← Marketing Operators 
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- [00:00]
A
We are back with another episode of Marketing Operators. You've got Cody and I were coming off the high of Meta Performance Marketing Summit. Cody, how do you feel?
- [00:07]
B
I feel good. I feel tired. Got, got in at 1 last night, baby woke me up at 4. I feel great.
- [00:12]
A
Yeah, I feel sick. Yeah. Yeah. Coming off the high of the, of the MPMS was a exaggeration. Yeah, no, I'm, yeah, I got, I got, I got, I'm, I've got the sniffles over here. I'm coughing. That's okay. Comes with the territory.
- [00:31]
B
Well, it was a big week for you. Not only the live pod. We had the live pod. But you were on main stage.
- [00:36]
A
I was on the main stage, yeah. No great experience overall. So, yeah, feeling pretty good. Happy to get back into the swing of things. We've got a bunch of stuff to talk about today, but I've got one, It's a little off the cuff here. Also, let me say we met a bunch of listeners, which is super fun, at the summit. And someone specifically said they like the banter for the first three or four minutes of the pod. So I told them I'm always split. And I'm like, do people want to hear about the protein intake? Do people want to hear about whatever Cody's drinking? And apparently a handful of you do,
- [01:05]
B
so I love it. Well, what I noticed from you is you're, you're a big water drinker. I was very impressed the first day you filled up your Nalgene and it was gone, like, instantly. I was very impressed and I was like, chugging a coffee. I do not drink water.
- [01:17]
A
I drink a ton of water. I also, I never, I'm really bad at, like, sipping water. So, like, as soon as I have a full beverage, like, it's gone. So then I have to drink like three or four or five of them throughout the day. So I get, I get plenty of hydration.
- [01:30]
B
I'm impressed. I gotta work on that. Working on that.
- [01:32]
A
Dude. Big day last night. Are you much of a Drake fan?
- [01:34]
B
I'm, I'm Team Kendrick. You're Team Kendrick, But I saw that. How have you listened so far?
- [01:39]
A
I, I, I haven't had the chance to listen. And also, being Team Kendrick makes total sense. I was thinking about it last night. I mean, Kendrick undoubtedly won in that battle years ago. Performing in the super bowl and calling out Drake, like, just unbelievable. And they play it, you know, moving back to la, they play not like us all the time. I went to a wedding last year and like, one of the guys, one of the groom and his groomsman walked out to not like us, like absolutely dominated that beef by making this like iconic song. But I'm a, I'm a Drake fan. I still like him. And what I like about him and what I think is interesting is he always creatively releases albums. So I don't know if you remember this many years ago, I don't know, 2016 or something, he released, if you're reading this, it's too late. And he released back to back albums and one of them was to fulfill his contract with his previous label. And then that's what people are saying
- [02:29]
B
he did here, right? Like the Frank Ocean thing.
- [02:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then now last night he released three albums and I just think that's the coolest thing ever. Music aside and creator aside, I'm like, if you're just, if you're just gonna like spam launch albums, like, I'm all for the creativity of that.
- [02:44]
B
Yeah, we know where he fits on the creative volume versus creative quality side of it.
- [02:50]
A
Yeah, see, exactly. Yeah. I said this on the main stage. You know, you could solve all your problems with volume and that includes fulfilling requirements to your label.
- [03:01]
B
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Just slop, just slop everywhere.
- [03:04]
A
So we'll see. I'll give it, I'll give it a listen. Yeah, I'll give it a listen. I, I'll give each of them a listen over the next couple days. We could, we could, could do a full, you know, 45 second review next week.
- [03:15]
B
I, I, I do like his music. I do like a lot of the music. So I'll definitely listen and then we can catch Connor rolling up on what's going on on the Internet next week.
- [03:21]
A
For those listening, we like, put together a little agenda doc. And I, and I sent this, I sent this to Cody and Connor last night. And Connor immediately responds. Drake, three albums. Like exclamation point. Exclamation point. And I thought that was funny because if I weren't to have sent the agenda, Connor never hears about any of those albums. He'll go months and he'll be like, oh yeah, Drake's got music out three albums. This is something he's done before. So he's, he's missing a good sort of culture, Culture segment here. All right, sick. So let's get into, let's get into talking about marketing a little bit here. I kind of wanted to debrief a little bit further. We'll have a full episode from our live podcast from the Meta Performance Marketing Summit, which was really fun, but it Was also difficult. I don't know how you felt about this. We had to consume the content from the summit all day and then 4:30pm we had to immediately jump into a. A live podcast. So not a lot of room for reflection. Was really kind of off the cuff. I want to take, you know, we could talk on it for 5, 10 minutes if you had any additional takeaways as you've had an additional, you know, 24, 36 hours to sit with it or even if you just want to hit what the high points were for you at this point.
- [04:29]
B
Yeah, I, I did a really terrible job paying attention this year and I just kind of hung out with everybody. I just was excited to hang with everybody and see everybody. But I feel like my main.
- [04:39]
A
But. But quickly, because you say that, but then you did have your granola notes rolling the whole time.
- [04:44]
B
So you're actually, you're actually, you're doing my listening.
- [04:47]
A
Yeah, yeah. Not listening, but by far the best documentation you've ever done.
- [04:50]
B
I mean it was AI everything like that was really it. If you kind of boil it all down, it's like we're getting. My big takeaway is, you know, Zuck's vision. I talked about this on the live pod. Zuck's vision of just give us your, your business goals and whatever and we'll handle the rest is. It's not there yet, but there is a world where it's maybe there and maybe it's a pipe dream, but there's clearly steps to do that. And I think Meta is trying to tell us as advertisers what are the basic things we need to do in this new world, which is kind of like context engineering. You know, we talked about signal engineering a lot, but it's same thing, right, where it's like they did the whole like AI one click cappy thing to make it easy for everybody. And that shows how important it is if they're going to invest in that. And then there was a big focus on catalog, which you know, in your session was on catalog. And no offense to anybody, like I find that it's like the most boring topic in the world. Like who wants to talk about proper catalog feed? But if they're devoting mainstage time to that, it just shows how important it is. It's just, it's just the context engineering. So I think just getting these inputs right and then even like the Gen AI stuff, I will say one last thing on it. Like I remember last year they, they talked a lot about Gen AI and then A lot of like creator stuff and like Gen AI was so bad at the time that it was like, oh, that's not going to resonate with people. It's not there yet. But it is so much better like just reflecting on a year later. So like they are getting a lot better with that and I think the vision is clear. It's not there yet. They've made a lot of changes. But that's my big takeaway. It's, it's, it's the AI of everything is coming. And obviously they talked about Andromeda, Gem Lattice, all that stuff. So there's all the backend stuff, right. That they want to remind us about is AI, but like there's more front end stuff that, that is coming.
