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Marketing Operators
What Grüns, Marty Supreme, and TikTok Shop Teach Us About Modern Marketing
00:59:49
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- [00:00]
Cody
So it's lock in 35% off forever on your favorite gummies when you switch to a quarterly subscription. Want to upgrade? Reply Save big, Save big. All caps. That's all I had to reply and it automatically upgraded my subscription. So I just thought this was like such good timing on like another transactional text from Grooms and it's so simple but like so effective.
- [00:17]
Connor
It seems very advantageous just trying to.
- [00:19]
Cody
Pull up as much revenue as possible at this point. Everyone's probably heard of this Marty supreme campaign. The campaign was successful for me because I did not know what Marty supreme was and then I ended up going and watching the movie trailer and I was like this looks amazing.
- [00:33]
Connor
There was like an inside joke that was a part of it I think makes it particularly memorable and just very self aware of the times that we're in currently. And I think that's what for me makes it feel extremely unique and novel.
- [00:43]
Sean
We are not currently on TikTok Shop but probably will be soon if you.
- [00:46]
Connor
Were to totally guess. Do you think 10% is accurate? 10% of the total impact of the channel is actually captured on TikTok Shop itself.
- [00:52]
Cody
Yeah, I bet it's 5 to 1 or 10 to 1 even of non TikTok shop orders to TikTok shop orders is my guess. All right. We got a bit of a hodgepodge episode today but it is jam packed with awesome information. We are starting off with talking about some more transactional SMS marketing that is really effective. We're talking about an incredibly well done brand marketing campaign for the new Marty supreme movie and we are talking a little bit about TikTok shop approach to running TikTok Shop and getting performance out of it, how to measure it and think about the KPIs associated with that channel. Thank you to the sponsors. Motion After Sell, Prescient Rich panel and Revo. Let's get into it.
- [01:35]
Sean
Hey Connor, I don't know if you know this but there's a lot of talk about creative diversity right now on all platforms. We've been talking about it a lot. Andromeda. I don't know if you heard about that. It's apparently a Greek legend, a Greek myth. But I believe it is something that Meta has done that. Obviously. Obviously I'm kidding. But everybody's talking about creative diversity. Everybody's talking about Andromeda and how the game has changed. We are all focused on it. I think there's not a DTC operator who does not know it at this point and how important it is and being able to Test measure, do creative diversity get a. A high volume of diverse assets is really the, the, the name of the game. And I'm super excited because Motion has just rolled out AI tagging, which helps to simplify as our volume's going. Diversity is going up. We have more different types of styles. You know, I know you're a big naming convention guy. I know that you think they're the heart and soul of DDC brand. But another casualty of the AI era, Motion now has AI tagging, which simplifies all of your reporting. Automatically tag stuff just makes it easier to splice data. I know you were just saying, actually you sent it to your team. I sent it to my team. What are your thoughts on AI tagging so far?
- [02:36]
Connor
Yeah, no, totally. And Motion's premier sponsor, we're supposed to say nice things, but legitimately, as soon as I got the video from them, because we got early access, sent it right to my team. I'm like, this is, this is the way to go. It makes the comparative analytics just so much simpler. I was just looking at it this morning, bucketing between UGC lifestyle photo with text, product photo with text, all these different breakdowns that we used to have to labor over to tag and automate and then, and then break down the reports by those dimensions. It's all kind of working out of the box. So you got it totally right. We were talking about creative diversity all the time. Producing that I think is a big challenge for brands right now. Analyzing that just as big of an issue. And AI's Motion's AI tagging system is a great solution for it. So if you want to check it out, go to motion app.com and, and let them know that the marketing operator sent you.
- [03:28]
Cody
All right, I wanted to start off with, I wanted to actually follow up on some of the transactional SMS marketing stuff that we talked about last week. I. Very timely. So I've, I've been a Groo customer for probably not quite a year. I just got my, my, my Grinch Grins by the way, which are delicious. I really a really great seasonal drop from them. And like there, this, this is not an expensive product, right? Like, I'm paying, I don't know, 70 bucks for every, every bag of grooms that I'm getting monthly. So the SMS I got from Groons and I can share my, my screen here a little bit. So very timely. I'm like. And I was just, I don't know if they like, knew because like I did go in and like was, was trying to see if there's any way that I could get a better, like, deal. So I don't know if they had some, like, if this was life cycle marketing driven, because they basically could track that. I was like, clicking around on like, my subscription page and I was like, changing stuff, which I thought was really interesting. I'm sure it was because I got this text like, I don't know, a week later, I think, or two weeks later. So the text is basically a push to have me go on a quarterly subscription versus a monthly subscription and get a discount. So it's lock in 35% off forever on your favorite gummies when you switch to a quarterly subscription. The Black Friday equivalent of a pink pinky promise. Want to upgrade Reply? Save big, save big, all caps. That's all I had to reply. And it automatically upgraded my subscription. So now the next order I get will be three months of, of Groons, three months of Groon, three months of grooms, which I'm also happy about because I find that I'm like, you know, my roommate will steal a few bags or my girlfriend will steal a few bags, and I end up with like, you know, five days in the month where I don't have groons because of that. So I think it'll be a better experience. But I just thought this was like, such good timing on, on like another transactional tax from Groons. And it's so simple but, like, so effective. And I just really thought it was, it was really job well done. So I wanted to share that.
- [05:21]
Connor
Do you think? Well, my first question is. So you, you suspect it was triggered by the fact that you were in your account, that they, they identified you as someone who, I don't know, is maybe, maybe you're a churn risk. And they're like, let's give him another offer.
- [05:36]
Cody
Yeah. So, so, all right, so here's my thinking. I remember way back when I bought grooms for the first time. You get this like, big first order discount. And then I got an order of groons and I was like, I just need to like, I, I, I honestly didn't know what they were charging me at that point. I'm like, this is like my sixth or seventh order. I'm like, what are they charging me? And I went and looked, I was like, Jesus, like, it's kind of, it's pretty expensive. So then I went to, there's my subscription. I'm like, I wonder if I can like, cancel this and like, try to get like a better price somehow. Like, is there a loophole here? I can find out. So I click cancel my subscription. And you know groons as robust as they are, they have like a whole like win back when people goes to the cancel your subscription. So I got into the wind back flow. They're like wait, like we'll give you this offer for your next order if you decide to stay with us and not cancel it. So I'm like great. I. I kind of achieved what I wanted to achieve here. I got a discount on my next subscription. So I did that and I think that is what triggered this message because then like a couple weeks later so I got my next subscription on a lower price and I was you know, probably halfway through it and then I got this text pushing me into the quarterly offer. So I think me going through that like cancel account flow. But then they, then they saved me. I think that's what maybe triggered this.
- [06:45]
Connor
That's fascinating. That would, that would make total sense and also just sounds like an incredibly well run retention program.
