How We're Reaching New Audiences on Meta with Partnership Ads

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Marketing Operators

Episode: How We're Reaching New Audiences on Meta with Partnership Ads

Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Special Guests/Contributors: Matt, Aaron Orndorff (lurking)
Date: September 16, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the Marketing Operators team dives deep into how fast-growing DTC brands are expanding their Meta (Facebook/Instagram) advertising beyond the basics—specifically, through partnership (whitelisting) ads and influencer collaborations. The discussion explores the strategic rationale for targeting new audiences, how creator and partnership ads fundamentally change paid media, methods for signal engineering to "shock" algorithms, and performance insights from running large-scale influencer and creative campaigns. There’s also an in-depth look at running high-stakes sweepstakes (with examples from Ridge and Hexclad), creative testing, and strategies for unlocking incremental growth.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Next Phase of Growth: Beyond Basic Meta Ads

• Brands max out with “general” Meta ads; targeting new personas is key to the next growth stage.
  • "A lot of brands can get from 0 to 5 just on like great product, general ads and meta. But at some point you really need to start to target different Personas to tap into that next phase of growth." – Matt [00:00]
• Strategic intent now involves targeting tangential or entirely new verticals and personas, sometimes via influencer partnerships well outside the core product audience.
• Example: Cooking brands pursuing partnerships in fashion or sports, and beauty brands targeting parenting and wellness influencers rather than just beauty creators.

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2. The Role of Creators & Influencer Marketing in Meta's Ecosystem

• Creator as targeting: Not just creative, but who the creator is, increasingly acts as a targeting lever in Meta’s ad system.
  • "Everyone says creative as a targeting. I also think creator is a targeting and meta is being, you know, transparent about that now that like partnership ads that are using the page signal." – Cody [00:10]
• Partnership ads are outperforming: Both large and small creators are being used for pay-to-play content distribution. Native distribution on their channels is limited in direct response, but the bigger value is often in whitelisting for paid amplification.
• Investment is shifting up market: Macro-influencer deals are increasingly justified as "buying a data signal," similar to lists in the pre-iOS14 days.

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3. Mechanics & Economics of Influencer Partnerships

• Distribution value vs. ad value: Organic influencer posts rarely hit break-even CPA; most value is from paid rights (whitelisting/partnership ads).
  • "We've gotten what I would say is very little value in the distribution...I think largely the majority of the work is more on the asset and the whitelisting." – Cody [11:54]
• Pricing is variable—negotiation and agency relationships are key. Ballpark: $4-8K/month for creators with ~3M followers for post + partnership ad rights. Large YouTubers command $50K+ for short-term integrations [see: Connor's examples at 13:58].
• Gifting (product seeding) finds small, native creators for cheap content generation. 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 delivers solid paid social creative, but that one can be extremely efficient.
  • "But also what we do all the time is...we pay them per video, but we're talking about paying them like 100 or 200 bucks, really small amounts of money largely for content. And then we'll get access to their pages to run partnership ads." – Connor [18:49]

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4. Partnership Ads vs. Whitelisting: Which Performs Better?

• Meta is pushing partnership ads as the future—whitelisting is being deprecated ("sunset in all but name").
  • "Meta never officially sunsets products, but they're really trying to move—sunset whitelisting and just kind of have partnership be the main hub...And especially with them now allowing you to run partnership ads just from the creator's handle—that essentially is whitelisting." – Cody [24:16]
• Single-handle partnership ads (from creator only, not brand + creator) appear less like ads and often perform better on Meta.
  • "I don't think there's any value in having the brand handle attached to it, frankly. I think it looks more like an ad and I think a lot of the value of partnership ads is they look less like ads." – Connor [26:36]

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5. Signal Engineering & Reaching New Audiences

• How do you know you’ve reached a new audience on Meta? Look for significant changes in age/gender/placements/engagement vs. account averages.
  • "You go and look just at the impressions on these ads and it's like not that different cpm, but the audience is like way skewed towards one gender compared to account average. The placements are totally different, the engagement looks different." – Matt [27:14]
• Partnership ads with new creators can pass new “signals” to Meta's algorithm, which in turn can benefit other ads and expand the overall buying pool.
  • "I fundamentally believe that...when we launched linear tv...no other change but you know, putting 10% of our mix into, into a new channel with completely new audience, Meta performance just significantly improved..." – Cody [28:59]
• Higher incrementality on partnership ads confirmed via holdout/lift tests ([30:05]).

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6. Approaches to Creative, Product, and Persona Expansion

• Creative "shock therapy": If Meta's algorithm gets stuck on a historic demo, creative differentiation (new personas, products, angles, partnerships) is required to unlock new conversion pools.
• Category vs. colorway expansion: New product categories yield new customers via new acquisition funnels; mature brands find incremental growth via bold new colorways/designs/angles that attract attention and refresh sales (see Ridge's collaborative designs).
  • "If we list out our biggest wins over the last few years, it comes from more dynamic designs, more exciting designs." – Connor [39:03]
• Ads promoting niche or bolder SKUs can sometimes drive engagement that closes on classic colors/products, not just the feature item (i.e. “lure and close”).

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7. Incrementality, Attribution, and Budgeting for Influencer/Partnership Efforts

• Most revenue from influencer programs does NOT show up as organic attribution. Paid whitelisting/partnership is the primary lever.
• Best practice is to allocate a % of media budget (e.g. 1-3%) to influencer/creator partnerships as a portfolio strategy—not chase last-click attribution.
  • "You were so right...You should just commit to 1%, 2%, 3% of spend going to influencer versus just over indexing on a bunch of like...whatever paid posts..." – Connor [23:06]
• Need to accept potentially lower ROAS on new audience/creative swings and account for “total account” incrementality.

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8. Sweepstakes as an Audience & Revenue Multiplier

• Case study: Ridge’s annual sweepstakes (now international). Grand prizes (e.g., Lamborghini or $100K cash) dramatically lift efficient spend year-over-year.
  • "We spent like 85% more year over year [in Canada] and had a...MER improve. In marketing, that never happens." – Connor [51:15]
• Major learnings:
  • Customer experience matters—personalized emails that update users on entry counts outperform batch-and-blast.
  • Higher AOV products (e.g. luggage) drove more entries than expectation; low-price tripwires less effective for generating meaningful participation.
  • Sweepstakes can be leveraged across channels (Meta, YouTube, linear TV) with different creative/adaptations.
  • Integration with creators/influencers (showing the prize car in their content, for example) boosts results—but quality and authenticity of integration trumps just displaying the prize.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "I also think creator is a targeting and meta is being...transparent about that now." — Cody [00:10]
• "Most of our partnership ads are from very small creators who, like, we might have just gifted the product to..." — Connor [00:24]
• "If you can get a business that works acquiring women, they're just...It seems to work a little bit, a little bit better." — Connor [45:08]
• "Meta never officially sunsets products, but they're really trying to...just kind of have partnership be the main hub." — Cody [24:16]
• "If we're going to use it for paid, it's usually because we liked the organic content...then we'll follow up and say, hey, can you make something like this?" — Matt [19:45]
• "You should just commit to 1%, 2%, 3% of spend going to influencer." — Connor [23:06]
• "If we list out our biggest wins over the last few years, it comes from...more exciting designs." — Connor [39:03]
• "We had a crazy backlog of CX tickets at one point—I'm embarrassed to say we had a seven day average response time that lasted for longer than it should have..." — Cody [30:26]
• "The only media mix modeling tool revealing halo effects on Amazon sales." — Matt [16:50]

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Memorable Moments & Segments

• Richard Branson cameo at YouTube creator summit—impacts the hosts’ thinking on influencer reach and brand sponsorships ([01:43–02:38]).
• Colin & Samir’s conference recaps giving first-hand look at creator-business intersection ([03:04–03:35]).
• Personal sweepstakes stories: Wedding band customer wins $100K ([56:47–66:17]).
• Pragmatic advice: Multiple hosts (and guest) advocate for sticking with partnership ads over legacy whitelisting and always negotiating hard with influencer agents ([13:58], [24:16]).
• New ways to measure audience reach: Using Meta ad delivery breakdowns to see if creative is tapping new age/gender segments ([32:05], [33:47]).

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Key Timestamps for Reference

• The importance of targeting new personas for growth: [00:00–00:24]
• Meta’s shift toward creator-signal targeting: [00:10–00:24], [08:27–10:25]
• Strategy for partnership/influencer ads & value exchange: [11:39–13:58], [17:37–20:54]
• Limits of organic influencer distribution: [11:54]
• Negotiating influencer deals & agency role: [12:47–13:58]
• Signal engineering (audience expansion via partnership): [27:14–30:26]
• Case study: partnership ads and incrementality lift: [30:05–30:26]
• Creative “shock the system” comments: [34:56–36:11]
• Sweepstakes strategy, results and CX innovation: [49:15–57:22]
• Measuring new audiences via age/gender splits: [32:05–34:56]
• Closing thoughts on sweepstakes, partnership ads, and next steps: [59:51–63:29]

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Tone & Style

The conversation is open, tactical, and operator-to-operator: honest about failures, experimental successes, and the shifting dynamics between creative, influencer, and paid acquisition. Heavy on hard-won experience, anecdotal evidence, and practical takeaways.