- [06:31]
A
Yeah, totally on the topic. I want to hit on each of those quickly. AI everything. It was a little heavy handed. Like we've probably heard the term AI used over the course of, you know, six hours, like hundreds of times probably. And one of the funnier ones I thought was they rolled out or they did a preview of like a one click checkout and they called it AI checkout. And it's like Amazon's been doing one click checkout for like 15 years or something. Like, like I don't know if this required artificial intelligence and maybe I'm being dismissive and there's some sort of like more sophisticated underpinning that allows them to do one click checkout. But I'm like this just feels like we're, we're slapping AI onto whatever this point. And then I thought product catalog, huge focus. And I'm so, I'm so aligned with this. And we talk about this in the pod, so we don't need to like belabor the point too much here. But product catalog and also I say this because I'm talking my own book. You and I did our 2026 predictions and I said everybody will realize you need to be investing way more in infrastructure in order for AI to be the accelerant that you want it to be. And I think I see this all the time. I heard Patrick could do say this over at AJF Andrew Ferris Agency and he said that, you know, a lot of AI implementation last year was like just kind of noise. And he thought that the end of 2025 and early 2026 was like the step change. And I think that's when Claude builds out the skills infrastructure. You get a couple really good models and all of a sudden it becomes like far more, you know, productive. But I think a big thing of that is like investing in the underlying infrastructure. You say context like how are you giving it the, how are you giving models the information that they need to actually be smart and make good decisions and get quality work done? I've used the example of us building out our data warehouse last year and I think something like Sarah's, Sarah's Analytics MCP will be like the most impactful implementation of AI we've had. And we don't get there without a like very methodical approach to like how are we inputting all the data, how are we tagging it, what are the dimensions we want to sort by? That's the big unlock. Now all of a sudden my team can go in, they can get all the information that we need. We can put together really robust reporting really quickly. I think the equivalent of that for Meta is like, hey, we used to say upload all your video ads and your static ads and we're going to try to take that. We're going to be at like the very end stage there and we're going to try to take that and, and iterate on it further with Gen AI. And like I was always so unimpressed by that. You had the, the Brian Kano tweet when he was at True Classic where they replaced the guy in the sweatpants with just like a grandma and it was like, I think that's an example of like meta not having the information that it needs. It's like trying to intervene at too late of a state and now they're saying, hey, we actually need to take a big step back here and invest in like the catalog. Let's go, let's go back to the SKU level information. Let's enrich that with images and video and you know, all of the, you know, it's, it's going to be 3D renders in the future. It's going to be things like that. Let's like really enrich it at a very granular level and only at that point will Meta have the all the information that it needs and all the context that it needs to then dynamically generate a bunch of like really high quality creative across all the placements that it needs to. So I really love that point and our reps and you probably feel the same. A lot of the Performance Marketing Summit is a culmination of things that we've been hearing for like a year. Like I walked away from a meeting in January with my reps and I said, oh, catalog is like clearly where things are going and like let's Invest much further here. And that just seemed to be like, far and away, like one of the bigger takeaways for me. Motion just dropped their 2026 creative benchmarks report. And it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same four questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate? And which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers and over $1 billion in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings, like the fact that only 4 to 8% of ads actually become winners and over half of ads actually lose. And for Motion customers, this report is half especially helpful. You can upload it into your Motion dashboard with their runneth AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes, I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionapp.com and tell the marketing operator sent you.
- [11:10]
B
Yeah, catalog. I didn't, I haven't talked about like, our, our reps have definitely been pushing catalog product video. And I have been resistant on that one because to me, like, catalog was just DPA and it like never worked. And it's like, so clearly that's not what's happening anymore. So now that's like my big takeaway where I'm like, hey, that's actually where I was wrong. And like, you know, we're going to focus on catalog right now. But, but I think a lot of the other stuff, there was no like, new thing. There was no, like, hey, value optimization is here. This one is here. Like, they have been working behind the scenes and I think probably because we're in disruptors, like, we've gotten, you know, beta testing a lot of these things, but there's, there's all of these different options that are so clearly attaching to business outcome. You know, where like, increment incrementality was really big last year. It was still a thing. I mean, it was really cool to see house, a house bag on every single chair there, you know, and like, and like, they, they had a panel. Like, incrementality was still a thing, right? But, but it was. No, it was not one focus. It wasn't like, hey, we're just going to talk about PLTV or just margin optimization. It was like, hey, here's actually a lot of different products to, to allow you to orient the system towards what you want, you know, and so I think that's a lot of the game. Like, obviously there's all the creative stuff, but then there's get your catalog, get your capi, and then tell us which inputs and what your business cares about. Like, I think that's the thing. It's like, that's the context. And then from there it's kind of like let. You got to let them cook.
- [12:35]
A
Totally.
- [12:36]
B
Yeah.
- [12:36]
A
I mean, one of the, one of the talks centered around signal measurement. Creative. And I feel like if you were to just probably look at the last couple years in terms of like, what is meta's, what is the narrative they're trying to build? It just like oscillates between those things. Right. And like last year, last year, the main takeaway for sure was measurement. Like, incrementality was the, the buzzword. And then this year it felt. I don't know if I would say it's around creative. I'd argue it's around catalog. And I think it all comes down to, like, it's. And it's definitely around AI, but it's around, like, how does, how is AI ultimately going to empower you further creatively? And like, what does that mean from a meta tooling perspective? So, yeah, I just thought, I thought it was good. I'm like, super directionally aligned with this. I'll talk with people or we'll talk with meta all the time. I'm trying to think of maybe another example of this where they'll be experimenting with new things. Like, they're, they're talking more about WhatsApp now and direction. I'm just, like, less convinced that, like, WhatsApp as a part of the meta, particularly, like, ad ecosystem, like, makes a lot of sense. Like, I'm sure it'll get there at some point, but that feels a lot less clear to me. Whereas the catalog and then the implications that AI has on the catalog feels like, much clearer as to being the, the future of how we're going to develop creative at scale.
- [13:52]
B
If you were to give meta feedback on one thing, what's. What's the biggest one piece of feedback you had that could make this event better for next year.