- [06:52]
Cody
Dude, it's. It's pretty wild. We'll have to have Connor Connor on and ask him if. If we're right and what triggered it.
- [06:57]
Sean
Yeah, I, I wonder if that's true. What I love is they give you a choice. Like I. I'm a grun subscriber as well. I'm actually a double. I'm a gruns and immune subscriber as well. Oh I. I find and I take them almost daily and sometimes my wife takes grins too. I much I don't know if I like have messed up the dates where like I have like a bag and a half at most times. So I've had to like push it back. So like I don't think it would have probably worked on me. I mean maybe for the 35% discount but I think we were talking about last episode like the and I think I've seen data on this that like a lot of subscriptions get paused. Just, just general programs. Not just groans really just because of. Of like the timing issues, you know either having too little too late. So I think like giving you the option and not necessarily forcing into but I wonder if they did use some behavior or some segmentation to. To give you that offer and not me. And if they did and had away like then that seems super effective.
- [07:48]
Connor
I also one of my thoughts was if they identify you as a churn risk are they better off? It seems very advantageous just trying to pull up as much revenue as possible. Like hey, if we think, if we think there's a 30% chance that this guy's going to churn over the next three months in each of the next three months. So we assume that he's going to be churned out over the quarter. Let's try to get that entire quarter revenue upfront and you'll actually have extracted more value than you would have expected otherwise. Which seems like it could also be playing a role here too.
- [08:17]
Cody
I cannot find Immune for the life of me. Is it. I'm like I'm googling everything I can right now. What is the brand, Cody? Is it just immunity or.
- [08:26]
Sean
No, I think it's immun. I think it's. I m m u n. Yeah, I don't know.
- [08:33]
Cody
All right, we, we finally, we finally found.
- [08:36]
Sean
You found it.
- [08:37]
Cody
We. No, I haven't but we. I'm, I'm kind of excited because we have finally found a hole in the, in the, the Groons funnel. Very, very tight Groons funnel. You guys. I think they need to put a little more investment into their, into their brand terms for the Immune gummies because I can't find it.
- [08:52]
Sean
The, the wildest thing is they're obviously doing the numbers they're doing which I think are public now and like they don't really have a website like they, their, their Gruins homepage is essentially a funnel. But. And even though they have other skus and brands, I'm, I'm so curious to see if they are going to go and develop like a standard site or not. And, and, and I think the way they're thinking about it is, is interesting but.
- [09:14]
Connor
Yeah. So why do you think they decided so someone just asked me this earlier this week. Why do you think they decided to launch Groons and Immune under completely different websites?
- [09:25]
Sean
And then there's a new traps too. So they have.
- [09:27]
Connor
Oh yeah, that's the other one.
- [09:28]
Cody
Yeah. I think they want distinct reasons for being. And I think, I mean I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do it but I mean they're really taking the, it's no different than the Nectar Mattress model or the, or the. What's the Holdco?
- [09:41]
Connor
Not Nectar Resident Home but the, the difference with Resident Home is they need to have the same product at different price points so then they do that via different brands. They have a mattress at 1200, a thousand and 800 or whatever.
- [09:53]
Cody
Yeah, but the, but the Valley like the value props are a little different. Right? Like you have like. I think if I remember correctly it's like the, the, the, the USPS that they're leaning into. I think are pretty different for, for each product. I mean, it's the same as Meyer cookware. Like they have Heston that was going to cost you $2,500 for a 12 piece set and they have Farberware that's going to cost you $100 for a 25 piece set. So it's like, but, but also very different technologies, different usps, different value props. So I think they're. I, I think it makes sense to like break something out by use case and outcome. I also think they could have launched it all under the same brand, but maybe there's, I don't know, less like reason for being for each individual brand. If you, you know, bucket it under. If you talk to Chad, he's like, or Connor, every. In theory, you could take every single product. Right? Like you could take Nootropes immune. They're all additive to one another. And I think if you bucket them under a single brand, that, that gets lost a little bit, in my opinion. I feel like you go to that website and you're like, well, I'm going to buy one of these. I don't need all three. I think the, the sense that you could buy all three or all four or however many they have is a little bit more enhanced by having them broken out as their own brands.
- [11:07]
Sean
Yeah, I feel like there's probably advantages to have them together, right? It's like, all right, like I'm trying to think, but like not necessarily a, a gummy brand but like, oh, momentous. Like, I'm just, I trust them. I'm gonna get them for my supplements. I'm my creatine from them, my electro, stuff like that. But I also feel like, so like there's probably advantages to that, but I also wonder if there's some limitations that where it's like, all right, this brand, I know them as, as the creatine brand. Like, I know that they're good for that. I hear people talk about it. Or maybe hexcloud, right? Like, hexcloud's a pots and pans brand. But like, you know, I don't hear as many people talking about this hexclad product. So I'll get that from somebody else. And I wonder if like that can help you. If you love hexclad, hey, I'm gonna get everything. Like, I have the knives as well. Like, I'm getting Hex Cloud. I love the brand. I love what they stand for. Like, I trust them, I trust Gordon, but I also feel like it's like, oh, like hey, I'm gonna, I want the best knives. I want, you know, like Jones Road is maybe not known for skincare. And like I almost wonder if just standing on a new brand, like consumers probably don't know that they're all together. I'm sure the ones do that are loyal and familiar. But it's like, oh, that's interesting. I'm gonna get my immunity gummies and I'm gonna get that. Like they might not actually know. And it almost like gives them like an even playing field.
- [12:13]
Connor
I also do think like the Grooms customer and the. Is it the Nootropics brand, those are probably extremely different customers for the most part. And there's probably not all that much value in like convoluting the Groons co experience with like multiple options, multiple brands, completely different value props, completely different customers. That's what I was saying is like it's almost. You have to look at the likelihood that someone will be developing a basket with both products and then that can help determine like whether they need to be coexisting alongside one another or not. And then the other one goes back to like. I feel we've thought about this quite a bit at Ridge just around like signal and funnel building. And it's like, I think, I think digital channels are so extremely good at doing one thing. They're like signal seeking for like orders on this website and they actually don't care what it is. And you can refine your entire business around like generating that. And that's why like a lot of these extremely low SKU brands, single SKU brands that are just a single buy button. I think of manscaped, I think of AG1, I think of Groons like they are the ideal digital businesses and you're almost better just building redundancies and doing that three times versus trying to build one site that sells to three different people at completely different times in their lives.
- [13:25]
Sean
And then, and then on that, on that note as well, I think so. 100 agree with that. I think there's so much the market will let you get away with in terms of expanding out laterally for, for your brand. Right. Or like Ridge, there's certain extensions of products that you guys can create that like you have permission to create. Right. You don't really get that if you do the multi brand thing. And so if they've proven that they can do this well now they can go into different categories. They can just do like obviously that's gummies, but they can go and do protein gum like and just put A new face on it, put a new creator on it and almost like expand it as they want because they're not anchored by that one core thing and the core ethos.
