operators are hearing this at their brands. Super relevant right now. Incrementality testing is the way to figure out what's actually moving the needle so you can move around your ad spend in a way that's backed by science. All three of us use House for incrementality testing. We all love it. And House is now working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands, which is pretty insane. I can speak personally for Hexclad. The amount of insights that we've gotten, especially on our view based channels and how those are driving impacts and efficiency and revenue for our business is not only super valuable, but only possible through House. You know, channels like Connected TV, YouTube, TikTok, these very view based channels that don't garner a click the same way that Facebook and Google does have been really only measurable through Geo incrementality holdout testing. And the actionable next steps from these tests in terms of deciding to scale up or down or keep spending where it's at is is really amazing. House helps you run experiments on your channel so you can confidently answer the questions you've always wondered about. Things like what channels are actually driving my business, how much should I be spending on each Channel. What's the impact of my ads on Amazon or retail sales? How should I structure my Meta and Google accounts to make sure they're spending dollars in the right way? The beauty of House is that it's built for marketers. The science under the hood is rigorous, but the platform itself is simple. So you pick a question, launch a test in minutes and get real results fast. Every customer is paired with a measurement strategist, someone who understands growth and brings a clear strategic point of view. They will get to know your business, help you build a roadmap of impactful tests and guide you as you operationalize incremental mentality in your day to day. Even if you're brand new to testing, you're not doing it alone. It is very much no, in no way like a go sign up for the platform and figure it out on your own. You have a partner in these customer success reps from House who's been in your shoes. And now more than ever, you need to make every marketing dollar count up. Level your measurement with House by going to house I.O. forward slash operators, that's H A U S I.O. operators and start allocating your budget with confidence. Yeah, that was like such an unlock for us when we probably, I don't know, a year and a half ago, got our own studio that's five, ten minute walk from our new office in la. Like that, that was kind of the constraint that we were thinking about when we really built the team out Internally starting in 2023 is like kind of a big broad constraint. But like how can we, how can we just like make it low friction to shoot whatever we want? Well, we need our own studio. It's got to be close by and then we need the team to do it. So now our team is like super built out and it's basically like we have a single content team that lives under brand. So like our head of content and then the team's built out under him. That's all on the brand side and then the studios right there. It's just like the, the amount of friction to actually shoot some of these concepts has just become so low and I think that's like the, I realize that's the bar we're trying to go for is like you don't want to have a good idea and then think this be so hard to produce, like let's just scrap it. It's like you want, you want to, if you can minimize that, that like it's just an unlock on all the things that you want to do, you can actually start to do these things and, and it's not that hard. Once you build out the team like it, it becomes practical to do it. So it's just been like. That's why I was curious because of the evolution at hexclad in the last three years have been really interesting to watch and it sounds like you guys have also had a, like a, an evolution over time that's just made it more and more practical for you to shoot. Like really anything you need to shoot.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. And for us it is. And, and then I have a question for you on this because we still have to strike the balance between like, how are we producing content for new colorways and products versus like how do we, you know, generate net new ideas and concepts and angles for like the core gray, black and you know, blue bridgewater silhouette. What percentage of your video ad creative is coming from the in house studio at this point?

[Connor]

I mean if you exclude like anything that's creator led. Right. Like we're briefing in a brand ambassador and they're shooting on their own time. All of it really well.

[Cody]

So I'm not including that though. I mean like just the. What you guys shoot in the studio.

[Connor]

Yeah, I mean that's, that's everything. Everything we're shooting now is coming from our internal team.

[Cody]

Okay, cool.

[Connor]

And not that we won't like, you know, like for example, like we work with the same photographer over and over again. Like she is not an employee of hexclad, but like she's probably giving, I would guess half of her working hours to hex. Totally. Because we're shooting so often, so kind of the same as you were. Like we've found certain contractors that like really are an extension of our internal team. It's like I, I say this often, but I think like at a certain point the next big unlock for brands is building out their content production function internally. Because there's like so much more speed, so much more volume.

[Cody]

Yeah, I would agree with that. I'm thinking through it. It's, it's a, like, I mean it's just a maturity thing, I think like I was just speaking to. This is a nine figure brand. I was talking to a woman who does the performance creative there and like they were just hiring their first overseas editor and it's like, oh yeah, like, I mean there's a lot of these brands are just in very like nascent stages. It just depends on what you need to focus on at what point in the growth of the company. Right. So yeah, I do think it's like, yeah, you all, you're always oscillating between internalizing and externalizing different resources. And I think you are at the phase or Hexclyde is over the last year of internalizing a lot and we're at like some sort of in between. I could totally see a year and a half from now. We've got a dedicated studio in LA just set up for video production that we're just like cranking stuff out, you know, two, three, four days a weekend. But we haven't quite hit that point. For better or worse.

[Connor]

Yeah. Do you think, do you think you would need to hire like if you were to, if you were to really go all in and be like, all right, we're getting our own studio. We're going to be shooting in it three to four, five days a week. Like we're going to shoot in it so much that we probably don't even need to rent it out. Like, do you think you would have to hire like a senior content leader, like a production leader? Yeah. Okay.

[Cody]

Yeah, I'd have to think through that. There's nobody currently on the team that would just begin managing that. Like it's some sort of at least one net new hire. Okay, so because I was thinking about this a bit more over the weekend because again, I'm super excited with the Comic Con shoot. There was another example. Same, same team, performance creative manager, videographer, contractor, creator, shot on Friday. I'm like, this is a great little tactical team. And I'm like, what would that look like if we had. I guess you would need all those people. Right. So we need on staff videographer basically or someone like the woman you described who's going to spend 20, 30 hours a week just on Ridge stuff. We'd probably want some sort of dedicated space. Our performance creative manager couldn't just begin producing, so we'd probably need an equivalent to him that would just run the, the this like studio.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, we have like, yeah, we have like a pretty senior level producer who like just plans the shoots, like make sure the shot lists are like she is the person actually doing like the, you know, not hands on keyboard, but the equivalent basically of like making sure the shoot goes exactly how we want it to go. And then our head of content is like, she reports into him. Yeah, totally. Our director of design reports into him and it's like a very well oiled machine. But that's basically become our, our stack.

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. We have, we have a similar structure here in Salt Lake. Creative director. You want to Remain high leverage. They can't be at the studio every day, like directing, lighting and things like that. So we have a part time stylist who's probably the closest to the woman that you just described. He's like making sure that we are checking all the boxes that we need to. And he's like. Because the other thing is we're remote, right? So like some people are spread out. We've got some of the project management done by a team member in Ecuador, creative director in Salt Lake. We've got the. Or he's in, he's in Heber. Um, and then we've got the studio in Salt Lake. So it's just like we gotta piece all these things together. Um, the stylus is big and him just being there in person is valuable. The last thing that I'll say and then we could talk about sweepstakes is I've also been. What I've been thinking about over the last couple days is taking more of like a creator first approach. I think what you just described is like. And what I just described, what we have in Salt Lake is more of a typical studio team and function. And it's like, oh, does that look any different for social native content where it's like, oh yeah, would I hire like a head of content from Conde Nast or would I hire someone who's got 300,000 YouTube subscribers? And it's just like. And is a little bit more like in tune with all the steps because they've been doing it themselves for a couple of years. And I think like, at least initially I'd be more interested in building out that function and developing more of that social first stuff.

