Connor (1:33)

I think I've heard of it. Yeah.

Cody (1:34)

Yeah. They're having a customer advisory board down in Miami, so they're getting a bunch of brands together. It should be super fun. And yeah, like I said, good change of pace. Good way to start the year, dude.

Connor (1:46)

If you do it right, you could do like one customer advisory trip a month probably.

Cody (1:50)

Yeah, I know. I've. I've joking. I love that. It's the. It's the new meta for. For SaaS. Marketing is like, let's just do fancy dinners. It's an. It's an escalation. Of DTC dinners. They've. They've raised the stakes.

Connor (2:02)

Exactly. January, going to. Going to Miami with Ty. February, going to California with House, you know, March, going somewhere with post script, you know.

Cody (2:10)

Yeah, totally.

Connor (2:10)

Just stack them up.

Cody (2:12)

All right, sweet. So I'm super stoked. We're, we're hitting 20, 26 predictions. Before we get into it, I do want to thank our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, prescient after sell and revoir.

Connor (2:24)

All right.

Sean (2:24)

I am super pumped with Motion's newest shipment of AI technology in their tool called Analyze this. So basically how it works is you create a report like usual. You know, slice the data however. However you want. Whatever you're trying to get insight to, once the report is pulled, you just click analyze this. It'll pull the report and then it'll send it right into your inbox and you can go into this report and it gives you a very, very detailed analysis of what's working, what's not working, and then ultimately it even goes into what you should do next based on the analysis that it's giving you. So just continuing to automate this analysis piece of creative strategy, and I'm, I'm very excited about it, how it's going to unlock more time and more production for creative strategy teams.

Cody (3:07)

100%. And it's another example of how important critically analyzing creative is today with Meta's Andromeda, which we've talked about at length on the podcast. Creative diversity has never been more important. But creative diversity to Meta is a black box to marketers. We don't know exactly what they think of as. As new and different and unique. So motions building native tools to help marketers guide us through that process and ultimately lead to better performance.

Sean (3:31)

So a few specific examples we've been using it for at hexcloud lately just launched a new product category in and we launched some social funnels around it. So I use it to analyze all of the cocktail shaker ads that we ran and it gave me super clear, very actionable insights. And then an even bigger report and even harder to do manual report was looking at all of our Gordon ramsay ads from September 1st through yesterday. Like, think about if, you know, Ridge was going to look at all of its everyday carry ads. Like, that is literally hundreds, maybe thousands of ads. And it's one thing to be able to pull that report, but it's totally different thing to be able to pump literally millions of dollars of data into the Analyze this report and have that analysis spit out in a fraction of the time that it would Take, you know, a team of creative strategists to do it manually. So very exciting stuff. Very, very different use cases. So it just shows the breadth that this new feature of the product has.

Cody (4:24)

So if you're a marketer that wants the insights of Motion, go to motion app.com and tell them that the operator sent you. We're obviously without Connor Rowling today, but this is. This is now the Cody Connor McDonald tradition of reviewing 2026 predictions. I want to talk a little bit about what we discussed in 2025 last year. We've got some Taylor Holiday tweets that will make an appearance. So we'll get right into it.

Connor (4:50)

Might be my favorite episode of the year.

Cody (4:52)

Yeah, it's the only one that gets a slide deck.

Connor (4:55)

Did you make it with AI?

Cody (4:56)

No. I know. No, no, no. This is classic screenshotting. Just screenshot and stuff and pasting it in the Google Slides. I included these because. Okay, so what we've got going on, so. So that you've got the heads up. I've got a number of my predictions. Your predictions, Taylor's. I've got a few mentions or like I've included some of last year's predictions because there's some pretty common themes and that's like typically how it goes is we're like working on the same sort of ideas for two or three years in a row. These are all pasted together because I want to take a victory lap and they don't get brought up any later because they are the least D2C relevant 2025 prediction. I said, Stephen A. Smith becomes a mainstream media figure. You know, Joe Manchin was on all in podcast and he said Stephen A. Smith is like towards the top of the list of like potential Democratic nominees in his mind, kind of like an outsider running for the party. And I was like, nailed it. I was like, that's. That was like the, the validation I needed. And then the other one in analytics tool will adopt weak based reporting. Shopify did triple Whale did and lifetimely did as well. So it was pretty good.

Connor (6:04)

I think Shopify is all you need, dude.

Cody (6:07)

I mean the fact that Shopify. Shopify was like one of the early adopters of it. They were, they were moving quickly on it. So I felt good about both those. I know you did like a little bit of your own roundup. How did you feel your 20, 2025 predictions had gone?

Connor (6:19)

Well, hold on. And then on this one, on. On What? My number 13 marketing operators becomes the de facto number one GDC podcast. So I'm in, I'm in Florida right now for, for holidays. I'm, I'm at the buffet the other day getting some lunch at the pool, and a guy comes up to me. He's like, hey, you're my favorite podcast. He has like an agency, used to work at D2C Brands, now has like a growth agency. I'm like, that was awesome. I appreciate it. But I think that's a good sign that, that one probably came True.

Cody (6:45)

Yeah. 100% undeniable, I would say. So you did, you did a quick like 2025 predictions recap on Twitter. I don't, I don't have any of that included. How'd you feel?

Connor (6:56)

Let me just talk about it really quick. Because if you're gonna do 2026 predictions, if you make them, you have to hold yourself accountable. It kills me when people are like doing their predictions and then obviously like cherry pick what's right. But like, you gotta call yourself out on your own BS as well. So I wanted to do that. Yeah, look, look, you know, look at what was right and what I was way wrong on. So I don't know if you want to spend any time on that or not.

Cody (7:18)

No, I'd love to hear. I, I've got, I don't have it in the slide deck, but I'd love to hear like some of your, some of your larger takeaways.

Connor (7:25)

I had 15. I went. So I went eight for 15. But some people said I graded myself too harshly. I didn't want to get called out publicly on X for like grading myself too easily, you know.

Sean (7:35)

Sure.

Connor (7:36)

So I'm, I'm pretty happy with that. A few of them, you know, 2025 is the first year it makes a decent sized difference for brands. Like I would say that's true. You know, coming from automating and some. I said there can be some legit ad creative options. That one potentially. But I do think that for most brands there's some legitimate impact that it that has had.

Cody (7:58)

Totally agree.

Connor (7:59)

Number two, brands will continue to loan in on. On hone in on low opex. Completely true. You know, with the tariff situation, everyone really, you know, tightened things up. I said RFK will ban political ads. I was very wrong on that one. Some of this maybe, maybe wrong. Maybe early. Well, time will tell. But didn't happen. I said. So some of this, I said data about like channels and how they're performing and you know, what percentage of spend will be. I don't have or I haven't seen really like breakdowns So I, some of them are pending. I said app love and hype will fade. Many brands will still find success there, but many will not. I predict 5% of overall spent. I don't know what the, what it was. I do think.

Cody (8:39)

Oh, you said 5% of overall spend.

Connor (8:41)

Yeah. Because I think it was pretty high. Right. Like think about like 2024. Q4 seemed like it was, you know, that was at the peak. I think the hype faded but I think it faded to a very normalized level and it's obviously still working very well for a lot of brands. I would be curious but my guess would be somewhere around 5%. If somebody knows, I'd love to see.

Cody (9:03)

And, and also I would say 5%'s a lot is actually like my, my first thought there. Like it was obviously extremely hyped. Q4, 2024. So like hype dying down makes sense. But like dude, if an ad platform's getting 5% of to like total budget share, that's a big, there's a lot of money being spent there. Why don't we, why don't we run through this deck? Because I think I hit a lot of them and then we could circle back at the end in case we missed Anything that you want.

Connor (9:29)

I just know it's fine. I just want people to know I'm holding myself accountable.

Cody (9:32)

Dude, I love it.

Connor (9:32)

At the end of this year we will this again. We, we didn't do an episode but I think next December we got to make sure we do like we've got to make it a two parter for next year and actually like grade our.

Cody (9:41)

Own homework 100% well. 100%. And then you can just imagine how kind of sophisticated our predictions episodes will be by you know, year four, five, six, seven. We'll just get incrementally better. All right, sweet first one I got here. You want to read this out?

Connor (9:59)

Yeah. Number one, Meta goes hard after new customers. Meta has heard a lot of the feedback and knows it's too good finding people ready to buy. They also know Meta. If you're listening that's. This is not a dig. I'm also saying you're too good. Right? So this compliments in here. They also know exclusions have serious limitations. Expect to see a lot of solutions designed to help DTC brands better improve reach and new customer goals. Not all of them will work, but some of them will.

Cody (10:24)

So I like this, I like this one a lot. I do have it. I've got it on the next slide. Number eight, last year from you meta admits they suck at reaching new audiences and they find a way to fix it. So common, common theme here.

Connor (10:35)

Yeah. Yeah, I think just continued stuff maybe. You know, a lot of the stuff just takes more time. I mean, I, I have it confirmed that they are working on this and know for sure. You know, it's obviously been something. I think they've heard a lot of advertisers feedback and have done a really good job of listening to customers and you know, people that have their pulse on the trigger and they're working on a bunch, so it's not a problem for everybody. But a lot of brands like us, obviously it's something we talk about and I think that they'll roll out a bunch of things in alpha or beta. And you know, meta is so good, I'd have a hard time not expecting at least one or two of them to make a big impact.