- [14:03]
Cody
Totally.
- [14:04]
Sean
So yeah, I think it's, it's, it's a, it's a bullish thing and seems to obviously be working for them. So I'm thinking about this a little bit for us because like skincare, right, like our skincare is not huge. Like Bobby's known for makeup, cosmetics. Like, that's what people go to Jones Road for, you know. Yeah. And, and, but I also see an opportunity and like talking to even bankers about like, there are 100 million to $200 million solo skincare brands, you know, and I don't think we're going to be that. And I don't have like, like I'm very critical on us that I'm not like, oh, like we can make the best version of this possible. Like it's a, it's the most crowded market in the world, right? Our, our makeup is unique and obviously Bobby's got the credibility for it. But it's like, you know, can we carve out, can we do 20 million, can we do 40 million a year in skincare alone? Like probably. And it's worth, it's worth a bet. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, you know, But I think thinking about it from how do you break out? What's your positioning? How is it different? You know, and maybe, maybe it's a partnership with somebody else for us who does have credibility. You know, like there are chemists that are, or creators that are known or it's a joint venture. Like I think something like that where it's not, not a, like because you can do it just directly under the brand. This is, you know, Jones Road product. You can do it the Groons way, which is this is a whole new brand. People don't know it's associated or you can do it. This is, this is a line within our brand that's a collaboration with somebody else, you know, and like a permanent thing like that happens. So there's this brand, Augustine's Botter. They're a skincare brand. They're probably, they're a nine figure brand, high end premium skincare. They have almost like a. Not nearly as well known, but they have like essentially a doctor who formulated this, this one ingredient and it's like very high end, like $300 skincare, but like really well liked, you know, does, does pretty well. But they wanted to capture a Different part of the market, younger market, less affluent market. So they partnered with Dua Lipa and they did a whole brand with her separate website. So they have also done. They did a collab with Victoria Beckham and put this skincare ingredient into some makeup products with her, which was like genius. And they sell it on both of their sites, but it's done well. But this one people are saying is gonna, is like terrible for them because they've essentially taken the ingredient that they're known for, they normally charge 300 bucks for, and now they're trying to charge 100 bucks for 80 bucks for. And it's like they've just like essentially shot their own credibility.
- [16:21]
Connor
Oh.
- [16:22]
Cody
So, so Cody, what's the, what's the, the original brand, Augustine is butter. And then what's the Dua Lipa brand?
- [16:30]
Sean
I don't know the name of what they're calling it, but if you search like Dua Lipa.
- [16:33]
Cody
So they basically just like devalued their hero product on their hero brand.
- [16:38]
Sean
Yeah, it's like they did like the Nectar thing, but because they branded it and people don't know it's separate.
- [16:44]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like no one, no one sees like Nectar's high end mattress or Residents high end mattress and then their low end mattress and knows in their head that it's owned by the same company. Right. They didn't. What do you guys think of like the goat foods model is kind of in the similar, similar vein. Like if you go to licorice.com, which is their first hero brand, I think it's probably their, their highest revenue generating brand. They do not cross pollinate except for like in the footer. They start to like cross pollinate and I know they do in their like own media, but they're not, they're not doing a ton of cross pollination, like above the fold, front and center like that. Whereas you see some of these clothing brands, like trying to think of the one, the clothing brands where it's like at the top of the website you can actually. It's like a tabbed experience and it's like, I think it might be like American Eagle and three other brands where.
- [17:41]
Connor
You can actually like, these are good, good mall throwbacks.
- [17:45]
Cody
So if you go to american eagle.com you can just click right to ARR instead and you can just go back and forth, which I think this is like a slick experience. I honestly think that like licorice.com could probably do something like that up here. And I think that's a value they do.
- [18:00]
Sean
At times I feel like I've seen them.
- [18:02]
Cody
I feel like I thought, I thought I did too. But now if I go to like, I only see it in there. Okay in their footer now. So it's a little bit different now than it, than I've seen it in the past. I mean maybe they tested it and they found that like the having all of them up there was actually too much and it was overload and they took it away. Who knows. Just a lot of, a lot of interesting ways to to go about this. I guess what we're, what we're figuring out and I think there's, there's ways that can work and there's ways that, that won't work. I think grooms and go have found ways and resident have found ways that work and hopefully Augustine is bader can like dig themselves out of the hole they put themselves in. Black Friday, you're about to crush it. The real job is keeping that momentum going past Black Friday, past Holiday and all the way into next year. Prussian helps brands turn peak season wins into predictable profitable velocity. Powered by a suite of proprietary machine learning models and a causality first validation layer, Prescient reveals what actually drove Lyft. It combines surveys, it combines multi touch, attribution and incrementality and then it forecasts for your next dollar of media will drive real incremental profit. Top brands like Coterie, Guess, Hexclad, Jones Road Beauty, Mary Ruse and many more are using Prescient to quantify halo effects across Shopify, Amazon Retail so their teams know exactly where to reinvest. So what actual questions can Prescient help you answer? Let's dig into it a little bit. Question number one Do I need to increase, decrease or reallocate spend for the shopping season? Pressions shows the optimal media mix to drive the strongest Q4 performance whether your budget grows or shrinks. Question number two where should I put additional Q4 budget? Prescient delivers recommendations based on current BSCM dynamics, your vertical and your optimal ad spend allocation. Question number three can pressure measure cross channel effects, especially between Shopify and Amazon. And yes, Prescient uniquely tracks halo effects and ad impact across both platforms, revealing where to dial back and where to double down. This is actually one of the very first problems that Hexclad onboarded with Prescient to solve is understanding the total impact across both dot com and Amazon over ad spend. Precious models are benchmarked against $6 billion in ad spend. So the recommendations you are Getting aren't just theory. They've actually been tested against billions of real media dollars. And if you are ready to see where your next dollar media will drive the most profit, visit Prussian AI.com operators to forecast your growth with Prussian. All right, so at this point everyone's probably heard of this Marty supreme campaign. I'm going to do a quick elevator pitch on what it is and then I'm so impressed.
- [20:43]
Sean
I'm like about to shed a tear.
- [20:46]
Cody
I'm, I'm for once in on the, on the cultural zeitgeist happening on the Internet. It's mainly because I think Timothy Chalamet is like the coolest guy in the world. And I'm, I, my, my feed on my Instagram feed is, is laden with Timothy Chalamet. So marketing Marty Supreme. So first off, the campaign was successful for me because I did not know what Marty supreme was. And then I ended up going and watching the movie trailer and I was like, this looks amazing. The movie looks really, really cool. So Marty Supreme's a new movie coming out. I think the general gist is that Timothy Chalamet is like, it's like a rags to riches type story. He's trying to make it as a professional ping pong player. That's, that's really all the context I have. He's got a sick mustache. Kind of inspired to the one that I'm wearing right now a little bit. Although his has become a, a pingpong protege mines to generate at least $2 million of incremental revenue is my guess on this mustache. But they just did a very, very creative brand campaign to promote the movie. So they had this like zoom call, like a stage zoom call where Timothy Shalam was like meeting with the marketing team for the production company that's making this movie and going to promote it. And like they were, it was like an 18 minute Zoom call where they were like brainstorming ways to promote this movie. I think there was like Google treatment takeover stuff. Like if you Google Marty Supreme, I think there's like some treatments, like some branded treatments. What am I missing anything? I know there's some other stuff. Like what else Cody was going.
