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- [00:00]
A
All right, sweet. We've got an exciting episode. We're going to talk Hexclad 2026 rocks, how they're setting them up. We're going to get into channel diversification. You, Cody and I all have kind of different forms of this. You've got this rock system. So I want to talk about two of the main rocks, both related to channel diversification in varying ways. In the case of the UK or Japan, how are you prioritizing channels in those? Like, you bring up terrestrial radio in the uk, that sounds stressful to me.
- [00:23]
B
I don't care what country it is. I don't care if you're Japanese living in Tokyo or if you're American living in Denver. Like, the channels are generally very similar that people consume media. I do feel like generally all these conversations about media diversification and all these opinions about it, I feel like these conversations have, like, strayed so technical, so digital marketing, that it's often forgotten. Like, why are you even doing this if you need to reach new people, that's why you diversify media. And there are ways to measure if you're achieving that.
- [00:50]
A
What does it mean to be a rock within hexcloud today?
- [00:52]
B
So for us, rocks are the big tactical objectives for the year. Now, basically the idea is that the way that we set these is like.
- [01:03]
A
All right, sweet, we've got an exciting episode. We're going to talk Hexclad 2026 rocks, how they're setting them up. We're going to get into channel diversification. Before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion, Rich Panel, Prescient, aftercell and Revo.
- [01:17]
B
All right, I am super pumped with Motion's newest shipment of AI technology in their tool called Analyze this. So basically how it works is you create a report like usual, you know, slice the data however. However you want, whatever you're trying to get insight to. Once the report is pulled, you just click Analyze this. It'll pull the report and then it'll send it right into your inbox and you can go into this report and it gives you a very, very detailed analysis of what's working, what's not working, and then ultimately it even goes into what you should do next based on the analysis that it's giving you. So just continuing to automate this analysis piece of creative strategy, and I'm. I'm very excited about it, how it's going to unlock more time and more production for creative strategy teams, 100%.
- [02:01]
A
And it's another example of how important critically analyzing creative is Today with Meta's Andromeda, which we've talked about at length on the podcast. Creative diversity has never been more important. But creative diversity to Meta is a black box to marketers. We don't know exactly what they think of as, as new and different and unique. So Motion's building native tools to help marketers guide us through that process and ultimately lead to better performance.
- [02:25]
B
So a few specific examples we've been using it for at Hexcloud lately. Just launch a new product category in and we launched some social funnels around it. So I used it to analyze all the cocktail shaker ads that we ran and it gave me super clear, very actionable insights. And then an even bigger report and even harder to do manual report was looking at all of our Gordon Ramsey ads from September 1st through yesterday. Like, think about if, you know, Ridge was going to look at all of its everyday carry ads. Like that is literally hundreds, maybe thousands of ads. And it's one thing to be able to pull that report, but totally different thing to be able to pump literally millions of dollars of data into the analyze this report and have that analysis spit out in a fraction of the time that it would take, you know, a team of creative strategists to do it manually. So very exciting stuff. Very, very different use cases. So it's, it just shows the breadth that this new feature of the product has.
- [03:18]
A
So if you're a marketer that wants the insights of Motion, go to motion app.com and tell them that the operator sent you. So cool. You know, Connor, I'll, I'll tee us up here a little bit. We did a number of like at the end of 2025 and earlier this year talking about like closing out the year as well as like, how are you setting goals for 2026? You, Cody and I all have kind of different forms of this. You've got this rock system. So I want to talk about two of the main rocks. Both related to channel diversification in varying ways. So let me hit those and then I'd like to talk in a more meta way. Talking about like, how do you set the rocks together? I know you've got like six or seven. So the two I want to talk about today, these are, these are what you sent me. One paid media rock. Continued focus on diversifying our media mix. Very focused on less in Meta purchase optimized campaigns, search Amazon and more into linear TV, CTV, YouTube, Amazon, DSP. Makes total sense. We'll get into that. And then another rock. Here is the international rock, which is the start of diversifying our media mix to reach a more top of funnel audience. So those, those make sense. You've got different, different levels of maturity in the business domestically versus international. So we're going to get into those today. But like those are two rocks that you have. I would love to just hear you briefly talk about like, what does it mean to be a rock within Hexcloud today?
- [04:41]
B
Yeah. So for us, first off, I think it's too easy to like start the year off and just get right into the most granular unit of work. And I think when you do that you lose, you lose sight of the big picture. Like I always use the forest trees analogy, like spending a lot of time focusing on building out the forest right now and then the trees we'll get into. But I think everything's so much easier when you have this like whole year outlook to kick off the year and, and you just like need to slow down and, and take. It takes time and like the, the urges just like get right into like the most granular unit of work. So for us, rocks are the big like tactical objectives for the year. Now basically the idea is that the way that we set these is like I'm coming to the table with the things that I think are the most important to do for the year. All the channel leads that report into me, like our director of paid media, our influencer manager, are doing the same thing. We meet on them, we discuss them, we kind of beat them up, we talk about what's the most least important and then we ultimately land with like a list of rocks. Some of them are overall for the business, most of them are channel specific. And then that the whole goal is that that guides everything we do for the year. So now as we do get into the most granular unit of work, everything should be laddering into one of, at least one of those rocks. So that's, that's how these kind of serve us, is these are the strategies, like the strategic tactics for the year. And then as we get into each quarter, everything I'm doing, everything the team's doing should ultimately ladder back into one of these. If, if they don't, we probably shouldn't be doing it. So what does it mean for something to be a rock at Hexclad? It just means that I think that doing that thing is important for driving our growth and hitting our targets. Like it's as simple as that, but just getting everyone on the absolute same page. So after I do this with every single channel lead, which I'm Finalizing this week we'll do like a full team review so everyone's on the same page. After we do that, we'll move into the kind of more most granular unit of planning which is our key initiative and key result setting which we do on a quarterly basis. But again that all ladders back into these like year long rocks. And some of these things will take all year long and be an ongoing thing. Some of them are more like one off and like once you set them up, they're. They're set up and they're good to go. I'd say most of them are more like we have a lot of navigation rocks this year for our website on CRO. Like once we publish a lot of those, they'll be like, they'll be updated and good to go. And like yeah, we might iterate but those are like kind of big projects that we will publish and then that rock will kind of be completed. And then others like the media mix stuff, I mean that's obviously like an always on thing every single month we need to like set our media mix, optimize against it, etc. So there's a little bit of both, but that's, that's our general approach and like what like what a rock means for us.
- [07:35]
A
Love it. Okay, so I'm curious about like how you guys get down to the more I like the term granular unit of work. So you said you rolled out this paid media rock. You just want to continue diversifying media mix. You, you said you're, you're discussing these with the team in this example. Are there more teams involved? Are you bringing in paid media performance creative? Is there anybody else at the team level that's a part of that conversation?