[Connor]

Yeah, that's an interesting, yeah, interesting way to think about it. I've, at least in our situation I found that like this whole content team is, does not come from like a doctor paid social Facebook ad background, but like they're, they're coming from a background where they're actually shooting like a lot more involved productions. Right. Like longer form videos, like bigger sets, more people, just a lot. So I think it's like I've been working now with, you know, our head of content. He's been, he started Hexcloud full time like a month or two after me and that whole team has just like, they've learned like what, what a good Facebook ad looks like, what does it mean to be direct response? Like what are all the technical specs? So I, they've, they've been able to like learn really well. So I think I don't think everyone would, but at least in my experience, it's like they had that really deep production, you know, script writing, all the things, background, and they've been able to learn, like, how to make a good Facebook ad or a good YouTube.

[Cody]

Totally. You know what's funny is I think the history of hexclad. When I first met the team, most of the marketing was done by their video team. Like, they. They had a good. They had a good, like, studio team that would produce content. And then they were doing, like, the search, media buying and the. And like, they were. They were doing everything. And then. And then Hex had reversed and they were like, okay, we're going to get really good at performance. And then now you guys going backwards and now internalizing, like, the original function that. That hex was good at.

[Connor]

Yeah. Yeah. So we had a. Yeah. To go back real quick. Like, we had a single agency that was doing all of our production. And then in 2022, we're like, no, let's actually hire a bunch of agencies that are more specialized. And that's when, like, they hired Homestead and some other agencies and Van Group. And, And. And now, yeah, we're. And then that took us to a really good spot. And now we're like, all right, how do we get another 20 out of that? Well, we gotta, you know, we gotta internalize it and, and get even more efficient. So, yeah, it's been interesting. And that's why I always say, like, I love agencies, but especially when you're growing fast, like, you're. You can outgrow them really quickly. And like, you. You kind of hit that diminishing return point a lot of time. Not always. And we've worked with, like, amazing agencies that have provided insane value. But, yeah, we kind of hit that point with our content where it's, like, cool. We. We kind of were doing this with that single agency. And then we steep in the curve again in our, like, growth as we, like, specialized and now. And then we kind of flattened out. And now we're, like, steepening that improvement again by having some of these functions. More internal.

[Cody]

Dude. And then there will be a time where you guys decide to outsource stuff again for sure. Like, it is just a totally. The circle of life.

[Connor]

Yep, exactly. Foreign.

[C]

We're about halfway done through the year. H1 is almost over. We're prepping for the second half of the year. We're also prepping for Q4, which is huge for us. And our budgets are going to be the highest then. And when our Budgets are the highest. We're going to need the most granularity and the most confidence knowing where we should spend our dollars. And that's why we turned to Prescient. Prussian is an MMM. Again, most MMMs, they use 60 year old regression models. They're not really built for DTC. Prescient, you can get readouts really quickly if something is changing, which again, DTC is really volatile so you can't rely on an outdated M that you're only gonna get one read out a quarter. One thing I love about Prescient so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend, which again is huge. We love to fill the funnel prior to a peak moment prior to Q4 holiday, something like that. We're really able to see the halo effect that has. Because sometimes you're not gonna see great attribution from YouTube campaign or from TV campaigns. Well, prescient plugs into all them and it can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful for us to understand and actually have confidence to invest in some of these upper funnel channels that are harder to measure with other ways. So I love Prescient. I can't tell you all the technical stuff behind it, but I can tell you it gives me and my team more confidence, know where we should put our budget, especially in some of these pesky upper funnel channels that are much harder to measure. And again, don't wait till Q4. It's going to be too late then. We're halfway through the year, but we've really got to all lock in for the rest of the year for Q4. There's a reason we use it. Hexclad, Hollow socks, coterie and 100 more leading brands so highly recommend checking it out. Go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo today.

[Cody]

Sweet. So you want to talk sweepstakes?

[Connor]

Yeah, let's talk sweeps. All right. So hexcloud, we're building out our second sweepstakes right now. Launches in a little bit. I always joke that we run our sweepstakes to kind of create like a new tent pole moment in what's historically a slow time for us. Or at least slow ish. That kind of post Labor Day pre BFCM, aside from Prime Day 2 is kind of like just a slower period before we have our big moment. The real reason we run our sweepstakes when we do is so we can see what Ridge is doing and then just piggyback off of all the net new functionality that Revo is building for Ridge and then just roll it out as well. And now Connor and his team do all the heavy lifting and I'm like, hey, hey, Stuart. Hey, James from Revo. What net new functionality is Ridge working on this year? And does that make sense for us? And they're like, you know, then Stuart, you know, who's the most like, founder mode guy you'll meet, kind of runs through all the things they're doing and then. And then we end up rolling it out. So it's worked out well so far. At least last year it did. But yeah. I wanted to ask about your sweepstakes. So you said it launches on Friday.

[Cody]

Tomorrow.

[Connor]

Yeah, tomorrow. Exciting. And I guess I have two questions. First off, what is the giveaway this year? And then. Well, I have more than two questions, but start off with two. And then what are. What are like, the major changes? Because this is your fifth. Fifth year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fifth year. So, like, yeah, what are the major changes like, from that you're making this year that is different from last year? And then any, any context do you have around, like, why you're making those changes? Like, if it was just like a gut feel thing to make the experience better or if you actually have, you know, data points from last year, we're like, hey, I think we could improve this KPI and this tactical change is geared towards improving that KPI. Yeah. What you got going on?

[Cody]

Yeah, totally. So one, we're giving away a Lamborghini Huracan Stirrado.

[Connor]

Oh, my. You guys are leveling up the car this year. You went from the gold plate of Tesla to the. To the Lambo.

