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When to Diversify or Evolve Your Media Mix: How To Approach Channel Expansion (Bonus Episode)
01:23:49
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- [00:01]
Cody
So what's up with all these hexclad guys missing the podcast? Connor, Roland, you're like the Jason Panzer of the marketing operators. Have you. Have you suddenly gotten into golf? Have you been at a villa in. In Tuscany? What's going on, man? It's been a while.
- [00:13]
Connor
No. No golf. No golf. I was in South America for a little bit. We had the. We had the Boring Marketer podcast with the. With beautiful Medellin in the background. Actually, last week I missed. I had two weddings in one week. I had my first Thursday night wedding ever. I don't know if you guys have ever had a crazy wedding. Crazy, right?
- [00:32]
Roland
So.
- [00:33]
Connor
So Thursday night wedding in Colorado in the mountains was gorgeous. And then I had a Saturday wedding in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So Friday was a travel day.
- [00:40]
Cody
So was that a Thursday night, July 3rd wedding, like July 4th weekend?
- [00:44]
Connor
No, it was the week after 4th of July, so it was. Yeah, not one.
- [00:48]
Cody
I had. I had a July 3rd wedding this year.
- [00:52]
Connor
Oh, really?
- [00:53]
Cody
Yeah.
- [00:53]
Connor
So you had a Thursday wedding? Yeah, yeah, it was. It was fun. It was cool. I mean, it was a little inconvenient, but it was. It was interesting. So, yeah, I knocked out two weddings the. In the back part of last week, so I had to miss the show Friday. But we're back in. Back in Denver now. Got some of the Hex Cloud team out here this week, so we're jamming. Jamming IRL in the office.
- [01:13]
Roland
Do you. Are you a little under the weather? I feel like you sound a little different.
- [01:16]
Connor
I'm just. I'm just stuffed up. Always. Dude.
- [01:20]
Roland
Tough.
- [01:21]
Cody
All right. Juice cleanse.
- [01:24]
Connor
I know. Maybe.
- [01:25]
Cody
How was. How was South America? So where were you? You're in Colombia.
- [01:29]
Connor
Yeah, we were in. So we had a ski trip. It's, you know, and, you know, the opposite side of the equator. It's winter over there, so we went to Chile or Chile. I keep getting people giving me crap for saying Chile. I don't know how to say it so much. We went to Chile for a ski trip, and then we just tacked on a stop in Colombia on the front end.
- [01:49]
Cody
Awesome, man. Sounds incredible. Was it. Was it great?
- [01:51]
Connor
It was cool.
- [01:52]
Austin
Yeah.
- [01:52]
Connor
The Andes are like. It's. It's. They're gorgeous. It's all about tree line. It's like super epic, very rocky. It was very cool. Food is great. People are super friendly. Yeah, definitely.
- [02:03]
Roland
Was there snow?
- [02:04]
Connor
Not. It's like. It's kind of like the equivalent of our, like December, I would say there right now. So they had gotten some snow, but it had been a little while. It had been a few weeks, so the coverage wasn't great. I would like to go back and maybe go in like August or September, but it was still. It was still fun. It was still, still good to ski in. In July.
- [02:22]
Roland
Sick. We should do a marketing operators off site.
- [02:24]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [02:26]
Connor
The marketing operators take on South America.
- [02:28]
Cody
If you want to sponsor that, let us know. You want to sponsor plugins out there?
- [02:33]
Connor
Yeah, United. Any. Any United Airlines listeners on this?
- [02:37]
Cody
I have this idea. I've never been to South America. I. Or I. I guess I have once, but I have this idea. I want to go to Argentina. They're supposed to have like the best steak in the world. And I'm a big steak guy. I want to do like a Walter Midi type excursion where just like backpacking with like a group of friends, just trying to like find like the best steak ever. That's like a bucket list trip that I have.
- [02:57]
Connor
This is. This is Cody. The Cody. This is your, like, angle into becoming a content creator, a social media person. Yeah, yeah. Food influencer. And then we'll see you with some hexclad to cook.
- [03:07]
Cody
Yeah. If anyone wants to sponsor just throwing it out there.
- [03:10]
Roland
Yeah, they'd be a good. That'd be a good pivot.
- [03:11]
Connor
After you sell Jones Road, that's your next thing.
- [03:14]
Cody
Yeah, yeah. Then I don't need a sponsor. Then, then, then hopefully I'm good.
- [03:18]
Roland
Have you told the Bucket List family?
- [03:20]
Cody
No.
- [03:21]
Roland
Okay, so that's. You made the joke, Connor, about him. Cody selling Jones Road, pivoting to food influencer. The. The Bucket List guy. I for game, but he raised money on Shark Tank. I believe he got a deal on Shark Tank. He was on Shark Tank at the very least for a QR code company where you could create QR codes. And he sold it to Snapchat. So he made like $40 million. And he was like, really young at the time. He made it in college, sold it to Snapchat, realized he didn't like the corporate life, pivoted out of it, and just became a YouTuber with his family. And now they're an incredibly successful travel content YouTube family. So that's a pretty cool. That's a really good pivot.
- [03:57]
Connor
Hold on. Why is this guy working after he sold his company to Snapchat for 40 million?
- [04:02]
Roland
Yeah, he's working. I mean, he's making. He's making videos as his. As him and his lovely wife and his children travel the. The globe. I mean, it's really not.
- [04:10]
Connor
No, but he's A pretty sweet deal. But did you say he like he hated corporate life so he started doing.
- [04:14]
Roland
This like well, because earn out at Snapchat or whatever.
- [04:19]
Connor
Right, okay, got it, got it, got it. I just followed them. Yeah, these guys, they crushed like insanely ripped too.
- [04:26]
Roland
So good model, Cody. Good model for you, dude.
- [04:30]
Connor
This is the muse.
- [04:31]
Cody
All right, we got a great episode today. We're going to talk about channel expansion, channel diversification again. What I mean by that is not retail. D2C Amazon channels. We'll save that for another day. Paid media channels because that's what we're talking about here on the marketing operators podcast. But before we do want to thank our sponsors, Motion, Pression, Rich panel after cell and House. Thank you guys as always. If you like the show, please please share it with a friend. Share it in your team Slack. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and drop us a like on YouTube. Foreign.
- [05:33]
Roland
To talk quickly about Motion's AI creative strategists. These AI agents are built by best in class DTC marketers including Barry Hot, Jess Bachman, Marella Crespi, Alex Cooper and many others. And what's unique is that you get to use agents to analyze your creative using real data from your meta ad account. Connor, have you played a around with these at all?
- [05:52]
Connor
Oh yeah, absolutely. Our team's deep in there.
- [05:55]
Roland
I wanted to pull up too. So for those listening we'll, we'll talk through it quickly. 1 I think the implementation beautiful you could see our top performing ad creative last week what I pulled up was Jess's critique this ads messaging played that progress ran took maybe two minutes and then this is what we got and I thought it was great. The good fast paced messaging, clean product demonstration smart focus on magsafe what we can push and I thought this was, this was funny. You know me as a marketer I'm very precious about our ad creator but he's like Apple's must have accessory is presumptuous and lacks credibility. The smartest wallet you'll ever own is empty superlative marketing speak. I'm like okay Jess. He definitely, he's definitely roasting the ad and what I thought was really cool were some of the next steps. He says reframe around the actual problem. This solves the daily friction of wallet phone management. So the AI has generated what this ad is about and actually reframed what the problem could be. And I thought that was really powerful. 2 I ran Motion's Trek this month's winning themes and you see exactly what we're Talking about all the time durability that lasts a lifetime, ditching the bulk for minimalist design. Lifetime offers create urgency and cultural partnerships that expand appeal. And I'm like, yeah, look, you basically get what we're trying to do as an advertising business. I think this is really helpful for creative strategy and giving the team actionable insights that we can work on every day.
- [07:06]
Connor
Yeah, this is saving our team tons of time. Motion's also giving teams an AI adoption cheat code. It's not like they're just throwing this new technology at you and saying go figure it out. And they are really giving teams what they need to utilize this and get the most value out of this. And last but not least, you do not need a Motion contract to use this. You can try these agents for free, test them out, see how they fit into your workflows and start getting value out of them without even needing a Motion contract. So if you want to try out some of these AI agents, go try them@motion app.com.
- [07:41]
Cody
All right, I'm excited to talk channel expansion. Before we do, gotta say Cal Ripken, Connor is not here with us right now. I know you saw him as part of the intro. He just had a power outage. So Connor, Roland and I are going to hit this a little bit first time. Him and I are going to be one to one on this. So we might, might have to take some time building some rapport. Might be a little rusty, but excited to chat. Connor, how, how you doing? You ready to talk some channel expansion?
- [08:06]
Connor
I feel, I feel so sad for Cal Ripken and his, his. It wasn't his fault. We'll say that.
- [08:14]
Cody
We'll just hold this against him. He was here, he was here. He'll be back on. He'll gonna join at some point.
- [08:20]
Connor
Yeah, yeah. I think, I think we can still give him his, his streak if he, if he makes it back on a little bit.