- [14:00]
A
So you kind of hit on it earlier. MET has done really a fantastic job of building out tools to support what advertisers ultimately want to do. They want to. And this is, this is definitely a big part of the narrative from 2025 MPMs. They want METTA. Excuse me. Jesus. Yeah, I'm all congested they want Meta to be as aligned with your business objectives as possible and they're, they're rolling out all sorts of tools to do that. Incrementality was, was the focus last year, the conversion lift studies. This year it's, you know, the ability to, they have these row optimized option where it's some sort of hybrid bidding between lowest cost and highest volume. You can do some of the value optimization stuff like you have all these little like pulleys and levers to like configure Meta in a way to try to best align with your goals. I still don't think they are, they don't like acknowledging that we still need like stronger guardrails for what exactly we want to sell. And if people will be familiar, the Ridge business, like we have four significantly different categories and I have to spend into each of those categories and they have way different price points between those categories. And then within each category there's a lot of different order values. Like if I'm selling wallets, I'm selling wallets at $80, $100, $150 and $200. So like all of a sudden there's like. And actually even a better example of this is I have a brand new launch that I have a bunch of inventory sitting on that I need to force spend too. And Meta still wants us to say, hey, just give us all the data unfiltered and allow us to figure it out. And I think in the future I would really love to see more ability and like I'd like to see, I'd like to have a better ability to configure Meta to drive dollars to certain SKUs and certain products rather than what we do now feels like what we do at Ridge feels very hacky in terms of like I'm sending you this signal because I want to optimize for this very specific type of purchase. Meta doesn't do a great job of supporting that natively and I'd love to see more tools around that before we get to the point of hey, I'm just going to give you my catalog and a budget and you're going to do everything that I need.
- [16:10]
B
So you want to, you want to be able to take advantage of the AI stuff, you want to be able to take advantage of consolidation, but you need to give it, you want to be able to give it a little bit more context into some of your goals. And part of that is like, I don't know if you've tested like the rows optimization or like even margin Optimization is like theoretically that makes sense because right, if you just put, you know, if you put pens and I don't know if you run ads on pens, but pens and luggage in the same ad set and put it on lowest cost, like you're going to spend all your money on pencil. Like that doesn't work. Theoretically Roas margin optimization works, but that also doesn't take into account just like first of all, halo effects, stuff like that. Right. Like how you look at your business on like a blended, you know, business unit thing. But it also doesn't take into effect inventory. So you kind of have to force spend. Yeah, I wish there was a way to say within Meta like hey, do that. But here are the guardrails. Almost like how you would do like a, like the way we control it is like ad set, min and maxes. But I wish there was a way to just say it to meta at like an overall campaign level. Like, yeah, like control things. But here's our must. Like we need to move this product. We need to do that. Like, like be able to just like give it a little bit more input because it's, it's annoying. I don't want to run 10 different campaigns and 15 different campaigns.
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A
Totally.
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B
I want to be able to keep it.
- [17:31]
A
It's that we have physical goods businesses and that there's inventory that we've paid for and that we owe payments on that we have to sell. If I were in, if I were an app creator, an app developer, and I was just selling subscriptions across any number of digital products, then I don't really care, then I could let meta rip on like whatever, like totally whatever. The best, like incremental return on the next dollar is like spread it across my 150 apps or whatever. That would be fine. But like that's just not how ecom businesses work. And then I think the second piece of that is like when we're launching new products or new categories, we're thinking on a longer term horizon. And I say this a lot where it's like we have to invest more today to try to sell more carry ons a year from now. And it's not necessarily about the optimal dollar spent today. If I were optimally, if I were trying to optimize for contribution dollars this very second, we would be spending dollars differently. But I have to do two things. I have to move through the inventory that I need to and then two, I need to make sure we're building the lines of business that we're dependent on a year from now or two years from now. And, and that's the sort of thing like Meta's just never going to have that level of context and just like. But I think they're down the right path of like building out the right forms of configuration for us to ultimately like support those nuanced goals. No. And combined awareness and sales is another one where it's like we're going to do this hybrid approach between reach and purchase optimized. And I'm like, I just don't, I just don't get it. That one doesn't track for me.
- [18:56]
B
So I love it in theory. I don't know about practice. We're testing it now. But why, why do you not like it? I'll tell you why I do.
- [19:01]
A
We, we optimize for like view content a lot. And I say this where my job is not always to drive a purchase that's attributable on a 7 day click basis. Like a lot of the time I want to be driving interested shoppers. So I'm all for moving up funnel for like the, the benefit of like driving more latent revenue long term. But I mean a lot of the, a lot of what we observe in those experiments when we're optimizing for like upper funnel stuff is our conversions that Meta never sees. So if meta's just all of a sudden deciding to optimize for reach at certain times, and at least the way it was described to me was they do believe that it will lead to revenue longer term and maybe that's informed by their bank of conversion lift studies or something. I kind of get it theoretically. But if they're not able to attribute those conversions, I don't know how they could possibly be serving reach optimized impressions in a way that they think is going to drive revenue long term. Like I get it, I, I get that like that's my job as a marketer, what it's trying to do. I don't understand why Metta is all that good at doing it. I'm just skeptical.
- [20:07]
B
So this was like pre podcast, you sent me a loom one time like two years ago. I don't remember this. And the way you analyzed it was way over my head. I didn't get it. But you were trying to show like some view content or reach campaigns and you were like, look, if you like you were looking like the incremental reach or something like that, and you're trying to like show and like to, you're trying to find a downstream effect in your conversion campaigns from your Upper funnel media. You know what I'm talking about.
- [20:33]
A
I think I know what you're talking about. Go ahead.
- [20:35]
B
And so like, I think that's what it's trying to do where like, I think it's meta acknowledging like not all reach is good reach and not all reach does go and actually become purchases. And I think a on in the combined awareness sales, hopefully I don't butcher it, but they're actually not just optimizing for reach like they are using some of the data from the conversion pixel to kind of try to reach in market people. And I think because of GEM and sequence learning and how good they are, they say they are at understanding full funnel and where people are in their journeys. Right. Like they, they can now use AI with all of this power compute to say like, hey, based on all of these characteristics, characteristics we're able to match back we. Connor's not in market today, but we believe if we show him this impression for Ridge, we believe he will be in market in three months because he matches the behavior of other people who have also gone down that journey. And so I think with AI, like that's not something that could have been done possible before AI because there's like, you can't match that many data points. And so I think it can do that and it can kind of like pull people in market. And I think it's, it's combining the power of both of them and then I just love the liquidity. So it's able to say like, oh, hey, you know, we're going to spend 90% on. I'm just making this up like, yeah, this is all theoretical. Like I'm going to spend 90% on conversion today because, you know, you've, there's a lot of demand going on right now. You're, you're in Father's Day, you know, and then post Father's Day, it's like, hey, I actually can't find, like, I can't find that many conversions for you today. Like I'm going to go up and I'm going to put 30% on reach. And like, I don't know if that's true. It's the same way that meta will allocate between, you know, between different creatives. It's just doing it on a, on a funnel stage and it hopefully maps like GEM and all the sequence learning to it. So that's theoretically it like most things, it's probably not going to work that well in practice, but I love the theory of
- [22:27]
A
Rich Panel CEO just predicted his own SaaS product will lose 90% of its revenue, and he's the one building what will kill it. They are betting that AI agents will replace traditional support tools entirely. No dashboards, no seeds, no workflows. So what did they ship? An autonomous AI agent that handles customer support from end to end, reading order data, issuing refunds, updating shipments without a human ever touching it. It means you can run a faster, leaner support team at a fraction of the cost while resolving tickets instantly. 24. Seven rich panel is cannibalizing their own business to build the future of CX and support for brands. Because if they don't, someone else will. Go check out what they're building@richpanel.com and learn how you can automate your entire support operation today. Well, that's it. So funny is you and I, what they are trying to do with. With this is the cask. Do I. Do you know if I have that right? These are the cask campaigns. Yeah. This hybrid reach and purchase optimized campaign. What they're trying to do, you and I both totally agree with. That's what everybody's trying to do as marketers. I laid out why I'm skeptical about it. And honestly, what you just laid out is an extremely compelling reason why technically they are able to do it. So, like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, we'll, we'll try it. We'll continue testing it. I have no idea whether a year from now we'll be running a bunch of cast campaigns is like our top of funnel campaigns. But it's just another reason how this idea that they want to be as aligned with our business objectives as possible and they're building the tools to do it. Like cask is a great example of that.