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah. So we did the 24 karat gold cyber truck last year. We knew we wanted to raise the stakes. One of the things that threw us off this year is it took us a while to land on, like, the actual concept for a second. We were for pretty late, like until into April. We thought we were going to do three Corvettes and have more winners. Ended up pivoting last minute. So the, the. The sweepstakes this year is. Oh, I'll hit a couple things. One actually, let me give quick context. Ridge has done five sweepstakes. We started doing these in August because, like, we really don't have much going on in Q3. Q2 is great for Father's Day. Q4 holiday sale. We do an anniversary sale in Q1. We had no, like, tent pole moment for Q3. And that's why we started building out these sweepstakes. They've Gotten bigger every year. We gave away kind of a souped up Jeep. Then we brought on Hennessy Performance, which is a Houston automotive automotive house. We bought some cars from them. We partnered with them pretty deeply. We did that for three years. And then this year we're not directly partnering with Hennessy, although we are giving away one of their trucks. So. So the, the premise of the sweepstakes here is you'll get. The winner will get the choice between a Huracan Serato, a Hennessy Velociraptor, which we wrapped with this like Miami bright Miami blue with flames on the side. So the creative looks absurd orange Lamborghini flame wrapped Hennessy Velociraptor or a hundred thousand dollars. A couple of the other changes we will have two winners. So there will be like an initial winner who will choose between the three and then a second winner will choose between the remaining two options. We think having two winners will be like, will make it more exciting.

[Connor]

So what do you do with the third car then?

[Cody]

Well, so it's two cars in the $100,000 and every year we have to decide that, right? Like last year, last year it was a gold cyber truck, a Hennessey Velociraptor or $100,000 cash. The guy took the cash so we had to. We ended up auctioning off the cyber truck and then we did something else with the, the Hennessey Velociraptor. So like you just always, the year before the woman took the truck and we got to keep the cash. And that was great because there was no option at the time. So we always kind of have to work through that. This year we have two winners. So the, the second winner will select between the remaining options. We'll see. Odds are someone takes a Lamborghini, then someone takes the cash and we still have the truck and we gotta resell it.

[Connor]

Whose responsibility is it to auction off the. The cold plated cybertruck? We.

[Cody]

Yeah. So last year, last year was like an incredibly like. And this actually will be one of my things that we've made adjustments to this year. We had a really like YouTube centric strategy last year. There's a guy here in Utah, Jerry Rig everything. 10 million plus subscribers. He Gold plated the cyber truck and then we got the, and then we got the cars in like a bunch of YouTubers videos. I think we got it in probably 15 different videos. Which like when you're talking about moving two trucks around is like I was very happy with, with the scale of that. So Just had this very, like, YouTube native feel to it the entire campaign. So at the end, we auctioned it off with. On Doug demuro's Cars and Bid. So Doug Demiro is another car youtuber. He launched a auction site called Cars and Bids. We did it there. All the proceeds went to Jerry Rig. Everything's nonprofit. He builds wheelchairs. So that's what we did last year. And it was cool. And it was like, just like a very, you know, fitting ending to the. To the campaign. So.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

All right, so this year we've got the two cars, we got a hundred thousand dollars, we've got two winners. We're making it international, so it'll be available in Canada and the uk.

[Connor]

Oh, and is. Is it all part of the same, all same campaign? Okay, that's interesting. And so you have. Because you have different websites, like different instances. Right. So will it just be like the same web build out across.

[Cody]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Okay.

[Cody]

And that's probably like the biggest lift, frankly, is like every. What we do with Revo in the US we have to do in Canada and the UK all the same rules. We hadn't been doing SMS internationally, so we got set up on. On postscript for the UK and Canada. Like, we just building all this redundancy across all the funnels in order to offer the sweepstakes everywhere, but will be like the easiest win ever. Like, all of a sudden, I think we're going to get really significant growth in those markets because we've never had sweepstakes here before. It's always been a US exclusive thing.

[Connor]

That's a great idea and I love that they're all. Because we thought about doing that last year. I was like, there's no way we're going to build this thing from scratch and then also roll it out in every single market. Like, that just seemed not very practical. And then we're not doing it internationally this year, but like, that we do want to in the future. But I didn't think about doing it all. I figured it would all be their own. Like, all right, here's the UK sweeps, here's the EU sweeps, here's the US sweeps. But they're actually all going for the same price, right? Oh, nice.

[Cody]

Yeah. And there are a few differences. Like, we're not going to ship the truck to the uk so you would get the cash equivalent. Like there's, there's like some different conditions in each market, but by and large, same creative, same campaign.

[Connor]

That's awesome.

[Cody]

Okay, so that's. That's like the premise is Simply just bigger. And that's led to like a lot of different execution. Some of the technical stuff, which I'd love to get your read on partnership content I mentioned last year we got in probably 15 videos and I might be underselling it, it might have been a few more. We spent a lot of time and energy like shipping these trucks around. What we found the previous year was that if we can get the trucks in the videos, they perform like twice as good. And I was like, okay, cool. This is like an amazing arbitrage opportunity. Yeah, let's spend a bunch of time shipping these things around and getting these like deeply integrated ad reads. What we found though was it was a lot of time and energy and there's almost this quadrant between like size of the channel and so like therefore potential impact of the ad read and then quality of the content and the two or the couple. The quadrant that we want to avoid is small scale. So small impact and uninspiring content. And we did that. We had a handful of those us here, which I'm like, we should just, we should not do those anymore. Now I'm totally fine. We're working with the two small, smaller creators. This guy, Connor Goldner here in Salt Lake does like these cool. He takes, he does car photography while people are driving around and then he prints them out in his car and then, and then he frames it and then he hands it to people without ever stopping the cars. It's like, it's a very fun video concept. He does well with like Instagram Reels and TikTok, but not super impactful but great content. So I'm like, okay, yeah, that fits into a quadrant that I'm really comfortable with. There's another guy, Moises, who does like on the street content who really won't drive that many views, but the content will be really good and we'll be able to utilize that. And it's like awesome. Happy with that low scale but creative concept. And then the flip side is I'm happy to get large creators with less inspiring content. Like if they just want to do an ad read in front of the cars, like fantastic, no big deal. We know that it will perform well and it will be impactful because they've got millions of subscribers. And then obviously the ideal quadrant is like large creators with inspiring content. And that was kind of like Jerry Rigg gold plating. The cybertruck last year was like fantastic. We have a couple like that. Probably not as good frankly, but like just some really thoughtful stuff that I'm That I'm excited about. So that was one where.

[Connor]

And were these like paid? Were these. So it sounds like you were. You're engaging with YouTubers of a variety of subscriber levels, engagement, you know, average video views. They're doing an ad read with the car. Yep. In it. And they're just, they're basically hyping up the sweepstake. You know, just your kind of your typical ad all about the sweepstakes. Are you then leveraging that in paid or is it like a pure organic influencer play?

[Cody]

Well, yeah. So good question. We get rights to all the content. So re. Reusing the content is a big part of the strategy. As soon as it comes in, we try to get it early. That was this year we shot earlier with the creators than we ever have before. So we have a lot of the content already. So once it goes live starting tomorrow, and a lot of it will go live in the first couple days, we already have access to, to all those assets and have cut it into our own ads. And if you look at our best performance from last year, it's all, it's largely like these montages of like creators doing different things with the cars.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

So. So that's a key part of the strategy. Some of them theoretically could just be pure influencer plays. Like the Jerry rig everything spot will like, that'll just be a great buy. Like that will perform in and of itself. The stuff like Connor Goldner on the other end. The only reason we're doing it is because it's great content that we will be able to repurpose.

