← Marketing Operators 
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- [00:01]
A
All right, wonderful. This is an atypical podcast for us. Like I said, first or second ever live episode. This one's way different. We typically don't have Aaron doing so much crowd work. I'm typically in boxer shorts because it's remote. So this, I'm a little. This is away game for us.
- [00:15]
B
I did not need that visual.
- [00:16]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're going to figure it out. All right. No, we'll get right into it. Let me tees up quickly. Marketing operators come out every Tuesday. I am the CMO at Ridge. Cody Plofker, CEO at Jones Road Beauty Code. Connor Rowland, head of growth at Hexclad. We enjoy really nerding out on all the stuff that meta discussed today. So if you like that, we've got a podcast for you. Okay, sweet. So, you know, we did this last year. There was a big focus on incrementality last year, and that's really what we centered a lot of our. Our discussion around. It feels like this year the main takeaway should be two very important letters that I think everybody's thinking about, AI, artificial intelligence. Um, I want to talk about some of the meta specific AI infrastructure stuff that they've talked about. What are they investing in and how does that affect us as brands and what we're trying to do every day? So they brought up things like AI capi. We talked a lot about product catalogs, Andromeda, Lattice, gem, all sorts of new acronyms. Cody, I want to kick it to you like, what is your general takeaway and what stuck out to you from today's content?
- [01:13]
B
Yeah, last year was definitely big incrementality. There's still some focus on that, but obviously very clearly AI focused. If you took a shot every time they said AI, you would probably be dead right now. That they said it a lot. So I think that is it. But, you know, breaking it down, it's clearly like Zuck said this on an earnings call. I forget when maybe it was like a year ago of like, there's going to be a world where you just tell us your product and your business goals and we do the rest. And we're definitely not there yet, but there is definitely a vision to that. And it's cool to see how things are evolving with, you know, all of the stuff, all of the. Still trying to understand all of the. You know, I think we all get Andromeda now and there's a lot more people talking about that. But GEM and lattice and sequence learning and stuff like that. But even the. I find the catalog Stuff interesting because it's, it's actually the most boring topic to me but because meta is focusing on it so much, it's so clearly so important or even like how they have done the AI Capi to make it really easy for smaller brands to be able to implement. Capi just shows like how important it is and they're kind of saying like guys, this is a non negotiable like you have to be able to give us these right inputs And I think they used to be, you used to need this developers and technical stuff to be able to do that and now it's easy. But it's also really important just to have like it's almost just a basic blocking and tackling that you need.
- [02:29]
A
Yeah. And I think it's been really cool. Like there's a lot of exciting updates. We'll talk about the catalog which I'm excited about very much aligns with directionally how I think AI should be getting applied. And there's just a lot of like what is the row is optimized option? They're like consolidating things that you can optimize for. They talk about cast campaigns we didn't today but that's like more and more part of the discussion with Meta consolidating your ability to optimize, optimize between reach and purchase. So it just feels like meta is giving us more tools than ever to sort of lay that groundwork. Did anything else stick out to you, Connor?
- [02:59]
C
Yeah, I think, I think seeing all of the different like outcomes that you can optimize your meta account for and Meta really listening to hear what advertisers want which is new reach, new customers. And we were talking after like where do you start with this stuff? And I think there's no one size fits all for where you start for this stuff. Like I was looking at our account last night and we really leaned into value because we sell a $700 set as our, as our number one hero product. And that's great, that works really well for us. But we also still lean into the lower costs or lowest costs because we still need to acquire people at a lower cac. We still want those lower, lower AOV customers and then get them into reorders and grow that lifetime value over time. So I think that's cool to see like they're just building more and more tools to optimize for which is just going to appeal to more and more brands and what their like core KPI is and like the that aligning with their AOV and everything that they need to be doing to scale their businesses. So I don't think it's a this or that. I think it very much is this and that and maybe that and just like aligning those, those optimization settings with what you're trying to do for your business and what makes sense for. For what, like allows your business to grow. So they're just rolling out more of that stuff, which I think is just very, very exciting. And they're clearly listening to us and everyone. And what these brands need, which is new customers, some need lowest costs and minimize CAC, some need maximize value and raise AOV. And you know, 10 different brands need 10 different things and it's cool to see all the different tooling come out to apply to all those brands 100%.
- [04:33]
A
A lot of really interesting tooling. And again, like I want to make the distinction here. There are meta specific tools and what I want to do quickly is like zoom out a little bit. I think everybody who's operating on the brand side cares about AI as it relates to the Meta ads platform. But really like how are you implementing it at a wider scope for your business and what does that look like every day? And that's another form of infrastructure that we've cared a lot about and I mentioned it on the, the panel that I was on. So Connor, I want to kick it back to you at hexclad. Like, what are the tools and what are the capabilities and how are you scaling that across teams, whether that's in meta or outside of meta and like your ability to lead strategy and produce the results that you need to.