- [08:25]
Cody
Yeah. So we're gonna talk about, you know, Media Mix today. Just diversifying, finding other channels at work and I definitely want to chat about both of our mixes and probably the journeys that we've had and how we think about it and, and this is especially true for Hexclad at your guys size is like I also want to keep it relevant for, for anybody, you know, listening. So I think we, we can really try to keep that in mind. Where I want to share probably where we're at now, but also our journey and then you guys as well. When to think about diversifying, how to think about diversifying, what channels to Test how you go about even like validating that.
- [08:58]
Connor
Yeah.
- [08:59]
Cody
So why don't you start like share your, your, your current media mix and then probably like what your journey has been to, to get you there.
- [09:06]
Connor
Yeah. So I can share like all the channels we're on. It's, it's been interesting to actually see our media mix within those channels change. I don't want to, I don't want to spill too much tea on that, but we're in a lot of channels now. But this was not the case two, three years ago. So we are on Facebook, Amazon, AppLovin, YouTube, Google. We have our deal with Fox. We have a bunch of linear TV through them. We also have a bunch of connected TV through Tubi, which is a Fox entity. We are on streaming TV outside of Tubi, Tick tock, linear TV outside of our Fox deal, Podcast, email, newsletters, a little bit of Pinterest, a little bit of Twitter. That is, that's every channel we've put paid behind in the last 60 days. So what, what's meta right now? Percentage meta is as low as it's been. So yeah, that's been like a big, a big test of ours this year is to see if we can diversify a little bit away from Meta and then within Meta, diversify a little bit away from purchase conversion campaign so we can try to unlock it as, as, you know, a net new reach channel.
- [10:10]
Cody
Yeah. And, and, and why is that? Are you, are you diversifying for the sake of, you know, de. Risking it? Are you finding diminishing returns and trying to bust through plateaus? Are you just trying to be proactive before you get diminishing returns and just trying to find, you know, top of funnel. How do, how are you guys thinking about it now?
- [10:30]
Connor
Yeah, it's, it's like the last few years we scaled matter really aggressively and we actually saw minimal losses in efficiency, which I think is, we could get into that. I think there's a variety of reasons for that. I think the big signal we saw in Meta that started to kind of like scare us was our rolling reach. So I'm, we, we track, we track funnel metrics very closely on a monthly and quarterly basis. So I'm always tracking sessions, unique sessions, new visitors, returning users, and then we're also tracking how we're growing from different traffic sources. So that was very concerning to me. Like I, I get very concerned if we ever start to see the net, like the new users hitting our site flat down or, or down. Like that's a huge concern of mine. And we also just wanted to see like, you know, we got to the end of the year and we were looking at our, our frequency and Meta for the year. It was like a 20. And that's, that's bound to happen at like just like that's, that's kind of a, you know, a champagne problem to an extent. Right. If you're like scaling meta aggressively, like of course your frequency is going to go up. But it kind of got us thinking like what could happen if we had a 15 frequency or a 12 frequency, like would we did we need to have that, those five extra touch points to get the same performance. And what we're finding this year is we've spent less on meta. Of course we've seen attributable revenue drop. Like the efficiency in our meta account has been insane. Really. Like I've been so impressed with how we've been able to scale meta back and, and really minimize the amount of, of drop we're seeing in attributable revenue.
- [12:02]
Cody
Have you guys tested like scale down tests like to try to find this sweet spot and, and spend or, or it's more just pulling back and just kind of looking at the business.
- [12:14]
Connor
We sort of, we kind of did it not. We had this test where we tested the view content and basically what we were testing was business as usual spend versus scaled up spend in more purchase conversion and then versus view content, same spend levels. So it was like a three cell test. We kind of, that was kind of like a secondary finding of that is that we were able to compare more spend into view content versus more spend into purchase conversion. What we found is that both look good. View content was just better. So it was kind of like we, we got two different learnings and that was scaled down from where we were. So we, but we haven't done like a true scale down test to find that sweet spot. But it's really just been like following the MTA data and, and really liking what we're seeing there.
- [13:03]
Cody
Love it. Love it. That's cool. What's the next biggest channel in terms of your media mix? Is it tv if you, if you add linear and streaming together?
- [13:12]
Connor
Well, if you, if you get rid of. Let's see here. Yeah, I'd say, well if you add in the super bowl it's tv, but that's a, you know, that's a like a six and a half million.
- [13:25]
Cody
How about like going forward like this next quarter.
- [13:29]
Connor
This next quarter will be. Yeah, I'd say inclusive. It'll, it'll be t. If you group together streaming in linear tv. It'll be, it'll be tv. Now a lot of that's coming through the Fox deal and, and the Tubi deal. But like YouTube's also been huge for us. Like we've scaled up YouTube very aggressively in the last three months and it looks really, really good. YouTube's actually our fourth highest spending channel.
- [13:57]
Cody
I love that. I'm so not surprised. I mean every. There's so many reasons why I think that we, that it can work for you guys. But I'm so happy to hear that.
- [14:07]
Connor
You know what number three is?
- [14:09]
Cody
AppLovin.
- [14:10]
Connor
App Lovin.
- [14:11]
Cody
Really? Oh, I was kind of kidding. Really?
- [14:13]
Connor
No. Yeah, yep. Amazon's two, Applovin's third.
- [14:17]
Cody
Huh. Do you have like, do you have like. Are you guys on Tick Tock still?
- [14:23]
Connor
We are, but we don't spend a ton there. Yeah, it's honestly Tick Tock's looked really good year over year too. I actually think we should probably be, probably be spending more there. Yeah, we just need to like slot out the. We. We have some priority. Like we really want to do a holdout on our scaled YouTube span because the, we're getting mixed signals right now. Like the MTA data looks really, really good. The, the MMM data doesn't look as good. We think that's because if you go look at North Beam at our ROAS lift which is just like whatever, it's the, it's the growth in LTV ROAS in any channel, it's the biggest in YouTube. So obviously like the word that means the delay and performance is the biggest there. So we think that might be a. Mmm doesn't like it as much. But all that to say that's kind of why we're like all right, we need to run a whole lot. Cause we're. Yeah, we're getting some conflicting signal.
- [15:11]
Cody
I am surprised that MTA is good. I mean I definitely with the lift but usually like YouTube MTA is not amazing because you know, it's obviously heavily.
- [15:19]
Connor
View based but well it's like, it's, it's. Let me rephrase that. If you look at click based YouTube in our MTA, it's one of the worst. But I'm saying it looks good in, in terms of how like we've scaled spend yeah very aggressively year over year and the, the click based return that we're seeing in North Beam has grown more so we've scaled YouTube up like multiple hundreds of percents year over year and our, our attributable revenue's up like 340%. So the one, the clickbase ROAS has grown 30 or so as we've sent more. So it's like relatively good directionally.
- [15:57]
Cody
Okay, I love that.
- [15:58]
Connor
Yeah.
- [15:58]
Cody
Foreign. We're about halfway done through the year. H1 is almost over. We're prepping for the second half of the year. We're also prepping for Q4 which is huge for us. And our budgets are going to be the highest then. And when our budgets are the highest we're going to need the most granularity and the most confidence knowing where we should spend our dollars. And that's why we turned to Prescient. Prescient is an MMM and most MMMs, they use 60 year old regression models. They're not really built for D to C. Prescient you can get readouts really quickly if something is changing, which again DTC is really volatile so you can't rely on an outdated M them that you're only gonna get one read out a quarter. One thing I love about Prescient so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend, which again is huge. We love to fill the funnel prior to a peak moment prior to Q4 holiday, something like that. We're really able to see the halo effect that has. Because sometimes you're not gonna see great attribution from YouTube campaign or from TV campaigns. Well, prescient plugs into all them and it can actually tell you your base plus your halo. So it's been really helpful for us to understand and actually have confidence to invest in some of these upper funnel channels that are harder to measure with other ways. So I love Prescient. I can't tell you all the technical stuff behind it, but I can tell you it gives me and my team more confidence, know where we should put our budget, especially in some of these pesky upper funnel channels that are much harder to measure. And again, don't wait till Q4 it's going to be too late then. We're halfway through the year but we've really got to all lock in for the rest of the year for Q4. There's a reason we use it. Hexclad, Hollow stocks, coterie and 100 more leading brands so highly recommend checking it out. Go to prescientai.com operators to book a demo today.
- [17:31]
Connor
Can I ask you about the same question? Like what is. What's your media mix?