[Connor]

Yep, yep. Got it then. Yeah. The reason I asked because we didn't do like our, our top two ads last year where we had this like menu concept where we actually designed a, A, a physical asset that looks like a menu and it just had like everything included in the sweepstakes on a menu. So that was our top performing asset. Which is really interesting because like there's no product in it. There was no visuals of the experience. It was just this, like this like fine dining menu design with the, with the experience. And then the, the next best was like the Gordon hero explainer that we did social cut downs of. So this year that's like one of the big changes we're trying to make is like let's get more, let's get better briefs into the hands of our brand ambassadors. Let's, you know, we have monthly, you know, organic post requirements with those deals. So it's like let's have, let's have those Organic posts. Be more of an ad read for the sweepstakes and then let's get all that raw content ahead of time. And totally, I think we can get a lot more, a lot more legs out of it. So we didn't. Gordon was like really the only like influencer led creative we had last year. So we're trying to, we're trying to beef that part up and have like more montages, more like single videos of all of our brand ambassadors kind of hyping up this campaign.

[Cody]

Yeah. And honestly I think that will be like a really easy win. These things are. There's. It's such a rich story, especially compared to like one of the reasons we do the sweepstakes is because we're otherwise mostly just talking about like sales. Right. We have some cool product launches now, so it's changed a bit. Five years ago we were basically just talking about being on sale and it was like this was a cool time to change that up and talk about some cool off roading trucks instead. But that sort of rich story just lends itself really well to, to stuff like partnership ads like Gordon talking about it or you know, you'll get the, the Real Housewife.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, Bethany.

[Cody]

Bethany. Yeah, you'll get Bethany on there talking about it. And like people just eat that up. Like it is inherently better content than what brands are typically talking about. So I think that just works better for partnerships. And we get the benefit of the very visual aspect of like Marquez Brownlee in front of a Lamborghini.

[Connor]

Right? Yeah, because that was the piece we. I guess you guys have the, you guys have the, the benefit that your giveaway is like a thing. It's a very visual thing. But then you have the con of like operationally we're trying to get 20 creators to shoot with the same thing. So we figure out how the hell we're going to get this gold plated cybertruck to all these different creators. We had the opposite problem where like the, the it's like an experience. So we don't have like a pan or a thing to hold in our hand or put in the frame. So we had to like do just a little bit added work of like, well let's. We got to source B roll like from some of these free like places, some of these accounts we signed up for. And then we actually ended up reaching out like to the restaurant group to get B roll of like Bishop's Gate and in RGR and all those things. So that's, that's the other thing we'll we'll need to figure out is there's not going to be anything for the influencer to necessarily show. It's probably just gonna be like self recorded them hitting on all the points and then we need to go and because we're doing. I won't give away all the, all the tea, but we're basically giving away another experience to a different city this year. And that's like something we strategically decided on because we think that if we can have this like constant theme year over year over year over year of like Gordon's golden ticket too, that it can become something that people look forward to. And it just like totally. There's a lot of like staying power in that. But every year then we're gonna have to go and figure out, well, like what's the visual representation of like these restaurants or this place that you're staying or this specific experience that's unique to that city. It's just like we have to go source that raw content versus having like, hey, we're giving, we're giving away like you know, these kitchen appliances that are worth a hundred thousand dollars and like here's a video of them. It's just like a different. It kind of made us switch gears a little bit where we're so used to shooting with like a physical thing as the hero of these videos. It's like, well that's not the case anymore. It's like it's been like a fun like kind of creative exercise and how we, how we explain that. But I was, yeah, I was curious how you guys have handled that because that's like something different we're trying to do this year to like just really beef up that, that content pillar and that was.

[Cody]

Yeah. So I think you guys are on a similar path to us where like we found two years ago, two years ago is the first time we got the cars in the videos and it was like easy win. And then last year we were like full blown, let's get the cars in as many videos as possible. And then this year it's like somewhere in between where we're like, let's get it more thoughtfully into the videos. Yeah, so that's a big one. The other thing for me, which is like a little bit less of a discussion point, more just like obvious. But what I said earlier about these like rich stories being ideal for partnership ads, I also think that's just as true of like YouTube in stream and linear TV. So last year we were very Facebook dependent or short form vertical video dependent. Like we typically are Because I think that's where we found the most performance. And now we have this, like, we have something interesting to say. So let's produce the content, we get the great creator stuff. We have the cool hero video. Let's make sure we're making the most of YouTube in stream and. And linear TV. That's another big one for us. It's just like, just simple channel expansion.

[Connor]

Oh, interesting. So are you shooting. Are you shooting these things, like some of these videos that, you know, you're gonna want to use content in a variety of channels that have different, you know, spec requirements? Are you shooting, like, will you shoot the same thing vertically and. And landscape and then.

[Cody]

Yeah, we shot a lot of stuff landscape knowing that we'd have to cut it down, but like prioritizing. I wouldn't even call it prioritizing because frankly it will look totally fine when cut down to 4 by 5 or 9 by 16. But we've shot a lot of like the quot quote hero stuff landscape first. So we at least have the option of being in those linear TV, you know, YouTube in stream, we at least run ads at our landscape, stuff like that. Ctv.

[Connor]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[C]

If you know me, you know how cheap I am and how much I love saving money. This year is all about cutting costs and staying lean. You've seen me talk about it on Twitter. I cannot stand watching great DTC brands, even mediocre ones, get ripped off by SaaS vendors in 2025. So many of them are charging way too much, promising and underd delivering. And so I can't stand to see it. So I don't want to see it to happen to you. I absolutely won't have it happening to me. You've also seen that I'm all in on AI. And both those reasons are why I love Rich Panel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before. And it was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to Rich Panel right before Black Friday last year, and I almost regret not switching sooner. We had zero downside. The implic implementation was pretty immediate, which actually shocked me. I was a little worried about it, not going to lie, but it just went off without a hitch. We saved money. We leveled up our CX at the same time. So here's our numbers. We cut our CCX team from 18 to 10 agents. Not before Black Friday, but since onboarding to Rich panel, with our order volume staying the same or even going up, our CSAT has stayed rock solid at 4.2 out of 5. I'd like it a little bit better, but that's, that's stuff that we can do. AI is handling 70% of the tickets, which is awesome. So our ticket to order ratio has gone way down from about 40% to 14%. So we have fewer full timers. Our revenue employee has gone up. We don't need as many people to get back to people and able to be a little bit more strategic with where we allocate our resources. So if your current CF CX software needs more people, is more expensive than you want to pay, and has some janky AI solution, I highly recommend that you check out Rich Panel. Rich panel guarantees a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back again. It's super easy to switch. They take care of data migration, staff training, all that good stuff. So you can go live in under 14 days. So check out richpanel.com and tell them you heard about them from the marketing operators podcast.

