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The Untapped Potential of YouTube Ads – Strategy, Measurement & What Drives Results with Brett Curry
01:14:03
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- [00:00]
Brett Curry
I fell in love with TV first and then, like, search. And then when I saw YouTube, I was like, wait a minute. This is like, all my world's coming together.
- [00:08]
Cody
We've got a great guest today. We got Brett Curry. Brett is here from OMG Commerce.
- [00:11]
Brett Curry
So this episode is going to be all about YouTube. I believe YouTube is like our generations. I know I'm older than you guys, but like our generation or this time period, it's our tv. But it's better than TV ever could have been because of the way you can measure and target and optimize. The hook is the most important. Right. You've got five seconds. That magic window, people are hovering over the skip button, and it's. If you don't get them, they're. They're going to move on.
- [00:33]
Cody
Let's talk measurements. What's your measurement stack? How do you think brands should think about trying to identify if it's working?
- [00:39]
Brett Curry
Yeah, it's a great question. So.
- [00:42]
Cody
So I was on vacation the other day in summer mode and I heard somebody Tweet, we're like 90 days away from Black Friday. And it gave me a heart attack. I don't know about you, but it comes up quick every year. The time to start preparing is now, if you haven't already, which is why Operators is hosting a Black Friday prep event. It is hours by operators for operators. I think that would call BofO. We've got over 25 speakers, all of them great. We got three keynotes, separate training sessions for leadership, marketers and finance. Ten Lightning panelists, plus a closer who's going to bring you to tears. It's September 12th online, so you do it from your home. Do it while your boss thinks you're working. There'll be an absolute blowout event to get you ready for Q4. I will be there. Rest of mops will be there, Rest of the ops will be there as well. So if you want to join us, jump over to 9operators.com Black Friday and sign up today. I feel like we haven't done this in a while. I think I've been. I've been traveling a lot. I've been mia. Connor, you're traveling right now. You're in New York, but very dedicated podcaster. You got your mic with you in New York for Beanstalk. Appreciate that. I heard that there's someone else recording a pod that was supposed to be recording right now that also traveled to New York that did not bring their podcast equipment. Is that true?
- [01:57]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sean's a couple doors down. Operators Are recording right now. But he forgot his mic last minute. I was giving him. I was giving him about it last night that I. I just care about the craft more. Obviously.
- [02:09]
Cody
You're definitely more determined. Podcaster, dude. I even bought like a travel stand when we were in California. I was going to do it. I was going to bring it out to Colorado. Not only did I. I was in Colorado with my family last week. Not only did I not bring my podcast stand, I get there, we get to the house, and I realized I forgot my two kids bags. It was like five o' clock at night. My son was about to go to bed because time difference. I have a Rivian and it has like the frunk. And so when we pulled up to the airport, just in the commotion of all of it, we forgot. Totally forgot the stuff in the frunk. And it. It wasn't until we got there. So we'd like scramble the. The nearest target was like an hour and a half away. So we made it. I was. I was like, my son had one pair of PJs. He's like seven months old. I was like, all right, at least he can go to bed in that. I get ready to put him to bed. He has a massive poop. Big blowout over the PJs. So I'm sitting there with like, no clothes. And then the second day, we got trapped in an elevator for 45 minutes. Had it. The firemen had to come and rescue us. So the trip was very good. It only went up from there. I met. It was the film festival, so I met, like, Jeremy Strong and a bunch of really cool people. But it definitely started off not on a great note.
- [03:14]
Connor
Crazy story. Just quickly. I said we'd get right into it. But I'm super curious. Why did you go to the Telluride Film Festival?
- [03:22]
Cody
Have a family, has a house there. So my parents go every year. And I just love going to. I just love going to Telluride. So we weren't. We weren't planning to go to any movies, but we got into one. We kind of just like snuck in. Someone was able to get us a pass. But I think next year I might do it. I think I might actually do it, but for now it was just hiking up in the mountains.
- [03:39]
Connor
Totally awesome.
- [03:41]
Cody
All right, well, we got a great one today. We have a guest, Brett Curry. Before we introduce him, I want to thank our sponsors. This show would not be possible without them. So, as always, thank you so much to our sponsors. This is episode 76, Connor's 76th consecutive episode. Mr. Cal Ripken want to thank Motion Rich Panel, Pression, AI Aftercell and Revo. Let's get into.
- [04:13]
Brett Curry
Foreign.
- [04:34]
Connor
I want to talk to you quickly About Motion's new AI creative strategist. These are AI agents built by Best in Class D2C operators. And what's unique about these is that you are using agents to analyze your creative using real data from your meta ad account. It's like ChatGPT but way more relevant with way more context. So Connor, rolling. I ran some of these this morning. Let me, let me walk you through them. So a couple quick things here. One, these are you'd see in the top right of your Motion dashboard you have account wide tasks that you can have these AI agents run. But the first one I want to show you actually is Jess Bachman's critique this ads messaging which is at the ad level. So this is our best performing creative last week. You can run this task here. I've got it open here as well. And what we hear from Jess is that one, he loves a concept, instant differentiation. But what I found interesting and kind of painful as always when you realize there's ad creative that you don't absolutely love. We use the headline almost as rare as winning the lottery. These are like one of eight unique designs and just says that is hyperbolic and undermines credibility. And I 100% agree and I took this to my team and we're taking action on it.
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Prescient Representative
Yeah, I love it. I think this stuff takes a lot of time to manually do like you could your creative strategist, especially at brands that are at the scale of of ridge like your creative strategist could spot, could spend all day, every day just like looking through top performing ads and low performing ads and just trying to come up with reasons why they work or don't work and like what the next steps are. So I don't think that this agent necessarily totally replaces that. But now you're starting at level five instead of level zero. So the amount of time it saves you is, is huge and it just empowers your team to go and action things instead of sitting there and kind of getting stuck in analysis paralysis all day long.
- [06:12]
Connor
The second task I ran was find new customer Personas by Jimmy Slagle and Alex Cooper. They have an agent called Marvis and this one was cool. I got to upload 500 reviews and then identified people that we might not be speaking to or can better build Persona funnels around which we talk about on marketing operators all the time. And I thought this was extremely helpful Traveler with tech. I mean, between our luggage, between our wallets, between our power banks, this is like exactly who we want to speak to. So I felt they nailed identifying some. Some new and maybe underserved Personas for us.
- [06:41]
Prescient Representative
I feel like this is so important. I talk to market brand operators every now and again and they're like, oh, like we're at 10 million, 20 million. We've hit a wall with meta and I ask them some. Some kind of pointed questions, and they haven't launched new creative in a long time. And I think this right here is like the absolute starting point for brands that have maybe hit a wall or haven't hit a wall, are just looking to continue to scale. Because how do you scale Meta? Will you reach new people? How do you reach new people? You create ads that speak to those people. And like, this is such an amazing starting point for that. And it's based on your real reviews. Like, what better, more trustworthy place to start?
- [07:16]
Connor
100%. That's all to say. Motion is giving teams an AI adoption cheat code, making it accessible to every DTC advertiser. And best yet, you don't need a Motion contract to use this. You can try these agents for free. Test them out in your Motion account today. So try it out@motion app.com.
- [07:33]
Cody
We'Ve got a great guest today. We got Brett Curry. Brett is here from OMG Commerce. Brett, I'll let you introduce yourself, but just some quick backstory. I've been familia for a little bit from Ezra's courses, who we had on a few episodes ago. I know you guys go way back. Kind of known you as a YouTube guy, so it was really fun to get to learn from you. And Jock from Raindrop, who's been on Operators recently, you guys did an event at Google headquarters all about YouTube, which was awesome. But Brett would love for you to kind of give quick backstory, you know, and intro yourself, please.
- [08:06]
Brett Curry
Yeah, absolutely. And guys, thanks for having me on. I'm a huge fan of the pod. Mean that sincerely. So long time, time. So thrilled to be here. And I also want to call out, I think this, this is worth noting. Connor, you're wearing a Facebook shirt right now. So this episode is going to be all about YouTube and you're wearing a Facebook shirt. So we're already making good radio, creating some tension. I absolutely love it.
