Operators Ad Masterclass: Panel

Test designs can improve improve that range, right?

You've got, you know, you want to be able to see how your ads are impacting other channels, right? Is there runoff to Amazon? Like we determined that there was like 7% sales lift on Amazon just from our Facebook ads last year when we ran a test in Q4. And then I want to move away from like, is this incremental or not? To how incremental is it, right? So if you test something, can you validate it, scale it? Where's the ceiling? Like where are those diminishing returns, right? There are channels that can be incremental at different levels of ad spend, right? Last 3 here in the last minute and a half. Product channel fit is real. This is hyper-specific to your brand. It's not what someone tells you online. Let's take TikTok Shops, for example. Love TikTok Shops. We're not very good at it yet, but you may all hear all these great stories about TikTok Shops. You need to determine if TikTok Shops, like how it can serve your, serve your business. So for example, are you like standalone profitable and benefiting from the halo to Amazon? Or are you just benefiting from the halo to Amazon and you actually cannot make that channel work from a standalone profitability standpoint? Both things are possible. Like there is a way to make the ecosystem work. You just have to be very clear about how you're defining success and how you're utilizing these channels, right? Last 2 here. Scaled ad spend can expose bad strategies. So I said, like, I love Wolf of Wall Street, like sell me this pen. I love that moment. I'm going to look into the camera and say, sell me this pen, right? You have to communicate clearly and simply. You have to communicate value. Make sure that your perceived value is greater than the price that you're listing on your website. That's the psychology of the sale is like the customer needs to feel like they're getting that value, right? Make sure you're tapping into like those underlying and relevant emotions. And then lastly, here at the end, make sure you're optimizing from ad click all the way through to conversion. Lastly, make sure this is your '96 Bulls, right? Every channel is not gonna be your Michael Jordan, right? Someone's gonna set the screen, someone's gonna dish the pass, right? These channels help each other in this ecosystem. So I'll leave it there. If you got any questions for me, shoot me on my new, brand new shiny Twitter. I'm happy to answer any questions there.

Scroll on back up, click, I dropped the link, hit him up on LinkedIn as well. Jarrell, zero worries. Man, are you kidding me? Now the rest of the panelists are shaking. That's what you're doing. You're spreading the love. Let it roll downhill. All right, we're taking Jarell down. Yingying from Kish to actually keep us rolling on a very similar topic. Uh, can the people hear you? Give us a holler.

Hello?

Can everybody— can you guys hear me?

Loud and clear. I'm gonna hit the clock.

Amazing.

I know.

That was a lot to follow. That was definitely a lot to follow. But yeah, Kitsch is— I'm the VP of marketing at Kitsch. We sell hair care and hair accessories product. We are a very omnichannel brand. We sell on Amazon, TikTok Shop, D2C, and also retailers like Ulta, Target as well. So When we think about our media mix and channel strategy and channel diversification, we have to take all of that into account, which is, makes my job really, really fun. But I do think when we talk about, when most people hear diversify your media mix, they think channels. I've been trying to diversify off of Meta for the past 10 years at every job I have been. But really no one have really been able to do that. So you're on Meta, you think about adding a Google layer in TikTok, maybe testing AppLovin, CTV. I think that's totally fine, but I think a bigger unlock that a lot of brands is not doing, it's thinking about channel diversification in the lens of creative diversification. So I think a lot of us run into the problem that, um, anywhere you want paid media, the bottleneck is always creative and not budget. I always like to say, if a creative is working, the budget on that is unlimited, right? So the model that we use and that really works for us at Kitsch, um, that really moved the needle for us. isn't just adding more channels, but also scaling the volume and variety of creative we can put into the different channels that we are already on. And we have done that really through scaling creators and different creative. So we don't think of our creator program as a brand awareness play and live in a its own silo anymore. We think of it as like a creative supply chain for paid media in a paid engine. We work with a very, very high volume of creators, not just a handful of influencers. The goal is quantity and variety. Think about different faces, different hook, different style, different product angles, because when you're running paid, especially on TikTok, the algorithm wants to test. They want to test different faces. They want to test different angles. So you really need at least like 1,000 creative a week. That's like the minimum for us. So our workflow right now really is creator makes the content, we whitelist it, and it goes straight into our paid media mix. On TikTok specifically, we run that through GME Max and we optimize across all shop placement. But it's always the same. We work with very, very different creators and yeah, sometimes we scale more than 1,000 creatives a week. So again, like I said, not every single creative is going to hit. the more that you test and the more that you launch, it's like, you know, the higher probability that you're going to get more winners, right? And again, like another reason why it really works in this high volume creative testing environment is your fatigue is going to be slower. So instead of burning through like the 3 hero creative in a week, you have, you know, a whole library of assets that you can rotate, you can pause things quicker, and you can like launch and testing a lot quicker. And I think the last thing that people don't talk about enough is you can actually spend more money through more creative, right? To us, it's really incremental when you launch more creative, even though you don't know it's going to work yet, but if it scales, it can be, you know, 20-30% of your media spend. I think to close it out, sort of one thing I would say, if you're thinking about channel diversification, don't just think about it In the lens of your channel mix, think about your creative mix, invest in a system that gives you more creative volume, more variety, and more speed, because that's actually what lets you spend more efficiently in the long run.

Yingying, you've got tons of questions in the chat about that 1K per week.

I saw, I saw.

Do not feel like you have to answer right now. If you're able to hang around and maybe pop some replies in there, or if you have any recommendations too, that That would be great. We have got to keep cooking at a pace. So we're going to take Yingying down and we're going to bring up Olivia Korey with a K, Chief Strategy Officer at Houzz, to not talk about incrementality today.

I think I'm going to do an audible. By the way, can you all hear me? You are loud and clear. I'm such an operator's webinar noob. I have no idea what I'm doing here, but, uh, Let's see, five minutes clock starting. Yingying Kitsch, the best team. Just have loved watching those guys cook. And Drell, that was awesome too. But I was on an airplane this morning. It was very delayed. I was going to present a bunch of data in screen share, and then I kind of got existential, and I started thinking about the best growth team that I've ever worked on, and I wanted to like share. I think. some of why I think that was the best team that I worked on. And maybe I can impart some wisdom on you that my leaders imparted on me when I was a campaign manager. But this team was at Netflix, and what they did in terms of leadership is they developed a set of strategic paid marketing principles that we lived and we died by. And I think it's so important because, like, Connor McDonald talked about it in the diversification section. It is so easy to lose focus in this world, and it is so easy to get bogged down. And if you don't have a lens through which to prioritize, you're gonna end up doing a lot and you're gonna not do it very well. And the playbook that we had, the kind of like the core strategic principle at Netflix was big ideas, big swings. Like you're looking to generate outsized earned media, you're trying to get social chatter, you're doing something custom in terms of creative. We opened a weed shop in LA for a show called Disjointed. So big swings or biddable, efficient performance marketing and nothing in between. We were not allowed to buy anything else. So we got really, really good at Meta, we got really good at Google, and we didn't buy anything in between. We couldn't really, it was like no homepage takeovers, no like secondary social platforms. Um, no TV unless you had a really big creative idea to tie to that. And it was just so great. Like, I had such clarity on what I was doing at this company, and I got really good at a few things as a result of that. And so I think like you kind of heard it with con— I don't actually think that that mantra itself is like the way to, to go. Like, I'm not saying that that should be your mantra. The big idea is biddable, programmatic, nothing in between. But I just loved that they created that structure for me to just go cook. And, and so that's where, like, I would say I'm, I'm getting distracted by Aaron, but it's, it's, he's just, he's just like reacting to my, to my energy.