Cody (11:10)

So the discussion on, on Twitter has been like, I'm curious, there's some distinction to make here between them getting good at acquiring new customers and then them getting better at driving incremental results or because you have the, because this was like the discussion with, with you and Taylor. Right? Like there is the, the scenario where they get better, they get better at driving incremental results, but it's coming from returning customers. Do you, how much do you care about the distinction between those?

Connor (11:34)

Yeah, and this is probably a good one for po. I do, I am. How should I say this? Both of them are important. I think it's a nuanced thing where you should have different targets for a new customer acquisition versus a repeat customer acquisition. Right. Because most people are, you know, acquiring customers at break even or loss or something like that. You can't reacquire a 30 day repeat customer at break even. Like that's, that's not valuable. But I want to be able to control it. What we had happen earlier in the year, and this is like verified with house, that's like 40% of our meta spend was being shown to repeat customers was incremental. Right. And so I'm not saying it was wasted spend, but even when we tried to exclude new existing customers, still 40, 40% of our spend, that was not what we wanted. Right now we have one camp, we fixed it. 90 plus percent of our spend is new customers. We have one campaign set up for returning customers. And now I can control, if I want that to be 40% of my budget, which I don't, I can have it be that. If I want it to be 5%, I can I just want to be able to control it and have different targets? I think my issue was when I was telling Meadow, let's go new, and it was kind of ignoring me. That was not good for our business because we always constantly need to be acquiring new customers to grow.

Cody (12:50)

Totally. Yeah. And I love that distinction. I mean it comes down to like, yeah, having control over the dimension of spending money on new versus returning customers. Makes total sense. Right. Like, it reminds me of the conversation I'll have with our reps where we say we'll talk to some reps and they're like, hey, just load up all of the ring apps ads and the luggage ads and the wallet ads together and just let us figure it out. And it's like, no, we need, like we as a business need to be controlling budgets at that level. And then thinking about it forward new and returning customers works as well. And then making the clarification or just the caveat that ultimately totally fine with incremental. Incremental return on returning customers, but just having more control.

Connor (13:31)

And I'm sure we have a lot, so not to spend too long on this one, but I think they, they have and will have solutions reach. They have obviously incremental attribution that's supposed to solve incrementality. But again, I think a lot of people think that's a new customer thing. Right.

Cody (13:43)

Totally.

Connor (13:44)

They have, they have. They're working on exclusion limitations because I think there are some leaks there with privacy issues and cross device stuff. So that fixes some new customer stuff and then they have things like different ways to bid on new impressions or not. And that actually fixes reach issues. And. And you can argue that maybe helps with incrementality, maybe helps with new customer, but I think they'll have. And they have these things that are in beta, like different ways to kind of go about it depending on maybe what a brand's challenges are.

Cody (14:12)

Totally. All right, cool. I like it as a prediction. I liked it as one last year as well, which we're going to jump around a little bit. I kind of cherry picked the stuff that I thought was either common discussion points on the POD or stuck out to me specifically organic social hot topic for you.

Connor (14:30)

Yeah, it's just, you know, the thing is like, I'm not good at. Like I only see inside one brand and so I'm really just like, my predictions are like stuff I'm going to talk about.

Sean (14:38)

Totally.

Connor (14:39)

And sometimes that makes more people talk about and focus on.

Cody (14:41)

But I, but I, but I do.

Connor (14:42)

Think it's going, you know, this way and people will learn in the best. And again, like a lot of this stuff, any of these predictions, I'm really talking about like the DTC X sphere more than I am talking about, like all brands, like, really good brands are crushing organic social. You know what I mean? Like, like none of this stuff is new. Like, and sometimes when I tweet the stuff, they're like, oh, that's already happening. You know, I find this one, you know, funny. I mean, it's again, it's. This is just what I'm focusing on right now. I don't know if it's something that's, you know, a lot of people are gonna do, but obviously a lot of the best brands are doing it. But we spent 50 million on marketing in, you know, 2020, 2025. And you know, I just, we, we probably spent so little of that on social. And I do think if done correctly, the way the algorithms work. Again, I'm also not saying I'm like, they should be going viral. Like when I've made some points like virality is not the goal. But I do think understanding the way the algorithms work should be really important. Maybe it's not organic social. Maybe it's more of, you know, the earned social comfort style thing. Like, that's fine, but like some type of algorithmically driven content at scale I think should be important. That could be just paid and getting that game really well. That could be just kind of like earn TikTok shop. But I do think you need some type of like flywheel to feed paid. And we're. I'm. Or yes, we're going to TikTok shop. But I also put we're going to go hard after, you know, organic social, flywheel content views, things like that. And I think a lot of brands are going to start to do more as they see that it functions more similarly. Like, I almost think growth teams should own some organic social because it's much more similar to that now. It's no longer, oh, I'm just going to go and put pretty stuff up. It's. I'm going to make a really good content that speaks to people, gets engagement, gets. Gets views and I'm going to measure it based on how it performs. And I think there's a lot that growth teams can actually teach, you know, organic teams.

Cody (16:31)

I totally agree and I think even that's an important distinction to make here. So the prediction itself, DTC brands finally take organic social seriously. What you're describing is I think there's A there's a class of brands that we're all in that like honed paid media skills years ago and then, and then our businesses maybe are over indexing on that slightly or like that is that is that is our core competency. Over the last few years there's been a whole new class of D2C brands that, that are like organic first and that's the comfort and the goalies and the things like that and what I'm hearing is like we're just going to try to play catch up a little bit and, and ultimately what that looks like actually isn't organic social in the way that it was eight years ago. It's like organic social with a performance bend the way that brands are doing it today. And I think that's a good take. I think we're on the same page.

Connor (17:22)

I mean there's yeah last thing on that right like mini Katana, like I don't know how, how big got that but like that's an eight figure brand just from organ like there are and it's not like I'm not saying hey we're stopping running ads, it's like no, we're going to run all our ads and we're going to do this and it's actually going to make our ad performance perform a lot better if we have that flywheel going.

Cody (17:43)

All right, I want to give a shout out to Rich Panel because they've quietly become one of the most impactful tools we use at Ridge. You know how SaaS companies love raising prices for the same product every year. Our old support platform did that one too many times. So we made the switch over to.

Sean (17:56)

Rich Panel and the results have been fantastic.

Cody (17:58)

Our SaaS build dropped by about half and once they rebuilt our workflows with automation self service routing, our cost per ticket fell 70%. Same team, same volume, totally different outcome. BFCM this year was our smoothest we've ever been. We've done the most amount of sales, we had the most amount of queries but with routing we had a lower cost per ticket and our NPS scores have never been higher. The team handled everything without the usual panic and our CSAT has been sitting around 96% every week. And what I really like is that Rich Panel isn't just software. They bring a playbook, they rebuild your workflow, set up your AI, handle migration and training and you can be live in under two weeks. The lift is basically zero on your side and they're launching returns portal soon which I'm really excited to Test. Because returns are one of those sneaky P and L items everyone ignores until it begins to cost you real money. If you want to cut support costs in half and run a leaner, more efficient operation, head to richpanel.com demo and they'll take care of everything. All right, next one I've got here. You and I both had this. You had. As DTC brands grow and mature, brand tracking becomes more popular. It's the natural evolution from in platform to MTA to GEO to mmm. I said something similar. Analytics infrastructure expands to brand awareness. It's quantified, tracked, and optimized towards. We begin thinking about it differently. These are kind of like rough notes I've got here. And then the one that I really like is Ben from True Classic. The president at True Classic said this thing, like, years ago that's always stuck with me. But he talks about the dollars that you've spent should be thought of as like an asset on your balance sheet, which is true. Like if you're generating like, almost, almost to the degree that, like, whether you're driving incremental returns or not, spending dollars has some sort of latent value and you should be, and you have that as an advantage. I'd much rather day one at a brand. If I'm starting day one at a brand, I'd. I'd rather have spent $50 million in marketing previously than $0 because there's some value in the, in the, in the ad spend that I've deployed previously. I think, like, the small update that I would make to that statement is it's not about dollars spent, but about awareness generated. I heard another interesting thing recently. It was about Allbirds. It was like Allbirds was trading the public markets for like $50 million or something. And it was like, look, their brand awareness alone is probably over $50 million. Like the fact that we all know what Allbirds is and many, many people have owned them in the past. It's like, that is a value that's hard to quantify. And I think you and I are getting at the same thing here and like, trying to find solutions for how do you quantify that, measure it and optimize towards it. And I don't think there's currently, at least in the conversations that you and I are consistently having a great, like, best practice or even common practice in, in place for how to do that.