- [22:13]
Sean
It was. And I don't, I don't remember if you hit this part, but. So there was a leak. He posted an 18 minute essentially internal zoom meeting where he was just going crazy. He was acting, but he was just like super egotistical, sharing his screen, which he's saying it was so funny because he was like my, I had my visual artist work on this stuff for six months. And it was just like scribble of a blimp and stuff, but just these like wild ideas. Like he was just making fun of himself. Like. So I think a part of the reason people liked it is so it got people talking. He was, you know, he was acting very differently because I think people know him as like this really cool guy, but he was acting very egotistical. So people, is this real? Is it not? Like, even the. Again, it was very lo fi. I think, I think I'm obsessed with these social first campaigns because if they just came out with this, this trailer and put it up like, that doesn't get people talking. It's. It's just so hard to get attention right now, you know, and you have to use the algorithms to your advantage. You have to. You have to be social first. Like, I think that's really where like brand campaigns start is being social first. Like, I think that's why the cozy Earth one was so good, right? It was just so socially native use. The algorithms got reach and distribution properly tapped into cultural zeitgeist of, you know, what's happening on social. This one as well. So, yeah, so they, they leaked it. He's talking about all this stuff. I don't know if it was on purpose, but here's a few things I think they did really well. So they got people talking about it just in general, right? Because it's. This is a wild thing. It's different. You know, it's different. It's fun. It's. It's lo fi. It gets clipped. I'm sure that they paid for clipping distribution, but people. I'm sure they did, but also organically clipped it. You know, there's just so many quotable lines from it. I mean, just. And then they turn into TikTok sound. Marty Supreme. Christmas Day Marty Supreme. Like, and you've probably just heard it over and over and over, right? But people now clip that and do TikTok videos behind it. And then now they're starting to do a bunch of these wild ideas in real life. So like he walked out in an event and people are wearing giant pink, orange, pink ping pong balls over their head. They're doing a blimp, right? They have a Marty supreme blimp. They're doing these trucks around New York that are orange filled with ping pong balls. So, like they're doing all of these stunts. But again, it started social. It's creating a flywheel. Starts social. Social gets distribution on social. I'm sure some of it is organic. Some of it is, you know, they probably have agencies and clippers and stuff. It goes in real life that creates a flywheel that gets reposted on social as well, added to all that stuff. And then like you said, you go and then watch the trailer. So it's like, it's like a funnel and a flywheel where they're not just being like, here's a trailer to market this movie that's been done a million times. And then now, huge influencer campaign, Tom Brady, I mean pretty much anyone you could think of. It's now wearing this like Marty supreme jacket. People are lining up to buy this merch. It's just like brilliant campaign. It's. To me, it's like one of the best I've seen. I don't know, I'm just so impressed by it. Obviously they have giant budgets.
- [25:00]
Cody
But you know what's interesting is the actual like a 24 released YouTube video, which is that 18 minute, you know, Zoom call that only has 713,000 views. But to your point, Cody, it was really all the clipping in the.
- [25:13]
Sean
On his. It has like 10 million, 18 million. But still. Yeah, okay.
- [25:16]
Cody
On. On his Instagram page.
- [25:19]
Sean
Yeah, yeah, but still, I agree with you. It's all the, all the flywheel it creates.
- [25:23]
Cody
Yeah. And, and I don't know what's good for like a YouTube trailer, but the Marty, like the official Marty Supreme YouTube trailer has 21 million views. And that's from A24's page. I don't know what's good. I'm going to go look at their page and see like what some of their other trailers have. But that's the KPI, right? Is like, let's get people to watch this trailer. Like that's the, that's probably the end action that they're wanting people to take. Connor, what are your thoughts?
- [25:48]
Connor
Yeah, one, one thing, what I loved about it is how self aware it is. So like he talks about this in the Zoom, but he talks about like the, the Barbie rollout of Pink. They did like a pink Xbox. They did all these cool, incredible like partnership program. And that was because I feel like we've been in this meta for the last couple years of just like extremely extravagant rollouts. We have gotten past the point of like, hey, we're just going to post the trailer on YouTube and run some TV commercials for it. Like it has become more immersive and more immersive and also like stunt based. That is very shareable on social. Like I, I think we've been in that meta for a while as it comes to movie premieres. But this one's like self referential about it. Right. It starts with he's like, what do you think about Barbie? Oh, you think about pink. And he's like, it's this very absurd thing. And then you actually see the rollout of that. And if they had just done the like orange blimp and the orange trucks, then like it would have been good. But the fact that we felt we were like there was like an inside joke that was a part of it, I think makes it particularly memorable and just very self aware of the times that we're in currently. And I think that's what for me makes it feel extremely unique and novel.
- [26:56]
Sean
Yeah, because I think like this you don't really get sick of seeing it because it's like a joke, right? It's like you're in on the joke a little bit where Barbie is like Barbie was. You're right about bringing up Barbie. That was like a super effective campaign. But it was like they are everywhere. They are spending so much money, they're doing every. Every collaboration known to man. You know, you kind of like get sick of seeing it at a certain.
- [27:15]
Connor
Yeah, you see the blimp now and you're like, oh yeah, I'm thinking about like the. The asshole Timothee Chalamet like pitching this on the zoom call. It's just like it's a way different experience of the campaign because you have this like faux behind the scenes premise as.
- [27:29]
Sean
Yeah, it's just so like now in the zeitgeist and like he just clearly understands social so well.
- [27:35]
Connor
So Cody, how are you? I think, I think we're all of our brands are actually. No, Connor, you guys did a fantastic job this year with the super bowl commercial. Like that was. That was. We talked about that a couple months ago. But like the world building you guys did there, I feel like is is a fantastic case study.
- [27:50]
Cody
I drew a lot of parallels between like the other and this and that. The campaign we did in this one with all the different. Like. Like you have the hero video, which is the TV commercial analogous to the. To the. I'd say the zoom call being. Yeah, exactly.
- [28:04]
Connor
Well, I'd say the commercial is probably closest to the trailer people. I think people watch the trailer because they want to know more about the movie.
- [28:12]
Cody
Right. Or would you say the conversion like them going to our site and buying is what's analogous to the trailer or to the trailer here now probably going.