Okay, so I'll keep going.

[Sponsor Content] So I don't, I don't actually think that mantra in itself is the way to go, but I just love that they set that for me. And I think you heard it with Connor at Ridge of like, at one point their playbook was, we wanna be the, the arbitrage team who is capitalizing on all of these new channels as they're coming out. Like, we wanna wanna jump on every new ad channel as they are coming out and we wanna take advantage of that. And as a result, like, because that was their focus area, they probably didn't do other things and that's perfectly okay. So that is my piece of advice is like, write down, as if you're a leader, write down your paid marketing principles and have your team memorize them and they will be so much better for it. So I know this whole webinar is about diversification. I have one more thing to say on this, which is like a, A bit of a hot take in terms of measurement when it comes to diversifying channels. One thing I see, and I have this amazing guy named Dean on my team who showed me this slide yesterday that really spoke to me. One thing I think a lot of people are getting wrong when it comes to diversification is they are comparing, let's say you light up a new channel like YouTube or like AppLovin, they're comparing the incremental ROAS or the CPIA to just your overall meta. Mm-hmm. incremental ROAS or CPIA. And I would say that that's the wrong way to do it. What you should do is you could, you should compare that new channel to the last tranche of spend in Meta. Like that last 20% is probably so much less efficient. We call this marginal efficiency. But you wanna know, is this new channel better than that last 20% of spend in Meta? Not the whole thing. You shouldn't be looking at averages. So, um, 'cause nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna reallocate their entire budget from Meta into another channel, but you just wanna measure that last tranche. And there's a way to do that. We do spend level testing at house, and we can definitely help you with that. But if you don't do it this way, you're probably never gonna diversify, and you're probably gonna never unlock any new channels. So with that, I was supposed to talk some AppLovin stats. They are amazing stats. They're honestly, AppLovin is a sponsor, and I didn't want you to think that I was being paid to talk about it, but I've been digging into our AppLovin data. The percent of spend to AppLovin is increasing over time, month over month. It's actually testing better at increased spend levels, which is an amazing stat and very promising. But success is very category dependent. We're going to drop a whole report about this. So this is just a teaser, but we're seeing apparel, fashion, tech and mobile apps, of course, and home and beauty are doing much better than subscription categories like health and wellness and pack categories. So I'm saying that the teams that are the certain categories who are finding success are like really, really able to push it. So that's it. This was my audible. Aaron, thanks for, for letting me run.

She's always dropping heat. And I kid you not, I think this 2026 Marketing Decision Confidence Index literally dropped today. I just put it into the chat. Uh, go devour their entire back catalog. Olivia, huge, massive thank you. Nuggets, gems all throughout. Take Olivia down. Bring on Jenna from Posh Peanut. Jenna, are you still here with us? I do think I see you backstage.

I'm here.

Thank you.

Thank you. All right. You've seen how this works. I can hear you loud and clear. I'm going to hit the clock.

Let's do it.

Awesome. Well, thanks for having me. Incredible panel. I'm learning a lot here myself. I feel like I have an observation being a DTC leader. Both in the CMO seat and now in the president's seat. I find that a lot of us end up in what I call spreadsheet sludge. So in the chat, I want to see how many spreadsheets do you guys all have up right now? Put it in. Aaron, I think we maybe give the winner who has the least something versus the most. Oh, I like zero. I like seeing zero. 16. I'm with you. 16. I have about 400 tabs open right now. You know, look, I think we all kind of get stuck in this, whether it's reforecasting, attribution modeling, looking at our daily forecasts. And I find that sometimes we forget to pick up our head and really recognize the real growth engine that drives our business, which is our community. And so I thought I would talk about what I call the forgotten community flywheel. I think about this in 4 facets. It's really customer, your foundation, ambassador, your amplifier, influencer, and celeb, which are your accelerators. I wanted to just talk a little bit about some of the things that we do on the customer side that I really encourage this group to do because you're going to hear a shitload of stuff about how to acquire customers, how to retain them, how to look at attribution modeling. But I actually think you should talk to your customers. And some of the success that we've seen here at Posh is highly engaging our Facebook VIP community. We are getting real-time feedback from them. We are talking to them every day. We're asking them about new products. We're asking them about collabs. We're asking them about silhouettes. We are taking that feedback and we are actually implementing it into our business. And it creates this really great way to grow your business straight from the horse's mouth. The other thing that I encourage you to do is think about a way that you can consistently surprise and delight your customer. So, uh, fun little story. Last week, one of our customers' daughters threw her Posh Peanut blanket out the window. It was freezing cold. They posted about the pickaxe they needed to use to get the blanket out of the snow. Within 24 hours, our founder responded to it. We sent her a blanket. The customer posted about the blanket we sent her. Not only did we get the organic love, but we recut it for paid and it's performing. And so we do this on a weekly basis. So we are getting not only the love from the customer, we're getting organic growth and we are feeding the paid machine. So customer first, go, go, go, you know, talk to your customer first. Second is ambassador. And I think Yingying actually talked to this and I would say one of the biggest growth engines for us, both at Ipsy, billion-dollar subscription brand, and now at Posh, is thinking about ways that you can scalably operationalize ambassador gifting. These are people who naturally love you, are usually posting just for products, and what they're doing is creating social-first content that again feeds your paid machine. The other great thing about ambassadors is really leveraging them to create bespoke content for any new launches. So Last month we launched a new fabrication. It would've cost us thousands of dollars to show styling, education, et cetera. Instead, we blasted it out to a diverse group of our ambassadors. We got amazing content. Now it's feeding the performance machine and we are getting little mini micro megaphones out there, you know, really kind of sharing and spreading the awareness and reach for our business. Last but not least is the influencer and celeb group, which I'll kind of bucket together. You know, again, these are your accelerators. Um, for me, this is really about finding brand-right, highly engaging influencers and celebs. Long gone is the day of the sponsor who's sponsoring your perfume and is up on a billboard. This is why the Kardashians work. They know this is a business. They know how to hustle. Um, not everyone has large budgets to invest in this. And so what we really like to do is find the brand-right influencers and celebs, uh, that really resonate with our audience, build an organic relationship, start seeding and see what happens organically. Um, a good example of this is we had seeded Bethenny Frankel these Cookie Monster pajamas. She posted it, it went viral organically on TikTok within 24 hours, called up her team, um, did a paid negotiation, got it into paid. We sold out within 2 weeks. Can't get the products. People are calling me up. I can't even get it to them. So again, using that as more like the fire you put on paid once you've kind of gone through customer and ambassador. And so look, once you get this flywheel going, each group is feeding each other, right? Ambassadors are creating a lot of like brand love, which attracts influencers and celebs. Celebs and influencers create credibility and desirability, which attract customers and ambassadors. And growth really stops feeling like something you have to push, and it really starts feeling like something the community pulls forward for you. So my biggest takeaway is Start by going after your customers and ambassadors. Don't chase the celebs and influencers first and build a really crazy flywheel.

