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- [00:00]
Cody
I guess there are always Cody and Connor episodes, but today there's only a single Conor. This episode we wanted to kind of dive deep on Meta.
- [00:08]
Connor
About half of our revenue and new customer revenue is driven by Meta, which is like amazing. At least it doesn't feel like we're wasting money on, you know, no incrementality.
- [00:15]
Cody
One of my pet peeves is the media buyers will put in their columns. We spend and then roas. And I'm like, dude, there's like so many metrics in between spend and roas that like we should be hyper aware of.
- [00:25]
Connor
We spend like tiny amount on Influencer compared to what we spend on Meta. And so that's going to be a much bigger focus and changing the approach.
- [00:32]
Cody
Program in many ways. There's nothing that you can do about cpm. It's something that you should be aware of. I want to talk quickly about Motion's AI creative strategist. These AI agents are built by best in class DTC marketers including Barry Hot, Jess Bachman, Marella Crespi, Alex Cooper and many others. And what's unique is that you get to use agents to analyze your creative using real data from your Meta ad account. Connor, have you played around with these at all?
- [01:31]
Connor
Oh yeah, absolutely. Our team's deep in there.
- [01:34]
Cody
I wanted to pull up too. So for those listening, we'll, we'll talk through it quickly. One, I think the implementation beautiful. You could see our top performing ad creative. Last week what I pulled up was Jess's critique. This ads messaging played that progress ran took maybe two minutes and then this is what we got. And I thought it was great. The good fast paced messaging, clean product demonstration, smart focus on MagSafe, what we can push. And I thought this was, this was funny. You know me as a marketer, I'm very precious about our ad creator. But he's like Apple's must have accessory is presumptuous and lacks credibility. The smartest wallet you'll ever own is empty Superlative marketing speak. I'm like, okay, Jess. He definitely, he's definitely roasting the ad and what I thought was really cool were some of the next steps. He says reframe around the actual problem. This solves the daily friction of wallet phone management. So the AI has generated what this ad is about and actually reframed what the problem could be. And I thought that was really powerful. 2. I ran motions Trek, this month's winning themes and you see exactly what we're talking about all the time. Durability that lasts a lifetime. Ditching the bulk for minimalist design. Lifetime offers create urgency and cultural partnerships that expand appeal. And I'm like, yeah, look, you basically get what we're trying to do as an advertising business. I think this is really helpful for creative strategy and giving the team actionable insights that we can work on every day. Yeah, this is saving our team tons of time. Motion's also giving teams an AI adoption cheat code.
- [02:51]
Connor
It's not like they're just throwing this.
- [02:53]
Cody
New technology at you and saying, go figure it out. And they are really giving teams what they need to utilize this and get.
- [02:59]
Connor
The most value out of this.
- [03:00]
Cody
And last but not least, you do not need a Motion contract to use this.
- [03:04]
Connor
You can try these agents for free, test them out, see how they fit.
- [03:07]
Cody
Into your workflows, and start getting value out of them without even needing a Motion contract. So if you want to try out some of these AI agents, go try them@motion app.com. all right, we're back with another episode of Marketing Operators. It's just a Cody and Connor episode today. I guess they're always Cody and Connor episodes, but today there's only a single Conor.
- [03:30]
Connor
Yeah. And it's still, still Connor McDonald. 60. I don't know what it says. 68, 69. Whatever it is.
- [03:37]
Cody
68. Yeah. 68 for 68. I tweeted Cal Ripken Jr. Because I'm gonna go, yeah, I figure we'll be doing this for, like, at least a decade, two maybe. So, like, you know, I'm hoping to hit, you know, he, he played, like, 16 straight MLB seasons. I looked it up afterwards. Just unbelievable.
- [03:56]
Connor
And did you, like, feel really good about yourself doing 68 podcasts in a row until then?
- [04:04]
Cody
I, I, I feel, Yeah, I mean, obviously, completely different scales. I feel good about doing 68 podcasts because, you know, I was doing a lot of traveling, so I'm like, I think I've, I've, I've brought my mic stand to, like, six different states. I mean, I've gotten some, some, some miles in while not missing an episode of Operators.
- [04:22]
Connor
You're much better about that. I don't think I've done a travel one. I'm gonna next week for a few of them. I'm gonna bring my stuff. You've inspired me.
- [04:29]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gotta set the tone, but yeah. Dude, I couldn't believe Cal Rukin Jr. Playing 16 straight seasons. Just unbelievable. On a, on a different point here, I learned recently we're gonna hang out for the second time this year. You're going to the beanstalk event in September.
- [04:43]
Connor
Yeah, I'm excited about that. I don't know that much. Sean intro me to the founder, and I just know Sean talks really highly of that event. It's funny because he tweeted about it. And, like, I've. I've noticed this trend where anyone that's tweeting lately has to, like, it's not a sponsor there. Like, this is not a sponsored post. It's like, just like. I love that the default is people just assume it's sponsored. Yeah, yeah. True, true.
- [05:05]
Cody
Yeah. It used to be. It used to be Commerce Summit. You've never been before?
- [05:08]
Connor
No. Tell me about it. Have you been?
- [05:10]
Cody
I have not been, but Commerce Summit. I've heard great things. I don't know why they rebranded to Beanstalk, but they have. It's historically been for CEOs, founders. I think there's 300 people last year, and then this year it is for. They're trying to do like, three, like, large kind of segments. They have the. The CEO founders, they've got CMOs and CDOs, chief digital officers. Then they have another track for, like, CFO types, and they're trying to, like, fill all those out because they want to appeal to more people, get more people involved while keeping it intimate. So it sounds like a really cool format for a conference, and I'm stoked for it, I think. I don't know if they're still accepting applicants on their website, but I would encourage people to check it out. You and I are hanging out. I'm trying to get Zach stuck out there. Krista Dalton, I'm hoping can come. There will be other people.
- [05:59]
Connor
Lots of friends in the pod again, you know, maybe make that totally. What is this? What is the format of it? Like, is it normal, like, summit or. They're like, yeah, what's the format of it? It seems like it's different.
- [06:10]
Cody
So I just talked to Ray, who's one of the founders, yesterday, and he was. I don't know too many details here, but it's less big stage speaking and more like they're trying to get people into. He called them boardroom discussions.
- [06:21]
Connor
Okay.
- [06:22]
Cody
20, 25 people around a table discussing particular issues. So it's more like there's. I know there's a couple dinners involved. They. I think they went bowling. Last year. I heard some stories of Alex Beller from post script and Sean bowling together.
- [06:37]
Connor
Wonder who won that one?
- [06:39]
Cody
Alex Bel. Sure. I. I see my money would be on. So, yeah, anyway, that's like. That's kind of the format. Keep it intimate with like not that big of a conference. 300 people. And then they're going to break it out amongst a couple different cohorts and then smaller, even smaller discussion discussions. A dozen, two dozen people or so.
- [06:58]
Connor
Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So when we were at the meta summit, I know like that second day they had those like breakout rooms which was like we didn't go to. It was like four, 100 people in a room. That was whack. But I've been to some meta events before where they'll have like a breakout room with like 20 people in it and it'll just be like, hey, let's talk about creative diversity. And like those are actually the most impactful, like parts of it. So that sounds similar. So I'm pumped about that.
- [07:17]
Cody
Dude. Totally. I mean there's so few. There's surprisingly few venues for small group discussions. And like, that's like a workshop almost Right. Where you can really get into the details and share stuff. It's one of the reasons I love the postscript. Does a customer advisory.
- [07:32]
Connor
Dude, I was just gonna ask, are you going to the August one?
- [07:34]
Cody
Yeah, I'm going to that too.
- [07:35]
Connor
Third time we're going to meet in person.
- [07:37]
Cody
Oh, dude, they're crazy. It was so much fun last year. But it's the exact same idea. They get like 40 brands together and then they just want to discuss, you know, SMS and maybe retention. But there's not a lot of venues for that. Is one of the reasons why I enjoy doing this podcast so much is we get at least, you know, typically two or three of us, we just get to geek out on marketing for sure.
- [07:57]
Connor
Absolutely. That's what we're here for.
- [07:59]
Cody
Sweet. So we can get into the episode. But before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion Rich Panel, Aftercell, Prescient and Revo. Um, we're going to hit a couple of things today, but Jones Road was in Vogue this week. I want to talk about that quickly. Can you talk about the launch a bit?