[Connor]

I'm glad you brought that up because one question I had for you. What we saw in our data last year was that it the sweepstakes were our top performing ads by, by a, by a pretty solid margin. If you just look at like all sweepstakes ads compared to all non sale evergreen ads during that time period and even just the account as a whole, including sales ads, the sweepstakes outperform pretty much on, on any metric you look at what you know, starting with the performance metrics, return on ad spend but then backing up to like click through rate. And it was also like a really good acquisition play for us. We had like 85% net new visit rate and mainly first time orders coming into these ads which is great. We were converting people. But what we found retroactively is that it actually wasn't, it wasn't a new to brand play for us. Like if you look at our rolling reach during the sweepstakes it was pretty low. So while it was getting people to visit our site for the first time and to convert for the first time, these people had already known about our brand. It was like kind of that middle bottom of funnel like final offer that pushed them over the edge and got them to purchase which is great. Like that's, that's awesome. But in retrospect we're like if we also think this could be a really amazing way for someone to be introduced to Hexclad and like this, this is a great discovery touch point we think. So this year we're going to like do some things in our ad accounts to, to make sure that happens. Right. Like we've, we've since tested into some non purchase conversion stuff that is a lot more top of funnel. So how do you guys think about that? Like are you thinking about how do we reach people for the very first time with this campaign? And like do you have any tactics on the ad buying side that you can share of like how you think about that?

[Cody]

Yeah. So to your first point because I really like that one. Some people like and we do it on this podcast where we'll talk about like rolling reach in like this, you know, the seeming necessity to like be reaching net new people when in reality a lot of times you just need to show people who have seen your ads before new stuff that they actually want to click on. And I, I, I think it was just Cody and I a couple weeks ago but I talked about, we ran this Joe Rogan ad a while back. Super high percent new visits, super high converting. And I was like, oh, we must be reaching a new audience. That's like what you would assume. And it wasn't the case at all. From like a rolling reach perspective. And you could do it. I did it all the way down to the ad level. We didn't reach any new people. Everybody had seen our ads over the last like year basically.

[Connor]

Did you guys get plugged on Rogan?

[Cody]

He has talked a number of times about using Ridge Wallet.

[Connor]

Oh cool. And you, and you paid to, paid for the use?

[Cody]

Yeah, something like that.

[Connor]

Yeah. Nice. I didn't know that.

[Cody]

Yeah, so we did that. Oh yeah. Just an example of like new content. I'll give you another example. We're seeing a ton of success right now running pen ads. So like you pens are like we'll do a couple million dollars in pens this year. Like but nobody ever thinks about them. And then, and then at some point the team was like, yeah. Oh. Our international agency was like we'll try pens. And I was like all right, whatever. And ultimately it is not reaching net new people but it is a new thing that people are interested in. We're getting a really high click through rate, low CPCs. Only half the products being bought are actually pens.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

So it was like a lot of people are coming through and finally buying a wallet.

[Connor]

So.

[Cody]

And it's like oh yeah. Like a lot of the time it's not about reaching net new people. It's about finding some sort of like new message or new angle that like actually get someone to click. So sweepstakes definitely does that doesn't necessarily need to reach new people. But we will get people who are familiar with us to click through and buy for the first time because they want a Lamborghini. That's like, that will happen naturally and that's happened every year. You and I are on the same page. This will be our first year running the view content optimized campaigns, which I think will naturally benefit from sweepstakes. As we get out in front of new people, there's just so much more of a reason to buy and something inherently more interesting going on. I think those campaigns will benefit. We've got that baked into the plan. Channel expansion is a piece of debt. Linear tv, you're not optimizing for purchases either. I'm like, let's just get in front of people, make sure people know YouTube similarly. And then the last one, which is like kind of a subset of of my previous points. But like, I was also telling the team what I really want to be reporting on is just engagement metrics, share rates, comment rates, things like that. Like, I have zero issue spending 2 to 3% of the budget on stuff that is just getting great engagement. We're not even planning to verify that via house. Like, that would be the most scientific way to do it. But like, right now it's like, hey, we've got something great to say if people are engaging with a particular piece of content. Let's just make sure we're showing that to more people. And I think all that will lead to just more brand awareness around this campaign and hopefully lead to better growth.

[Connor]

Yeah, that's really helpful. Yeah, we're going to. We're definitely making sure we're reaching new people better this year. I also like the note about, you know, kind of turning your performance marketing blinders off a little bit and like just tracking the engagement metrics and making decisions based on that. Because at the end of the day, like a sweepstakes is a viral campaign or at least has the potential to be a viral campaign if it's executed well. So why would you only optimize for, you know, return on ad spend or whatever your performance metrics are. Like, if you're not, it's not going to have as good of a chance of going viral if you're not optimizing for just awareness Net new impressions, shares, likes, comments.

[Cody]

Totally.

[Connor]

So you're doing a little bit of both.

[Cody]

Doing a little bit of both. Yeah, for sure. And there's even. Because we have some great organic, like, organic concepts like that are just like some of the, like Beatty stuff, like the One I saw the other day, like the video starts vertically and then it prompts you to, to, to flip your phone. Like you know you've seen stuff like that and, and then you flip the phone and it like the video becomes higher quality and you're like zooming in on these, on the two cars like driving through the desert with like dust flying back. She's like, looks sick and it's like are people gonna click that and then convert on a one day click basis? No, but it's like yeah. Would I feel really comfortable if that's the ad we feel is getting great engagement, just putting more dollars behind it for sure. Especially if it's a small amount.

[Connor]

Yeah, that's awesome.

[Cody]

One other point, there may be something you guys will use but we're also gonna play with the like comment. We're, we're gonna have two flows set up. One you can comment sweeps to get invited or sorry to, to sign up for free entries so you can comment sweeps. And then we have an automation set up with rich panel where they'll get sent a link to actually sign up. So like super easy engagement hack and a lot of people do this. We were looking at like goalie just crushes like large scale UGC like clipping campaigns. It's a big thing that they do is like it'll comment goalie and get 10 off or whatever. They do it with a platform called ManyChat. We just kind of hacked it together with rich panel and then similar idea but commenting Lambo or truck and it's like. And that'll be fun for people to actually participate in like what. Which one would they choose? And then that will feed the automation. We'll get people signed up and like that's the sort of thing like I wouldn't, I won't be surprised if we've got a piece of content in 6 weeks that has like 20000 comments on it or something.

[Connor]

And what's the, what are the mechanics of that? So are you running that content as a paid ad?

[Cody]

We would run that as a. That's the sort of thing like, that's the sort of thing that I don't think will perform from a typical doctor you know, click based ROAS perspective but could be getting the engagement that warrants us spending more dollars on it.

[Connor]

Yeah. So, so what's the like how are you, what's the like technical slash tactical way that you'll set that up? Like will that, will that ad be run under a purchase conversion campaign?