- [05:08]
C
Yeah, it's funny because I'll, I'll like be working in a coffee shop and you hear people talking about how their company doesn't allow them to use Claude. Like and usually it's like these larger corporations and I don't know what all the, all the concerns are. Maybe it's, it's data leakage and stu stuff like that. But I think like an enterprise cloud account right now is table stakes. Like I think it's up to the, the leaders of companies to empower their teams to gain efficiencies with AI. And like if you're not, if you don't have a, an enterprise cloud account and allow all the connections into meta and in your data warehouse into all these different tools. Like you are seriously just handicapping your team and how they can use AI to be more efficient, drive great outcomes. Like, I'm thinking about a very specific use case. We're kind of like, reigniting a landing page, Sprint at hexcloud over the next month or two. And we're sitting there on, on Friday with our lead media buyer, our director of paid media, and our CRO lead, and a report that probably would have taken us three, four weeks a year or two ago to pull. London pulled it in a Friday afternoon because we have a connector to Meta, we have a connector to Clarity, we have a connector to our data warehouse. So we had all the questions we needed and we had all the connections we needed to pull that report way quicker. So now our next meeting, which is going to happen after we review this data and come up with some ideas, is happening in two weeks or two and a half weeks instead of two, two months or two and a half months. So I think it's like empowering your teams with that infrastructure so as they're coming across these problems in their biz, in your business, like, they can just answer these questions way faster than you could have. And if they don't have that infrastructure set up now, they're coming across these problems and instead of answering them right away, they're like going back to the infrastructure over and over again and trying to get things set up. So, like, I think it's up to the leaders of companies to empower their teams to use these tools to answer these questions quicker.
- [07:05]
A
I've got a really nerdy. You guys will. This is so in character for me, but an adjustment we made recently, which, which I was stoked on, was, to your point, like, being able to rapidly create the reporting that you want. Historically, we've done a Tuesday weekly business review because the team spends a chunk of their Monday, like, putting together the reporting from the previous week. We're looking at performance across all of our categories, across markets. We're highlighting those things. We're discussing them Tuesday afternoon because that reporting has been consolidated down to like a query into Claude code. It happens automatically Sunday nights. Now we're waking up with that reporting Monday morning and we've moved that meeting up from Tuesday or late morning to now it's Monday, late morning. And all of a sudden we've got like an additional eight hours of work that we can synchronously do that we previously weren't doing. And it's just like really small wins that I'm just like, constantly stoked.
- [07:51]
C
Um, yeah, the prep time went to what, five minutes instead of instead of five hours.
- [07:57]
A
And then, and then you get these compounding benefits of taking action slightly earlier. You're extending the time that you can work on other things. Um, so yeah, anyway, I, I, I love that one. Um, Cody, you've spent a lot of time and spoken very publicly about how you're implementing AI at Jones Road. I'm curious, like, what's the most impactful implementation that you found?
- [08:13]
B
The biggest one that I focus on the most is like Shopify CRO. Like I've been just as a test kind of at night running our whole CRO program. Like we had a launch yesterday and I built like five new PDP sections and it's so cool. Like I'll do it from my phone like on nights and weekends and stuff. And I even built like I pre developed these so like they were more just populating the templates. But I just wanted to like show my team what it was capable of. I built five landing pages without ever going inside Shopify. Like I did it directly from the cli. And so just the fact that you can do that and push that and like I have no time to be able to populate content and upload 30 images. I'm never going to do that. But you can do it directly from Claude and just tell it to do it. And so I just think that's like a microcosm of where the world is going. And so all of the manual things you don't have to do. And we have ad uploading tools that can upload ads and experimenting with meta cli, same thing. We have one data analyst and in the past it used to take a week, two weeks to get a report. We have our entire data warehouse that was like one of our Q1 projects that we can access in Claude directly from there. And so you can get anything in a heartbeat and you don't have to be technical at all. So I think that was like step one, but now it's like actually the execution layer on top of that and the expectations for being able to do these things is so much faster now. Like I tweeted about it last week but like I want to get to a place where my team, if we haven't, because we do a Monday morning or Monday standup that now we can do Monday morning if we have an idea and see an ad that's performing well in the past, you guys know sometimes it can be weeks to a month to get that live. You need a funnel, you got, you need a project management system, you got to brief a creator, you got to brief an editor. It's no longer good enough. I want to have a 24 hour full funnel launch where and it's it's not even a crazy thing where you can build a landing page, you can have copy images, stuff like that done, but you can also have creatives produced. And obviously this would be like statics iteration but that can be done in 24 hours and, and you can just get insights so much faster. And I just think on again we, we can't forget we're advertising on social and social the, you need that speed sometimes and the best teams have that. And so I think that is what it will enable and that's like one of the most important things.
