Performance Creative in 2026: What We’ve Updated and Why

Summary

Marketing Operators Podcast

Episode: Performance Creative in 2026: What We’ve Updated and Why

Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Date: February 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, the Marketing Operators hosts revisit their earlier discussions on performance creative workflows and ad creative analysis. With more than two years of learning, iteration, and shifting industry standards, the conversation centers on how performance creative has evolved in 2026. They focus on the shift from creative volume to concept development, AI and signal engineering in creative strategy, new creative testing workflows, and the role of creators and in-house teams versus agencies. The hosts share their current processes, granular tactical changes, and predictions for where performance creative is heading next.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. From Creative Volume to Concept-Driven Approaches

• Past Focus: Chasing high volumes of low-fidelity content (UGC, iPhone shots) just for the sake of output.
• Current Shift: Prioritizing quality, thoughtful concepts, and meaningful creative over arbitrary volume targets.
  • “We are very much now not going towards volume and going towards... more of like a concepts to be done approach.” — Connor Rolain (06:43)
• Practical Numbers:
  • Past: 15-20 concepts per week, high iteration count.
  • Current: 5-10 concepts per week for some, up to 30 for others, with less focus on iterations for quantity’s sake.

2. The Reality of Modern Creative Strategy

• Training & Talent Gap:
  • Creative strategists are vital but scarce, with many still learning through intuition rather than structured programs.
  • AI has become integrated into workflows, not just for asset production but for analysis and ideation.
• Live, Up-to-Date Training:
  • Recognition that creative best practices are evolving so rapidly, only live education or immediate feedback keeps teams ahead.
    • “Courses that were recorded six or eight months ago, like those are all outdated by now. The course won’t just be listening to people talk about ads, you know, you will actually be hands on...” — Connor MacDonald (04:37)

3. Structuring Creative Testing in 2026

• Testing Budgets & Ratios:
  • Creative testing budget as a percent of total spend ranges from 10%–40%, but much of the “testing” budget is now a hybrid of testing and scaling winners in the same campaigns.
• Campaign Structure Evolution:
  • Increasing consolidation of campaigns, allowing for more budget liquidity within Meta, less granular “one campaign per product” structure.
  • Discussion on when and how to use custom conversion events, multiple pixels, and account segmentation for signal engineering.
  • “We went from thinking…every new launch should have its own campaign to saying, we think there's value in, you know, meta uses the phrase 'budget liquidity'... Let's roll up more of these campaigns and group them together a little bit more.” — Connor Rolain (24:17)

4. Defining a “Concept”

• Concepts are now more carefully defined as a unique combination of message and format, with variations (hooks, edits, statics) falling under the same “concept” umbrella, but still variable per organization.

5. Creator Sourcing & Organizational Structure

• In-House vs Agency Balance:

  • A marked increase in hybrid in-house models where internal teams coordinate a wide network of creators/freelancers, rather than producing all assets internally or relying exclusively on agencies.
  • Agencies are preferred for expertise (especially in influencer/creator orchestration), but brands seek to reduce agency footprint and maximize strategic in-house oversight.
  • “I would consider that an internal process. I just don’t see any scenario where we have any sort of system that is truly employees of Ridge creating content in that way.” — Connor Rolain (57:24)

• Creator Networks & “Creator-in-Residence” Programs:

  • Emphasis on building ongoing pools/discord communities of creators for on-demand content, trend responsiveness, and diversity.

6. Balancing Volume and Quality/Diversity

• The “Volume vs. Quality” Debate:
  • Most teams have shifted away from maximizing volume for volume’s sake — except in early funnel development or with new products, where rapid testing and sheer volume can still be valuable.
  • As creative pipelines mature (i.e., for core products), more intentionality and quality are prioritized.
• Role of Coaching and Briefing:

  • High creative diversity comes not just from volume but from effective, strategic coaching and open briefs to creators.

    “If you're working with them properly and you're not like overly scripting it and briefing it and trying to make it on brand, I think you actually get that natural creativity if you're doing properly.” — Cody Plofker (71:57)

7. Tactical Campaign Management

• Scaling Winners:
  • CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) plus ad set min/max spends is the preferred flexible approach for both testing and scaling.
  • When an ad emerges as a winner, increase ad set minimums or duplicate into a scale campaign.
• Liquid Budgets:

  • Liquidity in campaigns allows for immediate scaling of creative winners, bypassing the lag of manual intervention.

    “What I think feels like a meaningful difference is the performance and scale we can get out of what is called a creative testing campaign...We were able to more quickly and more effectively get to winning ads getting budget.” — Connor Rolain (47:35)

8. The Impact of Platform Changes (Meta’s Andromeda)

• The hosts recognize the influence of Meta’s new infrastructure (Andromeda) on how creative is served and scaled, allowing for new creative winners to break through in ways not possible in previous years.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Creative Testing Budget:

  • “I would say all in all over this time period we're probably like 10%, 15% going into creative testing. So it's not even, it's not even that high as a, as an overall percent.” — Connor MacDonald (10:54)

• On In-Housing Content Production:

  • “We were just looking at the fees that we were paying some of these like buy spend agencies. We're like, we should hire two more creative strategists, more in house production people and like it'll be a fraction of the cost but probably better quality once we really get up and running.” — Connor MacDonald (13:01)

• On Creator Sourcing:

  • “All they're gonna be focused on is sourcing that like, like creator LED content and like filling our library with any gaps that we have. So that's like one of the big bets that we're taking in 2026.” — Connor MacDonald (65:40)

• On the Evolution of Testing Volume:

  • “Maybe the most important piece will be like the coaching aspect to make sure that you're not getting just a bunch of average concepts... Or I could also see, hey, it actually, it doesn't matter so much. We're just going to solve it with volume.” — Connor Rolain (68:02)

• On Approach to Briefing Creators:

  • “The right brief is like here's maybe a few of the value props that we want you to touch on. Here's what's performed for us, here’s dos and don’ts—and then go create.” — Cody Plofker (71:57)

• On the Cyclical Nature of Creative Strategy:

  • “We will probably, if we all do our jobs well...build communities of creators over the next year and then we won't care too much about the volume will help and then we will reach a certain point where it's like...maybe a little bit more effectively.” — Connor Rolain (73:41)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 - 01:19 — Episode theme introduction; reflecting on past vs. present workflows.
• 03:55 - 05:37 — The emergence of creative strategy as a vital role; importance of AI in modern workflows.
• 06:43 - 09:55 — The transition from volume-driven to concept-driven ad creation; real campaign/practical examples.
• 10:11 - 13:40 — Creative testing budgets, agency vs. in-house balance, how teams are structured for creative production.
• 15:16 - 19:51 — Defining “concepts”; how brands measure and organize ad creative for testing.
• 20:03 - 31:48 — Technical deep dive: campaign structures, pixel usage, signal engineering, and practical campaign management.
• 38:48 - 47:35 — New hybrid campaign workflows, creative testing and scaling mechanics.
• 49:24 - 59:08 — Sourcing content: agency, in-house, and creator pools; building pools/communities for content on demand.
• 63:49 - 65:21 — Vision for the future: daily creative launches, networked creator pipelines, platform-driven creative diversity.
• 67:19 - 73:41 — The future: coaching vs volume, the maturity curve from volume-first to strategy-first, experimentation with creator dashboards.

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Takeaways & Flowing Themes

• The industry has universally moved away from simple volume-based creative strategies towards more thoughtful, concept-first approaches.
• Signal engineering—i.e., purposely structuring ad accounts, campaigns, and data signals—has become a critical strategic lever.
• Hybrid in-house/creator models deliver the creative diversity and speed now required, with deep partnerships (vs. one-off agencies) being key.
• The role of the creative strategist has grown, focusing on systematizing learnings, guiding creators, and ensuring quality within volume.
• Future creative workflows will further embrace community-driven creator pools, AI-assisted trend mining, and workflows built for daily iteration.
• Despite AI and technology, the core challenge remains: balancing iteration speed, creative diversity, and quality—while building teams and systems that can keep pace.

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If you haven’t listened, this episode is a goldmine for current creative directors, paid media leads, and marketing operators seeking to build or update their creative testing engines for 2026 and beyond.

Transcript

[A]

I'd love to hit some of the OG episodes. And one that, like, really stuck out to me was performance creative workflows. And then we talked ad creative analysis. So I thought it'd be cool to kind of reflect on what we were talking about back then, where we're at now, how those processes have changed.

[B]

Like, we're sitting here last week thinking about, like, big, broad brushstrokes for 2026. There was not a single mention of we need to launch X number of tests per week. It was all concept driven and, like, very creative driven.

[A]

I like this idea of moving from arbitrary volume to concepts to be done. Do you have a sense of, like, roughly how much ad content do you want to be creating a week?

[C]

We're probably like 30 concepts a week. We've really ramped partnership the most. Just think age old debate quality versus quantity.

[B]

Sometimes it's five concepts per week, sometimes it's 10.

[C]

Whoa, that's a cool wallet.