Shereen said it already in the chat. Let's go, Jenna. I had high expectations exceeded.

Come on.

Thank you all for having me.

Jenna's going down. Rico today repping our friends who are giving away the lifetime supply of Dude Wives, repping Dude Wives. Rico, are you here? Can you accept that button? Fabulous. Go ahead, unmute yourself. Give me a holler as soon as— yep.

I'm here.

Let's do it, sir. I'm gonna hit the clock. Take it away.

Great.

Perfect person to follow because I actually wanted to talk to you about paid influencers. So Dude Wipes is actually not the person to go to about buying Meta ads. This may surprise you. We buy zero ads on Meta.

Right?

And so you've heard people talk about Meta again and again. You might be thinking, how's Dude Wipes not on Meta? I think I see Dude Wipes on my Instagram all the time, so on and so forth. We're not the best ad buyers. We are the best at buying attention and eyeballs in different forms, right? So we're a social brand, but not in the sense that we buy a lot of ads on social, sell millions of dollars on TikTok Shop, And we're often on social, and I want to touch on the creators that people have been talking about. I actually believe that now we are entering a new golden age of creators and influencers. And the reason is because the platforms have fundamentally shifted because of TikTok. I'll give you an example. So the game used to be, I'm going to build up my following, and following means eyeballs. If I have a million followers, and it's 2014 and I make a post, maybe 800,000 people are going to see it. The new game is anybody can create a piece of content that is fantastic and it can go off for millions and millions of views, right? So what was originally the barrier, which was followers, no longer exists, right? And so you have people talking about, I think it was Yingying talking earlier about influencers, right? And so that also breaks the model, which is Let me get scale, right? Because think of it as a lotto ticket. If I've got 1,000 videos a week, it's just a matter of time until something goes viral, right? It's not, hey, what happened? It becomes a mathematical certainty. And the days of, hey, I have a million followers, therefore you need to pay me X, and where big brands could only play in that space and cut checks for 10, 20 grand, that's going away because they're becoming more accountable. Because things like TikTok Shop where you can say, well, I can give Sarah that you've never heard of with 10,000 followers a sample. She might make me a $5 million video or 5 million view video, and that might actually sell $100 grand worth of product. And so the entire market is in flux right now. So for brands of all sizes, I would challenge you to reevaluate your paid influencer strategy. And look at, go deeper than their following, go deeper even than are they the right brand alignment, right? Because it is the first wave of influencers say, I'm going to associate my product with someone living this type of lifestyle. That way they can associate and they will learn what my brand is about because it is associated with this, right? And now it should really be who can command attention. And I'll give you an example. It's going to sound insane, but that's how people on the, I mean, if you're on the internet, as everyone here is chronically on the internet, it'll make sense. So there was something where this guy would take 2 bottles on strings, throw them back and let them collide. And he called it like ultimate bottle fighting. We saw it, thought it was hilarious. Guy had no followers. First post got a million views. We said, we'd love to sponsor you. Guy doesn't know what to charge. Brand new. He's like, how's $500? We got a whole Dude Wipes branded setup in there. We put wipes in there. There was a little 20-second video read. That video went off for 18 million views. I can't even remember the guys' names. You know, no one here would know their names. And so, you know, as you think about paid strategy, think about it as you're really just trying to get eyeballs and conversions. So sometimes that means buying ads on Meta. Sometimes that means finding arbitrage and value in the system through creators, right? That you can maybe just, as I believe Olivia was just mentioning, or apologies, the lady just before talking about build your own community at a very low cost, right? And so these things that are low cost, low risk, high potential upside. So you can go find someone with 10,000 followers, but you go look at all their reels or you look at their TikToks and they're consistently hitting 20,000 to 50,000 views and once every 20 videos pops off for a million, you want to take that into it. So I think building out a well-rounded paid strategy, looking across different platforms as many people have referenced, but I think that, you know, we get caught into the tangibility of knowing exactly what you're going to get through Meta or exactly what you get through Google. But the era of arbitrage and finding ROI in influencers is, I believe, 100% back.

You're arbitraging attention, you're arbitraging eyeballs. That's what you're buying. Great, great way to frame it, Rico. All right. Rico is going down. Sarah Carasona is coming on up. to the stage. I see her smiling in the background. I can't wait for— there it is. I already hear you coming through. I'm gonna hit the clock. Ready to roll?

Okay, we're going right to it. Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Well, Rigo just made me think that I wanted to completely change what I was going to talk about, because I could go down so many rabbit holes on influencers and affiliates. And it's an incredible thing that has changed. And all of our brands are doing it completely differently. But I'm not gonna go there. What I'm gonna do I'm going to talk about something really tactical. Erin, do you have your thinking hat on? I think you have your thinking hat on. It looks like a thinking hat. Okay. I feel like there's probably a lot of people here who are running maybe 7, 8-figure brands, and on a daily basis, you're trying to figure out where you want to put your spend. Now, I'm not here, I'm not going to talk about incrementality. Olivia, don't come at me. I love incrementality. I'm here for it. Erin, that timer isn't going either, just so you know. But I'll talk longer. But I'll keep going. So I'm not here to talk about that. I'm talking about like real tactical. Let's say that you're a 7 or 8-figure brand. You don't have an incrementality tool right now. You've never done one and you are trying to figure out where the— sorry, I was able to cuss. You told me I could cuss. Where the hell can I put my money tomorrow in order to hit my AMER? I know that I have an AMER goal of 2. Meta's telling me this, Google's telling me this, AppLovin's telling me this. Where do I put my money? You're head of growth. You have to make the decision. You don't have any other tools besides a triple whale or a North Beam. I am going to tell you how to do it. Ready? Okay, you told me I couldn't do a deck, so I went to the local papelería. Um, I'm in Argentina and I am putting this together. Okay, we have— can you read this? Does this work right? Okay, okay, cool. All right, you've got a new customer— or sorry, a new customer revenue goal of $500K for the month. Okay, your AMER is 2x. So my spend is $250K. Easy math. I know I'm going to spend $250K. I'm going to spend it on these channels: Meta, AppLovin, and Google. Ready? I'm gonna put— oh, it's gonna be fun. I have also really bad handwriting, so just bear with me here. Um, so I'm gonna put $100K on Meta at a 1.2 new customer ROAS. Oh God, this is, this is very stressful. So I'm going to make $120K of new customer rev from Meta. Okay, so when I'm talking about new customer ROAS, I'm talking about something you can get out of like a Triple Whale or a Northbeam. So this is something where you actually know that it's new customers coming through. Okay, now also, y'all are about to come at me. We're going to use a first click or a last click attribution. Oh, I know it's terrible. Don't do it. It's not, it's not the source of truth. I know it's not the source of truth, but it's the only place where math maths. So stick with me here. I've got a 1.2 new customer ROAS on Meta. I'm saying $100K, I'm making $120K from Meta. I'm going to spend the exact same amount on AppLovin. How am I doing on time? Okay, we're okay. So I'm going to do exact same amount on AppLovin. So I'm going to make another $120K from AppLovin. Okay, $100K in Meta, $100K in Google, 1.2 ROAS on both. I got $240K of new customer revenue coming through. Google, Google, we spent a little bit less. Google, we're going to spend $50K on there at a 2x ROAS, which means that we're going to make $100K of revenue, new customer revenue from Google. Okay, we got $120K. Wow, my handwriting's really, really bad. Okay, we got $120K, $120K, and $100K. That equals a good old $340K.