- [10:31]
A
Totally. You know what I think is an interesting parallel. I'd love your guys's, I'm going to, I'm going to pressure test the concept for you guys. We talked a lot, a lot about product catalog and this makes a lot of sense to me in terms of like how do you ultimately get performance and accurate and good dynam creative for Meta. And it seems like right now, and this was like a main talking point from, from all the, all the, the panels and things that we heard today where like you need to start with the catalog, you need to have clean data, SKU level your descriptions, you have your variant images, you can enrich that catalog further. And that's like sort of a bottoms up approach because historically what would happen is you would load all these videos and static ads into the account. Meta doesn't know quite which product that you're at, you're advertising and then it's just trying to like do iterations on top of that. And I think the, the historical implementation of generative AI as it relates to Meta feel that sense. And this move to product catalog is like them investing in this bottoms up like infrastructure first approach. And I think the parallel for that for brands is actually to say all that same process but investing in the data internally. Like Cody brings up the data warehouse, it's like yeah, if I have my forecast and my daily spend and my daily revenue accurately stored in some sort of warehouse so that I can filter it across all the dimensions that I care about. Now all of a sudden I've got that same bottoms up approach that's going to allow my team to create better reports, get better insights and ultimately act faster. So what do you guys think? You think that's, that's tracking or am I just like drinking the Kool Aid?
- [11:54]
C
No, I think that's, I mean what we just talked about in terms of empowering teams to like answer their questions in real time with Claude by having the account set up and all the connection set up and not like gatekeeping that it's really no different than what Meta is saying with the catalog. Right? It's saying, hey, if you have a really clean catalog with all the data and all the information on this catalog, we can generate more creative for you, reach more people, drive down your cpa, drive up your return on ad spend. So I think it's, I really think it's the same thing. Like they're asking for a very clean input and if you give that, of that clean input, you're going to get orders of magnitude greater output. So I think that totally makes sense.
- [12:31]
A
100%.
- [12:31]
B
Yeah. One of the, one of the things I've noticed that's cool from like AI is there's a ton of leverage and like you have to do some of this technical work upfront like for Shopify, like you have to build components and things like that, but there's a lot of leverage and then the systems can use them to work off of and make decisions. I think it's the same thing where like, you know, you love to talk about naming conventions but like catalog is kind of same thing. It's not a fun thing, it's not a sexy thing. But like you have to have your, your capi set up properly and then now you have to have your, your catalog with all of the information and it takes some time to do that, but once you have it then it's clearly such an important input for these AI systems to be able to use and kind of optimize from. So it's, it is kind of annoying and not a sexy thing, but it is just so important. And it's like Meta is so clearly saying this is kind of like table stakes for this next system of the ad auction.
- [13:24]
A
100%. The other thought that I had was, and I joke about this with the team sometimes because everybody's really excited about implementing AI. It was a big topic last year, two years ago, everybody's talking about it. I think what we're talking about now is a more, I don't know, like a higher quality way of implementing it because historically I feel, and what I would say is, you know, someone will give me something that was AI generated. I'm like, okay, and intelligence generated this. I don't really care if it's artificial. It's a pretty low level intelligence. Like clearly it didn't have the context that it needed. Clearly this thing isn't good and like what we actually need to be doing is like making sure that we are evoking a High level intelligence from this magic chat box. Yeah, chat box or whatever, so that we can produce the content that we need that's actually going to work. So I think that comes down to infrastructure. It seems like meta's on board.
- [14:09]
B
Well, it's because it's context.
- [14:10]
C
Right.
- [14:11]
B
It's like these models have gotten better and now teams are getting more sophisticated and they're using skills or projects and giving it context. It's the same thing. And getting your capi and getting your, your catalog set up correctly and then using things like value rules or margin bidding is just giving these AI systems the context of what you want 100%.
- [14:31]
A
They're all examples of like the guardrails and sort of the, the pulleys and levers that we have available to us to set up meta in a way that's ultimately going to align with our objectives. And like, that just feels so much more foundational and like, I see the semblance, the path to Zuck's vision of us never having to produce another ad again. And we just turn on the meta money printer machine. Like, I'd love to get there.
- [14:51]
C
We're headed there.
- [14:52]
A
Hopefully. I don't know what we'll do in the meantime, but. Or when we get to that point. Okay, I want to talk about creative maybe a little bit further and staying on the topic of catalogs because, Connor, what is your take on, like, how hexclad might be implementing the product catalog and what does that mean for your business over the next, you know, 612 months?