- [28:21]
Connor
And buying a movie Ticket is the equivalent of getting a hexagod pan.
- [28:25]
Cody
Yeah, right, right. But yeah, no, it was like a lot of world building. Very similar. I'm also looking at a24's page right now. And their other first off, Marty supreme has only been out for two weeks. The trailer at 21 million views. I don't know how these things grow over time but like I think the highest other official trailer I'm seeing here in terms of views is like, I don't know, like this Miles teller One has 5 million only I see another one with like 13 million. But like clearly the, the Marty supreme trailer has like or like a lot more views than any other of their official trailers on here.
- [29:00]
Connor
But I was gonna ask. So I actually think what hexclad did earlier this year is a great comp to this for a D2C brand. Cody, are you taking any, any notes from this for 2026?
- [29:09]
Sean
Yeah. So we're planning launch in March. I. I will share privately. I can't share too much about it, but I'll say the three events that campaigns I'm most inspired by Cozy Earth, Bedrock Challenge because again, super socially native, tons of distribution, partnering with creators for distribution. Just, just doing this like fun thing. Right. The ramp one. I don't think we ever talked about the ramp one on here, but that was where they hired Kevin from the office was. He was, he was CFO for the day. They put him in a glass box in New York City. They live streamed it essentially mega viral on Twitter and other places. They had different talent, stuff like that. And then, and then this one as well.
- [29:48]
Cody
Right.
- [29:48]
Sean
Like I think there's a lot of parallels there. So yes, we're doing something in, in March for a launch, but it'll just be a stunt that we're trying to have be a social first. It'll be live streamed. It'll have a charitable component. And it's just. We're going to just try to. It'll be a pretty scary investment and just try to get it to go as viral as possible. Really trying to be distribution first. So I'll share more as we go. But yeah, definitely heavily inspired by this stuff. So I remember like right around Christmas time when most people should probably normal people were like off taking that, taking their time, chilling 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 when 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. It was slow, 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. If we switch 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 a 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, just make your team happier. Go to richpanel.com demo, tell them Cody from our credit operator sent you and tell them you're ready to get a tattoo.
- [32:11]
Connor
Okay, I. I had another conversation about this recently. I was talking to a brand who wants to. They're planning big campaigns for for 2026. Very highly creative stuff, highly immersive, multi channel, etc. Etc. Like some very cool stuff. It would be trying to think of a good, a good comp. I'm not gonna have one off the top of my head here, but what we were talking about was because this is the tricky thing, right? Like having Timothy Chalamet, your movie, a media distribution, right? Like it is like he can post, he can tweet something and he posts on Instagram and it's immediately going to.
- [32:45]
Cody
Get millions of impressions.
- [32:47]
Connor
So you just need like, you need the viral component or like the memeable component and then you have the distribution. Whereas I'm curious how you're thinking about this, Cody, or, or for Ridge, like we could have something good, but unless it's like integrated into a deeper distribution plan, I worry that it's just going to kind of fall flat on arrival. Like.
- [33:06]
Sean
Oh, totally. That's. That's the, the challenge of brand campaigns is like usually it's like this pretty polished video and all the assets go into that and then there's no distribution plan.
- [33:16]
Connor
Or even if you think about the, if you think about the Marty supreme, the entire rollout, but if you just do that with a smaller studio and a less known actor, nobody cares. Like they had, they had critical mass distribution off the jump and then it was like it was able to build momentum from there. But I'm always concerned about like, how do you actually like get across that, how do you cross that bridge to the point where like it's, it takes on a life of its own in any capacity.
- [33:41]
Sean
Yeah. So our biggest, our biggest cost of this event that we're going to, that we're doing are talent. And so it's a. For distribution. They have to post about it ahead of it to get people into it. But also people are going to want to watch them and they're not all giant talent. Like we're going to have a combination of people that have that brand name and you know, are going to bring in their audiences and they'll have to, you know, post and create content about it as well as people that are maybe really fun to watch, but maybe lesser known. But yeah, our biggest line item is going to be talent because we just have to think distribution first. Right. We're going to have a production company doing it, live, streaming it. We're going to have our team plus probably some freelancers shooting. We should have like eight cameras live on the day right away. Everything is going to get uploaded to, you know, to air right that's going to get sent to like clipping companies that we're going to have on retainer. Like. I know, I know. You know, Connor Hexcloud worked with the company to like do some like meme stuff and you know, distribution. Like, I just think it has to be like so heavy distribution first. Totally. We're going to do a lot of lead up content ahead of it. Try just to try to manufacture this story and be a little dramatic with it and obviously have fun like along the way. But I think, yeah, you, you. The way I feel is you almost can't do this on a really small budget because it's, it's almost like you put 50k into it. You can't really hire the talent. You can't do things. And again, we don't have ramps budget but like part of what made it successful, it wasn't a random guy. It was, he had this, this name built in from being on the Office. You know, it's, it's much less fun if they're like, hey, we're just going to put a guy in a box. It's like, no, we're going to put totally from the Office in a box. So I think you need the talent and then I think you need the distribution strategy. Whether that's paid stuff and having clipping agencies or whether you're doing things on purpose that are like, hey, I think this is going to get people talking and posting this online.
- [35:31]
Connor
I totally agree. I would also say I would bet we would be surprised at how affordable the Ramp campaign was with Kevin from the Office. I mean, that is a, that is a guy. I don't think he's getting all that much work. I mean, I'm a big fan of the Office, but like, I don't think he's getting a quarter million dollars for a day of work or whatever. Like, I actually think that's, he's probably on Cameo. You know, he's probably doing videos for like 100 bucks a pop. And you could probably get his day rate at something extremely affordable. And, and the point that I'm gonna make actually is that, but he's, he is a unique talent where the campaign as a whole is, is worth far more than the sum of its parts. Where you say like, if you're doing this fake CFO thing in a box, like he's kind of ideal. He's known for being this kind of like bumbly accountant at the, at the, the, the paper company. And that's like, that's the, that's like Striking gold, I feel, when you can, like, line all those things up.
- [36:25]
Sean
Oh, because. Yeah, because. Because, I mean, they're essentially borrowing the Office's credibility as well. That's still relevant because people just still watch reruns of the Office all the time. People are even nostalgic for some of that stuff. So it's like they're really, like, licensing the Office without really having to. And yeah, because it's a little older. He's not. He's not. It's not like you're getting Steve Carell today when they're doing it. They're getting somebody who, like you said, is. Is probably worth. Is. Is probably, you know, getting far less. So. Yeah, I. I totally agree with that.
- [36:56]
Cody
So, so. So the. So a viral brand marketing stunt, a successful one equals talent plus creative. So you got Timothee Chalamet plus a very creative activation with Timmy Timothy Chalamet, plus distribution. So all the. All the clipping and stuff that's going on. Right. I mean, that's. That's kind of the. The three pronged. The three pieces. That's like one plus one plus one equals ten is. Is how you do it.