- [23:56]
B
It's funny when you, when you're up on the panel, you said like, I was, I was so happy to see it and proud. But you said like one of your, you said your main like KPI or I forget exactly. You said it is. Is reach and it showed like the, you know, like the, the brand lift testing and Olivia, I was sitting next to Olivia and from House and she goes like, really main, main KPI. I was like, I know it's not really your main one. Like it's probably like your main new one, you know?
- [24:18]
A
Well, we were all. There were three panelists and we were all going to say incremental return on ad spend and I'm like, I can't do that.
- [24:25]
B
I know Connor. Like, I know he's not just a brand I know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really funny.
- [24:31]
A
No, it was. We are running way more brand lift studies this year and that's what it was about.
- [24:36]
B
How, how do you when you get it? Because like so same thing. We just tested reels trending ads and you know we're testing full funnel. So we tested with House, we got the GA4 stuff in there and then we have the brand left. Like we all know what a really good cost per incremental is, right? Like cost per incremental conversion. How do you think about knowing what is a good result on a brand left?
- [24:56]
A
How like what a cost. Like what's a good cost per brand lift? Yeah, yeah, totally. No, it's a great point. We're just talking about this now, right. So like to take a quick step back. The reason why it was a slide at the summit panel was we are expanding into more retail locations. We're seeing more of like our newer categories. A lot of revenue gets captured on Amazon. There's more non branded demand there. So I think like just more of our jobs as marketers at Bridge we, we'll be making sure that we have the brand awareness so that when someone's looking for a mag safe cardholder wallet on Amazon or whether they're in a, you know, whatever a shields and they're looking for luggage that they are just aware of who Ridge is. So we're looking at brand lift. What are the types of campaigns or how effectively are we driving brand lift and then what is our cost per brand lift that's completely disconnected from revenue. Like I have no idea like what the value of a, of a, of a lift in brand recall or something like that. All we're going to do in the short term is try to drive down the cost per brand lift. We'll do two things. We need to find ways to drive down cost per brand lift and reach optimized campaigns. Might be one way to do that. If we were just driving lower CPMs to people who we weren't serving ads to when we were optimizing for purchases, we could way more effectively drive brand awareness and also do it more cost effectively potentially. So that's one is just directionally how do we drive that cost down?
- [26:23]
B
And you'll test different strategies to do it. Different channels, different strategies and then you'll. Yeah. How will you allocate the budget? Right? How will you decide hey, this is how much we, we will spend on.
- [26:34]
A
Well it will remain a small percentage of budget until. And the second point would be like at some Point we have to figure out what is the long term, what is that latent revenue or is there any at all attached to driving brand lift? So if we say, hey, if we spend the next nine months and say we've found, we've identified, you know, this types of content and these types of optimized campaigns or maybe it's on these channels, like maybe YouTube's better, whatever. I could see us like Q1 next year really trying to figure out we're going to drive the most effect, the most effective brand awareness, cost effective brand awareness possible with a very long term house study and figure out like, okay, where is the actual like revenue impact coming from? The, because it could be on D2C but it's most likely on places like Amazon and you know, in Target and whatever else. So like that's the step two and it's only at that point where we'll, we'll, where we will be at all confident in it becoming a significant portion of our budget. Okay, so I've got, I've got a question on the topic of reach quickly. Well, actually, I don't know if you saw this. Adam Mosseri. Adam Mosseri, who's chief product officer of Instagram. Head of Instagram. Yeah. Really dresses, really cool, wears great watches. He had a little, he had a post the other day, he said creators. So he's talking about creators who he's typically sort of addressing care too much about followers. And what they should care more about is reach and also like consistent reach, consistently reaching the same people, which makes total sense. I get a bunch of Instagram reels of people I've never followed but like very much enjoy watching their content. And I think it's an interesting shift in the platform and, and it feels somewhat related to like what you've been getting at with CPMR and just the focus generally on reaching new people. It's both you want to be reaching new people, reach is important. But then also, and I don't know if you think about this at all, but then the frequency of that reach. So it's not always about net new reach but then at times like just like how are you maintaining consistently hitting those people for the three or four impressions that they need to ultimately convert. So I'm just, I thought it was a interesting little anecdote from Adam Masseri and I wanted to touch on your like most recent thoughts on cpmr because the last thing I'll say just quickly, someone did come up to me at the happy hour and was like, yeah, so CPMR And I'm like, dude, that's Cody's thing. I'm like, I'm not taking, I'm not taking any responsibility for your strategy around cpmr. So give us a rundown.
- [28:58]
B
Yeah, I mean, yeah, again the biggest thing is like I know when, when we spend more money to reach less people, performance isn't great unless it's like just a, you know, promo period. But it's still not great. But I think, yeah, I think, you know, you also like we've done a lot of stuff to improve it and I think there is a chance that we would have better short term performance if we were actually not pushing it as hard right now. Like the quality of try even, even amongst conversion optimized stuff, like not even adding reach, you know into it. Like the, we're reaching colder audiences so the one day returns are probably worse. Maybe the seven day returns are worse, you know, but we're, we're doing it because we think it's better for long term. And, and you know that's like incremental attribution. That's like some view optimization stuff on there. That's like how we're optimizing our, you know, our campaign. So I, I do think that it is important but I think you, you have to reach new. But also both of us have served, you know, because we've served so many impressions. Like also, you know, your, what's your impression to, to conversion percent is probably like. I don't even know. It's probably sub like 0.5%. You know what I mean? So it's like think about all the, all the people that you have shown ads to who have not converted and you know, you, they just kind of need to see a different message or an offer. So I think both are definitely important
- [30:21]
A
when you spend more to reach new people. Like what time period are you looking that, Are you looking at that on.
