← Marketing Operators 
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- [00:00]
Andrew Fox
If you're a brand starting from zero, what would you be doing?
- [00:04]
Cody
I would build organic distribution from day one. I think that's the biggest one.
- [00:09]
Connor
We launched a new brand this year called Gut Culture. It's incredibly difficult. I don't envy anybody launching a brand today thinking about it from like a bootstrapped, like, hey, let's not light a bunch of money on fire. It just seems to be no way around it.
- [00:21]
Andrew Fox
We have a lot of really awesome questions. We love doing episodes like this. All right, we're back with another episode of the marketing operators podcast. Cody's got a fresh haircut. Connor is in a hotel room somewhere, I think. How are you guys doing?
- [00:35]
Connor
Doing fantastic. We've got our ridge retreat this week, so we've got like 80 people from all over the world have descended on Santa Monica, California. So I'm out here for a couple days.
- [00:46]
Andrew Fox
Wait, hold on. So why. So you're. You're. You live in L. A, but you. You got the hotel, and is that just because everyone's staying there, so you're all just staying in the same spot?
- [00:54]
Connor
Well, yeah, everybody's staying here. And also I live, you know, with traffic hour 45 minutes from here. I mean, it would be. It would be that far.
- [01:02]
Cody
It's.
- [01:02]
Connor
It's not. It's not about distance. It's just time and speed. Right. So you're just sitting. Yeah, sitting in the 10 traffic. So it makes sense to make it like a little staycation. Almost.
- [01:12]
Andrew Fox
Nice. Okay, so this is not the. Not the Vegas trip.
- [01:15]
Connor
This is.
- [01:15]
Andrew Fox
That's a separate. That's a separate.
- [01:17]
Connor
No, no, no.
- [01:17]
Cody
So.
- [01:17]
Connor
So, okay, good question, because I've done a bunch of podcasts from Vegas at this point. Like, we were doing Vegas every. Every year, but you just can't spend five days every year in Vegas. It's just too much of your life being spent on the strip. So we switched it up this year. We're in Santa Monica. It's much nicer, a lot fresher air, some daylight, things like that. The luxuries.
- [01:39]
Andrew Fox
Not as much cigarette smoke.
- [01:41]
Connor
Not as much cigarette smoke. Not, you know, no gambling. The accessibility of alcohol is a lot different. It's been a. A nice refresh.
- [01:51]
Cody
Shop talk is also in Vegas right now. And then. So I. I hear it's nutty. And then also. Can't Sean not travel right now?
- [02:00]
Connor
Yeah, so Sean. Sean's got a baby coming up here soon, so it's easier for. Not for him not to travel. But regardless, we were. We were over Vegas, and we've Got, we've got the office in Santa Monica. It was like a nice, it was a nice change of pace. Do you guys know, did any brands go to Shop Talk or was it just vendors?
- [02:17]
Andrew Fox
I think it's only vendors, I think. And the people that, the people that text you and ask you if you're going are only vendors. Like, I don't think I had a single friend from a brand that was like, hey, I'm going to Shop Talk. You want to hang out? Now Expo west, on the other hand, that one did seem very, very brand heavy. And that's, that's when I think that would be fun to go to. But yeah, Shop Talk sounds, no offense, like my worst nightmare.
- [02:41]
Cody
I talked to one person yesterday from a brand who was there and she said it's the nuttiest thing. Like even the line to get in the gym was like a 30 minute line just to get in the gym. Even I was like, it sounds like such a nightmare.
- [02:53]
Connor
Really?
- [02:54]
Cody
Yeah.
- [02:55]
Andrew Fox
What's the, what's like the. So like Expos is obviously like all the natural food products. What's Shop Talk's thing? Do they have a thing or is it. I don't really know much about it.
- [03:05]
Cody
I think they talk about Shop Talk shop. I never, I wish there was like a great, a great conference. I really haven't been to one that's like, all right, it's worth the time. Maybe we just need a marketing operators operators conference.
- [03:17]
Connor
But there we go. Aaron Orndorff. I hope he's listening.
- [03:21]
Andrew Fox
You know, I think Bar Bruis does D to ski. I think we're going into the third year D to ski and that's, I'm going in I think two weeks. And he does a really nice job with that. It's only brands, it's a good variety of brands he gets. It's in Aspen, Colorado and he, there are some vendors there that sponsor it and like, because they're, they're sponsoring it and they, they raise some money for it. Like it's a really cool experience in Aspen. And he doesn't try to like pack in too much. There's like a big session in the morning where brands are kind of like, it's a little bit more guided and then throughout the rest of the day you're kind of just hanging out. You're skiing, you're walking through town, you're doing dinner and it's very organic. So I think, I think Bar. I'll give, I'll give Bar a hat tip. Bar is doing a nice job with The. The DTC event. But I agree. I think a marketing operators event is. It's not an if, it's a when I think. And I also saw Connor with. Before we started recording, he slid a big box of David protein bars across the screen. So what's the David protein bar today? We got a variety pack. We got a. What do we got?
- [04:28]
Connor
No, I got the. They make my packing list. You know, when I'm in order to get the protein in while traveling. I got a. I got a box with me. I just do the cookie dough, so nothing too fancy going on. I'm actually using it to prop up my computer. I've gotten. And then we can get into the contents of the episode. But I've gotten really creative. I was traveling a lot last year while doing podcasts. So I've got. I've got my laptop propped up on a box of David protein bars. And then I've assembled two cups, a book, and then the little ice container thing to hold up my webcam in a decent angle. So I'm locked in over here. It's quite the. The. It's quite. It's like a. Yeah, yeah, I've got a good setup.
- [05:06]
Andrew Fox
Do you guys have those. What are those things? Those, like nice little laptop holders so you can look straight at your computer. Do you ever use those or you just. You just using the books and the. And the ice holder?
- [05:17]
Connor
No, no, just the books. Found items.
- [05:20]
Andrew Fox
Yeah, found items is way better. All right, let's get into it. Before we do that, we want to thank the sponsors motion prescient rich panel after Cell and Revo. So we were doing a little. We were planning to do a little marketing operators kind of hotline Q and A during the event last week, but we didn't get to it because there was so much other great content that happened before us that we just ended up not getting to the. To the hotline question. So we're going to pull some of those into the episode today and, and run through and we have a lot of really awesome questions and we really appreciate it, you guys. Like, we love doing episodes like this. So if you do have burning questions that you would like us to answer on the show, please submit them, leave them as a YouTube comment, just send them to us some way, shape or form because we love answering these on the show. So we're going to start off with. With one of my favorite questions. I think it's one of my favorites because it's changed so much. I think I would answer it very differently. Ten years ago, five years ago than I would today. But if you're a brand starting from zero, what would you be doing? Like what, what specific strategies would you be deploying if you were starting from zero? Cody, I think you spent a lot of time talking about this and thinking about this a lot in the last few weeks. I know you've had some conversations with some people about it. What would you be thinking about if. If you were launching a brand from zero today? And what would you not be thinking? Like, what would you be like, what would you be marching towards? And what would be your kind of like anti goal as well? Like, what would you be trying to avoid?