[Cody]

Yeah, good question. No, it will Be run. It'll be a part of our like, view content campaign. And I guess, and honestly, like a lot of these things, I think this, I don't know, there are certain, certain types of campaigns where it feels like this is the case more than others. Like, rather than going in with like, here's the plan, it's almost like going into the campaign and saying, here's what we need to be looking at.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And then we'll adjust from there. Right. So like tomorrow we're going live with view content optimized campaigns and purchase optimized campaigns. We will look at probably all of that first on a roas perspective and then we'll punch down to say, hey, what's getting great engagement? Do we leave it running? Do we break it out into its own campaign? Are we doing something different with it? Do we. I don't like the idea of optimizing for engagement because I think that's the sort of thing like Facebook will just get you that and it literally like won't be anything more. So like we'll, we'll do a similar thing as review content campaigns. We'll probably optimize for some other event while measuring, you know, share rate and stuff like that.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah. And that's why I was asking because I feel like in that I think the easy thing to do is like, oh, we want someone to take this action. Let's optimize for that. But in reality, like, you want the, you want people with intent to do that thing. So like, for example, like in the past even we'll run campaigns where we're not actually trying to get a purchase, but we are still optimizing for a purchase event because we know that is what's going to give us the, you know, most high intent audience. And now we can do the same thing with view Content because we validated that that actually does reach a relevant audience. So, so how's. So they. This ads in a view content campaign, there's like a CTA that's like comment to enter. Yep. They comment like Ridge sweepstakes or whatever. Do they then get like a dm? Like, what's the. What is it? What are the mechanics?

[Cody]

They'll get a dm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how it works.

[Connor]

And then does that DM take them to your website where they opt in or can they actually like opt in right from the, from the dms?

[Cody]

No, they'll. They'll be DM to link to sign up on the website.

[Connor]

Got it. Okay. So it's just like A streamline flow for them to get to the website.

[Cody]

Exactly.

[Connor]

And and then also get engagement on the actual ad creative itself versus just clicking through the ad to go to the.

[Cody]

And we'll see because I think we've talked about this before too. Two years ago we entered this with like does. Does optimizing for leads make sense? And at the time it like just never really penciled like we could drive our cost per lead down but it was pretty low intent. It was extremely low intent lead so like nobody would convert and like it just didn't make sense. I think the benefit of now what we didn't try at the time was this like comment in order to get entered.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Because I think that engagement will actually benefit the creative and like we'll serve more impressions that way.

[Connor]

100 yeah 100. I think that's really smart. Yeah. Because we, we were running pretty much I think all actually purchase conversion campaigns. Maybe we did some awareness stuff. I can't remember but if we did it wasn't much but it was purchase conversion campaigns. Going to our landing page. You couldn't actually buy on the landing page. You were one click away from being on a collection page that you could then. But like so anyways. Yeah that's. I was just curious technically how you're setting it up.

[Cody]

If you run a D2C brand and you're still throwing all your budget at Meta and Google, it might be time to add a smarter, more profitable channel to the mix. Let's talk about Rock ads. Rock Dads put your brands directly on the checkout pages of premium e commerce sites right in front of real buyers who've just completed a purchase. It's not a discovery play. It's not broad targeting. It's high intent net new traffic with verified identity data and zero creative lift. Here's what makes rocked ads different. 1. You only pay for performance. No clicks, no cost. 2. No wasted spend on repeat customers. You upload a suppression list and ROKT only targets net new buyers. 3. Higher AOV higher LTV. These aren't looky lose. They're real customers in the buying mindset. Rock Dads is powered by after sell by Rock. Which means DTC brands now have access to enterprise grade tech that is powered checkout experiences for giants like Ticketmaster, Macy's and Disney. Brands like Jones Road, True Classic, Mugsy and Ridge are already seeing it work. And now after Shell is opening up early access to the marketing operators community. Here's the deal. Qualified brands can claim $10,000 in free ad credits to Test rock ads and see the results firsthand. Head to After Sale.com to claim your $10,000 offer and start scaling smarter.

[Connor]

You know, I had one other question for you that, that we're noodling on. So we did not do a cash option last year. And our thinking was it was twofold. It was a, like, we can give someone a. Because one of the reasons you might. Someone might want to take the cash options, they're like, well, I don't want to pay taxes on this. This experience. Which is how it works, right? If you're giving someone a 300, 000 car, like, even though they're. They're receiving that as like a prize, they still have to pay taxes on it. Like, it's not totally free. So what we did was we're like, okay, in order to like, combat that, we can actually offer a tax offset as part of the prize. So we offered 25, 000 last year, which was like the max we could give, which basically covered any taxes someone would have to pay on this experience. So that was part. Part one. Part two was like, we want to. We want to record this content of the winner and their guest, like, enjoying the experience so then we can leverage it. And next year sweepstakes, like, this could be really good content to put in ads on the landing page on organic social. We could run emails and texts redirecting to it. Like, it's a. It's a great way to like, create some realness around. So we didn't want somebody like, I just want the cash. And I was like, well, crap, we didn't. We didn't get the, the content we wanted. So now this year we're in the same. We're kind of in the same place where like, should we only offer the experience with a tax offset and no cash option? And I feel like there's the, The. The. The pro to that is like, yes, you're forcing someone into the experience and then you can capture it and then you can leverage it. And sadly, like the, the winner last year, his plus one, they actually, like, had some health issues, so they couldn't go on the experience. And we're hoping they still can, that they're. That their plus one, like, gets healthier and they can do it. But, like, we haven't gotten that content because they haven't taken the experience yet. But I feel like the, the pro to offering the cash is that like, just like naturally, if you. If Ridge were only doing the. The Lamborghini or the Tesla or the, The Raptor it's like just naturally that's not going to appeal. Like you're opening up your audience a lot more when you have the cash option. Because who doesn't want cash? Like now all of a sudden everyone's interested in the sweepstakes versus just like a subset of people that think the cars are cool. So that's kind of like what we're noodling on right now is should we go with only the experience or is there value? Because we're going to. Everyone's interested in cash. Is there value in the same orders? Take $125,000 in cash and you know, do what you want with it. Like we're going to appeal to more people. But then, but then they might not take the experience, which would kind of stink. Do you have any thoughts on that? Like the value of offering the cash versus just the experience?

[Cody]

I would offer the cash, yeah, for sure. That's where I would land on that. I mean I, I think, yeah, I think one, like if people don't want to go on the trip, they shouldn't, they shouldn't have to. They should be able to get some sort of prize. I do get that. Ideally you want the content. I also we did a great video last year where the winner was selecting between. We had both cars, we had a big check for them and they took the check. But it was like that content was great. We're going to use that heavily this year. So it's not as if even the fact making the selection could be good content in and of itself. And that's what I would say. Like one, that can be good content and then same sort of idea, just like imagery of like someone with a big hundred thousand dollar check is extremely powerful. Like I get. It's not, it's not as like brand building from the sense of like providing this like world class culinary experience. But it's awesome. People like it and people would, you know, think better of Hexclad because of it.