- [30:29]
B
We look weekly, monthly. We're just trying to make sure that our you know, cost per thousand accounts reach. Like we just have a directional metric for our business that we know when it gets too high it's, it's not great, right, that either our CPM is up or our frequency is up. It's one of those two. Obviously there's less you can do about CPMs, maybe that but you know, you got to be able to diagnose that or frequency is up. Why is that going up? Is it creative? Is it media? You know, is it exclusions? But we just know that when that gets too high, even if Performance is good right now. We're going to feel it in a little bit. It's kind of like the same thing. If your revenue is good right now, but you're just squeezing existing customers, you're going to be fine. Now you can squeeze that for Memorial Day promo, but in a few months you're going to be hurting a little bit and you always have to be finding that balance between creating demand and harvesting it.
- [31:22]
A
Yeah, I, I was, I was just curious. We don't really look at cpmr. We don't really look at cpmr, frankly. We've looked at, we've talked about rolling reach quite a bit in the past and I feel like CPMR was almost like a progression of that because rolling. Yeah, because what, what meta will put together is like rolling reach, but it's over like a two year period. So if you reach someone day one and then 18 months later you reach that person again, they don't consider it net new reach. And that is like, that feels counter to what Adam Masseri is talking about where it's like, that's not, it's not about just like gross reach. Like just literally everybody has to be new all the time. There's like a consistent factor to it and that's why a weekly or monthly makes a ton of sense to me. And that's, that's probably where we can improve a little bit more. Is like what is our, what is our rolling reach? On a much shorter time frame basis. I could totally believe we should be reaching someone at least once every month. Like, and, and if that's really the goal, then that's a lot easier to maintain than saying I should be reaching 10% new people every month over the course of 18 months. I'm like, that just seems kind of crazy because that will naturally decline over time. So anyway, I was just, I was curious your, your initial thoughts. The other thing that I saw recently is people looking at CPMR at like the ad level and then so, so you say, hey, if this ad is more effectively reaching new people, it has a low cpmr. We can, that we're going to assume that that is more, that is a higher funnel ad and therefore we should hold it to a lower ROAS standard than something that is like just hitting the same form audience over and over. Is that how you guys talk about it internally as well?
- [32:59]
B
A hundred percent. So I had the strong hypothesis that we were struggling to reach new people partly because of the way we were optimizing ads and we were kind of Just going off of like a last click metric, you know, or a one day click and we were shutting off ads that were getting spend that had better, you know. And again you could look at multiple, you look at percent new visits and stuff like that, but that didn't look great. You know. And like David Herman talks about a lot like not every ad has to, you know and it's like why would they like why if we, if we're truly reaching new people, like and what we know based on you know, our post purchase data, like why would it have a good one day click, you know, like, like that's probably not bringing in the, the new people we want. And so I, I again I think, I think it is important and I think it's given us the confidence and we've, we've tested and validated this with house tests as well. Like we've done things that have hurt our one day click and hurt our in platform and, and been much more incremental. So that's like for us that's what we've seen be, be helpful. And now I'm, I'm more in the don't shut off ads, you know and just like especially do its thing. Yeah like partnership ads we validated so we run them a little bit more aggressively. Right. And, and even like as we if we are making decisions because on like partnership ads, ad sets, renewing partners, we do have to make decisions of like how hard to scale them. It's like well what's the, what's the percent new? And if we have this macro creator and it's like hey, they're you know, making it up like a 0.41 day click. It's like that's not great. That's way below our benchmarks. But it's like yeah, but they're driving 85% net new.
- [34:32]
A
Like is that a bad ad?
- [34:34]
B
Is that a good ad? Like I actually think that's a great ad marketing operators, I want to challenge how you think about post purchase. You zoom out. Post purchase isn't a tactic, it's a system. It's your cart, your checkout logic. Your one click upsells how you increase AOV revenue procession profit per session. That's your confirmation page. It's all of that system together. The entire flow determines how much incremental revenue that you can make per order. That's why ROKT After Sell isn't just an upsell tool. It's a design system for the full post purchase experience. ROKT After Sale gives you one unified system A smart cart and checkout offers. One click post purchase upsells and thank you page Monetization with ROKT thanks and here's where it becomes very strategic. Beyond the 30% revenue per visitor lift, Rokt Aftercell opens a monetization layer that most operators haven't fully priced into their unit economics. With Rock Network products, run the math on your own volume. At 50k orders a month, that's 15 to 25k in pure profit. With rock banks at 100k, it's 30 to 50k. I'm not great at math, but I love those numbers straight to the bottom line as well. Every month from a page your customer is already landing on won't affect conversion rate, just free money you can pocket at the end of the month. No inventory, no operational lift, no contracts to lock you in. And this is not just for Shopify native brands anymore. Whatever platform you're on, ROKT after sales supports it. Operators listeners can activate ROKT thanks and get the full after sales suite for a year or grab an extended 60 day trial. To test post purchase performance go to aftercell.com operators build the system once and let it compound and this is how
- [36:01]
A
I responded to the the person who I was talking to at the happy hour was our equivalent of this is really looking at percent new visits where we will absolutely hold something that's driving 85% 90% new visits to a lower standard than something that's driving 45 or 50%. And like the clearest example of of that for us right now is like we see fantastic return on ad spend from our catalog ads because they are very like we are not we don't have a fully enriched catalog. It doesn't seem to be driving super top of funnel interest. It's not like you know, it's not in the discovery phase at all. It is like if someone's looking for a wallet like it is pretty effectively showing that the colorway of their design that they're interested in that is at 50% new visits. And and then our our other stuff is at 85 90% plus so we can obviously hold those to different standards. That's pretty true. And then the only point that I would say like in addition to that is and this is this depends on how you are calculating CPMR over what time frame. Because what I was saying is I don't really care if the ad that's driving the high percent new visits is driving new reach on some long term basis. Like I say this all the time as well. Like My job as a marketer is also not necessarily to just be reaching net new people all the time. It is getting new people to my site and new people interested. And you can absolutely do that without reaching new people. It's reaching the same people in new and unique ways that like are getting them interested for the first time. And that's actually what I thought you were referring to in the loom from two years ago. I was looking at this was like a, we call it a Joe Rogan ad. We had like a little clip of Joe Rogan in it and it had a really high percent new visits. And I said, oh, this must be reaching a ton of new people. No, like it had on a, on a, I forget what time period I was looking at was probably like year to date, like nothing even that crazy. And it was in the summer so it's maybe seven months of like people that we've reached. It didn't reach any new people, but it had like 95% new visits. So it was all people who had seen ads before but were clicking through for the first time. And I just think that's extremely valuable and that's kind of how we think the, I think the point that you make, which is a good one to take away is media buyers or whoever's making the decision on what ads are going on and off or how to structure accounts or whatever else should be thinking about the funnel ads are serving different purposes throughout your ad account and you should be holding them different standards because of that. So that is the most important thing. And if you're doing that via cpmr, fantastic. I think there's a way to do it through percent new visits as well. And then you know, it's all data that you can be triangulating with at any given time. Time.