- [06:51]
Cody
I like anti goal. I would build some type of organic distribution from day one. I think that's the biggest one. I do think what that is is going to depend on the founder or team and your skill set. I think some of it is also like today I think there's different organic distribution available than when we launched earlier. So yeah, I would do that. And it's probably some combination of found like I, I love, I don't know if you guys see even like local businesses if you're on like TikTok or Instagram, like founder, just like story content. I love that. I think, I think you can get really good reach and distribution if you're doing that. And there are definitely brands that you know do that pretty well. Actually Bar from, from Boost Kousse does a pretty good job of that. Like, I think that, I think that is probably one of the main things I would do and then try to scale that horizontally across different, you know, accounts. So I think organic social storytelling and distribution which will, which will serve your paid efforts too, as, and then like creator and I think that's it. It's like you don't have the ability to go and do like proper, let's call it brand stuff like out of home, just like big campaigns from the beginning. So it's like the cool thing about influencer or creator stuff is it's just infinitely scalable. You can just send some samples when you're just launching and get people to post about it. And that can be really successful at just a new brand. Like you can send out five a month and then as you grow you start sending 10. Like there's just like anyone can do it. And then actually all right, here's, here's, here's one more in real life I would get, you know, do like the, the Half Day's playbook outdoor voices, like get your products in the hands of people and start, you know, trying it in person because it's, it's hard to scale that right to $100 million business. But in the beginning, you don't need that. You just need your first few customers and fans and like, I think that's going to be an incredible way to, you know, start going. So those would be my three and it's obviously incredibly different than how I built. So that's, that's part of it would be just, just, just don't slam paid only. That would be my only anti goal is like do it but, but just don't have that be your only thing.
- [08:53]
Connor
Yeah, because I was going to say you mentioned, you know, you don't have the ability to do large brand things like out of home, and that's definitely true. But what you're also saying is really just reducing your dependency on paid as much as possible as early as possible. And that's just like, that's running Facebook ads. Eight years ago you would totally just like, oh, you'd show up with some static images and you would just turn on paid ads and you wouldn't have to be good at organic. And it would like, it could really work. Lots of brands were built that way. And you're saying that's, that's no longer the case.
- [09:22]
Cody
And some of it is. It's, it's right. It's one of those hinds. It's like, hey, I wish I had done this stuff for Jones Road earlier. Like, because we were not that it was just paid, but like, we didn't really build the muscle in some other areas and we were very heavily dependent on paid. And now it's like, how do we backtrack and do some of that stuff? And it's not, don't run ads. It's not like I don't think ads work. I think ads work incredibly well and I think they work so well that it's easy to get hooked on them.
- [09:46]
Andrew Fox
But, but the cost is like to your point, Connor, 10 years ago or even five years ago, like, you probably didn't need to think about organic distribution. You like the, the cost to play in Meta ads was cheap enough where you could be like, all right, I got a good brand, a good product, I built some ads and now I can run paid and I'm getting, you know, 25 cent cost per click and it's on a purchase conversion campaign and it's really high quality traffic. And that's just not the case anymore. So I think, like, I agree, I think you need to have distribution Outside of paid for because it's going to make paid work better. Like A, you're going to actually have audiences to remarket to. That's, that's the obvious one. But B, if you can pepper in traffic sources from organic social and from social affiliates and publisher affiliates and influencers like that should also help your meta go target cold traffic even better. And I think I, I fully agree. I would be thinking about the organic distribution way before peppering and paid and going back to, to your example Cody Abar, who's yeah, he's doing great right now. He has a very, you know, cool, brand unique novel product. But it's not so novel to the point where people don't understand what it is. Like I, I've talked to him about his like meta account setup and like the CPAs that he's getting. This is totally conjecture. I don't know but I would guess that his CPA would be 2x3x in meta. What it is if he didn't, if he wasn't doing all of the other distribution that he's doing, which is like he's doing a lot of organic, he's doing the founder content. He's also getting a lot of earned media. Like he's getting, you know, I don't know exactly how he's sourcing this but like he's getting local and, and more macro plugs from like I just saw he was plugged in like Entrepreneur, the media outlet. Like all that stuff is probably fueling his paid meta account setup. And, and it's all creating this like one plus one equals five situation. And also if you look at his content like it's very native. It's, it's not like he's like hiring camera crews and he's not like you know, Ross McKay from Cadence who has like a professional videographer following him around and cutting together these awesome YouTube videos. Like he's sh it on his own, probably editing it on his own. That that's how I think about like affiliate at hexcloud. One of the reasons I think content publisher affiliate works so well for us is we're really strict about making sure it's a high firsttime website visit rate. We have a long consideration period. So chances are only a small fraction of those people are actually converting in the, in the cookie window. Like if we do, if we do $25 million a year attributed to AWIN, I would guess that we actually have 2 to 3x that is actually attributable to that channel and then it just feels paid. And I think that's one of the reasons that it's like at least one of the supporting channels that's allowed us to scale meta without seeing too many, too much efficiency loss in the last like two or three years. So it's, I think it's the same whether you're starting or whether you're at scale because like Cody, you're starting to really invest in, in like creators and organic social more and more. And it's not too late, right?
- [12:55]
Cody
I hope it's not. We'll see. I hope it's not. Speaking of, of Bar getting earned media, I met him at, at an event last week and he said that when we mentioned him like last episode, they got a bunch of sales from it. So that was cool. We are, we are couscous officially protein couscous influencers, guys.
- [13:12]
Connor
We're. We're the earned media now.
- [13:15]
Andrew Fox
We are the earned media. I'll text Bar and make sure we can get our affiliate link set up. Great product, by the way. I don't know if you guys have tried it, but it is really good. My favorite my go to is is Boozco's eggs and some cottage cheese and great breakfast. Really sets you up for a, for a winning day.
- [13:29]
Connor
It shows that people are really just listening in for the protein content. I mean, maybe we should be doubling down there.
- [13:35]
Cody
Yeah, exactly.
- [13:37]
Andrew Fox
Like a health food show and, and a marketing show. Like we got, we got some versatility going on right now.
- [13:45]
Connor
Motion just dropped their 2026 creative benchmarks report and it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our. 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 a billion dollars 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 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.
- [14:37]
Cody
So, like, I'm partial to organic Social creator influencer just because we're starting to do a lot of like experiential sampling stuff. Right. I think there's some arbitrage. There we go. What are some like Connor, you bring up, you know, publisher, affiliate, like what are some other channels? If you had the constraint of not being overly unpaid, you know that you would, that you would think about both you guys.