- [08:15]
Connor
Not only was Jones Road Vogue, I was in Vogue. Vogue. Vogue Beauty. We had, we had a exclusive. So you us Vogue covered it. We had to give them access day early to it for our sunscreen launch. So it's our three years in the making mineral sunscreen. So that's like a clean sunscreen. That's mineral based, non chemical based. It's a very challenging product because it's actually a very challenging product. It's FDA regulated. So it's the first FDA regulated product that we've had and there's a pretty harsh stereotype in the industry with mineral sunscreens not being great on all skin tones. And you know, the, the, the zinc oxide, the minerals are, are white and so they can often leave a white cast and it's not loved by everybody. And I think the, the marketing of that can be really challenging. A competitor, Tower 28, they, they launched just a single white, you know, shade recently and they market it as no white cast and they got destroyed for it just pretty bad. So we, we were like, like we, you know, and we, and we did, we did so much testing and, and, and, and research and panels just to really make sure and get people's feedback and we, we actually delayed the launch. We were actually planning to launch this in January and I decided to delay it because I didn't think that we had the right shades for everybo formula shade and, and add one in, which is probably a better time to launch a sunscreen in general. But yeah, it's what people have been asking for for a while. In like, in beauty, there's a lot of like makeup products that are like have sunscreen in, in them. We decided not to go that route for this one. Yesterday was pretty soft, I'm not going to lie. It's also prime day, so probably not the best time to launch. We kind of just had it locked in by that time and didn't feel like moving it around. So we definitely want to see better performance. It's only one day. It was definitely the most stressful launch that we've had and really complicated with the reformulation, all that stuff. We had to do a lot of repacking and then even on the website. So like, because of the, you know, so we just have one site. We don't have like multiple sites like you guys do, but we had to set up multiple PDPs and redirect to make sure because like, we have to ship a different SKU to Canada than we do to, to us and, but those are coming from the same warehouse. So just probably the most complicated launch that we've had in general. And, and I would not say it went super smoothly, but it's something. We're still very excited about the future. But it's been, it's been a week. I'm tired.
- [10:38]
Cody
Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, congratulations either way. I thought the Vogue, all the Vogue features were really cool.
- [10:44]
Connor
Yeah, it's cool. I appreciate that. It's cool to see. I think they did a good job. And the Vogue Beauty one that came out of the Vogue business. It's cool to see, like, your. Your name, like, my name and like, like, above the fold in a. In a, you know, top headline. So it's. It's cool. But obviously want it to perform well. But yeah, it's. We'll see what the feedback is. You know, I think the thing that's so interesting with a launch especially, like, like a beauty product is, like, you spend so much time doing market research and trying to think about the messaging and the positioning and, like, you know, create a hundred ads and stuff like that, and you just have no idea what's going to hit and.
- [11:20]
Cody
Right.
- [11:21]
Connor
It's not always what you think. So it's always interesting and on edge to be like, all right, let's get this data back in a week and see people are saying about it.
- [11:28]
Cody
Yeah. So one question I had for you. In terms of launching new products, would you say we use, like, a tier system at Ridge so we have tier. Tier one launches for, like, new categories or, like, important new silhouettes? I know that you guys had. Was it a toner in March or April?
- [11:45]
Connor
We had, yeah, like a tinted moisturizer. So that was like, our biggest of the year.
- [11:48]
Cody
Yeah.
- [11:48]
Connor
And then this is second biggest of the year.
- [11:50]
Cody
Would you say, like, did you guys approach it with the same sort of magnitude, or is this one taking, like, a backseat to the tinted moisturizer A little bit lower.
- [11:59]
Connor
We are also redoing our tier system to more closely match yours. Inspired by. By your. Because we had. We used to have a B and C launches, and that wasn't enough. And then so we started doing, like, pluses and minuses, and then that became too much. Yeah, it was, like, not enough differentiation and, like, you know, where there's like a B plus, but then it's like a B plus and a B minus. And like, it was just like, what are even the differences? Like, people would ask me, like, what's the tier on this? I'm like, what are you going to do differently? If I said this is a B versus a B plus, like, and so what we're trying to do, and this is very inspired by you, is like, we're going to do 1, 2, 3, 4, and we're going to create that template or that playbook. And again, it's always subject to change of, like, this launch. This is our playbook. Tier A, homepage, takeover, new collection, breakout cards, TV ads, big shoot, all the stuff. Tier 2, not. And then I have questions for you about your AI stuff, but that's what we're Trying to do. So this was probably a 2 in that we didn't do TV ads for this. We did a lot of paid social. We did decent influencer push, did direct mail. Did not do out of home. So, yeah, definitely a tier 2 for us.
- [13:07]
Cody
Got it. Cool. Was there anything you learned from the tinted moisturizer launch that you applied to this one?
- [13:16]
Connor
That's a good question. I think a lot more. We're a lot more messaging. Testing out. Out the gate from the beginning is probably where we could have done better from last. Last one and trying to just test that much better from the beginning and. And not just kind of like just go with something that we think is going to work.
- [13:39]
Cody
It totally. So I think that's a really interesting one. We hired a VP of marketing in March. She was at Begamore and then before that, Wayfair, and Wayfair in particular, I think is so good from like a process perspective. And like, I think what I'm going to describe is an example of this. But we have as we're like bringing things to markets in the case of new product launch, we have one next week, and I think it'll be launched the day that this episode comes out. So we're doing. It's kind of an odd product. We're doing women's tungsten wedding bands. So we have like your standard male wedding band and gunmetal black, and then we've like gold and platinum and things like that. Great business for us. The founder's wife said, oh, I would love a tungsten band as an alternative to my diamond wedding ring so that when I'm traveling or working or whenever, like, I have something so that I can be wearing a wedding ring, but it's not necessarily a $8,000 wedding ring or a $20,000 wedding ring or whatever. So that's what we're trying to find.
- [14:40]
Connor
Don't be modest. You don't have to be modest on here.
- [14:43]
Cody
Yeah, yeah. The. So that's what we're trying to position these new rings as. And I say all that because, okay, that's the. That's the initial premise product teams like, hey, we built these. These tungsten wedding bands for women. They're slimmer. They come in this cool travel kit. There is a silicone band alternative. We have our never lost forever fit protection. That's like our standard ring offering. Here it is. Marketing team. Now, as we're bringing that to market, we are like, codifying the testing of messaging. So, like, we're saying we have a testing section in our Marketing summary that's like what do we want to test? And then from a channel perspective, how can we potentially test that? So in this case it's like is the better use case for work or travel? Like should we be, should we try to position it for you know, like blue collar women workers? I almost think it could be like a FIGS type approach or should it be for the business traveler who is, you know, always in new cities or new airports or something like that. So from the get go we're going to test that initial messaging and I think that's a good format and I think that's kind of what you're describing with the, the mineral sunscreen.
- [15:45]
Connor
So this is another reason for, for me doing the podcast. I'm stealing that. That's great. We're adding that to our creative briefs.
- [15:51]
Cody
Yeah, well I shout out, shout out Natalie from my team. She's, she's brought that into the Ridge or so. Yeah, I totally agree. I think that's a good learning lesson. I am super excited to tell you about our newest sponsor, Revo. They are a retention platform for Shopify plus brands. They start with Signed In Shopping via accounts and loyalty referrals, memberships, cashback and so much more. They're constantly launching new features. I personally am super excited about the future of Signed in shopping for e commerce brands and really accounts being the beachhead for just awesome loyalty and customer experiences and Revo playing a part in making it a better experience to be a customer of your brand. And Ridge isn't the only brand using Revo today. Hexclad, true classic, Dr. Squatch, Portland Leather Goods Princess Polly Kitsch Pit Viper and hundreds of more brands are using Repo on their Shopify plus accounts. That is like a billion dollars in gmv. That is a insane list of brands to be listing off. Stuart Chaney, founder led. He's all over Twitter. He's hands on in Slack. Great team to work with. I also think they're kind of the next wave of SaaS. You'll see Stuart talking on Twitter about being incredibly AI oriented in their development and they're shipping better features faster than ever before. So excited to see what comes of Revo. I suggest you check it out@revo IO that's r I v o IO you had something about you wanted to ask about AI.
- [17:14]
Connor
Yeah. So as part of. I'm just thinking what we're selling. By the way, we also totally stole the entire Figma thing where we were doing some of this stuff in Figma for this stuff. I know we've talked about our go to market boards but like we're, we still do our creative brief and Dex but we do all of our like integrated strategy slides, like everything in figma. I asked the team yesterday how they're like it, like everybody's loving it, so shout out to you for that one. But as part of that, all that go to market stuff, I know you sent me and Connor a loom a few weeks back of some stuff doing a Claude and essentially trying to automate or, or use AI to make that process easier. Can you share some updates on that if, if you're using it, if you found anything like has been helpful? I think you made like a cloud project.