Okay.

So I did my math. I got $340K of new customer revenue that I know if I hit these ROAS targets across these channels and I spend this amount, I am guaranteed that I am going to get $340K. But I wanted to make $500K. So where do I get the rest of that revenue from? Well, we're going to take $500K and we're going to subtract out $340K. And we're gonna get 160.

Okay?

Yeah, this is really, really bad. I should have done this differently, but we're gonna go with it. So let me get 160K of— I'm gonna call this organic revenue. Now again, we are all smart people. We know that if we're using a last click or a first click attribution on this, this is not the whole story. A lot of people who come in from like a direct channel or a Google channel or even a Meta channel might be coming from somewhere else. This is also including EDA. Okay, so I've got $160K that I know I need to get from other channels. Now, if I take $160K and I divide it by $340K, I get 0.47. This number is what you call your organic ratio, 0.47. And what this means is that for every dollar that I get from a paid channel that is new customer revenue, I am going to get $0.47 from another channel. If you can, every single person who has— so you don't need an extra tool or anything like this besides just a Triple Whale or a Northbeam or something that gives you that new customer revenue and that new customer ROAS by channel. You can go in and you can see this historically, and you can do this math very simply by taking your Shopify new customer revenue and subtracting it out and seeing how much revenue you typically get from organic channels. And then you can math that to forecast out the future, and you can then also use it to make in-month decisions. Now you have to use— hold 2 things in your brain at the same time. If my new customer ROAS on Meta goes down, but my organic ratio goes up and I'm hitting my AMER target, I know that I'm in a good spot. This is a system that I've implemented at 7, 8, and 9-figure brands. I know that still at Ola Kai, they are using this to this day to forecast out. They then layer on incrementality and they layer on those other more robust measurement tools that are so important. But this is also something that's incredibly tactile— tactile?

Tactile?

Tactful? I don't know what the word is that I'm trying to say. There is something that you can tactfully go and do today. And I'm done.

I am going to say, not on purpose, but so glad there was one flub of the thumb to not start the clock. Come on. Sarah Carisona from my alma mater, previous Olocai. Sarah, Fabulous. Please post that. We're gonna clip the crap outta what you just did as well. So we're gonna take Sarah down. And next up we have got Chase Moscheni from Creative OS. Chase, my man, my homie. Uh, we've done— there he is coming on up. So you know how this rolls.

Yes, sir.

Let's do it.

Terrible person to follow with that energy. I don't know if I can keep up. I'm gonna talk about something that not many people have talked about today. I really love what Kitsch talked about in terms of being able to pump 1,000 creatives a week, a month. I'm gonna talk about how you can do it if you don't have that scale. So everyone in this room knows they need creative diversity. You've heard it from every media buyer, every platform rep, more concepts, more formats, more variations, but no one tells you how to do it without a massive team or a massive budget. These are the kind of companies that we work with. We work with companies just starting out. All the way up to companies that have done 9 figures in revenue. So what happens? You either pump out garbage volume, you know, we're all part of the slop factory these days, or you run the same 3, 10 ads at the same time until they die. Neither really works. And so I'm gonna talk to you about the wrong approach first that I've seen hundreds of teams do at this point. And so the default is think creative diversity is a production problem. I need more ads. I need more ads. I need more ads. That is not actually the root of all of this. You batch shoot, you template everything. And again, I, you know, I sell templates. You crank out 50 variations that all feel the same, but performance stays flat and volume without intention is really just noise. We're all trying to capture that attention. Every single person here has talked about whether they're talking about creators, whether they're talking about how they build their ad accounts, they're all trying to capture attention. You're really solving for the wrong problem. This is where I'm gonna actually ask you to start working backwards.

backwards.

The real question isn't what ad should I make? It's what emotional state does my customer need to be in when they hit the page that we're driving them to? So first you need to start with your landing page to be able to drive greater creative performance. So what is it? Is it a VSL, a listicle, an advertorial? Are you sending them to a PDP? You have to make that decision based on what you want your customer to be doing in each one of those pages. And this is kind of the crazy one that no one really talks about. Each one of these pages converts. differently. So how does my customer feel when they arrive? You really need to ask, what assets do I have that create the feeling that they need to have when they arrive to drive more scroll depth and more scroll intention? So now you're not making random creative, you're engineering an emotional through line from ad to page to purchase. And like, this is the real thing that I think we all need to be talking about is like everyone talks about creative strategy. We're really now in an era of creative engineering, and that sounds like some sort of like Shit that I made up. But really, if you think about it, you're engineering end state to where they land to where they started. So you're trying to get thumb stop or hook rate, then you're trying to get scroll rate. You're trying to get them to take some sort of action on your page that then leads to a purchase event. So once you've nailed this, you've got your go-to emotion and you've got your emotion to page fit. That's where diversity comes in. You take that core emotional intent and you run it through 4 levers. And the 4 ones are Format, channel messaging, and and the fourth one is of course visuals. And so once you do that, they all have the same emotional job, but they have different executions, right? Like a UGC, a UGC testimonial ad on TikTok and a static carousel on on Meta can deliver the same feeling, but they have different types of packaging, right? They're going to need to go to different types of pages. This is where you can get real diversity without losing your coherence. And like one thing we always talk about internally is your your. Click to your post-click coherence from the place, whether it's an email or an ad, what we're talking about here to the landing page. You're not starting from scratch every single time. Now you're remixing on purpose. So let me give you an example of a brand. So we had a supplement brand that was dropping traffic onto a long-term VSL. And so, or that's what they were planning to do. So we needed to mix some curiosity with urgency. So we helped them, they built these and then they asked me to look them over. We built hooks about what your doctor isn't telling you and ran that through static. And then they did video and influencer formats. Obviously, they did static with us and then they did the video and influencer formats on their own. And they had the same emotional job, but they had 3 different entry points. Their CPA from that campaign dropped 30%. And so you're really trying to find where that through line is. And so Creative diversity really isn't a volume game. It's a strategy or engineering game. You start at the page that you want them to interact with, and then you work backwards to the emotion, and then you multiply that through format and channel. This is what I like to call like a mile marker method. And if you leave with doing one thing, it's stop asking what ad should I make and really what my customer should feel when they click. So I know I blitzed through that, but I think I made it.

on time.