- [08:30]
Connor
That's what I was going for. Yeah, thanks for picking up on it.
- [08:32]
Cody
It's not even a Meta shirt. It's a Facebook shirt.
- [08:34]
Brett Curry
Love that so, yeah, actually, and speaking of radio, speaking of good radio, I got my start in radio in college. I worked for a small radio station while I was putting myself through college. And it was one of those small radio stations where my primary job was to sell. So I had to convince, I was 20, had to convince people in their 40s and 50s to spend money on my radio station. And so that's what I did. But it was a small enough radio station that I would sell new advertisers and then the ownership would be like, all right kid, you need to make an ad. And I'm like, what? So I learned copywriting, I learned good advertising, even had to do some live broadcasts for people to know what that is. So I was like on location at, you know, a jewelry store or a, you know, boutique store or something like that, and I had to try to get people to come in. And so it was really like this trial by fire and lesson of what makes people respond. Like, if we say these things on air, do people come in? If we say those things, that people not come in. So I did that. But during the process, I built relationships with people and they're like, man, we love the ideas you bring, but we don't really want to do radio, right? And so, so I started learning TV right out of college, opened my first like consultancy doing TV and radio and then learned SEO. So I learned SEO, paid search, and really I think, you know, there's never been like a better bottom of funnel channel than Google search and SEO. And so that's what I kind of dove into. And then that sort of led me to YouTube down the line. And so that's kind of how I got my start. But I fell in love with TV first and then like search and then when I saw YouTube I was like, wait a minute, this is like all my world's coming together. This is going to be pretty powerful.
- [10:13]
Cody
And so bring us to today. So you have an agency, OMG Commerce. Like you guys specialize. I feel like you guys do multiple services. But would you say you specialize in like YouTube, Google?
- [10:24]
Brett Curry
Yeah. So started the agency in 26 or sorry, 2010, 2016 is when we went deep on e commerce and YouTube and stu. But yeah, we work with some pretty amazing brands like Native and Arctic and Organifi and Crumble, Cookie and Mando. And so we really specialize in kind of Google and YouTube, the combination of those channels. But also run full service Amazon and retention marketing and then also help with Meta as well. And so yeah, we've always Been more of a performance focused agency. I think that goes back to my beginning. Like I've always loved marketing. That drives response and so that's what we do. Yeah, we're, we're a Top Spender on YouTube for agencies our size. We invited to do events like the one in New York City that we get to hang out at. Cody. And so yeah, that's kind of a quick catch up to today.
- [11:14]
Cody
Cool. So kind of, kind of want to get into it. Connor and I are just going to grill you about YouTube. Maybe we can talk Google a little bit, but I think primarily YouTube, like just, and you know, love what you shared at the event, but just like want you to drop a masterclass. We've talked about YouTube on the show, you know, quite a bit. I wouldn't say quite a bit. But like I don't think either of us are like experts, experts at it. And obviously this is what you're doing all day. So like where do we need to start? Like you started, you know, the talk with like showing the house data and showing like, you know that like big study they did. Like is that the place to start? Like I think that the channel is so different from meta and like paid social. And so do we need to start with like thinking about the channel or who's using it? Like what, what do you think is the best way in?
- [11:53]
Brett Curry
I think that's a great place to start. So I think, understanding, like how do people interact with YouTube, how do they YouTube use YouTube in the first place? And it's really not one mode of consumption right there. There are multiple ways people interact with, with YouTube. So there, there's kind of the, the search feature. So there's still a lot of people that interact with YouTube via search. It's the number two search engine behind Google and even, you know, more searches than any of the, the AI platforms. And so people go to YouTube to search for how do I do this thing or that thing, how do I fix my lawnmower or what's the best travel pillow or things like that. So people are searching on YouTube, which is interesting. People are streaming on YouTube and this is something that I know Olivia Corey talked about a decent amount. But now it's like 50 to 65% of all views on YouTube are on smart TVs. So streaming is just massive. So that, that's a piece of YouTube that really functions like TV. It looks like TV, feels like TV. I think the advertising should be like kind of like TV because it's on tv, right? And so streaming is a big part of it as well.
- [12:57]
Cody
There's still, do you know if that, if that is increasing? Because I know like a year or two ago when I was like, I'm probably still quoting it, it was in the 40s. Is that, do you know, is that continuing to climb then?
- [13:09]
Brett Curry
I believe it is because the, the, one of the more recent studies I saw was like 50%. But Olivia shared recently, 65% of all views are on streaming TVs. So it appears to be growing. And Google is Now Google search. YouTube is kind of doubling down on this. So I don't know when this podcast is going to be released, but I'm from the Midwest, from Kansas City, huge Chiefs fan. And so the Chiefs home or the Chiefs first game of the season played against the Chargers in Brazil, but it's being streamed on YouTube, not YouTube TV, but the YouTube app. And so I think YouTube, I don't think, I know, like they are putting more resources into their, their streaming platform and so I expect that number to continue to grow. It just makes sense that it would.
- [13:52]
Connor
I saw another stat recently from Colin and Samir and I believe they said YouTube now has more TV views than Netflix and Hulu. Like they are like the number one sort of streaming service on, on, you.
- [14:06]
Brett Curry
Know, physical TVs, the number one by a long shot. So they've got like 12.5% of the total streaming time on smart TVs. And Netflix is at like 7.5. So they're almost double the market share of Netflix, which is crazy. They're the number one by, by quite a large margin. I think Disney plus is number two right now. But yeah, and this, this is not just YouTube TV. YouTube TV is actually a small sliver of this. This is mostly the good old fashioned YouTube app. And, and I see this a lot. So I've got, I've got eight kids, which is, which I know is a crazy stat, but when we let our kids watch TV, several of them just choose YouTube. That's what they want to do. They want to watch their favorite creators on YouTube, but they watch it on TV. I'm assuming that could be the same for you as well, Cody. Are your kids watching YouTube on TV or. They're a little young for that. They're more like mobile device.
- [14:59]
Cody
My daughter is three, so yeah, she has, you know, an iPad for travel and stuff or if we, you know, she'll ask for TV. And it's essentially, it's almost always YouTube. We're like just now getting into movies and even, even me Myself, like I don't have that much time for tv. Like I'll occasionally peak enough show when my wife is watching. But like if I'm watching like you know, up in the morning like feeding my son, like I'm usually putting on like TVPN on, on YouTube on full screen. So like that's my TV consumption.
- [15:22]
Brett Curry
Yeah, it's, it's the number one podcast platforms like the all in Pod, which is huge. And a lot of people in our community listen to that. People watch it on YouTube. Like your podcast, you guys have.
- [15:30]
Cody
Operators pod is huge. Marketing operators pod is huge.
- [15:33]
Brett Curry
Yeah, it's the number. Yeah, exactly. Those, those are the two best, the two best podcasts on the planet. But there's so much of that consumption happening on YouTube and so that's a big part of it. And then people are scrolling, you know, on the YouTube app. So they're scrolling and kind of looking for the next thing. And so they're just different modes of consumption. So we have to consider that. So that's a big part of this. And I think that's one of the mistakes that people get into is they try to port their meta ads directly into YouTube. Usually that does not work. We've even seen some brands, we've helped some big, big spenders on TV start launching on YouTube. And sometimes even your best TV ads don't translate one to one on YouTube. You need to tweak those just a little bit. And then certainly the same is true with TikTok and other platforms. And so it's just, it's just a different beast. It's kind of all those things combined. And so the creative, the messaging, the targeting, you need to keep all of that in, into consideration. And then yeah, the big piece that you alluded to Cody, is you measure this differently, right? This is not. People don't generally click on YouTube ads. It's got less than half the average click through rate of Meta. And as TV consumption grows or more people are watching YouTube on TV, that number is going to continue to go down. Right. Because you can't click on your tv. And so it's more of a view based platform. It is measurable, but it's not measurable in the same way the meta is. And so you've got to get kind of creative. You got to think about incrementality and search lift and brand lift and things like that. And so, so yeah, it's understanding how are people consuming it, understanding how to measure it, understanding the creative and the targeting, the campaigns. It's just A different beast.