- [17:54]
Cody
Yeah, totally. So I was describing this marketing summary. We get the product information from the product team, we put together a marketing summary and we put together kind of like what's the commercial goal? How do we want to approach this from a messaging perspective? There are tests involved in that. What else is involved? Some historical information. Typically like we're going to launch a new colorway in a couple months so we'll pull historical colorway, performance basket analyses, things like that so that we're just contextualizing for the team or whoever's reading it, external partners, whoever. Like this is kind of the overview of the campaign. I put that together. That's currently still a very manual process where I saw a lot of success over the last like year and a half very simply was going from marketing summary to copy deliverable where we could just say hey, with like a little bit of iteration in Claude, get to a really large copy deliverable so that we had hero headlines, messaging copy, email subject lines, ad copy, things like that. We have like a template built out and a couple months ago I was saying and this is all a part of our go to market process summary to copy. I'd hand those things off and then channel managers would, would take those things and then they would go and create email briefs, landing page briefs, ad briefs, etc. What I'm exploring now is I really don't see any reason why a lot of what we do is like mechanical to some degree. And also I am totally fine in a world of AI making things more mechanical so they can be better assisted by AI. I really, I think there's a future here where we can go from marketing summary to copy deliverable to if we have ecom briefs templatized that I could be populating all of those. Now all of a sudden I'm handing off like 80% of the campaign and the channel managers are just there to just improve it or inject new ideas. Like we are all the repetitive work of like I've got to take, I've got to choose one of the hero headlines so that I can put it in my, you know, E. Com brief that's going to the web designer. I think we could like compress that all down to like a two hour AI assisted workflow. So that's what I'm exploring now. And it's like the process stays exactly the same. It just gets, it just gets compressed down really quickly. So that's what, yeah, I've been tweeting about that and messing around with that. That is the two key pieces are templatizing everything and then just feeding those templates to Claude. And you need really good project instructions in the Claude project that says, hey, this is what you're doing. You're getting summaries, you're an expert copywriter and econ marketer, you're getting summaries, you're filling out these templates is a little bit more robust than that. But like that's basically the workflow that allows me to like, I'm getting way more of that done. I'm really only doing the E Comm stuff right now, but it's, I'm getting pretty far downstream.
- [20:38]
Connor
That's awesome. That's really cool. So how much time are you spending like a week on trying to build this out?
- [20:43]
Cody
Oh, dude, mostly just weekends. And yeah, yeah, it was 4th of July last weekend, so wasn't as productive. Mostly barbecuing and drinking White Claws. But yeah, the weekend before it's super, super fun frankly.
- [20:59]
Connor
So yeah, yeah, I know. I, I, I, I love my kids more than anything and like this is like, would be like just like so nice when I have some time on the weekends because I don't have time during the week but pretty much any like free weekend time I get or if they're like with their grandparents or something, I'm like, I'm like vibe coding something, playing around with something. Totally. But yeah, share whatever dude, share whatever you can on that. Like, would love to, to stay updated on that because yeah, I agree with you in terms of the like templatization of things and like moving in that direction. That's partly why we're redoing the tiers and making it a little bit more formulaic so that way we can put things in, in, in, you know, AI. So yeah, I think I'm very interested in that one. We're still working And I'm going to get a little bit more involved myself on, like, a copy project just because, like, I'll get copy from, like, you know, like, Facebook ad headlines and stuff like that. Or, like, landing page. And we have one copywriter for the team. How. How many do you guys have?
- [21:49]
Cody
We don't have a copyright.
- [21:51]
Connor
Okay. Then, boom. That's even, like, better constraint. But, like, she just doesn't have the bandwidth to. To be everywhere and do copy for everywhere. So I'm like, can we just take stuff and take some brand tone and pass stuff and then, like, have a project where, like, it's essentially like, an AI employee that, like, you know, a growth manager can be like, hey, here's the overall creative brief. Here's, like, the direction. Give me, like, five headlines for totally. For this test.
- [22:13]
Cody
Yeah.
- [22:13]
Connor
Yeah.
- [22:14]
Cody
And that is. Yeah, that's like, a really interesting process to explore because it's also. I think it can happen both ways. It can be like, hey, performance, creative teams. Like, I need five headlines copywriter. It could also be like, look, tier threes. You just need five headlines. And then all of a sudden, the copywriter just has a way more robust brief. And she could be. And that. I. Dude, I think if I was a copywriter right now, I'd be having so much fun with AI because, like, ultimately, I think the people who are getting the most out of it are good copywriters themselves. Like, it's really easy to get generic, fluffy, like, meaningless words, but if you have taste and can kind of curate it, it seems super, super fun, in my opinion. So, like, yeah, she could be delivering all the copy upfront, and then email would have largely what they need. Ecom has what they need. So anyway, it's cool that someone could sit in that process. Right now I'm kind of, like, bridging that gap.
- [23:09]
Connor
Awesome. I love it.
- [23:11]
Cody
Cool. I want to talk about Prime Day a little bit. You know, everybody's freaking out this week, and I'm sure we'll get more data over the next couple days. Prime day, prime day one, prime day two, down about 40% year over year.
- [23:24]
Connor
Oh, so day one and day two now both.
- [23:26]
Cody
Both days.
- [23:27]
Connor
Okay.
- [23:28]
Cody
We're down 40 year over year now. The big difference is Prime Day was only two days last year. It's four days this year. So Amazon's projecting. I think I saw 18 growth for Prime Day. But, you know, I'm like a. I'm like a OCD about comps. They're comparing four days to two days. They've doubled the Length of the sale and they're, they say that they think they' be able to grow prime day sales 18%.
- [23:52]
Connor
So they think the total revenue is going to be 18% more.
- [23:55]
Cody
Yes, but they're not even including. They're just comparing to the two days. Like if you're going to be super fair, like if you're going to be more fair about it. I wouldn't even call it super fair. You should compare it to two prime days and Thursday and Friday last year. Right. That four day period, the back two would be significantly smaller compared to the four prime days this year. If you were being fair. They're not doing that. They're saying four days this year, two days last year, 18% growth. So each day is obviously going to be smaller. $I think yesterday we got to comping prime day year over year and then today will be about a full day of growth if you're looking at it through that lens. So okay, so I've got that data point. I talked to Steve Rook this morning because I was like I don't think anybody quite knows what's going on and I'd love your perspective on this as well. Why is prime day down 40% or whatever? Why do, why does it need to be twice as long in order to just grow 18%? Steve R.A. cook says spending power, which we talked about with him a couple weeks ago, is it looks like it's slightly up year over year in July. So that data point says consumer spending is more or less the same year over year. And I guess those are the, those are the two big things. So my question for you Cody, is I know you guys are not on Amazon, but for brands that are having a softer prime day than expected, what do they do from here? Preparing for the back half of the year.
- [25:17]
Connor
Can I ask you turn around for you because let me think about it. Just because prime day is not necessarily a focus or thing for us. Obviously if we have a different sale we'll think about it. But what are your take or thoughts? Obviously it's clear that it's going to be spread out and hurt demand for those days if you spread it out over time. But do you think this is still an indication maybe economy is not 40% down but that there's a lot of softness going on?
- [25:45]
Cody
Right. And I think that's like, I think that is. Well, one thing that I found really helpful is Amazon has been so upfront and honest about their projections. They told them you don't get that from any, like you don't have Shopify coming out and being like, we think Black Friday is going to be up 10% year over year. They are being incredibly clear. Prime day is twice as long. There's twice as many prime days year over year. We're only going to grow 18%. Everybody sees you see it in the headlines. Prime, prime day down 40% year over year. So, yeah, just a really obvious acknowledgment of some sort of difference in consumer spending.
- [26:19]
Connor
Also, don't you even think them spacing, like doing more days is an acknowledgment of that?
- [26:24]
Cody
Yes, exactly. Okay, so that was going to be point number one was that Amazon's best in the business. Nobody's going to be better at understanding consumer spending and projecting it. I think brands can sometimes get skittish about extending sales or going deeper on sales. And it's like, okay, these, the biggest e commerce platform in the entire world is extending sales in order to barely grow year over year. So I think brands can be more aggressive in how they do that. Ridge has taken that approach really for the last like year and a half. We'll just like we, we did our first like Father's Day extended sale last year because we weren't happy with the way results had gone. So we can extend it. And I just think, you know, we're as direct to consumer brands. Like the, the, you get to write the rules to some degree there's downsides and you have to going to have to comp this stuff next year. If you're expecting to grow, you have to be thoughtful about it over the longer term. But also the reality is people are spending money differently and if you do want to grow, like it might require extending sales or going deeper on discounts. So that'd be number one. And then the second one would be, and this is what I just saw in a couple group chats, was just projecting down Q4. The other thing is, as a D2C brand, you don't want to get caught with a ton of inventory because Black Friday is flat year over year or something. Right? Like, you just have to be realistic. You have to take the data points you're given and be realistic about your expectations for the business. And that should lead to better inventory buying, which I think, at least for us, we're making like right now. So this is a helpful data point for us to plan for November and December. And we're just trying to hedge our bets a little bit in the case that, you know, we find it extremely hard to grow during Black Friday or something.