- [07:57]
B
Yeah, I mean every, every team in growth. So like I'm meeting with literally every channel lead, every channel team this week to review their rocks. I'm going to set pitch. Like we're basically pitching each other and like saying where we have the same stuff most of the time at this point because this team has been around for a while now. Like we're going into our fourth full year I guess and a lot of our team has been here for two to three of that. So a lot we are really on the same page. This process is getting more and more streamlined because it's not like we haven't talked about these things. Like we've had conversations last year and early part of this year. But yeah, every single team is setting their own rocks. And then there are again like some more like like for example, we need to keep getting better at our go to market. Like that's obviously not specific to one single channel, but I want everyone to be thinking about that and owning that. And that includes a lot of different things. Right. Like I need to this quarter do a better job of outlining our like tier A, tier V, tier C. The way that you guys have done a really good job of that. Um, you know Stephanie, who's our influencer manager, she might have a different key initiative that ladders into that one. So it's, it's a mix of like growth wide and then channel specific.
- [09:10]
A
Yeah, that makes total sense. And then I'm just curious like again, for this paid media rock, like at some point you're going to say you're, you need to. Let's just say as an example, a part of this paid media channel diversification, we want to launch Applovin. At what point does someone decide, hey, I'm gonna launch Applovin on, you know, February 15th. Like that, that, that's a very granular unit of work. When does that get established?
- [09:35]
B
So we, we run our quarterly. I'm actually shifting our quarterly sprints a little bit this year because I wanted to like really take our time in January. So we're gonna run basically February, March, April will be like the first sprint. Like we, we set these like quarterly, like three month time bounds on these. So basically hitting February, everyone on the growth team will have their most granular like list of initiatives and key results that ladder into these rocks. So I'd say in the next few weeks. So like next week we'll finalize these rocks. Then the week after we'll start. I'll, I'll say, all right team, like now's the time to go and like set the key initiatives and key results that ladder into these for the first sprint period. And then we will just like really hit the ground running and start executing against these things. Yeah.
- [10:17]
A
Okay, that's fun. I, I've mentioned this maybe a couple weeks ago, but like this granular unit of work, I always have trouble and I, I'm curious if you have any feedback on this. I always have trouble outlining the forest before I outline the trees. I think I'm just like naturally a very like granular unit of work level thinker. I'm in the weeds. I'm like, we need to do like this very specific thing. There are like, there are. I'm super excited I said this in the 2026 predictions episode. I think signal engineering gets way more popular this year. So I've got a very tactical thing of like I want to test optimizing for this signal on meta, super super granular. So what I did at the end of the year was I just like stacked up all those things. I have a list of, I think it's now 178 like really granular level tactics that I would like to do things, tasks that I would like to accomplish. And then what I did was I like sorted those back into, I started at the tree level and then I like built the forest from there. So like that rolls up into like more or less the same paid media rock that you have. Continue diversifying media mix. And then a piece of that is diversifying what we're optimizing for. So like that, that's kind of like what it's become at Ridge. But we've done this at least I did it in this like kind of reverse bottoms up approach.
- [11:31]
B
Yeah. And I'd say like for, so for you in that specific example your rock is like optimized signal engineering. Like that's a pretty straightforward clear rock. But then there's 107 more granular units of work that will ladder into that. And I just think having that like that highest level as a filter, it just lets your team like know what the priority is and let them set their own. Like I think I always, I'd say 80% of what we do like the team is setting it right. Like they're the, they're the owner and they're the expert and they're still pitching me on it. And like I have to say yeah, I agree but like because we have those higher level objectives rocks, it makes the, the filtering of what they're pitching me on so much cleaner, so much easier because everyone's on the same page. But like so you look at the this international rock as an example. So this rock is start diversifying our media mix to reach a more top of funnel audience. This is a pretty big rock across all of our international markets. Because if you look, if you look at a lot of our markets you see a lot of the same data points like rolling reach is down in meta, meta efficiency is down. Unique user growth isn't as good as I think it could be. So this is like a, a pretty high level rock for a lot of our markets. And then you go one level in. If you look at like the Japanese market for example, which is where I've been spending a little bit of time to start off this year, there's a bunch of initiatives that we are doing that ladder into that. So one would be we are putting more budget into Evergreen Creative versus Sail Creative. We are. Another initiative is we are pulling, we are adjusting our media mix in a major way. We are pulling way back on Google branded search. We are putting more of our budget, like I said, into Evergreen Meta. We are putting more of our budget into YouTube ads. We are putting more of our budget into PMAX. So that like media mix adjustment, that's another initiative. A third initiative is we are investing into way less sales in that market this year. We are totally adjusting our offer calendar. So all those things are like these granular. Another one is reporting. We don't have any consistent reporting going on over there. So I'm getting like a standard reporting stack going. So. So those are all these initiatives that are like obviously very granular that are going to ladder into this overall rock of let's diversify our mix to reach more people. And all these are, all these are like data driven. Right? Like we're looking at like why am I setting these, these mixes? Well, again our rolling reach is down in meta. We're losing efficiency in meta in a lot of our markets. Our like unique user growth is not that good. It's like, well the obvious thing here is we're not reaching new people. How do you reach new people where you go to new places. So it's like very, it's data driven but it's not like super complicated. But all these things like those are the data points leading to these rocks and those are the initiatives that are stemming from that rock.
- [14:18]
A
Totally 100%. All right. And I want to hit I. We're going to spend the vast majority of our time here talking channel diversification and what goes into that to close out the rock setting conversation, the meta rock setting conversation. You set this paid media rock. Continue diversifying, et cetera, et cetera. You've got granular stuff. You've talked with the team, you've got key metrics, you've got KPIs. Are you like. My question here is like how are you reviewing this throughout the year? Do you guys set a meeting? Are there like what is the cadence of that? Reflecting on the success and progress of the rock.
- [14:53]
B
Yeah. So going back to like the Japan example, you know, we have like there are KPIs that are indicative of this is working. Right. So it's especially for Japan, like Japan, our Japanese business last year, which is a seven figure business. It's not, it's not nothing, but it's not. It's definitely our smallest market. We actually saw sessions decline year over year. And I'm like, there's no reason a business of that scale should ever see anything under like exponential session growth every single year. So like we have, I have my KPIs that I know are indicative of this rock, this strategy working. So are our sessions growing? Our is our first time visit rate in North Beam growing? Is the total net new visits growing? Is the cost per new visit growing? And then like those are the early KPIs obviously as we get into like bigger swaths of time, I'm looking at revenue growth because I think those are obviously early indicators of revenue growth. So those, I have these KPIs like and it's what, five of them basically that I just listed there. There's a few other things like we'll go, obviously we'll go down to the channel level and like measure things in North Beam and optimize our channel mix. But These are the KPIs that I'm starting to track. And then we'll get some sort of cadence set up with each team where it's whether it's like weekly or bi weekly or monthly to review these KPIs. Because ultimately it's my job to tell a data driven story to these teams to get buy in on, on the strategies that I'm recommending. Like right now they're, they're like just doing the thing. But if I don't follow up and say, hey, the thing's working and here's why I'm saying it's working well, you're gonna, you're gonna lose trust in buy in very, very quickly. I think that's why people from like big corporations, the PNGs, the Unilevers, don't do very well in like data rich ecom startups because they can't tell that story to those teams and you lose trust. So yeah, I don't know exactly what the cadence will be bi weekly to start. I don't, I hate meetings. So I'll probably, probably try to get it to monthly at some point once we get some momentum going. But yeah, it'll be like some sort of bi weekly review call where I'll bring like the top data points that are indicative of, of this rock and, and just present them. And if it's not, if we're not trending where we want to trend, then it's like yeah, maybe we need to need to shift gears a little bit. Okay.
