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- [00:00]
John Morgenstern
We work largely with Fortune 1000 types of brands. We steward closer to like 1.5 billion of media spend a year for our clients.
- [00:08]
Cody
We have a really great guest today, John Morganturn from VaynerMedia. J Mo, as he's called.
- [00:13]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, head of investment. And investment is just a fancier term for media buying execution. Meta TikTok, Google, YouTube are like our dominant partners. But these days, CTV, Amazon, all things retail media, digital audio, like, you name it.
- [00:26]
Cody
We're just three D2C nerds here. But I'm so curious, like, how many parallels there are, like, at the brand sizes that you're working with and how different the game is.
- [00:34]
John Morgenstern
Fortune 500 land can never be as like, bold and like nimble. And that's like the competitive advantage that all of you guys have. But then there's a whole, like, brand side of the equation where you're as big as an Oreo. Your limiting factor is like the perception of Coco itself because when you're the category leader, you need to grow the category. Mmm will be a necessary evil.
- [00:52]
Cody
I don't know that we would succeed on TikTok shop because we're slightly higher price point and we don't run discounts.
- [00:57]
John Morgenstern
Show me a higher price point brand that didn't have to like, sacrifice their brand. There's a really high correlation between affiliate volume and Amazon.
- [01:08]
Cody
All right, welcome to episode 86 of Marketing Operators Podcast. Can't believe we made it this long. Today's a fun one. They're all fun. Today's an especially fun one. Conor's launching Black Friday Sale. Tomorrow we're launching Holiday, so we're all geared up to that. I have a Celsius here.
- [01:20]
Connor
I don't know about you guys.
- [01:21]
Cody
Connor's drinking some coffee because it's. It's that time of year, but we got a fun one. We have a really great guest today, John Morgenstern from vaynermedia. J Mo, as he's called. Excited to get into it, but before we do that, want to thank our sponsors. We've got Motion, Rich Panel, Prescient, aftercell and Revo. We can't do the show without them. Please check them out for all of your software needs. Let's get into it.
- [01:45]
Connor
So I don't know about you guys, but we are fully locked in on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday Sale at hexclad. Motion is, as always, a very big part of this. We do a ton of just iterations on evergreen ads with like Black Friday sale banners. So we're just taking literally Our top performing ads for the entire year, slapping a banner on them. And that's at least one part of our content stack for bfcm. So easy just to use motion to look at like last 90, last six months, year to date. Which ads are getting us the best efficiency, which ads are getting us the best scale. It's like a really quick and easy way to pull that report in motion and then come up with just a bunch of overlays onto your evergreen ads. That's one way we're using motion as we head into the peak season for us. The other way we're using it is for more like instantaneous feedback. So we're saying, hey, we did that. We also shot and produced all these seasonal ads, so which ones are performing best? And then we'll iterate on those like during bfcm. So all of this is getting powered by motion reports. It's just the quickest, the easiest way to see what's working, what's not. Connor, how are you guys using motion at Ridge to inform your Black Friday, Cyber Monday and holiday ad decisions?
- [02:58]
Unidentified Host
We're in a similar headspace. We did a, an exercise that I was calling Bottoms up planning this year where we granularly looked at what worked at what times throughout, you know, late October, November, December last year. That all comes from analyzing our creative. So we got that foundational approach of what are the things we want to be prioritizing and then we can get into the fact of what are the new things that we want to be trying this year. And motion really kind of led point on a lot of that analysis.
- [03:23]
Connor
Cody, how about you?
- [03:24]
Cody
Yeah, same thing.
- [03:25]
John Morgenstern
Like we'll have everybody propose their strategy.
- [03:26]
Cody
And their plan but like there should be no reason to start from scratch. Like there's no, you know, blank page. I think you got to hit that like 80, 20 of expl and exploit. But I think for, for exploiting like you got to look at what's performed well. And you know, we try to have a lot of warm up points. Like we will have like a holiday kits launch soon. We have Labor Day, we have last Black Friday. So we just build a report of all of them. We just see what traits perform well. Anything that you can filter by naming convention so we don't have to start with a blank screen. And then we're able to just get more pinpointed in our strategy, hopefully each launch.
- [03:53]
Connor
And lastly, one thing I really, really appreciate about motion is you don't need to like be this expert in how to use the tool. Like, like they're very good at getting you onboarded, getting your data ingested and then training you on exactly how to use the tool. So if you've been dragging your feet, it's time to get going with motion. Head over to motion app dot com.
- [04:16]
Cody
All right. What's up J Mo? John Morgenstern AKA J Mo from from Vayner. Super excited to have you on dude.
- [04:21]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, it's been fun just sliding to each other's x dms these past like 2 plus plus years. I forget how it even started. I feel like Tyler Schmidt's involved.
- [04:31]
Cody
Yeah, I went to high school with Ty and then so yeah, so we know Gary a little bit and stuff like that and then you just pop over my TikTok. I feel like you're more of a lurker on X but, but some really good TikTok content about media buying.
- [04:43]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, TikTok. I mean Gary always preaches like channel diversification. I am all my eggs are in the TikTok basket. I so I need, I need to do something about that jamo.
- [04:52]
Unidentified Host
Can you, can you describe your title quickly?
- [04:54]
John Morgenstern
I think you have the coolest title.
- [04:55]
Unidentified Host
I've heard in a really long time.
- [04:57]
John Morgenstern
Oh, thank you. Yeah, my, ostensibly my, my title @vaynermedia is head of investment. Investment being synonymous with media buying, media activation, paid media. We work largely with Fortune 1000 types of brands. We're based in New York, we have a few satellite offices globally. So I would say like 10% of the spend under our management, you know, touches on emea, apac, Latam, all that. But as head of investment we steward closer to like a 1.5 billion of media spend a year for our clients. Obviously Gary Vaynerchuk, being our founder CEO, we attract a lot of clients looking to like double down in social and like kind of modern digital more than your average bear. So you know, Meta TikTok, Google, YouTube are like our dominant partners. But these days, CTV, Amazon, all things retail media, digital audio, like you name it, is kind of involved in the mix and we love our self serve biddable platforms versus IO jockeying. But yeah, I lead the media buying discipline. We have about 250 media buyers across offices like grinding it out for clients. I love it.
- [06:13]
Unidentified Host
So I think there's a lot to dive into there. But let me just call out, I love the rebrand from media buying to investment. It's like, it reminds me of like the fancy Pooh bear meme where it's like, you know, it's like media buyer and then he's got the tux on with the, with the monocle and it's.
- [06:27]
John Morgenstern
Like a head of investment and it's like, I'm so here for it.
- [06:30]
Connor
Yeah.
- [06:32]
Cody
Change CMO to chief investment Officer for you.
- [06:34]
Unidentified Host
Totally. Yeah. I feel like I should get a raise with that.
- [06:37]
John Morgenstern
Yeah. A lot of the Holdco agencies have a cio, but that really is about, like principal buying and like, basically, you know, pre buying huge chunks of media and like arbitraging it with clients.
- [06:49]
Connor
Yeah.
- [06:50]
John Morgenstern
With all this media buyers dead memes, it's like I'm investment.
- [06:55]
Connor
So we're strong.
- [06:57]
John Morgenstern
Yeah.
- [06:58]
Connor
I love it.
- [06:59]
Unidentified Host
Yeah, we gotta. We'll wear suits. It feels like we should be on Margin Call or something.
- [07:04]
John Morgenstern
Yes.