- [17:34]
Cody
Yeah, I was gonna say let's. I wanna dive into some more like deeper but let me just share mine. Overall Our journey. So I'll go back. So like 2023, probably like we were like 80% meta. We didn't have any TV. We had YouTube, but it wasn't a huge amount. And for context, that year we did like 100 million, just over a hundred million. But I think we got to a point where it was like 50, $75 million run rate and like we had a rolling reach problem that was like the first time where we really like encountered it. And I think, like, I don't want to say where growth plateaued, but definitely hit some periods where we had to learn a new strategy and break out of it. We went upper funnel, Meta. We actually went reach on Meta. There's like one of our first house tests just because we needed to. We weren't ready for tv, like with creative, like we hadn't done a production, all that kind of stuff. So it was just, it was lower lift. And I think like always trying to think about priorities and bandwidth is like, you know, ice, roadmap, impact, confidence, effort. That's like how I would probably be thinking about is like, what, you know, what's the lift like? Like, I think the reason some people love Applovin so much is like, it's almost no lift. Like they. I don't know if they're still doing the buying for brands, but they were. You take your same exact creative, like takes a second to get the pixel integrated. Like, you don't need to stand up this giant thing or commit to a large test. So like that meta reach test was pretty easy and it helped us reach some new people. So we were probably like 80% meta then last year we were probably in the 60s. We actually really focused last year on diversifying and the reason why it wasn't necessarily a risk thing, although that was, that was definitely a consideration because Meta did have those weird bug issues. So. But it was, it was largely performance and largely, you know, reach and you know, top of funnel reaching new audiences. So we really validated a bunch of new things. TV we launched December 2023. So essentially last year was our first full year at TV. We probably spent 10 to 12% of our media mix on TV at that last year, and it scaled throughout the year. I find TV is challenging to know still to this day what percentage of our mix it should be. But you know, we've been up to 20%, 25% even on TV. Mostly linear. We were probably in linear for like the first half of the year and then in October tested streaming and, and that performed pretty well. So it's we're, we're probably 60, 40 linear to streaming but those will fluctuate. So TV has done very well for us. I don't want to say it's diminishing but definitely like when we first launched TV dude, like giant lift to the business. Like it was actually crazy like to the point where it's like inventory concern, stuff like that. Like 150 growth year over year in those months. Just like immediate shock to the system net new audience.
- [20:08]
Connor
Wow.
- [20:08]
Cody
Obviously you know that that doesn't sustain but that was awesome. That was amazing. YouTube last year was probably around 10 to 12% of mix. So pretty decent. We probably also started that around the same time. That was actually our first house test ever was validating YouTube because what we would find is we look at post purchase data looked okay. We'd look at North Beam did not look good. Not to know North Bean's fault. It's just how the channel works is, is going to be different and MER was good and but we were spending an amount that was like, you know, I'm not quite confident enough to scale this up. Like it would be like too much to, to do it. So that was our first test and, and, and every YouTube test we've we've ran has been really good. So we've gotten that up to like 15% of spend. But we have efficiency has been struggling there a little bit. I just don't think we've put the time and the bandwidth into it especially as we've had some team changes. So like that's going to be our, our biggest focus right now. And I really think YouTube could be at 15, 20% of our mix if it does well. So definitely want to drive a little.
- [21:12]
Roland
Yeah.
- [21:12]
Connor
What's the, what's the measurement look like on that? So you said you've ran some holdouts on it. It doesn't show. You don't see too much data like show up in the mta. Are you looking at. Yeah, like how are you, how are you looking at YouTube and you. Is it currently 15 of your mix.
- [21:27]
Cody
And you think it's like 7% currently. But I'd love it to 10 plus again.
- [21:31]
Connor
Yeah, yeah.
- [21:33]
Cody
When we started YouTube it was you know, knowing theoretically. So I think the stat is like 40% of people that watch YouTube watch it on a TV. So those people aren't going to be clicking. Right. And, and, and even the, the people who are not watching on tv like a lot of that is not a click based thing. Right. So there's going to be a higher multiple between your one day click roas which is a little bit more mid bottom funnel and a, you know, the, the true value. And I think we scaled it up to a level that we felt comfortable with. We look at percent new visit. So like we knew that theoretically you can look at post purchase and you can kind of get like a, almost like a incrementality factor or like a, like a view versus click multiple based on that. It's the same thing. If you're doing like influencer marketing you and you compare like click usage to code usage, you know, you can kind of be like, hey, for every click order we get, we're getting two code orders or two post purchase orders. So I think that's very directionally helpful to help scale it up. But again we got to like 10k a day and I'm like, I really don't know if it's working and I really want to be able to validate it. And we didn't have mmm at the time. So that was when we ran our first, you know, YouTube test. And essentially the great thing about YouTube is again you're going to get Houses published data on this much higher multiple of views versus clicks. Absolutely. Like you said, this was actually one of the things that helped us scale it up. Before we had House, we would look at the, that, what do you call it in north beam, like the one day versus like a 30 day lag or one day versus 90 day lag.
- [23:02]
Connor
They call it, I think they call it ROAS lift. And it's, it's like a built out metric that anyone can access.
- [23:07]
Cody
Okay, cool. So yeah, we compared that across all channels. Highest row S lift same as you said, higher percentage of new. So like all of those signs were really good. We just wanted to kind of run like a proper experiment on it.
- [23:18]
Connor
Yeah.
- [23:19]
Cody
And, and that was essentially it. And then it's just scale tests. Right. And, and so I think our roadmap was like let's, let's get a channel working. I think this is how we think about it. Let's get a channel working, let's make your attribution. MTA looks good. Let's run a holdout on it to really help validate it and then let's figure out how much we should be spending. And so let's say we, we ran a holdout at 10k a day. It's like, all right, well what happens if we now spend 15k a day as part of a holdout? And then what we did and I don't recommend this. We did a 3 sell where we actually were like all right, what if we put our next level of spend into video action which is YouTube's conversion thing versus what if we put that same level of increased spend into reach. We found that reach didn't perform but we ran too short of a test. So I don't think that was appropriate and I don't think we should have done it because we should probably only do that after we found diminishing returns. You know we should. I would rather just like just scale video action and then like only test reach once you hit it. Um, but. But that was it. So I think right now for YouTube main focus as we talked about two episodes ago is like fixing our meta rolling reach problem. But I think YouTube is going to be a focus dialing in some creative and testing a lot different account strategies. Some optimization demand gen we obviously are kind of being forced into. So retesting that which you know want to chat about and then like different objectives as well. I've been talking to a. Talk to. Yeah, yeah, I talked to somebody who, who seems to know you too pretty well and like they're actually not running any video action for, for prospecting. They're running video action which is essentially like the sales thing for retargeting and then they're running either like cost per view or cost per reach for their. Their like prospecting and it seems to be a lot cheaper. How. How do you guys have it set up?
- [25:08]
Connor
It's so we're also like in the process of migrating over to all the demand gen, like the new demand gen setup. I feel like for the most part we're running like the video action campaigns. We actually have ran some view content in the past. I think I actually heard like Connor talk about this a long time ago and it's actually gotten us really good like click based return on ad spend and revenue attributed. I'm just seeing if we're doing that now. Yeah, we are but not a ton. It's actually inactive right now. But I, I feel, I feel the same as you where I still think that our YouTube like budget has so much upside and I don't feel, I feel like we can put just continue to put spend into like the, the core video action campaigns. Like I think if anything it's. It's creative that's our biggest lever and I don't think we needed too much tinkering outside of just. Yeah, it's like maybe once we get to 1520 and we have reason to believe that we're seeing diminishing returns on the video action campaigns. But until then, it's like, I, I just, I just don't think, I think the more spend into more creative is the biggest lever we have to pull and that's. Those are the levers we've been pulling.
- [26:17]
Cody
Love it. So, so let's say you're listening to this and you're a $50 million brand. What, what do you recommend? Right. Like when should you think about channel tests? And then, yeah, let's say somebody was going to like, what's, what should be their framework for coming up with which channel to test? Because what I don't think somebody should do is just listen, listen to us and be like, oh, Connor's on. On tv. Like, let's go tv. Or you know, let's. I see people talking about applovin. Like, I think it should be a first principles approach. How would you advise somebody go about thinking about which channels that they should be testing?
- [26:50]
Connor
Yeah, I think, I think zooming out and trying to decide if you should, you should test new channels. I think everyone should. But I don't think it should come at the expense of your, you know, bread and butter channels. Like, if you're, unless you, unless you, you have reason to believe that like you're seeing hugely diminishing returns on those channels and you're like, oh, we gotta, we gotta figure something out here. But like, I think for the, for the most part, like a brand that finds product market fit can get to 50, 75, 100 million just through like mainly Facebook ads as your, as your primary driver. So I think that's, that's like the first.
- [27:29]
Cody
I absolutely agree.
- [27:30]
Connor
Yeah, yeah. TAM dependent for sure. But it's, you know, maybe not if you're like, you know, a niche brand like a mini Katana or something that has a. Yeah, a smaller tam. But I think that's the first question to ask is like, yes, let's, let's roll out these other channels. But not, not if it, not, not if it comes at the expense of everything we've done over the last however many years to like scale up Facebook. Like you, you got to keep that Facebook that, that bread and butter channel humming.
- [27:53]
Cody
So don't, don't diversify for the sake of finding better performance in meta. Like, you're likely not going to do that for most brands.