- [37:23]
Connor
I think that's basically right. I think it. Basically. I think it all comes down to distribution. And you have a couple levers to pull in. In ways to get to distribution. And that involves talent, that involves creativity, that involves incentives, things like that.
- [37:39]
Sean
Yeah, you got to get their attention, which I think the talent is the easiest way to do that. Right. And that's like the Skims playbook where, like, they'll do a collab with NBA, NBA or with Post Malone. It's like, that gets people's attention. Right. They'll have a different face, and then you got to get them talking. So it's like once you've gotten your attention, like the talent is a hook, then what are you doing as part of that campaign to, like, that's going to be getting people talking. And that was like all the stun stuff. And then hopefully what's. Then how do you turn that into flywheel to get more people talking about.
- [38:05]
Cody
Some of the meme stuff? By the way, we've. We've used those guys that run this agency a handful of times. They have insane distribution. It is crazy. These guys basically own tons of meme pages. The impressions that they're getting on these pages is absolutely wild. So, like, you'll give them a campaign and they'll. You'll give them raw creative assets. They'll go make a bunch of memes out of it post them, just distribute them across all their meme channels. And we are getting like tens of millions sometimes. I don't know if we got up to nine figures with the super bowl stuff. Like tens of millions of impressions for like, insanely cheap CPMs. I think a really nice, like, addition to a campaign to just ensure that you're like, arbitraging eyeballs. It's fine. You shouldn't lean only on that because if you're only leaning into memes, there's like a little too much jokingness around it, I think. But I think it's a really nice complimentary strategy to like, it's like, all right, we need 50 more million impressions. Like, great, let's go roll out with these, like, meme agencies that own all these pages and have crazy distribution. It's. It's really interesting.
- [39:07]
Connor
And also identifying, like, the moments or the images or the sounds like to Cody's point around Marty Supreme December 25th or Marty Supreme Christmas Day, whatever it is, like figuring out what are the moments that are particularly memeable and then seeding that. It feels like the other. The other really big component. And, and you'll see. Like, I mean, I might be projecting here a little bit, but, like.
- [39:30]
Sean
I.
- [39:30]
Connor
Think there are certain. Like, I think Sydney Sweeney's team, like, does this to some degree. I think they. I think they know she. When she does interviews, like the Hot Ones. Like, I think that. I think there was probably some coordination behind the scenes around what of this interview is clippable, how can we keep Sydney Sweeney top of mind and in the zeitgeist? And then that can just kind of take off. And I think more often than we would otherwise expect, there's some sort of behind the fiends artificial seeding that is getting it to the like, viral loop of, oh, now we're all talking about Sydney Sweeney on Hot Ones.
- [39:58]
Cody
What, what. What of that do you think is them ahead of time saying to themselves, we think like, of this whole campaign, these three moments are the most, like, memeable or shareable or engaging. And they're. They're like making that bet before the campaign even goes live versus let's react to what the Internet is taking. You know what I mean? It's like, all right, well, holy crap. This one bit the Internet seems to be running with. So now we're gon pour gas on the fire by doing our own distribution of it. Like, do you feel like there's a one or the other or a mix of both happening?
- [40:29]
Connor
Well, so I'm Curious on Cody's take here, but my initial thought is one, this is one of the benefits of live stream is that so much of it is not planned. You're just solving it with volume. You're like, hey, we're going to go live for 12 hours and memeable moments will happen. And then you're, you are, as the marketing team behind it, like, looking for those moments you can plan some of them, like Kevin, the Kevin from the Office and the ramp activation. They had the Rizzler come in at the end and it's like, okay, clearly they planned that. They were like, this will be clippable and shareable. But it's one of the things that I thought was really interesting about the 18 minute zoom for Marty supreme is that none of that, that was, that was all planned. Like, I'm sure they were thinking like Schwepp, him saying Schweppe. They're like, yeah, that, that is kind of inherently viral. The Marty supreme on Christmas Day. Like, they actually, they actually must have very much thought through what are the handful of little snippets that we could get and how do we layer this into a zoom call? Because there's no way that was just like straight improv, you know?
- [41:29]
Cody
Right.
- [41:29]
Connor
I was, yeah.
- [41:30]
Sean
Wondering about that when you're like, how much of that 18 minute video was improv? Because I'm sure obviously some of it was. Or do you think he, like, rehearsed that? You think he like rehearsed that and had lines?
- [41:41]
Connor
I think I think the, the, the Schweppe stuff, I think a lot of the stuff that has become clippable was planned ahead of time.
- [41:49]
Cody
It's probably like work. It's probably like, hey, here's eight things we want you to work in. Like, find the right moment to like drop it. But like, you should definitely drop these lines. But like, when you do it, it's like, go do your thing.
- [41:59]
Sean
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:00]
Connor
Even like him in the tank top, shaved head, and like the way that he was sitting like on top of his camera in like this weird hotel room, he's just like pointing at his head. Like, even that feels like they're like, oh, yeah. This visually, this visually is like the approach we want to take. I think that was all. I think that is, you know, thought through and constructed and not just, just Timothy Chalamet deciding moment of, oh, hey, I think this would be funny. I bet it's like, yeah, it's extremely thought through. I think they're very talented and well prepared.
- [42:30]
Cody
He looks crazy.
- [42:31]
Sean
Yeah.
- [42:32]
Connor
It's awesome.
- [42:33]
Cody
It's awesome. It's so cool. Okay, well, that's sweet. That was. That's a good recap of Marty supreme and how to just do. Yeah. Effective brand marketing campaign that goes viral.
- [42:47]
Connor
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- [44:15]
Cody
All right, we want to talk about. We got 10 minutes left. Let's talk about TikTok Shop a little bit. I'm curious what you guys are seeing and how you're approaching it, how you're thinking about measurement. We do not have products that lend themselves to Tick Tock Shop. Right? You look at most brands succeeding on Tick Tock Shop, it's like the bite size, more impulse buy stuff. Lower AOV sub 100. I'd even say like 50 or under is probably even the the biggest Sweet spot on Tick Tock Shop. With that being said, we're still investing there because, like, that is a corner of the Internet. Whether or not we see a directly attributable Tick Tock Shop revenue or not, like, people spend their time and we think we have prospective customers spending their time following TikTok Shop affiliates on TikTok, watching that content and being influenced by that content, regardless of whether or not they're going to watch that content, click on their Shop link and go buy the product. So even like, yes, we're seeing our, our revenue grow, but it's still a tiny, tiny, tiny percent of our total revenue. But like, the content we're getting is growing a lot. The impressions we're getting is growing a lot. The engagement we're getting is growing a lot. And we think that's a very good thing. So we're going to continue to invest there even if we do not see a ton of revenue show up in TikTok shop. At least that's, that's the approach we're taking right now. Are you guys investing in Tick Tock Shop? Are you, like, what, what are you guys seeing? Because you have a much lower AOV than we do, so are you seeing more success with the actual revenue with TikTok Shop affiliates or what's your approach there?