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Strategic Takeaways

• Meta growth depends on continual audience expansion through creative and persona innovation—don’t be afraid to aim outside your “core.”
• Partnership ads, especially from creator-only handles, are futureproof and offer the strongest blend of signal and scaling.
• Invest consistently into influencer/partnership as a percentage of media budget—be wary of chasing only easily attributable revenue.
• Use product/content innovation (new categories, bold designs) as a springboard for both new and existing audience purchases.
• Measure new audience impact through granular Meta ad reports (age, gender, placement, engagement), not just standard ROAS.
• Leverage cross-channel touchpoints (YouTube, TV, sweepstakes) to amplify new-audience reach and reinforce performance gains.
• Iterate and optimize operational details—especially in campaigns like sweepstakes, small tweaks (personalization, mechanics, integrations) can have outsized results.

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This episode is packed with insights for brand operators, growth marketers, and paid media professionals seeking to push Meta, influencer, and creative strategies beyond the obvious and toward sustainable, scalable business impact.

Transcript

[Matt]

A lot of brands can get from 0 to 5 just on like great product, general ads and meta. But at some point you really need to start to target different Personas to tap into that next phase of growth.

[Cody]

Everyone says creative as a targeting. I also think creator is a targeting and meta is being, you know, transparent about that now that like partnership ads that are using the page signal. So we are definitely testing and going to be making some large investments into like much larger creators that are, you know, significantly more.

[Connor]

Most of our partnership ads are from very small creators who like we might have just gifted the product to have gotten good content, get partnership access from there and then we're running it from their pages because that is like very native to how people are consuming social content today.

[Matt]

Are you saying you have better YouTube ads this year or more spend going into sweeps in YouTube?

[Connor]

Okay, so it's a good question. We.

[Matt]

All right, we're back. We got, we got Connor, Connor, Cody and today's special because we have a lurking Aaron Orndorff. But, but the audience might not know that. Connor, looks like you have some sort of, some sort of maybe hotel room setup going on. Not the usual home setup. Where are you at?

[Connor]

Still in Manhattan? Yeah, at a, at a pretty gaudy hotel. So it's a very decadent background for those just, just listening in.

[Cody]

Where are you staying?

[Connor]

The fifth Avenue hotel.

[Cody]

Oh, I stayed there. We did a staycation there that. Have you been in the restaurant there?

[Connor]

I have not been there yet.

[Cody]

It's pretty sick. It's cool. And then they have a cool like bar, kind of like a speakeasy vibe.

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah. So, so Sean and I are here. We went to Colin and Samir. Do you guys know the YouTube channel?

[Cody]

You're. That's what you're wearing, right?

[Connor]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had like a in person conference yesterday for like. So there were a bunch of creators. We'd sponsored them a number of times and had worked with a bunch of people there. So we, we've been hanging out for a couple days in New York to do that.

[Cody]

That's cool.

[Connor]

We so actually kind of cool. There was a welcome party Wednesday night that was between Colin and Tamir, YouTube and Virgin and Richard Branson was there. So I was within, I was within a couple of feet of Richard Branson, which was a pretty cool little appearance.

[Matt]

Did you have any exchanges?

[Connor]

No, you know, it was cool though. So they had, they had us out on the boat. Virgin has this new, this new like cruise ship that's just about to have its maiden Voyage. And that's where he makes this like surprise appearance and then they break us all out into a couple different dinners. And Richard Branson basically went to every single table and I would assume both restaurants or the three restaurants and basically like no direct interaction but like very close and basically him seeing me and nodding at me and then like moving on to the next table and I was like, what a, like what a, what a professional schmoozer move, you know, like he literally connected with like there's.

[Matt]

Probably 300 people there and he, and he hit every single person by doing that.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. Yeah, it was sick.

[Matt]

So what is. That's. I'm. I'm interested in this, this conference or. Conference. Is that the right word?

[Connor]

Dude? No idea what I would call it. Yeah, it was conference esque.

[Matt]

Is it like. So these guys are YouTubers. So is this like a, like a YouTube content creation focused like session? Is that what you guys are, are chatting on or is it all sorts of things? Not ecom necessarily, no.

[Connor]

But Colin and Samir are basically like creators about being creators. So it's very meta. They're talking about. Trent. Content trends on YouTube. They talk a lot about creators building businesses. They talk a lot about brand deals. So it's like the business side of being a creator. Connor, I would highly recommend it because you could basically just watch Colin and Samir and you'll get like a decent sense of what's going on YouTube generally. So super, super high leverage content for you to get plugged into like the general YouTube ecosystem.

[Matt]

This, this is like my YouTube current events.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. They're like basically the only YouTubers I watch and I get a general sense of like, who's big, who's doing well, what are the new metas, things like that.

[Matt]

Interesting.

[Cody]

All right, was that I saw Sean posted a picture of Dara. Was that at that?

[Connor]

Dara was there? Yeah.

[Cody]

That's cool. That's cool.

[Matt]

And are you just staying out there?

[Connor]

Yeah, because we've got Beanstalk, right?

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Monday, Monday, Tuesday, next week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So I'm here for another couple days. Dara Denny was there. It was my first time meeting her in person. She's great. Teachable was a sponsor of the event as well. So she was talking about the course that she'd done.

[Cody]

Yeah, I, I think Dara is great. I think I've like watched her stuff for years. I think she does such a great job with her content to the point now where like Meta is like sponsoring it and like she was at like the summit and then I don't know if you saw she's doing this like series like we, she did like a, this like interview with me and like just did like a phenomenal job like editing it and content and stuff. So I think her, her stuff is great both as like a creator and even as like a meta thing.

[Connor]

There's an episode with you on her YouTube channel or where does that live?

[Cody]

Yeah, yeah, I'll send it over, put in the show notes. But yeah, I think her content is awesome.

[Matt]

Sweet. All right, let's get into it. So before we do that, I want to thank the sponsors. Motion Pression AI After Sell Rich Panel and House Foreign, Motion is hosting the fourth annual Creative Strategy Summit. The virtual event is free to attend and it is where the best performance creative teams on the planet share what's working. Seriously, I have attended this the last few years and I am really blown away at the reputation and the people that Motion is bringing on and just the quality of the content that these amazing, amazing creative strategists are talking about at this event. And we're really going to learn what's working, how they're evolving their creative strategy and the overall bigger shifts in the world of DTC and creative. It's over six hours of programming featuring elite DTC brands and a must attend event for anyone working in paid social. I'm going to be there. Cody and Connor are going to be there. Plus the marketing operators are doing a live podcast episode. So we're really excited about that. There was over 18,000 people registered last year, 5,000 people tuned in live and many, many performance creative teams block out this day and just make this a learning moment for the entire company and it's been really, really critical and important for guiding our creative strategy. I remember the last few years we've had a lot of, a lot of information from the event get infused into our creative strategy in the following few months. Like I said, some of the best, sharpest creative strategy minds in DTC are presenting at the Creative Strategy Summit being put on by Motion. I'm really excited about this list of people. It includes Dara Denny, Sarah Levenger, Mirella Cre Lee, Joe Zelowitz, Savannah Sanchez, and a lot more to be announced soon. Seriously, some of the best minds in creative strategy right now. Plus, if you cannot attend, all the recordings are going to be recorded so you should sign up anyway even if you're not able to attend when the recordings are live in real time. So get your free ticket at motionapp.com forward/creative-strategy, dash summit. It's happening on October 9th at 12:00pm to 6:00pm Eastern Time. Make sure not to miss it. All right, let's do it. So we're talking today about a couple things. We're going to start off talking about reaching new audiences with meta ads and with creative specifically. I. This is something where we've been spending a lot of time thinking about and we've been at least recently been spending time thinking about it through the lens of influencer. And, and you know, we have you know, arguably the biggest cooking influencer in the world. So we, I kind of take this like not literal but, but I guess like just thought provoking stance of we don't really need another cooking influencer. And the way that we tap into new audience, at least through influencer marketing is by going in fashion and wags in sports and this, these other verticals that are not necessarily right on the nose with cooking. I think Brian Cano explained it really well in this video I have linked here. This is Charlie, I'm gonna mess up his last name, Titchner's video. And he talks about like a lot of brands can get from 0 to 5 just on like great product, general ads and meta. But at some point you really need to start to like target different Personas to tap into that next, that next phase of growth. So it's like how are you guys thinking about that? Is that something you're, you're actively focused on? Maybe Cody, you could start off because I know you were talking a lot about this a few months ago and how you guys were going after I guess very specific Personas more this year than, than some of like the more like general brand forward stuff that's worked for you in the past.