- [28:00]
Connor
Yes, exactly. Now the question is like, where, where do we expand? I love, I love YouTube, I love streaming TV, I love linear TV because the, I just think there's an ability to build a moat there through creative that you can't, not that you can't do in Facebook that like I did, there's this, there's this sense of legitimacy from the type of creative that works well in streaming, linear and YouTube. And I think there's like a huge, now it' a higher lift like to, to like you mentioned it earlier, you said you didn't have the creative ready to go. Like it, it requires more like a larger production. But I think if you can produce those assets, those are, those are hard, those are hard ads to produce. Most brands don't have the internal teams or know how to produce stuff like that. So I think it's, it's, that's how I think about it is like you're going to build a moat, you're going to stab yourself as premium as you're going to establish the sense of legitimacy by rolling out on YouTube and on streaming TV. And I guess I think there's also this misconception that you need to have like tons of money to spend on, on these channels to get them going. I don't think that's the case. Like of course you should. If you spend like 10 bucks a day or 50 bucks a day, you're probably not getting enough signal. But if you're a fifty million dollar brand or, or of whatever, a mid eight figure brand, even spending like a thousand bucks a day on YouTube for a 30 to 60 day test, like I still think that's plenty of signal to see against your baseline whether or not the channel is driving any sort of lift. Like you should be able to see it show up in your post purchase survey data. At the very least you should be able to tell by looking at the MTA or in platform data and comparing that to your other channels. Like that's why you know, self serve like platforms like Mountain exists. So you can get like a little bit of budget going into these. I don't think, I think that's maybe like a general misconception is that you have to have like massive, massive, massive budgets to get these channels going. And I don't think that's the case. You just need, you really need the creative that's going to be a good swing. Because what I wouldn't want to do is take your, you know, your top five repurposed Facebook ads, launch, you know, create them in landscape, run them on CTV and YouTube, have that not work and then write those channels off. It's like, well no, you probably didn't take the creative swing that you needed. To take. So I think that's, that's more important than anything else. And yeah, I think like start small. Like you don't need huge budgets to, to try these channels out.
- [30:23]
Cody
Yeah, no, I agree with that. I think I'm a big fan of like minimum viable product which is like what's the least amount of effort we can put into this and get a read. And I think it's a very fine line where you don't want to, you know, if you're launching, let's say Tick tock, you don't want to put like statics on Tick tock and launch it and be like hey, TikTok didn't perform with us for us. Like no, your strategy wasn't great. But you also don't want to go and produce, you know, these giant commercials and giant productions if you don't have to. I, I think something like TV is, is you kind of have to slightly more than another channel, you know. And so I think that goes into the consideration. But also is that a competitive advantage that if you're willing to do that, there's a lot of brands and competitors that are not going to, to want to do that and put the effort in 100%.
- [31:10]
Connor
I think I fully agree with that. I think outside of the like the, the kind of considerations I just mentioned, there's obviously the audience consideration. I think, you know, if you're, if you're like a brand selling 75 to let's say 45 plus, like it's probably no shock that meta works but now you're, you kind of move down the rabbit hole or you move down the chain of command. It's like where is that person spending their time? Well, they're probably more on linear TV than they are maybe on like YouTube. Whereas if you're a brand selling 75% to 20 to 35 year olds and you're, and you're like, like do I go linear? Do I go CTV? Do I YouTube? Well then I would probably lean more CTV in YouTube. So I think just like making sure you feel like you really understand A what your demo is and like what the age distribution is and B, how they consume media. And maybe you're wrong. Maybe like there's ways to, you can survey people, right? Like maybe you don't want to make the assumption that because your audience is 45 plus that you should go to linear TV first. Like just survey them, ask them like, hey, do you, where do you spend most of your time consuming Media? Is it YouTube? Is it, is it CTV but I would guess that an older demo audience is probably not on YouTube quite as much as like, you know, someone selling like a tick tocky type product that's going to a younger demo.
- [32:30]
Cody
Yeah, I absolutely agree. That's what I was going to say. Like, I think the biggest thing is where are your customers, where are they consuming media? You know what I don't think you should do is, you know, I don't want to hear, I shouldn't be hearing Connor from Rich talking about Snapchat working for them and must be like, oh, I hear Snapchat is working. Let's go test Snapchat. Like guess what? We have a 55 year old woman. Like they're, they're not on Snapchat. So ask your customers, survey your customers, where are they? You know, for us what's, what's funny enough is when we survey our customers and we look at like the percent that they're using, each one that is very correlated with our levels of investment that we can scale. For example, like they use meta properties of Facebook and Instagram the most. That's where we spend by far the most. They use YouTube next. That's where we spend the most. Outside of TV, they use Pinterest, but it's a small amount. They're not really using X. Well, we haven't really been able to scale X. They're not using Snapchat at all. We haven't even tested Snapchat. So I think that's the biggest thing. I think if you're opted into it, no commerce has this cool thing. It's like an audience insights thing where you can actually see some of the answers to the questions that they ask people. How that's benchmarked against the rest of like the industry. Have you seen that at all?
- [33:40]
Connor
Yeah, I'm actually trying to find it right now because I know we had this pulled up and I, I know we've ran this in the site. The path. I'm trying to find it.
- [33:50]
Cody
Yeah, it's cool though, and kind of goes along with that. And I've, we've got a Facebook group of 80,000 people. I asked them where, where are you consuming things like that? I think the, the one thing I've thought about and I haven't done it, I'm like, our customer is not on Snapchat. Would that be more incremental actually though? Because like that would be like a net new audience now. We'd have to be able to actually appeal to them and convert them. But if you're trying to get your core demo and Persona and just reach them in multiple places. Yeah, you've got to figure out where they are.
- [34:18]
Connor
I found it. This is really, I really like this. The the no commerce automated insights like it basically shows your customers benchmarked against all their data they have. This is a really valuable tool if you're trying to decide like where do we go next? And we see something pretty similar like it. It follows a very close trend to where we are investing. Like we're way above average on Facebook. It's no shock that that we put most of our budget into Facebook.
- [34:43]
Cody
Same here. If you know me, you know how cheap I am and how much I love saving money. This year is all about cutting costs and staying lean. You've seen me talk about it on Twitter. I cannot stand watching great D2C, even mediocre ones get ripped off by SaaS vendors in 2025. So many of them are charging way too much over promising and under delivering. And so I can't stand to see it. So I don't want to see it happen to you. I absolutely won't have it happening to me. You've also seen that I'm all in on AI and both those reasons are why I love Rich Panel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before and it was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to Rich Panel right before Black Friday last year and I almost regret not switching sooner. We had zero downside. The implementation was pretty immediate, which actually shocked me. I was a worried about it, not gonna lie, but it just went off without a hitch. We saved money. We leveled up our CX at the same time. So here's our numbers. We cut our CCX team from 18 to 10 agents. Not before Black Friday, but since onboarding to Rich Panel. With our order volume staying the same or even going up, our CSAT has stayed rock solid at 4.2 out of 5. I'd like it a little bit better, but that's, that's stuff that we can do. AI is handling 70% of the tickets, which is awesome. So our ticket to order ratio has gone way down from about 40% to 14%. So we have fewer full timers. Our revenue employee has gone up. We don't need as many people to get back to people and able to be a little bit more strategic with where we allocate our resources. So if your current CF CX software needs more people, is more expensive than you want to pay, and has some janky AI solution I highly recommend that you check out Rich Panel. Rich panel guarantees a 30% ticket reduction in the first 60 days or your money back again. It's super easy to switch. They take care of data migration, staff training, all that good stuff. So you can go live in under 14 days. So check out richpanel.com and tell them you heard about him from the marketing operators podcast. All right, guys, we got Connor back. Keeping the streak alive. His WI fi went out. He's now out of WeWork. So let's do it. Connor, to catch you up, Connor and I have been talking about our media mixes, how we've been trans transitioning that journey over the years. I know we've talked about it, but what's. What's your. What's your current media mix and what's your like, just quick journey been over the years of like, like how have you thought about diversifying or not?
- [36:58]
Roland
Oh, perfect. Yeah. And I'll apologize to everybody. I'm sure my sound quality is not as good. Trying to find a podcast studio on short notice is not easy, but it's gonna 14 minutes, so I record time.
- [37:11]
Cody
Just shows how dedicated you are to the consistency.
- [37:14]
Roland
I did 100%. Okay. Our experience with media mixes. I've talked about this a bit before.
- [37:22]
Austin
Ridge.
- [37:23]
Roland
The Ridge Wallet is a great, like, problem solution product and it appeals to a large addressable market. So I said for many years, if we could get out in front of net new male audiences at a reasonable cost, it would tend to work. And frankly, our job was. My job was way easier because that strategy, like, held true for many years. And this was back in 2017 when we were doing Influencer and we were sponsoring newsletters and like anywhere we could spend dollars, we would spend them. We had a really great experience on Snapchat. We were one of the first advertisers there and we just had to turn it on. We were running static ads on Snapchat, which is like not was not a thing. But because these were net new audiences and they were coming at such an affordable rate, it would just tend to work. So that kind of dictated our media mix strategy for a really long time. Sean and I have both said in hindsight, we probably would have been better off just getting really good at meta in that time. Like we kind of took like the mid curve strategy and that's really where we've been spending time since maybe 2021 is like, let's just get really good at the channels that can scale. So. And that was meta for a really long time. Now what that's led to today is I think we try to get really good at infeed and short form video and static ads. And if you can do that, then meta should work at a really high scale and that's still 50, 60% of our budget. But you can port that over into a lot of other channels. Static ads tend to work really well on Twitter at different times of the year. Short vertical video, there's just a ton of ad inventory across app lovin, Snapchat, Pinterest has short term, short form vertical video now. So now we're just putting ourselves in the position where we're creating great compelling content that we can prove out on meta and we can move to other channels as we see fit. So our media mix is constantly changing. The one thing that I would add on top of that that we're trying to get better at this year is really longer form horizontal video. So how are we unlocking YouTube in stream ads? And we just hit our year mark of relaunching on Tatari. So it's been our focus today. It's TV, it's most of the things I just mentioned is TV, it's YouTube, it's Meta, and then some mix of Snapchat, Applovin and those short form vertical video channels as we see them work.