- [28:05]
Connor
Thing Yeah, I, I agree with both those points. Absolutely. Yeah. To watch what Amazon does. I was at like a, like a small meta dinner the other night and yeah, pretty much everybody I talk to is like more discount, more promotion this year than years past. Right. It's just like what consumers need right now. So yeah, definitely. We're, we are even leaning like we're, we will do our first actual ever sale for Black Friday. We've always leaned away. We're doing more, you know, promotions which are mostly gift purchases or like a kit discount and then, and then same thing. Yeah, like again, no Prime Day for us. But we, we will definitely use again our Memorial Day promo which is similar to our Black Friday promo. As you know, hey, here's how this went. Do we need to adjust our forecast? Unfortunately, sometimes it's a little bit too late for some lead times. Sometimes we, we, we can still make some differences but as you get, you know, some pretty large orders in there, lead times are, get, get longer. So that's the challenge. But yeah, absolutely. A lot of reason I think to forecast Q4 conservatively and it's a lot safer.
- [29:05]
Cody
Yeah, 100%.
- [29:09]
Connor
We're about halfway done through the year. H1 is almost over. We're prepping for the second half of the year. We're also prepping for Q4 which is huge for us. And our budgets are going to be the highest then. And when our budgets are the highest, we're going to need the most granularity and the most confidence knowing where we should spend our dollars. And that's why we turn to prescient. Prescient is an MMM. And most MMMs they use 60 year old regression models. They're not really built for DTC. Prescient, you can get readouts really quickly if something is changing, which again DTC is really volatile. So you can't rely on an outdated MMM that you're only going to get one readout a quarter. One thing I love about Preschen so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend which is again is huge. We love to fill the funnel prior to a peak moment prior to Q4 holiday, something like that up we're really able to see the halo effect that has because sometimes you're not going to see great attribution from YouTube campaign or from TV campaigns. Well, prescient plugs into all them and it can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful for us to understand and actually have confidence to invest in some of these upper funnel channels that are harder to measure with other ways. So I love Prescient. I can't tell you all the technical stuff behind it, but I can tell you it gives me and my team more confidence. Know where we should put our budget, especially in some of these pesky upper funnel channels that are much harder to measure. And again, don't wait till Q4. It's going to be too late then. We're halfway through the year, but we've really got to all lock in for the rest of the year for Q4. There's a reason we use it. Hexclad, Hollow socks, coterie and 100 more leading brands so highly recommend checking it out. Go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo today.
- [30:40]
Cody
So the kind of the crux of this episode, we wanted to kind of dive deep on Meta. We. I've talked about this on the podcast a lot. We had a lot of issues with meta in Q4, 2024. We spent a lot of time in December and Q1 kind of testing into what I think is a better setup. Cody, it sounds like you're going through a similar thing. Can you give a lay of the land of your experience last couple months and how you've been looking at it?
- [31:07]
Connor
Yeah, and, and definitely excited to hear what worked for you guys. I've. I've heard some on the pod and some, some not, but definitely want to learn because we're, we're actively in the roadma. I mean, I think we've been, I don't want to say struggling, but definitely degrees of struggling. Like again, we grew, we grew 50% last year. We're doing a lot right. But even like Q4 was not really where we wanted it. And then just like very on and off this year, what we found every time we tested Meta. Like, I think there's three things, right? Like, it's always been very incremental for us, which is great. Like, We've ran probably four meta holdouts this year so far. Maybe five 40%, 45% incrementality in those regions. So like about half of our revenue and new customer revenue is driven by meta, which is like amazing. So like, at least it doesn't feel like we're wasting money on, you know, no incrementality, but not always reaching as many new people as we want. And so the split of new versus repeat has not always been in our favor, although we have just fixed that, which I am very excited about. And then not always profitable. And so fortunate for us were incremental now it's on new. Now we just need to get the overall efficiency down. And so that's what we're trying to do. And so definitely I'm gonna, I can, I can share kind of how I'm going about this roadmap and, and doing it, but would love to kind of know like what you guys found like when performance was not great, how did you think about it? Like what did you look at in the account? How did you come up with like a hypothesis for, you know, what you should be testing?
- [32:39]
Cody
Yeah. So I do want to talk to that but actually I would love to some more details from you to Parebeck. What you said, you guys incrementality has never been an issue. It was around new driving, incremental new customer revenue that seems resolved to some degree. Now you're trying to make it more efficient. You were tweeting this week about rolling Reach. You're talking about an issue with reaching new people. Like how are you even diagnosing that as like a potential area?
- [33:10]
Connor
Yeah, what I'm trying to do is like, like do like first principles thinking just be like oh here's a roadmap or like what's working for other people? Be like what are actually the issues in our account? Like why is our. And so like I spent a lot of yesterday and last night doing it. This is actually awesome. So our data analyst is, is out of paternity leave right now where I normally ask him to do some of this. Obviously you could do a lot of. In Meta I saw this guy that had a free MCP for Claude to hook up to Meta and it also can hook up to Snowflake and stuff. And so I've been just jamming on that and it'll just create like dashboards and bi tools and stuff like that. It doesn't like refresh over time but you can like get data just by querying. So I've been looking into that just trying to look at you know, rolling reach and, and things like that. Just like I think that was my hypothesis. Like is it a reach problem? You know.
- [33:58]
Cody
Right.
- [33:59]
Connor
And, and so just looked at a bunch looked at rolling reach, looked at cost per thousand accounts looked at at spend and new reach looked at CPMS conversion rates. Just like I don't know if you, you ever do this but like I feel like most we, we do a good job being so in the weeds. Here's how we're pacing against forecast. Here's how this channel is looking on a one day click. Here's percent of new, but it's, like, so in the weeds. And I don't think we do enough zooming out to look like, all right, like, how is just this entire account strategy just, like, trending over time? Because sometimes you just, like, unless you have a really good close eye on it, you wake up one day and you're like, I didn't realize our CPMs are up 30% or something, like, because just like each day it goes up. Do you. Do you ever notice that or feel like that?
- [34:45]
Cody
I had that feedback to my team. This was probably, like, Q1 last year. Like, one of my pet peeves is the media buyers will put in their columns will be spend and then roas. And I'm like, dude, there's like, so many metrics in between spend and roas that, like, we should be hyper aware of because we went through. And this. This was. Yeah, this was Q1 last year. It felt like. It felt like death by a thousand lashes, basically. Like, we were. We were letting things get, like, marginally worse over time. And then you look up and you're like, dude, things are way worse, like, year over year. So we needed better. I feel that, yeah, better year over year comparisons more frequently. And then we need to. Can't just be like, well, Rose is down on Facebook 40 year over year. And it's like, well, why is it. Is it cpm? Is it click through rate? Is it conversion rate? Is it aov? It's like there's. There's. Those are the metrics in between spend and roas that, like, the columns should be set up that way so that you are forced to look at those all the time. So, yeah, we've gone through that. I think we're better at it now. But for sure, there's always, always. You never get those.
- [35:47]
Connor
It's like, oh, performance is down. We should pull back spend. It's like, of course, like, we should pull back spend. But then what should we do now?
- [35:54]
Cody
Yeah, totally. 100%. Yes. Yeah, that happens all the time. Pulling back spend is the right call, but it's like, look, our jobs are not to just like, move, move, budget up and down forever, right? Like, at some point, you need to. Oh. So actually, we. And I've been talking with the team recently because I think we can get much better at this. Nick Sharma had a good video about. It's exactly what we're describing. And it's not a novel concept. He called it funnel diagnostics. And I was like, that's good. I'm like, we need to be doing funnel diagnostics more frequently because I mean, and there's some things I do get that it's tricky for media buyers because like in many ways there's nothing that you can do about cpm. It's something that you should be aware of and, and honestly actually there's not, it's not as if there's nothing you could do about cpm. It's maybe the hardest one to control because there are certain times where it's just like look, your purchase optimized campaigns are the CPMs up 20 year over year and your rose is going to be worse because of it. But there are things like like I do think bidding strategies play a role in cpm. Targeting definitely plays a role. So if it's up or down year over year, you should better understand why like we're doing more non purchase optimized events. So our CPM is naturally a little bit lower because we have less purchase optimized. So it's like, so then it's even breaking it down further. What is the CPM on our purchase optimized campaigns? Let's look at that. So anyway, this like this funnel diagnostic process of going from CPM to CTR where it's like okay, if that's up or down, it's a lot of the same things. Is it targeting, is it creative? What are we comping last year? And then you have conversion rate and aov which are like maybe more on site things or landing page things. But like this is the, the @ Ridge. I'm hoping our media buyers are like the torch bearers for funnel diagnostics. As soon as you get there, you, you, you begin working across teams. If there's a landing page issue, you can work with ecom. You know, know we'd look at email capture like if email capture is an issue or is not hitting our targets. And you could work with the retention manager. But it all comes together in like those five columns that I just described. And I think we could do a better job diagnosing where the opportunities or issues are and then like kind of running that back up the organization.