- [07:05]
Cody
That's great. All right. Yeah, I'm. I'm so curious because obviously we're. We're just three D2C nerds here, and I know you nerd out about media buying, but I'm so curious, like, how many parallels there are, like at the brand sizes that you're working with and, and you know how different the game is. So really excited to get into it. So what.
- [07:22]
Connor
What.
- [07:23]
Cody
I don't know if you can share any brands, but what, what kind of brands? Like, help. Help us understand, like, how to frame the conversation of what you're. What's a Fortune 100?
- [07:32]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, yeah. So clients of ours that are like, well, like, there's pr, you know, they're, they're, they're out there. Mondelez, Shout Out Mondelez. They're like, very near and dear to us, a very important client. They're the Holzco that owns Oreo, Ritz, Triscuit, Swedish Fish, Sour Patch Kids, all that. We, we attract a lot of CPG for whatever reason. So we have our monolith friends, JP Morgan Chase, we've worked with for a long time, and our relationships, we're an integrated shop, so we have a whole like, creative discipline, of course, and then media where I sit, as well as like analytics and strategy. Most of our clients do some form of both with us, creative and media, but I would say I think it's about a third are like media only or creative only. You know, Gary's thesis, our thesis is that, you know, the magic really more than ever these days comes from like the flywheel of creative and media and the feedback loop versus just like how much can you do on Meta these days? Completely divorced from the media variable. So I say that because, like, Mondelez, for example, is much more of a media centric client for us versus, you know, PepsiCo. We work with Purely on the creative side and then there's a lot in the middle. Some other names help contextualize the conversation. New era. So like in terms like D2C and where that's like most relevant, Yeti Coolers is a, is a recent new client of ours. I love that brand and probably, I mean like 80 others, but those are some that are top of mind. All right, cool, that's helpful.
- [09:11]
Cody
So yeah, so some, some that are a little bit more D to C, but some that probably have a pretty big mix of like I feel like New era probably has a good split. What about like the cpg? Like what, what are the goals of investment of media for those? Like Obviously we're again D2C brands. We're trying to just grow online sales, you know.
- [09:28]
John Morgenstern
Yeah.
- [09:29]
Cody
Majority of our investment is in purchase stuff and, and direct performance. Like what, what are the goals of.
- [09:34]
John Morgenstern
Some of these brands? I mean, as you can imagine. Well, first of all, we like so many look to you guys like the dtc, the challenger brands, like the, the hyperscalers as like the leading indicator of things to come and kind of of course red tape, very reasonable, like legal, like risk averse versus risk seeking behavior like Fortune 500 land can never be as like bold and like nimble. And that's like the competitive advantage that all of you guys have. But it's always fun to try to, you know, map your world to. How can we get this through the system of all these, you know, very, very large compartmentalized place. So much of the game is, I mean the joke with Oreos, their target is they're the top selling cookie in the world. People with mouths, like there's a pack of Oreos in a majority of US households right now. Like it is household pen that like it's like at the asymptote of household pen. And so of course the retail media partner side of the equation, Walmart Connect, Target, Roundell, Amazon, Costco, you know, whether you're doing that through, you know, Walmart Ad center or through like the trade desk partnerships, like there's that whole world of retail Digcom, of course that's more like sales DNA. And then there's you know, the, the D2C channels that typically is more like custom merch, limited edition. Amazon is kind of like the most scaled death star of like you're selling meaningful DTC volume and you can do full funnel, you know, throw prime video on there and really have fun. But then there's a whole like brand side of the equation where when you're as big as an Oreo, your, your limiting factor is like like the perception of cocoa itself. Like, like you're in like got milk territory in terms of like what you need. Because when you're the category leader you need to grow the category and so you know how that pertains to of course like product mix and innov use like health trends and what's going on in snacking. Like they have to be very on point there and mapping. But you know when you have 99.9% unaided awareness, you know all these things it is a different game. But that's like Oreo which is its own beast. There's a whole lot of others that.
- [12:07]
Connor
Are.
- [12:10]
John Morgenstern
More on the come up more mapping closer to your guys DNA. But I would say the big difference is just the omnichannel retailer partner management and some of the limitations of you know, if you jump on TikTok shop and you opt into their, you know, TikTok funded discounts, you know where they might. TikTok will just like throw something on on sale like and they fund it and this is not like specific to anyone on Klein or anything. And then Walmart sees that in the wild where their rollback deal is like no one ever has a lower price on your product than we have. It's like big trouble. So that's a lot of like the in practice like what you just have to be very careful on with this crop omnichannel game. You guys will, I'm sure you're starting to flirt with that territory and you'll definitely feel it more.
- [13:02]
Unidentified Host
I, I do have a question around this if I could jump in quickly. I think most of us here, although Cody's starting to talk about this so I think it probably becomes a bit more of a conversation in 2026. And I would say listening to this podcast, we're looking if we're measuring the impact of anything it's on like incremental revenue. We're still incredibly direct response oriented. I think as brands get larger obviously you need to start changing it and you bring up things like measuring awareness. So I'm curious. There's a large spectrum between Ridge, who's really. We've ran a handful of brand lift studies in the past, but we're almost always just trying to generate incremental revenue in whatever timeframe we're looking at. Yeah. Versus Oreo which is 99.9% unaware unaided awareness. What does that look like? Like maybe you could give Ridge advice here. Like what should we start looking at so that we could start moving away from direct response and more into growing brand or category awareness.
- [13:56]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean look like it is always important to like hold things to account with downstream sales incrementality and across the board this is like you know, agnostic to Mondelez, you know, conversion lift or you know, House is a important partner of ours in terms of running you know like bundled channel incrementality experiments. Like we really preach that regardless of size. We think that some mass advertisers think too much about like just net reach and frequency and like, like mass reach. And then there's always some form of media mix model MMM that tries to you know, regression based backwards looking, you know, time ROIs. But we think that as with all things, the truth is somewhere in the middle of like you will need some form of mmm. Ideally causal. Mmm. Like which house is playing around with more of. Yes, it's backwards looking but you're not waiting two quarters. I don't know how much you guys like you know, play in the like media mix model realm but often it's like glacial in terms of getting the reads. It might say what, how things in the past did. But if you're doing a totally brand new social strategy it's like irrelevant a lot of that data because it's backwards looking. But when you're on linear, when you're on legacy media like it's the lowest common denominator and there's a lot of innovation happening to like do it better, more agile, causal infusing loads of incrementality studies, brand lift sales lift into it to, to back back into channel roi. So mmm will be a necessary evil. But I would say what's. Well there's always some longitudinal brand tracker in place like a YouGov or a morning consult. That's just like one of the things on your odometer not tied to ads per se, just like your overall, you know, paneling consumer surveying consumers what you're.