- [15:10]
C
Yeah, I think, I think we all have, like, and most brands out there have their quote unquote hero products that they build 90% of their ads around and 90 of their landing pages around. And that's for good reason. You know, those, that those hero products drive the lion's share revenue. But, you know, I know at hexcloud, we, we have like three product categories that we consistently invest in building funnels around. That doesn't mean that we can just ignore all these other products and product categories and that we can't acquire customers on these other products and product categories. With that being said, like, I don't think it's probably a great use of my team's time to go and spend, you know, a month going on a sprint building out market bags, for example. Now market bags are. We have a great market bag. I think it is very differentiated from what's out there. And I do believe we can acquire customers on that product, but we're balancing resources all the time. So I Think that's what's cool about what I'm hearing about Meta's catalog product is it's no longer just this carousel of product images on a blank background. It's very much informing, a lot more creative. So what I'm excited about is how can we set up our product catalog in a way where we can enable Meta to make tons of market bag ads, just as an example, and not have it eat up a bunch of our team's resources and grow that business unit. And maybe that business unit is still only 1% of our revenue or 2% of our revenue, but I think we could double it or triple it and not have it eat up a ton of our team's time and they can still focus on the hero funnels. That's what's really exciting to me. Like, can we, can we have a really clean catalog and produce hundreds of market bag ads and really scale that business unit? I think that's the, that's the exciting part about this, this like catalog product update.
- [16:57]
B
So for me, number one, like we just did a. I brought in a consultant to do an audit of our Pixel, our Capi and our GA4 because these things are just so important. And I, I suspected something was wrong, but it was, it was pretty good. Same thing. So after this, the first thing I'm going to do is get a, get a catalog audit, like just to make sure things are set up correctly. And it's again, one of those boring things. I don't want to spend the time there, but I think it is that important to do and just make sure like we're feeding the right parameters in and have it set up. And then I think just thinking about it differently. I've always thought about catalog as like dpa, like dynamic product ads where you know, you can have like a mar pipe or something like that, or it's just like the basic white images. And I think it's not like that. Like now they have the catalog product videos and thinking of it more as the context and the data source, like a Pixel instead of an actual ad unit. And that can then just serve two other ad units. So I think first just making sure like proper data hygiene and taking the time to get it audited and then thinking about it different, differently and how it's going to feed other stuff and definitely testing some of the video stuff as well. And then like it's just, yeah, it's just clear that's the direction it's going in. So that'll just be the foundation. Like I'm really excited about a lot of the like meta creator changes that they're doing. You know last year there was a lot of Gen AI stuff but there was also a lot of creator partnership ads like from so many brands that you know we talk to and we talk about is like these like affiliate creator armies are really crushing and using the algorithm correctly. And so I don't think that's going to go away. I think if anything Meta is continuing to invest more in that and I think they'll, they'll keep talking about that but I think like that will tie in with this because just having creators who can then you know tag your catalog and be an affiliate and then you never know it might be for a product that they bought that's your market toad that you weren't expecting to do and then you're like hey this is a good piece of creative. This is doing well organically or affiliate. Let's see if we could put some spend behind this is is what we've seen on other channels and I think it'll happen more here.
- [18:53]
A
Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. It, it does it. It's funny to think about an affiliate program if you have like and we've spent so much time on this over the last couple months at Ridge but like activating hundreds of creators, having them post thousands of videos, all those videos are tagging products. It's like a form of it's like crowdsourced catalog enrichment where all of a sudden theoretically in the future when meta's supporting this in a way that TikTok shop is because they're doing such a good job of it, we're able to like auto auto generate but like sort of en masse create all this content that's getting associated down to that product catalog and then can be pre populated into all the other ad placements that you know, Meta has available to it.
- [19:30]
B
And I think that'll happen. I think that's like definitely one of my predictions though like GMV maxification of everything of all media. I think that's what it'll be is like outside of like the Gen AI stuff it's just like creators creator flywheels and then just putting media dollars behind that but in like a very automated media buying way.
- [19:48]
A
It's funny was thinking of them as distinct strategies like I and I thought that's where you were going with it was like hey one path is going to be enrich your catalog, allow Meta to create all these like very rich dynamic ads across all the different placements and then the other side of the coin would be get a discord full of 1500 creators who are producing, you know, 3000 videos a month for you. But what you're saying is you actually think that vision is like unified.
- [20:09]
B
Well, it's the same way. So like if you're running partnership ads, you need a pixel, you need a cappy.
- [20:13]
A
Right.
- [20:13]
B
I just think the catalog is now the same input that's going to give, you know, the, the ad engine all of the context behind this. But then it'll use it can gen gen AI some creative but also it'll use that creator stuff as a creative and that's like the data source behind
- [20:30]
A
makes a lot of sense. Connor, you guys have spent a bunch of time with product seeding. I know you're excited about the product tagging. Any other points to hit here?