[Cody]

Yeah, we're working on it for sure. I think you know, everyone obviously creative is the targeting. So just trying to have really specific intent of creative. I gotta be honest, we're not having the wins that we're looking for yet. I think we have to do more bigger swings. I also think there's a lot of outside ad account stuff we have to do. So one thing, and I think you'll talk about it as well based on some of your recent testing. But like like everyone says Create creative is a targeting. I also think creator is a targeting and meta is being you know, transparent about that now that like partnership ads that are using the page signal. So we are definitely testing and going to be making some large investments into like much larger creators that are, you know, significantly more. And I think we'll even run this with a house test. So we're doing that. We're going to do it even with some, like, publication pages. Like, is there a signal we can get? I feel like that's like another form of signal engineering. It's just like, how do we kind of bombard it with some new signal that says, hey, meta, you can, like, get out of your safe zone. You can go after these people. So, yeah, I think that's where, like, partnership ads can really work. And we're having more success with the larger creators. And so we just want to keep kind of going up a market, if you will.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Cody]

And kind of like take bigger, you know, bigger swings. And the way I'm trying to justify it is like, you know, you know, back in, like, Cambridge Analytica days and stuff like that, like, you'd probably pay 20 grand, 30 grand for, like, data, Right. For like, buying, like, indirect world. You do this like, you buy data. Like, you buy a data less. Like, if that is the signal, like, why not pay those amounts of money for essentially the signal for the. For the data? So I think that's. That's one thing that we're definitely testing into.

[Matt]

Do you. I feel like makeup's similar to cooking in that, like, you can find, you. You can find an influencer that's not in beauty, but. But a lot like, most women use makeup the same, like, the same way most people cook. Do you. Are you guys thinking about influencer that way? Like, are you thinking about deals that are. With. With influencers that are like, more prominently in a. In a different niche than what would be like your classic beauty influencer?

[Cody]

Absolutely. Absolutely. Because so a, we have Bobby. Right. And so that's it be like most beauty creators, we're very much. It's like a no makeup makeup look. Like, most beauty creators are not that look like we are really like a makeup company for people that actually don't really love normal makeup. And so I think our normal girls and most things. So what I'm thinking about when it comes to influencer or, you know, creators is who has influence with the audiences that we want to reach. So. And some of these will be macro. And so, like, a few of them that I'm negotiating right now are like, yeah, like parenting experts. You know what I mean? Like, there's people that have large followings, YouTube channels, podcasts, you know, their own course community that are like, parenting experts. The one I really want, there's this, like, sleep training class. And like, parents just like, love her and trust her because like if it helps your kids sleep, like I want to see if she'll do it. So yeah, definitely thinking about that health wellness business as well. Yeah, I think so. Especially just because we have Bobby and B. Like I don't think the normal beauty creator would work for us. So it's just like who are you trying to reach and who's got influence? Even if it's not, I think it has to be tangentially related. Like it can't be their first time ever talking about makeup, but who's got, you know, the trust of your audience and it doesn't have to be in your demo.

[Connor]

I've got a quick question here, Cody. How are you thinking about like the value between the distribution of the influencer? Like how do you expect the post to perform in and of itself versus creating the content and then turning that into a partnership ad?

[Cody]

Yeah, that's a good question. I'm curious what you guys think. So far we've gotten what I would say is very little value in the distribution. You know, we haven't done probably as big of deals as some of you know, you guys have, but definitely not anything close to like a break even CPA on the distribution. The one thing where I think it helps in part of this game is like added value and so where we do get more value and again it's hard to measure from a direct response perspective. Like one large creator we're working with, like she's, we're now going to have her be like a face of a campaign kind of ambassador thing and like she'll just continue to post stuff and put us in multiple places. So like that value does accrue over time, but I think largely the majority of it work is, is more on the, you know, the asset and the whitelisting. What do you guys think about that?

[Connor]

Well, just quickly can you give us a range? Like what, what is the cost per post from some of the influencers that you're talking to?

[Cody]

Man, it's all about negotiating. We could do a whole one. We have a really good like agency we're, we're working with as well. If you guys know like the super affiliate team, like Super Bloom, we're working with that Lily from their agency, like built the seed help program. So I'm learning a lot from her and just like having fun with like negotiating a lot of these, these bigger ones. It all depends. It all depends. What we're trying to do is like as our portfolio budget, 10% of, 10% of, you know, media spend on creative and so as it can kind of back out. And so like we might go with, you know, let's say somebody's like 6k a month and that's probably a good negotiated down. We want to spend, you know, I don't know if they're 10k a month. We got to spend 100k a month on the, on their assets, you know, so that's kind of how we're looking at it. But I would say somebody that has, you know, 3 million followers, we're probably anywhere between, you know, 4 and 8k a month for white listing. Okay. It's so dependent. Like the thing with Influencer is like you get these crazy high things. You'll get 40 grand and it's like, hey, actually. And then like you lowball and like you can get like a fourth of that or maybe you know, half of it. So it's, it's so dependent. I feel like as, as I'm sure you know.

[Connor]

Yeah, 100%. I, I was curious about that. Whatever. 6 to 8K, if you're getting a post and the ability to run partner ads from a creator with a million followers, that sounds like on paper, from my perspective, that sounds like great value, or at least there could be value there. We've basically gone two paths as it relates to, let's call it like influencer content or creator content. And how it relates to partnership ads is basically. Actually I'll list off three and then I know we want to focus on partnership ads. One, we're trying to sign larger, like deeper integrated deals and those are super expensive. We just sponsored a streamer last week, cost like 45,000 doll dollars for like a couple hours stream. And it was, it was a really interesting engagement. We're kind of like still doing a postmortem on it. We had a couple other creators go live for 60k plus a piece for YouTube integrations. And then sometimes we'll get Instagram as a piece of that. So we're going like big brand awareness. Those are multi million view videos, et cetera, et cetera. We use an agency now to tackle like the mid and long tail of Influencer content. So we have externalized that.

[Cody]

Is that the same as your podcast agency?

[Connor]

That is basically the podcast agency. And that's just because like half of views of podcasts come from YouTube at this point. So it's like, it is very visual.

[Matt]

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[Connor]

As it relates to partnership content. I was just having this conversation this week being at the Collin and Samir event. You know, with the popularization of like for you feeds, I think the recognizability of creators is just less valuable. Like, people are just by and large consuming less content from creators that they follow and more content from just what is getting served to them. So all of a sudden it's less a game of who's the most recognizable person and it's. And it's actually just who's creating the best content. So now our. Most of our partnership ads are from very small creators who, like, we might have just gifted the product to have gotten good content, get partnership access from there, and then we're. We're running it from their pages because that is like, very native to how people are consuming social content today.

[Cody]

And you from. From the gifting, do you get, like, really good creative sometimes? Yeah.

[Connor]

Very infrequently. We'll get really good creative. And that's kind of. That's kind of it. Right. But the, the thing is with gifting, it costs us basically nothing.

[Cody]

I know. That's. That's the thing with gifting. I see everybody talk about it and like, I want to ramp up our gifting more, but, like, most of the content is like, it's just like, not great paid social creative. It's like slower, no great hook. And it's like, oh, I was gifted this from Jones Road. And like, maybe a really good editor could edit it out, but I don't. I find it's like one in a million.

[Connor]

Yeah, we're maybe shooting slightly above that in terms of success rate, but like, but. But also what we do all the time is, and I've talked about this before, we've got maybe 50 to 100 creators that aren't gifted. We pay them per video, but we're talking about paying them like 100 or 200 bucks, really small amounts of money largely for content. And then we'll get access to their pages to run partnership ads. So all of a sudden it's like. And that's kind of like a really nice sweet spot. And we'll find some of those creators via gifting too, which is another, like, good way to do it.

[Cody]

Oh, that's.

[Matt]

Would you. Would you do that on your own if it was. If the only value are getting from the gifting. Connor was just the impressions and the cpm. Would it still be worth. Like, you guys are obviously leveraging it for. For paid Ads too. But would it be worth it if that, if you didn't use it for paid at all, just like reach cpm? Yeah, it would be.

[Connor]

Well, it's, it's hard. Like you hear we've talked about gifting a bunch. The CPM is fantastic. But that's all you have. Like, you really have no idea. Like, you know, you're not attributing any sales. Nobody's getting code. So it's like.