- [15:54]
Cody
Seeing and that's, that's just general trends of just as the business goes and evolves, exactly how you're awareness, how you're not really measuring like an incremental lift. So I remember like right around Christmas time when most people should probably normal people were like off taking that, taking their time, chilling with family. I was like looking through our P and L, our budget for next year and I was like how are we going to save money? And one of the things I did is I leaned on a lot of our partners and I remember slacking a meet from Rich Panel. And I was like, what can you do? How can you help us? We had just switched to Rich Panel a few months before, went really well. And I told him jokingly, by the way, I want to throw it out there jokingly, that if he could help cut about 500k from our customer service costs, I'd get a Rich Panel tattoo. Well, we did that. You've probably seen a tweet. He did some AI thing of me with a neck, neck tattoo. I'm not going to do it. Sorry, Amit, but I will talk about how much I love Rich Panel, how much Amit has helped us. So we had 18 support agents before. It was a lot and it just was not scalable. We had so many people. We had this like old legacy software that was slow, it was broken, it was expensive, and it just took too many people to operate. So we not only made the switch, but Amit and his team really helped us. Now we have eight people and we have a much better CSAT score. Our numbers are way better, our response times are way quicker. We're leveraging a lot of automation, a lot of AI, but again, it has not hurt customer experience. We track and I get a weekly report of our csat, of all of our stuff, of our nps and it's going up because we're actually able to get back to people, give people better answers. The automation learns from our best agents. So it's just continually is getting better. We switched to Rich Panel about two weeks before Black Friday. Might be a crazy thing to do, but it was super easy. We came out of Black Friday for the first time in three years with no ticket backlog. The software and support has blown us away. I highly recommend you switch. If you do it and they save you a lot of money, you should probably get a tattoo. But it's not something my wife would let me get away with. But yeah, if you're running an E commerce brand, I highly recommend you switch to Rich Panel. You'll be able to leverage their software, save money on software costs, which is great, while saving significant amount of money on personal costs. So if you want to go into Q4 with a leaner, smarter support setup and come out of there without this crazy tech backlog and just make your CX team happier, go to richpanel.com demo tell them Cody from our credit operative sent you and tell me you're ready to get a tattoo. Are you also measuring like, again? We work with House, so we work with a lot of, you know, incremental revenue, incremental acquisitions. Are you also running a lot of like brand lift and whether that's in platform and Meta which we've done like power Lift brand lift or is that something you do with a third party as well? And is that like the main media buying objective for something like an Oreo is like are you actually impacting awareness or consideration?
- [18:22]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, yeah. I mean it's always, it's always tricky with like the media KPI primary objective and like what you're bidding on. I mean you can bid on ad recall on Meta but like that's not particularly interesting. Like I think there's a real, really interesting territory here of like TikTok has a consideration bid objective that's you know of course always kind of opaque and black boxy but things that because these platforms have run loads and loads and loads of BLS and they can start to get at just like they can see conversion likelihood. It's like like likelihood of consideration lift according to their native studies. So I think that's a, that's like white space. I wish we were further along there but the way we, we typically think about it is there will be a 3P brand lift partner Again just because as much as I meta like who I view is just best in class in terms of the tooling they offering. Not that they're perfect but you know when you're dealing with with I heart you know you're gonna have to work with Kantar or you know, new star for you know a brand lift. Like not everyone has native and then certainly if you want to look at how social plus TV does from a brand lift perspective versus each in isolation that's where a Kantar or other 3P can add value. So we think about like 3P cross channel and like channel bundle and channel level like brand lift source of truth and then we use platform BLS for intra channel so like creator UGC vs brand produced content like like all of the like experiments intra channel like snap commercial sponsored stuff like audience slices, creative vectors, you name it right. Like multi cell being the game and so you have like you know, can't R for the the breath. You have platform BLS at least on all, all social Google for the depth and then of course like throw in conversion lift same deal there throw in like search lift. Google's doing some interesting stuff around like search like incremental brand searches not just as a study but like an in platform metric. So that too but this is where it gets tricky where there's also like the individualized incremental Lift studies with an Amazon with a Walmart. So it's like you can have both total business incrementality. The same principle applies with each partner that are each on their own journey, retailers wise.
- [20:56]
Connor
Are you then. So I'm looking at Oreo's website though and like they're clearly investing a lot here. Like, like there's a big beautiful like seasonally branded hero section. A bunch of new flavors like cranberry sauce, caramel apple, creamed corn. That's awesome. So are you actually running because you said there's like the, the Walmart like the retail media side and then there's like your you know, meta YouTube tick tock that we all spend a lot of dollars on. So I imagine there's probably a variety of like objectives going on inside of like yeah the YouTube. But like are you guys running like a lot of purchase conversion campaigns?
- [21:28]
John Morgenstern
Yeah. So there, There is a D2CM like there's media supporting shop Oreo and what you're looking at right now and it ebbs and flows like sometimes it gets bumped in priority like 1P data strategy and this and that but usually it's a much more nominal number and much more of a surprise and delight like you know, like birthday gifting. It's like a decent size little business. So like yes, their media supporting it. It would look a lot more like your guys stock and trade.
- [22:02]
Connor
Yeah.
- [22:02]
John Morgenstern
But it's the reality of the scale is just like you know, it's, it's always, it's always so tough. It's an innovator's dilemma thing which is like TikTok shop's another example. It's like how many people are buying you know, cans of Coke on TikTok shop right now and it's like okay, very few. Is that worth Coke's while? No. But like tomorrow the velocity is going up exponentially. Like how do you balance those things and that? We have our opinions but that more so tends to be the, the brand's call top down of where they're placing their bets. And there's a lot of you know, relationship dynamics with all the channel partners, retail partners. There's JBPs usually with all, all of them that commits. You're trying to hit, you know now there's things like AWS, Google Cloud elements of these. You know JBPs are like joint business partnerships where like you commit a huge number to Meta or Google or TikTok globally and you get you know, benefits above and beyond the, the everyday. Not just like access to a human that you have to spend a shocking amount of ad dollars to even get these days on some of these channels. So there's a lot of stakeholders.
- [23:12]
Cody
I'm on the Oreo website now. I never thought I would say this because I'm surprised they even ship online. They have a sick bundle builder, ux. Like, I'm saving this, for instance, Inspo.
- [23:21]
John Morgenstern
Oreo knows what they're.
- [23:22]
Cody
I did not expect to see that.
- [23:24]
John Morgenstern
And this is like, you know, one priority of like so many things. What I think Oreo does really well is the collabs. So a few years back they, I mean, they've done like stranger things. Oreos, Pokemon Oreos, Game of Thrones. And like, they can stamp their supply chain and like they can stamp anything they want on an Oreo. Like, their, their ability to make really custom things is amazing. But they, they did Pokemon Oreo collab and that goes across retail. And those drops are a meaningful, like, incremental driver even for them atop, like their base machine.
- [24:04]
Connor
It's such brilliant product LED marketing. Like every, every time I go to like a Safeway or a King Supers, I'm, I'm not always buying Oreos, but I'm always going to the cookie section and seeing what the heck Oreo has in their new flavors. Like, I just, I tried their like apple pie a la mode the other day and it rocked my world. It was so good. I'm always excited to see what they got going on.
- [24:24]
John Morgenstern
I love, I love all the, the love going to Oreo. We've, we're meeting with them later, later today.
- [24:31]
Unidentified Host
We've seen it.
- [24:32]
Connor
It's.
- [24:33]
Unidentified Host
This might be an interesting parallel, but I'm laughing because I'm going to compare Ridge wallets to Oreos and it's like, yeah, yeah. Multiple orders of magnitude different in terms of scale. But we talk about this all the time at Ridge, where we've sold, you know, 10 million wallets at this point. We have pretty good brand awareness at this point. The best thing we can possibly do is just new colors, new styles, new collabs. And that's not even to necessarily drive incremental revenue in those collabs, but it's just to refresh the entire product line. And we're, we're promoting Hyperline, which we're launching next week, and we're going to sell more gunmetal and black wallets because of that.