- [14:59]
Andrew Fox
Yeah. Cause certain, certain products will lend themselves to like especially social, especially like creator distribution. Like if you're, if you're selling mattresses, that probably doesn't lend itself as well. Not, not. It doesn't, not at all. But that probably doesn't lend itself as well to like creator distribution as like a supplement or a David protein bar. I think Content publisher is an awesome channel that, that most people don't lean heavy into because you have to like spend time recruiting these publishers like creating relationships with them and then proving that you have a product their customer wants to buy so then they can get affiliate commission. But that, that was, that's one of the best like supporting channels we have at hexcloud. We do a ton, a ton of revenue through Content Publisher and what you find is that like 20% of these publishers drive 80% of the revenue and they're, and they're plugging your product over and over and over again and then you just, if you have a larger SKU count, you can give them kind of different products to write about. If you have a lot of tent pole moments, you're giving them different moments to write about. So we're doing a lot of these, A lot of these and a lot of the like bigger publishers now are actually doing affiliate deals. You know, it's not just, you know, these like Pure Play affiliate publishers anymore. Like Fox does affiliate, USA Today does affiliate, CNN does affiliate. So I think that that's an awesome one. I think that brands should be investing in. I think we all saw the announcement yesterday that brands can now have a storefront in chat GPT. Like I think brands need to be focused about, focused on geo, like generative AI optimization. I know we are. I think that's, that's one where you can kind of get ahead of the curve if you, if you go and invest there and you understand like what are the content levers that are going to allow you to show up higher in, in all these AI platforms. So I think those are two, two that I have off the top of my head. What about you guys?
- [16:54]
Connor
I think we're hitting some good ones. We've got content publishers, we've got irl, we've got organic social, you know, because I'm struggling with this a little bit. There's not, there's not frankly like not. I don't think there's a ton. You can get creative though. Where my mind goes actually is I think there's more like pre work to prior to launching the product and how do you want to build community there? So I've seen and I'm such a sucker for these on Instagram, but a lot of people doing a fantastic job building community around like an interest or an activity before ever launching the product, I think is very cool. And then you can end up being like extremely community oriented where you're building out some sort of discord or telegram group or something like that. And that's a little bit different. It's still. Or you got to get good at organic social and we hit this point all the time, so. But you're a couple degrees further away from the product and like selling features and benefits or even, you know, some of the founder content is the story of building the company. This would just be, you know, I'm going to have a community of guys obsessed with getting the highest sleep score before I launch my, you know, Ashwagandha gummies or whatever. So I think about that just unique ways to build community.
- [18:02]
Andrew Fox
Yeah, I think your point of, your point, like getting the product in the hand of influential creators well before you launch, like hey, and like making them feel like they're part of the R and D on the product, like hey, I wanna, I want you to try this as like an MVP version of our product. Like would love feedback because if you can do that with 25, 50, 100, 200 people and then let's say three months later, six months later you launch and then you go back to those people and you say, hey, like we just launched. I would love your support in any way possible. We'll even get, here's an affiliate link too if you want to like try to get, you know, some kickback on this. Your hit rate on that is going to be so much higher than if you're going to that same cohort of people without having seeded them the product well ahead of time. And it's like that's the first touch point. So I think that, that pre work's a really good point. I think your, your organic social distribution is going to be way better if you actually like think a little bit ahead and kind of make those people part of the process well ahead of time. And then also on the IRL that ultimately just fuels more organic social distribution. Right. Like the irl there is value there in and of itself. But then if you're also like shooting content like again Bar does this really well. He like goes to these events, these like food events. He's like making recipes with his booze cous he's recording and then that turns into content on his organic social and I think even in his paid ad account. So he's like, you know these all compound, they're not independent things. They are flywheels that, that you know there's one door going out of IRL and into organic social and creator distribution and paid and paid distribution.
- [19:42]
Cody
I love that. Yeah, I had this call with this, this company called On Brand the other day. They do like sampling almost at scale. It's like if anybody is like hosting an event, again like this is not relevant towards your guys brand but like if anybody is hosting an event you can just go to this company and be like hey, I'm having a Bachelorette. 10 people. Here's the age, here's the demo. And they can either like do inbound to a brand and like request Jones Road beauty samples or like I can do outbound and just like search and look. But it's like a really cool easy way to just do like kind of like mass sampling. So, so we're going to try it. I've heard really good things from, from some teams but like I think stuff like that is cool. It's kind of like merging a lot of this stuff where it's, it's like influencers but it's just like community. It's in real life, it's samples. Like that's one that again you can do send out 10amonth, you can send out 100amonth, you can send out 10,000amonth. So I think some stuff like that would be really cool and it's cool to see things like this emerging.
- [20:32]
Andrew Fox
So they help you. This is interesting. So basically you send on brand products and then they bring those to relevant events and like also record content of people at the event using the product or how does, I'm seeing their, their homepage.
- [20:46]
Cody
Yeah, do you ever do like you guys probably do this where you'll have creators that are you know, in your network influencers. Like again this happens in beauty. I don't have to but they're like hey, I'm doing this event. I'm having you know, 20 people at this event. Can we get, I'd love to get Jones or beauty samples. Well we'll post about it. You know, stuff like that. It's just Like a two sided marketplace to enable that. And so it's just they recruit or you know, any, anybody. You don't have to be a creator. You can just be. Anybody can just go in there and be like, this is an event I'm having. It's as small as five people. As big as. I don't know how big it is. Like, here's who's going to be at the event. Here's like our social presence following. And then they can either go to a brand that's on here, let's call it Jonesboard Beauty, because we're just getting on there and say, hey, I want, I would like to request a hundred products for this event and we'll post about it, you know, or we can go and say, hey, we want to reach this Persona. We have this new product. What are all the events happening? And these don't have to be like big Coachella events because I think that's what keeps a lot of brands from doing this. Like we're not going to spend hundreds of thousands doing that. Right. Like that's not for a bootstrap brand or a smaller brand. But it's like you can, the cool thing is you can start small and you like, oh, this bachelorette party is happening. Let me give 10 things or whatever it is. Maybe it doesn't, you know, it's more of a consumable thing. But it's just this like two sided marketplace. And then I believe it's just, you just fulfill them directly from Shopify.
- [22:07]
Andrew Fox
I love it. That's a great idea.
- [22:09]
Cody
Yeah, I thought, I thought it was really cool.
- [22:11]
Andrew Fox
Anything, anything else on? If you were starting from zero, things you would be leaning into and things you would be avoiding. I think that was a pretty good recap.
- [22:21]
Connor
Yep.
- [22:23]
Andrew Fox
You heard it. Organic social distribution. That's the, that's the playbook. That's the foundation in, in 2026. Okay, let's move on. Next one. I wanted to start off with you, Cody. You said you would hold off on hiring ahead of growth. If you were starting a brand from zero, what's the role that you would be hiring? Like what, what do you recommend in 2026 as your like kind of key man, key woman that you'd be hiring to, to get this brand off the ground and get some early momentum and traction.