- [17:13]
Connor
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- [18:22]
Cody
I'm just like kind of realizing this now which is kind of stupid. But you have like the scale and the big screen impression power of tv. But you also have like the machine learning, conversion optimization optimization of something like meta which is so powerful. And then I've also seen this data where it's like everyone's on YouTube. Like it's not just old people, it's not just young people. Like it's pretty much everybody. And the scale is huge. It's not like we're talking about a Snapchat channel that you could spend a thousand a day on. Like if you do it right the scale can be pretty massive.
- [18:53]
Brett Curry
Scale is almost unlimited. And yeah, my, my 74 year old dad is on, on YouTube, my 8 year old son Benjamin is on YouTube like and everyone in between. So, so everybody is there and, and yeah, you, you've got to measure it differently. But one of the things I noticed, I noticed this early on when I was selling radio and stuff, I'd run into like local business owners. I'd be like hey, what do you, what do you do to grow your business? And and they'd be like yeah, I do, you know, newspaper. This was a long time ago to do newspaper, radio or Whatever, and those are fine. But I advertise on TV and that works. And when I advertise on tv, if I go to a local restaurant, people say, hey, I see your ads on tv. Or if I go wherever like people, it creates this local celebrity status. There's just something about a brand on TV that's meaningful. You're like, this is real, this is a real brand. And So I believe YouTube is like our generations. I know I'm older than you guys, but like our generation or this time period, it's our tv. But it's better than TV ever could have been because of the way you can measure and target and optimize.
- [19:53]
Connor
Well, you know, one thing I'll add there, I do totally agree landing on TVs has a different sort of impact with consumers. But just the, the, the type of ad placement that in stream YouTube is I think is naturally so much more memorable than something like Meta. Super simple. You get five non skippable seconds. If you look at view through five second view through rates on meta, I mean a great thumbstop rate might be 30, 40% and then you're having people drop off at second four, at second five, you're maybe getting a fifth of people watching five seconds of your ads. And that would be fantastic. I think on meta and on YouTube in stream, 100% of people are watching 5 Seconds. And that just ends up becoming so much more memorable. And I think, and I know we'll get into this, but I think that dictates a lot of the creative strategy where you know, you have this allotted amount of time to make that impression that you need.
- [20:40]
Brett Curry
Yeah, it, it does. And it's such a good call out. And one, one interesting thing too about, about YouTube on TV. Well, recently my, my kids and I, we watched the Mr. Beast, some Mr. Beast videos. Right. And so that's, that's one of those things where, and I know my family's a little bit different, but there was literally 10 of us, you know, gathered around the TV watching some Mr. Beast videos. And so that happens a lot on TV though, where it's not just one impression as much. It's usually multiple people gathered around TV watching, watching a show, which is interesting. Now we've partnered with Raindrop on a lot of campaigns. I know you mentioned Jacques Spitzer earlier. Love partnering with them. They did a lot of campaigns for Native. So back when Native was really scaling, we ran all the media. They did the creative same for, for Arctic, like Arctic coolers, Arctic Tumblers. And what we found with some of the native ads and some of the Arctic ads and others is that sometimes on TV the view rate would be north of 60%. There was a couple of ads that we, that we showed for Arctic, they were north of 80%, meaning eight out of 10 people did not skip that ad. They watched at least 30 seconds of the ad. Or if they ended up converting later, Google counts out as like, you know, if there were 10 seconds or more. But we would look at the average watch time per impression and sometimes that was literally 28 or 32 seconds, which is bonkers. Right? And so if you, if you couple that with the fact that you can pay less than $10 cpms, sometimes less than $5 cpms and the average person is watching 30 seconds, that's crazy. Now a lot of things have to be aligned. It's got to be a killer creative. You gotta be reaching the right person, all that. But yeah, to your point, you're creating some memorable impressions with YouTube on TV that you really just can't get elsewhere.
- [22:21]
Cody
Definitely. So, so let's talk measurement. So you're, you're, and we've talked about it a lot on this podcast, but you're not going to see a great last click. Right? Like Google does have attribution, they have different windows, but if, if that's what you're looking at, it's not going to look great. What's your, what's your measurement stack? How do you think brands should think about trying to identify, you know, if it's working? Because again, a lot of people are going to see it tv, I would imagine they're going to search later. Maybe they interact with pa, maybe they go, you know, website off a different device and you're not going to be able to measure that.
- [22:50]
Brett Curry
Yeah, it's a great question. So, and actually you can run conversion focused campaigns. So they used to be called video action campaigns. Now they're part of demand gen and with that you can bid for conversions. So you can do maximize conversions or conversions at a target CPA or maximize conversion value, target roas, things like that. Those do work. It's like we can, we can achieve some scale with those campaigns. They generally lean towards mobile, tablet and desktop because that's where you're gonna get the most measurable conversions. You can achieve a certain amount of scale there. Even still, the numbers are gonna probably be worse there than they are in meta, but you can at least see some direct conversion. So a lot of times that is the great place to start is running demand gen campaigns that are conversion Focused. But if we look at pure measurement, I do wanna look at direct conversions. We always measure that regardless. But then we talk about lift, and I call it the lift trifecta. Right? So there's, first of all, sales lift, and I would call this incrementality. So ideally, if you're, you know, the size of Jones Road beauty, or, or you're, you're, you know, like Ridge or whatever, you're hopefully working with House or somebody measuring incrementality. There's some incrementality studies that Google do through what they call conversion lift, which is kind of a incrementality light option there. So sales lift would be kind of the first piece of the Lyft trifecta. The second would be search lift. And I think this is one of those unique things where Google's got this data and nobody else really has it. But one of the most likely things you'll do if you see an ad and you're interested is, I'll watch the ad on tv. I'm not going to click that or do anything there. I'm going to search later. And so this, so search lift studies, they're scientific. You're measuring actual search behavior. So people that saw these ads, how does their search behavior differ from people that did not see the ad? And so those are huge. Like, with our take, we did this big campaign, we won a Google Agency Excellence award for it, but we drove like 230% search lift of branded search lift. Right? So branded search has to come from somewhere. It doesn't, you know, people don't just wake up with an epiphany. And so, you know, YouTube really drives that search lift. And then the third piece of the Lyft trifecta is Brand Lyft. I like these two. They're scientific, right? But they're based on surveys. So those are the surveys that pop up for whatever video you want to watch on YouTube that says, hey, have you heard of these brands? Or would you consider buying from these brands? Are you in the market for these brands? And so that's just another piece to show. Is there some data that's informing that, hey, these, these ads are having an impact? And what I like best about brand Lift, it's not so much the raw data because it's not super actionable, but it can show which creatives have a better brand lift than others. And so that could just be kind of another data point that helps us optimize and continue to grow.
- [25:37]
Connor
One question I have around this YouTube, you're getting 2030 second average views. If you have great creative. It's a, that's a fantastic like brand awareness building channel. I'm curious and you just kind of nailed the spectrum of like conversion lift to search lift to brand lift for most of your clients. Are you guys measuring YouTube to drive like incremental profitable cacs or are you saying okay, the answer is yes, because I could also totally understand the argument if I'm a massive brand. You know, if I'm Dr. Squatch now and I'm in, I'm in Costco's and Targets and Walmart's, like I might actually only care about brand list lift. So I'm curious like what are the, what are the size of the brands and like what does that spectrum look like?