[Connor]

Yeah. If by offering the. Or you're saying if the content was of the person just with the cash or the chat, it would work.

[Cody]

Yeah, it would work. It would be good. I think there's many reasons to. I think it's, I think it's good for the winner to get the choice. And then two, I don't think you're giving up as much as you might think on the content side.

[Connor]

Yeah. Okay, that's, that's good feedback. And have of your. So this is fifth year. So you've done four years of the four years you've done sweeps, how many times have you someone taking cash?

[Cody]

Cash on the first one, car on the second one. But then he turned around and sold the car.

[Connor]

Oh, nice.

[Cody]

Yeah. Which is funny. Like, and we have great content. If he comes, he brings his family. We gave him gifts, we give him the car. And then like he tweeted like the next week he was like 100 grand or best offer or whatever. It's like really funny the way it went down. Third year, a 19 year old from Michigan won and she took the the truck, which was sick. And they were, they were super fun. We flew them out to LA and then they road tripped back, which was awesome. And then four last year was the newlywed couple and they took the cash. So I guess we're split 50, 50 between cash and cars.

[Connor]

Got it. Okay. Oh, I think, I think I'm convinced to offer the cash, the cash equivalent now.

[Cody]

You should give it a shot. Let me. Okay. Last thing on sweeps that I'd love to get your read on. And just like marketing generally. Another new thing that we did this year was we did this like coming soon period that we launched like 10 days ago where we do a couple things. One, cold starting the sweepstakes and this is the case with like a lot of product launches. And I think you guys did this well, it's hard to cold start something. People have. No, I like people might not have any idea what's going on. So we were trying to like tee up. Hey, something's coming. We highlighted the winners from previous years. We highlighted that this is our fifth sweepstakes. We highlighted there will be two winners and that we're in more countries and things like that. Like trying to build up anticipation in terms of impact of it. I think really small so far. Like we had a, actually a good Instagram post yesterday go up. Hennessy actually reshared it, which was really cool. A number of very big accounts commented. We sent it out to the influencers that we worked with throughout this process to like kind of wrangle up some more engagement. And that is like the closest thing to what I was hoping to get out of this campaign. Like how are we driving impressions like generating intrigue and anticipation. But overall I'd give us maybe like a 4 out of 10 out of it in terms of like true impact. So I'm curious if you guys have had any experiences like that where. And I'll phrase it one more time a little bit differently. I feel like we might be over complicating the campaign. Without any sort of like incremental benefit, it feels cooler. Some people like it. But like, is it. Is the juice worth the squeeze? I'm not sure.

[Connor]

Yeah. How many? How many? That's funny because we're actually thinking about something similar with a different new product campaign we have coming out. What? How many people did you get to sign up for it?

[Cody]

Not like a few thousand. Like it'll be. We will, on day one, we'll capture more emails than we have in. In the previous 10 days, right?

[Connor]

Yeah. And were you actually driving traffic to it or were you just letting people organically find it?

[Cody]

We have it on the website, We've shared it out. It's really like an own channel thing is like the biggest thing. The reason we'll have more signups tomorrow is because we'll spend a bunch of money promoting it and people will be coming to the site specifically to sign up. So it's really just an own channel thing. So email driving, SMS signups, SMS driving, wallet pass signups. So I'll give a little tip there. We're doing that with Revo this year, so we'll get push notifications, which will be cool.

[Connor]

That'd be. So we're like for your blitz periods.

[Cody]

Totally. Yeah. So we're like. So we're. When we have subscribers, we're trying to push them down into subscribing to more channels. And then on organic social, we're sharing out the post to like I said, just kind of drive, drive intrigue. That's where we land now. But like in terms of raw new subscribers, like it won't have been all that impactful.

[Connor]

Yeah, I feel like, I feel like doing the, the lead gen, like phase one stuff is probably the most helpful and the most like impactful slash incremental. When it's a net new thing, like you guys have done this your fifth year of, of doing the sweepstakes, like maybe not needed because of that and like it's gonna, it's gonna hit and people are like expecting it. Whereas if like the example I have that we're working on right now is like we have a, we're developing new products and it's a new category that we're one of the, at least one of the new things we're working on. It's like a new product category. So we are investing heavily into like a phase one pre launch, like months ahead of time where we are creating like a lead generation funnel that's gonna. Now we're still figuring out like exactly how we're gonna Drive traffic to it. There's gonna be some, like, just evergreen placements on our website to, like, get people to this page. And we're gonna try to Launch it in Q4 so that way it. We can take advantage of all the. The traffic we're getting and hopefully have tens of thousands of people signed up. But we're only doing that because, like, it's a net new category, and we really feel like we need to hype it and we need to get people into, like, a nurture sequence. And, like, if we can have tens of thousands of people that have signed up, hopefully the launch will be a lot greater than it would have been with just a. A, you know. All right, now it's live, and now we're trying to sell it. And then on the contrary, it's like if we, you know, roll out a new, like, I don't know, extension of cookware. Like, hey, we have. We now have a new roasting pan or we now have like, a new version of our. Of our. Of our fry pan, whatever it is. Like, I don't really feel like there's a lot of incremental value into doing that because it's. It's like we're building hype for something that we've already been hyping up for so long, and there's so much awareness on it. Like, I don't think we need to have a lead gen page for, like, the next version of our. Of our cookware or whatever that is. So that's how I think about it. Like, if it's new, I think there's, like, some value into hyping it. Yeah.

[Cody]

And. And in the case of, like, the new categories for you guys, you guys are explicit about what it is. Like, the message is very clear.

[Connor]

Very clear.

[Cody]

This thing. This thing is coming. This is what it does. This is why we made it. Whereas I think one of the reasons we. We. What we've done so far hasn't stuck is, like, the message is a little less clear. It's like a little too ethereal.

[Connor]

Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, you're. Yeah, I have the page pulled up right now. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I was very, very like. Because that was. That was kind of. Some of the early back and forth with our team was like, should we keep it kind of mysterious like that? And people are, like, getting excited about, like, that. I'm like, no, no, no. Like, we should actually do the opposite. Like, the last thing I want is insanely high opt in rates with like really low intent. Like I would actually prefer less. But they get to the end of the page and like they know what the product is, they know what it does, they know like we're not going to put price point on it, but like they should assume based on our other products and based on the content that it's going to be like a premium price product. We should have comparison. Like, like we should actually be giving a good amount of it. Like we're not trying to hide this thing, we're trying to qualify people. It's like the same way a real estate agent, if they're doing like lead gen, they should actually ask the person like 10 questions on the page because it, because it builds intent. Like I was very adamant. I'm like, no, there should be like a pretty holistic page that, that gives all the information, not all of it, but like, you know, you get to the end of the page, you know exactly what the product is and what its value props are and the pain points it solves and all that. Um, so hopefully that leads to like, I don't really know. I'm not sure what like a good conversion rate on a page like that would be. I don't know if like is that due to does 10% of that list convert? Does 4 per. I don't know. We'll see. But this is like the first time we've really done a, a big lead up into a new product drop with like a pretty thoughtful page trying to get, get leads. So we'll see. I'm hoping it, it works for this like this product that we're, that we're developing.