- [22:56]
Cody
Yeah. So I think the, like, if we trace our industry, this is my bet and prediction. But if we trace it, like head of growth was the role, like probably when all of our brands were starting and we were starting. Right. That was like the, like the hottest job and you know, I think where the most leverage came from. And then I think it became creative strategist, you know, and that like, that was for like pre, and, like you know, media buying was much more important, all that stuff. And again, I'm not saying it's important, but it's almost like you need, you need to have that at a larger brand. And then creative strategy became creative strategist became like, okay, this is the in demand role. I think like head of creator is going to be the next one. I think just where these algorithms are, this community aspect, organic social earned media, you know, big push on both TikTok and, and meta of you know, creator first content, even going into ad accounts. I just think that's it. So it's not, it's not that you don't need head of growth, but if you're left with one role from the beginning, I would do that and then hire an agency to run ads. You know, it's just trying to pick what's like the most important, like what's your. I feel like your founding hires are like your foundation as a company and your like culture and DNA. And it's like if we're saying, you know, don't be overly growth, like paid focused and you want to be creator and organic, like have a senior, have a person there, be like one of your first hires.
- [24:09]
Connor
Would you mind like just for my reference, like loosely defining how you think of head of growth and then loosely defined again head of creator.
- [24:19]
Cody
I'm curious how you guys think about it. Generally I feel like growth is very paid performance marketing focused. I don't know if there's a difference between growth and performance marketing but I feel like I think about them interchangeably. So usually it's like this person's overseeing all of your acquisition functions. Sometimes they have e common retention under them, sometimes they don't. But you know, primarily obviously you know, your meta, your paid social channels, occasionally they have, you know, they don't have TV under them. Sometimes that goes to like a different department. So a lot of it depends on there. But really it's just like mostly your acquisition, sometimes your E comm. It's more of your like performance marketing come, you know, separate from your brand marketing. That's how, that's how you know, I normally think about it but I think there's multiple ways to skim cut and then head. A creator would be like. And so she'll be like anything that's like creator led. And so I think you know, I would want to take a very creator led approach to social. Like I think those are the, the, the brands doing it. Well, if you look at like joyride or something like that, just like very like creator first. Like you know, you're, that's like the best way to get distribution. Like most brands are not great at getting, you know, views on social cause they, they think like a brand and post like a brand but also like how to, you know, build that community. So whether you are doing just seating, whether you're doing paid influencer posting, whether you're doing TikTok shop, like just, you know, whatever the avenue is, I think that that person is kind of like responsible for that. And because it's a small company, if this is your first hire, like you're doing multiple, you don't have a separate influencer or social whatever. Like you have one person who's just like owning, owning that, you know, did a pretty good job with this. Like they're, I think it helps because they're not D2C but like Graza, like Graza was very community and influencer and social led from the beginning.
- [25:59]
Connor
I think there's, I mean what about like a Parade or a colourpop?
- [26:04]
Cody
Yeah, those guys were. Yeah, and they were earlier. I know Parade was very community focused but that was, that was Cammie, the founder's background. So that was like her influence and stuff.
- [26:18]
Andrew Fox
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- [28:18]
Cody
I would love for them to be a creator if possible. I think it's, it's harder to do without it. We're hiring for the stroll right now and we're trying to hire a creator to do it.
- [28:25]
Connor
Do you think? Okay, let me ask you this. You hit like we had ahead of growth phase. We had a creative strategies phase. Head of creator. And I'm curious to unpack the, the evolution of creative strategist ahead of creator. Because I could hear the argument that some of the best creative strategies probably look a lot like what you would define as head of creator today. That they are like extremely close to the production of the content and the posting of the content and even the seeding of the content. Like, you know, we're building out our affiliate program now and so much of it comes down to like how are you briefing your, your army of affiliates. We talk about comfort all the time and Hudson is on calls, on community calls, in discord showing people what does a good performing ad look like, giving them hook ideas. Like those are all creative strategist functions. And I imagine the, the, some of the, the responsibilities or things I just described you would say falls under the head of creator role. So there is like a lot of overlap there, I think.
- [29:24]
Cody
Yeah. So and where we are going to put it is our creative strategists are going to be under the head of creator because I think 100%, you nailed it. What the most creative strategists are not doing is like the community building aspect. Like they're just, they're One function and one very important one which is like content, content for other things which is very important. But they're not doing the community building, the organic distribution, the seeding. So it's just like one, one part of it. But I think, I think we talked about it with Dara, like Denny, like some of the best creative strategists now are creators. And Connor, you guys have done that like you were early to that. And so I think that's ideally, if you're trying to get somebody who's speaking that language like it's probably going to be better for as a creator.
- [30:04]
Connor
Okay, yeah, I like that answer then. So you'd go head of creator. It would look like a very just like modern form of the creative strategies role that we've talked about and own more of the community building because really we've talked about this before too. The community building portion of that, the seeding of product, the getting them into discord, the training them is all just. We talk about organic distribution but really it all comes down to getting good content that you can then promote on ads. And I also don't want that to go missed. I've talked to a number of people you think of as like quote unquote, TikTok Shop brands that are getting hundreds of posts every week, thousands of posts every month and still 70, 80% of their TikTok shop revenue is driven by GMV Max comes down to you further promoting all that content with ad dollars. So it's just a matter of head of creator, how are we producing fantastic content, getting some amount of organic distribution from that and then someone at some point is going to put ad dollars behind that and that's really where you start building scale.
- [31:01]
Cody
100%. 100%. But anyone can run GMV Max. I bet your head of creator could probably run that beginning even like your meta. It's not going to, it's not going to be perfect, right. But like you know, you'd better be, you'd be much better served having a not great meta account set up and high volume of really good creator content being rolled in versus you know, I absolutely agree.
- [31:23]
Connor
You know one of my favorite, the team structured very differently now. But Kizzix for a while I think they were very early to this sort of structure. This was at least three years ago, three or four years ago and it was the first brand I spoke to that internally. They had all of the creative knowledge like they were, they were producing a lot of content but the very least owning a lot of the briefing. They were heavily involved in the production of the content. Then they were just outsourcing all the media buying to David Herman. And I'm like, that's a fantastic setup. Typically the way Ridge was built at the time and we've kind of built out the, the creative muscle since we'd own media buying internally and then we pay for all the content from other people. So it was like the inverse of that. So I think we're just seeing brands lean further and further into that and like really embrace the core competency of producing content.
- [32:09]
Cody
Oh so much. That was the same thing we were when Jones wrote started. That was like my one. I was like media buying is so important. You're going to need to do it every day. Like you're a DTC brand. Like do not outsource that. I 100% agree and I, I don't feel that way anymore.