- [38:07]
Connor
For sure. I agree with that. How, how often? Like obviously there's different levels where there's probably stuff you do daily and weekly. But like how often are you wanting your teams to do like that, like zoomed out look back of like a larger year over year. Like here's how we're pacing probably like.
- [38:20]
Cody
Every other week or something. I mean it will change, right? Like if we're a week into our father's Day campaign, even a couple days into our Father's Day campaign, like that, that's the way that we should be thinking about it. But like a true deep dive. I don't think it's something worth. Unless it's, unless there's some sort of performance in the business that warrants it, then it's just probably kind of like a bi weekly check in.
- [38:41]
Connor
Okay, cool. Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm also thinking of like what we can automate where it's like, hey, if this goes up by a certain amount, like let's get a notification or something like that. Just because there's so much that is going on in the business that it's sometimes easy to miss it. But that's like, like I'm going to tell my meta team, like, I want rolling reach like every month. Just like every month and I, and I. Or like every two weeks and I saw someone like built a tool that actually like you can do this because otherwise you would need meta. And actually with Claude, I think you can do it as well. Um, but yeah, I think rolling Reach and then like cost per thousand accounts reached is like, just seems to be such an important metric and just keeping an eye on that. And yes, I think a media buyer should do it. But like if you can just automate it somewhere to have like that report sent to you and then have like a trigger anytime it goes above a certain amount or increases a certain amount, like I, I think that could be helpful.
- [39:35]
Cody
Yeah. So, so you did this diagnostic.
- [39:42]
Connor
You.
- [39:42]
Cody
Know, process and you, you and, and your takeaway was you think it's a reach problem, you're not reaching as many people. What, what were some of the metrics that you saw in that?
- [39:51]
Connor
Yeah, so we're spending slightly more year over year, making less and making slightly less and reaching less people. So we're spending more money to reach less people. And so the people that we are serving ads to, you know, just frequency, the frequency is higher, higher on them or they're not converting to the same degree. So you know, costs are up like again. And CPMs are, are up, but they're not up super significantly. We're also running probably 40 to 50% of our account on VO now. So that naturally brings CPMs up.
- [40:27]
Cody
But.
- [40:28]
Connor
Which I'm, you know, slightly skeptical about.
- [40:30]
Cody
What, what is that?
- [40:31]
Connor
Vo, like value optimization.
- [40:33]
Cody
Oh, okay.
- [40:33]
Connor
Because our, our AOV up, dude, our AOV up. Our AOV is up almost 20 year over year. Got it. It's pretty crazy, but our CPMs are up with that but so, but the CPMs are not significantly up. Like that's not the cause of the problem. And that's also probably not something that is within our control. Is my guess like click through rate is healthy. It seems like, you know, not that our ads couldn't be better, but that's not like a giant issue there. But we're just spending same amount and we're reaching less people over time and the new percentage is slower than it should be. And there have been times or inflection points where it's gotten better and worse. One thing I noticed is again, and I think you'll reach more people as you're spending more, but it's just very loose anecdotal correlation to reach and the times that we're performing really well. I just plotted out last 18 months or whatever to start of January 2024. Until now looked at reach, spend, rolling reach, you know, cost per thousand accounts, reach. And it seems like when we are either doing strategies to purposely reach new people or we just happen to do it by other means. Like that is when our business has performed the best and been most efficient. And like, I know that sounds like so simple, but like just zooming out, that's the finding that we're seeing.
- [41:52]
Cody
Totally. Yeah, I think that, I think that makes sense. Can I ask what percentage of budgets go into meta right now?
- [41:59]
Connor
We're in the 60s. We, the challenge is so last year we had two years ago, we were probably like 80% on Meta, maybe 70. And so we launched TV. We launched YouTube last year. Like, you know, worked with House and really validated a lot of those. Got, you know, TV up to 20%, YouTube up to, you know, 10, 15%. And we I think neglected meta. So this year has been like, let's get meta working better. I don't want to say that was the wrong call. Definitely. Like YouTube has slipped. We definitely haven't had the bandwidth, you know, focusing on there. It's. It's so hard to know how much to spend on tv. Definitely want to chat through that Another, another day with you, but so I think we're spending a lot there, but almost all of it is on purchase optimization. And I think we've really been trying to break through creative and because I thought we did a pretty good job of different objectives. But I, I. Creative is not necessarily being like the, the biggest lever that we need to reach new people. It seems like we have challenges there within our account.
- [43:00]
Cody
Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I asked that because we probably more than you guys Just because we have such a small like repeat buying behavior that like we constantly need to be reaching new people. And it's actually like for the first, I've been at Ridge for, for almost nine years now. For the first like four, our marketing strategy was basically just get in front of new people. And that's what we were like. We were sponsoring everything. We were sponsoring YouTubers, we were sponsoring newsletters, we were doing, you know, we would do live intent, we would do. We were on TV early. It was just like we're. I, I would say this all the time. If we could get in front of largely male audiences at an affordable rate, it would just kind of work. We had like a good problem solution. You've got this old wallet, we've got this slim one that was like the strategy and that's why we had to took such like a diversified marketing mix approach so early. And, and I've talked about this, but there are pros and cons to that. You also could have argued we should have just gotten extremely good at meta back then instead of trying to figure out how to spend money in all these weird ways. But when I hear reach problem and we've done like, this was also Q1 last year where I don't remember exactly if it were, if, if it were a reach problem, but I felt we were too meta centric. We had like probably 80% of our budget going to meta. And it's just like if 80% of your budgets go into meta purchase optimized campaigns, at least for us that seemed bad. It was. And I had mapped out like growth and mer against meta as a percentage of budget and it was the highest it's ever been. And we were kind of like, we seemed to be hitting a ceiling. So one of our first approaches was just like to better diversify channels. And that was March last year. We launched Twitter, we launched YouTube. We like very quickly adjust and like immediately saw improved results. Are you looking to do that at all?
- [44:46]
Connor
Yeah, I think we're, we're probably going to dual path it. YouTube has been very good for us in the past. I think we just have not found the creative wins on it lately. So definitely going to like first try to improve efficiency there. We spend like tiny amount on Influencer compared to what we spend on meta. And so that's going to be a much bigger focus and changing the approach of that program, but definitely looking to that to bring in new audiences and get new reach. So that will be a big one. Potentially trying to do some of that. But I Think also looking to different strategies on Meta right now.
- [45:24]
Cody
Yeah, right, Totally. Okay.
- [45:27]
Connor
On that note, so it's clear where it is. Clear we are overspending because we can. With Meta being very incremental. Right. And not profitable. We can get it to be profitable by just spending less. There's some point with less spend where it actually is hitting metrics and then we have two options. We can either or three just don't spend that money. But you probably aren't going to hit your volume goals, spend that money in another channel or spend that money in Meta on a different strategy.
- [45:52]
Cody
Right. And the answer's probably a mix of the back two if you want to be a growing brand.
- [45:57]
Connor
For sure. If you know me, you know how cheap I am and how much I love saving money. This year is all about cutting costs and staying lean. You see me talk about it on Twitter. I cannot stand watching great DTC brands, even mediocre ones, get ripped off by SAS vendors in 2025. So many of them are charging way too much over promising and under delivering. And so I can't stand to see it. So I don't want to see it happen to you. I absolutely won't have it happening to me. You've also seen that I'm all in on AI. And both those reasons are why I love Rich Panel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before it was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to Rich Panel right before Black Friday last year and I almost regret not switching sooner. We had zero downside. The implementation was pretty immediate, which actually shocked me. I was a little worried about it, not gonna lie, but it just went off without a hitch. We saved money. We leveled up our CX at the same time. So here's our numbers. We cut our CX team from 18 to 10 agents since not before Black Friday. But since onboarding to Rich Panel, with our order volume staying the same or even going up, our CSAT has stayed rock solid at 4.2 out of 5. I'd like it a little bit better, but that's. That's stuff that we can do. AI is handling 70% of the tickets, which is awesome. So our ticket to order ratio has gone way down from about 40% to 14%. So we have fewer full timers. Our revenue employee has gone up. We don't need as many people to get back to people and able to be a little bit more strategic with where we allocate our resources. So if your current CF CX Software needs more people, is more expensive than you want to pay, and has some janky AI solution. I highly recommend that you check out Rich Panel. Rich panel guarantees a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back again. It's super easy to switch. They take care of data migration, staff training, all that good stuff. So you can go live in under 14 days. So check out rich panel.com and tell them you heard about them from the marketing operators podcast.