[A]

Hexclad hybrid pan. It's stainless steel and non stick. I've seen everyone talking about the John Girard miracle bomb. Every time you launch new tests, it's a new campaign. And then you can turn off losers and then scale up winners in that campaign at a cbo.

[C]

With creative diversity being so important, I do think the challenge is having one team produce all of the content. Give them strategy upfront. They know what makes a good ad, they know what makes a good post. Like, they know about the brand and then they just create. And then it's just like every week they're just, boom, here's five assets. It's like literally the. I think one of the most important functions in ecom right now.

[A]

All right, welcome to another episode of Marketing Operators. We're going to do some refreshes on creative volume today. We're going to talk about ad creative testing. Everybody's favorite topic. It's been probably 80, 90 episodes since we last really went deep on it. But first we got some cool.

[B]

We got some backpack updates.

[A]

We wanted to thank Portland Gear for some fresh. I'm holding it up here. Some fresh leather backpacks emblazoned with the Marketing Operators logo. So shout out that. Did you guys get one in the mail as well?

[B]

I got one.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

I'm sad to say that I took my stuff out of my Ridge backpack and I put it in my new Portland Gear backpack. It's not that the Ridge backpack is retired, but I had to. I had to break in the new backpack, so I gotta get through. What's the. What's the use case here.

[C]

All right. I was at Best Buy yesterday. I happened to snag the last Ridge backpack they had. So Connor's going away from Ridge. I'm going towards Ridge, you know, dude, love it. No, this backpack is sick. But no, it's funny. Some, some product feedback for you. I, I went to go get it and one of the, the associates there was. The other one said, oh, I didn't know, like, Ridge made backpacks. And the other guys, the other guys, like, yeah, they make really good stuff. Like they used to make wallets. So. So you've got like, you've got like, mixed with, you got really good, really good awareness on your. Your products being good. But, you know, I think your, your wallet. Wallets are going down.

[A]

We're burdened by our own success of the new products.

[C]

Yeah, I guess that's like a good thing for you guys.

[B]

Yeah, no, it's definitely.

[A]

Yeah, it's definitely not a good thing. It's hilarious. It's more or less exactly what we wanted. It's like, you know, you're not going to be that big of a brand if you're a wallet brand, but you still want to make sure people know you make your hero product.

[C]

Yeah. But it is cool how even like the product quality associations transfers over. People are like, oh, they're known for good products.

[A]

Totally, totally. Yeah, 100%. Also one of the best buy blue shirts. Not knowing that we made backpacks, we could do a little bit of a little better employee education there.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

All right, let's get into it. But before we begin, I want to thank Motion, Rich panel, prescient, after sell and house.

[B]

Sam.

[C]

One thing that's become really obvious this year is creative strategy is changing. It is no longer just. Just about make better ads or even make more ads. You have to have AI in your workflow. You have to understand all the right best practices today. And the leverage point is how you think about the creative.

[A]

And that's where a lot of teams are struggling. People are still learning creative strategy the same way they did years ago, through trial and error, intuition. And there hasn't been a structured way to learn that role properly.

[C]

It's also super hard to find great creat strategists these days. It's still a new role and it's one that's extremely important. But there's a lot of self learning. It's. And so that's why the training in the space is so important. And Motion is a huge leader of that. And they're Launching a new free course and community launching in March. This is going to be a new way that people can really master creative strategy.

[B]

And what I really like that this is, this is all taught live. Things are changing so, so fast, so rapidly right now that courses that were recorded six or eight months ago, like those are all outdated by now. The course won't just be listening to people talk about ads, you know, you will actually be hands on in this course. So you're building concepts, you're actually making creative, you're testing it, and you're ultimately learning how to make decisions when things don't work out the first time.

[A]

And the instructor lineup is legit. There are creative experts from brands like Caraway, Calm, Harry's, Space Goods, Happy Mammoth and agency leaders and founders from Scaled Brands. They're teaching what they're doing right now, not what worked three years ago.

[C]

There'll also be some potential, I'm supposed to say internships, at least for Jones Road. I'm going to say job opportunities. You'll have the ability to sign up and learn more. But we will be interviewing a few candidates as part of this partnership, partnership with Motion, which I am so excited about. The course is live, it's free to register, seats are limited. If creative performance is part of your job in 2026, then this is worth paying attention to. We'll drop the link in the show notes.

[A]

All right, So I went back. It's funny, we were talking about like, what, what, what sort of content do we want to do? And I was like, I'd love to hit some of like the OG episodes. And one that like really stuck out to me was performance creative workflows. And it was episode two. And then we talked. And then we talked Ad creative analysis in episode 15. So dozens of episodes ago, over two years ago, basically just about two years ago. So I thought it'd be cool to kind of reflect on what we were talking about back then, where we're at now, how those processes have changed and then, you know, how are things looking differently as we move forward over the next couple months? So I want to start with creative volume because we, we literally talk about this all the time. Cody, you just brought it up. We were in another chat. But I'll, I'll start with you, Connor. So, so 2023, Connor Rolane says your biggest thing was you guys were cutting back. You were, you were creating such high volume and you wanted to focus on higher quality stuff. I'm curious, what's the experience been since. Is it the same strategy today or has it evolved at all?

[B]

Yeah, it's, it's, we've been very happy with this approach. Part of, part of that strategy too that maybe didn't get brought up. Like it wasn't a, that strategy wasn't necessarily just like a cut volume to cut volume strategy. Part of the like other side of that sword was we thought we were over indexing on low fidelity content and obviously low fidelity content like iPhone Shot UGC, it's the easiest stuff to shoot. So often when you're like pumping out volume, you're shooting a lot of lo fi stuff. So on the, yes, we wanted to like trim back volume because we thought we were like pushing volume just to push volume. But the reason we wanted to do that was a, we wanted to go invest more in other channels like YouTube, CTV, linear TV and we just needed to like open up bandwidth to do that. And we also wanted to just introduce more high fidelity content into our, our Instagram and Facebook ad library because we thought we were under index there. And like naturally that content just takes more time to ideate, to shoot, to plan. And we've been like, we've been very, very happy. We're, we're, we are very much now not going towards volume and going towards, I guess you could say more of like a, a concepts to be done approach where it's like, hey, if we have good concepts ideated like let's go make them. If we don't like let's slow down and think about new ones that we should make. So we're letting the, we're letting the ideas drive it forward and not this like arbitrary number of ads to be launched. And yeah, I mean I'm, I'm happy about it. Like it's pretty, it's pretty hard to look at our year over year meta account performance and not be convinced that that's worked. And then if you go like to the ad level and you kind of organize by ad spend, there's tons of new ads that we launched this year that have, you know, shown up now in our top spending ads. So yeah, I think overall account health looks good. And we're also seeing some of these new, these new ads scale well. So I'm, I'm very happy with the approach and I think we'll just keep going down that route this year. Like we're sitting here last week thinking about like big broad brush strokes for 2026 and it was a really fun meeting. There was not a single mention of we need to launch X number of tests per week. It was all concept driven and like very creative driven. And I think that's where we'll continue to go.

[A]

Okay. And, and okay. So I like, I like this idea of moving from arbitrary volume to concepts to be done. Do you have a sense of like, like roughly how much ad content do you want to be creating a week? Do you have any, any, any sense of deliverables, like where you just happen to land, land in this concept to be done approach?

[B]

I mean, I can pull up our calendar. We, in 2023, sometimes we were launching like 1520 concepts per week with tons of iterations under there. So now we're seeing that's often like sometimes it's five concepts per week, sometimes it's 10. It just depends on kind of like when certain assets get pumped through and like what time of year it is. So I'd say it's, you know, at a minimum half of what we were doing and probably at a max, like a third or a fourth and less iterations under each concept. So it's, I don't have like spec. I could pull up our creative testing calendar as like a follow up here, but it's, it's significantly less volume.

[A]

Awesome.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So Cody, you were, you were asking in a, in a chat we had with a friend this week how they were set in creative volume goals. So I'm curious. Let's see, 2023, you were saying use would do like, let me pull it up here.

[C]

I, I also have a lot of questions for Connor too. Oh, dude, I want to go there first. So Connor, what, what percentage of your, if you can share, like what percentage of your meta ad account is creative testing spend? Because I, I was looking through the notes that Connor was putting together and it seemed like it was like decently high, like maybe 30% and it, and if that's the case, it seems like you're, you're more like, we have much more volume, but our creative testing spend is less than it. So I wonder if you are just like spending more per test because you have higher conviction in them. If you're spending more just because you know you're aov or if you're like more successful, you know your hit rate is higher and you're able to like scale them harder. Like, what's that look like?

[B]

It's not, it's not even that hot. I mean, like I'm looking from September 1st through October 31st and we had 6% of our, of our budget went into our like dedicated creative testing campaign. Now that's not truly what's creative testing for us? Because also during that time period we have like a big knives landing page test that we broke out as its own campaign that we spent a good chunk of money on. We're launching a bunch of new sweepstakes ads that were, that were all in their own campaigns and that you could call that creative testing too. So I would say all in all over this time period we're probably like 10%, 15% going into creative testing. So it's not even, it's not even that high as a, as an overall percent. But also like the way that we like we just launched the cocktail shaker like we talked about. We didn't launch those ads in creative testing. That was our broken out into their own campaign because that's how we've decided to launch new products. But like that is creative testing. They're brand new ads. We've never ran them before just because it's not under our like evergreen creative testing. So yeah, I'd say like 10% over this time period roughly. It's not, it's not a huge chunk.