- [32:24]
Andrew Fox
Do you think there's a like the head of creator? I agree. They, they should be a creator. They should have experience producing social content, posting it, measuring it. Do you think? I think there's probably a gap between like the organic social KPIs that they're going to be looking at which is like, like views, impressions, distribution, engagement, like saves comments, likes, that sort of thing. Hook rate, which that does transfer well to a paid ad account. There's probably a little bit of a gap between like once you get to. Because the nice thing about the, the head of creator is they should also be able to make you very socially native ads as well. But that might be a little bit different feeling than the organic content that they're creating or helping creators make that are not them. And the KPIs are slightly different than. Than what you would be really looking at in like an organic social KPI stack. So Connor or Cody, do you guys have any thoughts on how.
- [33:23]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, I've got one here. Because honestly I think putting words in Cody's mouth here, but if I'm hiring a head of creator as my first role, what are their. And I want to focus on organic distribution. What are my KPIs for them? It's still winning ads in the ad account. Like that's what it comes down to. That is that is what their role needs to be producing. Everything that we're doing is going back to like producing content that like I said earlier, get some amount of organic distribution. But I'm not going to build my entire business on organic distribution. And I think very few people do. I mean there are some. Colourpop is a exception to this rule. Ashton, very famously they Hit nine figures in like never spent any money on ads, do you? What is it, Cody? It was like all influencers.
- [34:08]
Cody
I think that's true. Yeah. Like, yeah, it was all creator, all influencer product drops that like. Yeah. I just think maybe we could, we could pivot there. Like, I think both are important. I would, I would have KPIs for organic. I would have KPIs for earned media. So like number of people that are posting about you, how many impressions you get if you are doing affiliate that way, I'd have KPIs for your organic views reach. And then I totally have KPIs for, for paid. So I would do all of it, I think and even talk like Connor R. What you said about Bar and I actually have a recent example from this past week of a launch we had where playing that earned media game properly can totally affect your ad account. And, and it absolutely does. So it's also like, hey, let's build a little bit slower. Let's build this, this foundation the right way. And then when we do invest in growth more, I think you have a little bit better foundation that's more sustainable.
- [35:00]
Connor
Yeah. And I like being on like slightly different sides of the spectrum here because I'm like at the end of the day, for me all the organic focus is really just a form of content production with some benefit of getting its own distribution and generating its own revenue. But at the end of the day, I still think the fastest growing, the best brands, the scaled brands are built around paid support around that content.
- [35:21]
Cody
Yeah, I, yeah, I, I don't disagree. I also think it's what you want as a brand. And I think I was, you know, the specific one was talking to a specific brand that we'll have on the show and like really wants cash flow. Profitability, like is not after like the fastest growth. Right. Like if you're trying to do groons growth, like that's not organic at all. Like. And it's kind of funny timing with the whole ads thing that was happening on Twitter. The, the whole, you know, Uber and all the VCs. Yeah, yeah. Even though that's where all their money goes. So I'm not nervous. And honestly, if I was starting a brand, the first thing I would do is I would financially engineer it to make it work for ads. How can you run a business at a, you know, 0.8, 0.7 row s, like, so that's the ironic part. But I still would, I, I still would do it. But I, I think we agree about more than we don't hear.
- [36:09]
Andrew Fox
So I think, I think the one thing you need to be just careful and thoughtful about with going the, going the head of creator route first is just giving them some parameters because I think I see some of these organic social people and they're like, I want to go viral. Like I'm trying to like take off and like they'll do, they'll do whatever they need to do to like go viral and take off, which is, which is good. However, if, if the concept that you're rolling out to go viral with is not attracting your icp, then like that's not good. I don't think like you, you need to give them some guardrails to make sure that the content that they're producing is obviously going to bring inbound the people that you ultimately want to buy your product at some point. Like I have a friend who, he had this whole like pre launch content strategy, but the content had nothing to do with, with his product. Like yes, it, it got good engagement, it got good, good distribution, it got him followers. But then he launched this product and it didn't turn into like really good organic sales. And I, and I kind of saw it coming because he's like posting all these memes that just didn't lend itself to the product. So I think you still need to give that, that organic, that creator, that organic social distribution person some guardrails on. Hey, here's like the content pillars that, that we need to be making content around because this is going to attract the person that's going to eventually buy our product versus like hey, white, white space, white page. Like go, go draw however you want inside or outside the lines. Because I've just seen that happen a good amount where it's like what is, what does this have to do with the product at all? This is not attracting the right person. And I would rather have 10,000 views over a hundred thousand views if the content on the 10,000 views is going to attract my ICP versus the a hundred thousand views is like nothing to do with the product and it's, it's probably not relevant. And that's also not going to work in the ad account either. So that's like just some guardrails. I think you might. And that's kind of like putting that, that growth performance lens a little bit more on this. How to create our role where they might not have had that, those guardrails before.
- [38:17]
Connor
All right, so I've got some interesting numbers to share from Ridge from our beloved sponsor Rich Panel. We Switched our support stack at Ridge to rich panel about 15 months ago and our cost per ticket has dropped over 70%. That means same team, same volume and over $500,000 in annual savings. CSAT have not changed. We've been sitting at 96% week after week. So the automations did not come at the cost of customer experience. Our last platform talked a lot about AI, but nothing was really changing under the hood. Rich Panel is genuinely AI first. They came in, they rebuilt our workflows, and we were live in under two weeks with basically no lift on our side. And they're about to roll out a returns portal, which for us is huge, because if they can do the same thing for returns as it did for customer service, that would be sick. If you want to cut down your support costs now and save on returns platform with an AI first platform, talk to Rich Panel. Go to richpanel.com/demo. Tell them Connor from marketing operator sent you and they'll take good care of you. Thank you.
- [39:07]
Andrew Fox
Okay, and then looking at, looking at like an early stage brand, like a launch brand, or within the first few months. All right. We talked about setting up an organic distribution foundation. I think we all agree on that. And we also agree that there's 100 different ways to do it depending on the vertical you're in, your product, your brand, all these things on the paid side of the house. I think like five years ago, 10 years ago, the general consensus is launch meta ads, figure out how to get a profitable CPA with meta, scale up with meta, and really just like, keep leaning into meta until you've seen fatigue in, like, your efficiencies going up or down, your CPAs are going up, ROAS coming down, and you feel like you've really pulled all the levers to be able to offset that as much as possible. And then it's like, all right, now we need to expand channels. Like, we just talked about that an episode or two ago. Today, if you're launching a brand or you're six months into launching a brand, does that playbook still apply? Like, do you think there are other paid channels that you can roll out earlier versus just being on meta and search like the classic two. Connor, what do you think of that? About that?