[Matt]

Because we don't use it much for paid either, Cody. Because it's all like recipe stuff. So like we're not. Sometimes we will, but if we're going to use it for paid, it's usually because we're following. We liked the organic content, but that was not a paid asset. And then we'll follow up and say, hey, like we like what you made. Can you make something like this? So it's the follow up that'll get us what we want.

[Cody]

But yeah, yeah, yeah, we definitely find creators that way. Like a lot of the people that we source will. And I think it's important to have people that are actually like fans of the brand. Like, well, they, hey, this person seems great. Like let's, let's reach out to her for rates. Occasionally we'll reach out. And the good thing is it is cheaper when they've posted and it is a good piece of content. Like you're just asking for rights. And so it is. You can offer a few hundred bucks for that even if they're like larger. But yeah, I think otherwise. And Connor, do you think about. I've been thinking about this as we're starting podcast. Do you think about like these YouTube creators getting then meta whitelisting, partnership permission and like top middle funnel? Because like to me, I like if people are hearing about you from a podcast, like I'd love nothing more than to see that podcast or that creator talking about you on meta. Like, do you, do you do any deals like that or think about that at all?

[Connor]

Do we, do we repurpose podcast content into meta ads?

[Cody]

Like purposely try to get the rights from the same creator, even if it's a different piece of content. So like, if you're sponsoring, I'll just say Colin and Samir, right?

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Cody]

Are you then gonna, if you're sponsoring their YouTube, are you then gonna also try to make sure you get like partnership ads from them? So if somebody sees about you on YouTube from theirs is like hopefully getting almost like retargeted with, with their ads?

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. We have a, we have a lot of examples of that. It is. It's probably a small percentage of all of our partnership deals. Like I'd probably put it around 10% or something is like we'll get partnership ads, we'll promote their post and like, I mean that's largely what we obviously do with mkbhd. We've done it with people like Steven Shapiro. So things like that. Yeah, 100%. That's a part of the strategy.

[Matt]

Connor, to your question earlier, we get like zero. Not zero, but like very little organic purchase performance on these Influencer deals. Most of them are getting good, good impressions and good CPMs are like most, almost all of the performance is coming out of. Coming out of the paid account. Which is why, like that we don't need to sign another cooking influencer is not an actual thing we'll ever do. To your point earlier, like, we need smaller cooking creators that just make really good ads and that'll always be part of our stack.

[Connor]

Totally. And the thing with, with getting great content and then the right to promote it is that is if it works, it's the most scalable where it's like you really only need a handful of those to work at scale via paid for it to be a massive positive roi.

[Matt]

Yeah. Yep.

[Cody]

Can I ask you about that? So because I can give you our journey. Like, we've done almost very little paid influencer marketing. We've. We've dabble. And partly for that reason, like, it's just there's not great performance on it. We also don't want to do discount codes. Like, so we'll do like give with purchase codes. And like, I don't think people redeem them as the same amount. And so again, there's like very little. It's hard to measure. And so if I look granularly, I'm like, hey, we're spending whatever 100k a month on influencer content. And like the ROS is terrible. Like, why am I doing this? You know, but if I zoom out and I'm like, hey, we're spending, you know, multiple millions per month on Meta TV. I'm like, I should be spending 200k a month on Influencer.

[Connor]

Like, so you, you said that months ago on a podcast. And I'm like, you were so right. I was like, you should just commit to 1%, 2%, 3% of spend going to influencer versus just over indexing on a bunch of like, you know, whatever paid paid posts on Facebook or whatever. So I'm like, I.

[Cody]

You.

[Connor]

You got me bought into that a while back.

[Cody]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's hard though. Then you get the performance in and you're like. But I think the way that we're negotiating a lot of these deals is like we' partnership content at no additional cost. So if the ads work then it's like I can take some of that cost and just, you know, reallocate it.

[Connor]

So I had an interesting question someone asked me and I think it's a good quick topic for the pod. As we're talking about partnership ads. They said they were ab testing between whitelisting ads and partnership ads and they were not seeing, I think they were seeing like a negligible difference. What would your guys response be?

[Cody]

I think I have some inside baseball, so see what I can share. But just understanding the difference between them.

[Matt]

I would not be that surprised. Like, I think it's, it's like from Gordon Ramsay versus Gordon Ramsay and Hexclad. And it's the same content, right?

[Connor]

Same content, yeah. Same creators. And also partnership ads now have single handle options. So it doesn't even have to say and Hexclad anymore.

[Cody]

Yeah. So are you, are you talking about a test between the two different types of partnership ads which is combined or are you talking about whitelisting which is actually like a different product in meta that they're like. My understanding is they're a different product, they're different teams, there's lots of politics involved and they're essentially meta never officially sunsets products, but they're really trying to move sunset whitelisting and just kind of have partnership be the main hub. It's way easier to integrate with creators which was such a huge hassle back and forth. And so especially with them now allowing you to run partnership ads just from the creators handle like that essentially is waitlisting.

[Matt]

Exactly.

[Connor]

Yeah. Yeah. The ad units at this point look exactly the same under the hood. They're slightly different.

[Matt]

Interesting.

[Cody]

I think I, yeah, we're, we're doing everything partnership ads, we still have like legacy whitelisting. We're doing everything partnership ads. But I think and, and my understanding is there's better signal there. Like behind the hood. It's, it's, it's better and I think people should do that. It's just easier. But in terms of does an ad or do ads perform better from the brand, I'm from the creator only or both? I don't know. I, I, We've never specifically tested it like, we've tested on like one off ads. So I don't know. I Have heard more often than not that just from the creator does better. But I, I don't know for sure.

[Connor]

And I would assume the fact that they were testing between them is they want the single handle partnership ads. So like from my perspective and for the sake of this exercise, I think we can assume the ads look exactly the same. They're ab testing, getting negligible results. My point was closer to yours, Cody, where I'm like meadow wants you to do partnership ads. Partnership ads is the new thing. They're pushing you there. It's working slightly differently under the hood, I don't think. You said Facebook never sunsets products which is probably true. But also you don't want to be investing in things that they don't care about any longer. Right. It just makes sense. Like you just bite the bullet. I, I think it was a. My point was basically it is a diff. It is a unnecessary difference to test between the ads look exactly the same. The industry and meta are pushing you in one direction. It's best to just swim with the current on that one.

[Cody]

Totally agree.

[Matt]

So are you fully, are you fully partnership then, Connor?

[Connor]

Yeah, we're only running partnership ads at this point.

[Matt]

Got it.

[Cody]

Do you guys have any opinion amongst partnership ads? Only from creator versus creator and brand page. Anything you've seen?

[Connor]

I don't think there's any value in having the brand handle attached to it, frankly. I think it looks more like an ad and I think a lot of the value of partnership ads is they look less like ads.

[Matt]

So you're just doing it as the, the single handle? No, no, Ridge handle.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally.

[Cody]

Have you guys seen evidence of partnership ads reaching new audiences? I know and Connor on like you guys have done some, some pretty big ones recently and that's how we started the conversation. Like I think that's everyone's talking about is like hey, this is signal to reach new. Like is that something you have found? How would you know? Like do you look at cost per thousand accounts reached? Are you looking at like comments like what are your guys thoughts with that?

[Matt]

Absolutely. I mean this is. We had a big one recently that launched in the last few months that really opened my eyes to like we were already headed down this path of signing more influencers and these like cooking adjacent verticals. But this, this activation is like oh my gosh, like this is so clearly the. The way to go. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of data points we're looking at to like validate whether or not it's a New audience. First off, we're just like looking account wide and saying like generally like what is our, our age split, our gender split, our demo split, what are our CPMs? And then you go and look just at the impressions on these ads and it's like not that different cpm, but the audience is like way skewed towards one gender compared to account average. The placements are totally different, the engagement looks different. Like the outbound click rate is different, the net new visit rate super high. So it's exactly. So it's like it's very clear that we're tapping into a new, new audience just by activating with this creator. My question that I have for you guys, because we talk like meta's talking a lot about signal engineering and, and you know, Cody, you've been thinking about it a lot. Do you think this, this new audience that this creative, these ads are tapping into and all that data that's getting passed into the account through the pixel is helping the other ads like outside of the, the creator ads, like is that signal then helping the entire account? Like wow, this new audience is out there and there's a lot of these people and we can actually go find them with more creative now. Like I know Matt, I heard Matt Bartuli talk about this years ago and, and he had this hypothesis that when you add in like a YouTuber, a CTV or a linear TV or like you start spending big on a new channel or you're reaching a new audience, that that should help the Facebook algorithm too because you're giving it a new audience to go target off of. That could be the same thing here, right?