- [26:24]
Brett Curry
Yeah, so we do a little bit of both. We were now kind of like the outsourced YouTube agency for a couple of larger traditional agencies. So some TV advertisers are now running on YouTube and we're like doing the back end of that. And so that is mostly brand lift search lift things along those lines. We're helping a lot of brands with retail lift. So that's actually the main thing we did with Arctic Arctic coolers and Tumblers was we did like an eight week campaign to see can we drive meaningful lift to Walmart. And so there's a few ways you can track like store visits to Walmart. But mainly we were measuring can we create a sales lift at walmart through, through YouTube. And so, so that's kind of larger brands or omnichannel brands and what, and what they're doing with brands that are mostly D2C or mostly D2C in Marketplace we are still measuring CAC but it's just that the platform specific CAC is bad. Right. You look in YouTube it's going to be underreporting by an order of magnitude. Right. Olivia Corey and the House study, their data came back and it was like 190 incrementality tests that hey, if you're seeing a one row as in platform on YouTube, it's probably a 3.4, right? So, so Google under reports by 70% on average, which is sort of nuts. It kind of makes sense if you think about it. Just people aren't clicking and there's privacy issues and stuff like that, but still kind of nuts. Like they under report by, by 70% and so what we're mostly looking at and we're, we're helping, you know the, this brand is scaling to 100 million this year and like they're really trying to unlock YouTube. And so we're also looking at, okay, we're looking at some in platform numbers because that's, that'll inform us how are people engaging with these specific ads and how are these specific audiences working and things like that. But overall we're looking at, are sales growing and is our blended cac, is that still good? Is that still within range? And is our blended new customer CAC improving or staying within range as we scale? And so those are the numbers that matter. And you can then kind of figure out what in platform numbers translate to the blended CAC that you need and things like that. But yeah, you just can't. You can't open up Google Ads and look at your YouTube campaigns and expect them to perform the way meta does. They just don't. And so, so it's more about combining and looking at this holistically. They make you work for the measurement. But the, the good news is your competitors are not on YouTube right now. Like, I speak about YouTube all over the place, and when I ask for a show of hands, like, hey, who's, who's advertising on, on YouTube, it's almost always less than 15% of the audience, even if it's bigger brands, and usually it's less than 10. So it's one of those things that, like, I've been talking about YouTube since 2016, but it's still this untapped opportunity. And so, like, it does take more work, but it's absolutely worth it if you can nail it.
- [29:18]
Cody
Yeah, it's like I was gonna say, it's not as easy to stand up. It's much harder to measure it. But yeah, like definitely scales there. And one other thing that I've seen like Olivia and House talk about is these upper funnel, even if you're running a video action, you know, YouTube is still, I'll call it higher funnel than meta. And these video campaign, they also have a stronger halo effect on other channels as well. So, like they've seen a higher Amazon halo, a higher retail halo as well. So I do think it can be like a really incredible full funnel channel.
- [29:48]
Brett Curry
Yeah, just a quick note on that, because it is 100% agree. So we worked with this hair care brand a few years ago and they were scaling on meta. They actually ran some direct response TV could never get YouTube to work. And part of that was we had to fix their creative. Even their TV creative didn't translate to YouTube, but we fixed it and then it did. And so it took them from like zero to a million dollars and spend in less than 90 days on, on YouTube. But they had a data scientist team and so they were looking at stuff. We were measuring CAC on their retail store. I'm. I'm sorry, on their, on their Shopify store. Right. That's what we were measuring. But over time, their, their data scientist team came to us and they said, hey, we're looking at this. And we're pretty sure that for every 1D 2C sale on Shopify that we're getting, we're getting two on Amazon. And we noticed this too. We were actually running all their Amazon. We had to pause YouTube for a little while because of some tracking issues they were having. And when we paused YouTube, we saw branded search on Amazon get cut in half. So branded search on Amazon cut in half. When we paused YouTube, it all came back. It was all fine. But it was just one of those realizations that like, oh man, people will see the ad here, they'll be motivated by it, but then they're just going to buy where they want to buy. And for a lot of people, that's Amazon.
- [31:00]
Prescient Representative
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- [33:16]
Connor
I feel like the there's always been Alpha in YouTube because of the poor attribution in platform where it's like the brands don't have the confidence every there's been a number of brands over the last couple years who have scaled almost like predominantly through YouTube. I'd put like William Painter in that bucket many years ago, Dr. Squatch early on and like all those guys did.
- [33:37]
Brett Curry
That for a number of years. A buddy of mine was there, we helped them a little bit. Yeah, totally.
- [33:40]
Connor
And a lot of those guys will just say like yeah, we just knew it was working because the business was growing like it wasn't any. Like oh my God, we're like getting this amazing in platform reporting now. My question is one thing that we do now and we started doing many years ago and you can correct me where I'm wrong here because Google's changed a lot over the years. But one of the reasons attribution's hard for YouTube within the Google Ads platform is that it is Google would favor search and shopping campaigns. So if I view or click a YouTube ad and then I Google Ridge Wallet and then I click on a branded search ad, 100% of that conversion would go to the search ad. No matter if we were using Any attribution model, it would always fall to search. So the second part of this is we used to, we still do, we break out YouTube into its own Google Ads account so that we don't get any, we don't lose any attribution within the platform to search or shopping. So one, is that still accurate? And then two, do you have any guidance on whether we're doing the right thing by breaking out the ad accounts?
- [34:39]
Brett Curry
Yeah, it's a really great call. We used to do that all the time as well for the very reason you mentioned. Like Google just couldn't separate cross channel attribution when YouTube was involved. And I think that comes back to Google was built for search. Like, you know, Google Analytics was built for search, you know, back in the urchin days and whatever. Like everything is built for search. And so it would just cannibalize all the credit. And it still does to a certain extent. Now I think there's, there's some value in having everything in one account. And so more often than not we're putting YouTube in the same account as everything else. But we still like some of our legacy accounts we've been managing for years and years. YouTube isn't a separate account. Or occasionally we'll work with someone like Ridge and they'll come to us and like, hey, we got YouTube in a separate account. And like that's fine. We'll keep doing that because basically at some point, Wherever there's good YouTube data at the campaign level, that's the account that I want to work in. Right. Because if there's a little bit of history, there's, that's usually better than like a cold start campaign. So, and I think there's, there's a few, Google says they've fixed that cross channel attribution issue, the one that you described. So Google says it's fixed. It does appear to be better. So even if we're running YouTube in the same account as search and shopping and PMAX and everything like that, but it's like a direct conversion focused YouTube campaign or in this case it'd be, you know, demand gen, Demand gen. That's YouTube only. We are seeing more conversions than we used to. So is it fixed 100%? I'm not sure. But, but now a lot of times we do like to run it in the same account and then just lean on things like searchlift and incrementality studies and things like that. So not necessary to separate them anymore. But if you're already running that way, then there's really no Reason to combine.
- [36:30]
Cody
Connor, do you think obviously like it changes the measurement. Do you think that also Chit and Brett as well? I guess. Do you think that also changes or helps with the optimization? Like meaning like does that then more data, better Data on your YouTube campaigns lead to better performance because it now has more signal.
- [36:44]
Connor
Okay, so I'll give a very anecdotal answer here. That's not guidance for anyone but one. I mean I think naturally or intuitively I would say the answer is yes. Right. Like if you are able to get more conversion data back attributed to the YouTube campaign, I would imagine Google is better at finding more of those events. Yep. The. I'll go a step further though and this is where it becomes extremely anecdotal. Another thing that we've done in the past is we talk about signal engineering. We've talked about it before like, like Cody, you and I have seen success optimize review content giving back more signal. It's upper funnel the ad platform seem to be able to create those events more reliably and maybe more cost effectively. And the version of that we've. We've seen two examples of this on YouTube. One, we'll create action sets. And my nomenclature is probably way out of date. I haven't managed a Google Ad account in like, like six years or something. But you used to have these action sets where we would group conversions and add to carts and then we would count all of those as events that we would be willing to optimize for. We saw a lot of success in doing that because again, especially if you're losing attribution, those events might be few and far between. And then one thing that happened a few years ago that kind of like validated that hypothesis, at least for me, is we accidentally started double firing our Google Pixel. So for like a couple days we started just every time we got a conversion attributed to Google it was. It would report it as two. And on Northbeam all of a sudden our results got better. Like if we just told. If we just told Google that it was driving twice as many conversions, our true performance got better and that anyway, I think there is some validity to how much data are you able to feedback to Google and is it able to create more of those?
- [38:20]
Brett Curry
You know, I think that's one of the ultimate growth hacks there too. Connor, the easiest way to improve your conversions is just have that Pixel double fryer and then you like immediately double conversions.
- [38:29]
Connor
Yeah, totally. No, I mean obviously we fixed that, but it was like it was just another examp of like more data seem to be better a hundred percent.