- [25:09]
John Morgenstern
Yes. Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. There's. Yeah, like, and Gary is a master at this of like, there's like, what is this about and what Is this really about sorts of things which is like how. How can you have marketing tactics that like actually accomplish two, three, four things at once? Meaning okay, you drop a.
- [25:28]
Connor
You.
- [25:29]
John Morgenstern
You do what you just described. Sure that might sell some net new of the thing you're doing but you know it halos onto this other thing. You know it gets some partner excited about you know giving you like co op dollars to co co market. A lot of these days is things like YouTube strategy and organic YouTube shorts like the volume and variety game. But okay, great to get organic views and you know consumer insights and maybe even a viral hit every now and again. But also how are we seeding Gemini and the LLM and other LLMs too that are like YouTube is a top citation source like like what's the half life. What there's a short term and long term effects you know that you should be thinking about or we try to think about and that's where Gary's like really good about like killing three, four, five birds with one stone.
- [26:22]
Unidentified Host
Jamo you talked about. You guys are always trying to boil things down to incremental revenue. So you talked about geolift studies. You talked about feeding MMMs. You also talked about having objectives other than revenue so that you could do brand lift studies both intra channel between strategies and using something like new star for the full brand lift across maybe some larger set of marketing channels. I'm curious what the workflow looks like. How are you guys ingesting all that information actually making decisions as to how to allocate budgets across channels.
- [26:55]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, great question. I mean there this is where like the causal MMM stuff and like what House is now flirting with and North Beam is trying to as well gets interesting of that's. That's really the. The goal and value of those things. It's like the the MMM that does typical you know multivariate regression econometric stuff but then is also ingesting all these data points around incrementality sales lift brand lift and then spitting out like the all up hey this channel, that channel and often we will there will be some partner in the mix that is involved with that. There has to be systems to get. We have like a master learning library of like you know on on this isn't in CPG this for another another vertical but like the 1300 brand lift reads across sources. You know Meta TikTok snap Kantar like and all the questions what the cells were testing. You know everything from consideration awareness, brand favorability, association, purchase intent and that is fed in along with the you know, omnichannel retailer sales data. So we're not, we do our diligence in terms of trafficking, taxonomy, organization usually being piped to some central source like analytic partners is like a like advanced MMM kind of enterprise level provider that comes up often. Often we'll onboard new clients and they have some level of partner mix that we're inheriting versus when it's like net new blue ocean. But yeah it's like it's just this pretty equation that you're just taking all this in and then trying to weight and balance all the things including promos, exogenous variables like weather, seasonality like competitive shelf trends, distribution changes, changes in distribution. So even all that incrementality focused data helps to calibrate and get to more of a causal mmm. But it's, it's a, you know, can be a blizzard of variables. So it's something frankly like pretty much all large brands still, still wrestle with and it's like in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. It's like everyone knows that this is far from perfect. Totally. But, but you have to get to something that again importantly is lowest can sit across all the mix. Like man oh man is it more clean when it's like we do meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon baby like that can just be a lot more precise versus 120 plus channels including loads of at home and terrestrial radio. And you know.
- [29:35]
Cody
Yeah the thing is I used to think and maybe this is like us getting more sophisticated and matured and, and doing a lot more incrementality and some brand stuff but I used to think like all right all these big brands like they have no idea what they're doing. They're just like you're just given a budget and you're just like chasing CPMs. And I think what I've, I mean.
- [29:52]
John Morgenstern
That can be, that can certainly be true too.
- [29:54]
Cody
I'm sure, I'm sure it still happens by like. But, but obviously like Vayner is much more on the cutting edge. It's, it's much more similar to what what like DTC brands are doing and, and much more data driven than you know I originally thought. Yeah.
- [30:08]
John Morgenstern
And honestly what I'm talking about is like is like what good looks like and what like is is where few have moved, more are moving. But yeah it's still an, an epidemic on the like reaching frequency cpm, you know lowest like in the ROI equation of effectiveness over efficiency in MMM like efficiency is the much more concrete one and unfortunately also the Much more gamable one. And so yeah there's still it's tough because on the one hand when an MM comes back and says like hey this is how programmatic display and like cheap banner ads persist in a lot of cases because a lot of these 3PMMMs like from a Nielsen might be like hey the effectiveness is cheap on this but it's so damn cheap. And it's just trying to weight all the variables accordingly. Like often you CMOs ourselves you have to just make the the common sense call. Like Gary talks with all the time just being like we are a common sense AOR of like what the math says versus just like what common sense and intuition and just reverse engineering from the consumer says. And that's what you. That's the X factor in a lot of this because a lot of these reads and you guys all see it too where like you might get a great brand lift read back and you're like I don't buy like I'm not seeing anything that suggests that like this actually was meaningful. Like common sense is undervalued in a lot of these things. And it's the people who are too dogmatic about the sort the one source of truth and the variables that go into it that end up with you know, kind of like out of whack behavior. And then there's also among the whole co agencies there are misaligned incentives. That's a whole. I don't even get into that. But the margin associated with various media buys not being equal. Yeah and the last thing I'd say on that point is the reach and frequency thing. And why like total household pen why so many big brands care about boiling the ocean to get at like the total US households unduplicated that they're reaching with media across Disney, Hulu, Roku, Peacock. Like when you are a. When you are Oreo and you are you're talking to people with mouths like you ha. You have to be hitting a certain number of in your funnel. Like you have to be hitting all households like and games that view and then go down from there. But like work where that can get tough is when you met like get to audience on duplication for the sake of it or measurement for the sake of it. And then it's like you lose some of the pragmatism is like what gets tough about it but I get it like you can't a lookalike audience of a few million buyers is just like the math of their business like that won't get the job done. It's an unenviable task and they do it. You know, the best brick brands do it, do it it as well as it can be done. It's. Yeah, it's so interesting about like will the symbiotic, the challenger brands are the figure out what the consumer wants, scale it and then like the end game sustainably is get acquired by the big CPG machines and then they plug it into the system or will there be more of a pendulum swing into welcome to the club, good luck competing in this. Much more you know, hairy like gray versus black and white area. Like I don't, I don't know the answer to that. Like Monolith has acquired Tates Cliff and like it seems to be a win win but you know, you look at like Unilever and like dollar Shave Club, it's like, you know.
- [33:55]
Unidentified Host
Oh absolutely. Do you think there are any DDC brands that have crossed the chasm from upstart, you know, doctor oriented to thinking about household penetration? Because like not many come to mind without being acquired.
- [34:08]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, I think, I think all the ones that have, have been acquired. But it's about like at what point were they. And I do think, I don't know this for sure but like I do think like manscaped. No, they're still, they're still private. They haven't been acquired. Right?
- [34:24]
Unidentified Host
They have not been acquired.
- [34:26]
John Morgenstern
Like I feel like manscaped is probably knocking on this door. Still not acquired of like I see them at retail like that they're, they're in it and, and like I'm sure they can be more disruptive in terms of like setting the new norm there. Dr. Squatch was just acquired but I think they were pretty, they were pretty far along.
- [34:45]
Unidentified Host
They got, they got really, really far.
- [34:47]
Connor
Yeah, but like hims and hers.
- [34:49]
Unidentified Host
Oh, hims is a great one.
- [34:51]
Connor
Yeah, I mean they're like. I'd be curious to see what like the media mix of hims and hers is like. I feel like they've they've like taken that Airbnb approach and really swung into like doing a lot of brand marketing into like video based performance channels like linear CTV, YouTube. But like I, I would bet they're spending more on those three channels than they are in like Meta and Google at this point. Yeah.