- [17:08]
A
And then owning all the top data points for the rock like monitoring those over time. Are you doing that for all the rocks or do any of the rocks get assigned like a new owner essentially? Like I know you guys have a retention rock. Does that go to the director of retention and they're actually the one owning that meeting and owning those higher level metrics.
- [17:27]
B
Yes, it depends on this. Like Japan, we don't really have like a, like a, like an own, like a marketing owner of that, of that market specifically. So I'm kind of de facto stepping in there totally. But yes, at the, like we have country managers now for the uk, for Germany. As we start to like make operationalize around these things, I will start having conversations with them about hey, here's the data points that you should be tracking, here's what you should be reporting on to the team and like really let them own, own that and, and track that and ultimately that lets them drive it forward. Because I can't, you know, I'm not going to be in every single market. You know, strategy meeting, totally providing pressure. But yeah, it'll, it'll depend on it. But I'd say for the most part we will be like having someone else own it where like someone might own a net new like visit growth rate or something each quarter and like that's their KPI to own and, and to like push on and make happen.
- [18:22]
A
Totally. Yeah, that makes sense. I find that like to be very interesting as businesses mature. Like what I've been describing is international is a great example of like that Rock is, is a very much a cross section of the business. The way Ridge is built is we have, we have paid, we have like, we have paid media, we have retention, we have creative and we have web essentially and they're almost like these, these silos and everybody's like working towards growing ridge.com. yeah, your business is always like oriented around like a very simple dimension. Right. Then we start thinking about international or a single market or for us like a single category. You have all these cross sections of the business and like the ownership of those things, at least in my experience has rolled up to me really quickly. Our director of acquisition owns acquisition as it relates to Ridge, but he's not going to own the success of rings across the board as it relates to retention and web and everything else. So you have to almost like identify and prioritize these cross sections of the business and then like elect leaders there. So we just hired our first international marketing manager who's going to do exactly what you just described. International is a cross section of the business requires all channels but isn't anywhere near like the biggest focal point of the business. And they're just going to make sure that those channels are marching in the same direction. They'll own the geo level KPIs and we'll have a bi weekly meeting set around that to keep everybody coordinated. And that feels like a very interesting form of maturity in the business. It's like all of a sudden you have so much surface area and so much complexity in the business that you need key managers of like these different sort of subsets of it.
- [19:59]
B
Well that's where you get leverage. That's where I get. That's where like all the like marketing leaders get leverage is if they can align with that marketing manager and say hey here's the key rocks. Here are the KPIs that are indicative of whether or not these are working. And then that person is going off and pushing, applying pressure, making these things happen. And then every couple weeks like you guys are having a conversation. But that's where, that's where like marketing leaders get leverage. When they're interfacing with one like super talented strategic data driven marketing manager that then goes and interfaces with the team. Where you don't have any leverage is if like you or me are the person that has to meet with like every single team member to keep buying pressure. It's like well now I'm spending too much of my time on a market that takes up that we think has upside but in reality still is a very small percent of our business. And like there's now this mismatch of time. So I think team structure is like absolutely critical here. If you don't have the team in place it's really hard to get everyone moving towards these, these rocks and ultimately the initiatives and the, and the key results.
- [21:00]
A
100 and then the other thing there is, I think it's also so easy to over hire in that scenario where all of a sudden you need a bunch of managers managing different cross sections of the business. You're, you can theoretically get leverage. But I think a lot of time you just build like bureaucracy. You just build like yeah, too many layers, too much. Taylor Holiday says like you want to be closest to the production of work and if you just have a bunch of people managing other people doing work then all of a sudden you've created this very like ineffective layer of the business if you're not careful.
- [21:30]
B
Yep, I fully agree with that. Operators, quick gut check here. Q1 is when everyone realizes the same thing at once. Traffic gets more expensive, growth slows down. So the question isn't how do I drive more demand, it's how do I make more money from the demand I already have. That is exactly why we use After Sell by Rocked. Most brands think upsells are about being aggressive, but they really aren't. They are about timing. And the best time to upsell someone is when they're already in buying mode, which is when it's right after someone buys. So after sell it lets you put the right offer at the right moment with one click. There's no re entering payment info, there's no extra checkout steps. Brands using after sales see around a 30 lift in AOV and when you're running real volume that adds up fast. But here's the part most people miss. It's not just upsells that after sell ads. Once you're live you unlock the entire ROKT monetization suite. Rock thanks monetizes your thank you page with premium non competing offers. Think Disney plus hello Fresh and brands are seeing $0.30 to $0.50 in pure profit per order Rock Pay plus as a clean wallet placement at checkout and kicks back another 10 cents to 15 cents in profit per order without hurting conversion. And in some cases it actually improves conversion. No inventory, no new ads, no operational lift, just margin. This isn't growth hacking, it's just found money. If Q1 is about tightening margins and getting paid more for the traffic you already earned, go to aftercell.com operators activate rock thanks or rockpay plus and you'll get the full after sales suite free for a year or an extended 60 day trial for post purchase upsells.
- [23:08]
A
All right, cool. Let's talk channel expansion. Yeah, Taylor and I were fighting about it on Twitter this week. We're going to get into that a little bit. But I'm curious for the international one specifically, you guys are in an interesting position. As you mentioned Japan or maybe some of the other markets are like obviously less mature than the domestic business. You think it's time to begin diversifying your your media mix in those different markets. So I'm curious like what are the signals that tell you it's time to do that versus just trying to continue scaling something like a meta.
- [23:39]
B
Yeah, well I first off there's too much vibe on channel mix conversations. Like if you are deciding to diversify your channel mix, you should absolutely have data points recommending that you do so. So for us, let's look at our UK business. The UK business is it's a solid business. It's an eight Figure business, I can say it's mid eight figures. But if you go look at the UK business last year, a, we didn't hit targets. So and granted we do always set fairly aggressive targets but I think we overall as a business didn't grow to the extent that we all think we could grow. So that's data point number one. Data point number two, as you go a layer deeper, you look at our media mix. I won't, I won't speak to the exact mix here, but I can say that the majority of our spend went into meta search and Amazon. Okay, so that's Data point number two. We're only really spending on three channels. We introduced YouTube into the mix late last year and we're starting to see really good results there. Data point number three, our rolling reach in meta was terrible this year. I think one in five accounts reached was a new impression. So we're not reaching that many new people in meta. Data point number four, our meta account got less efficient or yeah, last dropped in efficiency year over year. So the channel as a whole is reaching not that many new people. One in five and it's not performing as well. So now we're, that's like four or five data points where I'm like to me the very clear answer there is like we need to unlock more top of funnel here. We're not reaching enough new people because we're not reaching enough new people. We're not growing. So those are like the data points for. And I'm sure there's more. Right? Like I could go and look at like net new visit rate. I could look at growth in net new visits. I like looking at cost per new visit. There's like more, even more data points that you can lean on. But those are like the four or five where I'm like, all right, this is like clearly a media diversification problem that we need to go and address. Like we need to do more YouTube, we need to do more diverse creative and meta. We need to you know, try to get CTV and linear TV going over there. Audio is big in, in the uk, like terrestrial radio. Like let's go, we're not there yet. So to me it's just like a very obvious answer. But it is data driven. I'm not sitting here saying, oh, we're only spending on three channels, let's go diversify. Like that would be a very vibe based decision. So we're absolutely like stacking these data points to say okay, what's going on here? And based on that like thinking tree I just kind of went through, I'm like landing at this conclusion that it's, it's a media problem. Like we're not reaching new people because we're not in enough new places.