[Cody]

I, I, I fundamentally believe that and I've talked about this with Matt a lot for tv. When we launched linear tv, it was probably like a year and a half ago, new visit. Again, like no other change but you know, putting you know, 10% of our mix into, into a new channel with like completely new audience, Meta performance just significantly improved percent. New visits went up like pretty significant, like no other change. So yeah, I, I fundamentally believe that. I think that's one of the things we're, we're up against. So I think, you know, it can be, I guess that's a great form of signal engineering and kind of like flooding the system. And we're about to do like a pretty big mid upper funnel test on another channel, partly with the goal of feeding Meta. So definitely we'll keep more. But I think, I think what would be super interesting, I don't know if you guys have like done a House test on partnership ads specifically, I'm very curious, like the incrementality factor on those compared, you know, like we talk a lot like static versus video, but like the incrementality factor on that because like, I wonder if like you can even run those a little bit more aggressively if it seems like you're doing a much better job reaching new audiences if, if you know, you know what I mean.

[Connor]

But yeah, we did do that and we saw a much higher incrementality factor from partnership ads and that's how I was going to answer that question. I don't remember off the bat if there were higher percent new visits or if we looked at like rolling reach on those ads particularly. But what we did find was that they were, they had a higher incrementality factor at least for the few weeks we tested it back in May.

[Cody]

That's awesome. It's great to hear. Two years ago we had a crazy Black Friday. We were actually one of the top selling brands and products on Shopify. It was really cool. Harley shouted us out on TV and everything which was awesome. But it wasn't all good news. With unforeseen growth comes some challenges. And one of the challenges we had was we had a crazy backlog of CX tickets at one point, I'm embarrassed to say we had a seven day average response time that lasted for longer than it should have. A big part of it was our CX software was just not scalable and couldn't keep up. We were using of those old legacy slow players. There was no AI involved, there was no automation and just the UX was not great. And so when we came into Black Friday of last year we knew we needed to prepare better so we switched to rich panel. It was pretty close before Black Friday. Onboarding was really quick. Two weeks was all all it took. They got all of our macros there, they got all of our tickets, they trained our team, they just took care of everything. We got the self service widget set up. I think now like 40% of people are actually getting responses just by the self service widget. And then we're using obviously a lot of the AI. They have this like AI moderation tool that us and Ridge are, are big fans of. Our average response time is now within hours. We've gone from 18 people to 10. We're able to, our CSAT is higher than it's ever been. And so last Black Friday, no backlog. All of our peak moments we're able to, you know, without having to fully ramp up our team or like go crazy with it. We're able to get back to people way better, provide a better customer experience. And Rich Panel is a huge part of that. So if you want to get ready before peak season, before Q4 and Black Friday, switch to Rich Panel. You'll save money on software, you won't need as many people, and you'll be able to just provide a better service for your customers. So go to richpanel.com demo and tell them Cody from Marketing Operator sent you.

[Matt]

And have you guys had any ads that you've launched? Whether it was like a unique angle, unique creator, you know, any like, just very different ad that when you look at just just purely like the age, gender and maybe like placement splits on Meta for those ads compared to your account wide that you're like, wow, this is just a clearly a totally different type of person consuming this ad. Do you have any, anything like it could also be like for different product categories maybe. I don't know, Connor, if you've seen that with like rings to wallets to luggage, but have you seen any of that for any angles the the bet?

[Connor]

So I don't have an example off the top of my head from a content perspective, but we've seen a bunch of really interesting stuff this year with products we launched in March, a Dessert Warrior collab and Dessert Warriors. This like, it's dessert with two S's. So it's kind of like it's got good lore in the EDC community. They've done a lot of really cool collabs in the past. It's like a sprinkled donut design. And we launched it and it was like basically DOA to our list. Like, we did not sell any. And then we launched on Instagram and for the first time, we saw ads perform extremely well to a much younger audience, which makes sense. It's like pink with sprinkles on it. And then the inverse of that is like just yesterday we launched a Pac man wallet. And that's way more like. I think that appeals to a slightly older crowd. It's more nostalgic, ip, et cetera, et cetera. Absolutely. Crush to our audience. I think we'll probably see it succeed to a similar age and demo that we typically do in our Meta Ads account. So that's where we've seen the most. Like, how can we target new audiences? The easiest way is to do designs that appeal to different people. But I also think partnership ads and content are just as valid of a way to do that.

[Cody]

Do you see the Spend. So I know you're saying like performance is good. Of those different audiences, do you see the spend delivery skew to different demos like the Pac Man 1. Like, is that skewing older than your like account average or your BAU and vice versa.

[Connor]

So that's what we. With Dessert Warrior, we just, we launched it with broad targeting and we saw Meta optimize towards a younger demo. So that was like, that was one that was like by far one of the most interesting data points we had this year. A largely unsuccessful launch to our audience launch on medit Abroad and Meta figures out that it is, it is going to work with a demo that we are spending very little money on otherwise like this like 18 to 24 crowd. Pac man, we just launched yesterday, but I assume it'll look a lot like our account average.

[Cody]

Yeah, that's a, that's a great way. It's definitely a lot of what we're working on for next year is like, things like that is like, I guess it's all signal engineering. You know, it's like creative signal engineering to feed it to those. I think I've talked about it a lot. Like we do it theoretically, maybe we're not taking big enough swings. But like we find even when we're producing stuff for different audiences, Personas like we don't have the evidence of that of we're like, you know, I've talked about this a lot where like we would make Millennial creative, a lot of partnership ads and the delivery would still.

[Matt]

Be older audiences and we, without giving it any constraints. Cody, like just like Connor said. Yeah, yeah.

[Cody]

So before giving up on it because we were like, is Meta right or is Meta wrong? Right. That's like the age old debate. And so we ran a conversion lift test where we essentially put a bunch of this creat in its own campaign, but forced the spend to different age groups, ran a holdout on it, same efficiency as our BAU stuff, not as much spend. So it's like, all right, maybe Meta doesn't know. Like, I think Meta is stuck in a little bit of a loop and we just have again, we have, you know, millions and millions of purchases on this one customer demo. And so I think that's why we're in the signal engineering phase right now where it's like, can we shock the system? You know, so I think, I think in addition to having campaigns, we're doing that like a lot of stuff, like Connor is saying, a lot of different partnerships, collaborations, product stuff that we're going to do. That's just like much bigger swings but you know, that'll be for next year. Larger partnership ads. Let's see if we can get some signal. Kind of like you guys did Hexcloud and then like, you know, I'm definitely open to doing second account, second pixel. Like I'm not going to rush into it, but to me like nothing is off the table and I'm, I'm very much a proponent of like consolidation. Like don't fight the systems. But I do think there are some times where you gotta kind of fight back a little bit.

[Matt]

What we're like talking about is there's actually a lot, you know. So Brian, Brian Kano talks about new, new audience reach through new Persona targeting hexcloud's finding new audience reach through like different, different partnerships and different influencer verticals. Connor's finding new audience reach by rolling out unique designs. I, I wanna. How is your like thinking around that change, Connor? Like were you. Because we don't generally launch, I mean most of our products were not launching an acquisition funnel. So. And like did this change over time? Like once you actually realize that some of these new designs are reaching new audiences? Like are you now launching bigger swings design wise, more frequently than you used to or have you as always taken your like more unique designs and launched them in a, in an acquisition, paid media acquisition campaign setup?

[Connor]

Yeah. Okay, so it's a good question. We, we have, we have like two types of product expansion. We have category expansion and typically when we do that, we're always building out funnels around it. And that would be, you know, that's rings and that's luggage and that's where we'll have iPhone 17 phone cases next week we'll launch acquisition around that. So those are like more or less net new categories. We're building out full acquisition funnels. We expect those to be incremental to the business, whether reaching new people or we're getting someone who wouldn't otherwise be purchasing from us. I think. And then what I also say internally is depending on the maturity of those categories, new colorways, which is like the second form of expansion, become more important over time. So we have basically like five colors of luggage. And I think we could build a easily 50 million dollar plus per year luggage business without any new colors or designs. We shouldn't, we shouldn't need to rely on that. There's so much meat on the bone just getting the, the, the basic category up and running. When you're the wallet business and you've done $100 million a year for a couple years in a row now. Now all of a sudden getting that incremental dollar requires new designs. It is far more important to that business. And we have done many new colorways over the last couple of years, but I think we've really just found our footing in terms of what succeeds. A lot of our initial new colorways was inspired by Yeti who like YETI basically just comes out with new solid colors. And that frankly, like has not been as impactful to our business. If we list out our biggest wins over the last few years, it comes from, it comes from more, you know, I don't know, dynamic designs, more exciting designs. Dessert Warrior was a good one this year. Kintsugi, which is like the, it looks like broken porcelain. It's like black or white and then it has gold oil filled cracks. We've, we've spent like hundreds of thousands of dollars. People might have seen it in their feeds. It's those like big design swings that tend to have much higher ceilings. So looking at 2026 and 2027, that's really where we want to be spending more of our time.