[C]

And what's your gut like if you can share like what's your like portfolio look like? And I guess like Rich, I'd be curious you guys as well. Like I feel like Connor, you guys are doing a lot in house. I don't know, like would you say you're 100 in house? Would you say you're like 50? Like you still have agencies in the mix obviously you have influencer ads in the mix. Like what's that, that portfolio look like?

[B]

I mean it's all in house if you obviously like the influencers shooting on their own. But like we're facilitating it. So I guess I would technically call that in house. Same with any net new content production. Like technically we might go honestly for like the paid social stuff and the YouTube stuff. If stuff. It is pretty much primarily in house now for the higher level like CTV linear TV ads, our head of content is going out and sourcing, you know like writers and, and people to help with the production. But again it's like yeah, so you.

[C]

Don'T have any issues that are shipping you content for like paid social.

[B]

But not, not anymore. Yeah, not, not since like Q1 of this year. We're pretty much 100 internalized and we were just, yeah, we were just looking at the fees that we were paying some of these like buy spend agencies. We're like, we should hire two more creative strategists, more in house production people and like it'll Be a fraction of the cost but probably better quality once we really get up and running. So yeah, we're, we're fully. No, no, this is just in the US we definitely lean on something like we lean on static for example in our EU UK hubs. So we're definitely not, not fully in house over there. But yeah, the US is yeah, awesome.

[A]

I think it's a good, I want to, I want to walk through that same, same kind of set of questions for you Cody. So where are you landing right now with volume? Because if I remember correctly over the last couple years you guys, you guys didn't have that much of a focus on volume. Maybe became more of a priority over the last year and a half or so.

[C]

Yeah, we definitely have, have tried to ramp up volume and, and want to continue to do so. We're, I should know. We're probably like 30 concepts a week. I don't, I don't know exactly. We've, we've really ramped partnership the most. So that's really like the biggest focus and probably like the most number of the most volume of concepts that we're launching. But I think it's somewhere around 30 per week and want to do it, you know, bigger. I just think age old debate quality versus quantity. I think we are shipping a lot of not good ads and I think that's a little bit pointless to do. So you know, I think it's volume once you get, once you get the right muscles in place. And so we've definitely had successes in a lot of areas and then I think a few recently we're trying to make some bigger swings and kind of change the way we're doing it which I think you have to a like just a performance isn't there? You have to you know, restructure and shake things up. But also like if the platforms are changing you gotta, you gotta do it. I think our, our approach was a little bit, and the team we had was a little bit like three years ago which like doesn't sound like that long ago but like things have changed so much since then and so I think we're trying to take like a very different approach to it and we'll probably scale back up volume even above where we were at once. We feel like that's in a really good spot.

[B]

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[A]

Right, so, so 30 concepts. Okay, so being like slightly pedantic here, how do you define concept?

[C]

We call it Jobs. It's essentially what's, what's given to an editor or a strategist. It is, it depends. For a partnership ad, that's a unique video, right? And so that's, that's a influencer doing a unique video. If we got. And usually there's you know, three hooks in that. So those are iterations. But concept would be, you know, I'm Jane and I'm doing a miracle on video in my car, right? Like we might do three hooks. That's one concept. If Jane does what the foundation video in a kitchen, like that's a separate concept. So that's like a, like a unique ad. Not necessarily edited, but like unique footage. And then I think with statics it gets a little harder because the way that we've gone from testing statics is like a bunch of very similar statics with, you know, different headlines. Like we're not really doing that and so we might have an ad set that has like eight different statics or 15 different statics. And there are variations, but like it's, it's kind of muddled. I don't know.

[A]

Yeah, totally. No, I mean this is like also extremely blurry. I was talking about it with Reza from Motion and I said I don't have like a clear view on what a concept is. I think roughly the way we treated it, ridges, some combination of message and format and like what are you talking about and how are you talking about it? And then there can be, you can imagine there are variations within that headlines or hooks. Or it could be, you could edit it differently. Right. It could be like you could remove the voiceover and add sound and things like that. And that would be variations of the same concept. Um, so.

[C]

Okay, cool.

[A]

So. And you think you're delivering like roughly 30 of those. That's. That, that seems. With variations. And we're talking about 50, probably 60 unique ads a week.

[C]

Yeah, so we're, we're probably going and doing three variations of like all partnership ads. Two or three of partnership ads. Not above that. We used to do like six, which is like, used to be overkill. Now it's way overkill. Um, and then. Yeah, and then the other stuff. But one of the differences that we've made is how we test is trying to go to this like ecosystem approach. And so rather than testing like three ads and in different ad set and then you like scale them out into the whole one. It's almost like a campaign. It's almost like, hey, this is like. And we're not fully there. We're like hybrid or we're going towards it, but it's almost like, hey, this is a Persona or like a value proposition that we want to test behind. We're going to create like 12 to 15 ads and we're going to launch those and there's going to be statics, there's going to be videos. Like they're all going to be grouped around some type of shared theme, but they're all going to be like different ads because I think that's how Meta is saying it kind of wants things. So it's still a work in progress. Like, I love it in theory. I don't find that we get as. As accurate of necessarily clean data or learnings from it because you get, you know, three ads that get spend and the rest don't. But that's at least a little bit. And I think that just like completely makes that conversation of what is a concept so much more challenging.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's why it makes for such good podcast fodder.

[C]

That's why there's not the same thing.

[A]

Yeah, we'll be able to do dozens of these episodes over the next decade.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Cody, a quick question about that. Do you. So are you launching all those? Like, if you have this. All right, so let's say it's like a certain messaging angle around a specific product, like a certain problem that people have that your product solves. So you're saying you'll go produce a, like, robust stack of content, like maybe statics like hi Fi, maybe some ugc, and then you'll. Will you launch that all under the same ad set?

[C]

In theory, yeah. We're definitely not there yet. Like, we don't have like all of the production and all of like the capabilities, like line them all up at the same time. But yeah, if we're doing like a sprint or we're trying to test a new Persona, like, we're trying to create different ads. Right. Let's say we're reaching busy professionals and we're trying to talk about how this is great, like before zoom and stuff like that. Like, we're going to shoot different stuff. We'll get some UGC going, we'll get some existing assets. We'll usually start with that before, like shooting new production stuff because usually we want to test the message sooner. But yeah, we'll try to find a bunch of different ways to speak to the same thing or the same person. And we'll put that together.

[B]

Got it. Nice. And then. And single campaign, then all around that.

[C]

Yeah, often. Often single ad set. So we have. And I know one of the questions like CBO versus abo. We have two ways we test creative. One is partnership ads. We have. And it's like right now it's like our second highest spending campaign. We have a partnership ads ABO where we test things for partnership ads. Usually like 250 bucks a day. That is more traditional testing where it's like one concept, three variations, two fifty a day. We'll let things spend a thousand before we do anything. So that's usually like five days. But it depends obviously how quickly we scale it. If we see any signs of life of leading indicators. So, you know, north beam roas percent new visits, you know, cost per thousand, accounts reach. Like, we'll start scaling the budget up in there. If after a thousand looks bad, we'll cut it and then we'll. We'll scale things in there. Like we have stuff in there that's probably spent, like, a hundred grand over the last, like, you know, month. Um, but we'll obviously try to scale it out into, like, another campaign, but if it's performing, we'll leave it. So that's, like, one way we do it. And I think for partnership ads, I really like it because we are investing a lot in this content, and we kind of. Maybe it's sunken cost fallacy, but, like, we kind of do want to. You know, we do want to force some spend to it. I also think we're investing a lot in this content, you know, because we are confident in it. So it's like, it's all just, like, a level of probability. The other campaign that we have is a CBO with, I think it's been a while, but I think we do minimum spends on it, and we'll usually have, like, three ad sets in there with minimum spends, and that's kind of those, like, 12 ads in there concepts. I think if we were more confident in a lot of that stuff, I think we just haven't really had the right approach or strategy. I probably would be more comfortable going abo, especially because there's a lot of ads. It's not like you're forcing spend to, like, two ads, but we'll. We'll do that, and then we'll kind of just like, let things, you know, see how they perform. So we have both going. I do think I lean towards the ABO approach a little bit more, which is obviously different at the beginning of the year.

[A]

Those are the two types of campaigns that new creative gets put in.

[C]

Yep. Yep.

[A]

Okay. Super interesting. Why do you feel partnerships should be its own campaign?

[C]

Because I wanted. Strictly because I wanted to test them in abo, and we didn't have abo.

[A]

Got it. Got it.