- [35:12]
Unidentified Host
One thing that keeps me up at night, hims has a 02am so for every 20 cents they get from new customers, they spend a dollar. Isn't that crazy?
- [35:21]
Connor
Their LTV profile must be, must be banging. Don't tell, don't Tell Pat from Groons that he's not gonna like that.
- [35:27]
Unidentified Host
The. The LTV on a Hims customer is just absolutely unreal. I'm sure. And it just made. They're playing a super long game thinking they're a fantastic example, Connor, because they are thinking how do we just. How do we get in front of every single. They have hims and hers. But for a while it was every single millennial male so that we are their solution for the next 10, 15 years. It's like, yes. Whenever I need anything, I'm like, oh yeah, finasteride. I'm like, I'm only going to go to Hims. And that's because they spent a billion dollars on Facebook five years ago.
- [35:54]
John Morgenstern
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's like anyone that can play that long game with discipline versus getting caught in these short term ROI traps. Yeah, that's where you guys in your world like are really very impressive to me and like I think that like, like head of tail brands have more, more to learn on that on like the LTV game and like the, the sophistication and like again not through the tracking of it back into. It's like the Amazon thing. You like land grab a huge swath at like a, you know, loss lead and then like you then have like encircled this and then you watch the, the money pile up from there.
- [36:32]
Unidentified Host
Totally.
- [36:33]
John Morgenstern
Yeah.
- [36:33]
Unidentified Host
You said with discipline. That's the key operator there. There's a lot of people who've messed that up.
- [36:38]
Cody
Yeah.
- [36:42]
Connor
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- [38:49]
Cody
All right, I want to chat creative. I'm very curious your take and obviously with, with this being, you know, a lot of upper funnel stuff and we're talking about creative all the time because obviously the platforms have completely shifted there. But like what is your approach to creative? Let's start with I definitely want to hit to to have you touch on brand formants and explain that because I've talked to Gary about that. But what is your take on creative today? There's a big debate about volume versus you know, quality or diversity. How do you guys approach creative like today or what's needed going forward for social.
- [39:23]
John Morgenstern
Yeah. Oh man, loaded question. Yeah, I wish. I think Gary's in his office right now. He'd come in and just like you know Kool Aid man. Crash into this and talk about. Please do. I mean Gary, Gary sees around corners so well. I've learned this about him where like being at Vayner for 10 years and him having said many bold things that like of course our clients or new business prospects were just like okay. Platforms were certainly like okay eye roll and then and myself would be like gee that's a, that's a hot Take like like that's. I think that's a little overblown and then it's played out. So we had the Vayner volume model in like 2018 and this was the peak of when meta was like 2 to 3 assets per ad set. Like don't touch them. And like say one thing beautifully and you know now especially for. For lower funnel not. Not the world of brand consideration as much but it's. They are fully leaned into creative is a new targeting volume and variation. I think the folks have gotten better at this but the. The volume trap initially was like volume that's. And this gets into like the Andromeda debate happening that I think Cody, you and I have laughed about of just like you know D2C Twitter but like volume of like extremely similar things with little things tweaked. Like isn't. I consider that side dishes and little window dressing like sure. Like like this headline body copy CTA button here. But like that's not volume. That's like hey Meta, go have fun with that and A plus but like the volume and the like if you think about. Let me go on a. I'll go on a side quest real quick to explain the point. TikTok a few years ago did a great when they were under a lot of pressure. Like the last time it was like you know divest. They did a like transparency day and like we're like hey, we're going to show you much more of a look into how our FYP algorithm works. Of course not like the special special sauce but more and the way they explained it was and this was like 2020 new user signs up. They have no history on the first they do they would do batches of like six or eight videos populated and then like the next would then be like amended. The first six to eight would be the most viral popular six to eight videos over the last whatever period that nodes wise in terms of like the graph of all of their the videos on the platform were the furthest apart in distance. So like it was like the six most viral scaled videos that were most far apart to one another in style content like and then based on the user response it would then be like oh we're gonna shape shift over to these this area. And then you get into like you know more and more and then they were talking about how like our bigger problem is not the personalization of giving you the next thing you'd want but introducing randomness and and surprises in so that you're not just seeing like and reels had this issue early on where it's just like, oh, you like, you like rock climbing videos of this guy. Here's like that guy rock climbing 20 in a row. And to bring the analogy back to the creative point, it's like you want to start with like yes of course a volume but kind of as far apart different looks as you can. Consumer weigh in Video static long like whatever that means. And then over time the nature of what of the variation changes based on what you're seeing. And a lot of people were just like starting with this little area of variation on this one style. So we, the way Gary set it up in our creative department is like it's all, it's flat. It's like all. It's like ECDs, executive creative directors and like creators that like make stuff. And it is very much a, like we have this audience cohorts of like in our strategy team of all of these very specific segment Personas. Like not when you think marketing Personas like, like, like Back to the future DeLorean fans like in New York City who like you know, skateboard and use like 3 to 1 shampoo conditioner body wash as like a cohort for some like, like that specific and creators making content for all of those cohorts that ladder up to like the business targets and then ebbing and flowing from there. But we're always balancing like what we make the UGC style creator stuff we make versus like the high polish like we make super bowl spots that too the brand produced assets, we remixing those. But it's like the volume is, is the easier part. But not all volumes created equal. It's like that diversity that's still on strategy and like, like, like where you can also get lost is when it's like you just. I'll ask a creator like why did you make this jump on this meme trend for you know, this like very serious financial financial institution that's going after like wealth advisors. Like you know, everything has to have be rooted in strategy in the business. Which also gets hard when you're like pushing on new different styles of creative, you know, UGC forward. But it's that volume X diverse diversification piece that it's far from perfect. That's a long answer to a much.
- [45:30]
Cody
More straightforward volume of diverse assets.
- [45:33]
John Morgenstern
Volume of diverse assets that are, that are rooted in a business case and or the consumer.
- [45:41]
Unidentified Host
So do you think if you were like for, for a brand listening to this and saying like okay, we have a problem with creative diversity. We're doing what you Described earlier which is volume around just one idea.
- [45:52]
John Morgenstern
Yeah.
- [45:54]
Unidentified Host
And operationalizing. How do we get to creative diversity? Do you think it goes back to like creating those? I think you described them as cohorts. The DeLorean liking New York skater and a brand should like figure out a handful of those and then create for those people and hopefully that results in diversity.
- [46:09]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, yeah. I mean with organic that's a lot of what we do because you know, the inorganic, the like creative finds its target. That may or may not be who you had in mind. And there's this paradox of like the more you kind of go vanilla trying to talk to everyone.
- [46:25]
Unidentified Host
Totally.
- [46:26]
John Morgenstern
That never works. When you go shockingly niche and narrow, that like can be the thing that unlocks the most power. So you have these Personas like much more for organic then paid. I've lived through just like the terror of like hey JMO and team, we want to target these 86 cohorts in our meta conversion campaigns. And it's like no, no, no. Those are like creative Personas, not literal targets. So then it goes, we're getting Cody, I know you want to talk brand formants. It starts again. To brand formants. Organic to us is the best signal of like you have consumer attention. You found something relevant out of anything the platform could serve. It decided to, to serve your brand's thing. For big brands, organic not couched in that lens is just never interesting because they're fanatics. They run such an enormous amount of doctor spend. They can have a lot of organic hits of showing their athlete jerseys, hats during big games and it still they can't even see the signal through the noise. But these Personas and organic validation of like oh, that got outsized. You know, hey one a day vitamins that got this got 40,000 views. You try to look at the, the insights breakdown of the demo Geo, the commentary to get at the qual and then that is like a version for us of like what creative test, Creative X or Ipsos or Ace or all these expensive creative pre testing tools and focus group tools are of old. So we have these Personas that inform the the the the creative inspo that's really like into the organic gauntlet of attention that then can make their way into into ad campaigns and often can get up upscaled, polished up in the process. But then we also have this always on Dr. Engine of like catalog ads, you know, partner ads with TikTok creator affiliates. Like you know there's, there's layers. Layers to this game.