[Matt]

And do you see that those campaigns, the people that are getting purchases attributed to them, are they actually buying for the most part the product that you're advertising?

[Connor]

Okay, another really good question. We, I'll give a great example because the answer is like, the answer is largely yes, but not exclusively. Yeah, another, another successful colorway for us has been these like tattoo inspired designs. So in February we came out with a traditional flash design. It's kind of like a sailor tattoo type wallet. And we measured a 4x incremental ROAS on those ads. Extremely good for us. But that incremental return was actually basically higher than total revenue for that product. So then we were looking, you could do this with the north. If you say, hey, show me all the traditional flash ads and show me the products that were sold from those. And we only saw, I want to say it was 40 or 50% of revenue come from that colorway. So a lot of the value is just, oh, hey, we're getting great engagement, we're getting higher CTRs, lower CPC people are coming to the site and a lot of people, half of people are going to buy the gunmetal wallet. They actually don't really want the cool crazy tattoo wallet. They just want one of our core colors. So not only have we seen colorways reach new audiences and be great revenue drivers in and of themselves, but we found it a way to kind of refresh and get people interested in the stuff that we've had for, you know, 10 plus years.

[Matt]

Yeah, yeah. So there's, there's people out there that, that want your, your kind of like basic blocking and tackling colors, but you still haven't reached them with those, with, with the ads promoting those colors. It's funny that you had to like show a different design to find that person in that different audience, but they still have the same overlap of your core, of your core audience preference.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah. And we, we've talked about this too, because some people will be tempted to in the company, like fully weight the like, mer of a product. They'll be like, hey, we spent a hundred thousand dollars on traditional Flash and we only did $120,000 in revenue. That's terrible. But that completely ignores all the other stuff that you've sold because you were able to promote that product. The ability to spend that dollar is so, so, so important.

[Cody]

That's such a good point.

[Matt]

Yep. And I think like, it's, it's in our best interest to put our next dollar into whatever has the best efficiency. Right. So even if you're, even if you're blended knives, if you're like spending into a category and you're, let's say you're, you're blended, your blended return is break even. But if that, if Those ads have a 20 higher, whatever performance metric you're looking at, like, you should still invest there because that's like the best decision for your business. Even though the blended business unit technically doesn't look that great. Like there's, there's a of lot to your point, there's a lot more going on with that ad creative that is outside of that.

[Cody]

And I wonder if that's part of the issue with Meta is like most of us are saying, you know, mass conversions. Even if it's like value optimization, it's like the, the, the new audience is going to be more expensive. And if Meta is competing in the kind of like, you know, deciding spend in the auction against audiences, it's probably going to go with the safer option, which is a new one. So it's like, is that why you do need to force out a little bit more spend there and then be okay with maybe slightly less efficiency on an attribution basis, but maybe there's more criminality factor or you just know you have to accept a slightly lower return for a net new audience?

[Connor]

Yeah, dude, I think that is like basically our jobs at this point is like when we tell Meta to optimize for conversions. The best thing it can do is optimize for conversions that it can attribute to Meta and that largely completely ignores incrementality and it also completely ignores like the long term growth of the business.

[Cody]

Definitely agreed for sure.

[Matt]

Connor, what do you, what do you see across your category? Like do you guys look at one of the follow ups I'm gonna do after this is actually go and look at the, the age, gender and ad delivery split amongst like because we basically just name our ads, you know, hex mills or knives or cookware or whatever product. So I, I want to go and do like a refresh on any audience differences from those, from those attributes. Do you guys see any like, like major swings in like rings versus luggage versus versus wallets and in all your categories?

[Connor]

Off the top of my head the answer is like not really amongst men. One of the more interesting ones is that we found targeting women with our wedding band business to be far more incremental. So naturally Meta would serve the budget basically 50, 50 between men and women. And then we measured the incrementality of each and we saw a higher factor amongst women. And our hypothesis for that one, it was pretty clear to me that buying a wedding band is at least somewhat of like a group decision. Like I think, I think you know, two people getting married or sitting down Sunday night to like check off from their wedding list and, and at some point they're buying a wedding band. So there's a little bit of a group decision. And targeting women can also introduce a sort of like attribution break where the woman's showing up with like hey, you should buy this, this wedding band from Ridge because I'm worried you lose all your stuff and they've got this replacement program. So we see a higher incrementality factor there. So we end up like shaping how we' targeting and therefore how we spend dollars between genders way differently. That's probably the best example. But otherwise the wallets and luggage are relatively expensive and I think we just naturally skew older.

[Matt]

Have you ever worked with a female creator to, to hit, hit on that like buy this wedding band for your husband message?

[Connor]

So, so back to the, the point around partnership ads. That's a, that's a place where we're seeing a lot of success is with women creators, women ads via partnership ads on Meta promoting wedding bands. And now right currently we're seeing like some of the best performance we've seen.

[Cody]

The spend breakdown, you think that's the spend is going to women but they're influencing or making purchase decisions for obviously their future husbands.

[Connor]

That was the hypothesis after observing this higher incrementality factor by targeting women.

[Cody]

But like, if you look at that and you just filter by those ads, like, is the spend going more to women than other stuff?

[Connor]

Oh, yeah. 100%.

[Cody]

Okay.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Cody]

That's awesome.

[Matt]

That's a, that's a great example of how to reach a new audience with, with your creative and meta.

[Cody]

I would do that. I don't think guys are going to influence women's makeup decisions.

[Matt]

I don't think so.

[Connor]

No, no, dude. And like, I mean, this, this. I think I've brought up this step before, but I saw it again on Twitter. Like, women control 85% of dollars spent online or something. It's like they're the ones making a lot of the, the buying decisions. Like, if you can get a business that works, acquiring women, they're just. It seems to work a little bit, a little bit better.

[Matt]

Do you guys have any angles that you were like, holy moly. This. This angle just totally took off and maybe it's reaching a new audience. Like any, any just unique. Like, that's how I felt about this partnership ad and it's like really changing how I'm thinking about our influencer marketing strategy and how we shape these deals. I. But have you, have you guys had any. It could. Maybe it. Maybe it's not Connor. And it's just like the new, the new product designs. Was that for you? But are there any other ads, whether it's new product or new partner or an angle that just. You were like, holy, this has really taken off and it's. And it's changed how you're thinking about just your paid media creative in general and what you're doing next for it.

[Connor]

Well, actually, let me ask you first with the, with the influencer ad that's working so well via partnership ads, is it of the contents of the ad, is it different? Like, are they. Are they teeing up the hexclad products in a different way than you guys typically do?

[Matt]

It's very native to the creator and like the con and the type of product review content they do. But I wouldn't say it's that differentiated from our other review content. Aside from the fact that the person doing it is really well known for doing it. It's. But it's just like your classic native iPhone shop product, like product review. Here's what I like about it. Yada yada yada. I wouldn't say the actual content itself is that, that unique. Other Than that.

[Connor]

Okay.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Connor]

Yeah. All right. So what you're taking away is largely just it coming from a different handle, different creator and that leading to success.

[Matt]

Yes, exactly.

[Connor]

Yeah. That's more or less been the same for us, like partnership ads. We really started testing more aggressively back in April and May and it just seemed like there were wins to be had there.

[Cody]

I would say the biggest one not enough. Which is again a large part of the problem. I would say the mom stuff definitely that has been an angle that we've unlocked and now we'll go into scale it.

[Connor]

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[Matt]

Yes, yes. We like a little, a little change up. All right dude, I've been pumped. I've had like just a blast following along the Ridge sweeps this year. It looks great. I just. You guys continue to level up that campaign every single year which is fun to follow along. We have ours launching and I'm also really excited about it. We have some really fun branding getting developed. We have some really fun creative getting developed both through the branding and with some some creators that we're working with on this campaign that I think is going to be really fun and exciting and, and Just build, you know, add a fresh face to the, to the second year. We're doing, you know, Gordon's golden ticket to blank. So I'm excited about that. But I got to hear, like, what's going on with the Ridge Sweep Stakes? How's it going? Like, what are the KPIs looking like? Any interesting things happening? I would love the, love the rundown. We haven't chatted about it.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. Okay. So this year, big differences are we're giving away a Lamborghini. So the bigger prizes this year we have two winners. Someone gets to select between. The first winner will get to select between the Lamborghini, a Hennessey Velociraptor or a hundred thousand dollars cash. And then the second winner will get to select between the two remaining ones. So we've never done, they're more expensive prizes and we've never done two winners. Then the other big thing is that we launched in Canada and the uk, so actually worked with a different legal partner.

[Matt]

Separate. Three separate sweepstakes.