Super underrated on congruency. Start with the, where am I gonna take them? What emotion do I need them to feel when they arrive? And that layered in, you talked about with like almost like the hook rate, the scroll depth of the landing page itself. My man, sir, thank you. I'm gonna say round of applause. We're gonna take Chase down. We have got 2 more still in the hot seat. Steve Recook from, again, my alma mater, still currently there. Go ahead and unmute yourself, Steve. I know you have got some sauce that I don't want the people to miss today. So Steve, you ready to do this thing? It's yours, sir.

All right.

Thanks, Aaron. So I'm here to talk about our incrementality results that we typically see, or that we've seen over time from a number of different platforms, and then how we look at those in prioritizing incrementality testing. That is, Which channel should we test first? So what we're looking at here is the results from Meta Acquisition incrementality tests. And the incrementality multiplier I have on the bottom is often referred to also as an incrementality factor. Now, this is the incremental ROAS divided by the platform reported ROAS at the same time. So it's the relative amount of incremental revenue you're getting compared to what the platform is telling you. And you could see from Meta, so 100% on this would be Meta is absolutely telling you exactly what you're getting from that platform. So what we see is a decent range somewhere between 60% and 200% from Meta acquisition with a mean of around 120%. Now this can show you how widely spread that data that are the revenue that you're actually getting from Meta is when before you test it. So that's why we heavily encourage testing. And we often start out with the benchmark of assuming around 120% for our brands. That 120% is also based upon CTC's philosophy of using click-only attribution. So that kind of skews it a little bit higher because, and obviously if you're using view, it would probably be a little bit lower than our 120%, but we still highly encourage testing. This, uh, because revenue can be anywhere between that 60% of what Meta is saying and, and 200% of what Meta is saying, and maybe even more, um, if you're an outlier. So let me share another one. Google incrementality is actually a little bit lower on this one, and this comes obviously because customers that are searching for you on Google have a pretty high intent. So Google has a, a hard time in that a lot of the customers that come there and see their ads would have been purchasing anyway from Google. So the difficult job that we're giving to ad platforms is to try and find me customers that are high intent enough to purchase, but not so high that they would have purchased already. And in Google's case, some of these customers may have purchased already, even if they weren't shown an ad. Let me move on to the next one, the YouTube incrementality results that we see. We actually see the widest spread here. We've had a number of brands that look at like over 300% incrementality factor here. And that's partly because YouTube also shows these ads on YouTube TV. So we kind of probably lose the attribution for those purchases for a lot of those TV views. But we highly recommend testing this. And that's one of the first things we do as we turn on YouTube. And then last but definitely not least, AppLovin. We've actually not had a test result on AppLovin below 100% incrementality. That means we always have seen more revenue from AppLovin, or AppLovin actually drives more revenue than it's reporting for every single test that we've run. We normally assume around 150%, but as we're turning these on, obviously we Highly encourage testing this as well. So what does this all mean? How do we tie it back to prioritizing your testing? What channel should you test first? And that's the spreadsheet that Aaron and I have been talking about. So in this example, we're— it becomes an expected value problem. So if you're looking at meta as potentially being 60% incremental on the lower bound and 200% incremental on the higher bound. So for, in this example, with $175,000 in revenue, the assumed value of 120% incremental, you wind up with $210,000. But it's possible on the low end, you could be at $126,000 or on the high end, you could be at $350,000. So if we look at this for all the channels combined and we sum them up at over on the column on the right, you can see what channel has the biggest spread in potential re— untested revenue that you have. And that's kind of what we recommend testing first. Of course, we're an agency and we have to work with brands, and they might have a different plan in mind or have different goals other than just clarifying the revenue. But we normally test in this order first, and that's what I typically recommend.

And I know I shouldn't actually be recommending this either, but we did Olivia Corey from House, phenomenal episode on YouTube incrementality that she dropped with Andrew Ferriss a few months ago. Uh, also a mega episode on the Nine Operators Podcast. I'll make sure to include that in as well. Uh, and then your boy Taylor Holiday just can't not drop. Go follow him. Go follow Steve, especially for the D2C Index.

Um, all the love in the world.

We're gonna get that out. Um, and also throw together a quick Loom of, uh, exactly how to put it to work with your data when you input it. So thank you, Steve. Love that you're bringing the resources. We're going to take Steve down. I'm going to say the cliché of last but not least, Brian Kano, come on up to the stage. How are you introducing yourself these days, sir?

Well, we're actually going to hold off on the announcement. There's an episode coming out here soon, and I think we should wait until we announce it then.

Fabulous.

Yeah, I'm here from True Classic Marketing. Next case, put the time on. I did a lot with paid media to grow brands. I do a lot of mentor paths and I get a lot of questions around how do you effectively, profitably grow a business using paid? Now, there's been a lot of incredible topics today. You've got new channels, more creative scaling strategies. We've got incrementality and measurement, all fundamental key concepts that we need to implement and execute at our brands. But we're missing a step. So before you start scaling, we got to ask ourselves, what percentage of your spend today is profitable? Now, I'm not talking about blended ROAS. I'm not talking about your meta ROAS. I'm talking about at the ad level today, today's performance. If you graded every single ad in your account between things that are above target, below target and unprofitable, what would that split look like? And I think what a lot of us failed to look at is we look at averages, right? And we look at, we want the week over week average to grow. We look at the blended number in the Meta account, we look at the blended number in our analytics dashboards, but that 1.8 blended ROAS could be hiding that 30% of your spend is actually unprofitable and it's eating into your business. And if you can free up that cash, well, guess what? Now you got more capital that you can go and deploy to these new tactics, to more creative, to new channels and distribution, new ad platforms as well. So how does— how do we bring this to life and how can you go today, go execute this for your brand? I'm going to try to keep this short, 3 minutes. So what you want to do is you want to Download all of your spend by day at an ad level on whatever platform it is that you're looking at. And there should be 2 key numbers that you should know leading into this exercise. Number one is your breakeven ROAS. Anything below this number is your business is losing money. The next one is your growth ROAS. And so this, and this is kind of what we opened up the session about, what is the target contribution margin? What's the target EBITDA the year after? There is a ROAS number associated to this.

byproduct.