[C]

So more for, like, the cleanness of it and because I want. The reason I want it to be ABO is, you know, some of these partnership ads, I mean, on the high end, you're spending like, we just had our largest partners, 30 grand a month just on content. Like, I don't want to put that in ASC and, like, hope it gets spent right. Like, sure, I'm gonna spend some money on that, because I think you're. You're. Everything is a bet, and you're saying, hey, I'm willing to spend this money on the content because I'm not confident. Like, I then need to put some level of spend behind it. And maybe I've just gone a little bit away from trusting the system. But I think on that Content where you have a sunken cost of the content, like, it definitely is worth it. And so that. That's the main reason why otherwise we could. We could. If we were doing ABO everywhere, we could just have one campaign for it.

[A]

Yeah, 100%.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Interesting. I. To jump in on. On you guys want to talk campaign structure for creative testing quickly. We could jump around a little bit. And then I do want to talk about how you're sourcing all the content that you're. You're getting, Cody, Because I've come around on this a bit. Like, one of our big differences year over year, really, is that we have a far more consolidated campaign, and that comes from a couple of places. One, I asked about the partnership ads because we've just been less. We've been more flexible on the ways in which we'll consolidate different product or licensing deals or, you know, just seasonal newness or promo ads into the same campaigns. I do think there's like, it's like, what are the dimensions that you really need to be breaking it out? We obviously have different ad accounts for our different categories. Our meta reps will sometimes say, like, just throw your ring ads, your luggage ads, and your wallet ads all in one, you know, CBO campaign. And it's like, just give us everything in, like, one budget line. We're not going to do it. We're nowhere near that. But we went from thinking, hey, we, every new launch should have its own campaign to saying, we think there's value in, you know, meta uses the phrase budget liquidity in giving meta more budget liquidity between these campaigns. Unless we're like, unless we really care about inventory or the margins are significantly different. Let's roll up more of these campaigns and group them together a little bit more so we have a far more consolidated structure. So you have.

[C]

So if your ad accounts. You have three ad accounts.

[A]

We have three ad accounts.

[C]

Right. And you have. Are they same pixel like or are they all unique pixel?

[A]

So two of them have unique pixels that fire conditionally on product.

[C]

The.

[A]

The product type field. So if you're buying a wallet, you're f. You're. You're. We're firing a purchase event from meta just for that. And that's a wallet purchase. And we know that same with rings and Travel right now uses our. Travel right now uses our general pixel that fires on all purchases unconditionally. And we are going to try to move to consolidating to one pixel and then using custom conversions.

[C]

Cool. Cool. I love. Yeah. I was going to ask if you tried. Because we are one ad account, we used to be like so consolidated that it was one campaign and now we're trying to break things out further and I feel like separate accounts, separate pixels, like as far as you can get. So I was curious if you've like tried different ones because otherwise it's. Yeah, it's like a hard thing to test, dude.

[A]

It's an impossible thing to test. And it's hard because like really the categories that use. Yeah, like a little bit of a side tangent here. Every time we've moved to a single pixel, the categories performed better. That's, that's not causation. I'm not saying that those things are like, are caused by one another necessarily, but it has happened. So then the, the whoever we're talking to, our reps or someone else would be like, you should try consolidating. And it's like we don't really have any reason to. Things are performing well. It technically got better when we switched it over. There are limitations. You don't get any server side tracking. So you lose all of the capi stuff when you have conditional pixel firing and that's a problem. And like I think over the long term it probably makes sense for us to figure out how to get cappy on all of our pixels. But it's kind of a delicate, A delicate, what's the phrase here? We're walking the line as far as like how we want to approach it. So we're going to try to consolidate. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully we don't see any like negative impacts at the category level. That's really how we'll be looking at it because we're not going to be able to a b test it or do any sort of household out. So we'll just see how that goes.

[C]

So you're gonna go, you're gonna go, you're gonna try to go separate ad accounts. One pixel.

[A]

Yeah, one pixel. And then just optimize for the custom conversions. So the, the problem, the, the reason we do it and we can actually even see this in our travel ad account. Sometimes the one that uses the purchase event that fires on all purchases is we are promoting a, a product that is has a $450 AOV when you buy it. It's extremely high. If we allow. There are many times where because we don't have the best performing ads or for whatever reason, like just things are not really working in the account. We'll see Meta begin driving $120 average orders and it's like, oh yeah, you are no longer acquiring luggage customers. You're no longer doing what we're asking. You are just kind of like feeding off the bottom of funnel. The people interested in Ridge wallets are coming in and they're purchasing, you know, a Ridge wallet, a key case and a tracker card or whatever. And that's not at all what we want. But if you don't even allow for the purchase event to fire on that sort of purchase, I think meta has that constraint and will is more accurately optimizing towards the goal that you're setting for it.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's probably how we're going to test first, is we're going to test different ad account, same pixel, do some signal engineering. Because I think the separate pixel seems like the most risky or like the biggest one. And obviously you said there's some downsides. I don't know how much, by the way. I think this is one of those things that I'm sure some meta reps will be listening, like they can't advocate for it. I just think they're never going to say, hey, I think you should set up a different ad account. It's like admitting a little too much of maybe the systems being inefficient or maybe Olivia's point from House is the systems are actually so good at getting what you want that this is somewhere where you need some signal engineering. But yeah, I think that's always been.

[A]

My theory is that the system is so good at optimizing for the thing that it's tracking the most of. And like that is, I think if you look at the best brands in D2C, they're like, they're like single buy buttons on websites. They look like AG1 more than ever. All, all the like invoke brands right now are like extremely low SKU count and all of your paid social channels are just optimizing for one very simple thing. And I think if you're trying to build a big catalog business or potentially even more difficult, like just four very unique lines of business that like the idea that you don't need to do any sort of signal engineering is just like kind of silly to me.

[C]

Okay. And then I guess to close up the point on this and go back to Crypt, that's. So you think rather than try to get meta to optimize for multiple different things, have it optimized for one single thing multiple different times.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. It's just building redundancy and that's why it's like okay, so the one thing I'll say quickly, we don't really, I don't think there's much value, at least our belief at Ridge is that there's not that much value in the different ad accounts. We just think that's more like organization more than anything else. It's really about like the event that you're optimizing for. We set up those pixels to build that redundancy. We want to be optimizing for exactly what you said, the one thing, but doing it multiple, multiple different ways.

[C]

But, but there are, there are learnings at different levels. Like I don't think it's just ad account. Like I know there's learnings at page level, right? There's learnings, I believe at some ad account level. I don't know. Like, obviously there's learnings at pixel level. So what I've been told about is like, if you're going to do it, you almost have to do it. And again, I hope we haven't tested, but you almost have to do it like clean. It's almost like Gruen's approach, like different funnel. So you have different, different everything.

[A]

Totally. Yeah. Or you look at like, you know, Fabletics has like a Fabletics men Facebook page because I think there's, there's learnings being rolled up there. So we could probably be even more. We do a ridge travel or ridge rings, separate pages. We'd probably be even more experimental. But as it relates to the pixels, we're going to try to consolidate a little bit more and then have those custom conversion events and then optimize for those. And that should give us ideally a nice mix of like capi and all the server side stuff that you need. You have access to the full suite of value optimization tools, but you're still optimizing for like the exact thing that you actually want to be driving.

[B]

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[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And you're doing that now like you're, you're sorry, you are, you are or are not optimizing for the custom purchase.

[A]

Event right now we have separate pixels. We have examples of se completely separate pixels that fire conditionally. You don't get capi. We're going to try to consolidate to one pixel, get capi and use custom and conversions to still get the effect of optimizing specifically for like a ring order or a luggage order.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, because we do the, we do what you're moving towards, but slightly different where we have a single pixel but custom conversion events. But we are not actually, we're still optimizing for the single like overall general purchase event. We, we're just using right now the custom conversions as a, as a measurement tactic. But I, but, but we've had these custom conversions set up for I mean over two years now. So we have tons of specific purchase conversion data and we'll probably get into like how we, how we like the dimensions that deserve new campaigns because that's kind of the approach we've taken. But I do want to go and we haven't felt the need to like make any big swings because we're getting pretty good performance out of all of our broken out categories. But I do want to try and see like what happens if we do optimize for this knife purchase in this knife campaign and, and not only use it for measurements. I'll be curious to, to check in with you once you guys have made that, made that test and got some data back.

[A]

Totally. Yeah.

[B]

I do think like the campaign level though, like that's been our approach and that's why our, our ad account looks like if you were to go in there, I'm sure all you guys are like, oh my God, like there's a full, a full, you know, ad account, page length of live accounts. And it's because we, we don't break out our, our product categories into new ad accounts and but like every time we do this, it like revalidates that. As long as you're breaking it out at like the campaign ad set level, like we just launched our cocktail shaker. Couldn't be more clear that a, it's a different buyer. What I've been very happy about is I can very clearly see this, the, the campaign optimizing over time. Like we started off at like, it's just the CPA has been slowly going down and down and down. We haven't done any refreshes on creative, we haven't done any refreshes on the campaign. It's just clearly more data is getting passed back to Meta and Meta is getting better at going and finding a more efficient cpa. So I've been, that's like, just like a recent example for hexcloud where we didn't have to do any, like the signal engineering was happening through the, just the campaign structure. We didn't have to do any like weird technical pixel stuff. Maybe again, maybe we could. And to your point, Connor, maybe we should test that. But it seems that just by having it broken out as its own ad set ad campaign ad set ad funnel, it's, it's kind of achieving what we wanted it to, which is reaching an incrementally different audience than we're reaching with our like, you know, cookware ads going to a 12 piece set landing page.