[Connor]

Technically they all have different rules. And, and there are, there are some differences in how you can get, you know, a, a big part of the legal component of Sweep 6 is you have to be able to enter for free. And there's slightly different requirements. In like the uk you need a digital way to enter for free, whereas, and we have like free free email entries and things like that. But in the uk, we build out like a separate little web portal for people to sign up.

[Matt]

Does that, does the email SMS not qualify? Like not check the box as like a digital free method?

[Connor]

Yeah, we don't need to get too far into the details. There's these alternative means of entry. You just need an alternative way to get entries. And it's slightly different in the uk, so we have a digital portal belt out there. In the, in Canada and the U.S. we have mail in entries as like another alternative. So there's like slight, slight nuances to each market. But the idea is, you know, our international business is anywhere between like 10 and 20% of our business and we've never been able to do sweeps there. So this is our first year doing that. And right off the bat in terms of win so far, the, the seeing the performance internationally is also interesting because we're not comping a sweepstakes. So we, we in a way get to observe like, what is the, what is the incremental impact of the sweepstakes.

[Matt]

And are you just looking at like revenue growth rate year over year? Like in the uk, for example, and then looking at that rev. Growth rate and efficiency. Growth rate, maybe compared to. Yeah, like where I was trending in the previous few months. And you're saying the growth rate has spiked.

[Connor]

Yeah, exactly. And I said this earlier, right? Like, so much of everything, product development, content creation, partnerships, et cetera, it's like, can you give yourself the ability to spend another dollar efficiently? And in Canada, we're able to spend. I think in September, we spent like 85% more year over year. And we had a. We had a. An mer improve. And it's like, okay, you and I've been in marketing for a long time. That never happens. At least, like, it's never happened within Ridge that we've been able to spend 85% more at a better return.

[Matt]

That's insane.

[Connor]

So that tells you how impactful the. The. The.

[Matt]

And they're all for the same pot. They're all for the same two cars or. Got it. Okay.

[Connor]

We're not giving away, like three Lamborghinis or something. So they all. They all share the same prize pool. It's just available in new markets. And because of that, basically our growth in Canada in September. In August. I think I just said September. But yeah, August is when we spent all the 85% more. We could justify the entire cost of the sweepstakes just with our growth in Canada.

[Matt]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Connor]

Because some people are like, well, how. You know, how well does it work?

[Matt]

Whatever.

[Connor]

Now in the US Also growing super strong, we are comping what was a really good sweepstakes last year. We had the 24 karat gold cyber truck, another velociraptor, another 100 grand or whatever. It was just harder to grow. What we really found is what I was hoping for. We would just get like, this is. This is real wishful thinking. Right. But, like, I thought everything would just work. Work 30% better. Like, just off the bat, like, oh, hey, we're just gonna get like a big incremental lift, cooler prizes, better integration on the site.

[Matt]

Were you planning to spend 30 more?

[Connor]

No. So, like, theoretically, I was like, I would love if we could spend the exact same amount and just grow 30. And I didn't think. I didn't think that was. I didn't think it was crazy. I didn't think it was, like, unheard of. It's not the case. But what it has given us is the ability to spend more dollars. It was like, okay, I'll take. That's a total win. One thing that I'm really excited about, and we've seen A lot of success with is you and I both use Revo beloved sponsor. You get live entry tracking on the site. You have an account page. You can see your entries. I think that was like a big upgrade for us last year just in terms of, like, the experience as a customer venturing the sweepstakes. Before, it was like total black box.

[Matt]

Which, by the way, that was one of the big things that. That made me say, you know what? I love running our sweepstakes right after Ridge runs their sweepstakes because we then were able to have that experience on our site for our first one. And I like it. It makes the gamified, the gamification of it so much more emphasized. It's a really. It's a really cool user experience.

[Connor]

Yeah, it's much, much better. And like, yeah, a lot of these other. I think I've said before, I think we're in the really early innings of like, the gamification of. Of commerce there. Many other brands have done many other sweepstakes and I just think from like a tooling perspective, we're. We'll still see a lot of cooler stuff get developed. But what we did was we've been sending. We have like plain text emails coming from, you know, coming from, quote unquote, a member of our CX team that's like, hey, Connor, thanks again for entering the sweepstakes. You know, we see you've got 420 entries. So we like that. And that is personalized. It's literally how many you have. That's awesome. You've got a great chance. We wish you luck. And, you know, our Labor Day sale is happening right now, so you can get 20% off and you get. And you get. We did bonus entries last week, so we, We. Because of that, we have basically personalization on the site as it relates to entries. And now we're leveraging that information across other channels for like hyper, hyper personalized plain text emails to you. And we saw that message absolutely crush. And that was. It actually wasn't for Labor Day. We sent another one for Labor Day. But now we've got it in the flows. And what I was saying, have you ever signed up for.

[Matt]

Wait, you added. You added like the entries. Awareness into your life cycle.

[Connor]

Marketing the plain text into flows.

[Matt]

Yeah. Oh, nice.

[Connor]

Have you ever signed up for Equinox?

[Matt]

I have not. Okay.

[Connor]

Because Equinox does an incredible job of like, onboarding. It's. It's very clearly automated, but it feels extremely. It's clearly automated from a marketer's perspective, but it's extremely personal. And then the way they do it is just like, it's a very white glove experience. And we were trying to nail more of that as it related to sweepstakes. And that's why we ended up testing these plain text emails. One other, like, small thing, because I've talked about plain text in the past, we send a lot from our. Our founder, Daniel. And those messages are different, right? They're like, we'll say the first plain text from him is him reflecting on how crazy it is that, like, you know, the. It was a couple that won last year because they bought a wedding band. So, like, they got married, and then a day later they came out to Ridge, they chose the hundred thousand dollars, and now they're going to be able to, like, you know, whatever, put a really hefty down payment on a house in Wisconsin. Right. And it. So it was like, reflecting on how cool it is. Like, I started this in my garage with my dad, and now, now we, like, really get to, like, give away these amazing prizes. That's the sort of message that I want coming from the founder. Daniel would never email you and say, hey, you've got 400 entries. Right? Like, that just. It doesn't make sense. We're starting to, like, build out, like, what kind of messages do we want to send them and who are they best sent from? So now we've got Megan on the CX team emailing you about. About your exact entries, and that feels a little bit more transactional. Megan's the one that would highlight the Labor Day sale and, like, be a little bit more like, hey, if you want to get this other stuff, you should. And I'm excited about that development. And we've seen that's not leading to, you know, the growth that we're seeing year over year, at least not exclusively. It's. It's contributing to it. But from a messaging and marketing and tactics standpoint, one of my. One of my more favorite wins so far.

[Matt]

Yeah. Dude, that's an awesome. That's a really cool branding choice.

[Connor]

Yeah.

[Matt]

Right? And like, that. You can't. That's not. Yeah, that probably won't show up in the. In the revenue or the revenue per user on. On those emails, but it's. It's going to make the experience better.

[Connor]

Well, well, actually, my point was the email itself performed incredibly well from Daniel. From. Well, Daniel's always performed well, but the one from Megan, like, over. It was our first bonus entry period, and we said, hey, these are how many entries you have. Thanks. For entering, you've got a great shot. We wish you luck. If you want double entries today, you can get it. And that email. Absolutely crushed. I do think the personalization plays a really big role in it.

[Matt]

Got it? Yes. That's awesome. 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 best 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 in 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 really amazing. House helps you run experiments on your channel so you can confidently answer the questions you've always wondered about. Things like 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 operational incrementality 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 IO forward slash operators. That's H A U S IO slash operators. And start allocating your budget with confidence. What other, what are there, like, are there any other first time components you have this year? This is your, Is this your fifth, is this your fifth sweepstakes?

[Connor]

Yeah, fifth, I think for first time components. The two winners, the international, some of the messaging stuff. A lot of it is just building on wins from previous years. Like I've talked about this a number of times in the past and I just mentioned it a couple episodes. So. So we don't need to go too far into it. But one thing we identified three years ago at this point is that if we can get the cars in the videos of influencers. At first I was like, this is the easiest win we're ever going to get. Every, every influencer post is going to work if they have the cars. We spent the following Sweepstakes 2024 last year getting it in a ton of creators videos. Spent a lot of time and energy doing that. Saw like it definitely overperformed our, our other buys that don't have the creators in the videos. But it wasn't as, it wasn't as I thought we'd see. Literally I thought we'd see like 100% success rate. Not quite the case. So this year we tried to nail that balance between let's get it, let's get deep integrations in large creators or let's get really great content from small creators kind of cut out the middle. We had a lot of like uninspired content last year that had the, the, that had the cars in them. And it's like, let's just not deal with the logistics of that.