- [48:20]
Connor
Are you like running the same so you're saying you're letting the, the organic performance like and you're creating certain content for a very specific Persona organically launching in that, letting that perform. And then you're are you taking that exact creative running it in paid. Are you saying hey like this creative Persona out of these other 10 has really popped off relative the other ones. Let's go create 10 more new swings but this time for paid ads. But still targeting that that Persona is that the approach and like the, the process.
- [48:48]
John Morgenstern
So we, we, we try not to have it bleed into a like, like, like targeting conversation. It's more because again all these brands are ultimately trying to building with these Personas is it's like okay cool, we reached that Persona. That's 1% of our audience.
- [49:03]
Connor
Yeah.
- [49:03]
John Morgenstern
Like how replicable replicable is this? So it's like Persona is the inspo. But is there that. Do we find that broader like insight with a capital consumer insight with the capital C and I that all big brands are still rooted in. And so you know, the more organic distro the better of course. But we then try to have it be a means to an end into what gets into scaled. Brandformance is easy where you get things into the organic ether. You try to impart, you try to show the product, you try to have it have some tie to the business so that it actually will sell things in Dr. But brandformance for us is organic validation of the net new kind of stuff. The curve balls, the alpha to then throw into your already pretty humming, pretty scaled and diverse conversion mix. The tougher thing is for this upper mid funnel stuff where you don't have that heat seeking conversion missile guidance, but you want to make sure that the volume you're rotating in is validated in some way. Because when you're buying on Reach, Meta's algo is not. You can't rely on it to perfectly serve the right thing. So organic into conversion again more that's more for a new era or a yeti than for say a cpg. But into a into upper mid funnel territory where it often is the literal asset, often it'll be kind of remixed or kind of shoehorned into paid. So for Dr. It's like you get a call to action. You make sure that it's like, like buy the thing which might not be in the organic piece.
- [50:43]
Unidentified Host
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- [51:59]
John Morgenstern
Some CPG and and other like luxury types like like more so may use it as like let's double down and then do a let's use this insight and make something more polished. We our whole thing is always like and like throw in both and like it'll surprise you, you know what you think versus what what goes down and we bring our clients into it. So it's like it's like ideas and making is kind of what we preach. So clients Mars will be like you know I've always now that we're talking cohorts like I have a hypothesis that like this you know like gen Zalpha like this thing matters and it's like cool. We'll make it and put it out there and see. So it's like everyone's ideas and it can go like if Gary had his way it would ladder all the way up into the stuff that makes its way into your cross paid social full funnel stuff. But even like what is the kernel of the idea that becomes your super bowl spot? Where like our Planter's super bowl spot a few years back we we killed Mr. Peanut. So that one was was a popular one back in the day but we did for March Madness and it wasn't super bowl, it was March Madness. We did the snack it Bracket challenge where like as planters we put out like You've seen these like the bracket but it's snacks head to head and then like people fill it out and then like you vote and then it's like the snacks progress and, and that just went so crazy on social that we ended up doing a March Madness TV buy like rooted in that idea. So like can this form the kernel of like what you do in those, you know, one to many. You know you can't volume. You can't volume model the super bowl yet.
- [53:42]
Connor
That's interesting. So you bought you, you. You're not only creating paid social ads based on what's working organically, but you're actually creating linear TV campaigns which can be you know, millions of dollars and months of, of production. That's very cool.
- [53:56]
John Morgenstern
And, and if you look at what Roku Ads Manager Universal ads they're being like just give us your top social stuff vertical. Like we'll help add, you know, make it, make it 16 by 9 and put it in and that's a big thing too. And I think a lot of like you know like True Classic with Roku Ads Manager I know is an early partner like doing a lot of that. We, we're into that as well. But you know, super bowl or, or like upfront type TV buys. I get why, why clients want to.
- [54:24]
Cody
You know, I will say I'm bought in. Like Gary kind of shared this a few you know, weeks months back and like I know he's that we haven't acted on it yet but I promise we're going to. You can, you can let them know but we, we I will say our. What was our top TV spot for a while. It was an organic social TikTok post from Bobby, went pretty viral. Just ran it as Spark ad from there, crushed that, ported that over to Meta, ran that, scaled that. Then we shot, we shot with, with Vid Grow who's a production agency paid social assets behind that. It was essentially a founder story but different you know spin on a founder story for Miracle Bomb was it's probably our top scaling ad ever where we probably have $10 million to spend behind like variants from that. That's and then we turned that into TV production, you know and, and shot it for that. So I would say of that initial concept we probably have like 30 million of spend across that concept. Obviously many different variations of it. So I've seen it work once but I think like yes, I'm totally bought in. I think it makes sense. I think the you know one of my, you know this is predictions and stuff. We were talking about last episode is like the organic and paid social. First of all it's, it's so different. I think most teams are. Are stuck and like you said, Gary's always early. But of you know, Gary talks a lot about like followers don't matter. I think a lot of brands are still creating organic content for followers.
- [55:48]
John Morgenstern
Yes.
- [55:48]
Cody
And I see all these and I've seen some people that are doing this for their brands and clients where it's like 7,000 followers on like a. I don't know what you call like when you have like multiple social accounts and like the main one might have a million followers and that's like the branded stuff but like there's a few other ones that like kind of look affiliated kind of don't like you can't tell and all 7,000 followers. But like you look at some of the content and it's just like million views, 2 million views, you know.
- [56:13]
John Morgenstern
Yes.
- [56:14]
Cody
And then, and then obviously how that then makes it over because it's. It's obviously the same. It's a very similar delivery engine behind both, both of them. That's very. It's. It's using engagement signals. Right. So like I'm, I'm totally bought in and I think more brands need to start getting there talking about it. But we're, we're working on.
- [56:32]
John Morgenstern
But the. Yeah and it's awesome. I mean you. That's even that example is like phenomenal and it's like it's not that this is the only way. It's like there's a whole lot you can do foundation setting especially in lower funnel and like the, the D2C kind of like playbook and then but as you scale and as you're tapping out and you need to like you know truly do demand creation more and more this becomes a more and more important thing to find like those ways in. Yeah. Gary. Gary did an experiment to really prove his point of he has 15 million followers on TikTok. He spun up some like Gary Vee replies TikTok account that had zero followers. He posted had his team post ANFA on both. He had one on the like 200 follower new handle. He made get like 3 million views on the same thing that like or a similar thing that his 15 million account and he. He's used that with brands in the room before. And I get it. Some platforms like hitting your followers is still more of a thing but on all the places that you know, matter.