- [38:32]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, I, I mean I agree with that. Even if you do your math on, you know, your, your click through rates are 1%. Right. So it's like there are so many people that have seen your ads and haven't clicked to your site. So I, I, I do agree with that a ton.
- [38:43]
A
Totally.
- [38:44]
B
And yeah, yeah. And again it's, we, we look at it, I don't really love it at the ad level. We'll look at it from like ad set level when we launch partnership ads. And it's just like, hey, is this creator reaching new audiences? You know, because that's, that's part of our strategy with partnership ads. Not everybody see that our partners are more effective way. Certain, certain of them are, you know, definitely like the larger macro creators we work with, that's like a big part of the goal. And again, it helps to underwrite it because the, the, the attribution metrics would not always allow us to scale into those ads. And I think that would have been a mistake. So we do look at that, but it's also, it's like you could just say it's looking at frequency, you know.
- [39:22]
A
Totally.
- [39:23]
B
Totally.
- [39:23]
A
Yeah. All right, sick. I've got. Do you want to talk TikTok shops or do you want to. Do you want to talk about us launching chains?
- [39:32]
B
Let's do chains. I got just the funniest thing. So, so yesterday at the event there was a panel and so we had. Whitney from my team was on, Olivia was on it and then J. Mo who we had on from, from Vayner. And then we were talking, they were talking about upper funnel stuff and like real trending ads. And like somebody asked him a question, he's like, oh, it's, yeah, it's like the TikTok spotlight and, and, and then the meta rep who was on it at the time just goes, no, it's not. It's like real trending ads. It was just like so funny because it was, he probably said it way better. It was just super funny. He like, he was like, oh, it's like tick tock. And he was like, no, it's, it's
- [40:02]
A
not like that dude, that's gonna, there's gonna be a lot of awkward conversations around that because this is a big thing, like everybody. And actually maybe we could segue into TikTok shop here because you can, you could see a lot of the meta ad and like creator based features that they're building are for sure TikTok inspired. It's not, it's not like, it's not a secret, but I imagine, yeah, they
- [40:26]
B
talk about creator stuff a lot too.
- [40:28]
A
Yeah, totally. And like, and, and that's what I was. They finally launched like not, I shouldn't say finally but like they've, they've launched product tagging which is like one step in like building out what is like a really powerful native sort of creator flywheel that TikTok has. And, and like meta for sure is looking at that as like, especially when they think about the, the, the importance of asset diversification and creative diversity. It's like giving the tools to activate hundreds of creators in the way that TikTok has now for the last couple years is extremely impactful. And then the other thing is, you know, I think with TikTok shop. 18 months ago, two years ago, it was less clear how that became ad revenue because it was like people were getting organic distribution. I think people were running like pretty effective, like pretty high mers, and they were getting this halo effect on other channels. And it was all done via like the organic impressions delivered by affiliates. But now it's like shifted towards GMV Max. So now like the playbook is laid out again where it's like, hey, if you can build this creator flywheel, incentivize people. Incentivize people to create tons of content and then make brands pay to promote that content further, that. That is a path to getting additional ad revenue. And that's, that's absolutely where matters going with all of this.
- [41:38]
B
Oh yeah, the, the. I think that was probably my other biggest takeaway. It's the GMV maxification of everything is here. Like, that's, that's going to be like ASC 2.0 or whatever is just like, it's just like, don't even like, get your catalog set up, get your cap set up and then, and then it's just getting as much creator content as you can in there.
- [41:58]
A
It's actually funny you say that GMV Mexican, I think is great. And I think we're in the very, very like early innings of that because there's two sides. There's like, there's GMV maxification in the sense that they are making the, the, you know, whatever we want to call it, like the, the standard meta ads manager potentially simpler than it's ever been. You load up your catalog, you enrich it with a bunch of stuff, you configure it in a way that aligns with your business goals and you give it a budget and it works. And that's like, that's, that sucks future. And that has nothing to do with
- [42:30]
B
creators, but it has everything to do with creators.
- [42:34]
A
It can. And my point is that it can. There's actually a path, what I just described, I think is a path to like today, without ever engaging with a creator, my meta ad account can look way more like a GMV Max campaign. And then, and then you layer on creators on top of that, where it's like all of a sudden, if you can incentivize them to create that much more content and you're just feeding that into this GMV Max like campaign that is like extremely simple and you've just given a budget that is like the. That's the future.
- [42:59]
B
Yeah. The reason why I'm saying it has everything to do with it because Then it's like, all right, well, media buying is so simple, you know, it's so easy. It's so simple. It's like you just have to toss it in. And it can be toss in just your product catalog and metamaxy ads or like, I think there will be two pathways. You toss in your product catalog and Meta makes the ads. Or you toss your product catalog in and then creators make the ads for you. Like there will be, there will be much less brand internal, creative.
- [43:23]
A
I think I like the point around affiliates just being a form of catalog enrichment. Like that's what it is. Like they're. When they post that content and they tag that product, they've effectively enriched your catalog.
- [43:35]
B
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
- [43:38]
A
Okay, I've got a couple. So we've been spending way more time on TikTok shop and it's going like pretty good. I talked about it with Zane and Isaac on their podcast a couple weeks ago and we were still like, still figuring it out a little bit. Just operationally it's a really interesting platform and there's like all sorts of like tactics that I was unfamiliar with. So we got there, but now we're pacing towards like, what could. I think we could have our first million dollar month in June.
- [44:05]
B
Like, I think like that you guys are growing. Wow.
- [44:08]
A
Yeah. And my, my couple, my couple takes. I have a couple takeaways here. One is, and this was a learning and I think I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, just the importance of GMV Max. Like I, I was going into it, I was still thinking about Tik Tok shaping as I understood it from 18 months ago or two years ago, where it was like really about organic distribution. And that's where, like, that's so out of our wheelhouse that I'm like, I have some skepticism that we can really pull off the quality of the content and the types of creators and do we have the product that can, you know, that can go viral? Right. I was, I was talking about it with Isaac because he crushed organic content for so long as CEO of Mini Katana because sword content is inherently awesome. And it's like, yeah, I can understand how you can drive a billion views a month.
- [44:55]
B
Wallets.