- [45:43]
Connor
Can. I'm just curious, when you say you guys are investing in Tick Tock Shops, what does that look like right now?
- [45:47]
Cody
Seating with a lot of TikTok shop affiliate. So, like just getting more of our products in more affiliate hands, integrating our store with their storefronts and just getting more affiliates posting content about hexclad and selling hexclad through their stores.
- [46:02]
Connor
Are you at like hundreds of posts a month or dozens of posts a month?
- [46:06]
Cody
Hundreds, yeah. We've had like 500 videos go up in the last, like, month or two.
- [46:11]
Connor
Okay, cool. Cody, where are you guys at?
- [46:14]
Sean
We are not currently on TikTok shop, but probably will be soon.
- [46:18]
Connor
A little tease.
- [46:19]
Sean
Yeah. No, no, I mean, I think, I think the things that were holding me back, first of all, like, again, we, we grew 50% last year, so, like, we didn't really have to even think about it. Obviously growth is slower. It's like. All right, that's very clearly just like the direction and like we've talked about on a few pods how we're just like, we and Connor and I, Connor Dalton. I talk about this a bunch where it's like, we just feel so old and washed up and I know Sean's been tweeting about this a bunch. He's just like Gen Z kids who are just like, scaling tik tok shop and, like, look at us, like, running Facebook ads as, like, old, you know, geriatric dudes. But it's like, it is true. And, like, that's how the platforms have shifted. So it's like, for most reason, you can't be. So I didn't love the margin profile, like, but you can't really do anything about that. Right? And it's not. I know it's not about being profitable on that channel, but it's like a halo. So, like, cool on that. I also don't think it's bad for brand. I mean, that's so subjective, I think. You know, again, this is. This Timothy Shalom, I think is important. Like, I think. And. And we're very guilty of this. And I'm literally banning the phrase on brand here because it's like, what's good for brand is more people talking about your brand and more people searching for your brand.
- [47:24]
Cody
And.
- [47:24]
Sean
And if that's lo fi slop, like, so be it. That's what. That's what the world wants right now. So I think from that perspective, like, it doesn't hurt brand really at all. I think the one thing I'm still a little hung up on that we're trying to figure out was, like, what would our offer strategy be? Like, you do have to be more promotional there than other places, and there's things that you can do. So we're just trying to figure out what that would be for us. But I think once we. Once we get that, like, we're going to launch on it very shortly.
- [47:49]
Connor
And this will be the first time you guys aren't selling on the website.
- [47:53]
Sean
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I mean, listen, we. We've been on, you know, we had meta shops. Like, it's not that different. They're all directly integrated with Shopify. But, yeah, I think that's the other thing. It's like, all right, we don't want to be here. We don't want to be Amazon, but, you know, we really don't want to be Sephora. So it's like, I don't want to even call it a lesser evil, but it's like, you know, all right, if we want to keep growing, we do have to expand channels, so.
- [48:16]
Connor
Totally. Yeah. And. And I mean, Connor's point is selling on TikTok shops, being able to pay affiliate commissions to creators is really just unlocking distribution that. Connor, your point is you're likely capturing the value elsewhere. You guys, Tick Tock Shop revenue is not going through the roof. You're selling more on hexcloud.com presumably because people are talking about you on TikTok.
- [48:39]
Cody
Yes, yes, exactly. And like we're still, we're still thinking about TikTok shop as like a KPI or TikTok shop revenue as a KPI to track because we should, we still should see that, that grow over time if we're doing more content, more affiliates, all the things. What I'm really excited about is we're, we're integrating with Prescient right now. So and that was like Prescient's initial USP as like measuring halo revenue. So I'm really excited to see what pression is modeling TikTok Shop to be doing for us. And it's also going to backfill it. So we'll get like all historical data too. Because what I want to be able to do is I want to be able to almost create a multiplier and say, okay, we know that like let's say 10% of the actual revenue total is, is actually coming through Tik Tok Shop. So if we're getting 10k in TikTok shop revenue, we can almost extrapolate and say we're actually getting 100k total. And I want to be able to back into like some sort of multiplier. We have like an overall blended sense of like, hey, this much revenue in TikTok shop equals this much total revenue. We can almost back into a return on ad spend based on the affiliate commissions we're paying and almost have like a, like think about performance that way. So we actually just finished the integration with Prescient yesterday and I'm hoping in the next handful of days we'll be able to come in there and actually get like a good read on total TikTok shop performance, which is going to be really insightful.
- [49:57]
Connor
So if you were to totally guess and then maybe we could circle back here once you have more data. If you were to totally guess, do you think 10 is accurate? 10 of the total impact of the channel is actually captured on TikTok shop itself.
- [50:09]
Cody
That might be like a little conservative. I'd say no more than 20. I would say especially, especially when I look at like our holdout results and like look at similar channels like the YouTubes, the tick tock ads and I see this like the, the over like way more Amazon orders to Shopify orders. So if I apply that same logic to TikTok Shop it's like yeah, I bet it's 5 to 1 or 10 to 1 even of non TikTok Shop orders. To TikTok Shop orders is my.
- [50:37]
Sean
Wait, so you think for every dollar you make on TikTok shop, you're making nine on hexcloud.com or hexcloud plus Amazon save?
- [50:44]
Cody
I'd say, I'd say four to. I don't know, four to nine even.
- [50:47]
Sean
That significantly more than I would have thought. Because like Amazon though, if they're trying to run Tick. Yeah, but if you're trying to run like most people are trying to run Tick Tock Shop as like a break even channel, then you're still at like a 3, 4 iro ass or something like that. Which means that's like crushing.
- [51:01]
Cody
Let you know, I'll let you guys know what we find out. That's like, I could be totally wrong but just based on the little amount of of revenue we see on Tick Tock Shop and like we get good. Like the engagement on the content's good, the reach is good. So I'm like there's got to be something happening here outside of just this district, this, this sales channel.