- [20:37]
C
Yeah, I just think like brands hit rates are gonna go way up on product seeding. If you now they can also say and oh and by the way, if you're interested, here's an affiliate link and you can use the product tagging feature in reels. Like I could see a brand having significant growth in the amount of content they're seeing get posted from creators or seeding by adding this into their outreach strategy. So I think that's one thing I'm excited about is to like adjust how we're seeding products and almost dangling that carrot a little bit more on like, hey, we're not only going to give you free product, but here's an affiliate link and like you can do this product tagging in reels and you can make additional money on top of that. And to Cody's point, if you do that and if they are going to post and tag it and use the affiliate link, well, you're much likely to get content that's going to work as an ad because if they're using an affiliate link, they're probably trying to explain the product, explain the usps and those are the types of pieces of content that perform well in ads versus you know, someone cooking in a hexclad or someone's Ridge wallet shows up in their content. But it's not about that. Which like I want that too. But I want to also fuel the paid media creative engine and I think that's a really exciting way to do that. And I'm also excited just to re engage with everyone that is an Instagram creator that we've already seated and say, hey, glad you love our products. We love that you posted content by the Way now you can do this thing and earn additional money on top of everything that you're already getting from us. And I'm curious to see how many Instagram creators we can reactivate because of this product seating functionality. So I think there's like a new iteration of how we outreach people, but then also this whole reactivation strategy, which is going to be really exciting.
- [22:14]
A
I am excited for Meta performance marketing summit 2027 when we've got full creator discovery, creator outreach, receiving product, we've got native affiliate payments, and to your point, like, really build that flywheel around, incentivizing them to create content that sells, create a ton of it, and then, you know, we're serving the purpose of it all gets associated down in that catalog in a way that everybody wants.
- [22:33]
B
But I think that's what it is. And even, like, I think if we think that's the direction even now, I think a lot of the game, like, understanding what media buying looks like today, which is very different. It's not selecting audiences, it's not even doing a ton with bids.
- [22:46]
C
Right.
- [22:47]
B
It's. It's understanding how the media relates to incrementality. So do you need to do value rules to push to different audiences? You know, are you. Should you be doing IA versus not? Like, there definitely is some level of testing into a lot of that, making sure you have your data correct. And then it's just creative velocity on top of that. And the best way, I think, to do creative velocity is with a creator ecosystem.
- [23:10]
A
Totally. Yeah. So, okay, so. And that really nails a creative point. It's like we're going to get to, like, mass somewhat. Some of it will be dynamically generated via all of meta tools. Some of it will be done by, like, massive amounts of people. On Discord going back to the media buying point, we talked about signal measurement, creative. We talk a lot about, like, is media buying dead? Is like a common question. And it does feel. I was having this conversation with someone at lunch. There are more tools than ever. And like, it feels like we went through a period of time where maybe four or five years ago a lot of value could be created almost exclusively via media buying. There was a lot of alpha in the right targeting, the right campaign structure, et cetera. Felt like that went away in many in. In a lot of capacities and consolidation was key and you have fewer tools. But now we talk about. I mentioned some of them earlier, but cask and. And ROA's optimized options and. And all these other things. So, Cody, where do you think like where is the Jones Road media buying team spending time today? And for people who are just sort of exploring these tools, how are they, how are their media buyers best leveraging it in, in, you know, in a way that's different than years ago.
- [24:15]
B
So it's been a long time since I've been in platform, but let's say it's like five years ago. What I remember you have to upload ads, you have to pick your campaign settings. You back in the day used to do targeting and testing, lookalikes, testing, stuff like that. You scale budgets, you turn on ads like, like I used to optimize ads weekly. And you would go in and you go into Northbeam and be like, hey, these are my testing ads that I'm going to do. I'm going to go and scale these. Here are my ads that are fatigued. I got to shut these off. Like the testing and scaling still happens but a lot of that is actually on the creative analysis front. So I think that's a big component. It's clear, you know, everyone knows this, right? Like I don't know if the stat is still 56% of results are creative related. Like any media buyer has to, I'm not saying they have to make creative, I think you can decide for your company but they do have to be able to analyze creative and help with that flywheel. I have the expectations now with AI, all of these convergence of roles that media buyer and creative strategists are becoming more of one. It's the same way where you know, all of this Shopify, dev0stuff one person can now do CRO strategy, copywriting, design development, analysis because with, because of AI, the same thing is going to come for the media buyer and creative strategist role. So they are becoming closer to one. I still think there's some distinct lanes but you know, ad uploading has pretty much been solved. There's a meta CLI now and so you can automatically upload stuff. Interest targeting is pretty much dead. I do think there's a level of like growth experimentation that's never going to go away. You need to understand your business, run experiments, test them, be able to, you know, have a hypothesis again. AI can help with a lot of that, but you need to be able to do that because there are more settings than ever before. There's no longer like the Power 5 or Performance 5. Like these are best practices now meta is saying like, hey, there are some fundamental truths we need everybody to know. You gotta have your CAPI set up, you gotta use Andromeda have created diversity, but it's also like there are actually so many nuanced things for your business. Do you want to be on val volume versus value? Do you want to be doing bid multipliers or value rules? What's your customer life cycle strategy like? There are a lot of specific things that I think are good things to choose from, but it does create a little bit more complexity of what people need to do. So I think it's like the growth experiment side post click is easy because again you used to have to go to a dev team and a CRO team and get it in a backlog. Well, like it's so important that post click experience is so important for performance. I need my growth team to be able to do it because they're going to be held accountable to it. So part of the way I think about it is what are you measuring this person on? What are their KPIs and then do they have the resources and the autonomy to be able to do it? I don't want them to always have to wait on creative or E comm and anybody non technical can now do that and set up a landing page test. So I just think these roles are continuing to converge and there's some fuzzy areas but you just have to work through it. But it's no longer budgets and shutting off ads.