- [39:44]
Cody
I like that. I feel like you're all about leverage and thinking about how you can repurpose things. I remember you said when we were talking about channel mix like a few months back, I think maybe end of last year, you're like, I have no interest in testing a new channel that won't be able to scale to a certain amount of spend per day. Right. And that stuck with me, I think was great.
- [40:02]
Roland
And I would even put in like, I'd put Reddit in that bucket to some degree. And Reddit's honestly, their ad platforms probably developed, but for a long time it was text only. It was kind of like a feed placement, but it was text only. You could have some image. And that was just such a categorically different type of content. And I never spoke to anybody who was able to get it to scale to a meaningful degree. So if it's in that side of the quadrant where it like requires unique content and can't scale, we are like not screwing around with that.
- [40:30]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're more okay with like a Twitter that might be $2,000 a day, but it's no unique content. It doesn't take, it can take winners.
- [40:36]
Roland
Yeah, totally.
- [40:37]
Cody
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I, I agree with that. And then how's. How's. We're going to get into it in. In a little bit, but how's TV looking for you guys? I know that you guys were on, paused, relaunched. How's that looking?
- [40:50]
Roland
Yeah, so we. We launched TV initially. 2020 is right. Like April 2020. It was just at the beginning of the pandemic, basically. And it was with that same line of thinking, let's just get out in front of new audiences. We ran it for about two years from there, and then in 2022, when we were facing a lot of headwinds, it was one of the first channels that we decreased, mostly because you're just committing to spend in a different way. Like you're pre. You're prepaying for spots. Usually we could talk about Net terms with the Tatari team if we want, but it's just not as flexible of a channel. Right. Like, if you're seeing things work or not work, you can turn Facebook down 100% day over day if you need to. And. And TVs just from my experience, or at least in 2022, was not as flexible. So we turned it off. 2024, we relaunch as we're getting back into the mode of like, reaching net new audiences and trying to grow kind of our core wallet business. And I would say it's good. Good. Our strategy for a really long time has been let's hit these male, dense, affordable networks. The Fishing Heroes, or, sorry, it's Fishing Network, American Heroes, Motor trends, things like that do really well. They're really affordable. And we found a lot of efficiencies there.
- [42:06]
Cody
Love it. Let's say you were Connor today, but ridges, you know, $50 million brand, $75 million brand. You've been primarily on meta and obviously some Google stuff. And you're thinking about your next channels, like, what with what you've learned. What are you thinking about now? What would be the next channel or two that you would go and test out?
- [42:24]
Roland
Yeah, totally. So I was thinking, preparing for this episode, I was thinking about Zach Stuck, who was on many. Probably like 40 episodes ago or something. But he had a great. He like laid out a brand going from 0 to 40 or whatever. It's really about, like, nailing the messaging and the funnel. Right. He would probably say messaging and offer, like, who are you speaking to? How are you speaking to them? And what is the offer when they land on your website? And then he talked about how you go from you te test static ads first. That's like probably the Cheapest, quickest, most affordable way to reach like a me, a form of messaging fit. Then you can dedicate more time to UGC, to paid social content, etc. Etc. That is the level like if I'm Connor Back at 50 million, we've probably done that well, right? Like we figured out how to sell wallets. We totally went through the phase of just testing static ads. We've gotten good at that. That short form vertical video that I mentioned. At that point we're probably mostly on meta, but we're exploring the Snapchats, the app lovin, these like kind of tertiary networks, what I'd be doing and I mean Ironically in 2020 we were exactly at 50 million. So we were saying hey, let's get better at horizontal video. Let's try to unlock YouTube and let's try to look at TV. And we would try to contain all those same value props. Like we want to contain the messaging and the offer and the strategy that we're seeing work on other channels but just kind of fit it to these new ones. And I'd be going after those horizontal video placements particularly right now in 2020 there was no Roku, didn't have an ad network. I don't know if Hulu had self service at the time, things like that. There's just so much horizontal video ad inventory at this point that that's really what I'd be trying to unlock in the same way that I am right now really.
- [44:09]
Cody
So you'd be going there and those are, those are channels that are again you have to create creative for. It's different measurement strategy but they're are, they're more dissimilar to meta I would say and like previous strategies but more scale potential versus trying to go like hey, let me go short form vertical. Like you're saying like you would, you would go horizontal before diversifying to other short form vertical ones with like smaller stuff.
- [44:33]
Roland
I was saying at 50 for Ridge, for Connor in 2020 we're probably already good at that short form vertical video.
- [44:40]
Cody
Let's say you're just on meta because I think you're good enough at meta that you could get to 50, just meta.
- [44:45]
Roland
Then I would go, I would go the short form vertical video route first for sure. Like I think and actually that's an important point to make. Like I think that sequence or that order of operations makes a ton of sense. And then the scale at which you need to move on to each new layer is going to be different for, for all brands.
- [45:02]
Cody
What do you mean?
- [45:02]
Roland
Like I think, I mean, I mean there are certain, like, like you know, there are larger TAM products and categories that you can probably scale much further than 50 million. Just staying on meta. Right. Like you, you talk to. Not the perfect example, but Dr. Squatch hit nine figures basically just spending money on YouTube. So it's like if you have, if you have large TAM products, high LTV compounds a little bit more, then you probably have to diversify at a slower rate than someone like Ridge, whose new customer acquisition oriented. So we're kind of forced to expand channels, reach new people because we don't have them coming back and giving us all that much more money. So that was the point that I was making. So For Ridge at 50, maybe we can get meta further. But that's also probably around the point. We're thinking about diversifying channels further. Whereas other brands might be able to take it. They might be able to scale a meta exclusive business to nine figures.
- [46:03]
Cody
Yeah, I talked to somebody last week. Subscription appeals to men and women and they do a great job at creative diversity. So their reach is probably way better than some other brands on just, just a purchase event. So they're doing 80 and can probably easily get to a hundred. Just meta.
- [46:20]
Roland
Totally. And we kind of talked about this last week, Cody, in terms of reach on meta, one thing we're not talking about, I'm talking about nailing content for meta and how that can help you expand into similar ad inventory across other platforms. But we're not talking about creative diversity and how that leads scale. So that's probably like another dimension to this.
- [46:40]
Cody
Yeah, for sure. Because we, when we started getting. And this was what Conor Connor and I were talking about a minute ago when we started getting some rolling reach issues and some plateauing, we, we broke out with different objectives on meta and TV and YouTube. So we went channels and I think because we felt like we were actually better at the horizontal stuff, we're better at like a little bit of the more branded horizontal stuff that like longer form storytelling. Especially because we have an older demo. Who is more likely to go and sit through a longer video. Like we found success there. What we actually did a very bad job of is getting really good at short form diversified video.
- [47:17]
Roland
Sure, yeah. 1,000.
- [47:19]
Cody
We're backtracking now and we're trying to get good at that versus like in hindsight, I wish we just cracked that earlier.
- [47:25]
Roland
And you know what I would say is it does feel. And you let me know if you disagree here, here that you used to be able to, you could scale meta without requiring the amount of creative diversity four years ago. So I think a lot of us, at least for me, I think I'm in the head space of hey, like we used to be able to scale single ads to like hundreds of thousands of dollars in spend. That seems incredibly hard to do now. Now my natural next step five years ago would be like, okay, we've scaled this to hundreds of thousands of. Of of dollars in spend. Let's just get it to other channels. Whereas now it feels like, or at least maybe the last year and a half, two years people are talking about actually really having to go wider on meta in order to get the scale. You are not going to get it in a single campaign level necessarily in the, in the way that you would have four or five years ago.
- [48:15]
Cody
Yeah, you definitely need way more creative and I think that's. It's just worth being really honest about like your bandwidth and teams priorities and especially if you're trying to keep a lean team doing things in a high leverage way where like if you are going to kind of to your point of like maybe the short form vertical stuff, like if you can port that, if that's going to be your team's biggest time suck and resource, you know, going into that, how can you then get more leverage by taking that same creative and kind of like allocating that cost against multiple channels now versus if you have to have like a completely separate team or workflow or, or resources for, for horizontal video. Like you just have to make sure that's not going to come at the expense of kind of like your primary short form which is it did happen to us. Like we didn't have that and I think it was almost like, I don't want to call it a band aid because it worked super well, but we probably just went to it when we were earlier and like we had a ton of success going TV and YouTube. But then it's like we didn't have the resources on the meta creative as much as we should have. So that would be my learning if I was to do it again from the beginning is I would try to bust through some of those plateaus with creative more than we did and get really much better at diversifying creative and get better at short form before like just completely going with all the other stuff.
- [49:34]
Roland
Totally.
- [49:35]
Connor
Connor, do you have a time? Because I do have a. Do you have a moment in time where. So you just made the comment about like a handful of years ago you think the ability to scale on like a handful piece of creative was a lot greater than today where like you think you require a lot more diversity, a lot more volume of assets. Do you like a moment in time where that like pivoted for Ridge? Because I definitely have that like moment in time where like if you look at our like 21 to 20 or 2022 to 2020 to 2021, like we definitely started plateauing like that. Like a. A handful of Facebook ads got hex clad to like that 30, $40 million rate. And then that year over year growth from 20 to 2021 wasn't that great. And then 2022 we started just like really investing heavily into like that growth curve. Like re. Re accelerated again. But I was curious if you have like a like any time horizons that you can pinpoint.