- [38:35]
Brett Curry
And actually you're spot on. We most campaign. Well I shouldn't say most. It's. It's maybe about 50% of the campaigns that scale for us have purchase conversions and then micro conversions in them as well like add to cart. For that reason the campaign just gets better as it's fed more signal as it's, it's showing like, hey, this is a conversion or this is close to conversion that, that sort of thing. Where that could get you in trouble though is if you've got like a lander that's unproven or offers that are unproven or things like that where you could just be stacking up, add to carts and not getting many purchase conversions. But for a lot of accounts where it's like no, this, this is an offer that we've proven. This is a lander that really works. Having those micro conversions helps a lot. And I mentioned that hair care brand that we scaled to a million in 90 days. They, they, we had add to carts included there we tried to stop add to carts where I tried to cancel them and just go purchase and the campaigns never performed the the same. So we just always had to, we always had to go back to add to carts. So I like more signal there for sure. There's a few other things you can do now where you can use like maximize conversion value like with or without a target roas. That bidding system I used to hate. So like target CPA used to be the thing for YouTube. It was like the most tried and true algorithm for smart bidding target CPA. But now maximize conversions is pretty good for YouTube and so that can help kind of bridge the gap where it's like okay, we're counting every add to cart is one. Like that's the value. But then every purchase is 50 or 80 or 100 whatever your AOV is. And so that can kind of help. But still campaigns do better with more with more signal for sure.
- [40:18]
Cody
Yeah. I do wonder and Connor, I think this could all be a good test. I almost feel like the two account structure could be like a good house test like running out of there versus your other one. But I also think I do have a hypothesis that like, you know, the same way that everybody is testing like mid funnel stuff on meta, I really think there's probably a lot of value and incrementality that could be had if like brands are testing mid funnel stuff on Pinterest and on Snap and on YouTube specifically because especially when you lose like maybe Those channels are not as good at, you know, finding intent as meta. So when you lose that just moving up funnel, getting new people into your audience and then taking advantage of cheaper traffic while it's. As long as it's still some intent there could be really valuable.
- [41:00]
Connor
Yeah, we almost exclusively optimize for view content on Snapchat for exactly that reason. I just, I don't think they have any idea who's converting.
- [41:07]
Cody
Yeah, so it's like, then I'm just gonna pay you, I'm just gonna pay you four times less than if you don't know either way.
- [41:12]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
- [41:14]
Brett Curry
So one interesting thing here, and we saw this with an automotive brand where they're primarily meta and they're almost exclusively meta. We got, we got YouTube up to several hundred thousand a month and spend and when we did that, they unlocked a new level of scale with meta. Right. And it kind of makes sense. You guys have mentioned on the podcast before, I totally agree. There's never been a better mid funnel engine for growth than meta. It's just like it knows when you're in market, it knows when you're about to be in market. Like, you know, it just knows. Never been Probably a better lower funnel conversion engine than Google. And I think YouTube kind of is a bit of a mix there. But if you can start to scale on YouTube, it almost always unlocks new scale on meta as well.
- [41:56]
Cody
Oh yeah, not specifically YouTube. I do think that has happened to us over time as we've scaled YouTube. But when we launched TV, TV performed really well for us. Linear TV like years ago. One thing we look a lot at is our percent of new traffic in Northbeam shot up like just. I just think it was this extra signal, like new audience and so, yeah, I definitely think I can feed each other. All right, we got probably 20 minutes left, so I want to make sure we touch on like account structure, strategy and then creative.
- [42:22]
Brett Curry
Sure.
- [42:22]
Cody
All right, so let's go account structure first. So meta is obviously going very much in the way of automation. Asc. Everything broad, let us do everything right. And I think there's pros and cons of that. From your standpoint, Brett, Is Google doing the same? Are they behind? Like, how does best practices and buying look on. On YouTube compared to Meta?
- [42:42]
Brett Curry
Yeah, I do think YouTube is behind in some ways. You know, everybody that we. And we run meta, but I just, I don't know it well personally. Everything seems to be broad, right? It's like, yeah, set it broad. Let, let the creative do the targeting Which I think is, is brilliant with YouTube, it's becoming. It used to be like, no, don't go broad, just audiences. Like you need to tell the algorithm it's this audience now it's kind of this, this cool combination, right? So one of the differences that YouTube has that meta dozen and no other platform has is you've got all of Google's search behavior, right? So Google knows. Meta may know when you're in the market for something. Google probably knows too. But Google also knows what you're searching for right now. And so one of our favorite audiences to build is audiences based on someone's Google and YouTube search behavior. So people searching for my competitor, people searching for the category, people searching for a problem that we solve. So you build audiences of people based on what they're searching for on Google and YouTube and then you can target them with your YouTube ads. But then this is the kicker, and this is something we recommend all the time now, is if you turn on what's called optimized targeting, then basically that audience becomes a signal. So YouTube will target that audience, but they're also going to go beyond it. And so I think it's this beautiful mix of like, hey, start here, these are our buyers. Or like lookalike audiences. And I know this feels like, I don't know, five years ago, 10 years ago for meta, lookalike audiences are finally good inside, inside of YouTube through demand gen. It just seems silly. But so you can do lookalike audiences, some of these custom intent audiences, like the search behavior audiences. But then open it up and let, let YouTube go wild a little bit and say, okay, these are, these are signal, but kind of start here, but then find me converters. And so that's kind of the way we treat audience. We want to guide the algorithm as much as we can because it's going to learn faster. It's going to get to either higher engaged views if it's a view campaign, or it's going to get to better conversions if it's a conversion focused campaign, if we do that. So I want to give some audience signal, but I also want to let the algorithm experiment. And then in terms of the campaign structure, we're almost always running smart bidding, right? So we're running maximize conversions ideally with a target cpa. So we're saying, hey, this is what we want to hit for a new conversion. You know, this is our, this is our CAC or this is our CPA or maximize conversion value and eventually probably at a target ROAS as well. So for Most clients, you know, 60 to 80%, maybe 90% of their spend is going to be in that smart bidding structure. Now the exception is someone like Arctic or other big brands where they're trying to drive foot traffic to Walmart or Target or Lowe's or whatever. And so we're mostly trying to drive retail lift. Then it's going to be mostly View based campaigns. So the video View campaigns or Video Reach campaigns and then those are usually, you know, like a bid per View or a bid per CPM for Reach. And so it does kind of depend on your strategy. But if you're mostly direct conversions and we're going to lean 60 to 90% into kind of smart bidding campaigns. The cool thing is though, if you're doing smart bid campaigns and like direct conversion campaigns, demand gen campaigns, you'll still see a lift on those other channels that will happen. But, but the, the interesting thing there is your CPMs on those campaigns maybe triple what you're paying with a Video View campaign or a video Reach campaign. And so it does kind of depend on the, the overall goal there. So I'll pause, pause there, see if that makes sense.
- [46:25]
Cody
Two years ago we had a crazy Black Friday. We were actually one of the top selling brands and products on Shopify. It was really cool. Harley shouted us out on TV and everything, which was awesome. But it wasn't all good news. With, with unforeseen growth comes some challenges. And one of the challenges we had was we had a crazy backlog of CX tickets At one point, I'm embarrassed to say, we had a seven day average response time that lasted for longer than it should have. A big part of it was our software was just not scalable and couldn't keep up. We were using one of those old legacy slow players. There was no AI involved, there was no automation and just the UX was not great. And so when we came into Black Friday of last year we knew we needed to prepare better. So we switched to Rich panel. It was pretty close before Black Friday. Onboarding was really quick. Two weeks was all it took. They got all of our macros there, they got all of our tickets, they trained our team, they just took care of everything. We got the self service widget set up. I think now like 40% of people are actually getting responses just by the self service widget. And then we're using obviously a lot of the AI. They have this like social AI moderation tool that us and Ridge are, are big fans of. Our average response time is now within hours. We've gone from 18 people to 10. We're able to, our CSAT is higher than it's ever been. And so last Black Friday, no backlog, all of our peak moments, we're able to, you know, without having to fully ramp up our team or like go crazy with it. We're able to get back to people way better, provide a better customer experience. Enrich is a huge part of that. So you want to get ready before peak season, before Q4 and Black Friday. Switch to Rich panel. You'll save money on software, you won't need as many people and you'll be able to provide a better service for your customers. So go to richpanel.com demo and tell them Cody from marketing Operator sent you. I find it, I find it interesting because like in most cases I do agree Google is very behind. For example like meta used to be interest lookalikes and then you could do like whatever they called it, like you know, expand reach on and then at a certain point they didn't let you turn that off. And then now an ASC you can't even put in audiences. So that's probably foreshadowing how, how Google will go. But I do find like it's probably not the super common. The majority of meta conversion spend is probably on, you know, max conversions. It's not on a manual, you know, bid. It's probably on like lowest cost, whatever you would call it. Why do you think YouTube best practice is to be on some type of smart bidding and not just do hey, I'm gonna hit my spend goals no matter what.