- [27:07]
A
Totally. Yeah. 100% agree. I like the flow of like there's growth, experimentation and then there's like and you're identifying where you're creating value in the business through things like geolift studies, measuring incrementality. Then there is the how do you instill that in the ad account? Meta, to their credit, hits this point all the time. Like they want to be as aligned with your true business objectives as possible. There's more tools than ever to do that and it feels like the media buy role has become instilling that within the account with all the tools that you have available to you. I do think like signal was brought up a number of times today and as a business Ridge is just more diverse than ever and I think there's still more nuance to instill in terms of like signal engineering. If I want to be driving, whether it's a purchase, but a certain type of purchase or I talk about all the time, really as marketers we just want to be driving an engaged shopper and it's like I don't even feel like we quite have the tools to do that yet. So I'm excited. Maybe 2027 we're talking about a few more options available to us on the sort of signals that we can, we can optimize for. But on the topic of media buying, Connor, anything else you'd want to hit here?
- [28:07]
C
Yeah, I think, I think, like today is great. Media buyer enables just like very clear strategy with, with data analysis and then can even to your point, go and like, like make some of those moves without needing a designer or a dev, right? Like, can they go and see a new creator is really taken off in the ad account and then go into maintenance and like start briefing out a landing page right away to optimize that funnel? Like, I think those are the things that a great media buyer is doing today. So, like distilling that data, bringing that to the team and enabling quick decisions to go and do the next thing and then maybe even doing some of those things themselves, like the landing page design. And maybe they can't get it all the way there, right? But maybe it's like, hey, this creator's crushing. Here's a little mock up I put together on how I think we can optimize this funnel that goes to a designer and then that goes to a developer. And like, that's a lot quicker workflow than it was a year or two years ago. I still think there is like we saw today, right? There's a lot of things that meta that you can optimize a meta campaign for. You can do value, you can do lowest costs, you can do these bid multipliers, you can do lifetime value. I still think, like a good media buyer can, can look at all that and all that optionality and say, hey, I think these two things are the most likely to work for this business and like their product catalog and their AOV and all this because there's an opportunity cost to like, sifting through the stuff that, that doesn't work, right? And if you're just sitting there kind of mindlessly saying, all right, I'm gonna do first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and now it takes you, you know, eight weeks to find the optimization setting that really worked best. Well, that's a lot of wasted time, wasted money, less efficient than you could have been. So I still think there is some skill in like, being able to have that like, matching of business objective to what you can optimize for in meta. I think that's a smaller part of it though. But there's. There still is some value in that, I think 100%.
- [29:59]
A
All right, let's see. I've got one question. Do you guys see a future and this actually came up in the conversation too. It does feel like over time we'll stop making the distinction between catalog ads and like non catalog ads. And at some point I'm probably going to be able to build a campaign where I'm able to manually build an ad and then just run catalog ads alongside that within the same ad set. So that's probably the future. But do you think that like projecting far out and then I want to ask if you guys have any hot takes from the day. Projecting far out. Is there a scenario where like 50% of ridges budget is product. Is is product catalog ads as we know them now?
- [30:34]
B
Yes, but it won't be, as you know now it'll be 50% of your budget will be on Gen AI creative. On the front end, what you'll see is statics or videos or animated stuff with hyper personalized headlines and backgrounds and stuff like that. That'll be Gen AI created and on the back end will be powered by the catalog information.
- [30:55]
A
Okay, so let's call that. Let's say 50% is kind of the. The line here. When do we hit that point? Is it six months from now? A year from now?