- [47:46]
Cody
All right, so you're thinking channel diversification. I'll, I'll talk through the Meta Media buying roadmap or the testing roadmap that, that we kind of walked through December of last year through like March of this year because our experience was a little bit different. We actually like, we went into Black Friday with a geolift study on Meta really just so. And we've been doing more and more of this. We just want that incrementality readout right before we're making important budget decisions. So it was like two weeks leading into the week of Black Friday so we could get a readout for YouTube for Meta. Those were two big paid social channels or two big like scalable channels at the time so that we could know relative to one another which one's better performing and we can make a slightly better budget decision going into the week of Black Friday. And what we found at that point was Meta was really not very incremental. We were in like the teen percentage points and it was like that is not, we were not efficient and we were really essentially not driving anywhere near the lift that we would need to. So it's slightly different problem.
- [48:57]
Connor
Why did you think?
- [49:00]
Cody
Well, I'll, I will say like we were just kind of confused by the whole thing. Like I did a lot of deep diagnostics at the time and I don't think there was a clear answer to me aside from we were 100% purchase optimized. Because the thing that was confusing about it was and there aren't many times where we've seen this where like it was actually a discount to what we were measuring. Like even in North Beam, like it was less than our one day roas. So it was like, so that's crazy, right? Like you're seeing people click your ad come through convert just within a one day click basis. That goes up over time. And then now we're getting a house readout that says it's actually only a fraction of that was incremental. So I was like, well, what are you going to do? I mean you're you have ads that people are clicking and buying like you're doing everything you're supposed to do do. It just seems as if they would have purchased otherwise. That's what, that's what the house readout told us. So from that perspective, it seemed as if. Oh, hey, yeah, really just 100% of purchase optimized campaigns. Spending 100% of our meta budget on purchase optimized campaigns. Probably not the right idea. These people are so qualified that they would purchase otherwise. That's what the data's selling us. So like how do we, we, how do we, you know, test out of that to get more incremental results?
- [50:15]
Connor
So you're, you're, we're in our case, we're reaching people who again, it's, it's still incremental for us, but we're reaching people. It's just more expensive than we want. We're reaching people who are existing customers. You were actually just reaching people who would have purchased anyways. Like, it was actually not incremental.
- [50:29]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that's why there's. So like what you and I are describing are.
- [50:34]
Connor
Yeah.
- [50:34]
Cody
Pretty different issues. And that's why we move to. We just started spending more dollars up funnel, so we spent a lot less. I mean, we did what we're in the middle of. We're at the very end of November and December at this time, we end up spending way less on meta. So like just from the, the point you made earlier, it's like, let's just move ourselves way down the cost curve.
- [50:56]
Connor
Right.
- [50:57]
Cody
We were seeing incredible results on Applovin and I feel very confident in the dollars that we spent on Applovin at the time. I also think these issues are correlated to some degree. Like if we're being honest, like it comes out months later that Applovin was seeing who Meta was betting on bidding on in the, what's it called, the audience network. So like I, it, it did seem as if. And this was a part of like one of the, one of the investment firms like short reports or whatever was like, hey, it looks like Applovin is basically front running bids for meta. So I do think Applovin performing as well as it did made meta worse at the time. Less incremental.
- [51:40]
Connor
Yeah, totally.
- [51:41]
Cody
So we don't need to hit on this point too much. But I think meta became incremental as soon as we pulled back spend on Applovin. And actually the only other point that would make there is in hindsight what we should have done is just pulled back Even further on meta. The thing was Applovin was driving very incremental purchases and revenue more incremental than meta. It was just cannibalizing meta completely. So in a perfect world we would have just like basically switched those budgets for the time being and. And that would have been the most efficient thing to do. And we ended up kind of in like a middle ground where we pulled back meta.
- [52:17]
Connor
What percentage of your of your media mix was meta prior to, you know, the original not great test and then like what did you pull it down to?
- [52:25]
Cody
So it was probably, you know, probably 60% or something. And then for December it was like 25%.
- [52:33]
Connor
Okay.
- [52:34]
Cody
It was a huge, it was a huge pullback. So we pull back spend quite a bit. We test, we have a number of of house tests that we ran over time, but we really just started began testing top of funnel as a percentage of top. When I say top of funnel, we bit. We optimize for view content events. So that's technically a conversion event as far as meta is concerned. Our reps jokingly call it like the, the highest point in the bottom of the funnel. It's like. But it's view content and what I'm. Yeah, yeah, the top of the bottom of the funnel, which is like I think a little bit unfair. We're bidding for PDP views or we're optimizing for PDP views and we're landing people on landing pages. What we're optimizing for is someone hitting like two or three pages. We're optimizing for a browsing user which it's Tobo.
- [53:25]
Connor
Tobo, if you are curious out there.
- [53:27]
Cody
Yeah. All right, cool. Coin coining the new acronym. So that was like our main optimization event. And the reason why we we moved to that was because. And this was a sign that meta was like not working the way that we intended through the week of Black Friday. That was one of our highest performing campaigns, was something that was just optimizing for view content. So not only was did meta become a significantly smaller percentage of total budget, but also we had this random couple campaigns optimizing for view content that we were spending a lot of money on. So we came out of this period and say, hey, let's explore that strategy further. How much of our budget can go to this? We also thought more critically and kind of reoriented what content was running for different optimization events. So like thinking we're trying to introduce ourselves to people for the first time in the view content optimized campaigns. Let's run More videos there, more problem solutions, things like that. Those are a little bit softer because I'll also say the process that we went through is not particularly scientific. Like our, our director of media buying described it as like, we're kind of like, we're kind of like in a dark room and we just have like a flashlight and we're just kind of like searching around for like signs of success. I would love for it to have been perfectly scientific. Single variable tests that we're like identifying over time. This was, let's try a bunch of new things at once. If directionally we're moving in the right direction, let's continue doing that. And that was, anyway, that was like the initial.
- [54:56]
Connor
Can I talk about that for a second?
- [54:58]
Cody
Yeah.
- [54:58]
Connor
So we have the same house rep. We have, we have Noah and obviously, you know, both, both have worked with Nick as well. And I thought one of the points of, you know, or ways we should be testing and thinking about like incrementality is to limit variables and control variables. And one of those variables being like, like seasonality. It's like if you test things at different times, you can't necessarily infer results because it could be due to that. But. And so I, I was expecting to do a lot of two cell tests or even three cell tests with like same stra. Different strategies at the same time. And we're actually taking an approach that's like account wide holdout, change one thing, run them sequentially and then just see like. Does that change overall account readout?
- [55:44]
Cody
Yeah.
- [55:45]
Connor
Is that. And that's kind of how you guys tested.
- [55:46]
Cody
I believe that that is how we did it at the time. Okay, I, okay, so yeah, what you just described I've thought quite a bit about and actually I think yeah, seasonality is a, A big thing. What we did for this period of time, this like 8, 10 week period was running different strategies. There were two and three cell tests involved. We ran them sequentially. We saw IRO as increase over the time we hit like late January, February. We were getting like, honestly like some of the best readouts we've ever gotten from Meta. But seasonality is a factor there that we're not adjusting for.
- [56:25]
Connor
Nick's point though, when I, when I push back on a. Nick's point was like we're trying to find a big enough improvement in performance that like it's not going to be caused by seasonality alone. Like if you're trying to find like a few percent swing, like you should probably get more precise. But like we're also because you're also making big. You're not changing attribution settings. You're not doing a seven day versus a one day click. Right, right at these times. That's like the button color you're testing moving 30 of our account to a new strategy or something.
- [56:50]
Cody
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, so I, so I agree with Nick. In that case then, yeah, we were looking, we, we needed to make such significant improvements that like we could just do it sequentially it and the improvements couldn't possibly be, you know, knock on wood. Couldn't, couldn't possibly be completely described by seasonality, but it's definitely a factor. I mean even to the point that I made earlier. During that period we began spending less on Applovin. And another like another big thing was we launched new products towards late January and this was a big learning for us as we found new products are extremely incremental. We had one readout that was so incredibly good and we saw like I forget 30% of our budget was going towards new product launches. And we were like well that is, is a really big variable in this test. Now we've got this great readout but this one is significantly different than early January when we had no new products. So then we began breaking that out and we said oh actually new products are, I've said this before, 4 to 5x incremental row is by far the most profitable.
- [57:53]
Connor
And did that change your, your distribution in your account and have more spend and focus on new.
- [57:58]
Cody
Yeah, totally. So we've, and that, that's been a big change year over year. But we've also in parallel began how do we drive better incremental kind of evergreen results. And that's when it' down to like the video content, the event optimization, the percent that we're spending on that event optimization. So those are kind of the, the large, you know, learnings we unearth. It's really dictated a lot of the strategy for the last six months.
- [58:23]
Connor
Yeah, I've been thinking about that and I think that's what I was going to dive into today in our account is like almost like the, the, the data that I looked at is like reach and new reach segmented by product offering or line or like naming conventions. To see like are we doing a worse job reaching new people on Miracle Bomb? Because we've spent probably a hundred million dollars on that SKU versus like is our tinted moisturizer doing a better job and should we have more of our investment going into that?