- [26:13]
A
And you would also agree, I think there's probably many ways to get more juice out of meta given all the.
- [26:20]
B
Metrics you just described.
- [26:22]
A
Like you, you had it in, you actually had it in the, in the first paid media rock. But like less purchase optimized campaigns on meta would be one path to saying hey, our issue is we're not reaching new enough people or we're not driving new visits to the site cost effectively enough. You have a list of tactics that you can like deploy within meta but then also in total alignment here. Expanding channels makes obvious sense.
- [26:46]
B
Yeah, well and I, when I say like diversify media mix, I would also group like meta optimizations into that. Like if you're totally changing the creative and like the allocation within meta, like that is absolutely immediate mix change. So yeah, it's not just like this. These and that's the same for the Japanese market. Like those rocks are not just leading into hey, get more channels live, spend more on new channels. It's also here are all the adjustments we need to make in meta. Again the, the Japanese one was easy. It's like God, we're putting all of our, all of our money into sale creative. Well no wonder our like new visit rate in meta is like 30. Like that's a no brainer. Of course it is. And it's the same with the uk. So it's definitely going to be a mix of both and you and that and that will show up in the like I will make sure that as we get into the quarterly sprints here, it's not all like new channel focus. It's a mix of hey, we're going to try to get you know, YouTube up to this much budget and we're going to try to produce this many new ads for YouTube. But it's also, hey, we want to source, you know, 10 new UK based creators to make ads with. We want to, we want to make five new ads ad sets around like this angle that we're not currently hitting. It'll be a, it'll be a mix of both that are ultimately, I think, I think both of those are, are a diversification of media mix tactic.
- [28:04]
A
Totally. Yeah, it makes, that makes sense. So in the case of the UK or Japan, how are you prioritizing which yeah, how are you, how are you prioritizing channels in those like you you bring up terrestrial radio in the uk, that, that sounds stressful to me. I'm like, oh my God. I have to figure out terrestrial radio in the UK versus like something like, you know, YouTube or whatever. So like how do you, how do you weight those and like, how are you going to lay them out over time to introduce them to the market?
- [28:34]
B
Yeah, well, what's, what's interesting, if you look like you go to chat GPT and you just do a little research about how like people consume media. I don't care what country it is. For the most part people consume media the same way. Like people are on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, they're streaming TV. Like, I don't care if you're Japanese living in Tokyo or if you're American living in Denver. Like, the channels are, are generally very similar that people consume media on, which is empowering for us because it's like, all right, great. We don't have to go and like spend six months doing a bunch of research. Like we know that we know where the, the channels we can be on. So I think it's a mix of, you know, it's like the classic ice scoring, like impact, ease, confidence. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, you know, for YouTube, for example, like I know tons of people in the UK consume media on YouTube. Same with Japan. I know that we already have a lot of creative that's going to work for YouTube in the UK. Well, that's like really low on the E score and I have confidence that it's going to be high impact. So that's like, let's go start there. We already have the creative for it. It's an easy channel to set up. Then you look at like audio. That's a different bucket because that is a different form of media consumption than the us. Like no one listens to terrestrial radio here. Um, but like that's why we have, you know, a UK country manager, she knows these vendors. So that one is a little bit harder to get set up because we need to produce some net new creative. But still it's like we gotta go there because that's how people consume media in the uk. And then you start to look at these other channels like ctv, Linear tv. Again, these are. People consume media in the UK the same on these channels the same way they do in the U.S. but the ease, the E score is a lot lower because now we actually probably do need to go and produce some net new creative. We're going to see it like what we already have made that can work for that market. But assuming we're going to go and need to produce some new stuff. TikTok, same thing as YouTube. It's like we're not live there. People Consume Media on TikTok in the UK we have a bunch of meta creative that we know will probably port over a while. Like that's super low on the E score. So we're starting with YouTube and Tik Tok. Because of that, we're going to get terrestrial radio going. That's going to take a little bit longer. And now I'm starting the process of vetting vendors for CTV and Linear tv. So that's kind of like, I'd say that's like the step wise approach is like let's get YouTube going, let's get tick tock going. Let's adjust like our creative strategy to like, you know, create better ads there and reach more new people there and get better performance there. And then audio CTV and Linear tv. We're like starting those processes of like finding the right vendors, getting the right creative. So hopefully, you know, at the end of Q1 we'll have made a lot of progress on that. Yeah.
- [31:17]
A
Okay. So I, I like, I like what we're, what we're laying out here. All right. This episode is brought to you by beloved sponsor Revo. What is Revo? They are a retention platform for Shopify plus customers. They do accounts, loyalty, referrals, membership, cashback, wallet passes and so much more. Stuart Cheney is the founder. He's very public on Twitter, building best in class retention features, powered by AI, quicker and with higher quality than anybody else in the business. We are lucky to have them as a sponsor. Revo is working with some of the best brands in D2C like Ridge, Hexclad, True Classic, Dr. Squatch, Portland Leather, Fenty Beauty and hundreds more that are on Shopify plus and want to provide better experiences for their customers. I think retention is going to be a huge trend in 2026 and beyond. All the effort that we put into incrementality and acquisition will eventually get diverted to retention so that we can continue driving incremental sales and Revo as an account solution will play a big part in that. If you want to become a Revo customer, go to Revo IO. And right now all Shopify plus brands get wallet passes 100% free on the platform. Tell the marketing operator sent you. We had a channel expansion playbook go out in the, in the newsletter a couple months ago and I said this and I think it's what we're saying now. Where it's like if you, if you need to approach channel diversification, the first step is almost like how do you just get more juice out of Meta, right? It's like, like I think a lot of people are expect or assume, hey, I am a year older as a brand now, like I have to be doing influencer or something. And I always say it's like you're actually much better off just getting better at meta. So that's like number one, we both hit that point. Then there is other digital channels where like the E score is good. It's like relatively straightforward. This is also why I talk about short form vertical video all the time. It's like if you have content that works on Instagram reels, there's just so much ad inventory, it's so much easier for you to diversify from there.
- [33:07]
B
Right? YouTube shorts.
- [33:09]
A
Yeah, YouTube in stream, linear TV. Those are trickier. Those are trickier channels. They require a little bit more work. But you have the typical like self serve ad platform. So it's like relatively simple. Then you have like very specific forms of channel diver diversification like terrestrial radio in the UK or you know, I don't know, maybe Japan loves direct mail or something, right? Where like all of a sudden you're talking about very bespoke solutions by market or by category. And that's where I'm always like the most hesitant because it's like that requires you probably have the least confidence, the most work and the in and impact is very unclear where it's like, I just, I can't possibly, I don't think either of us know how much you could spend on terrestrial radio in the UK worth exploring. Like you hit that point where it makes sense for you to like, you know, flesh out that option. But just the expected value is incredibly low to me.