- [31:01]
B
Well, then I think the other 50% is creator, source, you know, affiliate, whatever it is. That's what I think. I don't think that there will be brands who, you know, are uploading a hundred Figma design statics per week. Like I think that will happen in Meta and that'll be catalog ads underneath it when that happens. I mean, I think I remember we talked about it last year about, you know, the Gen AI stuff and Meta was pushing it hard. And we also kind of talked about the irony of it a little bit because on one side it was all Genai and the other it was all creators. And it's like you have the kind of the least authentic stuff to the most authentic. But if you think about how much better Gen AI has gotten since then is clearly accelerating at the most rapid pace. So I'm sure when we're here next year, hopefully we get invited back. Hopefully we're on the main stage next year. It'll be so much further along and I think it'll be a lot more. And I think probably we're in 2026 by 2030, it just doesn't even look anything like what we had. It's probably three clicks of a button. Pick my goal, pick my product. Boom, done.
- [32:05]
A
Totally. All right, we've got maybe like another question then. Do we want to do Q and A? Well, maybe tbd we'll get a mic ready in case we want, but I'll hit two more questions here. Connor, one thing today that you're going to immediately action with your team.
- [32:21]
C
I think the, the Monday morning task for us is Cody kind of hit on this but like catalog cleanliness. Like I think it's just been a long time since we've actually gone back and, and looked at our catalog and have actually looked at the list of things that Meta is saying it needs to do the absolute best job possible in generating creative based on it. So that's where I'm going to go start. It's like it's very clear that Meta's investing in this product. We also have a ton of like, like within hexclad business unit objectives that I'm really excited about how this functionality can serve. Like, I already hit on the market bags, but that's just the start of it, right? We have all sorts of new cookware accessories, we have new lines of cookware, we have new categories coming out and like I want to give get ads for these products in the account quickly. Like in days, not weeks, not months. So that's point one for us is like, let's go like we're gonna get on the horn with our Meta rep. We're gonna run through the list of everything that they're saying is going to give you the best catalog feed possible. And we're just going to audit our catalog and make sure that it's set up the right way so we can get the best Gen AI possible. Because I would bet that, you know, a lot of the marketers saying, hey, the Gen AI creative is not there yet. I would bet if you went and looked at the inputs that, that that are required to like get it to be really good are probably not there either. So that's step one, I think before we even try to like start serving all these objectives is just like make sure the input's super dialed in.
- [33:42]
A
Cody, what would you say?
- [33:43]
B
I mean, I'm not gonna take that one. Cause that was a good.
- [33:45]
A
You gotta go with a different one.
- [33:48]
B
I'm doubling down on the, you know, the, the creator stuff. I'm continuing to do that. Yes, I'm doing that in the background, but just doubling down on. On creator. Tripling down on the.
- [33:57]
A
Because how's TikTok shop going for you guys?
- [33:59]
B
It's going well. It's, you know, slow to start, but a lot of that stuff is performing very well on, on Meta. Just like the most organic, authentic stuff. Between that and like Our partnership ad funnel. Like, I have to stop myself because a lot of times I'll review stuff if I am, and I'm like, there's no hook to this. There's no edit whatever. And like, it just crushes. It's just so different than from what I think. It's what people want to see on the platform now, and you can't really predict it, so you kind of just have to feed your ad account with a lot of it and. And see what works.
- [34:28]
A
Totally. I mentioned this on stage, but month to date, we've done 700 ads at Ridge. And that's like patting the stats a little bit. We just launched Memorial Day. We're going into Father's Day. We had a lot of this kind of like backloaded, but it's a lot of variance. Things like that. It doesn't include. Just last week, for our TikTok shop campaign, we. We posted 1200 videos. That's so like almost 2000. And that's that army of creators each of those are posting. It's probably an average of like six or seven posts per person, something like that. So hundreds of people creating 1200 ads. And I'm excited for two reasons. One is meta is clearly signaling where they want to go and they want to support this. And then two, I think brands today, I don't think about us. I mean, we are doing TikTok shop, but I don't think about it that way. What we're figuring out is like, how do we activate creators at scale, how are we reaching out to them, how are we briefing them, how are we doing community calls each week to tell them what concepts are working, what are the new products that we're launching, how are we treating that as a resource to just generate content agnostically across platforms? So whether that's meta in the future, when they've got all the tools for me to reward them on an affiliate basis, we're able to sort of pour gas on that fire immediately. So I'm also going to piggyback off that answer. Immediate next step. We'll continue going down that path because I think it only becomes more important over time.
- [35:38]
B
Yeah, I was pretty happy with the numbers we were doing on. On what we launched this week, and then I heard that, and now I'm definitely saying we're. We got to do more.
- [35:44]
A
Yeah, yeah. We're running a contest now where we're just rewarding people on amount of videos. I've said this a lot too, but, like, what I'm trying to do at Ridge Right now, as it relates to our creator activation is just flood the zone. I want as many pieces of content live. We're going to identify quicker what works, what doesn't. We're going to trim it down over time because the future is not us spending, you know, a couple thousand dollars every time someone posts a hundred videos. Like, we want to align our incentives around revenue a little bit further. But I think to bootstrap our way there, we can just sort of like blitz it early on.