- [40:15]
Connor
Yeah. Well, I'll give you a quick rundown. I have a unique perspective here to some degree, because when was the last time you guys spent $500 a day?
- [40:27]
Andrew Fox
It's been a long time.
- [40:28]
Connor
Yeah, it's been a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we launched a new brand We, I haven't talked about this at all on the podcast, but Sean's brought it up on operators. We launched a new brand this year called Gut Culture. So it's a fiber supplement, like a drink mix that you can take daily Gutculture out here.
- [40:46]
Cody
Just trying to get some earned media.
- [40:50]
Connor
Yeah, I heard all that talk about organic, organic social impressions. No, but, but it's, it's standalone gutculture.com there's absolutely no benefit of Ridge and the business that we've built there to drive in Gut Culture purchases. And at some point we might try to do some sort of cross pollination but at the start we're giving ourselves a constraint of how are we acquiring customers with Gut Culture in and of itself. So we're literally building out the ad account from scratch, which is a very interesting experience and what we've done so far at least. What I'll also say is I think it's incredibly difficult to do right now. I don't envy anybody launching a brand today thinking about it from like a bootstrapped, like hey, let's not light a bunch of money on fire. It just seems to be no way around it, I don't think. But the loose sort of parameters that we've set up for ourselves is we're testing a lot of different funnels, like a lot of different value prop messaging whether people want to poop better or whether they're looking for better energy. They're worried about some sort of hydration solution or GLP1 type of supplement because a lot of people need fiber if they're getting a lot of protein and things like that. Each of those funnels we build out, we have landing pages and we dedicate 500 per day. That's like the, that's like the, the watermark that we've set where it's like if we want to be testing something new, we want to spend $500 a day. Even then it's like hard to get ads out of learning like so you end up working with a lot of imperfect data and you're really not sure how those results will mature over time, which I think is an interesting sort of process to go through from a media buying and management perspective. So the other thing that we've done is we'll do two things. One, we'll look at more upper funnel metrics, we'll look at click through rate, we'll look at add to carts, we'll look at begin checkouts, things like that for like early indicators of whether we're driving intent and how Cost effectively. Are we doing that? And then the other thing that I think is interesting is we'll look at a lot of on site behavior to identify potential new messaging or funnels to build out. So like very early on we saw a lot of interactions on the site around energy. So that became, that was not a funnel that we launched at the jump, but we saw a lot of early indicators based on the ads and the site traffic that we were seeing. And then that became basically the second or third funnel that we built out and it's currently our best performing one. So that's where we're at now. And I think like, so that's how I would spend roughly $500 a day. And like that, that's sort of the, the mindset that we've been in. And then how do you scale to 1000, 2000, 3000 when you begin integrating new channels? It's really when you start to see those ads working. The other thing I'll mention here and then I'll kick it to you guys is Ridge really cares about the blended results of the business because we are scaled and we should know what's working. And efficiency is extremely key. Being so early in a new brand, I'm less worried about the blended results and we're looking at more like channel or campaign level CPAs and saying, hey, this, this 30% of what we're spending right now is actually working. So we feel comfortable scaling this. And I, I have no problem thinking of the other 60, 70% of the budget as being very experimental. It's above our CPA target. But we're going to continue chipping away and improving those things. So how do you scale up? We would be looking at those channel level metrics and if we have a semblance of something that's working, even if it's just like a subset of our entire strategy, we would try to scale that up. So that's where we're at currently. I'd give ourselves a not perfect score. It's been like extremely difficult getting it off the ground.
- [44:19]
Cody
Man. I was waiting for you to talk. I didn't know when, when you're gonna talk about it. I'm so excited. I have so many questions now.
- [44:24]
Connor
Yeah, dude, great podcast fodder.
- [44:27]
Cody
Yeah, seriously. I love that you started with like the funnel strategy and like the, the messaging stuff even before going into like, like you actually didn't even mention how you're setting up the account. So I love that you're just doing that. That's like obviously like the, the, the Classic Playbook. Now just like let's do some Persona funnels. But I love that. Are you. Is it like all statics to start just for like early MVP testing?
- [44:48]
Connor
It's mostly statics, yeah. Cause again it's like it's just trying to identify like what are the messages that are resonating.
- [44:54]
Cody
A hundred percent love that. I think that's totally the way to go.
- [44:58]
Andrew Fox
And it seems like, like I'm seeing. I'm curious if you guys are doing this yet. Maybe not because you're only, you're only running statics, but it's. It seems like from our conversations, I know our personal experience and just people that we're talking to that probably the, the channel that allows you just to take your winning like vertical video and, and launch it in this other channel and get the highest surface area of trying to make it succeed. Is Applovin like even higher than TikTok, even higher than YouTube shorts, you know, Bar also tweeted about this that he's finding success early on Applovin. However, his, his playbook was launch a bunch of creative and meta, let Meta optimize, let's figure out what's working in Meta. And then he took it over to Applovin and, and it took a lot less time for him to, to get his CPAs in a good spot there. So I think that might also be different than like five years ago, you know, even, even a couple years ago. Like I think you can expand to some of these. I'm not gonna, it's not a social channel, but you can expand to some of these other short form vertical video channels a little quicker. It seems like Applovin's allowing people to diversify earlier on so they're not, you know, leaning into meta too much out of the gate. And for the first, you know, six months, year, two years, whatever it is. Like I think there is value into diversifying a little bit early. Not too much, but like a little bit. So you're not fully reliant on, on meta because now you have organic distribution. You know, you have creator social distribution, IRL feeding, some of that stuff. Meta, Applovin. And now you have this more like solid ecosystem where you're not. Oh crap. If, if like meta doesn't update tomorrow and it breaks my account, like my business is screwed. Do you guys, do you guys agree with that? Do you think that's more of the modern playbook is a little bit more diversification and paid upfront with channels like App Oven?
- [46:44]
Connor
I directionally agree is what I would say, I mean my bias and just because I've been doing it like a decade or whatever is like you really, you should be able to get meta to work. Like diversification is not going to save you like super early on. Yeah Bar Bar had a great post. I saw that about expanding onto Apple. Evan Hudson on operators fantastic interview if people haven't heard. But he talked about being really early to Snapchat. So there's like a lot of exceptions to the rule and like just platform behavior and opportunities are changing so frequently and depending on the brand and depending on the content that you have. I think there's lots of ways that diversification can work at any point of the, you know, maturity of a brand. So that is my, that's my, that's my non answer
- [47:38]
Andrew Fox
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- [49:11]
Cody
Yeah, I it's probably the second channel I would go after. I don't know when the answer is when I would do it, but it would probably be the second channel I would do. You don't really have to worry about. Yeah. You know, if you have had trouble with exclusions or reaching people when you're a new brand, there's going to be way less. So it's like, it's actually a pretty good time to start. They have made it. Like, we're made a lot of progress with like the discovery campaigns. We're about to run a big test on that. Like, it actually looks really good. But I agree, I agree with you. That would definitely be, again, pending some nuance. That would be the second channel I would go with. I just don't know when to kind of's point. I don't know when. And you do want to hesitate too early. It's probably more of how do I get more scale? But you have to be thoughtful. Like, can I just do more of what I'm doing? Can I just make some more creatives for meta? Test a new funnel on meta or can I, you know, can I just bump spend on meta before doing it? Probably. Probably do that first. Get some level of diminishment first.