- [58:50]
Cody
And then are you guys running well? Are you just Running partnership ads.
- [58:56]
Connor
Yes. And finding a lot of success with it actually. And we're essentially 10xing. That's part of our influencer focus as well, is like, how do we then just like get more, more in the, in the funnel pipeline? Yeah, we, we have, I would say probably 30 to 40% of our account is on partnership ads right now. And efficiency is probably, it's like very similar. What I don't know is reach. That's, that's another one I want to look at and test because that one.
- [59:24]
Cody
That one, that's something that we found success with and I think these are. Okay, well I'll, I'll backtrack a little bit bit. This is an example for us of it's not, it's not solving the reach problem, but for us it's solving the incrementality problem. And it's really just like, how are we, how are we like repositioning Ridge in a very unique way. The best example, actually the few examples that I have are one, we were running this like Joe Rogan clip last year in like August and it was performing extremely well. High click through rate, high conversion rate, by far best ad in the account. And I was like, oh, we must be reaching new people here. So then what I did was I actually did rolling reach just for that ad. So you can look at like how many people. I'm not going to get the. How many people did I reach like year to date, not including that ad and how many impressions did I serve? And then you could add that ad back in and say what percentage of the people that I reached with the Joe Rogan ad were new to the account year to date? And it was extremely small. All everybody had seen our ads already. So it wasn't solving the reach problem. What it was solving was that they were interested in this content. They were probably. I don't. This is a little bit.
- [60:41]
Connor
And that was an existing product as well.
- [60:43]
Cody
Existing product, yeah, we're selling gunmetal wallets. But I think that idea where it's, hey, you've reached all these people. You just need to, you just need to really show them something that feels new in order to get them to act. Joe Rogan's an example. Partnership ads are an example. That's why I brought that up. We've been seeing success there and I think it's a similar thing where, where it's not necessarily new people we're reaching, it's not even necessarily new people getting to the site, but they are now converting because they're Ready to. So we're driving better incremental results. And then newness is obviously an example of that where it's like, look, we've got 10 million Ridge wallet customers. We've served billions of impressions over the last just couple years. People don't need to know what it is. They need to have a design that they want. So when we launch the cool tattoo design, it ends up performing extremely well. So we're trying to find those like, pockets of, of newness that like drives better incremental results, but to my point, not necessarily reaching new people.
- [61:39]
Connor
All right, so here's, here's what I wrote down. Tell me if I'm missing anything or you think about it. So there's new products to reach new audiences. There's new products for the same audiences. There's old existing products. New audiences. And then you have new message with same product and same audience. Yeah, just like the different ways to maybe think about improving performance.
- [62:06]
Cody
Totally.
- [62:07]
Connor
Anything that seems to be missing in there?
- [62:08]
Cody
No, I think you got it.
- [62:11]
Connor
I think that's an interesting way to think about it though, because I think so much of our time has been how do we improve reach? But I think, yeah, I think that's really interesting. It's like those are probably the different levers and different things I think to test through and just kind of making it like systematic for that.
- [62:28]
Cody
That.
- [62:29]
Connor
Because like, I think partnership ads is, is, is interesting and we have had a lot of success with that. And so I'm, I'm curious to look there as well. Like, does it seem like we are reaching differently or we're just hitting them up with a, a different message.
- [62:41]
Cody
Right.
- [62:42]
Connor
Than what they've been exposed to before. More just like creative fatigue. But not creative fatigue for reaching new. Just creative fatigue for like giving a new message or like a new reason to buy now for existing.
- [62:51]
Cody
Because also, do you know how many people you've reached over? Like, were you looking at the. A two year period?
- [63:00]
Connor
Yeah, I don't know the numbers, but it's millions.
- [63:02]
Cody
Because you guys are going to run out of people. Everybody's going to run out of people. Like there's only, I guess you're, you have international markets now too, but you know, whatever. There's. How many women, how many women could possibly buy Jones Road in the US and it's like you for sure hit all of them once over the last two years. So here's the.
- [63:20]
Connor
Yeah. And again, product development is a really big focus and a lot of it will be for next year. We have a A conversion with meta right now for Millennials. Because we've tried to reach Millennials and our spend has continued to, like, we'll make creatives that we think are good for Millennials. And our spend has continued to go to an older audience. And so we were like, let's just break out spend. So we gave it its own. Its own asc, you know, its own campaign, but actually just like, limited the age groups that it can. Can go to. Right. It has the same exact cost per incremental as in a conversion lift compared to our, like, standard, you know, so it's in a sandbox. So, like, I haven't looked at the reach metrics and things like that, but to me, they're. That is promising. And I'm trying to think how that gets incorporated into this, like, overall test roadmap that we, you know, want to do. But there are. We. We probably have to look at the data. We've probably reached way less Millennials than we have. Older customer, older audiences and so.
- [64:19]
Cody
Or at the very least, way lower frequency.
- [64:22]
Connor
Sure, sure. And I think, like, maybe it's. Maybe it's. We just the same way you took View content up to 40% of your account, like, maybe just this one campaign on purchase optimizing. And the creative is very Millennial specific. There's a ton of partnership ads in there. Maybe that just becomes 40% of our account. We just run that for a test or that's one. Maybe we reach. We go to reach specifically with them. Like, maybe we. Maybe we don't need a reach campaign or whatever View content campaign to reach them. We just have to spend more on them in general, you know, and like, totally force spend to it with its own campaign. Maybe we do have to reach them. But I'm, I'm very. As. As much as we're struggling right now, I'm very excited about this test, the Millennial test show. Energized. Yeah, energized. Yeah.
- [65:07]
Cody
Yeah. You know, I was talking to someone. I, I, Dude, I've been feeling this hardcore. But, like, they were saying how. I mean, in reality, I've got like, half a tweet drafted up that says this, but, like, our jobs are basically just to. Well, at least from a paid media perspective, allocate budgets across, like, a ton of different cost curves. And what you're saying is like, yeah, you're. You're really far up on the Gen X. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. Gen. Gen X cost curve. You. You should probably be spending less there. And you're. You're at a completely different place on the millennial cost curve. You're on a completely different place. Know you guys are in the uk. Yeah, the UK cost curve. Right. And it's like you basically are trying to allocate dollars as efficiently as possible across like all these different dimensions. And it's cool. And we're, we're in a very similar spot where we found, going back to my point around the new products, I was actually really worried last year that the new product launches performed really well on Meta just because we were cleaning up demand from like emailing millions of people sending big sms. It's all over the side. I'm like, I'm worried these people would convert regardless. This not at all the case. I couldn't have been more wrong. These things are like multiples more incremental than everything else. We are at a way different place on the newness cost curve than we are trying to sell black and gunmetal wallets. So it's like you're just trying to navigate your way to different parts and, and it's one of those things. It's just never perfect. But like you have to as long if you're getting it directionally correct. You can kind of feel that in your business, which is super exciting.
- [66:40]
Connor
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm. I'm excited to see that tweet because that's like a hard one to summarize and a few characters. I might have to be a long feed.
- [66:46]
Cody
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- [69:09]
Connor
That's a great question and, and I agree with that and I think that's something that it seems to be working really well for a lot of brands. I've talked to Nick as well about a brand that was spending like a ton and all on purchase, but that that was their strategy just being like very specific like upfront on who it's for. Like overly specific. Like if you are a millennial, like AG1 does it there wasn't them but AG1 does a pretty good job of this as well. And they have tailored landing pages. I think Loop Earbuds does a really good job. I've heard. So I definitely agree with that like horizontal scale not doing an amazing job of it with right now. I think we're doing better job on the creative with partnership ads. We're essentially running them to the same land page. And so we are actively working on our roadmap specifically for those millennial Personas because we still want to get the overall efficiency down. Right. And that'll help, you know, scale. But I think definitely so like A lot of the, A lot of the ads that we are running are mom focused and a lot of partnership ads. So like we're going to brief a lot more creators on those mom specific. And then how do we get those landing pages to closer match those? At the very least, like our images just need to show millennials on them and not older people. And like that's hard to do on a whole site but like on a, a satellite site on a funnel that's much easier to do. I even actually am curious about like our funnel and like as we run things from a landing page to a quiz, like I don't. We, we've never tested that on Millennials. Like maybe that performs differently. So like even like the layout of the funnel we're to test and experiment with.
- [70:35]
Cody
Yeah, totally. I mean like even the quiz sounds a bit more Gen X to me. Right?
- [70:39]
Connor
Exactly.
- [70:40]
Cody
Yeah. Yeah, that's a little.
- [70:41]
Connor
Exactly.
- [70:42]
Cody
Like Zoosk is like the dating site for Gen X plus and they, I. They run a bunch of like open web funnels, you know, like how to find your life partner or whatever. It's just not, not as much of like a 30, 31 year old behavior.