- [50:26]
Roland
Yeah, ironically our timeline would be super similar.
- [50:32]
Connor
Yeah. Okay.
- [50:33]
Roland
We got, we got, I think we got not even good but like we started seriously taking a more serious approach to just video editing. So it was 2021 where, where we said hey, we have tons of content. Let's just spend way more time editing our existing bank of content into like, like it's when we really started thinking about hooks and hold rates and like let. Let's more critically think about the short form video we're putting out. Not even necessarily creating net new stuff. That was 2021. That was around the time. And the reason I remember that is because it was around the time of iOS 14 too. And just where a lot of brands seem to be struggling. We kind of came into our own when it came to this, this, this video content strategy. So we ended up having a really strong growth year there. So very similar experience.
- [51:19]
Connor
Got it. Okay.
- [51:23]
Roland
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- [52:44]
Cody
All right. We've been talking a lot about tv, a lot about different channel expansion and it's time we bring on the experts. We know a thing or two, but it's not what we do all day, every day. So we wanted to bring on the expert from Tatari. So we have a great segment. We have a sponsored segment by Tatari, but it's going to be super valuable. We have Austin Santino, who's a client development manager. Is that right, Austin?
- [53:02]
Austin
Yep, that's correct.
- [53:03]
Cody
Awesome man. Well, thank you for joining us. It's great to great to connect again. Thank you for having us and I'm excited. We have a bunch of questions. I know a lot of people listening, just are eager to learn a lot about tv. We talk about it a lot. We've been talking about it this episode. So excited to chat. But just quick bio, background kind of on yourself and Tatari for the listener.
- [53:22]
Austin
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me guys. Really excited and excited to learn from you all. So my background, I obviously met Tatari. We're a platform for buying, measuring TV across really all TV types, streaming tv, linear TV as well as online video. Company is I believe eight years old. Now we have a fun story. Our founder is a very frustrated TV advertiser and he tested it for the first time with a very high barrier to entry. He felt the revenue but he didn't know it was working. And so that's really where like the thesis for Tatari came from. My background, I got started here pretty early in my career. Been here for about six years as an early member of our client services team. So really like hands on keyboard managing campaigns for all sorts of consumer brands, brands of all shapes and sizes. Yeah. Excited to join you all today.
- [54:15]
Cody
Awesome. Cool. So yeah, I'm a Tatari customer, Happy Tatari customer. We use probably about two years. I know Connor Ridge is as well. So yeah, first of all, you mentioned a few different types of tv. I think you mentioned linear streaming for people that don't know haven't done tv. What are the different types of TV and can you buy them all through Chitauri?
- [54:33]
Austin
Yeah, it's a good question. It's a question that's changing a little bit as the landscape evolves. I think you're kind of going to bucket them into two broader things. So streaming TV would be considered anything over the top. You'll hear the term ott. And so that's TV delivered through essentially a wi fi. Right. So Hulu, Sling, Roku, Peacock. I will also bucket CTV under streaming. So that's ads actually delivered to a CTV device like a Roku. I think oftentimes like in our line of work, they get used a little bit interchangeably and then you'll have linear tv which is, you know, traditional cable broadcast delivered through a set top box satellite, that sort of thing.
- [55:18]
Cody
Yeah, that, that makes. Connor, go ahead.
- [55:20]
Roland
Yeah. I've got a quick question on this one. We were just talking about it. I onboarded with Atari 2020. We were just linear focused for a long time and I was, I was thinking about how much more like TV or OTT inventory there is now. Like in 2020 there was no Roku ad platform. I don't know what Hulu was doing. Can you speak a little bit to like the growth, growth in ad inventory and just how different TV providers or CTV providers are offering advertisers inventory?
- [55:51]
Austin
Yeah, it's a good question. I think there's, there's two ways to look at it. There's, there's a way to look at it as a viewer or like a consumer of media. And then there's a way to look at it as like an operator, an advertiser. Right. And so streaming is obviously like if you do two minutes of research, you'll see that's where people are spending their time. There's new ad platforms popping up out there. Linear is seeing a steady decline. That's once again thinking about as a consumer. When you think about as an advertiser, there's a little bit of a slow move in the market where a lot of streaming may not be ad supported yet. Right. So you see Netflix starting to roll out ad supported options, hbo. And so when you buy streaming inventory, a lot of inventory you're getting is actually going in front of like live TV content. So like a favorite example I'll use is YouTube TV. Right. I'll talk with marketers all the time and they'll say, you know, I don't watch linear. My customer is not on linear. And I go, well, what do you watch? And they'll say, YouTube TV. Right. But it's, it's a lot of CNN, ESPN, live TV. So I think it's really starting to change from just thinking about it as streaming and linear to live TV content and then on demand. Right. Live TV is breaking news, Sports on demand is, you know, I want to sit down and watch the Handmaid's Tale at home.
- [57:19]
Connor
Right.
- [57:19]
Austin
It's kind of appointment viewing where you're going and selecting a show.
- [57:22]
Cody
And so how is, how is TV bought? Like, it's not obviously like meta, where you just go in and you can change budgets daily. Like, how was TV bought before Tatari? And like, why should somebody even go Tatari versus going like direct to a network or something?
- [57:36]
Austin
Yeah, before Tatari, I'd say, you know, it was very slow moving. There's a high barrier to entry. So you'd go work with a traditional, maybe omnichannel agency who goes out to publishers or networks and buys a ton of inventory. Then they kind of allocate it across clients. Right. Which is, it can still be effective for premium inventory, you know, steady pacing, et cetera. But for brands who are very performance focused, it lacks like the agility or the accountability you'll find with something like meta. Right. Where you can make quick changes, you can adapt to economic conditions. And so what we're really trying to do at Tatari is like kind of harness the reach, the power of storytelling that TV provides, but also giving you a chance to make it a little bit more accountable, a little bit more transparent and allow you to optimize it alongside some of those other channels you might be more familiar with on digital.
- [58:33]
Cody
Yeah. So there's also like some attributions and reporting stuff that like just a direct to network buy you won't have.
- [58:39]
Austin
Yeah, that's a good. Yeah. I guess hitting on the second part of your question, right. Is if you're kind of going out to networks on your own and working with each individual provider, they're all kind of grading their own homework. Right. And so you might get some reporting from Roku, some reporting from Hulu, ABC over here. And as you're looking at like, what's the ideal mix for my brand, it's kind of difficult to kind of work through all those. Right. And so what we're really trying to do at Tatari is, you know, help you Set a video budget and then allocate it appropriately across all the different ways to buy from linear streaming, et cetera. Really look at it all under one roof.
- [59:19]
Cody
Yeah, it's fair. You don't, you don't care if Fox or ABC performs for us. Yeah. Versus they're gonna obviously have different stuff. I guess I have never actually thought about that, that part of it.
- [59:28]
Austin
Yeah, exactly. You know, we're going out, we're placing the buys, but we don't care, you know, which partners perform for you. We just want it to work for you in the business so that, that way you guys can grow it alongside of those, those other big channels.
- [59:41]
Roland
I've always thought the way that Tatari does measurement with like the minute to minute user traffic and then, and then measuring the spikes. Maybe you could talk through that quickly because I, I do, I'm obviously like a super dork for attribution, single source of, of truth to a certain degree. And I think your guys is, you guys have a very clever solution for, for measuring across all these different platforms. Can you talk through quickly how that works?
- [60:06]
Austin
Yeah, for sure. So you're, what you're really referring to is linear. I think streaming is maybe a little bit more digestible for a lot of marketers. Right. Because it's like a one to one IP match, similar to other platforms out there with linear. Like the problem you're really trying to solve is you don't have the IP address for every TV viewer in the country. Right. But the benefit is that when an ad's delivered, it's virtually delivered to the whole country at the same time. And so you kind of get that nice clean spike. Right. I think like the other Connor, when he ran in the Super Bowl, I'm sure he saw a nice big spike to the website. Right. And so it's very apparent what's happening. Like the science behind measuring linear tv. It's really about kind of getting in all your website activity, making sure we're appropriately filtering out other paid marketing. Right. To capture incrementality. And then when a spot runs, we'll look at a very short window, typically like we'll say five minutes to assess the incremental cohort of people that come and then we'll follow them to see do they come back, you know, do they, they click purchase, do they sign up for your service, et cetera.
- [61:14]
Roland
And then one other point that I would love to hit that I've always geeked out on is the way in which you can buy linear to save money.
- [61:22]
Cody
Money.
- [61:22]
Austin
Yeah.
- [61:24]
Roland
So like we, we do a lot of, we buy national ads locally and then maybe you could talk through a couple of the other ways because that's what I find really, it's so much different than Meta. There's like, there's almost hacks to like saving, saving dollars buying tv.