- [34:02]
B
Yeah. And I'm using, we're using, we'll use some. So on your point, a lot of the messaging apps is where you get a lot of like social media, very similar consumption habits. A lot of the messaging apps are different, right. Like a lot of international markets are using WhatsApp. So we're trying to figure out like what's the best way to do text message marketing. We have a, we have a new market coming in the next couple months and they're a big WhatsApp market. So we're not going to roll out like postscript over there because they don't, they don't really, that's not the best way to reach people. So we're trying to figure out Stuff like that with like new owned media channels we're also using, I'm using other markets where the E score is a little bit lower as a data point to like tell me if I should go and do this in, in a different market where the E score is a little bit higher. So as an example we ran a CTV flight in Australia last year towards the end of the year and we spent a good chunk of money. It was like six figure amount of spend in that channel using just some of our, you know, evergreen creative that we're using in the US that you know, again not localized, not using Australians but definitely like good enough creative. And like we ran it, we spent like I said a good amount of money. And I like the data points we got back. It was a pretty solid cost per website visitor through the, through the platform that we're using. And then Prescient actually measured a little bit over break even just on the, on the ad spend. So just revenue to ad spend was like just over break even via prescient. And I'm like, you know what, I think that's a solid data point indicating that this was a success. This was very top of funnel. So the fact that they're even attributing like break even on the amount we spend, I think that's very positive. And I like I thought the web, the cost per website visa was pretty decent. So now I'm saying okay, great, it's working pretty well in Australia. Well what does that mean? We probably need to have like some sort of always on CTV strategy in Australia this year which we are working on. But it's also giving me the confidence to go and take that swing in the uk, in the eu in these other markets. So like trying to take learnings and like you know, if that wasn't the case, like if let's say Prescient recorded like totally, totally a 3X and it was a 15 cost per site visitor. I'm like dang, that didn't work at all in Australia. Maybe I'll actually deprioritize that a little bit in the uk so trying to like piggyback off what we're learning in each market here a little bit more. And not every market's the same. Like you look at YouTube in Japan, the arbitrage opportunity is wild. Like CPMs are dirt cheap, right? The net new visit rate in our YouTube channel so far since we launched in like December has been like 80 to 83%. The next highest is like Google PMAX at 50 meta was at like 30, 35% just because of the like creative strategy there and the cost per new website visitor and YouTube is, is dirt cheap. So I'm like holy crap. There's a massive like funnel arbitrage opportunity here that's not necessarily across the board. I'm not necessarily going to take that learning and I'll go look and see if it's the same in uk. But you know there's a, there's this like balance of like market nuance with these channels and hey, can I like lean on this learning and say hey, this might work in the UK because it worked in Australia or because it worked in this other market.
- [37:10]
A
100 and it's a great, it's a great point that just like what we're talking about is technically diversification but it's like you have the ability to introduce channels that you're already utilizing in other places. So it's, it's, it's more redundancy than net new and you get these opportunities to, to, to say hey, like law, if you needed to launch TikTok in all markets tomorrow, you could, you have winning TikTok creative. You've proven it out. You kind of know what winning looks like. So that redundancy is actually just significantly easier than a brand that's diversifying for the very first time. Adding that net new channel just like.
- [37:41]
B
Requires a different approach even with just the measurement. I mean we went into this Australia test with like a, a very strong understanding of what winning and losing looks like. In this test we had the, we had the modeling for how we wanted to measure it. We had the, the technology tooling for how we wanted to measure it. These are all things we struggled through so hard in 2023 with the US business. So you're, you're totally right like you're, the learning curve every time you do this again is just less and less and less to the point where, dang, we can run a CTV test for two months, get it up and running quickly, measure it quickly, make decisions on whether or not it worked quickly. Our analysis of this in the US in 2023 would have been like night and day different. We would have been just struggling through it like but, but we don't have to do that now. So yeah, they definitely all like piggyback and build off one another.
- [38:32]
A
One, one question that I have because we are only in largely native English speaking countries, Canada, Australia, UK, EU's like 50 or whatever, 60 speak English. So we don't do any, we do very little. We do some on Site translation. We've done a handful of like, German language ads in those markets. Something like Japan, though. Everything's harder. Like what, like, how is your guys's approach there? Everything's harder because everything. The translation is just significantly different. So how do you guys approach that?
- [39:09]
B
Yeah, we have a, We've had a creative team over there that's been handling all of our ad creative. What we are working on, though now within our content team is building a, a more streamlined process where everything we make gets translated into all the languages that we are in. So that way instead of. Because historically it's been like the creator strategist focusing on that market, looking in our US Calendar, being like, hey, can we get this made for our market? Like, I like this ad. I think this could work here. We're, we're trying to be more generative about that this year and say, hey, if we're making this ad, let's just translate it right away into all the languages that we have. And that's going to give the creative strategist and media buyers the absolute most ammo. But dude, it's hard. It's like, it's so complicated. There's so many moving parts. There's so many players involved. It's. It's definitely a struggle and something that we're trying to get better at. I think we did an okay job in Germany last year, which is like the. One of the first markets we've really gone and tried to localize for. And if, like, you look at the growth rate in Germany versus like the EU as a whole, very obvious that that strategy is working. But now we need to go and try to scale it more. But yeah, dude, it's. It's pretty tough. But we've just had like, local creative team so far. But again, I don't think we're doing a fantastic job with the creative strategy over there. Like, we do not have a strong, we don't have a great paid, social creative flywheel in Japan at all. Like, we, we need to go build those and make those more robust across the board. Which is why we're making the change that we're making this year to try to have it just be more streamlined through our, through our US Team. But then, you know, there's you. You think about that flywheel. But then there's also like the local, like creative flywheel. Right? So obviously the flywheel I'm talking about of like, take every ad and just translate it from the start into every language. That's obviously not a localized strategy. So you have to be able to layer both like on top of each other to really have a robust stack. So Totally. We still need to figure out that. That bit.
- [40:58]
A
Yeah, yeah. 100. I also think that's probably where like AI will become really, really impactful. You know, like they're already doing that like YouTube does it like I think natively now for creators where it's like you could just like publish your. You publish your video dubbed in different languages. It's like extremely powerful. Yeah. Mr. Beast used to, this was years ago. He had a big international strategy and he was all doing it manually. He'd have different channels. He'd republish the videos in different languages all the time. And then, and then just technology and AI over the last couple years has made that basically be able to happen programmatically. And that probably gets pulled down to brands at some point or at least makes those internal workflows a bit clearer.