Connor (20:48)

No, I, I 100 agree. I love the, the balance sheet part that, that Ben says, and I've thought about that a lot. I, I think there is a Good amount of data on this. Like I don't know what books it's from, if it's like how brands grow or like other stuff. But I've seen people quote over the years where like, you know, especially coming out of a recession, like the brands that do the best coming out of it are the ones that actually, you know, invest harder in marketing going into it. And I do think, right, like there's still a significant brand awareness. Right. Like we have whatever, I'm not gonna say the number but we have, you know, double digit unaided awareness. Right. Like we've done very little brand advertising. So I do think performance marketing done correctly can obviously lift, you know, lift awareness. But I do think it's possible to have a longer amortization phase if you will, if you're doing specific stuff, you know, aimed at awareness. And so our, one of the things I pitched to my board is our, one of our hypothesis and our bets this year is that this effect is true and increasing awareness and consideration is a leading indicator before sales. And so that's why we signed up for Tracksuit, because we can track this monthly and we're going to do some pretty big bets into more brand marketing things, whatever falls under that bucket, organic, social being one. But there's a bunch of other ones with the goal of seeing an uptick over time. Kind of like a pre post of our awareness. Totally. And we think following that, however many months following that, we will start to see sales rise from that. And that's a bet that we're going to make. And it's, I think it's harder to track. It's not like I can run a two week GEO test or I can get a last click attribution today. But I think, and I think this is maybe some of Taylor's points, he's probably seen it done incorrectly where you know, I have personally held off on this style of marketing because it's like how do I know if it's working, how do I track it? And I just didn't have this, the skill set or the tool set, right to be like hey, I can go and invest in this stuff. And I didn't want to not hold it accountable. But you also can't hold it accountable to the same things we normally do. Right. And I think now I have a better understanding of that and I'm willing to take that bet and actually do things over a six month period of time. And I'm told at the end of the year I'll come on here and I'll tell you if it worked or not.

Cody (22:54)

Do you expect, do you expect to be able to, I mean you won't be able to attribute revenue to. What you'll be able to quantify is to say, hey, I'm going to drive an increase in brand awareness. You have a form of measuring that. You will have marketing activations. You will track whether you are driving that number up. I don't. Revenue might go up in the future. You won't be able to directly attribute it. You'll be able to maybe highly correlate it or something. Is that kind of how you foresee it happening?

Connor (23:22)

Yeah, yeah, we'll be, we'll be able to correlate it. I mean, I think there probably are ways to get more sophisticated. We're, we're going to do it more broadly. Right. Like it's not going to be like one specific demo, but maybe we'll be some demos. But yeah, it'll be, it'll be just, hey, as our awareness goes up, does our revenue follow that? Right. Kind of just looking back on a year. But you can, like there are really sophisticated teams that'll do it. You can almost do an quasi incrementality test. Be like, hey, I'm just going to do this brand stuff in this market, you know.

Cody (23:50)

Right, right.

Connor (23:50)

And then I'm going to look at retail sales in that market. Like that's one option. You could flood a market and kind of do it that way. That's how a lot of like traditional CPG brands have done things. But for us it'll be, yeah, it'll, it'll be bigger, longer term.

Cody (24:04)

Cool. I love it. Yeah, no, you and I are on the same page here on the, on the balance sheet.

Connor (24:07)

Same thing. Like I tweeted about this and people thought I was an idiot. But I'm like, I think brand spend should be able to be capitalized and I would, I would be so much more willing to invest because like we are, we usually we optimize for ebitda, which is maybe an arbitrary target, but like for stores we can capitalize our store build outs. And so it's like, hey, let's open as many stores as possible. We don't need a break even till, you know, however many months because we have the cash. But it's not really going to hurt our operating, you know, P, L like, but if I go and put 100k or 200k into an event this month, like that's just hit, that's just hitting our, our P and L like that month. But the value is over time. So in my mind at least I'm like, hey, I can capitalize this stuff. I'm not actually going to do it on paper because I totally agree with Ben that like it's, it's, it's a long term approach.

Cody (24:56)

Totally. All right, cool. The next one. We've got our first Taylor holiday appearance here. I love these. We don't need to spend too much time on it. These are both highly comfort coded. Comfort also like true darling brand right now people are so excited about comfort and they talk about the organic social strategy all the time. My favorite thing that immediately stuck out was on their, on their PDP is when they're selling their hoodies, they'll have eight or nine or ten colors. And they do two things that are very interesting. One, they'll be discounted at different prices, which is like not as common as it should be. And that's Taylor's first prediction here. Dynamic pricing becomes table stakes. The death of msrp. If, if you have a white, black and lime green hoodie, like a lot of people are just pricing those the same or like we could even go further. Like let's say there's a navy blue one. You'd either be at full price or maybe you'd be on promo. And then I think a lot of brands would treat all those colorways the same and they would think about the silhouette of the hoodie, like determining the price. Comfort kind of throws that out the window. They're all different prices, they're promoted different rates and they're almost just like optimizing the price to sell through whatever they need. And that makes total sense. And I think E Commerce has extremely static and like static prices and a rigid approach to pricing and I think that just becomes far more dynamic over time. So I like the comfort example. The other one that I'll say quickly is I talked with vendor towards the end of last year who was doing like, like Geo optimized pricing. And the other example that I love to use is if you, if you buy native deodorant at the CVS on Hollywood Boulevard, it's like 16. It's so expensive. If you buy native deodorant in Salt Lake City at the Target, it's like seven. So why do they do that in retail? But we don't do it on D2C and I think that would probably also fall into this bucket. So I think we see a lot more maturity there. I think there's a ton of profit to squeeze out in optimizing stuff. Like this. So I liked it a lot. The second one just quickly dynamic pricing extends further to convenience. Quote unquote slow logistics becomes a discount tier. The other thing Comfort does is they're pre ordering hoodies all the time. So it'll be 30 off and you're receiving it in February. And that is just fantastic for cash flow of a D2C brand. And I don't think it's all that common. So I think both of these are examples of just more sophisticated dynamic ways of pricing and driving you know, sell through or volume around the SKUs that you really need to from an inventory or ordering perspective. And I think that gets much better over time. So I love both of these. What do you think?

Connor (27:27)

I love that you mentioned. I love both, I love that you mentioned the pre order thing. I think that is such an underrated thing that has actually been probably very important to comfort success. I mean think about it. They're, they're, they've grown faster than anybody else has bootstrapped. I don't, I don't know their finances but I don't believe they have debt. And just the especially like apparel is not a great. Right. Cash flow business in general. Right. You have a lot of different SKUs so it's not necessarily like the easiest to order. I, my guess is I would not have been able to do what they've done without the preorder component. And I love this, I love this. I guess the dynamic nature of the sliding scale between what you're optimizing for and are you optimizing for, you know essentially profitability and gross margin or cash flow and being able to kind of flex things up and down based on whatever you need to meet your financial goals at that time I think is brilliant because I think most brands are just so stuck in hey this is, this is our, our way, you know, our way and like we're in a cash crunch and they don't necessarily have the levers and I love that they have levers that they can pull because in such a fast moving business and state especially with how their business works off of TikTok I think it's genius.

Cody (28:35)

We, we have like a very small. So I totally agree that Comfort wouldn't. It's literally not possible for them to scale as much as they have. I believe they're totally bootstrapped too without doing this pre order strategy like they are. They are just funding their own inventory with orders 90 days before they have to ship the product. It's fan like it makes so much sense it's fantastic in terms of the dynamic pricing. Like we have a semblance of this at Ridge and I've spent a lot of time over the last year working closer with planning and the inventory team so that we can more strategically do markdown prices or promo prices and kind of marry these things. But even that feels like it's as soon as we get good at it, which like we're not even good at it now. I think it will. It's like it's basically already an archaic system. Like there's just no reason why it doesn't get, I wouldn't say fully automated, but far more automated over the next, you know, year or two.

Connor (29:27)

Do you know what they use? Is there a software? Is it like proprietary tech that they use for the dynamic pricing?

Cody (29:32)

I forget. I told, I told Sean a while back, like I could see this becoming, I could see this. I feel the same way about Revo and accounts. I think accounts become like just a standard part of the E Comm stack and I could totally see some sort of like pre ordering software be the.

Connor (29:48)

Same thing where it's like even the, the dynamic. I mean that seems like a great AI opportunity to tie in with inventory and forecasts and just do the dynamic stuff on the fly. So I'm. Yeah, 100%.

Cody (29:59)

Yeah. A lot of, lot of cool stuff from these.

Connor (30:01)

Yeah. If you're, if you're listening and building a software that would be a great one to, to build.

Cody (30:04)

All right, I'll, I'll hit this one for you and then you can let me know what you think. This is your 10th, 10th prediction. Affiliate and drop shipping get their glow up. Shopify invests in partnership network apps like After Cell find ways to cross promote brands and meta implements into their platform in a big way. This one's less so like Jones Road can't possibly be doing this. This is, this is a trend you're.