[A]

What, what? From my experience, the only thing that I would add to that is when things are working, I think Meta will do that. Right? Like if you're saying, hey, I, I just, I, I don't care about any conditions, just optimize for purchase. I'm going to give you these cocktail shaker ads and go do it now. And if it can get cocktail shaker ads, it's a cocktail shaker ad to a cocktail shaker landing page. Like, obviously if things work, the best thing it can optimize for is cocktail shaker purchases. If it's not working for some reason, then I've, then I feel I see Meta begin to like, oh, we're just gonna, we're gonna see percent new visits go down. We're gonna start driving people that like are just buying wallets and things like that. So it's like you almost lose, you lose the constraint. When you don't have constraints you lose leverage in like low volume periods or when things aren't working and you have to be like more deliberate about testing into them. That's where we've seen issues.

[C]

I also think that's where to start. Like, like start the. Less.

[B]

Yeah, less. The least technically demanding. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

Like and then if that doesn't work. Right. Cause like that's what we're going to do. Separate campaigns. Maybe some. We're going to have some custom conversions with you know, whatever it is, different ways, different value rules as well. And then if that doesn't work then you can figure out what is your next step from there. Is it right?

[A]

Totally.

[C]

Is it page? Is it ad account? So for me it's campaigns, ad accounts, Pixels is probably how I would go about it.

[A]

And then, and then I'd even put the custom conversions like earlier in that process. Campaign campaigns, custom conversions.

[C]

Yeah, totally agreed.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

We have seen that. By the way though, like fragrance when we, when we try to put fragrance ads. It's happened a few times in makeup campaigns. Just weirdness like where like makeup will stop. Miracle bomb ads stop performing. Like it just, it just throws it off.

[B]

I do think like high level this. I think any, no matter what size you are, I do think now more than ever, I mean they were harping on this at the performance summit. Right. Was. Was signal engineering. Like whether you're going to be set doing like the more advanced stuff like Ridge or whether you're just gonna be doing it in the ad account with how you structure it. Like I do think like you gotta be going into it with like signal engineering in mind and keeping the signal clean for your business objectives and not just like oh I have two campaigns and I have like 10 different products I'm. I'm dropping under all these campaigns like it is gonna. That will definitely have adverse effects on your, not just your ad account but like you'll probably see that flow all the way up to your like revenue growth. Totally. So I, we're definitely thinking about that more and more and more. And I think that's what like that's the big takeaway I think here is like you don't have to be doing all this super technical stuff. I think you can if you need to. But you should be like everything you build out in your ad account should have that like signal engineering signal clarity lens on it. 100.

[A]

So we were talking about, we got on that topic because I was talking about campaign consolidation that's where Ridge is at. And another place that we've. I don't know if you'd consider this campaign consultation consolidation, but I've liked where we've landed from a creative testing workflow perspective. So where we're at now, we have one creative testing campaign for each category. But, like, we're not breaking out different. You know, in. In the past, we might have had a video campaign or an image campaign or something like that. Just dimensions that we've decided we're better off consolidating now. So single creative testing campaign, CBO concept gets launched, has a new ad set. So we'll have a number of variations in there. We're doing minimum budgets on it. So that's how we're ensuring that dollars get allocated to new concepts. And I guess the. The concept variations of a single concept in an ad set is not a hard and fast rule. There are scenarios where we're grouping in a few more, but by and large, we're launching a lot of new ad sets. In the CBO campaign, we're using minimum ad set budgets to make sure that dollars are getting allocated there. And then what that's allowed us to do is it's become like a hybrid winners campaign plus creative testing. So when things begin to perform, we can. It will naturally take up a larger percentage of the budget because we might have a $10,000 budget for the creative testing campaign and only minimum set up to spend $6,000. So all of a sudden, whatever's winning gets to spend that additional $4,000. If we have any concerns about one ad set spending too much, we can set max as 2. So you get a lot of control there. And then we're able to scale that campaign while continuing to launch new ad sets within it to say, hey, yeah, we need to spend 400 a day on these XYZ new concepts. And this is what actually I got from the Performance Summit and was something that we implemented in the summer of last year is like, we just want to get to budget liquidity faster. What we'd been doing in the past is we would be testing everything in ABO campaigns, and then we like, trying to, like, pseudo scale those. And then we just had a media buyer making decisions at the ad set level, which just doesn't make any sense. So, like, just how do we. How do we set up the testing campaign and the structure so that we can get to that liquidity faster? And that's kind of the place that we've landed at now. And it's allowed us to the creative testing campaign. We've been talking about creative testing budgets. It's hard to know, I don't know, actually, like our creative testing budget on a day to day basis because a creative testing campaign ends up being able to scale so meaningfully because we're able to maintain this hybrid approach. Yeah. So like, I'm looking last. This is like last 60 days. It's like almost 40% of our ad account was spent on creative testing, but the majority of that will be going to things that we've deemed are winners and that. It's just a. It's just a subset of that. That's like truly testing with the ad set minimums.

[C]

I like that a lot. I think the point of getting to liquidity faster is great because, like, I can tell you on the. It's kind of funny because you and I have flopped from CBO to AB over the year, but on the partnership stuff, right, that, that is an issue. Especially when we get a winner and we have 30 days rights and we want to scale it as fast as possible. It's like, all right, we're launching this as at 500 bucks a day or 250 bucks a day. Like, yeah, you can double that for, you know, a few days in a row. You're still not spending that meaningfully. And. And so it's like, how are we. Like, for example, we had a winner recently. It was, you know, 30k a month, and we actually launched it a little bit later. So we like, didn't have full months. We're like, all right, we gotta spend, you know, we try to spend 10, so we gotta spend 300k minimum on this, you know, to hit our goals. I'm like, all right, we launched it at a thousand bucks a day. Like, I could. That's not much. I'm like, I. I can either just double, triple it up in here, you know, and do that. I can relaunch it. Right. And not me and my team, but we can relaunch this at, you know, five grand a day. See how it does. We can try to scale it into other stuff, but, you know, it doesn't always perform the same. So, like, I love that you have the option, you know, the liquidity in there, I think makes a lot of sense to scale it faster and take advantage without having to manually decide.

[A]

Totally. And we've talked about this before because the other way that intuitively made sense to me is just to be launching new creative testing campaigns, like on a weekly basis. Every time you launch new tests, it's a new campaign, and then you could turn off losers and then scale up winners in that campaign at a cbo. And then we just. We just landed at the spot that is like this big hybrid campaign where we can get a lot of volume behind it.

[C]

And do you have any concerns with kind of competition of like, do you ever feel like the newer stuff doesn't get a fair shot against the older stuff? Or do you feel like the minimums take care of that?

[A]

I think the minimums take care of that.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

I think it's a really, like, elegant solution where it's like, we can make sure if we have some, like, in your case, we have some expensive piece of creative that we really want to put budget behind because we feel good about it, and we want to make sure we, like, fully flesh it out, as in ideas. Like, you can set up $3,000 per day minimum and just spend $30,000 over 10 days on it. So you get the, like, you get full control on the low end. And then as soon as you want to scale, we've at least gotten to the point as it relates to this campaign to say, okay, Meta, we will. We will allow you to allocate however you best see fit over, like, over the minimum amount. We have minimum set for 50k a day or whatever. We want to spend a hundred K on this campaign that the rest of that $50,000 can. Can be divvied up however you choose. And then you even have control on the high end with the maxes where, like, if all of a sudden Meta wanted to spend the additional $50,000 on one ad, we might just set a maximum for that ad set and just say, okay, no, we actually do want you to distribute it a little bit more than this. But we try to, like, we're trying to, like, minimize the amount of manual decisions there a little bit. And this is at least the current approach.

[B]

So can I. So if you. Because we do a similar setup, cbo, minimum, minimum ad set spending. So we're. We're not going to, like, drop a new ad set in there, a new example, and it's going to get, you know, $3 to spend. So when you. When you find a winner and it's in a CBO and you're like, hey, we want to scale up this. This winner. But it's. It's a cbo, so you don't have as much control over the ad set except with, like, some of the men and the max. Like, will you. What's the actual like tactic to make sure that you're spending more on that winner. Like, are you. If. If Meta's not doing it? So let's say you spend like, you have a minute and 500 per day or a thousand per day. Maybe one scenario is like, that ad starts working and Meta is recognizing that, and it starts to spend way over that min. And in that case, you're probably like, great. We don't maybe need to touch it. It's doing what we want it to do. Do you ever have a scenario where like, wow, this ad set relative to our other creative test right now is really crushing, but Met is not spending much over the min. Like, do you have any tactics to be like, how do we get more budget behind this outside of, you know, duplicating it into a scale campaign or something like that?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's. It's really just those two options you have. When it comes to getting more dollars behind a winning concept, I guess there's three options. Meta either figures out it's winning and does it for you. We're saying that doesn't. That doesn't happen. If you want to get it within that creative testing campaign, we would just set a higher minimum. Now all of a sudden, we're saying, this isn't a creative testing minimum. This isn't 500 a day. This is like, we want to make sure that we're spending $10,000 a day here. That's totally plausible.