- [44:56]
A
I'm like, I just don't know how they're, how interesting they are and how that will relate to our ability to get organic impressions. And was frankly somewhat relieved to hear basically Everybody sitting on TikTok shop spends a bunch of money promoting the content via GMB Max. I say, oh, that's just ads. All you're telling me is like you're just getting content created by a ton of creators and then you're promoting that via ads. And I think we could do that. So that is something that was news to me to some degree and really that the volume worked. So our big unlock was we launched a new. We are, we are flooding the zone right now with content. We're like definitely going to overpay for content in the short term but I think that will sort of speed up our ability to learn who are the creators that are going to work, what's the type of content that can work and we can like whittle it down over time to be more effective. This month I think we'll, we'll spend on like fixed content costs with creators so like the equivalent of like retainers or content bonuses, like almost 50 grand. So it will be a really big percentage of, of total revenue and that doesn't include any of the dollars that we've spent on GMV Max. So we are flooding the zone with volume. We get 1200 posts go live just last week and that it was like the big unlock where all of a sudden we.
- [46:02]
B
I was like in your ad account or just creators talking about you?
- [46:06]
A
Creator. No, no. So this is all TikTok shop related. So all affiliates posting, tagging making their way into GMV max. 1200 posts last month or last week.
- [46:15]
B
How many of them will get into Meta ad account? What would your guess be?
- [46:20]
A
I don't know. I mean I, last week I was like the big focus was like let's get more of this stuff moved over. We'll probably take the top dozen, couple dozen, like maybe 50 or something. But I also don't quite know like the right system for like even moving that content over. I'll continue.
- [46:41]
B
I can, I can talk about what we do for that.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah. What do you guys do?
- [46:44]
B
Well, so I feel better. Cause on the, on the live pod you said the 1200 number the other day and I thought that was in meta and I was like, damn, I was feeling good because like that day we launched 70 TikTok shop videos on meta and I was feeling pretty good about that and then you said 1200 so. So we've been using Yuka, we've been like a design partner on their beta and so they're making it really easy to do like one click stuff. So it's very cool. So we're not doing, we're right now not getting the same volume of people talking about us as possible. Like I'm curious, you know Your strategies, if you're willing to talk about it. But we're not getting that we have to do that. But I think we're getting a decent amount of people to talk about us and post videos. And then with Yuka, you can request and so you can either do flat fee and just kind of have a template and it'll DM them and just be like, hey, we'll pay you 100 bucks. 200. So we started at 100. Very low acceptance rate. Went up to 150. Pretty low. 200 seems to be the sweet spot. We haven't like underwritten in terms of like, what are we willing to pay per video? And so these are. We're being slightly. I don't. I would say we're reading medium selective. It's still not high. We look as. When we underwrite Ad creative for a 10x content efficiency on average, that's like an ambitious goal. So like, if we're spending 200 bucks on a video per average, we need to spend, you know, right. Two grand on, on that. And so if you just back into your hit rate and it's just like, all right, if we have a 20% hit rate, you know, here's like what, what we can afford to spend, but you can also do a percentage of spend, which is really cool. So you can either offer a percentage of spend on the video or this is a really cool thing. You can offer a percentage of spend on any of the videos that the person's tagging you in. And so if you post about Jonesboard once, we could just go that. And you can just be like, yeah, anything I post about you guys, you can run it and it's just like. And you know, more incentive.
- [48:29]
A
A percentage of spend. So as you could connect it to the Meta Ads account.
- [48:32]
B
Yeah. And then you can one click upload to there. Oh, you can do a percentage of sales as well, which is I think what comfort does. So that's, you know, just another one. So because it's kind of like you can incentivize posting on TikTok and you know, a few various things and I don't think we're doing enough there. But you can also incentivize, you know, from, from the ads a few different ways. You have like the pre and post. We talk about incrementality a lot. But how do you actually operationalize it to make your business better? That is one thing that I've been really leaning in with my team recently. And Haus has played a tremendous role. We use it for all of our experiments, all of our geolift testing, but we now use it for our MMM as well. I've been a design partner, I've been one of the early design partners on House's cmm. C stands for causal. So it's one of the only MMMs, if not the only MMM that I've seen that's actually using your causal experiments to build the model. And so that allows me to just trust the data so much more. So it's not a black box. So it actually informs our roadmap and has been so crucial for allowing us to operationalize around incrementality. The House team is world class. I can't speak highly enough about them. They've also built a really amazing community with some of the best DTC growth operators out there. They have a few exciting events coming up soon that they call the Houzz Growth Lab. One is in LA on May 19th and the other is in New York on May 21st. I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the area, if you want to check it out, learn a little bit more about CM1 house IO/ operators to start making better data driven decisions.
- [49:56]
A
Today it was you and I. The founder of Yuko was there and I heard you mentioned that. I'm like, oh yeah, dude, we need that like yesterday and we do need to figure out the. Like, I've said this before, like I don't. We're. Ridge is not going to become like one of the biggest TikTok shop brands. I just don't think we have the products or price points to like compete with the Shark Ninjas and the, and the comfort hoodies of the world. I think most of the value we'll get from TikTok shops is not shop specific. It's about, hey, we're now, we have, we now have the tools to incentivize hundreds of creators to create great content. And it is going to be a form of content production that's going to feed the meta ad and TikTok and Snap and whatever else. And that's really like the, the, the comfort playbook as well. It's like this is content that he's running everywhere else.
- [50:38]
B
But what do you think you could get to? Like, I know you said you might do a million this month. Like what's your run rate? Like what do you think you can get to in TikTok shop revenue? Like you think you can be a million a month? You think you'd be 500k on average? Like what do you think you'll be at.
- [50:50]
A
Yeah, I mean I think, I think it's very possible we could do a million a month in June is is what I was thinking with new products and stuff. I mean yeah, it could be a couple million a month for sure. And then even still, I still think the majority of that like the majority of the value created by this program will be in the spillover into Amazon and DTC as well as the content produced becoming winning ads across those other platforms.
- [51:12]
B
So we're new and the crazy thing with Tik Tok is like everyone can see you can't even make up numbers. So we're in like 150k a month. We, we're in like month two. We just started. We have a, had inventory issues be like some ops issues that we're learning through. So now we're trying to scale it. I think we can get like I want to do I, I want to do like I think we can do 600k a month like average by the end of the year. I'm hoping for more if we like push it. But again like that's not that much for you know, a lot of time and focus. So like it's clearly got to be you know, driving other, other things for you. Yeah, I think we can probably get to like we could probably do a million dollar month in November is, is a goal but I just, I want to push it and the number is just getting as many people talking about us getting as many videos as we can. It's like one of the core KPIs.