Connor (30:24)

Predicting for the industry. Yeah, I was listening to a podcast Orin and has like a podcast with, with, with Ashwin called like Brand Father. So I was listening to it. They're talking about Shop My. So I, I stole the Shopify buys Shop My from them. But I think it just like makes sense actually when they talked about it. But yeah, I mean like in a few ways. So like one TikTok shop is obviously like much more mainstream and you know, affiliate marketing used to be this like, you know, gray hat, black hat thing and like it's now becoming very common. Right. With you know, it used to be the kind of like this thing behind the scenes obviously a few years ago all press has gone affiliate now with Social Commerce TikTok shop that's happening. This was one of. I don't know if you have my meta creator prediction somewhere else about how I think they'll try to compete do social commerce. So some of the stuff is like I have some, some, you know, I've heard some things so it's like a cheating prediction. But I do think meta tries to compete with TikTok and is going to try to. I don't think they're going to do shops because I don't think that their shop efforts have worked but I do think they're going to make it easier and they're going to try to compete with TikTok on like the social commerce affiliate side and weave in affiliate stuff dirt natively into it. Kind of like how TikTok has done which has been extremely successful for them and obviously they, they've got to compete. So I think that shot, I mean shot my shelf has gotten really big. They've raised, they just raised like 70 million. Like they've gotten really big and that's a little bit of a glow up where it's like now all these like celebs and creators who have you know, affiliate things and affiliate deals. I think after sell, you know, I've seen some stuff they're working on but like they're working on ways to kind of cross promote brands and upsells where you can post purchase, upsell somebody else's brand. You know, I know that that's been one of your pred is you know brands will continue to find ways to kind of monetize different places. You know there's some stuff that I've seen you know brands do like hellofresh will do and like you know and even in unboxing it's just again it's the, there's continued margin pressure year after year in EE Commerce and DTC and there's consistent customer acquisition inflation. You know, so it's like it's not like that, that hot of a take to say hey like brands are going to try to get their margin better and they're going to find craftier ways to acquire more customers. Yeah.

Cody (32:43)

Okay, so, and, and, and in this case it's like hey yeah, we're actually gonna re embrace affiliate, we're gonna re embrace drop shipping because of margin pressures over time. I, I totally agree that we are.

Connor (32:53)

Because they're good ideas if you remove the stigma of, of some of their baggage like they're very good ideas that are, I mean it's, it's variable customer acquisition. Right. Like affiliate is just variable. You only pay when you acquire a customer. Like as long as it's incremental. What brands wouldn't rather have that? You know and sometimes I'd rather pay a little higher for the safety of it being variable. And you only pay when it happens. You know like that. And then, and then Shopify Fulfillment Network, whatever, whatever they call it Shopify Collective. Like I think they're going to invest in that. But there's, you know, you've talked about it on a pod. Like there are good logistic operations, financial, you know, components of that that I think can really be helpful for brands.

Cody (33:34)

Yeah, absolutely. And, and Harley talks about, or I've heard him say it, he'll. But the drop shipping is ultimately, it has its stigmas but drop shipping he says is simply a process improvement. And it's like yeah, it's totally true. It's just like it's, it's logistically optimized. We have, we have digital storefronts. Like we should be able to have a ridge wallet buy now button on the Jones Road beauty site without me shipping you product and us like literally moving around all these atoms in space and it's like we don't need any of that. That the beauty of digital is we can be a lot more flexible. Okay. On this one and this are recently we ended our holiday sale really strong and one of the reasons is super simple is you know you do the countdown timer. It's like we, you've got. And it's like, it's funny because it's like it's literally just helpful. The countdown timer has a stigma because people run them literally all the time. But it's like we have free express shipping for the next 24 hours. The countdown timer is simply helpful for people shopping on our site. It makes important information very clear and that's one of those things. I've said the same thing about the spin to win pop ups. I'm like because of margin pressure, because of everything getting harder all the time for D2C brands, just everything ends up making its way back onto the table. Be like oh, I'd never be a brand that would run up. I would never do drop shipping and I would never. I only sell on my.com and I would never do a spin to win pop up. And it's just like over the course of time it's like with all of the headwinds that you face all those Things get back on the table upsells.

Connor (35:00)

If you look at upsells, I remember like in, in checkout upsells were like off brand for everybody. Go, go look at everybody now. Right? So like at first it was like PDP upsells. People like people thought that was off brand. They added them. Then in card upsells became in vogue then in checkout. Now I see way more post purchase upsells than. Because that was another one that's like scammy. So 100% agree with you.

Cody (35:25)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so like affiliate and dropping and drop shipping and spin to win pop ups and post purchase upsells. Like all those things are amidst the glow up. We are like just embracing a lot of these things because ultimately like they are fundamentally not bad ideas. We're really just working through some, some negative stigma.

Connor (35:42)

What, what are some of them that are like more like five years out like where. What's like currently like hey this is like really gross and ugly that like we should start doing now that we think is going to get in this direction.

Cody (35:53)

You know, maybe shipping protection.

Connor (35:56)

I mean no, but that's more common now too.

Cody (35:59)

It's for sure more common. But I, I still think that one, the, the like auto adding of shipping protection is still like a little. Any.

Connor (36:07)

Well that's a, that's a violation. That's actually against Shopify terms.

Cody (36:10)

But even. Yeah, yeah, but even like sort of like the, the. The gray hat ways to apply it even if it's not like literally auto adding but just like making it too seamless. I think it's still seen as being bad. Any, any. Any sort of like misdirection I'd even say. Yeah, any sort of misdirection. The other thing that comes to mind actually is like the subscriptions that are extremely hard to cancel is probably. Will probably get more embraced in, in.

Connor (36:36)

In. In in fairness like a lot of the ideas that we're talking about like, like affiliate like drop shipping like upsells. Like they're like like how not timer like you said. Like they're not bad for customer experience. So they're not like tricking people. They're actually a good customer experience and benefit the brand and customer. I think that's like the one important distinction versus like some of the. You know. But yeah, I mean I agree even the subscription stuff. Like I do think brands have probably gotten a little bit more aggressive with their dark patterns and things like that to improve things.

Cody (37:06)

Totally. Okay, cool. Good, good, good. Glow UPS underway. All right listeners, let's Talk about the next couple of months. Holiday spending is naturally going to slow down, but sales volume can still remain high as you get through shipping cutoffs as you the New Year and as you crush your Q1 targets. One of our focuses at Ridge will be squeezing more revenue from every customer that we've been acquiring for so long. And that is where After Sell by Rocked comes in. It's the one click post purchase upsell platform trusted by over 40,000 D2C brands. And here's how it works. When someone just bought from you, they're already in buying mode. They trust you their cards on file. All you do is show them the right offer at the right time with zero friction. No re entering payment info, no extra pages. Just yes. Add this and boom. Done. Brands are seeing up to 30% AOV lifts and when you're running volume during the holidays or into 2026, that can compound fast. And look Jones Road Ridge True Classic hexclad. We're not running aftershell because it's trendy. We're running it because the unit economics work and the data is undeniable. But here's the kicker. Beyond the AOV boost, Aftershell unlocks rocked monetization suite Pure Profit with zero work rock thanks on your thank you page. 30 to 50 cents in Pure Profit per order. Rocked pay plus another 20 to 25 cents per order. No impact on convict version. It's found money. So here's what you do. Go to after sale.com operators right now. Activate Rock to Thanks or Rock to Pay plus and get the full after sale suite for free. Run it, check your numbers. Then you can come back and tell us if you want to turn it off. But I already know what you're going to say. All right, we got some points on channels. Taylor said Apple hits 10% of of wallet share. He went on to describe how the way Apple's working with brands is like a big value for them that they're like then they have a great rep system. He also said 21x ads finally break through so he thinks more people spend money on X. You also said Apple finally corrects prospecting and new customer targeting. They eat some meta share. 10%'s a lot. 10%'s really high. I think that was my like I, I think, I think it is a massive success that Applovin can get between 5 and 10% of of wallet share. That's, that's roughly where they'll, they'll probably be around 5 on the year for us. I shared our Channel down on X a couple weeks ago and it was higher but that's just because of the holidays. For us I think it's a massive success. If they can be 7 to 8% I10 ends up feeling high. So I, I would take the under on that. And then we've seen a ton of success on X and I was like, I was like quiet about it for a little bit because it was like secretly working, working really well. They've clearly fixed the platform. Nikita the, the head of product there is just like very publicly just like marching through a bunch of like awesome on platform and I think that's benefiting the ad product. So we've seen success for the first time starting in like September, October and I think it ended up for Q4 at like 3 and a half percent of our budget which is a lot.

Connor (40:10)

It was like substantial.

Cody (40:11)

Yeah, yeah. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. So. So I like both of these. Yeah, I like both of these. I think it's. Sorry the last thing that I'd say on Applovin what people we had Kathy on a couple months ago, what people still don't quite realize and this might be the difference between them landing at like 5% of budget, 10% plus is people really tailoring the content for the ad unit. There's so much non skippable time, there's so many seconds of ads being consumed on Apple people should be and we've been trying to do more of this creating content differently and, and and thinking about that because I think you just create more value if you know you have a 30 second non skippable ad versus something where you have to be earning attention every single second. So I think if brands embrace that, understand the ad units and maybe this is the point around services, the moat there's not, maybe there's even more kind of value to extract there and you know they earn even more of the wallet share. My take on Applovin.

Connor (41:10)

Yeah, I agree with that. I think Applovin does everything right except for the customer exclusions which is just not something that they can control with, you know with how mobile apps work. But I obviously they have prospecting campaigns and I think they're continued test stuff. It's like a great platform in every other reason and again not every brand cares about that or matters for us. It just, it just changes things a lot. But, but I agree. I think 10% is high. I could see it being higher than what it currently is and again I don't know. I wish we had the data. I could see it being higher than it currently is because it's yeah great team. They're. They just care about performance you know which is great. Their model seems really good. Right where like a lot of the other ones like a Snap or a Pintere or an X like are a little bit behind, you know significantly behind Meta. Right. Like meta is here, everyone else is here. But I do think Applovin is like here at least in terms of their model. So I think that that helps. I think 7% would, would. I would take the over on 7% so overall agree.