[Matt]

Yeah, I was going to say. So you didn't have to have to move those Lamborghinis across the country like a hundred times. Like you did with the goldplated Cyber truck last year.

[Connor]

Right, right. So. So the, the Cyber truck and the Raptor two years ago or sorry, last year. Yeah, we had to ship out to la. We shipped up to Reno at one point, came back to Salt Lake. It was like, it was too much time and energy. It took a lot.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Connor]

A lot of effort. So, yeah, so that's where we've landed now. You know, another win from last year that we've built on this year is YouTube. There's just a great. There's just a great opportunity. There's like a larger story for us to tell. And I think that just works better in, like, kind of longer form ad placements, like a. Like a YouTube in stream. So.

[Matt]

So you think you have better. Are you saying you have better YouTube ads this year or more spend going into sweeps?

[Connor]

Both. More ads. Better ads. Now more spend is going to YouTube during sweeps.

[Matt]

Is that like an iteration of the. Of, like, you guys have that hero video on your website? Is that. Is that kind of like that seems like it could be a YouTube ad.

[Connor]

The hero video ends up getting edited down quite a bit to, like, work better for. For YouTube. The point of the hero video is we need bad driving footage to work in throughout our ad. So, like, when we shoot the hero video, it's like, we got to get a bunch of great driving footage. We need to introduce a sweepstake so that. So the hero video talks about the international markets, the two winners. It talks about the mechanics of the sweepstakes. It has to be educational. And those are basically, I told my team, like, those are the goals. We need bad driving footage, and we need a piece of content that explains what's going on with the sweepstakes. When it comes to developing the best YouTube ad, it's a little bit different where it's like, we need to hook the viewer. We need to introduce the sweepstakes. We need to sell the product and the hero video. And because we need to do that by category, we need to do that for luggage, for. For wedding bands, for wallets. So pieces of the hero video will make it into those different iterations. But it's. It's a little bit different.

[Matt]

Yeah, we talked about that last year. I think, like, I don't know if you said you. You did this in the past, and it's something you're trying to. That you were trying to improve on, but it's. You can't. You can't forget to sell. Sell your products in these. In these sweepstakes ads. Right. And I think maybe you were talking about how in the past, either you either you did this, you're trying to not do that again, or like, you were just very aware of it, that you can't just sell the idea that they're going to get this Lamborghini or this cash, you got to sell them on the wallet as well.

[Connor]

Yeah, totally. Totally. Okay. I've got two other kind of observations for you. One is I was expecting to see better Performance. I brought up phone cases earlier with like lower value entry products like right now. I mean like last year like the cheapest way to enter was like an $80 wallet. And I was like, oh yeah, I could see phone cases working. We had them on sale for different points for like 30 or 40 bucks. I'm like, I could see that working just because I don't know, someone kind of could always use a phone case and 30 or 40 bucks gets you entered into the sweepstakes. And I like, I could see that kind of unlocking an incremental, more price conscious audience. We actually more saw the opposite. Where we've seen, seen larger AOV products work better. We've seen travel work extremely well. Yeah. And I think there's something around, you know, a dollar spent per entry. If someone's buying $30, maybe they just feel like they have too low of odds. Like it's actually a little bit less compelling. Whereas if you're buying a $300 carry on and maybe you're getting it during the bonus entry period, you're getting 600 entries, a thousand entries. And it's a great product product. So we actually found, we, we continued. I would still love to test it in the future like some sort of fifteen, twenty, thirty dollar entry price point. Like there has to be some sort of win to have there. But we didn't see it this year.

[Matt]

Yeah, we saw that, that we saw the opposite last year. I was super happy with our, with what the sweepstakes did for our, the changes in our growth rates on non cookware like our knives and aprons and, and pretty much every non like cooking accessory just shot through the roof. Rachel 18%. So it definitely, it definitely gave people like a little more I guess snack sized entry into our brand. I think we, we probably tipped over a lot of people that were, that were kind of on the fence for a while by, by having the sweepstakes and then they came in and bought one product or two products and, and got their entries. And the guy that, the guy that won for us last year only entered his email. Fifteen entries. He had.

[Cody]

No way.

[Matt]

Yeah, he had the least. He didn't even, he didn't even opt in for sms. He got halfway through that, through that opt in flow. He like nah, I can't, I'm, I'm, I want email only. So yeah, and he was the, he was the second, the second guy. Like we reached out to the first person, we didn't hear back and then we reached out to the winner and yeah, 15 entries yeah.

[Cody]

Dude, that's so funny.

[Connor]

Yeah, no, we've, we've. I would consider lucky. Everybody who's won so far purchased product which makes for a nice, nice story. Like the guy last year buying a wedding band was great, right?

[Matt]

Yes. Oh my God. That could not. That's like the most perfect story. Buys a wedding man to get married, wins the sweepstakes, takes the cash, uses the cash for the, for his wedding or is. Or is. Or starting his new life with his wife. Like that's perfect.

[Connor]

Oh yeah, dude, it was, it was fantastic. Do you guys have now that you're preparing for it September? Yeah. So you're, you're. It's coming up quick here.

[Matt]

It's coming up.

[Connor]

Do you guys have any like net new efforts that you're. You'll be you know, know implementing?

[Matt]

Yeah. Mainly do we spent. God. This, this, this sweepstakes build out. I feel like took years off my life last year because it's just, it's like a very. There's a lot of details to consider building it from scratch coming into this year I am like it's just a lot less work because we're using a lot of the same stuff right like there we don't need to rework the way that our, that our website's built out. For the most part it's going to translate like generally across like the strategic approach we're taking and paid and an email it's, it's not that different. We're just layering in some like fun new stuff on top of it. So like one of the things I'm really excited about is like this email block that Revo developed where if someone's in their logged in state you can just like very easily drop that email block into a campaign or automations and it's going to show them how many entries they, they have and what they did to get those entries. So I'm excited about that. That we have a, our director design started like five, six months ago. So this will be. He did not develop the branding on this campaign last year. He is developing the branding this year. So I think the branding is just gonna be really cool. I've. I've seen some like shots of what they've been working on. So the branding's gonna be fun. And then Hero video very different this year than last year. Last year was like single shot Gordon, we're walking through his restaurant doing the explainer. This year it's going to be a little bit more, more more visual. Our team's producing it themselves. And we're just gonna have some fun, exciting new ad content. We're leaning, we're trying to get more of our brand ambassadors content earlier this year so we can do a bunch of cuts not just from Gordon but also, you know, the, the other, you know, five to 10 folks that we work with regularly to announce this thing and explain it. So yeah, I think those are the, those are the big things. But generally following a lot of the same, the same things we built out from last year. Year.

[Connor]

Totally. Yeah, it makes total sense. What I was going to say, the other one that was a relatively easy win is we got all buttoned up with TV ads. We have sweepstakes ads on linear TV.

[Matt]

This year and it's like same as your YouTube cuts.

[Connor]

No, they're a little bit different because they're. We just, we. Everything we run on linear is 15 seconds because you're getting basically half the CPM we end up. Cody just sent it to me so I could send it to YouTube. Our TV ad has a big like overlay. So like just a really clear like enter sweepstakes ridge.com tv so there's like this very persistent CTA the entire time of the video. It doesn't, doesn't really look like your typical TV ad. And those have worked really well. And kind of to our point earlier, I mean we see them work on the networks that you would expect. Like we see it work really well on motor trends. We see it work really well on bice, stuff like that.

[Matt]

And are you seeing those ads when you say that you're seeing them work really well? Are you saying whatever provider you're using for tv, are you seeing that there like the attributes they're reporting on for those ads is better than like your other TV creative right now?

[Connor]

Yep, there's that. We see, you know the way that we verify TV is, is through their attribution which is basically like an incremental lift on users. And that has been working well. And then we see itself reported in our post purchase. We even see, I mean I was just looking at it today, this week our TV ads have a, have a 10% row is on a one day click basis. People actually going typing in ridge.com tv oh really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a, it's like a $30 CPC which is like that's fine. Like I totally makes. I think very few people are actually doing that. Most are just going to Google Ridge, Google Ridge Wallet, something like that. So the direct attribution is it's there.

[Matt]

Yeah, that's interesting. And like, are you putting what percent of your TV mix is going into those sweepstakes ads?

[Connor]

It's like 60. Yeah, it's a lot. 50. 60. Something like that.

[Matt]

Cool. Should we wrap that there?

[Connor]

Yeah, I think it's good.

[Matt]

All right, that's a wrap on episode 77. Awesome chatter about how to reach new audiences in Meta with new Personas in your creative with different product designs and different products in general with different partnerships. Also went a little bit into Ridges sweepstakes and heard from Connor how that's going this year thanks to the sponsors Motion Pression, AI After Style Rich Panel and House. If you're liking the show, make sure to subscribe and share with your friends.