- [48:41]
Brett Curry
Yeah. So if you use maximize conversions or maximize conversion value often that's a great place to start. If you're doing a cold start on YouTube, no real campaign data, you don't know how it's gonna convert, nothing like that. Then just use one of those, maximize conversion value, maximize conversions because you don't want to constrain the algorithm. I've seen this happen a lot too where if you say, hey, I wanna be at a $30 CPA, so I'm gonna launch with a $30 CPA. The campaigns may just never spend, right? Google may look at that and say, eh, can't get it, not going to spend. Or it'll spend for a day or two and then it stops. But over time you got to keep in mind that if you give Google a budget, if you say I'm willing to spend a thousand a day, 6,000 a day, 10,000 a day, and I'm just going maximize conversions, Google will spend that Budget, like they, they will spend that budget, they'll prioritize that. And so that makes me a little nervous. And we've seen campaigns get a little bit out of whack over time if you don't have the parameters of a target CPA or a target roas. And so I believe adding those parameters allows you to scale with more confidence. And then it keeps the campaigns from kind of going off the rails and just going wild on spend and views and clicks without getting the conversions.
- [49:51]
Cody
And how do you feel about Demand gen? Obviously, like, we don't have a choice. Like, all video action is now Demand gen. Is it like, just. Do you feel like it's you. You get everything, it's just renaming, you know, YouTube or is this like a drastically different campaign? Are there advantages? Are there big disadvantages, like losing control? How, how. What's your take on it?
- [50:10]
Brett Curry
Yeah, so this, this is kind of classic Google, right? Where when we first started testing Demand gen, we sort of hated it, right? I had a couple buyers on my team. Some really seasoned buyers are like, no, this, this sucks. Not ready for prime time. Don't do it. But now it's beating vacs on almost every test that we do. And so the difference is though, don't just run Demand gen without really making sure you get your settings right and checking everything. Because Demand gen by default is also the display network and it's also search. And so it's kind of combining those things. And so you want to make sure that this is video only, right? I'm just targeting YouTube. And also I recommend don't do the video partner network, right? My friends at Google would argue with me on that, but I'm convinced, like, I want to start with just the best inventory on YouTube. And so if you do that, if you say, yeah, I'm just targeting YouTube with this demand gen campaign, then it functions pretty similarly to the video action campaigns of old. Except now we've got lookalike audiences, we actually do have a little more control. We could go only in stream or only shorts. We could do some things like that that we couldn't do in video action campaigns. And so, and I think even the, the House study showed that, hey, Demand gen is like 27% better than video action campaigns. So. So I think overall it's a win. And yeah, now we don't have a choice, but we're taking old vacs and when it makes sense, converting them. But of course, every new campaign that's conversion focused is Demand gen. What actually are the differences?
- [51:38]
Cody
Because I Actually didn't know that you couldn't turn some of that stuff off. I just figured like you had to be running on some of that inventory by the way also on vac. Google has always been sneaky about that stuff. So it's been like sometimes really hard to turn off. But yeah, what are the actual differences?
- [51:51]
Brett Curry
Yeah, so I would have to go back and double check because it's been a little while since I've ran a video action campaign and measured it. I know one, one of the things that was in demand gen is just really clear and easy like in your campaign settings to, to click on and off all the different channels and and so you know we recommend go YouTube only. I recommend doing in stream end shorts. It's important to note the, the central like the core of YouTube though is that 16 by 9. Right. That that landscape video and so that's going to mostly run on, on, on mobile, on desktop and on tv. And then I recommend don't turn off tv. Right, I see like we just audited this big account. Just want it. But they're excluding TVs and it's partially because they only had like one by one and nine by 16 content. But yeah, you want to keep all devices on in my opinion because over time either the algorithm is designed for conversions or and this is one important note, one new thing with the algorithm for video view campaigns and video reach campaigns is that the algorithm is looking for how can we find low cost engagements or low cost reach. But that also is likely to drive a brand lift. And so that's kind of relatively new in the last year and a half or so. Which, which makes those, which makes those campaigns better. So yeah, I think you know a couple of differences in demand gen. You can't use lookalikes inside of vacs. I think some of the settings are just, just easier. Some of the other nuance I'd have to probably break down with my team.
- [53:22]
Connor
Actually I've got a quick question on this. At some point over the last couple years the, the way the ad inventory worked changed and your video ads began showing as thumbnails. So I think thumbnail designs became more valuable. The title of the video like you might actually need to get a click through from some sort of like recommended video feed. 1. Am I correct in that? 2 Do you guys focus on things like thumbnail end title or maybe demand gen or vacs allow you to avoid that placement altogether.
- [53:55]
Brett Curry
So that is an in feed placement. So that's where your ad is showing up like in the search results or in a recommended video or a similar video. And then that's different in that you only pay if someone clicks and chooses to watch that video. In that case, yeah, you do want to design that in card. You want to think about headline, brief description, things like that. For YouTube campaigns that are scaling though, almost all the views come from in stream. Right. So those.
- [54:24]
Connor
Got it.
- [54:25]
Brett Curry
Those pre roll or mid roll ads, like that's where all of the action is so to speak. So we don't spend a lot of time there. We will check it. We do look at, hey, let's, let's name in some placements like even the video title, the name of the file shows up like so we, we think about some of those things but, but they're minor in the grand scheme of things. Like in stream is where you really find the most scale. Shorts can be good too. But, but in stream non shorts is still the majority of your conversions and that's really where most of the magic happens on YouTube. And that's not to downplay shorts. I'm, I'm, I'm a fan of, of shorts but, but yeah, in stream is way bigger than, than infee.
- [55:09]
Cody
All right, cool. Let's, let's check creative. Connor, let's start with you here. I know you said you have had a pretty big creative win recently. I know a few episodes ago you said you guys were kind of like sprinting on this internally. Tell us about that.
- [55:23]
Connor
Yeah, well, we've, I think, I mean the reason I've been so stoked on this episode as a whole is because a big focus of ours over the last year has been trying to unlock YouTube in stream and that just takes like a totally different approach to creative. From my perspective, the win recently was. Yeah, it's funny, when you have one of the biggest YouTube creators in your ads, it just tends to work better. So we got some really great Marques Brownlee content that's just ripping. It's basically I was. This is. I tweeted that our ad account looked like it was 2019 because we were getting a better one day click roas than meta from our YouTube ads. So we are still over indexing on like the clickable devices. We're still predominantly mobile, some, you know, tablet and desktop. Not nearly as much on TV as I'd like to be considering 60% of views are there. But that's what we're seeing right now. Better meta one day click rose and then I'm extremely confident that these YouTube campaigns have a 2.3x incrementality factor relative to meta. So not only are we seeing better trackable click attributed results, but I also know that like the halo of the channel is significantly higher.
- [56:32]
Cody
That's, that's awesome. Have you ran any. Cause you can run like YouTube partnership ads. Have you ran any from his handle?