Cody (42:12)

I would also say it goes. I think it will go up in 2026. I'd be really comfortable saying that. And, and honestly I'm sure North Beam will share this data so we could actually talk about it in the future. I'm sure it's not that high if For Ridge it's 6% like I just don't think it lands above that. So I do think it probably goes up year over year. Two other quick things on AppLovin. One is it's just such unique like behavior, you know, like I don't know if I have it. Taylor had a prediction around. It was just a comment on the amount of short form vertical video feeds we have available to us now. TikTok reels, Snapchat, all of them have the same sort of ad unit and you're like swiping through for you pages. Applovin is just different. Like if you want to play Candy Crush, you were playing Candy Crush in Applovin and that is, that is one of the reasons why they can have such high value non skippable ad inventory is like I can't just jump to some other random thing like if I want to play my game I've got to play my game. Whereas I feel like the you the YouTube shorts and the reels and the TikToks are a little bit more. If there's ad load there you'll switch platforms. You can get that content elsewhere. There are many for you short form vertical video feeds. So I just think that is such an advantage for Applovin. Brands will further embrace it. Performance will get better. The second point that I was going to make is I was extremely surprised for Q4 for Ridge. We basically comped performance year over year. It was a smaller percentage of our budget because we were able to scale meta more this year. But like we had extremely efficient performance in, in Q4, 2024 and I was impressed that we were able to comp that in 2025.

Connor (43:53)

All right, put you on the spot, bullish or bearish? Do you think we're going to see Applovin specific agencies, maybe Apple, Evan specific creative agencies this year?

Cody (44:02)

Oh yeah. I would highly consider hiring an agency to specifically do Applevin content. I think, I think and that's just my experience like with the, with, with our current internal team at Ridge, we're buying a lot of media, we're creating a ton of content across all these different platforms. We don't quite have the muscle of like, hey, let's take a step back and like develop a, a creative strategy specifically for Applovin. We end up a lot of the time just like moving winners over or like a lot of the content looks the same. We'll still launch some ads that have hooks when like I really don't think we should be so I would highly consider it. Yeah, I don't know. That doesn't quite answer your question. But like, I think it's different enough and I think brands would value just like the immediacy of come in, have tailored content. So. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, I'm on board.

Connor (44:53)

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's become clear to us, especially some tests that we've ran that like, I mean like you said, it's the only vertical one that's not social. Right. That's not a fee and it's, it's very different experience. And what we found a lot of success with on social is not porting over well from a content style and demo perspective. And so I think it's clear we need to take a different approach than, you know, what we're finding success with on social and would definitely be down. Like I know when we had David Herman on for Titans, he talked about like trying some stuff where like actually had like a game as the hook. So it's like native to that. I think trying, yeah, I think trying specific stuff would be helpful. So I, I wouldn't be surprised because you know, again, where the money, where the money goes, you know, there's opportunity and then if, if it goes from 5 to 10% year over year share, like there's significant opportunity there because creative is as important on Apple oven as it is on meta. All right.

Cody (45:41)

We talked about Applovin last year. I mean Apple I think probably surprised Taylor predicted it'd be 2%. I think if we were to say at the very end of 2024 that Applovin comp performance for Ridge Wallet share grew, I think we'd all be kind of impressed. I, I or surprised. I probably would have expected it. Was just seemed highly likely that it could kind of fall off. Be more of a flash in the pan sort of deal. Oh, this is all right. So we don't need to hit this one too much. I liked it a lot. Let me, I've. I'll end this one with a question for you though. Taylor talks about the rise of the universal feed. We've accepted that we're uploading more or less the same short form vertical video into Meta, Tick Tock, Snap, Google ET etc. He thinks this should end. There should be a universal feed buying platform that basically pumps your ads into wherever the customer needs to view it in order to, in order to, to get them to convert. I like this because effectively this is like all we're trying to do at Ridge. This is what the entire team is built around. We're trying to get really great short form vertical video. We're spending money across a lot of different channels. We're running geolifts and deciding on budgets to like do our best to optimally allocate budgets across these different platforms. He's saying that should be consolidated. He said, for the record, I think this is what North Human House should do. I thought that that was interesting. What are your thoughts on the potential development of some of these analytics tools getting into consolidated media buying platforms?

Connor (46:59)

I don't know enough about like the APIs and the specifics. I think it makes sense in theory, but obviously all of it's not like it's like a, you know, a trade desk where you can have, you know, one DSP and then, you know, it's not like they're all on the same network. Right. They're not on like. And I think they're just such massive companies that have their own, own platforms and incentives and ways of doing things. So I, I don't know if they're gonna play with it. So my guess is that that won't work. I think probably what it looks more like is mmms that are, can, are can then be media buying agents. And rather than saying, hey, we think you should put this much budget in, you know, in meta and this much in there, it's just like, all right, hey, we think you should do this much and much in meta. All right, press a button. We're now going to go and make that change for you. Or, or hey, like the same way you get budget liquidity. You know, in a cbo you now just have budget liquidity between platforms. I think that's probably the way I see it going.

Cody (47:56)

And, and I know that that was Like, I mean, I'm sure that's like on North Beam's roadmap when they, when they first talking to Austin years ago, like, that was kind of the vision. Hey you. You set a baseline form of measurement. You're getting all the ad channels plugged in. Like, there's totally a scenario in the future where we give. I like your. What do they call them on meta, the flex budgets where it can like flex up and down. Like, yeah, hey, we're gonna give you. We're gonna give Northview a 5 to 10% flex budget. You guys can adjust budgets depending on what we're seeing work given incrementality tests and our current MTA results and things like that. So allocating dollars seems a lot easier than loading up one piece of creative and then it uploading it everywhere for you.

Connor (48:36)

Yeah, and, and, and that could happen but it still has to be like unique ads. I do think the one thing that's important for this is like, if you're doing just on meta. Right. You probably have a similar incrementality factor. And then if not, you have to manually, like, you're gonna, you, you have to figure out what you're going off of. That kind of matches, you know, incrementality. So I do think house. And if north theme has incrementality, you know, which, which they're doing, they have to go that. Because you can't just be like, oh, we have a 1.0 row meta and a 0.5 on YouTube. We're going to shift to meta. Like then. Then you just get like a bottom funnel game. So as long as it's calibrated that way, I think there's a lot of value.

Cody (49:10)

I totally agree. And that'll be, it'll be interesting. And that's why you, you brought up the mmm is like, MMM's like pro there. I have no idea. It will be extremely interesting to see how these different, like the different parts of the analytics stack converge so that we're getting more automation. Because it's like at some point, like right now it's like people still getting data from different places and making budget decisions. I think it's a great prediction. Probably not in 2026, but over the next three years that that ends up getting more automated and it will take these platforms utilizing similar data and they're just being more of a formal system around how those decisions get made.

Connor (49:48)

100 and I completely agree with Taylor on that. I know. You know, he, he said it. But yeah, I, I think that manual media Buying decision process will be very limited.

Cody (49:56)

Totally. All right. This was maybe my biggest prediction. Oh, I. Meta gets even better at performance and it increases its share of budget year over year. Meta increasing its share of budget year over year would be kind of crazy, I think. I think everybody's trying to diversify. We just said we'll spend more on X, we'll spend more on app love. And, and I think it's extremely possible with one. I think Andromeda and Gem and all the platform optimizations they've been making. I think Meta is literally getting a more performance ad platform. I think brands will get better at producing the creative diversity that Meta needs. Those two things will kind of hit their stride in 2026. And I could see Meta being so good that we end up spending. Yeah, More of our budget there year over year. And I just wanted to call out, seems. Seems simple, but I actually think things would be. Have to be going extremely well for Meta to be earning even more budget.

Connor (50:47)

All right, so what do you think has to happen? If you're Meta and you're. John Hegeman, the chief revenue officer of Meta is listening, and he probably is. What does Meta have to do to get this to happen?

Cody (50:59)

Well. Oh, you know what I was thinking about is it like, I mean, we saw. We saw fantastic Meta performance in. In Q4. It reminded me a little bit of when ASC first launched. Launched in like this was like April, May 2023, or at least that's when I remember we were embracing it and we just saw fantastic performance. And I think a lot of people saw the same. And it just felt like the platform and the creative. Like, and like the way that we were media buying. The platform itself and the way that we were media buying and the creative that we were producing hit its stride. It performed really well. And that is a perfect example of we spent way more on Meta year over year. It was a larger percentage of our budget that, like Q2, Q3, 2023, period. And I just think that there's a similar sort of deal potentially in. In 2026 with those things coming together. The only real caveat is, and we talk about this all the time, consumer has to be strong, consumer strong. I think Meta is frankly already put in the work. I think brands are embracing what they need to be doing from the creative side. That's the, that's the trifecta if we have good consumers. So if the chief revenue officer of Facebook can. Can. Can get some stimulus checks going, get interest rates down, I think that would Be a huge help. All right, I got one. I thought you'd like this one. Signal engineering we've brought up a bit. You had the prediction last year. I think this was a, I think this was a really good one that brands will embrace like a middle or top of funnel media buying. Always on strategy. We've talked a lot. I think we've all seen really strong geolift experiments optimizing for things like view content. That's what we do at Ridge. I think it continues to grow in popularity and I think we get like more formal solutions. So I say brands will, brands will more commonly optimize for non purchase events and we will see SaaS vendors provide formal solutions for more non purchase optimized events to optimize for. What do I mean by that? We optimize for view content. Right now we drop people on landing pages. So we're, what we're ultimately doing is we're optimizing for someone visiting two or three pages. That's what we found to work. We're optimizing for a browsing user which I think is good. If we optimize for clicks, we get clicks. Clicks, we just get clicks. If we optimize for video views, we just get video views. Or like you just run that risk if you allow meta to achieve its goal too easily. Like I think it's, it's harder to actually be generating the value or like hitting the true objective that you have. So what I would love to see, and this is if I was northbeam, this is what I would build is some sort of like smart pixel on my site. I'd love to say hey, we're going to use all these different data points, all these different site behaviors. We're going to identify when someone becomes an interested user. User. And it's, it's not always going to be the same. It's not always going to be view content after two or three pages. It's going to be they hit, you know, learn more or they hit, they, they browse four product pages, something like that. Then we're sending that signal back to meta and then we're optimizing for that because I just think it's, it's hard to imagine that we'll still have these like very rudimentary tools over the, over the medium term.