- [51:56]
A
Yeah. And I mean like for Ridge, how much we can do is going to be dependent on the, you know, how much we're willing to spend on GMV Max. I guarantee we're spending way more on GMV Max than you are for every like 150 grand in revenue. So and, and a big part of like justifying I, we have to figure this out. I was told, I think Olivia told me that like we can work with TikTok directly to run a geolift on GMV Max. Have you heard this? Okay, well no, I mean fingers crossed I'm right because it was kind of, kind of an important part of our strategy here. I did hear that at one point. So we'll figure it out and I'll come back to the pod and address it if it's not true. But really trying to measure what is the off platform impact of TikTok shop, what will will be the determining factor of whether we can scale up to a million or millions of Dollars a month is we would need to be very confident that we're seeing lift across other things. So, okay, in terms of other Tik Tok Shop takeaways, I said volumes working for us. Gmv Max important. The other one, and I heard this from a really large TikTok shop brand. One of like the top top 10 TikTok shop brands on the platform is that they allow creators to activate basically any part of their catalog. And this was kind of news to me from like a more traditional D2C perspective. Like you, you're typically honing your strategy around a hero product. We got to sell the wallets, we got to sell the wedding bands. Like that's the focus, that's what you build the content and the landing pages around. But we have, you know, 150 different silhouettes or whatever. If you go through all the little accessories and things. And what this executive was recommending to me was like, just make it all available to affiliates. If they feel they have an angle that works for like a product that you might not otherwise be expecting that you should allow them to do that. And you actually have. You just have this ability to activate like mid and long tail products on your catalog and find winners that like wouldn't really pencil maybe on any other platform. And I thought that was really interesting. And we are seeing semblances of that now where I think we're still going to be a wallet business, but something like the individual tracker card which allows you to track your wallet on Apple's Find My Network, that ends up we're over indexing in sales on the tracker card on TikTok shop versus what we see on D2C which I think is really interesting. So the plan for moving forward is to continue expanding the catalog more aggressively than I had originally planned.
- [54:25]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think that's it. We're seeing that a little bit. Where some stuff that we're not even like doing campaigns on is, you know, is, I don't want to say taking off, but you're seeing a little traction. And it's so much easier than the cool thing about this. And I think this is where it can help with like creative diversity is like, you know, you might not be able to take the time bandwidth internally to be like, oh, let's create the funnels for these SKUs. But it's like, well, we can just have it available if creators do it and get traction, like we can then do campaigns on that. We can do it. So I think it's a great like Creative and product testing tool.
- [54:58]
A
Yeah, 100%. And we're actually going to try the reverse of it now where it's like, maybe the tracker card can work as like a standalone funnel on Meta. I have no idea. And I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of those things that just like remains TikTok exclusive. And I think, like, I also think one thing we'll do, and someone mentioned this might have been McCoy from Portland Leather Goods. Just like marketers will become more of, we'll work closer with merchandising teams in the future and just like making sure that you have the products and the value props that will work across different sorts of placements. TikTok Shop is an example of it here. But even at Ridge, we're developing more things specifically for, you know, upsells and progress bars and things like that. Because I just think like, yeah, that that catalog component of it is going to become more and more important versus the like, hey, we're just going to hammer the hero product as I think most marketers are doing right now.
- [55:49]
B
Yeah, totally agree. Totally agree with you.
- [55:51]
A
Okay. And then the last one that I had was really just. And I kind of hit it earlier. We're just focused on bootstrapping content. Bootstrapping the content. Flywheel overpaying for it. Now the contest that I mentioned, we're gonna spend a lot on, on creative and it's gonna be a larger percentage of revenue than I'd like because it's not affiliate based. It's like if you create 30 videos, we will pay you X dollars. And that there's pros and cons to that. It's like one, we ensure that creators are developing content and it's like. And it's coming together and it's working, but, but it's not, we're not rewarding people. Only if their, their content is driving sales, which is like the most natural form of that flywheel where the Ridge and the creators incentives are perfectly aligned. This is a little bit different, a little bit more transactional. But I think it's like what we'll need to do in the short term to just like get the affiliates engaged, on board creating content, seeing results. And then like I said, we'll kind of whittle it down from there. So those are kind of my, Those are my three takeaways for like TikTok shop so far. We're about, you know, we're four and a half months into our journey.
- [56:51]
B
Yeah, we're, we're two in. You know, we should really have somebody on like a, like a, some expert TikTok shop. I know like Hudson went on. On operates, but like somebody like from marketing side because like we're both so new to it and we're kind of. I'm not saying we're talking out of our. I am, I'm not saying you are. You have, you're more experienced. But I, I think it would be cool to like also be able to learn from somebody because I don't know about you. Like, I'm talking to a lot of people. Like I talked to, to, you know, Jeremy about it and talked to a few other people and like trying to piece together like what the playbook is and I feel like it's. I feel like everybody has a little different of a playbook.
- [57:21]
A
Yeah, I can hear that. Where do you think some of those bigger like differences lie?
- [57:27]
B
Well, like, some people are like, oh, lives are crushing it. We're doing daily lives. And some people are like, lives are dead. You know, they're not working. Some people are like, yeah, you just have to sample a ton. Some people are like, no. Like, this is how you nurture craze. I mean, I think probably the biggest thing is in nurturing creators. I think that's probably the biggest consistency and where a lot of the alpha is.
- [57:45]
A
I, I talked with this large tick tock shop brand. I was like, what is like the distribution of like revenue generated by creator? I wasn't sure of the right way to. I still don't know the best way to phrase this question, but like, what's the 80, 20, is it 20% of creators driving 80% of the revenue? They told me it was 6 creators drive 60% of the revenue.
- [58:06]
B
That's crazy. And they were a big brand. That's crazy. And so the, that's the thing that I've been actually surprised by and probably disappointed by. It's probably not a great thing. Like we, we don't have that. Like we have a long tail. Like, I think our, you know, so let's say we've done 350k in TikTok shop and you know, two months like our, our largest creator has driven 15k. So like, I'm actually shocked. I would have thought that it would have been more of that. Maybe it's just way too early. Maybe we're not nurturing enough. I don't know.
- [58:31]
A
Yeah, totally. And so, so I do hear that. What I hear more consistently is it's about like a smaller handful of creators that are developing like great scales. But in order to identify them, you need to seed, like, a hundred times more. Like a thousand times more. Probably. I do. I can't even. It's six. I mean, they've probably seeded tens of thousands of creators. Right. Like, the actual ratio there is probably just insane. So, yeah, I do hear that point. And I mean, honestly, that's how every mark. Like, that's how all marketing advice works. If we were looking for, like, the silver bullet playbook, it's. We wouldn't have a podcast.
- [59:09]
B
Yeah. And I also think because it's growing so fast and it's getting more mature, it's probably, like, changing. Like, I bet people that I talked to six months ago when we were trying to get on TikTok Shop, it's probably, like, they're doing things differently if they're still succeeding than what they're doing now. All right.
- [59:22]
A
Anything you want to hit on the TikTok side?
- [59:24]
B
No. Excited to watch both of us, and hopefully by end of the year, we're both crushing it. We're not Ankh and we're one of those Gen Z kids who scale into tuk shot by the end of the year. Yeah.
- [59:36]
A
Fingers crossed. From your lips to God's ears. We become TikTok Shop brands.