[B]

So now your man won from like, 500 a day, and you're like, we've, we've called this a winner. We're gonna actually go into the ad set and edit 500 to 5,000 or 10,000 or whatever it is.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's the lever that you have there. And then we do still take winners. And then we have two scaling campaigns that we have that have different types of exclusions. So we do get it there. So, like. But those are CBO as well. So just if you were trying to get budget behind it, we do get it in more places in the account. If it is a winner, you'd like to think at some point, Meta figures it out and just starts putting budget behind it. But if not, you just have the controls around the minimums.

[B]

Yep, got it. That makes sense. And do you. Maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but what do you see the more. The most success with now, do you see the more success with raising the min or duplicating the ad into We.

[A]

We've put the most success we've seen or what I think feels like a meaningful difference is the performance and scale we can get out of what is called a creative testing campaign. Just because this is where the ads are first launched, it's where they get the most learnings. You're giving Meta the flexibility to deliver more budget behind each of those new concepts so you can scale that campaign further. So it's this again, this like weird hybrid that feels like the most beneficial. We've never had, like I said last, last 60 days, creative testing for Meta for our wallet business is like almost 40%. You would never expect that, like that, that would be really high. Yeah, it's about 40% but it's not actually. But it's not actually. And that's like. And I actually think that's the whim is that we were able to more quicker and more effectively get to winning ads getting budget.

[B]

Right. That makes sense.

[A]

Our Meta reps were happy with it too. They were like, hell yeah.

[B]

Well, we've seen more. I think when we had this conversation like on episode, whenever we had this conversation last, like hexcloud was having a really hard time getting winning new creative test winning ads to serve in our scaled campaigns. That's actually not. That has shifted. And I wonder if that has to do with the Andromeda update because it's like again, theoretically it does seem like Andromeda would allow for more horizontal scale amongst ads if you give the account like the setup to do so. And now I'm going through our scaled campaigns this year and like tons of new ads from this year are showing up in our scale campaigns which I'm, I'm pumped on because it's allowed us to kind of reconsolidate our scaled campaigns. Now again, our, our account still looks crazy because like we have scaled campaigns for cookware and then like different, like, like audience audience enhanced bidding and like value bidding. So now you end up with like a bunch of different like technical settings to scale out certain categories. And then you also have like the non cookware stuff still. It looks, it still looks kind of crazy, but I've been very happy that we've been able to take winners and not have to like do as much kind of like campaign jockeying or even just scaling up in the like we will still scale up and creative testing as long as it performs well. But I was looking at our like creative testing campaign from September 1st through October 31st just because we don't do as much net new testing in the, in the following two months. And like I think our highest spending ad set was like 50 grand. So I'm like, great. This is because we're, we're finding winners and we're effectively getting them out of this campaign and, and getting them to scale in the scale campaign. So I don't think there's a right way to do it necessarily. But I've been happy at least about that and what that's meant for like the, the amount of live campaigns we have in hexcloud at any given time.

[A]

Totally. So yeah, Andromeda obviously plays a really big role here. Right. Like I think that's, that's what's driving a lot of the decisions or changes or experimentation around campaign structure. So I do want to go back to Cody as it relates to you guys are delivering 30 concepts a week. That diversity is more important than ever with things like Andromeda, who's producing all that content.

[C]

We're not current, we're pretty agency heavy. We're not currently producing a ton. So I would say we have a decent amount or different workflows pipeline. So our creative team, who's less like paid, social focused, we have a lot of launches every two weeks. So all of our statics comes from our creative team. Whether it's, you know, our creative director and creative team working with our, you know, external photographer. We do, you know, we do every probably two to three months of like a campaign shoot where we'll get multiple products. So that's just like all of our e commerce assets, all of our hero products, stuff like that one person on our, on our internal team does a lot of like product still and, and video. So that's like a lot of assets that then gets repurposed whether that's you know, or B roll. We'll try to get some like social style iPhone stuff on those shoots as well. And then like static. So that's, that's a lot of it and at least that's like a lot of statics and a lot of like launch stuff. We'll shoot some stuff with Bobby. Whether it's you know, a little bit more higher produced or iPhone lately. Like we'll do that internally as well. So that's just you know, our internal creative team and creative strategy team and social teams. We have probably one to two agencies that we're working with at a given time for you know, creative and, and I. Whether this is the episode or not. Like happy to share how our approach is changing. Obviously, you know, we talked about kind of moving towards the organic social stuff but we have kind of like creator agencies that's more like, I'll call it more of like you're like UGC rather than like influencer and then influencer. We do a combination right? So this is like mainly the partnership ads of internal. We have you know, people on. What we try to do is, is if we get people that are performing, get them on a, you know, six month contract and get you know, multiple deliverables. So we have people like that. We have just like people from you know, our internal teams effort that like we can kind of reach out to and get some content. We have Superbloom so we had Lily on like they're definitely the bulk of our partnership spend is, is with them. We do two things. Some of it is just a UGC pipeline where it's, it's influencer stuff. It's what, it's whitelisting but it's, there's no like organic influencer post. It's just getting content and whitelisting and then probably double the amount of budget comes from you know, people posting on their, on their IG either whether it's a reel or a story and then getting you know, getting rights to that as part of it. TBD on which style performs better. But it seems like both of them work so they've been most successful. You know we've tried some other stuff like agentio and some other agencies but really consolidating that down to Super Bloom for the majority of it and then some internal stuff for, for whitelisting ads I think yeah, we'll use like static, right? We'll use like you know, static like really trying to build up a fleet of designers. You know, we'll use like Activate and Talent and stuff like that to get like a bunch of designers starting to ship some AI stuff like it's, it's getting, I'm curious if you guys are. But like just with statics now with videos like I'm not interested in like AI UGC but with statics where it's like very close to just like unlimited amount of, of those. So that's, that's kind of currently where we're at lately.

[A]

Every market I talked to says the same thing. Budgets are tight, goals are higher than ever and I have to prove what's working, not just report it. And that is the new reality of marketing. If you can't afford to rely on guesses or platform reported results, you need clear causal proof of what's actually driving growth. And that's exactly where house comes in. Incrementality testing is the new scientific way to measure true impact to see what's moving the needle and what's just noise. So you can reallocate spend based on fact and not faith. Cody, Connor and I all use Houzz for incrementality testing, and it's become a core part of the modern measurement stack. They're now working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands, which shows just how quickly this approach is becoming the new standard for serious growth teams. Houzz helps you run real experiments across your channel so you can answer questions that actually matter, like which channels are truly driving incremental revenue? How much should I really be spending on Meta, Google or YouTube? And what's the halo effect of my ads on Amazon or retail sales? What sets haus apart is the combination of rigorous science and market. The math under the hood is complex, built on causal inference and experimentation. But the platform itself is simple. You can choose your questions, launch a test in minutes, and get clear, actionable results you can actually use. Plus, every customer gets a dedicated measurement strategist, someone who's lived in the world of growth and knows how to translate data into strategy. They'll help you design smart tests, interpret the results, and build a repeatable culture of experimentation across your team. With House, you aren't just buying a tool. You're buying the growth marketing team that can help you make the most of it. In a world where every marketing dollar is under a mic scope, you need to know what matters with House by going to House IO operators, that's H A U S I operators, and start allocating your budget with confidence. Do you think it will always be so, like, given. Given how diverse the creative needs to be and how much you need of it, will you guys always be this agency heavy or do you think you're in, like, in a. An exploritative phase and you'll eventually start in housing More of it?

[C]

Yeah, for sure. That, that, that's how I feel about it. We will definitely do more like on the influence side than Supervolt, but like, they're. I'm not, I'm not just trying to like, pitch them. Like, they're really good at it and so like, we've had better performance from them versus, you know, others. But yeah, I think we'll do both. Right. Like, we won't just be them. Like, we'll do more internally for creator stuff. Definitely, definitely. I think more. I think definitely we'll in house it more. I think definitely it's been, you know, as we explore, want, you know, ideas or as we've had, you know, team turnover and stuff. It's kind of like what, who can we bring in to get some kind of fresh ideas? But I think it, I think it depends or what I'm learning. I know you've said this about like your, you know, your influencer partnerships, like less partnerships but more like bigger ones. That's kind of how I'm approaching, approaching agency stuff. So in the past we might have had like five agencies at a time. Now it's like I want like two agencies.

[A]

You want to like fully utilize them.