- [50:05]
Andrew Fox
And then going back to Andrew's question, so, so, Connor, to summarize what you said, you, you launched this new brand in meta. You had a bunch of different angles, which makes sense especially for this product, right? Like a gut fiber product. There's me all sorts of different use cases. You know, someone's digestion is bad, someone's on GLP1s and they need fiber. Someone wants more energy, right? There's all, especially with, like, gut health stuff. There's so many, like, problem solutions. So you're testing those, you're finding out what's working. Once you find the winning funnel, you're scaling that up, right? So that's, that's like the indicator. It's like, wow, this funnel has way better CPA than anything else and it's profitable. Great. That's the signal to say, hey, let's try to take this to 1k and keep scaling it up until we see CPA start to diminish. And then like, we need to, like, once CPA diminishes, you kind of bring it back to that level where it didn't. And then you try to find more unlocks until you can like lower CPA at that spend level and then bring spend up. Like you're trying to unlock CPA to bring it down with like a creative win or a landing page win or an offer win and then scale up. What about account setup? Like are you running because the way that meta works, right, is in theory your cp. You should be better at targeting when you have a hundred attributable purchases compared to zero. And you should be better at targeting when you have a thousand attributable purchases than when you have a hundred. Because the more outcomes you're optimizing for that are passed back to the ad account. That's supposed to make the ad account and the pixel smarter. I mean that's like fundamentally how machine learning works. So purchase conversion campaign out of the gate. Is that your entire account setup? Are you running any non purchase conversion stuff to when you're launching the brand?
- [51:40]
Connor
All. All purchase optimized for sure. Cody hit this point earlier but like it's really easy to, to tease out incrementality when like the brand would be zero otherwise. So it's like, oh yeah, everything's basically incremental. Like we don't, we don't have to worry about that too much. Everything's in one look. And this is where like we've gone back and forth over it. I talked to some media buyers and they're like, we actually, we actually need more fragmentation. He's like, I, I would set up like a bunch of ad sets and they all get like a hundred dollars a day. I'm like, that doesn't seem right. I was advocating for like the real meta playbook of like, let's just do a bunch of consolidation and let meta allocate the spend. But then we've seen a number of instances where it's like, okay, it spends 80% of the budget on like one static ad. So that's not any good. So right now we have one purchase optimized campaign. It's an abo. We've got the funnels built out within there. One thing that we're doing, so that's, I mean that's literally the campaign setup. We don't even have like a, a, you know, testing campaign and then a winning campaign. It's like all getting launched in there. The other thing that we're doing is we're trying to leave on winners longer. And that's like we're, we're just trying not to touch it too much is for the first couple weeks we've been running ads now for like eight weeks. You would launch new ads, they would perform well, CPA would increase and then some other new ad would be winning. And like we were just like touching the ads too much and turning them off once they began, like underperforming. I don't think that's right strategy. So we're just trying to like get more content in the funnel. Let meta allocate the budget the way that it thinks is best. And I think that just normalizes over time.
- [53:17]
Andrew Fox
I love it. That's a great answer. Cody. Anything else you want to add to that?
- [53:23]
Cody
I mean, I'm not, I, I'm very jealous of Connor. I'm not in the trenches at, you know, starting a new ad account. I've heard it's incredibly hard and you have to light somebody on fire to do it, but it's, it's, you know, it also seems really fun. So no, I'm not, I'm not there. It's been so long since I've been there. But it's really fun and I think Connor totally hit the nail on the head with the playbook. That's. I would just, I would follow that to a T. You know.
- [53:44]
Connor
You know what I would add. Cause I was thinking about this when we were talking about the head of creator role earlier. Like I'd love that. What we're solving for there is producing great content. Some of that can become ads. It's solving for some level of distribution. You're generating revenue. Like I think that's fantastic. We talked about the media buying component being like really relatively easy today. Anybody can set up GMV Max. I totally agree with that. Anybody can set up a single purchase optimized campaign with a couple ad sets like we've got going now where I would be spending more time. We're just talking about distribution at that point. Content and distribution is really trying to build out the, the landing pages, the offer testing, trying to improve retention where that matters, things like that. Those are, that's an extremely different skill set that's required. And this is where I think like we talk about comfort hoodies the best when it comes to like large scaled affiliate programs producing great content. They spend a ton of money on ads. It becomes a bunch of really strong performant creative. What goes overlooked with comfort is like the optimization on site is just fantastic. Like the, the products that they have, the value props that they have, the way they do promo, the way they do the pre ordering. Like it is, it is a, you know, lean machine once you get onto the website and that is what allows you to. Connor, your point earlier, like continuing to move yourself down that, that diminishing curve that like as you spend more cac is just going to go up. So at all points you have to be finding these wins, whether that's increasing average order value, increasing conversion rate, increasing retention, moving yourself down that curve so that you can, you know, tolerate higher and higher CS over time. So just wanted to call that out. I think that's an important piece of the puzzle here.
- [55:30]
Andrew Fox
And when you're doing, when you're doing your landing page testing at, at the smaller scale, are you mainly still looking at like just in platform CPAs as your indicator and like in platform conversion rate on which destination experience like. So let's say you have this energy funnel and presumably you're testing a few landers. Are you just setting that up in meta and then like looking at like setting up naming conventions so you can see, okay, here's all of our energy ads and then we have these two landers and like, let's see which CPA and conversion rate is better between the two landers. Is. Or are you doing a true like convert.com type split test where you're taking that traffic and sending it into different places?
- [56:10]
Connor
Yeah, it's a good point. So a lot of the landing page development isn't technically tests and we're treating it more like Ad Creative or something where it's like, hey, we want, yeah, we want to launch this energy funnel. So we have an energy landing page that is not associated with the test and then we build ad Creative around that. Right. We've had, you know, five or six landing pages, so we've just built that out and making sure that the, the landing page and the messaging there is complementary to what we're discussing in the ad. Then there are, there are a handful of tests that we do with intelligence where it's like, you know, we'll test new images, new copy within a landing page, and then we're spending a lot more time in terms of on site testing, looking at the pdp, looking at pricing, doing gift with purchases, things like that. That's all run through intelligence so that we can try to understand the difference in, you know, site behavior and conversion rate.