Connor (53:54)

You know how meta's got the whole like hey, we know that user is going to stick if they add you know, seven friends within the first week or something like that. It's almost like what's that on your site? What's that pre purchase for you that's going to lead to either like the best incremental performance or like the best ltv. Totally. Yeah. And I think finding that it takes probably a data science team to, to, to do that. Most brands are definitely not equipped to do that. But I think if you can find what that signal is, you could probably drive a ton of value. Do you think that's a, do you think that's a software solution and that's not Meta? Like Meta is obviously doing signal engineering themselves. They're kind of, you know, trying to work on, you know, profit optimization as like a test they have. I think they're, you know, they always talk about doing like a pltv, like a, you know, like a predicted LTV as well. Like do you think that the innovation will come from them or it'll come more from the SaaS space?

Cody (54:45)

Okay, so it would make total sense for me for Meta to do it as well. Like, like just some sort of, like it's just, it's kind of silly. Like the, the default events are just like so simple. It's just like, like clicks and add to carts and, and purchases and it's like okay, yeah, there's like, there's so much more nuance that can be applied there and it can be so much smarter and dynamic that I could see Meta doing it. I obviously think a third party provider could be powerful because it could also be more bespoke kind of to your point, like I think Meta could do a good job of having a very like general, hey, like this is now an interested user based on all these different like site behavior data points. But like someone coming in and being like oh, I understand the way Ridges site is built and like what are the custom things and like I'm going to provide some, some, some loose parameters for my smart pixel and that's how we're going to create this event. I think it would be a valuable thing that like no doubt I'd be interested in testing. You know what I mean? It's like I just, it's one of those things where I hear it and I'm like yeah, it, it, it intuitively makes sense that that would work and I'd love to see that solution developed. So that's a prediction. I could see that really happening this year.

Connor (55:53)

I love it. I, I absolutely love it. I, I think so.

Cody (55:59)

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Connor (58:40)

Yeah, so I agree with that. I, I think you guys are probably more buttoned up than most. I think we, we've had to spend a lot of time on it. We still, from like a systems perspective, I think, do a terrible job. I think we do more just like manual communication because I've learned because we used to do such a bad job and it's like, hey, why did you place that PO without checking with me when I was like CMO at the time? Like, no, what our plans are. Hey, we're not. We have. We weren't planning to spend any ads on that or hey, like, we think this would crush. So I do think like any good organization, those leaders do have to talk. But I think you guys are taking obviously like further steps for us. Like our systems are very disjointed. Like our marketing team doesn't do anything with NetSuite. Right. And like, part of that is because NetSuite is so outdated and not built for E commerce where fulfill is, you know. So I, I completely agree with that. And I think like, you know, if you have a good, you know, like, like a Saras or something like that, that can get all your. Your data in like huge value. My only thing is like it's until Shopify decides to buy Fulfill or Good Day and finally actually give a crap. Core problem merchants are facing. Do you believe this is the core problem merchants are facing?

Cody (59:42)

I don't.

Connor (59:42)

I don't see that. I do think it's a challenge. I don't find that this is by any means the core problem.

Cody (59:49)

I think, you know, Taylor, I saw that he updated his bio at some point. So he's like, his bio says uniting marketing and finance, something like that. Like, he's really complet completely doubled down around this idea of uniting media buying and inventory buying and like running the business. He says core problem. It's functionally what an E. Com brand is. I think that's what he's getting at. Like if, if you like to the example that you just gave, like, we're buying product based on a certain projection. We're getting to inventory. There's a media plan attached to that. We're building creative for it. We're allocating. But like, like that system is what we're literally doing all the time. I don't think people think about it as their core problem because I think if you're a functioning E Comm brand, you're doing those things. But I think that the, the I, I like, I like the general direction of this take that it is more fragmented currently than it should be and with agencies and as I think it becomes particularly feasible to create better systems with AI. And I think that's what he's getting at here. And I, I do like that.

Connor (60:55)

I thought. Yeah. I just think. And again it's like which brands are we talking about? It depends what cohort you're looking at. I think profitable customer acquisition is the core problem. You know, the challenges in profitable customer acquisition I think are the core problem. Much more so than like marrying, you know, marketing and operations together.

Cody (61:15)

Yeah, I totally. I think for me, for me. And maybe I'm getting too hung up on the word problem. Acquiring customers pro profitably is for sure what I think of as a problem. Something we are actively trying to solve. Solve always. And I, and I don't feel that way necessarily about this like underlying flow of teams, but I think they're both equally valid. But I'm like, I'm not getting in between you and Taylor.

Connor (61:39)

I would get more excited if Shopify bought shop my to try to help brands do customer acquisition versus Shopify buying fulfill. And I think that would be more of a net good to the industry and community for helping these brands be more successful and grow profitably than improving their backend operations.

Cody (62:01)

Yeah, I, I said this for a long time and what was Shopify rolling out at the time? Like, I think it was when Shopify bought that fulfillment company years ago that they ended up like spinning back off to Flexport where I said yeah, what they should be doing, they should be buying like Pinterest or something. And at the time like it kind of made sense for them to do that. They should be solving the customer acquisition problem problem. I feel it's less likely now that Shopify will be able to introduce a customer acquisition solution, particularly a scalable one where I do like the idea of Shopify as a platform just embracing the like the, the literal logistics of running an E Comm brand further versus trying to solve a marketing problem. Like really just embracing the platform approach. Just because I think the acquisition went so hard. Hard. It's so hard to solve. And also it looks so different for so many brands. And it's like if Shopify wants to be the like common denominator solution, they should focus on the, the underlying problems that all businesses are, are running on. And that is like closer to the, the uniting of inventory buying and the selling through of that inventory.

Connor (63:12)

Can I, can I debate that one?

Cody (63:14)

Sure.

Connor (63:14)

I Don't disagree. But all right. I think it's, I think it's a failure of Shopify. That shop my exists. That shop my shelf exists.

Cody (63:21)

This.

Connor (63:22)

Because if you think about it, right, what it is, it's an affiliate platform that's essentially like a little digital storefront that then goes and leads to probably most commonly Shopify sites, you know, and it's, it's a way for creators to curate and build these little storefronts and monetize their audience and then it goes to most commonly revenue on Shopify sites. And there's just like this intermediary and I think especially like Shopify is pretty tapped in. Like they sponsor Mr. Beast consistently. They're very tapped into the creator economy. You know, like they're very focused on it. Like, I think that's a miss and I think it should have been something that they built. They have, you know, they bought a really small one. I forgot who they bought, but they brought a really small affiliate thing and like have Shopify collabs and it just kind of went nowhere as a product. But I think it's a m. I think it's a mistake and that they didn't build it because it would have been big for growing them. And I think, yeah, like, like they can't necessarily build their own, you know, customer acquisition system in terms of building like a Meta or something like that. Right. But I do think they could have significantly grown and had the best user experience and, and had, you know, a way for. Maybe there's better pricing, there's some vertical integration. Like, I don't know, the benefit to merchants if Shopify owns it versus not. But like it just should like be plug in seamlessly. And I think that would have been. Been a big opportunity to help the brands grow, which is I think the biggest thing most brands are up against.

Cody (64:49)

Yeah, look, I, I hear that point. Do you think, do you think. And I guess so. One of my thoughts as you were speaking was do you think it's a failure? I mean most of these shop My links are just like in the bio, right. Is it a failure of Meta that they don't have like a simple tool? You know, they kind, they kind of. They have like a link tree, like competitor. They kind of built that out natively in the platform where you can like upload multiple links. Do you think Meta should have something similar? Similar?

Connor (65:14)

Oh, absolutely. I mean, TikTok has only been able to do what they have done because Meta has struggled so hard with like creator monetization. Right. It's so hard to monetize. And you have to do, if you're doing a real, you have to do a hey link and buy or you have to do a mini chat automation.

Cody (65:33)

Right.

Connor (65:33)

Or for you know, story. But that goes away in a few days and you don't have the same reach. And obviously they tried stuff with Shop. So yeah, I think, think and that's one of my predictions is, is they're going to focus on that and build in kind of a native to meta or native to Instagram affiliate, you know, component because yeah, and so that's the.