[C]

You want like business, they know like everything but, but makes total sense. The one thing this is why I was asking Connor about this is like with creative diversity being so important, I do think the challenge is having one team produce all of the content. It's just hard to come up totally the, the, the, the biggest change that we're making, obviously we're going to change. We're gonna, we're merging organic and paid social under one. So that's a big change that we're, we're, we're actually not really producing that much content or right now we're, we're not going to be producing that much content. We are going to be working with creators. So I think an internal team can work with a wide range of creators and get the creative diversity you need. I think the challenge is if you have like an internal production team, they are probably good at one style of creative.

[A]

Totally. And that's, I think, I personally think the scenario where you have an internal team quarterbacking like a network of creators, I think of that as internal. That's almost exclusively what we do at Ridge. Like we don't, we don't actually have anybody who's filming any content that gets in the ad account in any meaningful way. Like there may be a handful of exceptions there, but by and large 95% plus of the, especially the volume based content that we create, I would consider being done internal. But it's all briefs that we're sending out to creators. We're paying $100 a video, $80 a video, 200 video, something like that. And that feels, I, I consider that an internal process. I just don't see any scenario where we have any sort of system that is truly employees of Ridge creating content in that way.

[C]

Yeah. Unless you have like specifically creators and residents.

[A]

Right. And I guess, sorry, I. It can happen, obviously. But then to your point, they're not going to be producing diversity. You're not going to be able to have a couple on staff and a Single young dude and a single old dude and like people living in different parts of the country. Like you'll just, you'll never be able to do it. So you can produce content internally. But I think just quarter like working directly with creatives should be considered more or less an internal process. I can't see it getting any more in house than that.

[B]

I think it's a. It's about like if you're going to inter. Like what we've done is we've internalized a lot of it but we have multiple different flywheels going on internally where like when I talk about stuff we're shooting that's like anything super high fidelity. Right. Like anything that we think is going to be more of like a premium feeling hi Fi asset that we just don't have that raw footage for. We will brief that in with our content team. Often it's just like shot list, right? It's not even full on. It is. It is also full on baked out concepts. But also it's also like just hey, here's a list of shots that, that we don't have yet that like a creator can shoot for us because we want to cut them together with some other hi Fi assets we've already made. And then we have like what you just described where you know, we have tons of creators that we are briefing to shoot all sorts of stuff and obviously that's like not happening in our studio. But we will also bring creators in studio because we found good success with some of these like hi Fi. More studio produced like influencer LED ads. So we're doing, we're doing a little bit of all of it. Totally. And it, it's like I think allowed us to still be diverse because we have like different teams owning different flywheels and it. And it's like it created just kind of baked in diversity because of that.

[C]

Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a good point. There's difference between who's producing and who's. Who's strategizing. And I think yeah, more of the strategy in house. The. The agency is temporarily. I think the one will definitely be, you know, Subaru. Just because they're like influencer experts and like I think they, they give us a ton that we don't, you know, have and we, we could build it but you know it's currently working very well. But I think on the other side, yeah, our, our two. Not to get into it too much but like our two like real big rock things are like having a. We'll call it Like a discord, whatever is like a community of creators that. That you just have a deal with. Again, this is not like influencers ugc, but it's just like, all right, you're on. Whether you're on retainer, whether you're posting organically or not, right? Whether you're a TikTok shop creator or not, it's just like, there's just a pool of people now. You know, HUD's comforts is like 17,000. I don't maybe expect that, but, like, I think even hundreds you can get a lot of value from. But it's just like, they don't need a full brief. They're. They're coached, right? Because I think, like, some. Some brands will. Will brief creators, some will script them. Even. I haven't found that approach working. I would rather give them strategy up front. Give them, like, re. Like, us do the research, we give them strategy, and they're coached. They know what makes a good ad, they know what makes a good post. Like, they know about the brand, and then they just create. And then it's just like every week they're just, boom, here's five assets. Here's whatever it is. That's the goal. So we're working with an agency right now. Build out, like, an organic TikTok and IG real, like, trend dashboard. So we can just see what's trending in our space relative to the other stuff. And they can literally just see that and they're on retainer and they can just be like, all right, cool. Redness is popping off. Here are the top five organic videos in redness. I'm gonna go make five. And we'll just get them uploaded that week.

[A]

And sorry, where's the. Where's the TikTok trend dashboard living?

[C]

It's just like a dashboard we're building. We're building it with an agency, but we'll just essentially have like a bi tool. And people can just see that and walk in on Monday morning and be like, all right, I. I got. I. I owe Cody five videos today, or I owe. Yeah, five videos this week. Like, they already know about the product, the brand, all that stuff. Like, like. And then this is a. This is what we're working on right now is in progress. And then it's just like, all right, here's the ones that are performing. I think this is what we can do. And they just, like, ship it. Because what. What I found with, like, UGC agencies, this is what we're not doing, like, the tube science, the narrative, the Whatever it is, where it's like, it's scripted, right? It's like, it's, it's UGC in quotes. But it's like, you know, you know, you know the kind I'm talking about, like the very like forced kind of direct response, very scripted. That has never worked for us and it just never will. What works for us is with stuff that feels very organic, native, right? And the other thing like I've learned about it is like I remember when, when we were at the meta, we went to the meta performance roadshow. I just like brought my team there and do you guys know how they have that IG reels like trend, trending thing? So it's like in meta business suite, but you can see like what topics are trending for Instagram reels. I was like, I want a, a I wish I had like a full time employee creator who just sees this and they're just like, oh, that's what's trending. I'm gonna make a content, I'm gonna upload it that day and see how it does. Cause, cause like what happens, what I found with these agencies, right, it's such a long process where you have to, you bring em on, you have to ship products, you review creators, you go over briefs, you script them, you get, you get round one of footage, you edit it, it's editing by committee and you have five people who are giving notes on it and, and you don't even. Everyone's got their opinion. The agency is editing stuff a certain way for the brand just because the brand is paying them money, but they're probably doing it begrudgingly. You end up with this like watered down piece of content that's like pretty produced, but it's also not produced like Connor's team is doing in like a beautiful thing. You know, it's like this middle ground, right? And so I'm like, you just wasted two to three weeks where you could have just shot something, put it up that day, seen how it did, got some data iterated. And so what I'm trying to do, and this is, this is very similar on organic and paid socials. Avoid that middle ground of like multiple edits, multiple people approvals. It's either something gets shot and uploaded that day, whether it's organic social or paid social, you see how it does and then, and then you make iterations based on the performance of it and it's all based on trends or organic insights or something like that. Or you know, or you're going to then do production stuff where, like, you're going to take a long period of time to make a perfect video. But I think that middle ground is like, what I'm trying to say away from. And so that's the goal. We're literally building like a creator residence, creator in residence program to do that. And like, that's what we're trying to get to. So hopefully in six months we can come back here and I can be like, yeah, this worked well.

[A]

So that's exactly what I was going to say. Like, it's funny looking back on some of the older pods, like what we were. We're talking about creating and we're still kind of at the point where you're creating dozens of concepts a week with variations. Maybe you're landing between like 50 and 100 ads. What you're describing, Cody, and I'm. It sounds like it's maybe the most critical question you're addressing at Jones Road right now is like six months from now, you might be creating hundreds of pieces of content a week. If you have. If you have a discord of 17,000 people. I'm sure Comfort's posting and testing thousands of ads a week. I would think so. Just creative volume a year from now might look like so significantly different. It just won't even be recognizable. I think so.

[C]

And that's like the bet and the hope and it's, it's, you know, again, but it's all organic and paid and yeah, it's just a ridiculous one, but again, it's not possible for a brand to create that. It's all done internally, but it's all creators.

[A]

Okay. And then, and then in that scenario, like, if you think about a creative testing campaign, is it what you were describing earlier? Like, if you're getting. Let's. Let's call it 200 posts a week now that are going direct. You want to test it on paid. You can set those all up as ad sets and run 200 bucks a day and just have this, like, I don't know. Do you have any idea?

[C]

No, I haven't gotten there yet. I feel like that'll. It probably won't be an overnight fix. It'll be like our account will like mold as we scale, you know, because I don't know. I'm curious how Cumber does it. I remember I talked to somebody from Rise one day and they're like, yeah, we launch creative every day. Like, that's the goal. It's like, it'll be so much creative that I don't think we can launch it. Weekly. We want to do it daily.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Connor, I'm curious, what's your answer? Thinking about what we were talking 18 months ago, two years ago has changed a lot. You guys are at a good kind of steady state today. What do you think are the critical questions you're addressing that you'll want to be circling back on in the future?