So knowing those 2 numbers, anything that is below your breakeven ROAS, we're going to call that unprofitable. That's your tier 3, that stuff that's losing money. Tier 2 is anything below target, but it's not unprofitable, right? And so that's going to be anything below the sort of scaling number where it lands the contribution margin or the EBITDA that you're looking for on a daily basis. And then tier 1 is the stuff that is exceeding your contribution margin or your EBITDA numbers. So you're going to grade your ads amongst those 3 tiers and you can do that in Excel. You download all the data, you can probably go to Claude or ChatGPT, download the data, import the data and say, hey, here are my 3 tiers, here are the 3 numbers that classify those tiers, give me a scorecard by ad. Then you're going to roll that up, right? You can do it with pivot table if you still use Excel or you can do it with ChatGPT and you're going to see this scorecard where you can see what percentage of spend is tier 1, what percentage of spend is tier 2, and what percentage of spend is tier 3. And again, tier 3 is the unprofitable stuff. You should be looking at no more than 20% of your spend at any given point should be quote unquote unprofitable. You're going to find, you know, many of you are going to be shocked when you do this exercise, you're going to find that a lot of your spend, probably 40, 30 to 40% or higher is actually unprofitable, but it gets blended, it gets masked. Right? Now, that doesn't mean just go, all right, go right away and start chopping stuff off, turning things on and off. You're actually going to have to look at this over a period of time. So what we want to derive are things that are consistently in tier 3. Those are the items that we want to turn off. Anything that's like had a day in tier 3, it's okay. It's noise. It happens. It's fine. But what you're looking for is the stuff that's consistently at tier 3. If you find things in tier 2 and it went from a tier 1 to a tier 2, that is an early indicator that something is fatiguing, right? And you can pause it early before it goes into tier 3. The next thing that you can do is you can define leading indicators to how you manage your entire account. Anyone that works with creative agencies, you, I'm sure you've heard this. Oh, if you just keep spending, you got to spend 3.5 times your CPA, you got to wait spend 7 days. You really need to spend $2,000 to know for sure that that ad, that creative is actually performing. It's not performing. Well, guess what? With this method in that pivot table, you can get your leading indicators to know what's your hook rate, what's your thumbstop rate, what is the cost per add to cart amongst 3 tiers, the 3 tiers to know if something is working and not working. And you can take action. You can take action within 72 hours, 48 to 72 hours, and know that if something is below the cost per add to cart threshold that makes it a tier 1 ad or above it, that makes it a tier 3 ad. Within hours, you'll know if you want to keep that ad on or off.

Just random. Sir, the people are screaming for when you started explaining, download the data, put it into Claude, ChatGPT, Claude for the prompts. If you have any idea, and you don't have to give them to us right now.

Thank you. Yeah, I'll follow up with the prompts. I'll take some exercises for you guys and look, it's a great way to free up some cash. And now don't just pause those ads, reallocate that capital, free up the money to go test YouTube, to go test AppLovin, to go test Google. And you can increase, it's a metric that we followed at True Classic every single day. What percentage of our spend is above at or above target spend. And if it ever went above, or I should say, if the unprofitable spend ever went above 20%, we took drastic action, keep that low, as low as possible. So.

All right. Now there are people are also asking for an extended Brian Kano session. So here's what I'm going to do is we've got Miranda in the background. Miranda, come on up on stage. I see Sarah Carasona. Is still there as well. Uh, and unfortunately, because of our technical difficulties early in the day when everything got delayed, stop, restart, we absolutely ran out of time for the Marketing Operators Hotline. That was gonna be Miranda joining us to mop it up. Uh, if we can get Sarah on the board here too, what I wanna try is for the next 10 minutes or so, if you can hang in there, With me, I want to give all of our tried and true folks that have hung in there with us, um, a little something something to reward their efforts. All right, so Brian, you're good to stay. I see Miranda here now, Sarah as well. Okay, so the question that I get hammered with over and over again, whenever we do MOFs episodes, when we throw things out there into the Twittersphere or on LinkedIn, is, listen, I am not trying to scale from $10,000 a day to $100,000 a day. I am trying to grind my way to my first million-dollar year, maybe my first million-dollar month. So what I'd really like to do is with sort of the collective expertise, Miranda, let's start with you on the— what are the 3, what I wish I knew when I was starting out that I would do different today. Let's say you're legitimately starting from zero, a paid strategy. What are your 3 lessons and what's the best insight you can give to somebody on that? This is what it takes to get going and what to expect.

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is content. I think this gets overlooked a lot. And that is the biggest bottleneck for almost any brand that I talk to. I do mentor paths like Brian does as well. And people, that is the hardest thing to overcome. That's the hardest thing to build. If you can get fantastic at creating content that goes viral organically, that works in an ad account like that, it will scale you to however large or small you want to scale. If you get a video to go viral, there's a 9 out of 10 chance that it's gonna work in your ad account. So if you get someone who's really, really great on your team at making content, or if you are making the content yourself, yourself to be able to launch into a TikTok and Instagram and go viral, or at least get some reach, that's first of all free sales that you're not paying for, free CPMs, as well as content that you've already proven works. And now you can put some money behind it and continue to scale it. So that's the first thing for sure. Um, I think there's a lot of content out there to consume, and I think that's fantastic for our industry. So I think like just get obsessed with consuming content. Go on Twitter, follow as many people as you can. Go on LinkedIn, follow people. Join like a Smart Marketer or some type of, um, Andrew Foxwell has a great group too. Try to join groups with other paid media buyers because you'll get advice for free and people just want to help. Like, I get DMs all the time asking for advice. I'm happy to answer them because I want everyone to succeed. And I think everyone in this industry and e-commerce really wants you to grow as well. So I think get really connected And that's going to help you tremendously. If you have a question, you have someone in your corner that you can ask, that's going to help you as a media buyer exponentially. So those 2 things for sure. I think it's the 3rd thing, don't get distracted. There's a lot of content. There's a lot of, I could use this channel or this channel, get really good at one thing and then move on to the next. If you can crack Meta ads, you can crack AppLovin, you can crack Pinterest, but you got to start with one. If you're doing all the things at once, You're not going to get really good at one thing. So stay hyper-focused on one thing. If you really want to crack Pinterest and you have a super cool niche creative brand, then go all in on Pinterest and spend all your attention there. Don't spend 50% of your time in a bunch of different places because it won't get you really deep on one thing.

Okay, so now to recap, and then I'll hand it over to Sarah. I heard you say, uh, content creation yourself. And/or someone on your team, or maybe we'd even extend that out to if you can start seeding, if you can reach out to people in your life who will help you make content, who will make content for you, get good at making content. I imagine you're really talking about native vertical sound on distribute, push, publish. Organic was the second thing I heard you talking about was the content creation and then get it out there organically. Connect with people. And then third was the, and just stay focused on those first 2.

Okay.

Now, Sarah, let's kick it over to you for the what you wish you knew, what to expect when you're getting started. Where are you gonna take us?

Yeah, I think Miranda, I mean, hit it, hit the nail on the head. I think content, if I were a brand starting out, that would be the number one thing that I would focus on is getting really, really good at content. And I would pair it with get really good at pitch. And like, but simple math, like you need to know where are my dollars going, where am I spending them. If you can't tell, I like math. I don't know, we do, we do some math over here. Uh, so understand what is it that I want to accomplish. If I'm trying to get to $1 million a month, if I'm trying to get to $1 million this year, how does that break down into what does that look like on a monthly basis, or what does that look like on just even on the whole year? If I want to get to $1 million, in a year, am I going to get half of that from new and half of that from repeat?

I don't know.