- [41:37]
B
I mean that's, that's definitely our like a big rock for the content team. We have a couple different tools for static translations and processes and then another tool for video translations. Right now that we're trying to figure out like what the workflows are. I think that is like for us at Hexclad, I'd say that's like a top three AI use case that's like going to provide serious efficiency gains and productivity gains. Prescient helps brands turn peak season wins into predictable profitable velocity. Powered by a suite of proprietary machine learning models and a causality first validation layer, Prescient reveals what actually drove Lyft. It combines surveys, it combines multi touch attribution and incrementality. And then it forecasts where your next dollar of media will drive real incremental profit. Top brands like Coterie, Guess, Hexclad, Jones Row, Beauty, Mary Ruse and many more are using Prescient to quantify halo effects across Shopify, Amazon retail, to refresh, forecast daily and to surface explainable recommendations so their teams know exactly where to reinvest. Prescient uniquely tracks halo effects and ad impact across both platforms, revealing where to dial back and where to double down. This is actually one of the very first problems that hexcut onboarded with Prescient to solve is understanding the total impact across both.com and Amazon over ad spend. Prescience models are benchmarked against $6 billion in ad spend. So the recommendations you are getting aren't just theory. They've actually been tested against billions of real media dollars. And if you're ready to see where your Next Dollar Media will drive the most profit visits operators to forecast your growth with prescient.
- [43:17]
A
While we're on the topic of channels, do you have any. And then like I like the terrestrial radio example for the uk. Do you have any new channels that you'll try in the US that you're excited about or is it mostly the things we've talked about. Ctv, linear, Amazon DSP et cetera?
- [43:34]
B
I'd say it's definitely more of what we've been starting to dabble our toes in. So I think we'll definitely do more national buys this year. Without a doubt some of that's going to come. Like Amazon DSP has a lot of really great ad inventory that we're really excited about some of that including national sports buys. So those are two big ones and I'm just really pumped up about some of these holdout tests that we ran at the end of the year and the cost per incremental order. I think we're going to be putting way more budget into some of these like video based channels this year. So it's a, it's a bit of like let's just keep doing more like let's vertically scale. We've, we horizontally scaled a lot of these channels last year. That was the, the name of the game for us last year was like we produced a lot of YouTube creative, we produced a lot of TVC creative. Now we need to vertically scale. Now we've like done that work and we don't have to produce as many TVCs as we did last year. So this year's gonna be a lot about vertically scaling those channels. But yeah, I'm pretty excited about Amazon dsp. There's like insane inventory. They have streaming tv, they have Amazon Prime Video, they have Thursday Night Football, they have you know, off Amazon like publisher site pre, pre roll, mid roll. Like Amazon has a really like they have this insane inventory and obviously their data is second to none. So their targeting is really strong. And we've like integrated these tools with Prescient and North Beam. So we do feel comfortable in how we're measuring them because they aren't click based channels. You have to have an mmm or there's probably no other way to really measure Amazon DSP stuff that well without an mmm. I just don't know how else you would really do it. Like you could do short links and QR codes but no one, no one does scans those things. So I don't think it's going to help you that much. So yeah, that's it. Those are like the big ones. What about you guys?
- [45:18]
A
I, I mean there, there aren't too many on my, on, on our roadmap. I did hear an ad that I was super interested by. I was listening to podcasts on Spotify because I'm a Spotify premium member. So I, I don't get ads listening to music, but I listen to a lot of podcasts there. And you do get ads there, which is super interesting because that's like a very high value user. A lot of people on the Spotify platform. A lot of people listening to podcasts.
- [45:38]
B
Is it just host red when you're a premium? Oh, it's like the programmatic ads.
- [45:42]
A
Yeah, programmatic ads. And I'm trying to think like I get all sorts of like random programmatic ads and it's a bunch of like big like non Dr. Media publications and things like that. But I got one just yesterday or the day before from. And it was Will. Will Knits at IQ Bar.
- [45:58]
B
Oh yeah, yeah.
- [45:59]
A
And he was like, hey, I'm Will, I'm the founder of IQ Bar. And you know this and this and that about the bar. And I'm like, oh, this is. And, and I'm a little biased because I've met Will. He's, you know, he's around ax, he's in the community, things like that. But I was like this is a very cool ad unit. Like you know, everybody sees like founder ads work and the more like personable you can appear as a brand, I think the better in many ways. And so these like 30 second non skippable founder led audio ad during a, you know, I'm listening to like you know, politics on podcast. Like I think that's probably a pretty like high income audience. I'm like this seems like there might be something here. So that was the only one recently where maybe it's Daniel, our founder talking. Or we could layer in Marquez. You guys get Gordon. Like I just think like notable people, memorable people speaking and talking about your brand. It feels like there might be some opportunity there.
- [46:48]
B
Yeah, I mean we're definitely going to lean in Gordon for our radio stuff. And we actually produced a radio ad with Gordon to run in the US last year. I'm still waiting to get a report back on it. So I'll probably just use that creator for the uk. Just make it evergreen and that'll be like our core hero spot there. IQ Bar, by the way. Delicious. Have you.
- [47:05]
A
I haven't had one.
- [47:06]
B
Oh, they're so good. They are, they're very good. They've made an amazing product. I do feel like generally these, all these conversations about like media diversification and all these opinions about it. I feel like these conversations have like strayed so technical, so digital marketing that people like, it's often like forgotten. Like why are you even doing this? Like if, if you need to reach new people, that's why you diversify media and there are ways to measure if you're achieving that by, by diversifying, by diversifying your media mix. So like the answer to this question of like should you diversify your mix? It's different for every, for every single brand. But if, if you are having a, like if you have data points signaling that you are having problems reaching new people, driving more new unique users to your website, the current channels you have are maybe losing efficiency. Those are all great data points to say we have a new like a new reach problem and like we should go diversify and like different brands at different stages are going to reach those problems at different times. Like you could be a 10 million dollar brand and start to see those issues. You could be a hundred million dollar brand and start to see those issues. Like it totally depends on your market, your tam, all these things. It's not a cookie cutter approach. Like you might be a $2 million brand and start seeing these problems. I don't know. But the, the important part is like you have to have the data points to, to, to like conclude that you're having a new person, a new reach problem. And if you are then go and like start to expand channels and like have a way to understand if you are reaching new people. Like again going back to the, to the Japan example, I look at YouTube, it's 85% net new visit rate. It's our best cost per new visit. It's like very clear to me that what we're doing is reaching new people, driving more first time site traffic and that it's working. Then I pair that with like the, the performance last year which was less than optimal. Like well this is a no brainer. That's not a big, that's not a huge brand in that market. That's a low seven figure brand and we're starting to diversify the mix. Not a ton, right? It's still like diversification in meta diversification in Google and then layering in YouTube. It's not like we have this like insane 10 channel stack now. Totally. But it still is a diversification strategy that's driven by those data points. And so, and it's not like a, it was a $50 million brand by the time we started to do that 100%.
- [49:26]
A
So like I'd love to hear you expand on that a little bit more because this was. Taylor and I were talking about it on X and he said, and I don't disagree with anything that was said. He says the post was about ridges channel diversification by product category, that wallets have a much more diverse media mix because it's a much more mature business. If you look at our smallest categories like travel, it's the least diversified we're spending. It is like 78% of our budget for our travel category was on meta. I think as you go from the size of our travel business to the size of our wallet business that we will get more diversified over time. And we have examples of that where like rings are like partially in between. Taylor's point was, or he says, I have a bet that this is more a byproduct of human behavior than optimal allocation. And then he says in almost every case he's encountered why diversification has more waste than when you were concentrated. Part of that is that the measurement complexity increases exponentially, not linearly. So it just becomes harder to be right. That's, that's what you're laying out that like, and, and maybe you could like restate what you just hit like with through that lens that, that Taylor's laying out because it's like it's a very tricky line to walk. I don't think there's any, I don't think anybody's going to argue that as you get bigger the need to diversify becomes greater. I would, I think 10 out of 10 times larger brands have more diverse media mixes than smaller brands. I think that's like more or less true. Especially if it's the, the same category. Right. If you're a cookware brand doing 5 million and you're Hexclad doing like $600 billion a year or whatever, you guys will have different, different media mixes. So any, any like advice that you would give brands trying to like cross that spectrum from fully concentrated on something like a meta to being more diverse.