Cody (65:51)

Thing for me that would be my, that would be my counter argument is like I don't think Shopify wants to play in a space where they end up like more or less competing with a TikTok or a Meta or things like that. Like it's almost like they're better off kind of. Hey, let's, let's assume our position as just like the, the pipes of all, all of this. We're going to build the integrations, we're gonna have amazing APIs. Meta's gonna be able to support it whenever they want to do their Shop. My competitor like it will be really seamless to connect with brands and the way that you do with partnership ads and you'll be able to sell their products, et cetera, et cetera. Like I just, I think Shopify playing that role makes a lot more sense and then if you look at their product roadmap, it ends up looking like more backend work than, than front end consumer facing stuff. So that would be my. That's just where, that's why I sit where I do.

Connor (66:33)

Yeah, you're, I mean that's essentially what they're trying to do with open AI as well. So yeah, I totally. You're right about that. And that was Harley's prediction when we had him on.

Cody (66:40)

Exactly. And they're like. And that is, that is they will remain extremely important in the ecosystem if they are just keeping pace with like making things available to shop on a YouTube and meta and open AI and wherever commerce is happening, like Harley said. All right, I like it. All right here, I, I'll, I'll, I'll hit this one quickly. This is yours number five. AI content gets really, really good. We're already using workflow that will be able to output hundreds of statics per day that are identical to non AI ads. All creative teams implement AI into their workflow in significant ways, but more to edit, design and iterate off of assets more than generating net new from scratch. And then just quickly you talked about this from 2025, which I think was a good one. You mentioned it at the, the start of the call. You predicted AI makes a decent size difference for consumer brands. It will come from automating CX and there will be some legit ad creative options for the first time. I, I think that, I think you nailed that one. I mean, I think, I think AIs made an insanely impactful, an insane impact on D2C brands. And I think from an ad creative perspective, specifically if you'd asked me in like May, I was probably underwhelmed and now I'm like, oh, it's really good. Like I think it really accelerated over the last like three months.

Connor (67:52)

100%. Yeah, I think so. Part of that at least where we are for us is for statics. We're working with an agency who's essentially a sean, a software enabled agency, right, has kind of like done that and we're working with them to build like you know, these workflows and we have gotten to a point where it can get all of our fonts in. It looks really good. You cannot tell just for statics that you know, these are AI and they all have our products. So I think for us, at least where AI currently is, it's like how do we take existing assets and more, more like be an AI designer more than an AI creator, you know, but pro backgrounds, copy, props, all that kind of stuff, animations, like all AI can do that and you can't tell and it's at the volume. I don't know the cost to it, but it's at the volume where like we can get 100 a day. Like we are literally going to load our ad account and launch stuff every day. Like the limiter right now I think is literally going to be, be uploading. Like I, I, I'm working through it and thinking like literally and maybe there's better ways to, to do it and have AI upload it. But like right now, literally our limiter is, is ideas which AI should be able to do. But right now it's just us prompting it and then uploading and we can get 100 ads uploaded to our ad account every single day.

Cody (69:09)

Totally. I, I didn't include this one. But I Also, I think 2026 will be the year like brands go like scorched earth on volume, volume and AI plays a big role in that. And what you just described, it's the same with like the comfort hoodie social example where it's Like, I think when people say they want to do product seeding or an affiliate program, it's like they're going to want to be activating hundreds and thousands of creators and it's just going to result in massive volume. And I think that also plays into my, my meta prediction that like, I think all those. If meta keeps claiming that it needs more and more creative, creative and creative diversity and that the new Andromeda system is going to be able to pick out the best piece of creative and match that with the person who needs to see it, I think that volume will, will, will benefit meta maybe more than we're currently anticipating.

Connor (69:58)

That's fair. I, I want to make sure I touch on one that is like to me is like the most important and my biggest focus right now. So, and just on. Oh, that's related to this. Um, I'm also not super bullish. Like I'm sure it'll impact video in a significant way. Um, I'm not, I'm not expecting to do like fully generated videos, but I think for AI Creative it's a few things. It's like statics are easy like I talked about with just like, you know, like the workflow and props and stuff like that. Like you can't tell is AI or not. I do think video is going to be and it's obviously very close but like really good. And I don't know if you saw this yesterday or two days ago. Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram, came out with like a long post post about this morning.

Sean (70:39)

Yeah.

Connor (70:39)

You read that?

Cody (70:40)

Yeah.

Connor (70:41)

So I think that's like one of the most important things that everybody should read. Like I really urge everybody to read it. He's essentially saying like AI video. It's getting so good that like you just can't tell. And it's going to really change how people perceive content and it's going to make people really not, not trust things. And this is behind a lot of the social strategies we're doing. We're like so, so government trust is at an all time low, right? It's like 28% of people trust. Government corporation trust is extremely low. People don't trust brands. People have shifted from Create, you know, all of their, their attention and trust from you know, institutions to creators, which has been huge and you know, social piece have let them do that. But even a lot of the stuff that people are currently valuing from creators is actually they're not going to know like deep fakes are getting so good and so, so it's not that creators are going to lose trust but it's that they have to find ways to continue. It's kind of like going from influencer to creator and now it's like the next step is like, you know, because people lost trust with influencers but like they still have trust with like really great creators that are behind the scenes. And to me at least the, the next thing that's important or the status signal is like stuff that can't be faked. And it's almost like I make this analogy with GLP when ones being thin used to be a big status signal now because and, and no shame to anyone that's on a GLP one like I think they're great medicines. It's easy to be thin and so it's no longer as much of a flex because it's not like hey, I had to work hard to do this right, right. And so it's actually like I think this is one of the things behind the protein craze actually being jacked is more of a flex now cuz there's currently besides steroids like there's no easy quick thing for that. And so that shows that you're like, so it's like what society values kind of changes a little bit bit. And I think that's really anything that can't be fake. So live streaming, streaming culture, I think you're going to get more brands into streaming because that can't be faked. You can't fake a stream. This like low fi behind the scenes. Just like any content that can't be faked in real life activations, like that's at least a giant component of our marketing strategy right now.

Cody (72:43)

Okay. Yeah, I read that one didn't include it. I'm glad you brought it up. I, I've had this conversation with Sean because like it does feel like the writing's on the wall to some degree. I've seen just some like unbelievably good yeah AI UGC stuff. I think I it. It'll just be interesting to see how it plays out over time. My take is that I actually still think there's a lot of value in the high volume stuff that we're describing now and like even AI videos and like mass producing it and getting to that scale. I think there's, I think there's, there's probably a full year of arbitrage opportunity where it's like people haven't quite lost trust yet. They're still consuming a lot of content. The in. You know the Internet's probably not flooded. Like, we don't really reach like a saturation point in the, like in the immediate future. But I don't know what it looks like at the 2 year mark or 3 year mark from now. And I, I don't know what that means. I, I was telling Sean, I was like, I was concerned, will people seek out more authentic content or will they just like kind of regress to consuming AI slop? Like, and, and like, and honestly like a massive amount of consumers probably will just be totally fine consuming whatever the TikTok feed feeds them. And I, I just, I'll be curious to see how it plays out. I, I don't know the perspective, but that seems like a fork in the road that will, some will end up on, on you know, one side or the other.

Connor (74:06)

Well, this is, this is why, and I think like most things, I think the middle ground is actually probably the worst. Like, like, you know, like, like the ARC ads. Like oh my God, I love this product. Like first of all it's illegal. But secondly, like I think AI that's trying to pass us human is not going to do well because I think AI content that is good content, even if people know it's AI is going to do really well. And I think people want that. People want good content regardless of what it is. Right? Like it's like, you know, you look at those like baby podcast ads like that shit is funny regardless of if you know it's AI or not. So I think that is really important. But don't try to make your AI stuff pass as non AI. And then I still think the other end, it's, it's like I, I would play on both ends but like the whole like oh my God, I got this product. I love this product. Like that being done by AI. I'm really bearish on that.

Cody (74:51)

Yeah, yeah, I'm totally with you.

Sean (74:56)

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Cody (76:46)

Small prediction here. I also kind of hit on it earlier. It's obviously top of mind. Brands realize the key to unlocking AI across an organization is not through one off tools but with infrastructure and documentation. Knowledge work looks more like cursor with a model agnostic structure. This goes back to like I think data warehouses become more powerful, I think naming conventions become more powerful. I think like centralized data sets that I can bring and then use within a chat GPT or a Claude or a Grok or whatever is kind of where things are going. I think 2025 there was a lot of like new software tools developed that are just I would describe them as these like one off tools a brand would try to like bolt on to their creative workflow and I don't think that's a long term solution. I think actually many brands will be reconfiguring what they look like internally, what they're prioritizing. There'll be better documenting knowledge and then it will be used. Then they can port that knowledge and that information and like all of their important details over to whichever models they need to be working with. So small prediction there.

Connor (77:47)

So you're thinking there's like one like operating system that's like yeah, hey this is like our portal that we log into. This is where I get my data, I see my data, I can chat with My data, I can then go and brief things from there directly. I can, I can go and make landing pages, I can brief ad stuff like that.