If I'm starting out from scratch, I'm probably going to get it all from new, which means I need to spend a certain amount to get that, or I need to get really, really, really, really, really, really, really good at organic content and know that I'm going to be able to drive a certain number of sessions and traffic and orders from that organic. Typically what I see, and again, it depends on the patience that the brand owner has as well, because organic and content takes time. And it takes a long time to learn and grow that way. It is, again, I 1,000% agree with it. And I would say that most brands will want to put a little bit of gas on that flame in order to be able to accelerate it and learn a little bit faster and get more eyeballs and get more traffic. And so understand how much am I willing to spend and then how much am I willing to acquire that customer for? What are all my costs that go into shipping the product to the consumer. Because if you're selling a $100 product and you have a $50 CAC, guess what? You didn't make $50. You might have made $10. I don't know. It depends on how much your COGS and your shipping and boxing and all that other stuff costs. So understand your unit economics and understand what the strategy is mathematically of what you're trying to accomplish. Are you a subscription brand? If you're a subscription brand, do you have the cash and the ability to break even on the first purchase or lose money on the first purchase because you believe they're going to come back. If you're an apparel brand and you're a little different than True Classic, which is, I think, a little bit different, if you're a, I don't know, typical apparel brand, you probably want to make money on that first purchase. And you need to make money on that first purchase because you've got to make payroll and all of those other things. And you don't know how often people are going to come back. And people shop for clothes a lot differently than they shop for supplements and things of that nature. So the math is So the biggest thing I would say is like, if I were a brand owner, I would like the first 2 hires, I posted about this the other day, the first 2 hires I would make is like get somebody who's really, really freaking good at content and get somebody who's really, really freaking good at math. Pair them together ideally in a very way that they don't like try to compete against each other and they respect each other's lanes, but they also work really well and collaborate together and you've got a really magic team right there.

Really good at math? Really good at content and creative, really good at content and creative, really good at math. Brian, uh, besides saying dropship flamingos as your number one, what everybody should go do, um, rather than going down, unless you had, unless they didn't hit a point that you think is fundamental to say, who's somebody who's starting from zero and starting to spend.

I'd say, I'd say 2 things and I'll make it quick. One, um, my gosh, think about how your customers are going to come back to your business, whether that's a subscription or a repeat or new product launches. You know, Nude, I joined when the company was doing $100,000 in trailing 12-month revenue, scaled it to $60 million. The thing that I could go back in time is just having that conversation earlier with my founder and product team and saying like, guys, what are we building to get these people to come back? Because I'm working my butt off to acquire customers here, but there's nothing here that really brings them back. And it's really difficult for device companies to do that. We've saw the, thing that solved that challenge. But if goodness had we solved that challenge just earlier, it'd be a totally different business. I see it at True Classic, just the amount of repeat revenue, how it compounds. The first thing I'll say, it's your first million, your first million, you haven't figured out product market fit. The thing that was fundamental for us at Nude when we were scaling that business was figuring out what was the angle in positioning that solved a problem for the highest addressable market on the distribution channel that I'm on, in this case Meta, and for most of you guys, it's gonna be Meta. So for Nood, you know, I didn't know, we're like, okay, we have this device and it flashes light and it removes your hair, but who's buying for it? Is it the person that wants to get laser but wants to do it at an affordable price at home? Is it the person that's waxing every 2 weeks and they're tired of waxing and they're like, gosh, if I could just You know, get this device and no longer have to wax or shave? That'd be amazing. Is it the person that hates shaving, right? So like, those are different problems. They speak to different people. My job was to figure out what problem am I solving for, and then also for who. Am I solving this for runners? Am I solving this for moms? Am I solving this for, for men? Or am I just solving this for any woman or man that is above the age of 30? You know, and so being really clear about that and doing a lot of static image testing across those different angles and personas to then figure out what has the highest engagement and cost per add to cart and ROAS to then go and get the UGC and the content to build that out. That's, that's huge because that's going to give you the signal for your business to know truly who is your customer so that you can go beyond that first million and get to 30, 50 million. But that step, a lot of people just create ads and they throw the ads. What you have to remember is that your ads are incredible signal for who your product, like to find product market fit. So use the ads as a way of researching to know what, who you're building for and what to build for them.

I'm gonna take this next one to Miranda and then back over to Sarah, because this one came up a lot as well on the front of starting from zero, getting going. Should someone expect to lose money in a new ad account? And if so, what is the acceptable threshold for that waste? How do you build that? Is it, is it to be expected?

Number one.

And then 2, how do you set that threshold?

I think it's very unlikely that you're going to launch brand new ads in a brand new ad account and be profitable on the first day. I think that's going to take some learnings, but I think I'm going to go back to that organic content of if you have content that, you know, has worked before, before you started doing paid, that is almost guaranteed to find you success in some capacity. So I would start with, we know this works. We know lots of people watched this video and we saw sales in Shopify before we started with paid. Like that's where I would always start versus maybe something you've created for ads. Um, yeah, I think there's always a threshold of, I don't think you're going to start out like, oh, we're making hundreds of thousands in a few days, but I think starting with what, you know, works organically should help you lead in the right leading direction of what will work for paid profitably.

Hmm.

Sarah, you, you, I see, I see you nun also answering questions in the chat. Kudos to you.

Yes, I was, I was distracted then. The question is, how much are we gonna lose when we launch a new Meta account?

Yeah, because I don't know, I've heard this, you know, from, from back in the day of like seasoning the pixel. That sort of talk is the way people describe it. It's incredibly difficult to especially use manual bids or cost controls in the beginning before the system has enough information about what it should even be charging you. How do you expectation set that for yourself when you're getting running?

Yeah, well, I think you, I would err on the side of setting an expectation that you're going to lose money. And I would err on the side of the expectation that you're going to lose money for a period of time and probably more than you're comfortable with. And the reason I would do that is just to set that expectation and then try to beat it. Um, because you're going to be wrong. You have no idea. Not one person here can predict what an ad is going to do in an ad account, whether it's a new ad account or an old ad account. Every single one of us is going to be wrong. And so you, you are— that's, I think, part of the whole exercise in forecasting is knowing that you're going to be wrong. And so when it's something like that where it's a, it's a risk and you know that there is a likelihood of you losing money, if I was a business owner, I would err on the side of, okay, how much money am I willing to lose? And let me just accept that and know that this is going to happen because that's going to at least get you comfortable with the idea, allow you to start to take risks against that idea. And this losing money, I mean, again, to Miranda's point, this could be from organic too. You got to pay people for content. Um, I, I know we were talking earlier about there's a lot of ways that you can go about organic content with creators in different ways, especially with the evolution of TikTok shops. But even with TikTok shops, you still got to send the product. You still have to pay them something for their content or for their sales. And so there's— I feel for brand owners, like I honest to God do, especially brand owners who are starting out, because it is a— it's an investment in product, it's an investment in content, it's an investment in team, and it's an investment in ad spend. And so the— that might sound a little doom and gloom, but at the end of the day is just to have a number in mind. I was, I was going down this path actually with my husband, and I were to start a brand. We were like this close to like signing a, um, a like a PO order, and then the THC brand came through and it was in that space. So we didn't go down that path, but we had a number in mind where we're like, we're ready for this money to basically— we're never going to see it again if this doesn't work. And but we know mathematically and how much we're spending in what different areas, from a content perspective, from an ad spend perspective, from a people perspective. And we know that we are expecting this type of result from those in order for us to not lose that money or in order for us to make it back over a period of time. So I would say just know that it's not, it's not going to be pretty roses as soon as you launch because it typically does take a little bit of time and just be comfortable with that because it's a, the, the best brands that I've seen, they know that they need some time to test and learn. If you're super tight with your pocketbook at the very beginning, you're, you're, you're running from a scarcity mindset. And you're not allowing yourself to spend the money, whether that is on testing offers or content or, you know, testing channels and whatnot. And I think that having a little bit more room from a cash perspective is really, really helpful when starting out.