- [70:58]
Connor
Not, not, not, not totally. Yeah. So I think probably shorter funnel, like even, you know, creative styles are even different. So yeah, I think you have to tailor it and I think we can do a better job. So that's part of the reason I'm excited is because we, we probably did like a minimum viable product where we have the creative, but we don't have the full funnel. And I think if we're getting good performance with that, it just shows that like as we test into more of that, it's worth dedicating the resources to do so.
- [71:20]
Cody
Totally. The, the one thing, at least the way that I've been thinking about it is I don't mean to blow up Dan's spot, but like everybody should check out the Create ad library. It's not a, it's not a big lift. Okay. Dude, it's actually even cooler than that. It's not a big lift. They have five reasons. They're only slightly tailored. It's a lot of, A lot of them have the same reasons. It's really just like the hero image and the headline that are like change for these different Personas. I've been building them out for. I've been building out similar looking pages for some of our different categories and even like a little bit more niche like silicone rings or I'm doing one for the women's wedding Bands now, how I did it for travel, etc and I've actually been using chat GBT to write the reasons. And then I'm just like plugging those into a template and I'm like, oh yeah, the vision's here where if this were to work, which is still a question mark for us, like we could have so many of these. It could just be a part of even small launches. Could be like, it's actually not really tied to launches, but like if we're seeing women's wedding band work, I'm like, oh yeah, we could be creating two of these a week or like five of them in a weekend. Like this is not. Not. Is not all that hard. So that's a, that's a sort of like and it strategy, Persona based targeting that I think will help with horizontal scale and feels more achievable than ever before.
- [72:40]
Connor
Aggressive templatization.
- [72:42]
Cody
Aggressive templatization is what I'm saying, man. You know, I did send one of your guys ads to my team just yesterday. It was this. It's a shot of the hero kit and it says busy mom starter pack. Busy mom starter pack. Dude, I'm sure I forget where I, I think someone shared it on Twitter actually. And I was like, this is great. And what I liked about it was I, I told the team, I'm like, yeah, it feels like it could be Busy mom here, but it could just.
- [73:09]
Connor
As easily be something else that's working. Same same kit or maybe different kit, but Coastal Grandma starter pack 100%.
- [73:17]
Cody
And my, my team will sometimes say like, yeah, we should create a kit called, you know, like the.
- [73:24]
Connor
You know.
- [73:24]
Cody
Whatever college kid kit. And I'm like, we don't need a new kit. We've got all these kits on the site. Let's just say it's for college kids at the ad level, maybe in the five Reasons page. And like, maybe that works. And it's that level of like, it's like just repackaging that. Like we could be doing more of.
- [73:40]
Connor
For sure. For sure. No, it's helped again, we can do way more of it. And so we're gonna, we're gonna plan and test, but I agree with that.
- [73:45]
Cody
So Coastal Grandma, huh?
- [73:47]
Connor
That's.
- [73:47]
Cody
That's crushing right now.
- [73:48]
Connor
Yeah, that's our, that's our Gen X audio.
- [73:51]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Well, cool, man. All right, any other meta points you want to hit? I feel pretty good about that. That rundown.
- [74:02]
Connor
Yeah, that, that was helpful. I think that answered all my questions. So where are you guys at today. Like, like, do you feel like you're at a good level? What's your account like, do you still have a lot on view content? Do you have a lot more of your spend on new products? Like, where are you guys at today?
- [74:14]
Cody
Oh, yeah. So we have a lot more of our spend on new products. That's, that's for sure. Been. This year's been super spotty. We've had some like fantastic months and then like June was fine. So we're like. And I've, I've said that before. Like, like, so some weeks have been like, really okay. And then other weeks are like absolutely crushing. That's largely dictated by new products. I tell Sean this all the time, but like, I think it is the most impactful thing we can do for our business right now. The EDC business. The, the most impactful thing we could do to our business is introduce really large TAM categories. So we're excited about wedding bands and travel and things like that. But if we're just talking about making the EDC business bigger and more efficient, it's new wallet designs, it's like the easiest money we'll ever make is just like new cool stuff. And then now that we validated that we're not in fact just like cleaning up existing demand, that we're driving extremely incremental and profitable results. We have a new product right now and it's like 30% of our total budget on Meta. We're spending like, you know, $20,000 a day or whatever. So yeah, so, so that, that's the big one. We have targets now for Top of Funnel. So we're always running Top of Funnel. These View content optimized campaigns, it's often not at 30% of the account, it's often smaller, but it kind of ebbs and flows with where we are above and below target. So it's like if purchase Optimized isn't performing, but Top of Funnel is, then it can, you know, creep up to 20, 25% of the.
- [75:46]
Connor
What do you consider like top of like view content performing? Is that like based off an incrementality factor?
- [75:53]
Cody
Yes. Yeah. So we've like, we. And we've ran a number of top of Funnel lift studies this year now. And we just have a relationship between like what we observe there and what we're seeing in north beam. And so we have a north beam target that we use on a day to day basis. And then if we're above that target, we can increase back spend.
- [76:10]
Connor
That makes sense for sure. I also Feel like it would be interesting to like, figure out, I don't know what the metric would be if it's like rolling reach or new reach or cost per thousand accounts and like, as that begins to dip to like, you know, put more spend into that and just like toggle it based on that.
- [76:25]
Cody
It was super cool idea. That would, I mean, that makes total sense. It also, like, it seems different in and out of promo periods a little bit where I'm like, I could also see it being, you know, hey, in, in late April, early May, before we're getting into Memorial Day and Father's Day. Like, it should be a higher percentage of budget. We also see that kind of happen regardless where that top of funnel seems to more often outperform purchase optimize. So. So when I say that, I just mean it is. It is closer or above its target more than purchase optimizes. Right. So relative to each of their targets, it is like, quote unquote, performing better. And that is when it would become a larger percentage of bud. It feels like that naturally happens outside of promo periods. So not only does it seem to be hitting our targets, but we're also theoretically building the funnel. Right. We're reaching new people. We're doing it more cost effectively. Then we go into promo periods and the purchase optimized stuff seems to hit budgets and be the most scalable.
- [77:27]
Connor
For sure. For sure. Last, last question on this. Like, so did you go straight to 40%? I know you were running before that. Did you go like, oh, let's test 10, then that work? Let's go 20, let's go 30. Or how that shake out?
- [77:39]
Cody
No, we went, we went straight to like, I think we went straight to 40%. We, we were taking big swings.
- [77:48]
Connor
Yeah.
- [77:48]
Cody
And it was also like, at 10%, I'm like, there's, it's just, it'll be too noisy. I'm like, let's just, like, let's just figure out whether there's like any sort of potential here. Because. Because the last thing that I wanted.
- [78:02]
Connor
Was.
- [78:05]
Cody
You know, inactionable results. I really don't just want to go another three weeks and be like, well, it's 5% better. And it was so like, let's creep it up to 20%. I'm like, let's take, let's take big swings. We were totally just throwing stuff at the wall, running tests sequentially, trying to get incremental rows to improve over time and then measure, well, what are the changes within that? And that's event optimization. Percent of budget, whether there's newness or not. And that kind of has. Has guided the strategy.
- [78:31]
Connor
The chief.
- [78:32]
Cody
Love it.
- [78:32]
Connor
And were you on two week tests? Like, how long were you letting each go for? Or one week?
- [78:36]
Cody
They were like two week. They might have even been more, I don't know, off the top of my head, but at least two weeks.
- [78:40]
Connor
Okay, cool.
- [78:41]
Cody
The other thing that I'll say is just, just quickly because we, we've taken this approach of like. And I know you have as well. You. You were describing it earlier, but like really measuring different ways to spend. Like in a silo. Right. Like we did for Father's Day. We ran white listing tests or sorry, partnership ads. They had their own house test. So it was like, we just want to understand, we're not worried about the account level. We just want to understand how this $80,000 in. In budget performed. So we've been doing that and then we have all these strategies and these readouts and then we're like assembling how we want to spend all of our budget from there.
- [79:19]
Connor
Yeah, I love that. That. That makes sense. Yeah. I think like, there's probably some level of like tactical tests, whether it's like a sandbox or not, where it's like, all right, let's just test like partnership ads on the side or let's test this campaign style. And then like, if that seems to be working, let's get and go and make that a big part of our account and test that with an account wide.
- [79:38]
Cody
Right. Test with that 100%. Yeah. And we're. Yeah, you're absolutely right. We're going to do that. I think we're in the middle of that now. Is like a full meta account holdout. So you can test these strategies. You put together your like, whole account strategy, do a whole channel holdout, then you go for.
- [79:54]
Connor
From there. For sure. Yeah. Love it.
- [79:56]
Cody
All right, that's a wrap on another episode. Thank you again for listening. Thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel after Cell Prescient and Revo. As always, like and subscribe. Leave reviews. I've been reading those. And we'll see you again next week.