- [51:23]
Connor
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- [52:39]
Sean
Well, and then the other thing I'm thinking about, dude, I'm. This is how dumb I am. I. I had dinner with Hudson from Comfort like, a year and a half ago. It was like, before Black Friday last year. It was like, me, Moyes and Nick Sharma, like, first time I met him. And he was like, yeah, we're doing like 100 million. Like, just TikTok shop stuff. And I was like, all right, that's cool. Like, that'. That's not for us, you know? And I'm like, dude, I'm. It's literally keeping me up at night. Like, I'm just watching. He's. He's so awesome. I don't know if you guys know him or, like, have listened to stories. Like, he's super humble, humble, but, like, he's just like, well, he'll go on these podcasts and share. Like, I'm sure he's leaving stuff out. But, like, their entire playbook, dude, they have a discord of 17,000 people. Can you, can you imagine how much better your ad account would perform if you had that many people producing content for you all the time? They get on, like, weekly zoom calls with them. So, like, there are so many benefits of that community outside of TikTok shop revenue now there they have affiliates all other places on, you know, TikTok, because I was a huge one, but on, on meta, Instagram, elsewhere. And then they just have this, this ridiculous level of I get again, earned media that it's creating, but then also, you know, paid media. And like, I. He said the numbers on podcast, but like, they're getting like thousands and thousands and thousands of pieces of content for their ad account. You know, it's like. So it's like, I think it's that way. It's like, yes, you can look at your actual impressions impression and like, I'm excited to model it out once we launch there. I saw Pression had that, and that's awesome. But also, like, it's probably hard to build a discord, a community of that size without TikTok. Like, you're not going to start with that on just Instagram alone, right? Because, like, they don't have that presence and things, but, like, it's almost like your excuse to then start building it and then you just have that as an asset, right?
- [54:17]
Connor
And he talks about it as like a moat that they have. He's like, yeah, I don't care about sharing the playbook because I'm so far ahead of everybody that, like, it doesn't really Matter.
- [54:26]
Sean
Yeah.
- [54:27]
Connor
They're supposed to do 700 million this year is like, that's the headline number I've heard.
- [54:30]
Sean
500. That's wild.
- [54:32]
Connor
Yeah. Comfort.
- [54:33]
Cody
I wasn't going to say this because our affiliate lead just met with their team yesterday and like got the lowdown on how they have everything structured and I thought it was a brilliant strategy to like pull their TikTok shop affiliates out of like the TikTok whatever back end and put them into an owned community. Like, that is so brilliant. And like we're gonna maybe start thinking about, you know, trying some stuff like that. But I thought that was like, oh yeah, we are.
- [54:58]
Sean
It'll be a KPI. I don't know. I don't know how many. Maybe we'll say like 5,000 at the end of next year. But like it's just you. It's just one of those things where if you think about. It's like if you have that, you just can't really lose. Like you just. It makes it so much easier to win if you do have that.
- [55:13]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would totally agree with that. Comfort's also fascinating. I mean it's, it's a, it's a fantastic category to be in. Like he talks about, there's a great podcast he did with. It's Jack Neal, who I haven't listened to any of the other shows or maybe one or two others, but that's the one that I would recommend where he really goes deep on some of the Ambassador stuff that they do. Apparel is a great category. He talks about how high the LTV is. Like there's just multiple people buying a couple hoodies and sweatpants and things like that. And then I think what they do on the website, just like constantly on promo, they do a really cool thing with pre orders where they even further discount things that you'll receive in 60 plus days. So they're like freeing up cash flow. The Ambassador is obviously a massive, massive advantage that they have. But I also think there's some very unique things that they're doing on the. The CRO side and just like the category that they chose and the value props around that category, the whole like anti anxiety blanket, but it's a really comfortable hoodie, is killer, killer for social commerce. So there's just. They have a lot of things they, they've got the deck. He's stacked the deck in his own favor, which is. Shouldn't be overlooked either.
- [56:22]
Cody
So. So their strategy is their, their team, at least from my understanding, is they have two separate People, one that's all recruiting and that's all happening within the Tick Tock, like shop affiliate platform. And then they have a totally separate person that's their like affiliate Discord manager. So the strategy is like one person's all recruiting.
- [56:41]
Connor
Yeah.
- [56:41]
Cody
And then pulling them into Discord and then another person, a totally separate person manages that community and like, make sure all the information is front and center for those folks to just like. Because it's really just like an empowerment game at that point. It's like, are you empowering your, your affiliates to have all the, like to post? And you do that by giving them all the information. Hey, we have these new products, we have this offer, we have this brand collaboration, like just giving them all the, the brand information to post. And like, what, what better way to do that than in your own community where you can have like a back and forth dialogue? It's brilliant.
- [57:14]
Sean
They get on weekly calls with them. Right.
- [57:17]
Cody
Embrace them.
- [57:18]
Sean
It gets a little bit like an ML. It's like, all right, here's who's making the most revenue. Like, here's what they're doing. But it's like, hey, here's. Here's top content. Here's what we have coming out. Like, yeah, the same way that they, that they, that you guys would brief an internal team, like, they're, they're treating them like a team, you know, and like a community. And they brief them on, on upcoming launches, things like that. They brief them on what's performing well, what hooks are performing well. Like, like they're, they're training them and investing in them. So it's like, yeah, you, you, you have, it's, it's all about, I think, how you use it and leverage it. But they do such an amazing job of it, right?
- [57:48]
Cody
Yeah, I mean, that's how like we do Costco Roadshow, like reps, right? Like when we hire someone, they come to LA for like every two months. We have like a training with all the new reps. It's not that different than, like, if you really want your affiliates to sell for you, like, you almost have to treat it like that, like, give them a formal training. Give them like, like make it like, have a structured program where you're communicating with them regularly, training them. Like, it's not that different than training like a sales team to go and, and sell your product in person.
- [58:16]
Connor
You know, they, there's even programs where like we have, we've developed content to educate the blue shirts at Best Buy as I guess not that different from that. You've got the guys on the sales floor. People are asking questions. So you want them educated about your product. What are the interesting USPS, etc.
- [58:31]
Cody
Etc.
- [58:31]
Sean
Etc.
- [58:31]
Connor
Just form of like, just education at different levels I think is, oh, we.
- [58:34]
Sean
Do it for our retail teams all the time. We do it for our retail, for our.
- [58:36]
Cody
Totally.
- [58:37]
Sean
It's just a much higher leverage. Oh, I see. You mean. Yeah, totally. Yeah, they're. They're just doing it much higher leverage. You know, when, when we do it, you know, you guys might be trading 10, 20 people at a time. They're trading 17,000 people out on one call.
- [58:53]
Connor
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then those people are posting on TikTok and they're getting 1 to 10, 100,000 views or whatever. It's just so much higher leverage than the like six people that are in a Best Buy.
- [59:03]
Sean
Yeah, we should do like a whole TikTok shop episode. I was thinking about it because I feel like this is the most. We talked about it where we have somebody on who's like crushing it up.
- [59:09]
Connor
Yes, totally. Because, yeah, we are all clearly just figuring it out.
- [59:16]
Sean
We are the old, the old guard at this point.
- [59:18]
Cody
All right, let's wrap there. All right, that's a wrap. On this episode of the Marketing Operators podcast, we talked about transactional SMS marketing. We talked about Marty Supreme's amazing brand marketing campaign campaign. We talked about Tik Tok Shop. Thank you to the sponsors, Motion after pression, Rich panel and Revo. And as always, if you're enjoying the Marketing Operator show, make sure to like, subscribe, comment and share with your marketing friends.