- [57:37]
Unidentified Host
I'm curious. I feel like there's an interesting trend right now what you just described, like how are you creating content that succeeds organically and then letting that feed your ad creative or middle and top of funnel sort of funnel building. I think we see a lot of that naturally with like the brand succeeding with TikTok affiliates right now. And they do it in an almost decentralized way where it's like I'm gonna send out hundreds of product, I'm gonna have random people post videos all the time. They all have these small incentives and then every once in a while, to your point, they're gonna find the right message or the right concept that just pops off and then it's like. And then to Cody's point, you can feed that. So just making the distinction between like brands having to create that organic content and then and versus seeding product and letting like more of a larger community create content.
- [58:23]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, you. Yeah, totally. And there's rules for both and like, like it's more scalable to be the maestro conducting the orchestra than being like the violin player. You know, in terms of like what a brand. Brand can do. Yeah, I mean the TikTok the world of TikTok shop and affiliates and, and you know, premium price point brands that, that have a brand canvas and what they view is. That's been a challenge for us frankly. Where we love we. Gary's term for this is like mystery box of like you have in your mind who you think your customers are or the prospects or ways in. But like you can put something out there and some group is all about it that you like hadn't planned for or your content might have been for this skater Gen Z Redditor that then like actually pops with like old ladies like you never know. Affiliate really TikTok shop affiliate really puts a finer point on that of when you see, okay, who, you know, requests a free sample, gets it, who's responding to your stuff, who's putting stuff out there, who's selling stuff. It can be very eye opening as to like both opportunities but also things to solve for. If you're like man, no one 18 to 34 is involved here. And often when you're a brand with a. Everyone rightfully has a preciousness about when they're on the brand side of the brand image. It can be a challenge with TikTok Shop when you really. Because the name of the game is just scale like crazy. And it's sort of. They all are like can this be more like shop my like curated market. But I get both.
- [60:02]
Cody
What about, what about. I think you mentioned something about this you want to chat about like TikTok shop for luxury brands like we are not on TikTok shop. I think I am becoming more open to it. I still don't love necessarily the fee and the structure but obviously I can see that it can drive so much top of funnel awareness lift to other channels plus this content engine. But I think the thing is like I'm past that. I'm over that. I can take the fee, you know we can validate halo demand and just consider a reach channel. I don't know that we would succeed on TikTok shop because we're slightly higher price point and we don't run discounts and I just feel like you, from what I've seen on TikTok shop it seems like you have to play that and so much of what I see are very strong offers.
- [60:45]
John Morgenstern
Yes that that's been the rub of if you are playing in the low cost, fastest fashion trend driven game. And again it's, it's like all this is it you know, exported from Asia and like China and we're like live shot and this whole thing is like, like you know, monstrously big. I couldn't even tell you the names of the brands or the TikTok shop of the couple random things I've bought from them over the years like Tim Robinson ornaments. Like it. It is a sales channel full stop at least how it's kind of done currently and affiliates and I something we, we've pushed TikTok on and I'm sure there are examples of folks doing this right is high. Show me a higher price point brand that didn't have to like sacrifice there that like was able to without promoting the out of out of things or doing like you know, enormous affiliate commission disc and was able to actually do it do it. And there's very few. And then there's also Amazon has the same challenge. It's like if you're Apple trying to, trying to sell $600 AirPod Pro Max and there's literal carbon copy dupe knockoff versions all over the place that are literally $9 and 27 cents, it's a bit of a problem. So we brands are definitely waking up to it and it makes more sense for more vertical price points, et cetera. But it's really, it's tricky. I understand why. Cody, you are where you are.
- [62:22]
Connor
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- [64:11]
Unidentified Host
One thing we're talking about and maybe maybe you've worked with clients who have done this but almost like a product assortment strategy specific to TikTok shops where we say hey we to take the same wallets that we sell in Shields and Best Buy and Verizon and mark those down 50% on Tik Tok shops. But like maybe there's some sort of complimentary product that makes sense coming from Ridge that has an offer that can work on Tik Tok shop, grow brand awareness that way and that will like trickle down to some of our our hero products.
- [64:38]
John Morgenstern
Yes I think that makes a lot of sense. That's like a good happy medium TikTok will talk about. We'll mention that like when when TSP folks are in the room and even even like merch and like side quest things that build a broader brand halo. But you Benefit from like, you know, I've seen you, you do a Shop tag post versus that same post, not shop tagged. Like there's always this how these platforms do they put their thumb on the scale to incentivize certain things that you kind of want to like exploit to your benefit without, without downside.
- [65:10]
Connor
Have, have you seen any brand brands do like this is something we're starting to do because we have a high price point. We're on TikTok Shop Shop. We are actively engaging with Tik Tok Shop affiliates and we're getting good volume, like really good reach. Sales are growing but it's still like a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket relative to our, our main distribution channels, probably because of our price point. But we're trying to get Tik Tok Shop specifically set up with Prescient, which is one of our MMM tools to see like can they measure a halo into other channels. Like I have to imagine there has to be a longer tail than just that moment trying to sell that product in Tik Tok Shop. And I still think, think it's net net a a good play for us purely based on the impression and CPM arbitrage that we're getting. And I, and I'm guessing at halos in other channels. I'm hoping we can get it integrated with oppression and measure it a little bit more. But are you like, do you recommend brands do that even if they're not seeing a ton of sales? If like the impressions are there and the content's good?
- [66:03]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, I mean especially if you're not seeing a ton of sales, then it's like, let's get creative about how we can see how this is working otherwise, you know. Yeah, so, so I love that point, Connor.
- [66:13]
Cody
And anecdotally like, like I have bought a few things from Shop, but usually my first thing is, all right, I want this little $10 widget. Let me go to Amazon and see what they have.
- [66:21]
John Morgenstern
So, so we have, we, we have done this exact exercise for a couple clients. One that sells like, like consumer tech, like household product sorts of things. And a hundred percent we were looking at like the total impression volume from all of the affiliate creator posts and both on D2C and, but Amazon, TikTok and Amazon have this like weird kindred spiritness of like when, when we see TikTok Halo onto, onto something non TikTok Shop Amazon. Yeah, it's like uniquely strong for whatever reason and there's a really high correlation between that affiliate volume, putting the sales aside and D to C and it was a pretty controlled environment at the time in terms of variables constant and Amazon. So I think inkling is totally right that there can be a there there and if you can see that, use every part of the animal sort of picture of it, it can make more sense. And yeah, these poor creators, like grinding it out, the effective CPM you can back into versus, like the commissions you pay can be, you know, pretty damn efficient. Amazon is a. I mean, they're such a beast. And what they're doing right now with like Amazon DSP and like taking rates to zero to just like body the. The trade desk into. Yeah, you know, Pluto is crazy. I'm curious what you guys think about the fledgling Buy with prime integration on TikTok. I set it up the other day. I got an ad on TikTok that was like link your prime account and then on the merchant side you can set up fulfillment through Amazon and like linking through seller center. And if that's coming up at all in your world, TikTok I don't think rightfully is too interested in it because for them it's like, you know, they, they would prefer them directly. Right. But for some brands that are like especially larger brands with more red tape going that route via Amazon on the, on the seller center linkage side, I.
- [68:26]
Unidentified Host
Have a couple thoughts here. One, I think it's fascinating how Amazon's going to try to like productize fulfillment and then port it over to other places. Yeah, so they, they had, they had a snap in an integration with Snapchat years ago where you could buy stuff with prime right on Snapchat. They have it on Tik Tok now. But they also have. Have you seen the Buy with Prime on Shopify sites where like they've been, they've been trying to get us to add a second add to cart button. It's like you have add to cart on ridge.com and you have add to cart and you're building an Amazon cart and then you're checking out with your prime account.