- [56:58]
Andrew Fox
Yep, that makes sense. Okay, and then I think this, this is a good one to, to round it out here. Kind of related to some of the conversation we've already been having. What specifically changes in campaign setup when you shift from demand capture to demand creation. And when do you recommend making that shift? What's been the biggest change in how you structure campaigns?
- [57:23]
Connor
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- [58:23]
Cody
Yeah, okay, so I think the first place is like to answer demand capture versus demand creation. I feel like it maybe means different things to, you know, different people or give it like a shared definition. But yeah, at a certain, you know, when you're launching a brand at a certain point in time you can just go conversion optimized, bottom of funnel traffic ads, statics as well and just like scale, you know what I mean? And you'll get people in market that are looking for a, you know, whatever it is, a lip gloss and it's just, hey, this is why you should buy this lip gloss and you should buy it now because it's on sale or it's better comparison ads. But you'll, you'll quickly outgrow that and you do have to move up, you know, up funnel and every. This is all based on your TAM and whatever, you know, your organic traffic. It's always going to be at a different point for every business. So like that's the number one thing. So it's more like what are the signs in your business that you have to start thinking. Thinking about it. Yeah, I think we talked about it last episode. Like how good are you at generating demand from other sources? Like Ridge was great at YouTube integrations. You guys do a great job with Influencer and Gordon and stuff like that. So like that is inherently demand creation, brand building. Whether it's you still perform and stuff like you are doing that. And then I think Meta can work most effectively harvesting that. But some brands are very meta focused. We have been very heavily concentrated on meta and so I think that's where it eventually hurt us. So I think the signs reach is a big one. If your frequency is going up and your reach is going down and you're trying to spend more, you can't profitably spend more. That's just meta telling you, hey, we're, we're tapping out a little bit, like this is the most we can do. And then I think you have to figure out what to go. But that's, that's at least like the sign I would look at. It's hard to say it's at 50 or it's at 70 million.
- [60:02]
Andrew Fox
Yeah, well, and also if, if going all the way back to what we started the episode on, if you are doing distribution outside of paid, really well, then when you launch paid, like if, if you have really good organic distribution and a ton of creators promoting your product and you're doing affiliate and you're doing irl, like that is all demand generation. If you're layering in paid after all those things, I would be setting up a remarketing campaign out of the gate and not even set up prospecting to start. And that is a pure demand capture setup in meta. Now chances are you're probably going to set up prospecting and, and remarketing, so you're probably going to be doing a little bit of both. But I think ideally if you're, if you're peppering in pay, it is more of like a complimentary to these other channels and not the thing you can have it really serve that demand capture role more than you would if you're, you know, out of the gate and you're like launching a single asc, which is going to simultaneously generate demand and it's also going to capture demand.
- [61:02]
Cody
Do you know that naval quote that's like you're doing marketing because you failed at product and you're doing sales because you failed at marketing.
- [61:09]
Andrew Fox
I've heard that, but I like, I
- [61:10]
Cody
have not, but I like it's like a polarizing quote. Like, but it's like, it's like a good one. I almost think it's the same thing with like demand creation on meta and running different funnel types. Like it's, it's a black and white thing and like I still think there's a ton of value and like we've talked about it a ton, but it's almost like you almost need to do it. Like Jones Road almost needs to do it because we failed at some of these Other aspects and it's almost like if you nail product and you nail organic demand creation brand building on these other channels like you should just be able to rip meta all day.
- [61:42]
Andrew Fox
Yeah, but part of me feels like that.
- [61:45]
Cody
Part of me feels like that.
- [61:47]
Andrew Fox
But if you're a brand at scale and I think we all came across this problem where our, our net new visit in meta and other channels is dropping, our rolling reach is dropping, our frequency is going up. Like that is a great signal that you should probably get some holdout tests set up on like a view content campaign or a traffic campaign and make sure that a it is driving a higher percent of net new visits to website and it is increasing your rolling reach and then ultimately that it is driving incremental orders. I think that is if you're a brand at scale, I think that is the signal you need to be looking at. And like what can you trigger you to launch non purchase conversion campaigns or launch new channels and and like that. Those are both tactics to kind of reignite demand generation and get more new people aware of your brand.
- [62:35]
Connor
You know. You know what this reminds me of a little bit. Jess from fireteam talks about this and and Motion actually has a really cool one of their automations, like their recipes that will like analyze your ad, account for creative and what parts of the awareness stage are you speaking to. So like whether someone's solution unaware or problem unaware, problem aware solution aware product and the brand, something like that, like you're moving down the funnel because that's really what we're getting at here. You know, you look at someone, Wayfair for instance spends like 90 of their budget on catalog ads. That's because like they don't really need to be doing demand generation. It's like if people are moving and they need a mattress then like they're in market. And that's why it's like Nectar works in this way too. Or resident home. You can just fundamentally spend your budget in different places. Those catalog ads, the statics, like when people know that they have a problem and are in market for a solution, this is when you know, you go to look for running shoes and then every Facebook ad for the next three days is like just a bunch of running shoes. It's like that's, that's not demand generation. It's not that it's not incremental. It could still very much be incremental because I'm probably not buying from APL if I don't see their Facebook ad. But it's a lot different than them convincing me I need to love running and moving in market. That would be true demand generation. So I think there's a question here around creative strategy. And then it comes down to like well what does it mean for the ad account? And I think we all like this is why we have a podcast is like is you can land so many places on this spectrum is because do you actually how do you structure the ad account differently? Do you need you know, ads for the solution or the problem unaware person to be in a different account? Should you be measuring the incrementality or the the latent demand capture on that differently than you are your static ads? Because meta would just say to consolidate everything. So I think we go back and forth there to answer the question very literally, what's the difference? It's like really comes down to like exclusions exclusively. Where it's like oh yeah, am I willing to like show this to people who have already been to my site? That's probably the clear sign that I'm comfortable with this being demand generation. If I'm being aggressive with exclusions probably means I'm closer to being demand generation and hopefully my content aligns with that strategy.
- [64:50]
Cody
Yeah, I think, I think to that just point a levels of awareness. I think needing to run again this is not an actually how I feel but a little bit like needing to run reach. So earlier things like that is just a sign that it's actually like you have creative problems. And again I think totally pass assert past a certain size. Like I don't agree with that and meta is not perfect and there is value in doing that stuff. But yeah, if you're running to those problem problems pretty early, like I think that that is probably where I would go to really audit and try to hack it before going on to some different objectives.
- [65:19]
Andrew Fox
All right, that's a wrap on episode 106 of the Marketing Operators had a really fun episode answering some of the questions that you guys submitted over the last couple weeks. So please keep submitting those. They're a lot of fun for us to answer and they create a really good conversation on the show. So please leave a comment or shoot us an email. Leave us your questions, we want to answer them. Thank you to the sponsors Motion, Prescient Rich panel after Sell and Revo. And as always, if you're liking the show, make sure to like comment and subscribe. Thanks.