- [56:38]
Connor
We haven't done that on YouTube. We've done that on meta. I do, I do have a. So we're, we've got iPhone 17 phone cases coming out next week with the Apple event. Big moment for us. So we're like teeing up for that. So what I told my team and Brett, I'd love your feedback here because I'd like to end this week with a few more variations for YouTube and then for the launch next week, which is Tuesday, September 9th, I'd like to have a couple more by that point. What I said as it relates to YouTube instrument is I, I said we have to nail that first five seconds. It was non skippable. How are we getting information across hooking the viewer? And then I said, I really feel like the next, I mean this is like really obvious. But then it's that like 6 to 12 second period where I'm like, if we just nail that and have a couple different ideas as to how to get people engaged in the video, then I'll feel really good that we'll have some, some, some stuff that will perform well in the ad account. So from like a creative optimization approach, do you think I'm right or. Where else would you, where else would you tell my team to spend their time?
- [57:35]
Brett Curry
Time. Yeah. I could not agree more. The, the hook is the most important, right? You've got five seconds. That magic window where people are hovering over the skip button and if you don't get them, they're, they're going to move on. And so the hook is really important, but really all the hook does is it gets them to watch maybe the next 5 seconds or 10 seconds. And so you've got to keep that going. I'll give you a couple examples of some things we did. So back to that, that hair care brand I mentioned before, they were running these TV ads and they were pretty good. They were like direct response TV ads, ads they were converting on tv. But I noticed something as I was watching them is about the 32nd mark. One of the people they were interviewing said something that was so powerful and I was like, that's it. Like that's the hook. And so this was like a hair regrowth product. And so there's this one scene where this lady, she had a full, thick head of hair. She was like, that was a bald spot. And she pointed at her head, but the bald spot was not there. And so I was like, guys, that's it. Like, we've got to move that to the front. And once we did, like, it unlocked new scale, and we kind of did the same thing with a few other ads. That was the most dramatic one, though. And so, like, that piece really allows people to stick with it. And so I think there's this. There's something that Google talks about this a lot. There's like, this story arc that you got to think about with YouTube. And it's not the same story arc of, like, a movie or a book. It's more like the story arc of a movie trailer. Right? So a good movie trailer, it maybe starts with, like, an explosion, and you're right in the middle of the action. You're like, what's going on? I don't know what's going on. And then it backs up and tells a little bit of the story, and then it's back to a high point point. And I think That's a good YouTube ad, right? Start high. Hook them related to your product, related to the problem, related to the solution right away. Tell a little bit of the backstory, but then something else that's high pretty quickly. Right. Right after that. I'll give you an example. This is one of the most most powerful pattern interrupts that ever saw. One of my buddies is the creative director at Life360. Do you guys know Life360 or do you guys use that app?
- [59:25]
Cody
No, I don't know, Cody.
- [59:26]
Brett Curry
You will as your kids get older. You guys don't use any now?
- [59:28]
Cody
No, I don't know.
- [59:30]
Brett Curry
So it's a tracking app, so our whole family is on it. So basically, you can look at this app and you can. You can understand where your family is at any. At any given point in time. So we have a bunch of teenage drivers, and so we use this app all the time. Well, there's this great ad where it, like, opens, like, the breakfast scene with a mom and a daughter. And the. It's like a musical. So the mom is singing to the daughter, and she's like, every time I look at you, all I can think about is all the ways you could die. And then it, like, it goes into this. This dark, dark. It goes, like, cartoon mode of, like, all the ways that the daughter could die. But the daughter's, like, rolling her eyes and skeptical. But I think it speaks to this, this thing where like most moms and even some dads are like, yeah, I just, yeah, I know you're out, you're with your friends, you're going to school, but I gotta make sure you're not dead in the ditch somewhere. Right. Like my mother in law used to say that. And so like it's this powerful pattern interrupt that speaks is unexpected. Speaks directly to the, the issue that Life360 solves. And so, so I totally agree, Connor. I think the biggest levers we have testing the hook and then it's also how can we get better at that product demo part or we call like the objection busting part or the social proof part. So a lot of times we overlook that. Right. And so that middle piece is important. I think those two are the most important. But then the call to action at the end is super important too. Right. We've seen where it's one of those things that I, you know, I just forget. I've been running marketing since the early 2000s, but sometimes you forget how, how important the CTA is. And I'll give you one, one quick example here and we can unpack whatever we have time for. But with Arctic, with this case study with Arctic, we had this killer ad but everything in the ad was like, go to Walmart, buy this in Walmart, shop at Walmart. At the end it shows a family coming out of Walmart with their cooler. And so as we tracked direct conversions on that, that ad it got, got zero like and we spent a lot of money on it. Like it got zero conversions online but it smashed when we tracked like in store visits and sales lift in the Walmart stores we were targeting and things like that. So just a reminder that like what you ask people to do is what they're going to do and if you don't ask them, they're not going to do it. And so, so all those elements are super important.
- [61:38]
Cody
Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. I think the other thing everyone thinks, I know you talked about it when like at the Google thing, like everyone thinks YouTube has to be super polished. I really like that one demo that you had from, from Arctic that was like a native YouTuber and so I think that's something I'm excited about. And I see Google also focusing more on they, I know they like bought brand connect and turning into partnership hub or something obviously like meta. We've talked a little about it. A lot like they're pushing partnership ads. It also seems like Google is going the same direction. So like that's something I'm very excited to test. We don't have a, you know, anybody on our cap table who's the biggest YouTuber in the space, but we're definitely going to partner with some creators, some, some like YouTub specific creators. And so that's something I'm excited to test as well. But yeah, even, even taking you know like UGC iPhone stuff, editing it together with bumpers and stuff like that I think can do very well as well.
- [62:27]
Brett Curry
I've seen yeah, one of our best ads for an automotive big automotive brand that really scaled was it was just a mashup of influencer content and real users. So it was UGC and influencer content. We mash it up to to fit 16 by 9 and 9 by 16 and one by one but it just smashed on all those platforms and actually we tried some high polish ads. These mashups were always the winner for them. And so it had this cool mix of all the UGC and influencer stuff had high authenticity and the trust factor was off the charts. But it had just enough editing and just enough pacing and a little bit of music and a little bit of graphics to make it feel a little more polished. But yeah, that, that absolutely crushed and I, I'm with you though, Cody. I'm excited about YouTube affiliate which is like YouTube's answer to TikTok shops. Maybe it's early days but showing some promise and then you can take that content through brand connect and run run partnership ads with those with that content. So yeah, lots of good things coming for for YouTube for sure.
- [63:31]
Connor
If you run a D2C brand and you're still throwing all your budget at Meta and Google, it might be time to add a smarter, more profitable channel to the mix.
- [63:38]
Brett Curry
6.
- [63:38]
Connor
Let's talk about Rock Dads. Rock Dads put your brands directly on the checkout pages of premium e commerce sites right in front of real buyers who've just completed a purchase. It's not a discovery play. It's not broad targeting. It's high intent net new traffic with verified identity data and zero creative lift. Here's what makes ROKT ads different. 1. You only pay for performance. No clicks, no cost. 2. No wasted spend on repeat customers. You upload a suppression list and Rokt rocked only targets net new buyers. 3. Higher AOV higher LTV. These aren't looky lose. They're real customers in the buying mindset. Rock Dads is powered by after sell by rockd which means DTC brands now have access to enterprise grade tech that is powered Checkout experiences for giants like Ticketmaster, Macy's and Disney brands like Jones Road, True Classic, Mugsy and Ridge are already seeing it work. And now After Shell is opening up early access to the marketing operators community. Here's the deal. Qualified brands can claim $10,000 in free ad credits to test rocked ads and see the results firsthand. Head to After Sale.com to claim your $10,000 offer and start scaling smarter. On the creative front we, and maybe we're like over leveraged here a little bit but meta creative is such a volume play for us now. I think think YouTube does not especially YouTube in stream does not require the same volume of creative and I also feel if you find a winner it can scale further. That's at least I would totally have agreed with that a couple years ago. Is that still the case? And do you have a recommended like creative volume and testing, you know, cadence 100?