- [68:55]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, yeah, I know, it's wild. And also Meta had a Buy with prime initiative, but that kind of stalled. Stalled out.
- [69:01]
Unidentified Host
Yeah, I think, I think there's like, my take is at least initially there's more friction. Like, I almost think it would be more valuable for us. And we've done this at different times in the past too, where it's like, hey, if for some reason we think someone will want to buy on prime, we actually just want to send them to Amazon. That's the shopping behavior that they're like extremely familiar with. I can go it, you know, deep links to the Amazon app. I'll check out like I do every single day. Whereas buy with prime. It's like, it's actually just confusing and that's what we found when we tested it a couple years ago. So they're gonna have to cross this chasm of consumers learning how to buy with prime off of platform. But then at that point it's probably really valuable.
- [69:38]
John Morgenstern
Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious what you guys think too about like how this goes into like 2026 predictions maybe meta. How, how meta has been so out of the game on the creator economy for one and just like, like keeping creators happy. I think they're not out of the game by any means Creator marketplace and it's huge. But like relative to YouTube from like the programs, the monetization, the income and then TikTok like you know, meta sun setting checkout and shops being like a secondary priority. I'm curious like I, I've been through enough Facebook meta cycles that like, like Zuck knows what he's doing. Like they're not running around with their heads cut off being like, like are you aware of TikTok shop is really scaling like they're being very intentional about what they do but it's been surprising to me.
- [70:29]
Cody
I know exactly what it is. It's, it's the innovator's dilemma. It's the same reason that Google is slow to incorporate you know, Gemini into their main search interface because is they're yes. Like they're getting their lunch eaten on the in App Shop checkout creator, you know thing but they can't give up their main business and Right. I think from, from my, my assumption is that test to you know with checkout and stuff like that like they're always trying to monetize the real estate as well as possible and I think they probably sacrifice their ad business to get there and I think that was probably a trade off they determined wasn't worth it at least in the near term. But I, I suspect they will roll out other tools if maybe it's not an in app checkout but to. To do better with creator economy.
- [71:23]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense.
- [71:25]
Unidentified Host
Yeah that's I think because TikTok shop has been like an, an extremely unprofitable line of business for TikTok.
- [71:32]
Connor
Right.
- [71:33]
Unidentified Host
Like I don't think it's necessarily been beneficial to their ad platform and then they've subsidized so much trying to drive shopping behavior there's there. And I just don't think to Cody's point, Meta would have to give up other parts of the business if they wanted to commit to growing on platform shopping and they're just not willing to do that because I think to some degree it's at odds. Like we're all describing this weird attribution break between having things on TikTok shops driving impressions and it getting captured on Amazon or on Shopify and it's like Meta won't benefit from that. You'll spend less ads if they're not able to report on a higher roas. Whereas TikTok shop has just been going like scorched earth trying to acquire both attention and just brute forcing their way to, to like a normal shopping behavior.
- [72:16]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, I mean I know TikTok shop, I know for ByteDance globally is a profit, it's a beast. It's the US that's I think been the, the challenging part from a revenue standpoint.
- [72:26]
Cody
Sure, yeah, I, I do, I, I, let's call it a 2026 prediction. I do think Meta will make some plays here year. I don't think they'll necessarily go back to in app checkout, but I do think they're, they do seem very bullish on creator economy and you know, obviously huge push on partnership ads and stuff like that. But so I could see them, I could see them kind of doing some stuff and trying to, trying to improve there because yeah, I agree they're, they're behind obviously. YouTube monetizes the best by far.
- [72:52]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, I'm excited for the YouTube dynamic insertion into like the product demos. You see that?
- [72:58]
Unidentified Host
Yeah, yeah, that'll be interesting.
- [73:00]
Cody
No, what's that, what's that? What's one last one.
- [73:03]
John Morgenstern
They just announced it. It's, it's like YouTube dynamic brand so.
- [73:08]
Cody
They can like, you can put like ads and old videos and like.
- [73:11]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, it's, it's. I feel like we're in a zoom right now, but I know we're not but I would post the link. It's, it's basically like creator is doing a in show product demonstration and it's like what Amazon announced with virtual product placement a few years back. It's like, like it's like you can make that in show segment like Jonesboro Beauty. It's like a biddable like flippable. Right, okay. And it's like I'm sure to start it's gonna be much more simple than that.
- [73:41]
Cody
So it's making like YouTube ad reads a little bit more programmatic.
- [73:46]
John Morgenstern
Yes. It's like, it's like making like product placement and, and host live reads like that whole territory. Biddable, programmatic, photorealistic with AI. Amazon's virtual product placement was like hey, in Reacher he can be driving down the highway and like you can biddable Amazon DSP on the billboard for it to be yours sort of thing. That whole territory I love, I love product placement.
- [74:12]
Unidentified Host
Yeah, I think it'll be like my understanding of it. We heard about it from, from Marques because Google had reached out to him about like piloting it. But there's, there's pros and cons.
- [74:24]
John Morgenstern
Right.
- [74:24]
Unidentified Host
We get a bunch of native integrations right now and those things will live on far past and generate the views far more than we like initially agreed upon. And some that works in both directions sometimes. So there are downsides to it there where he could in theory like oh, turn off our ad because we've hit the, the $10 cpm that we agreed to pay him. But then there's also the opportunity to potentially further monetize back catalog content that's still accruing thousands of views a day.
- [74:50]
John Morgenstern
Exactly. Like there's a real like the answer will always be like it's some blend. It's like TV up front and scatter. But yeah, the back catalog thing. Yeah back catalogs are just like becoming another underrated for 2026 predictions like back catalog for like YouTube and LLM citation and like for this remnant monetization. Like there's just a lot there. It's like good for brands that have been like doing the volume game for a while now.
- [75:17]
Unidentified Host
100%.
- [75:18]
Cody
All right, well I know we're, we're over JMO. Really appreciate your time but I know we gotta let you go. So thank you so much for coming on where this was awesome. Super excited to su. Super appreciate it for you to come on and share your take on things and learned a lot. Where can people follow you? Where can people learn more from you?
- [75:35]
John Morgenstern
Oh, TikTok is my one main. It's Johnny Moe with zeros as the O. So J0N N Y M0 you couldn't get the JMO? No, no, I got it for. I got it for Spotify. I love trying to sign up for services. I signed up for Robinhood years ago really early and I got John. I like take pride in those things.
- [76:03]
Connor
It'd be worth a lot of money one day guy.
- [76:05]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, yeah. We haven't even talked about handle flipping.
- [76:10]
Unidentified Host
Do a whole episode on it.
- [76:11]
Connor
Yeah.
- [76:13]
Unidentified Host
But J, thanks for coming on.
- [76:15]
John Morgenstern
Yeah, thank you guys so much. Have a good one.
- [76:18]
Connor
All right.
- [76:19]
Cody
That was a fun one. Head of investment at VaynerMedia JMO. That was awesome having him on hearing how big brands do it. We all have a lot to learn from them. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed it. That was episode 86. That was a fun one. As always want to thank our sponsors. We got Motion Rich Panel, Pression, AI After Sale and Reva. We couldn't do the show without you guys. And if you like this, please share it in your team Slack. Share it on social. Leave us a comment, give it a review, anything you can do. We listen to it all. We see all the comments. We love the feedback. Thank you guys for listening.