Cody (78:07)

So like, so I mean it's not as if it'll all get united into one thing, but there will just be like consolidation. I think two, two quick examples actually I'll give three quick things. Like one thing that we did internally which is like so obvious, but we used to keep our executive product summaries in Figma and just like having written content in Figma is not, not conducive with working with AI. So it's like we just moved all of those to Google Docs. Now you have Docs and you can, you can paste those into Claude or Chat or whatever. So that's an example of us just at, at an infrastructure in terms of how we work, making sure that it is kind of portable between different AI solutions. The two other examples I would use is like the data warehouse with something like Sarah's is you can chat with your data with Claude or with ChatGPT or whatever. Like the data is centralized and I can show up with whatever tool on top of that to do that. And I might have a different tool for inventory planning than I do for merchandising, but we're utilizing the same underlying dataset. The other one is I really liked Motions. Motions been building a lot of tools for like providing context for, for the AI for when you want to do creative strategy. They were calling them Playbooks for a while. I'm not sure if they've changed the name. Um, but you can document like hey, these are our learnings. This is how we do creative. This is how we want to look and sound and be as a brand. And then that's informing all the other workflows that you're doing within Motion. So I think they're doing directionally a good job of like being a, a like comprehensive single solution that's built off of like again documentation versus we're just going to show up and begin producing ads for you.

Connor (79:42)

Yeah, no, I agree with this and I actually do think this is a pretty big problem because you, you have, have. There's so many different tools and they're not currently speaking to each other and things love multiple places, right? Like even now with like just on research, right? Like you've got reviews, you've got ad comments, you've got social comments, you got what people are saying about you on various places. Like even getting that stuff consolidated into one place is no easy. And I've seen like there's like one or two softwares that are trying to do just that, you know, because there's a lot of data and like in the past brands have hired like a full time team, like a customer insights team or person to do that. You know. So I think, think that's one component and then there's a lot and then yeah, you have, you have your Shopify data, you have your ad data, stuff like that, you know, all in different places. If you're using a tool like Saras, you get it kind of consolidated into one place and hopefully you can chat with it. But then you know, you probably have a lot of your about your brand. Like it's just in so many different places. And so I agree with that. I think if there was one operating system that kind of funneled them all in one place would be insanely helpful. I just, I don't know, maybe it's because like E commerce or marketing is like such a smaller tan. Like I don't know that there is a player that has the budget and capabilities to pull that off versus like you know, cursor can do it or cloud code can do it because like the TAM of just like software development is so huge. So that's my only skepticism that on that maybe. I don't know.

Cody (81:06)

It's true. No, it's a good point. Yeah and we'll see because there is like not like I, I have, I say it's knowledge work here which is a massive TAM because that's across industries. But then there will be more ecom specific stuff like you know, performance, creative development or whatever that like maybe doesn't get as bespoke of solutions. So we'll see. I just, I continue. It's again top of mind for me at Ridge just hitting on this like investing in the infrastructure and documentation I think is like continues to be the unlock for AI.

Connor (81:39)

So I mean and, and I agree in general about like even, even just general office work stuff like Slack and Asana like shouldn't really exist. Right. Like, like it's kind of silly that like you have to like slack about something. Like all right, cool then I'm gonna go and add this somewhere else. Like I'm sure an agent can do that soon and maybe it can go between them. But like the fact that like your email and then your, your Slack and then your project management are all like different things is, is challenging and I think like the more consolidation of them the better or like there just has to be ways for these things to talk to each other. Much better.

Cody (82:13)

100%. Oh, I got a quick one here. Fewer paid B2B influencer launches. I forget who it was a couple weeks ago that launched and like had the, had the little D2C X, you know, activated. But I think we'll see less of it. It just, it didn't feel well received. I think that strategy's probably played out, worked extremely well for a really long time. I don't, I don't think we see as much of it. Relatedly, less shock marketing, particularly for B2B SaaS. We saw Icon do it really big in 2025. CLUL is not B2B, but they seem to have pivoted into a more kind of standard note taking app. I think they're like obnoxious marketing is on its way.

Sean (82:57)

Way out.

Connor (82:58)

Yeah, no, I, I, I, I don't disagree. I, I think that whole like everybody's getting paid thing and there seems to be a lot of drama every time it happens. But I mean, I also wonder if that helps because then there's a lot of earned media that's talking about, you know, yeah, if, if somebody launches. But, but yeah, there's definitely a lot, a lot of trust issues. And I think, I think the part of the reason it's different because it's like, all right, I saw somebody ask like, well, why is it a problem in B2B SaaS? But brands do it all the time. I think it's like at least this DTC X community, it's more like a community where like, it's more of peers where it's like everybody's kind of, I don't want to say on the same level, but right. Like you have brands talking to brands and brands and agencies and like everyone's like in the game, everyone's like, it's this like weird mix between like, yes, there's brands and agencies and brands are, are, you know, be our prospects of the agencies and SaaS. But like it's, it's more of a community than like a B2C thing. Like a, you know, gummy supplement is like, hey, you have your consumers and you have your influencers, you know?

Cody (83:56)

Right.

Connor (83:57)

Totally. So it's, it's a little more intertwined, which makes it a little bit weird. I just, the thing is, and I'm sure maybe it doesn't completely work. It does work. It is effective. Like influencer marketing when done correctly is really effective. Maybe they won't just like wide blitz and maybe brand, you know, the SaaS companies will be more, more thoughtful about how they tailored over time and who does it. But, like, you know, it's very clear. Clear, at least from my perspective, like who is putting a lot of budget into influencer marketing because those tools get talked about and people kind of take notice versus when they stop paying people. Unless a software is great, you know, it goes, it goes away.

Cody (84:37)

I, I, yeah, and point. Totally heard and I have no problem. I was the one, I defended Triple Whale's last launch. When people were freaking out about it, I was like, this seems pretty like run of the mill stuff.

Connor (84:47)

Stuff.

Cody (84:48)

I just think my perception of it is that the last time I saw it, and again, it's like this, it always kind of looks the same. You get like the nicely formatted tweets you're getting it from, you know, 12 or 15 people tweeting about it all on the same day. I think we just see less of that. It just seemed tired to me. It seemed less effective. I. No, absolutely. No doubt. I mean, I think sponsoring marketing operators is a fantastic investment. That's influencer marketing. I just think we see less of this, like, very, very well trodden launch strategy that we've seen for a couple years now. I think, I think it begins to kind of dissipate and probably ends up looking like something different.

Connor (85:26)

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I do, I do agree with that. And I think the shock marketing. Totally agree with it. Has not seemed to be very successful and I think it's probably covering up not a great product, at least for those two examples.

Cody (85:39)

Totally. All right, sweet. I think we hit basically all the ones that I wanted to. I think this is a good, good little run through of 2026 predictions. Any fit we didn't hit or anything from 2025 that you'd like to reflect.

Connor (85:50)

More on in general, do you think it's going to be a good year? Like, what do you think? You know, the market, the economy, consumer. Do you think it's going to be. Obviously 2025 was, was extremely challenging. You think we come back. You, you think it's, it's another kind of tough year for people.

Cody (86:06)

Yeah, you know, I'm the worst. Like, I'm so not in my wheelhouse trying to predict, predict like macro trends like this.

Connor (86:12)

Yes, but you're a podcaster, so you have to.

Cody (86:14)

Yeah, yeah. So it's my duty. You know, we have primaries next year. Like the, the White House has every incentive to make consumers happy and feel good and vote Republican going into the primary. I mean, but, but both parties do. So I think that Works to our advantage. There's all sorts of concerns, I think, like just things seem really expensive. People aren't making as much money. I think there's going to be job insecurity for all sorts of reasons. Uh, I think it'll be a good year. Look, I think it will be positive. If I were to guess it's probably a mixed bag of a year, right? Like I don't think, I don't think we go through 2026, the next 360 days or so when like everything just rips forever. There will probably be some. There's just so many looming kind of shakeups and like pending macro changes and threats that like we probably get some big swings. That's what I would guess. I think it's net, net good for ecom. I'm sure there will be a lot of volatility.

Connor (87:22)

I'm, I'm going to go bullish. I mean there's, there's some good signs and it's, it's funny because I, I find that they don't get talked about as much as when you know, the current administration is, is doing poorly. Obviously like negative news, travel, so much more. But like, you know, the, the, the, the GDP growth, you know, 4.3% last month or whatever it was like strongest it's been in years. Inflation looks relatively under control. Looks, looks pretty good. Good. You know, tariffs have not brought in the inflation that most people were, were expecting. Like there are, you know, homicides are down. There is some positive signs and I guess I'm just trying to be an optimist. I think there's obviously lots of challenges. Like there have been places where market, you know, seems weak. Jobs has definitely been challenging. I don't know if Jobs is really going to get better with AI, you know, I don't. So there's definitely a lot of, a lot of challenges. And then in, in, in general, just like political divide is, I don't want to say an all time high, but it's definitely, definitely, you know, it's definitely a tense period. So I think it gets better. I think it gets better. I think the, the hardest times are behind us. I think 2024, 2025 are hardest times. And I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I think it gets significantly better. Rates will come down, consumer confidence will go up.

Cody (88:32)

There we go. From your lips to God's ears. I like it. All right, well look, it'll be a great year. I should call that an episode.

Connor (88:39)

Good ones.

Cody (88:40)

Beautiful. Thank you for listening to another episode of Marketing Operators. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Prescient, Aftercell and Revo. Make sure to like subscribe, share with your friends and family, tweet at us, comment on YouTube, leave reviews on Spotify. Always appreciate it and we will see you next week.