- [61:38]
Austin
Yeah. I think it's really the beauty of like having a little bit more control over just being like a pure black box. Right. And so when you think about cost savings for linear, there's a few different ways networks will sell it. They'll sell it in the upfronts where brands will guarantee, you know, a finite amount of dollars or impressions over a period of time. And then there's this leftover inventory that's still very premium, where week to week networks are really kind of trying to offload it across agencies, buyers, et cetera. And so what that allows us to do is kind of use a little bit of technology to understand what are networks asking for for this inventory week over week? What are they expecting viewership to be? What are we calculating viewership to be and how can we kind of undercut that to make sure that you're getting the right placement, but also at the right cost. Right. I think the other piece you mentioned was at national locals. Yeah. So the bulk of inventory is going to be sold, you know, to a national audience. So if you're watching ESPN in la, you'll see the same ad in, in New York. There's a small sliver though that's kind of reserved for your local car dealerships, your pizza shops, that sort of thing through local affiliates. And when those brands or advertisers don't buy that inventory, you can kind of insert yourself across all the leftover space. So maybe you pay a few hundred bucks for a spot spot and you serve 60% of markets. Right. As opposed to paying 10k, 20k for a spot and seeing delivery in 100%. So the economics can be incredibly efficient.
- [63:20]
Connor
Yeah.
- [63:21]
Roland
Awesome.
- [63:22]
Cody
So when, what types of brands should think about tv? Like, I, I know we were just talking about channel expansion and the segments before this, but like, you know, as we've grown and scaled, like Meta was a bigger percentage of our spend for all of us. And then we needed new ways to reach new people. And I know TV is a big, you know, part for all of us. YouTube is a big part as well. Just a little bit like more reach, upper funnel, things like that. I actually think we are a little bit late to it where I didn't realize brands were starting earlier in my Mind TV was always this thing that like, it's only reserved for really big brands. You have to, it's like fancy production. Like it's just, you just have to be ready for it. Where this like small scrappy startup, what types of brands should be thinking about TV and, and when is the right time to think about it?
- [64:02]
Austin
Yeah, it's a great question. I think you partially answered it. So the majority of brands that come to us have hit this point where on Meta, that marginal acquisition cost, like the cost of the next customer, it's just getting more expensive. Right. And so they need to look for ways to diversify. In other cases, maybe brands start a little bit earlier, they see that kind of coming on the horizon and they want to make sure they get ahead of it. So if there's an issue with the Meta algorithm, you know, they have other tried and true channels for growth in terms of company size or types of. I think the companies that really lend themselves to starting TV earlier are probably like much of your audience, they sell a product or service and the website, they have a broad consumer base right. Where they can really take advantage of a lot of that cost effective reach and the website measurement. Whereas on the other side we actually run TV campaigns for Tatari trying to reach marketers and I could tell you like our audience is much smaller than the people you're trying to reach. Right?
- [65:06]
Cody
Yeah, it's, it's, it's a little bit more of a, I guess a spray and pray. I was so shocked how cheap linear TV CPMs are. I did not expect that before we launched.
- [65:15]
Austin
Yeah, for sure.
- [65:16]
Connor
It's actually I wanted to ask you a question related to that because, because the, yeah, the, the linear TV CPMs can be so cheap, which ultimately just means like you don't need as much dollars to reach as many people as maybe you would need to reach on Meta. So, so that's, that's actually something I wanted to ask you a little bit like more pointedly is like, I mean if you're a, if you're a, let's say you're a brand at like a $3 million run rate and you have an older demo like that, you think you can reach on linear tv. Like is. Is. Does it make sense for that brand to Launch on linear TV even though presumably at a 3 or $5 million run rate, let's say they're going to spend a million bucks in, in their whole year and let's still say half of that's going to be on Meta or whatever. So like do you still think that it's advantageous for a brand like that to, to try linear TV out? Or are you, are you saying no? No, you need to have a much bigger budget, you need to be a much larger run rate.
- [66:04]
Austin
Absolutely. In certain cases, like brands I could call out would be like a boost Oxygen that works with us. I don't know if you guys ski or anything, but they sell a product where it helps you get oxygen at elevation. And it's also great for older users. And so brands like that might be able to come in and maybe they're very endemic to a particular network. And you know, certain brands can get started like 5 to 10k per week over a few weeks. It's, yeah, starting small, it's going to maybe limit your ability to make it big sooner. Right. And there's other brands where, you know, we'll tell them that, hey, you're actually better off coming back to us in a year. Right. We still think you have room to grow on other channels.
- [66:46]
Roland
You know, one thing there, I'm speaking a little bit out of turn, but like there's a, there's a luggage company that we follow somewhat closely and they have like a great gimmick and you like open up the luggage and you pull it out. It has like a closet inside of it and they run these like infomercial style ads and it's the perfect product for like that type of content. And I heard at one point that they were spending over 50% of their budget just on TV, so they must have started at a much lower run rate. So I also feel like there's some sort of fit between who you're speaking to and the type of content that you can produce.
- [67:19]
Austin
Absolutely. Your audience is, is going to be a little bit of a barrier to entry. Right.
- [67:24]
Connor
So.
- [67:24]
Austin
So how small or how big is the group of people you're trying to reach? If it's a very big broad audience like Luggage, then you could get started a little bit lower. And it's such a visual product to where it really. I can't think of a channel unlike TV that would give them a chance to demonstrate the functionality, whereas other products may be a little bit more difficult or, or it's a smaller audience. You know, the approach needs to be different.
- [67:55]
Cody
Let's check creative. So what do brands need to know? The creative is obviously going to be very different than, you know, your 9 by 16 vertical video. Like, I think it's a little bit daunting for a lot of brands. Like, do you have to go super Polished and produced. Do you, can you repurpose existing assets? Is AI helping and changing this? Are most brands doing, you know, big productions before launching? Like what, what do I need to know if I'm thinking about TV creative?
- [68:22]
Austin
Yeah, big misconception, you know, you don't need a big celebrity Robert Downey Jr. LeBron James and you're creative for your first TV launch. I think most brands that work with us are oftentimes repurposing assets from other channels that have like a very UGC feel even and they'll take that, maybe they'll, they'll apply those creatives, learn about the channel and if, if TV really works for them, maybe they'll take that information to go invest in creative down the line. Right. So it doesn't need to be a big huge barrier to entry. And AI is definitely something that's changing that. Like the, the biggest example I think you guys maybe talked about it a few weeks ago was Kalshi. We work at their team and I think it was 48 hours for from products or like concepts ideation to final products with a few thousand dollars and they put together this creative that in many cases it's probably not going to follow your hard hitting best practices. I think it was really the first AI creative for me where I kind of went wow, things are changing and they're changing very fast.
- [69:34]
Connor
I keep hearing the same things from people. Lately I'm being asked to do more with less. I have big goals to hit but my budget is tight and every marketing dollar needs to work harder. I know I'm hearing this at hexclad. I'm sure a lot of operators are hearing this at their brands super relevant right now. Incrementality testing is the best way to figure out what's actually moving the needle so you can move around your ad spend in a way that's backed by science. All three of us use House for incrementality testing. We all love it. And House is now working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands, which is pretty insane. I can speak personally for Hexclad. The amount of insights that we've gotten, especially on our view based channels and how those are driving impacts and efficiency and revenue for our business is not only super valuable but only possible through House. You know, channels like Connected TV, YouTube, TikTok, these very view based channels that don't garner a click the same way that Facebook and Google does have been really only measurable through geo incrementality holdout testing and the actionable next steps from these tests in terms of deciding to scale up or down or keep spending where it's at is is really amazing. House helps you run experiments on your channel so you can confidently answer the questions you've always wondered about. Things like what channels are actually driving my business? How much should I be spending on each channel? What's the impact of my ads on Amazon or retail sales? How should I structure my Meta and Google accounts to make sure they're spending dollars in the right way? The beauty of House is that it's built for marketers. The science under the hood is rigorous, but the platform itself is simple. So you pick a question, launch a test in minutes and get real results fast. Every customer is paired with a measurement strategist, someone who understands growth and brings a clear strategic point of view. They will get to know your business, help you build a roadmap of impactful tests and guide you as you operationalize incrementality in your day to day. Even if you're brand new to testing, you're not doing it alone. It is very much no in no way. Like go sign up for the platform and figure it out on your own. You have a partner in these customer success reps from House who's been in your shoes. And now more than ever, you need to make every marketing dollar count up. Level your measurement with House by going to house IO forward/formators, that's H A U S IO slash operators and start allocating your budget with confidence.
- [71:51]
Roland
Have you also seen just kind of a. A similar point here? We when we launched on Tatari four years ago, we were running like pretty high production value content and then now I feel like it's just become over the last four or five years far more commonplace to be running essentially ugc. And I see it all the time like I've seen some great ads from Honey I've talked about and I know we want to hit on to Covas. I've seen some great to Cova's UGC that actually the Tatari team sent me as an example. So has that become. Do you see? Obviously it's become more popular. Can you speak at all to like the level of popularity? Do you think we're at the climax of UGC on TV or is it only going to get kind of more native feeling from here?
- [72:33]
Austin
I think it will get more native feeling. Something that really could be influencing that is is TikTok for example, right? All these brands run on TikTok now. They, they learn about creatives and they go maybe kind of retrofit that or apply that to tv. So it's growing. I wouldn't say it's incredibly new. Even companies like Credit Karma, you know, that obviously invest a ton on tv. You'll see a lot of their advertising. It's very ugc. I think where a lot of brands kind of get burned early on is they'll invest in maybe a very upper funnel brand message. It's a beautiful creative, right? There's a celebrity or something, but you remember the celebrity or you remember how beautiful their creative was. You don't remember what the product is they're trying to sell, where to go to buy it. And so I think as brands are really just trying to get smarter at their dollars. It's about making sure we're telling the right story and telling people where to go.