- [36:14]
B
We have a few tools right now that's helping with volume. Some of them are our TikTok shop creators. We can go to them and offer a flat fee or a percentage. It's kind of cool. We can offer a percentage spend on all of their videos. So a creator can just opt in and be like, hey whatever, you could have access to any of the videos I post that I tag you gu in, just give me a percentage. And so just drastically scales volume. Or we can actually do partnership ads on a, on a percentage. And so it allows us and it just, it just de risks it. And so I'm telling my team like we should just really. There's no limit to volume. It's really inventory. It's the only limit. And I just think that's the name
- [36:46]
A
of the game, that pesky inventory dude. Do you guys have any hot takes from today?
- [36:53]
C
I still think we're a ways out from the agentic media buying. We've been talking a lot about this and it's a hot topic because it's like, like a cool and sexy and fun and controversial thing. But I mean we've tried it with, with certain tools out there and like I hope it gets there but I just, I think we're a ways out. So that's my. I don't know if that's a hot take or not, but I think we're lukewarm. It's a lukewarm take. Yeah.
- [37:15]
B
Cody, what's yours?
- [37:17]
A
Yeah, I've got. Well, so looking at all the product catalog stuff, I did have the thought that at some point it feels like it becomes very competitive with Shopify. Like if all of a sudden all I need to be giving meta is like my catalog level information and they have have their one click AI checkout in app and they're producing all the content that I need. Like you understand how the website is far less important at that point and at some point they will have like maybe like meta native brands in the same way that like some people just sell on Etsy and like that's how they do it over there that might exist on Meta, but you have the like underlying infrastructure to really scale it. So I think that's like a maybe an interesting bridge we'll have to cross years down the road when they maybe become more competitive.
- [37:55]
B
But, but Harley told us that like I think when one of you guys, when we had Harley on the pod, asked us like where's the vision? And he kind of said that he's like, we don't really see the future as websites. Like we see the future as a feed to serve wherever you want to shop.
- [38:07]
A
And then it's just. But how defensible does that become? And at at some point does Meta say hey, we want to be processing those payments? Because that's really what Shopify is at that point. So that's my hot take.
- [38:16]
C
Well, and I think if, if in theory, if this trends how Meta is building towards, which is like Meta is doing a lot of the generative creative on product focus, more Dr. Assets. I think they're all of a sudden there's even more alpha and the ability to create like really well done brand forward content. Right. So now it's like, all right, we don't need to focus our, our efforts as much as like product focused doctor stuff.
- [38:40]
A
Totally.
- [38:40]
C
But now creative strategy teams are going to be shifting more towards like these beautiful hi fi. More storytelling driven ads that historically like aren't what you fill your Meta account with. Right. Those are more of like the upper funnel objectives, the YouTube ads, the CTV ads, but now become even a bigger moat because you don't have to focus as much of your human resources on the doctor Product stuff. Like I could see it trending that way and I think that would be great because that's, that's where you really build brand and like I think brands can really differentiate themselves with that type of creative.
- [39:08]
A
I think that's a good one. And that was more of a focus last year was like developing culturally relevant creative. And I don't think Gen AI from product catalogs is a way to like make your brand cool necessarily. So someone will have to do that at some point.
- [39:20]
C
But the ROAS is going to be
- [39:21]
A
great, but the rose will be great.
- [39:22]
B
Right? So I think Meta has done a really good job of allowing businesses to set their objectives and their different criteria because they used to be very, they were like, hey, consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. Here's AI Power 5 Performance 5. And I think it was too simplistic. I think like I get why they did it, but I think there were challenges and, you know, we talked about this. I've tweeted about it for my predictions. Like, you know, there were challenges reaching new customers and things like that, and they've done a really good job of looking into that and kind of of aligning. Like, again, last year was all about incrementality. Like, and now there's, you know, stuff like PLTV and margin optimization, like aligning their systems to business outcomes. The only con to that is it's so much more complicated. Right, Right. There's no longer a set of five things that you have to do to get success. Now it's very confusing. And even, like, sophisticated teams like ours are still confused on how much should I be on value versus VO and ia and should this be my whole account on ia or is this just a percentage? And how do I marry all these things together? Like, it's just. It is a lot more complicated now. And so I think that will reel it in a little bit and find a way to kind of blend both of them and keep the basic Zuck vision of just tell us what you want to do and we'll do it for you, but as well as not get too consolidated, and if you have different goals than I have, be able to do that. And I think AI will help with that, because AI can kind of do a lot of that on the back end without the advertiser having to do it.
- [40:43]
A
Perfect. All right, we'll call it an episode.
- [40:45]
C
Sweet.
- [40:45]
A
Thanks, everyone, for listening.
- [40:47]
B
Thank you. Hopefully we get invited back.