- [51:14]
B
First off, I do think Taylor is absolutely right. The measurement complexity does increase exponentially. Meta's easy to measure. There's like so many ways that you can measure meta when you, when you have a less diverse mix. Post purchase survey data is more trustworthy. Click based channels are obviously easier to measure with multi touch attribution tools and.
- [51:33]
A
Just top line revenue. Right. If you're just on one channel, your business is either working or not.
- [51:37]
B
Right, exactly. And so, so the Australia example, we ran that flight at the back end of the year, but now our growth rate in Australia to kick off the year CTV's off by the way, is huge. Like we are seeing massive top line growth right now. I think when I pair, I didn't even mention that data point earlier, but when I pair that with the prescient data, with the cost per site visitor, I'm like three data points making me think that this is driving. But again, to Taylor's point, I'm looking at literally three data points now and that's like a, a small level of complexity to measure a lot of these channels. Whereas meta, you can basically get all your answers with like MTA data and like top line revenue trend. So Taylor's absolutely right. Like the more, the more channels you have, which each of them requires their own like nuanced measurement stack. He's, you absolutely do have the, the risk of wasting more spend. But I think the, the upside of like reaching more new people and driving more sessions to your site for the first time totally outweighs the, the risk of like wasted spend. Like you shouldn't not do that because you're worried about oh, what if we waste spend on CTV or YouTube? Like if you're gonna, you're going to like that's just like, that's a right of passage to diversifying your media mix and you're gonna have to figure out what is the best measurement stack for all these new channels. And that's like, that's the fun part of, of being like a digital performance marketer is being like, oh, I think this new channel could work for us. What's my methodology for measuring this? And then like fine tuning that over time. Because what you're going to find is that if you've never launched a channel before, the measurement stack you've outlined pre launch is probably not going to be 100% perfect. So it's all about tweaking over time and making sure you are measuring these things the right way so you can you know, minimize the amount of wasted spend. But I would bet for like Ridge, like all the data points I just mentioned, you can go and like filter that at the, at the product level and you can probably go into luggage and, and see like oh, luggage efficiency. And meta is still growing. We're still have a high net new visit rate. We're still driving a lot of net new visits. Like why diversify? It's still working, we're still growing. But I over at some Point, I'm sure you're going to see that trend start to do this and be like, oh, our net new visit rate's lower efficiency. Even if the total business growth is, is up, the efficiency is going down. And then you're gonna have that signal which, which is, and then you're gonna act on that signal and say, okay, we're gonna go get more YouTube going on travel, more CTV on travel. So I think it's the same data points, it's just like filtered for your, for your different business units. I think because our, our I, we don't have this chart. But like I would bet if you looked at our, if you looked at cookware versus knives versus hex mills and aprons, I bet we'd have a very similar chart as you have right here with your like comparing travel to rings to wallets. Yeah.
- [54:25]
A
And, and for those listening, it's just pie charts of each and the, the wallet pie chart of our media mix is like very colorful. And travel's just, it's meta. It's a little YouTube, it's a little Google. All right, I want to give a shout out to Rich Panel because they've quietly become one of the most impactful tools we use at Ridge. You know how SaaS companies love raising prices for the same product every year? Our old support platform did that one too many times. So we made the switch over to.
- [54:52]
B
Rich Panel and the results have been fantastic.
- [54:55]
A
Our SaaS build dropped by about half and once they rebuilt our workflows with automation self service routing, our cost per ticket fell 70%. Same team, same volume, totally different outcome. BFCM this year was our smoothest we've ever been. We've done the most amount of sales, we had the most amount of queries, but with routing we had a lower cost per ticket and our NPS scores have never been higher. The team handled everything without the usual panic and, and our CSAT has been sitting around 96% every week. And what I really like is that Rich Panel isn't just software. They bring a playbook, they rebuild your workflow, set up your AI, handle migration and training, and you can be live in under two weeks. The lift is basically zero on your side and they're launching a returns portal soon, which I'm really excited to test because returns are one of those sneaky P and L items everyone ignores until it begins to cost you real money. If you want to cut support costs in half and run a leaner, more efficient operation, head to richpanel.com demo and and they'll take care of everything.
- [55:55]
B
I think Taylor's note here too, about like, so Andrew responded to him and said, what's your solution to that? Better measurement, less diversification. Better measurement, yes. Like, more intentional methodology. But Taylor's note about. I think it's about sequencing and slowing down the diversification intentionally. Absolutely. Like, totally do it one by one, like, or two at a time and make sure they're not going to. If you launch eight new channels all at the same time, you're gonna have a really hard time measuring that effectively. So I think the intentional, like slowing it down, being intentional about the diversification. I think that's very, very true. Very important. Like, you don't need to do all these things at once.
- [56:33]
A
Yeah. So the, the one thing I'll call out is just like, because it's funny, I. I get. And. And the points around sequencing and, and the slowing of introducing new channels. Could not agree more. You do want to, you want to avoid as much as possible. I don't think Ridge has been in this position many times, so I'll get into that. But you want to avoid as much as possible having a bunch of channels live and not really knowing what's working. Yeah, that's like, undoubtedly you've got like quite a bit of waste in that. In that system. But kind of to your earlier point, like, we have seen so many examples of like enormous success when we introduce new channels. And the first one was like, and I've talked about this at length. We were frankly, we spent money on everything back in like 2018. In hindsight, we probably should have gotten really good at meta and we probably could have scaled more efficiently. But all these channels were working undoubtedly. And, and it was like, I mean, we were sponsoring YouTube creators for the first time. Massive success, a bunch of newsletters, early morning brew buys, like, totally crushed. I remember launching on Snapchat for the first time. It was like August 2018. We were a part of like the very first advertisers on Snap. We were just posting static images and promoting those and no joke, it was like it prob. Led to like a 30% lift on the whole business. I remember seeing Google showed us a wallet search query as like a category and they were like, yeah, we're not sure what happened in August 2018. It was like, it was just up like 15% month over month. And it was like us getting onto Snapchat. So you see these like, really big opportunities. I put AppLovin Q4, 2024 in that bucket. Extremely undervalued. We were able to spend a lot of money really efficiently. So you see examples of like the value you can get from channel diversific and, and the, the, the balance you need to strike is like, how do you capture a lot of that value while as quickly as possible minimizing the scenario where you have wasted spend, like spread it out across too many channels. So like, that would be, that would be my quick answer. We, I confirmed with our house rep this morning. Ridge ran the most House incrementality test of any brand on the platform last year. We just are aggressively and we have, we have revenue segmented so we can run incrementality on rings versus EDC versus travel. We're just like aggressively doing that by channel right now. We have Snapchat ring incrementality test live. Like, we are getting super granular to tease out, hey, we think this is working. All the MTA metrics point to, or the post purchase survey points to this working. But let's like validate that with a test. We're like consistently doing that all the time and that is not easy to do, but it's how we're trying to hedge against that, like that bloated media mix. That's where we were at the beginning of 2024, I think maybe 2023, where like we just, we were in the exact position that I mentioned. We were very diversified. I wasn't sure what was working. We were trying to use an mmm at the time. We weren't getting a lot of clarity. We just had like big confidence intervals around all of our channels. And so we adopted House to say, hey, we actually are going to opt for these, like, clarity for snapshots of time. And we're going to aggressively test the incrementality of these channels by category. So that's really been our journey over the last, you know, two years or so, two and a half years.