- [73:30]
Roland
One thought that I had on that point, it almost feels like a couple years ago you wanted the validation of being able to be on TV like that. That part of it was very valuable. In the same way that billboards are too where now it feels like people are running TV ads ads to validate that they're popular on social. So it's like almost backwards a little bit. It's like you want to feel as if you've gone viral on social as you're showing it on someone's like widescreen TV in their living room.
- [73:56]
Austin
Yeah, absolutely. And then as channels kind of converge a little bit too, right? And you think of, of channels like YouTube or online video. A lot of people watch YouTube on their, their big screen TV now and so they'll really carry over assets from channel to channel so that people are really seeing the same message. Message.
- [74:14]
Roland
Yeah.
- [74:15]
Cody
Yeah, that makes sense. I didn't think about the AI thing. I think it depends on the brand. Like I think AI is perfect for like Kalshi or like something like that where like their brand is out there. Like I think for like a beauty brand, it's a little bit harder to kind of hit that, you know, that spot with like a completely I owned. Like you have to give it a serious consideration to, to think about if you can make that in a day versus you know, I, I can tell you from doing a production it's like you know, sometimes a hundred thousand dollars, we haven't put that much into one but like it can very easily be, it can be six months of planning pre post production. Like you have to give that a serious consideration or at least like to test the waters to get some, some, some data on a concept before then maybe you go Produce it. So I love that. But. But I think probably more rather than like a net new call she had, like I've seen some stuff that is actually, you know, helping to repurpose UGC and putting like side panels and stuff like that and making it a little bit more branded. Like I've seen some AI tools that are doing that, which is probably what I would think about testing if I was going to start today.
- [75:14]
Austin
Yeah, for sure. And AI, it doesn't just need to be applied to like creating the concept. Right. So one of the ways we use it Atari, is when a brand is thinking about launching an asset, we can actually upload it and there's certain patterns we're looking for. You know, clear eye contact, solve, soft call to action, persistent URL. And so that can kind of give us some insight in the development stage about what changes can we make so that, you know, when this thing does go live, how do we really hit with a running start?
- [75:45]
Cody
So say those again. I think those were good takes or some just best practices. Can you just go through them again?
- [75:49]
Austin
Absolutely. Clear eye contact. Right. So I think one of the most popular types out there is like a founder spot where someone's looking at the camera, brings the viewer out in saying the name of the product. Beginning of the ad too is great. Sometimes you're competing for attention and so if someone's listening to a creative, the audio of telling someone where to go is very important. Persistent watermark. Right. So you don't need like a Billy Mays 1-800-phone number always in the bottom right of your ad. But having a logo or a website URL could be really helpful and then also authenticity. Right. I think that's something that lends well into the Tokova's asset that I know has been talked about on here is maybe it's not the most hard hitting Dr. Creative. It's very authentic. It tells you who the brand is. You know, when you look at the work boots, the shirts, they're not brand new, they're dirty, right. It's kind of telling the audience that this is a product that should be.
- [76:51]
Roland
Used.
- [76:53]
Austin
In the everyday life that, that you're living at work.
- [76:55]
Connor
So. So can I. Can I ask a question about like the other so on the other side of like the so which I think is what you just said is very empowering for brands, right? Like you don't need to go and spend tons of time, money, resources, all the things to produce creative, to get linear streaming tv, online, video TV off the ground. What's your Take though on like the, the more higher production value hi fi brand forward creative because that's what we really leaned on on to scale our, our TV channels. And I think that is, I think that has a lot to do with our product. I think like we are a premium priced product. We really look at ourselves as premium kitchenware and I think that that, that valence comes through our TV creative because it is higher production value, it is more brand forward, it is very, very storytelling driven and it's just a cl. More of a classic TV ad. So like what, what's your. So you, you said the native stuff works but like what's your take and thoughts about how to introduce hi fi more brand oriented, high production value creative.
- [77:55]
Austin
Yeah, it. Going back, it really depends on the stage and the goal of a campaign when you're first starting out. A lot of times your goal on TV is to prove that it can be profitable for you. Right. And then it's really kind of trying to hit a ceiling on that profitability. Then over time as competitors join the space they're also running on tv, it changes to not just telling people who a brand like hexclad is, but kind of changing the perception of that. Right. So we're not just another cookware brand. We are the premium cookware brand. And so for a message like that, I think premium and quality and higher production is very important.
- [78:40]
Connor
Yeah, I actually think we under index on the, on the easier stuff to do in those channels, like the more native stuff. That's actually, that's one of the big notes I have is like what is some native of UGC style cuts for. For those channels look like for us?
- [78:53]
Austin
Sure. Yeah. And there's ways to incorporate that. Right. So if you run a big spot and you have a really good idea on who's seeing that ad. Right. And, and you run this more upper funnel spot then you find a way to go hit those people again with something that's a little bit more hard hitting that can make that first spot very impactful. Yep.
- [79:13]
Connor
Yeah. Right, right. That makes sense. Yeah. So it's like a, it's a one plus one equals three situation.
- [79:19]
Austin
Yes. Just like you know, driving, prospecting traffic from a big spot on tv. You're going to hit those people again on some of your other channels across digital. Right. Similar, similar principle can be applied to.
- [79:30]
Roland
Video because Connor, do you guys have much creative diversity on the TV front right now?
- [79:36]
Connor
Yeah, it's actually been like a big priority of ours this year. Like we actually just launched two new spots into linear streaming and YouTube in the last, last, like two weeks with. With probably more coming this year. So, yeah, it's. It's pretty solid, I'd say. We have like, because we have the, we still have the social, the super bowl spot. We have an extension running. We have like two or three other evergreen spots that we had produced in the previous couple years, and we just launched two more spots. We have like, like seven or eight unique pieces of creative running right now in those channels.
- [80:10]
Roland
That's awesome because, you know, and I know we got to wrap in a couple minutes, but I do. Another thing that I geek out about is like, quote unquote, targeting on TV where it's like, you can have, you know, you might. I've seen Hexclad during the NBA playoffs and like, that spot should probably look different than like the HGTV spot. And both of those make total sense for your brand. And it's just fun to think about that targeting. Like, you have to think about, well, what is the programming that you're running against and what's the best content for that? Which I think is super, super interesting.
- [80:39]
Austin
Yeah, absolutely. And with TV specifically, I think what's really impactful is the contextual targeting. Right. It's something that a lot of brands maybe get a little bit wrong when they first start audience targeting. It's. It's very important you have learnings and who your customer is from other channels. But in many cases, brands will kind of come into TV trying to hit such a small group of people that it can really overlap with who you're hitting on social. Right, Right. And so going out and targeting types of content that you believe is going to work for you or that your target customer is watching is another great way to do that. Like, there's something very different in running in the NBA Finals than targeting NBA Finals viewers. Right.
- [81:24]
Roland
Because you're part of the game 100%. So cool. So, Austin, I've got. I've got one more question for you here. We talked in the weeds ways you can save money buying Linear and ctv. We've talked about attribution, we've talked about some best practices for content. Is there anything else you think we've missed that would help advertisers just thinking about getting onto TV today?
- [81:50]
Austin
I think we've really covered a lot of the big myths, and I think it's, it's just, you know, when you come to it, you should certainly come with hypothesis into, you know, how to approach it, but you really need to validate that through Measurement. And so when you, when you first start out, I think you need to test very targeted inventory types. I think you need to test broader inventory types and then really just let the outcomes tell you where your brand is better off investing.
- [82:15]
Connor
Right.
- [82:16]
Austin
Because it will be very different across verticals, categories, et cetera.
- [82:19]
Roland
100%. Awesome. Cody, anything else you want to hit?
- [82:22]
Cody
No, I gotta run. So, unfortunately, let's wrap it. But Austin, this was great. Thank you so much for having us. I learned, I know Connor was saying he's got some creative ideas. I definitely do as well. Well. So, yeah, I think this was great. And especially for I think the newer brands who are thinking about tv, this is going to be really helpful. So awesome. Thank you so much for having us on. If brands want to learn more, where do they go?
- [82:43]
Austin
Sorry.
- [82:44]
Cody
Thank you so much for joining us. Brands. Three hours.
- [82:48]
Connor
It's Austin's podcast.
- [82:49]
Cody
Crying, crying baby, up all night. So please forgive me, Austin. If people want to learn more, where. Where can they go?
- [82:56]
Austin
Yeah, for sure, you can find us at Tatari tv. There's a ton of great resources our marketing team puts out, just kind of about the space in general. So if you want to learn about TV as a channel, even if it's, you know, you don't feel it's quite right for you yet, it's a great resource and you could reach us there.
- [83:13]
Roland
Awesome. Austin, thank you so much.
- [83:15]
Austin
Thanks for having me, fellas. Really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.
- [83:18]
Roland
All right, later, guys.
- [83:19]
Cody
Thanks, man.
- [83:20]
Austin
See ya.
- [83:20]
Cody
That's a wrap. Thanks to our sponsors, Motion, Prescient, Rich panel, after Cell and House. We could not do the show without them and we also can't do the show without, without your support. So please, if you're liking this, share it with a friend. Share it with your team. Share it in Slack. Please subscribe where you listen to podcast, subscribe on YouTube, interact with us. We read every comment and we will see you guys next week. Thanks so much for listening.