[B]

Yeah, one, one thing we're trying to figure out a solution for right now is the like the filler content from creators. And we, while we have a lot of like influencers that we work with regularly and these are not necessarily like huge influencers. Like we find people that have, you know, 10,000 followers, 20,000 followers perform really well for us. And these are very cost effective. You know, we're paying, you know, probably a thousand bucks per month when we're sourcing new creative from them and much less than that. We're not sourcing new creative, but one thing we are trying to be better at, and I know some people like have creators in house and do it this way. We are going a little bit of a different approach to, to start is just bringing on someone that is like super experienced in E. Com working with creators to source content. And they will not even be full time. There's me, a freelancer, but having this person is like a freelancer, I don't know how many hours per week exactly. Like 10, 20 hours per week. Where anytime we need creator led content from, not an influencer, just like a creator, that person has an absolute army of people that we can go and get content for. Whether it's you know, a 65 year old woman or a 24 year old man, whatever it is. And like we can kind of go fill that content much quicker because we just have the network and we have a single person who is just. All they're gonna be focused on is sourcing that like, like creator LED content and like filling our library with any gaps that we have. So that's like one of the big bets that we're taking in 2026 is like bringing this person on and seeing if we can just like get this creator content much, much, much quicker and get it into our ads much, much, much quicker versus right now. It's like we don't have that.

[C]

It's like literally the, I think one of the most important functions in ecom right now.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Yeah, it's. What Connor just said is extremely similar to what you're talking about.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And we're, we're in the same bucket now. Let me ask you Guys, this because I do think there's a trend where people were creating a ton of volume. It wasn't meaningfully different. So I think we all went through the, the, the experience of wanting to like, cut back and taking more intentional. We, we want it to be more intentional in the way that we were creating concepts. Would you guys agree that, that that happened over the last two years is like. We would happily take a reduction in volume if it meant a, an increase in quality, diversity and thoughtfulness of concepts?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

All right, so I've got some interesting numbers to share from Ridge from our beloved sponsor, Ridge Panel. We switched our support stack at Ridge to ridge panel about 15 months ago and our cost per ticket has dropped over 70%. That means same team, same volume and over $500,000 in annual savings. CSATs have not changed. We've been sitting at 96% week after week. So the automations did not come at the cost of customer experience. Our last platform talked a lot about AI, but nothing was really changing under the hood. Rich Panel is genuinely AI first they came in, they rebuilt our workflows and we were live in under two weeks with basically no lift on our side. And they're about to roll out a returns portal, which for us is huge. Because if they can do the same thing for returns as they did for customer service, that would be sick. If you want to cut down your support costs now and save on returns platform with an AI first platform, talk to Rich Panel. Go to richpanel.com demo tell them Connor from marketing Operator sent you and they'll take good care of you. Thank you. So now we're talking about creating massive amounts of concepts with like huge teams of creators. Do you think, like, so I have an. I'm having this thought right now, but like, actually maybe the most important piece will be like the coaching aspect to make sure that you're not getting just a bunch of average concepts or like boilerplate stuff from this team of creators. Or I could also see, hey, it actually, it doesn't matter so much. We're just going to solve it with volume. If you have hundreds of people creating content, it's like, even if, even if it's only 20% of them are doing meaningfully, you know, new and interesting and creative and diverse concepts and like you're still going to get more than what you need and it's just the volume play. Or are we going to go through the same thing where it's like, it's less about quantity and it's more about how are you finding the right creators and coaching them to the right concepts and like actually focusing on quality. Where do you think we are in that like adoption curve?

[B]

But I can, speaking from hexcloud perspective, we are, we kind of have two separate things happening and we have like cookware, which is like our most mature funnel. We've been running cookware funnels for four years and, and very much still going to be intentionality over everything. If we can get to v. More volume through intentionality, great. And I absolutely think that like this, this freelancer that we're looking at hiring will help us do that. But then on the other side of the spectrum and like Connor, a lot of our conversations we've had on here have kind of shifted how I and thinking about this, like I want to introduce a lot more product funnels into our account this year because to, to the conversations we've been having and like some of the holdouts you've ran, like you've validated that those different products are reaching new audiences. And sure we do have like some big product launches that I think can be like good acquisition funnels on their own and that's one part of it. But I also think that we have products in our, in our stack right now that are really popular products like the, our wok, our griddles, our high sided pans that we don't push creative across those. But if, I think if we did, we would be reaching new incremental customers than we would be reaching with our current cookware stack. So I think when you think about the like A plus product launches as well as the like, hey, we just want to get more ads across our griddles, I think we're going, we're going back to a more like immature phase in those funnels where volume is way more important. So like yes, we're still gonna be intentional, but we're almost going back to where cookware was in 2022 where it's like volume, volume, volume, we gotta like scale through. So like we're going there with certain funnels but we're still gonna be very, very, very intentional and like letting the concept lead the way in our more mature funnels. So we're trying to, we're trying to strike that balance and like do kind of different things for different funnels. And that's where like having this person where we can just source creator content super quickly is going to help us check that, that volume box for like these new products that we have launching in, in 2026 that we're all very confident can be, you know, big new acquisition pipes on top of the ones that we already have built out. So yeah, kind of going back a little bit in time to where we were totally time ago and needing to serve that a little bit more.

[C]

I think, I think working with creators correctly actually fixes the. Or like naturally allows for diversity. Because I think if you're working with creators correctly, you're not over scripting and doing things like that and you give them, I think the right strategy up front that's like, like the right brief is like here's maybe a few of the value props that we want you to touch on. Here's what's performed for us, here's do's and don'ts and then like go create, right? Like we want you to be creative, right. And so I think if you're working with them properly and you're not like overly scripting it and briefing it and trying to make it on brand, like I think you actually get that natural creativity if you're doing properly. And then part of creative diversity is like one thing I'm really curious about is trying and it probably is so simple. Like when you get a winning ad or a winning creator ad, just give that, let's say you have that discord of people, just give that to them and have them recreate it because a, they're going to create it in a different way. But like also part of reach and traffic is who it's coming from. And so let's say you get a, you know, mid-40s male talking about, you know, ridge wallet. Well now you get a, you know, and he's, he's, you know, essentially has a certain look, maybe he's you know, middle of country. Well now get somebody, you know, 30 year old, different ethnicity, different background, like and it's not that all of them will work, but if you have this big pool of creators doing the same thing like, like a, they're all going to give it their little unique approach but they're all going to maybe reach different people differently. So I think that's like one aspect that like if it works, I'm curious what you're gonna think is it's so simple that it's like you just need that creative that, that creator pool to then just go ship it off to and like already have structured 100%.

[A]

I and I, I've said this for a long time. I think most problems can be solved with volume. And if you just have a ton of creators, it just kind of naturally like addresses some of the Issues. Exactly to your point. I also agree with Connor's point that it's like we will probably, if we all do our jobs well or like if, if, if this strategy plays out in the way that we anticipate it to, we'll all build communities of creators over the next year and then we won't care too much about the volume will help and then we will reach a certain point where it's like, oh, it's actually we need to be shaping this like resource, like maybe a little bit more effectively. And that's where. And that's just like the natural flow of things. It's like just get the volume, get the ball rolling, get traction, get people creating content. You'll get all the benefits of that. And then as that business matures in the way that Connor said it, it's a matter of like crafting a little bit differently. And that's why Cody, I was curious about the. Even the TikTok dashboard seems like such a great resource where I think you. There's a scenario where you can find just a couple bits of information and a couple bits of guidance that can actually be like super effective in just like helping this network of creators produce like even just slightly more relevant or better content.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, we'll see. And again, like I'm always going to bring it right now back to Organic Social. Like we'll have some critters that are just doing ads, paid social, but a lot of it is going to be that because I also think that's such a great testing ground. It's really the same algorithm and environment and it's like. But I don't know if you guys look. But like there are creators on TikTok that post essentially the same thing every day.

[A]

Yeah, totally.

[C]

And it's just like slight difference and like some of them take off, some of them don't. So. So there is, I, I totally get quality and like, especially with Andromeda, like the same ad over and over is not going to necessarily do much. So like it's not the exact same as Organic Social, but there also is something to like the way these social algorithms work and the people behind them. You just have no idea what's going to perform. So there's some level that I think probably it's like, like almost marrying having different funnels or pipelines where like creator stuff is like super high volume, very not briefed at all, like not scripted. And then you also should have some stuff that's like what hexcloud's team is doing and it's like beautiful, polished things that you're like meticulously editing. And like you're not shipping 40 of those a week, you're shipping like two of those a month probably.

[A]

Yeah, 100%.

[B]

And it's. And it's like some of the stuff that now has just become a part of our product workflow and other stuff is like the one off stuff. So you have like the cocktail shaker Dr. Dre Collab, right, where that was obviously all very meticulously ideated, edited, edited again, edited again, launched. And then you have other stuff where we always shoot product hype reels now, like always, whenever we're shooting a new product, there's always that hype reel. And it's like just a beautifully shot. It's value prop driven. It shows like the use cases really well. Like, that's just part of our like checklist now whenever we do a new product. So it's a little, it's a little bit. And then some of the, the stuff that's one off gets like ultimately brought into the, the, you know, kind of the checklist now.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

All right, guys.

[A]

Well, I feel like this was pretty good. Pretty good little check in.

[B]

Yeah, it was great.

[A]

All right, thank you for listening to another episode of Marketing Operators. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Pression after sell and House. Make sure to like, subscribe. Please leave comments, questions, tweet at us. We'll be doing a marketing operators hotline coming up soon. We'd love to get some of those questions addressed. Thank you for listening. We'll see you again next week.