- [65:12]
Brett Curry
That's that's a great question. And that's one of the things where people are just confused by this and they, they can start YouTube kind of on the wrong foot by taking the, the meta testing methodology and applying it to YouTube but it doesn't work the same way. Right. And so for launch we recommend like 3 to 10 creatives tops to launch on YouTube. Like the, the platform isn't built to test more than that anyway. Google/YouTube picks winners very quickly. Like it just, it just becomes hard to, to test more than that. And then the beautiful part and I know this is music to all the, the meta buyers out there, music to their ears is I you know like my buddy Andrew Ferris and others I know they say like a thousand creatives in Meta, 3000, whatever, you know fifth, that's, that's never going to happen on, on YouTube. And in fact if you look at like the, the hair care brand or the automotive brand or boom Boom Beauty at ezran recently true OG longtime friend with boom they had two winners that both were the top spenders in YouTube for like 18 months. So but we see this a lot where top spenders the winners last at least a year. Maybe that's shifting a little bit. But usually like the cadence we have brands on is hey let's start with three to 10 creatives and then based on what we see, you know, we create a creative feedback loop of looking at view rates and average watch time and click throughs and conversions and things like that. Then maybe we want to iterate and spin up an additional 3 to 10 per month like that. That's a pretty good cadence for YouTube. Now if you start spending, you know, a couple million a month on YouTube, maybe you want to do more than that. But it's never going to be as creative hungry as meta and I love that.
- [66:48]
Connor
And that's been a really kind of interesting learning curve for our team. What made me think of it as you guys talking about the, it's a great placement for slightly more edited. It doesn't have to be high quality footage necessarily, but like you have the ability to tell more of a story on the platform so you can spend more time editing. And because of that you almost like you don't want it to be a volume play. I'm like, yeah, I don't want you guys producing 15 in stream 30 second YouTube ads a week. Let's nail a handful of them and then we'll let Google kind of do its thing from there.
- [67:18]
Brett Curry
Yeah, and that's what we talk about a lot. You know, so we partner with Raindrop on a number of brands but you know, a lot of times it's their style of creative that can really scale like that. Those creatives can really go to the moon. And I, you know, my understanding is they often work better on YouTube even than they do on, on meta. And so yeah, if you, if you spend a lot and invest a lot in creative on an ad, like you want that thing to have some legs, right. You want that thing to get to carry its weight and to really produce. And so yeah, that's another piece. And so then it's basically looking at like, okay, how do we iterate on those top winners or how do we find new audiences or how do we find the right combination of demand gen and video view campaigns? And how do we unlock these creatives to grow D2C and Marketplace and retail? And so you start looking at some other things like that, that. But yeah, it's never going to be this. I need a th creatives a month.
- [68:08]
Connor
Totally. I've got one more question. Do we have time for it? Cody?
- [68:11]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, hit one more.
- [68:13]
Brett Curry
Okay.
- [68:14]
Connor
Because now I'm, now I'm getting the free, the free consultation here.
- [68:17]
Brett Curry
Yeah, let's do it.
- [68:19]
Connor
Okay, so let's, that's why we do.
- [68:21]
Cody
A podcast by the way. Yeah, 100%.
- [68:22]
Brett Curry
100%.
- [68:24]
Connor
Okay. So I, I said next week we've got this big new product launch with the iPhone, 17 phone cases. We're going to go in with about three to 10 pieces of creative. We'll probably land at like six or seven. We can launch all those. I would love some basic heuristics but like, I guess part of my question is when will I know to optimize the first 5 seconds or 12 seconds or the CTA or the like meat of that video? What are the metrics I should be looking at in that first, you know, week or two of performance to kind of guide iterations or opportunities?
- [68:55]
Brett Curry
It's a really great question. I love this. I'm gonna, I'm gonna share a quick sports analogy. Don't want to go too much over time. Wanna respect Cody's time here. But, but have you guys ever watched the movie Moneyball?
- [69:04]
Connor
Of course, I just watched it, dude.
- [69:06]
Brett Curry
I just, I love that. I love that movie. The book is fantastic as well. And so this was in the book, not the movie, but in the book they talk about, hey, for pitchers, earned run average is maybe not the best metric because, and I won't get too nerdy here, but after the bat comes in contact with the ball, what happens after that? There's quite a bit of randomness to it. Like depending on where you hit it and where the fielders lined up, is that a hit or is that an out? A lot of randomness. And so what this guy came up with was, hey, the three metrics that matter the most for a pitcher are actually probably walks, strikeouts and home runs. Because those three things are three things that only the pitcher controls, right? And so I started thinking about that, I was like, oh, how does that apply to videos, right? Like, how does that, what are the things that only the video is responsible for? Obviously it's got to be conversions. We got to hit our CAC targets, we got to grow, we got to see, you know, sales lift and things like that. But the components of that are, is this video working? And so we look at view rate and that's almost always based on the hook, right? So, so view rate, a healthy view rate, if you're looking at like TV placements, needs to be north of 50, maybe north of 60. If you're looking at demand gen conversion focused campaigns and it's just scaling and pushing and going hard, then usually I want that in the mid-20s or, or higher as, as like a view range rate. And so view rate is almost always based on the hook. If we look at average watch time per impression, another one of my favorite metrics, it's like, okay, we're paying this low CPM and on average every person that sees this ad watches this, this amount. Like it's just kind of a crazy thing to, to think about. That is the combination of the hook plus that next six to 12 seconds or whatever like you were talking about. So I really look at that and that's one of those things where sometimes we'll see an ad that's got an off the charts hook rate but the average watch time is not that great. And so then we look at, okay, but these three ads, the average watch time is an extra five or six seconds. That's significant. What is it doing? What is it saying in that next six to 12 seconds after the hook? So let's lean into that. And then the click through rate like that is really telling you what the CTA is. It's a little bit misleading because sometimes you're just saying, hey, go to Walmart or whatever, you're not going to see that, that, that click as much. And it's not a click based platform, but it's still, it's like relatively speaking, right? So relatively speaking, how does this video compare to other videos based on ct ctr? And then that's going to tell you what the, the CTA is like. So those are the most important metrics that I look at. And then I guess one of the, the final pieces I'll say is, is sometimes let's say that the average watch time is off the charts. Let's say that the average, the click through rate is a little bit low. And you look at it and you're like, well this is the same call to action these other videos have. Then I would still say, I would back up and say it's probably the product demo or it's that we didn't overcome some objections. So maybe we kept their interest. Like maybe it was interesting enough. Pacing was, was there. We had, you know, Marquis Brownlee in there. So it was really cool. But we didn't say enough to make them say, okay, I gotta check it out. Like I've got, I've got to take a closer look look. And so I would also look at if the CTR is not good, it could be the, the call to action or it could be the product demo just left something to be desired. So, so those are the main pieces that I would dissect and measure relentlessly and then iterate and test on those.
- [72:27]
Connor
Fantastic, fantastic answer. The only problem is this episode will come out after I need all these videos. So I, I've really got to be ingesting all this information. I had to jump on with the team today to get this done.
- [72:37]
Cody
I was gonna say, you got a sprint. All right, well I gotta wrap it up. I, I wish I had more time. Sometimes I forget I'm not just a podcaster, but I got a board meeting. Board meeting in a few minutes. So, you know, wish I could just do this all day with you guys. But Brett, this was awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Learned a lot. Where can people find more about you? Where can people follow you? All that good stuff.
- [72:58]
Brett Curry
Totally. So I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, pretty active on Twitter. Slash X at Brett Curry. But then OMG Commerce. OMG commerce.com Happy to do a GM session on YouTube. Happy to do a complimentary YouTube readiness audit for you and kind of talk about, hey, based on your creatives and what you're doing now, this is what you need to do to be ready to to scale on YouTube. So OMG commerce.com for that. And yeah, fellas, appreciate it. Tons of fun. Could do this all day.
- [73:28]
Connor
Super, super fun.
- [73:29]
Brett Curry
Yeah.
- [73:29]
Connor
Thanks for jumping on on.
- [73:30]
Cody
And Connor, I will see you in person. Third time. See you soon.
- [73:33]
Connor
Yeah, dude. All right, thank you again for listening to another episode of Marketing Operators. Thanks for Brett for jumping on. And as always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich panel, Prescient, Aftercell and Revo. Please like and subscribe anywhere you listen to the podcast. Tweet at us, email us. Aaron Orndorf is managing the email so we we hear about everything that comes through. We will see you guys next week.
- [73:55]
Brett Curry
Sat.