[Cody]

Yeah, you'll have to report back.

[Connor]

It'll be a while. It's like we're gonna try to launch this page in like Q Q4 like early November to take advantage of all of our, our Q4 traffic. And the, not the tricky part but like the, we'll just have to be intentional right about like not making it disruptive to someone's buying experience. Like we want to figure out how to get traffic to it. Like it's like, all right, well post purchase you've already bought. Like can we get you to go opt in now for this new product? Or if you're just surfing around like what are good, you know, kind of low friction ways to get you here. But yeah, we're gonna launch this on like early November and then we're not actually gonna launch the product until probably end of Q1. So there's gonna be like a solid 4 to 5 and I'm not sure if we'll leave the page up that entire time. Like we might take it down after Q4 and see how it performed and then relaunch it a month out. But yeah, it's like a pretty big Runway. So it's the first time we've ever done this. So we'll see how, how effective it is.

[Cody]

Would you guys, I mean, would you ever consider just pre ordering it? It's like, look, give them all that same information, get them qualified to purchase and take their credit card information.

[Connor]

Yeah, we've. So the other. Yeah, so the kind of, the three paths we've considered are like just getting someone to sign up, you know, kind of the, the classic lead gen play, getting someone to put a deposit down. So like I, you know, hey, if you, if you put X dollars down, this is fully refundable. But like you have confirmed that you definitely get one if you want one. Like I did that with the scout that I'm really interested in. It doesn't come out till 2027 or 2028, but I put a hundred dollar deposit down because I'm like, this is a cool car, I'm interested in it. It's fully refundable and like it definitely has qualified me as like a high intent lead. And then there's like, yeah, pre order. I think we could do pre order. Maybe that's something we would do in Q1 of like, hey, we have this phase one and Q4 where it's only totally. And then we could even do like a Pre order in Q1 at some point to like qualify some of that list maybe and just like see if, like how, how impactful they are. I don't know what, what are your thoughts on that? Would you do pre order if we were, if you're, if you knew we were planning to launch this page as early as we are?

[Cody]

Yeah, I just, I don't know what the downside is, frankly. Yeah, like, I mean it could be very similar in the sense that like you capture leads. The, maybe the primary thing is to capture leads. It could be sign up for email or it could be like, you know, place a deposit to secure your spot or what? Like something maybe, maybe that would be confusing, I'm not sure. But like part of me is like, look, if the goal is to build brand awareness, unless you think the customer experience of waiting a couple months, you're worried about for some reason or yeah.

[Connor]

Then maybe I would do a super long. Basically what I want to do is for the have like a pretty Long spaced out nurture campaign or sequence built out as well. So like you hit the page, you read all the information, you opt in and then you have like, I don't know how many emails, like five to ten emails over the course of like three to four months just to like stay top of mind and then we launch the thing and hopefully that engagement is, is driving more conversions. I'm just trying to think of what the messaging would be if we like did lead gen to a pre, to a pre sale. It could be like, you know, hey, we just got our first 500 units of these in and like we're going to sell them on pre sale. If you want to guarantee yours, like totally, you should buy it on pre sale and then we'll do like a second launch. That could be an interesting angle that could work and could like validate how, how intentful that audience is.

[Cody]

Yeah, and like I said, I think you run the risk of people just falling off, right? Oh yeah, I am interested in it right now. In January I could sign up for the leads but like I might not be opening your emails in four months or whatever. Like even if I've signed up for this thing, I have no, I'm not committed to it in any way where it's like, yeah, look, I want this thing. Let me give you 200 bucks or whatever so that when you have it, you'll ship it to me. Like that's how pre orders work. And it's like I don't think anybody would be the only. I guess the downside would be if you thought that by offering pre orders you would drive down your subscribe rate and that net net you would sell fewer items. But like again, I'm not quite sure.

[Connor]

I think we would do. I think what I would want to do is do Legion. No pre order, no, no deposit and then offer like a pre sale to some of that list and like just a small segment of it. Like and just see how that converts. And then if we wanted to expand it out, we could like this is. I can, I'll share my screen real quick because I think this is, you know, we looked at uni who uni has like done some really solid Legion stuff and then a little bit different. So uni is like more of like what we want. What we want to do where they have like a new product coming out. It was purely gen. They were a little more mysterious with what the product actually was. And then you have like Fellow for example and Fellow has had this up. They've had this page up for a really long time. They have a new espresso machine coming out with a pretty well done page. Like nice. It explains it well. The content's gorgeous and it's pre order and their value prop is just saying like hey, if you want to lock it in at a little bit of a lower price, you can do it. So this could be the angle, right? Is like lead gen pre order we offer like it's like hey, if you want to lock in this best price, we're gonna off. We're gonna. And then built in. Maybe you bake in some like urgency with like we're selling 300 of these things at this price point. Once that happens, we're turning off pre order. Then you have to wait till launch. That could be an approach is like give a slight discount or like a gift maybe if you don't want to like discount the product right now. And they're taking $100 off of a fifteen hundred dollar product.

[Cody]

So yeah, it's not, it's not super compelling. Now on this page, can you sign up, can you sign up for email?

[Connor]

I don't, I don't think so. I think yeah, yeah, everything's reserve. Reserve.

[Cody]

Yeah. I frankly like this and like, I mean getting money is better than not having money most of the time. But, but I could understand that. Hey, there's a lot of people that would be interest this espresso machine when it's ready to ship and they're not collecting any of those leads. But then again like if you start, if you begin collecting leads, does that drive down the conversion rate meaningfully? It's like, it's just. I have no, I have no. I don't know like I have no idea what net net would be better.

[Connor]

I would, I feel like that's if that's like my. I like this page a lot. But that is my one piece of feedback is like they should have some sort of like secondary CTA right where it's like hey, you're not ready to buy right now, that's okay. But you're still, if you're still interested in this product, like sign up and, and we'll let you know when it's available. And, and all the things. I like this. This has been a helpful, helpful workshopping.

[Cody]

Yeah. Super fun. All right, cool. You want to call it a wrap on the episode?

[Connor]

Let's wrap it. That was good. Cool. All right. That is a wrap. On episode 70, one of the marketing operators had some fun chatter about content operations, sweepstakes, the merits of doing lead generation campaigns. Thank you to the sponsors, Motion Rich Panel House Prescient and After Cell. And if you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe like comment and.