All right. I'm gonna toss this last one back over to Brian. You've all been very kind. And then Miranda, I want to round it out with you because, yeah, I constantly hear that drum as well. And the way I've heard Sean Frank put it is I would not spend on paid until I can make content on the internet organically, get people to like me and sell them something. And I love the simplicity and the stripped-down nature of that. Now, I don't know about hitting 10 million on the back of organic. I really, I don't. But what are your go-tos for sourcing that content or distributing that content? If organic is the path forward, if getting good at content is the path forward to then unlocking the ad account, what are your go-tos for sourcing? And what are your go-tos for distribution?

Yeah, so you've got to find people that are good at making content. Here's a quick tip. Go, let's say it's Instagram. Let's say you're trying to make content that is for Instagram. You have to be an audience and a consumer of the medium that you are trying to advertise in, right? Like if you're advertising on AppLovin, you better be getting some AppLovin ads to understand the user experience of what it looks like. And if you're trying to build your brand off of Instagram's organic, you have to understand how it works. And that's going to be very different from TikTok organic as well. So go, let's say it's Instagram as the example, create a burner, create a profile, Instagram profile that is dedicated for your brand, your sleuthing. And what you're going to do is you're going to, you're a new user, you're going to start interacting with content that inspires you that you feel like would work well for your brand and just keep engaging, comment, like, watch things. Just, I know it's going to be like, are you serious? You need me to doom scroll? But do it. It's incredible because once you get your algorithm trained to the type of content that you're like, man, I would love to have this for my brand, guess what? It comes to you. And not only does it come to you, but you're going to be able to find those creators that are making good content. They're obviously getting, the algorithm prefers or favors them because they're getting to you as this new account and you can then forward these to your organic manager or your main profile, whatever, forward these to your branded page and then reach out to them from your branded page. And so that's what I've been doing for organic. I have my, like, I have different Instagram, I have a bunch of different Instagram burner accounts that I don't post anything on there. I just consume different types of media. So, you know, I have stuff that's like man on the street type of content. I'll do someone that's like really good at sketches and like comedy skits. I have someone that's really good at like transitions and each of those accounts have been sort of trained to go and find more of that type of content. And then I just forward it all to the main account and then the team knows what to do with that. If they get a forward message from one of my accounts and like we can go and reach out to those creators and try to try to establish a relationship with them. So that's one way. As the founder, as the leader in your organization, it's got to come from you at first. And then over time, once you kind of train the algorithm, you can share it with your team and it'll just naturally flow to the type of content that you're looking for.

Burner accounts. I need a B2B LinkedIn burner. Come on. Yeah, Sarah.

Brian, how much time do you think you spend a week scrolling between different burner accounts?

Honestly, at first it was probably like 3 hours a week and it was mostly, look, it was mostly like weekends and nights and weekends and I'm just like, just kind of like flipping through there while I'm waiting on something, while I've got something on TV, while I'm waiting for the pot to heat up, you know?

Yeah.

You just kind of do it. Now I'm probably scrolling maybe like 30 minutes, 30 minutes to an hour a week. Week max and still under the same settings of just kind of waiting for stuff. But it's a good way of just kind of seeing what are the trends, what's the algorithm favoring? And when you have that context, you can brief a lot better. You know exactly what to look for and you kind of stay in tune with the culture of the platform. Again, whether that's Reels, Stories, TikTok, or even other channels like YouTube, and YouTube Shorts.

Yeah, I need to do that and get rid of all these ads that I'm getting from SaaS companies instead.

We've got about 250 people here. I want to round this out with Miranda because one of the questions that also did come up and Connor McDonald touched on this before, he talked about content, like almost content arbitrage of like when it's working somewhere, vertical video, I'm looking for where can I also place this as part of my channel diversification strategy? But one of the questions I got a couple of times was we've essentially tried porting over, taking a one-for-one approach. This is vertical video that's working really well through Meta via Insta. And then we try to drop it into somewhere else like Shorts or AppLovin and it doesn't hit the same way. So the question was, is there a way you approach that? Is there a tweaking mentality? Is there creative analytics you look for in platform outside of just performance to then say, this is where I'm gonna start pushing what I'm hoarding. Have you seen that yourself? And what's your take on that creative arbitrage?

Yeah, I think there is a level of like stepping back before you look at even performance and thinking about how does the user interact with this platform? The way that users interact with Meta and Snapchat is different than the way that users interact with AppLovin or YouTube or connected TV. An ad that works on Meta is probably not going to work on connected TV same way, whereas if you showed a TV commercial to someone on Meta, you definitely would just lose all your money. Um, so you have to really think about how do users interact with this platform and does this ad format fit the way that they interact with the platform? Because I think, yes, you can take a Meta, uh, Reels and/or a viral TikTok or a TikTok ad that does really well and put it on Snapchat. You're interacting with the platform in a similar way. When you're going to YouTube, you're expecting an ad because you know you're gonna get shown an ad and you have a 5-second bumper. And the way that you speak to that customer in those first 5 seconds is probably different than getting someone to stop a scroll on Meta because you have a nanosecond instead of 5 seconds. Same way with AppLovin, you have a consumer ad, has consented to watch this ad in exchange for something in their game. And then if you show them like a face talking to the camera, very organic feeling post, they might be a little confused of— of, well, I was expecting an ad and this person's talking about this hair care and this doesn't really quite connect with what I was expecting. I expected to see an ad and now I have a TikTok on my phone. So I think you really just have to bring it one layer back of how are they interacting with the platform? Does this make sense? Because I think in some cases people are like, oh, I take my Meta ads and I plug it in here and it's great. And other people are like, well, I do that and it's terrible. And I think it just depends on what is that piece of content and how does fit into that platform? Because I think in some cases, yes, you may have really great Meta ads that are 50 seconds long and crush on the platform, and they're super informational and have a good hook, and they work on AppLovin, and they work on YouTube. But then it might not work when you have something that's 15 seconds and really short and face-to-camera, very organic feeling that, yes, crushes on Meta too, but it doesn't make sense for the platform you're on. So I think that's the step back that you have to take, almost like qualitative versus looking at numbers. of when you're deciding where to disperse content, because I think the answer is yes and no at the same time.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I remember from months ago when I first heard you talking, it's like getting back to your DR roots. If someone's expecting an ad, hit them with a banger ad, give them an ad then, and how the context that it's being consumed in. Well, you folks have indulged me. Thank you so much. To say nothing of the still 330 or so that are hanging out here with us today. I have got a whole bunch of more questions that we did preload for the Marketing Operators Hotline. If you have any additional questions, what I'm gonna do is roll those right over onto the guys for next week's episode and make them go long form, hour and a half, question after question after question. So holler at me with it. We're gonna send out these recordings. Uh, round of applause, especially for Brian, Miranda, and Sarah for giving us extra bit of your time today. Uh, and until next time.

Bye.

I think the Avalon booth is still open, so you can go ahead and jump over there if you'd like. Otherwise, thanks for spending some time with us today. We'll see you again.