- [59:40]
B
How many tests did you guys run last year?
- [59:42]
A
I don't have the number. I'll get it. I'll get it. For the next episode.
- [59:45]
B
50 is this. I'm like, I'm like, what's the.
- [59:47]
A
It's a lot of tests. I can also hear the argument, well, some would argue it's too many tests that we should be running longer tests. Like, there's a certain thing where it's like, you don't, you don't want to just be like randomly spraying and praying incrementality tests. The point that I'm making is measurement complexity increases exponentially. We're very much aware of that. We've tried to operationalize as much as possible, massive amounts of testing to make sure we're getting as much clarity as we can.
- [60:12]
B
Yeah. And I think your point of obviously there's all the channel level metrics that you're always going to get, right? The mta, the media mix modeling, the post purchase survey, like short link utms, you know, the, the laundry list goes on and on and on in planner, in channel attribution. But what you're getting at and what Taylor's getting at with like the slowing down of sequencing your new channels is anytime you can also go past just the channel level metrics and be able to say, hey, we did X on this date through this date and like here's what our like revenue trend was over that time and efficiency trend. Like anytime you can like make a strong relationship between like a new channel launch or like a new channel flight and like blended business metrics totally. And then layer that on top of your like channel level KPIs, I mean that's going to be the absolute best way to do things. But if we launch YouTube and CTV and podcast all at the same time, and now that's taking up 30% of your mix, right? Like, yeah, you get all the channel level stuff, which is good, which is good. And you can probably suss out what's working but you don't get that, that like relationship to the blended business performance. Because if, let's say business went up 50% during that time, well, you don't really know which one did it. You can kind of like extrapolate but it just makes it more complicated. And that's what, there's a lot of ways this gets complicated quickly. And I think that's what Taylor is hitting on here is like you leave it, you leave it to people and, and they'll make it more complicated than it needs to be. And, and then that makes decision making hard.
- [61:40]
A
Yeah. And you know what, I'll add here because again I also, and we already hit this point earlier but like it is in the brand's best interest to slow the introduction of channels that like if you think you might need to diversify your next step is almost always like how do I get more juice out of what I currently do? Yeah, it's just like limiting that complexity as much as possible, giving yourselves that constraint, building that list like we talked about earlier for you guys, for the international markets, if net new reach is an issue, there's a list of meta related tasks that like you almost want to start with and say, hey, yeah, we're going to optimize for new things, we're going to load in new creative things. Like that one thought that I had recently was, and it was about hexcladden Ridge actually, or stems from Ridge in terms of people always talk when should I diversify? Is it at $10 million, $20 million, $50 million? I think it's actually way more about number of customers and it's probably more accurately about number of customers. Like and tam like some sort of like hybrid metric there. But like I bring this up all the time hexclad for years. I don't know where it's at now, but there were many Black Fridays. You and I acquired the same amount of customers. You guys just have like 8x the AOV. So like we probably pace pretty similarly in terms of like need for channel diversification. Yeah. Because even though Ridge is much smaller than hexclad, we're, we are acquiring customers at the same rate. We probably have a relatively similar repurchase rate. Like the underlying user level metrics in the business are actually very similar. So therefore despite significantly different revenue numbers, we've actually had to, you know, employ similar marketing strategies in forms of diversification.
- [63:13]
B
Yeah. And I, and I think again you should start with those thoughts. But like if you're going to make the decision to diversify, please, please have like you gotta have data that supports it. Like you should never be vibe diversifying. You know what I mean? Like if you don't have the data points that are saying you need to diversify, then don't like and it's again and start high level. Like where's revenue trending? Where's efficiency trending? Go down one level. Where's unique users trending? Where are like net new visit rate whereas like total net new visitors cost per new visitor trending in your ad channels. Where's roas trending in your ad channels? Right. Like these are like this is the decision making matrix. Where along the way if you can check all three of those boxes of like losing efficiency, losing revenue growth, new visits going down, new visit rate going down, channel efficiency going down. Like that's the, those are the three main checkboxes. Right. Where it's. To me that's a very obvious answer of we need to reach more new people. How do you do that? Well, you, to your point, go get better at meta more ads, reach more people with better evergreen ads, more new channels, like bang. And that's, and that's like a. I'd be very confident in doing that if those were the data points that we were seeing versus the oh we're at 30 million now. Like it feels like it's the right time to it's like totally. I don't know maybe you could get to 75 million and you don't need to. If if the data looks good and you're again what's the opposite of that is we're a 30 million dollar brand. Revenue Revenue's growing even more. Efficiency is flat. Are getting better even though we're spending more. Our net new visit rates going up. We're getting more net new visits from our ad channels. Ad channel efficiency and MTA is going up. More new unique users to site like those are all green. Green go like green go signs. Like you do not need to diversify your mix if that's. If that's the case. So I just want people to like keep that in mind when they're reading and thinking about all these channel diversification like conversations like those are the data points you can make data driven. Not only can you but it's not that hard to make a data driven decision on this whole media diversification question.
- [65:10]
A
100 all right. I like it. I feel pretty good about that. Discussing rocks discussing channel expansion I'd love to do. I've got a. I've got a number of. We don't call them rocks at Ridge. We don't have. We don't have a good catchy name for them. But like we should, we should do a future episode on a couple of mine. I think it'd be fun.
- [65:27]
B
We should honestly we could do a like we should do a bunch of like just keep hitting on some of these rocks. I think there's a lot of fun conversation to be had. Like even the like the retention one that we didn't talk about at all. Like that's kind of a fun like non performance one to talk about.
- [65:42]
A
I've got a retention one also. That's why I figured this is. This is good. Let's hit channel expansion internationally domestically. Had some discussions sessions on X recently.
- [65:51]
B
We've.
- [65:52]
A
I think we've. You and I at least have some, some pretty heavy retention focuses for the year so we'll hit that in a future rep. All right man. Well let's call that an episode.
- [66:00]
B
Let's do it. All right. Sweet.
- [66:02]
A
All right. Thank you for listening to another episode of Marketing Operators. We've obviously got big plans for 2026. We're excited to chat through those on the pod over the next couple weeks and I'm sure you do as well. So if you have any questions or comments or feedback for us, make sure to like, comment and subscribe. Subscribe. Share this with your friends and family. We'd love to make each and episode better every week. Thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich Panel, Pression After Sell and Revo. We will see you next week. Thank you.