Spending More & Reaching Less? Fix Your Meta Account With Us

I guess they're always Cody and Connor episodes, but today there's only a single Connor. This episode we wanted to kind of dive deep on Meta.

About half of our revenue and new customer revenue is driven by Meta, which is like amazing. At least it doesn't feel like we're wasting money on, you know, no incrementality.

One of my pet peeves is the media buyers will put in their columns, we spend and then ROAS. And I'm like, dude, there's like so many metrics in between spend and ROAS that like we should be hyper aware of.

We spend like tiny amount on influencer compared to what we spend on Meta. And so that's going to be a much bigger focus and changing the approach program.

In many ways, there's nothing that you can do about CPM. It's something that you should be aware of. I want to talk quickly about Motion's AI creative strategists. These AI agents are built by best-in-class DTC marketers, including Barry Hott, Jess Bachman, Morella 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 around with these at all? Oh yeah, absolutely. Our team's deep in there. I wanted to pull up too. So for those listening, we'll talk through it quickly. One, I think the implementation, beautiful. You could see our top performing ad creative last week. What I pulled up was Jess's Critique This Ad's messaging, played that, progress ran, took maybe 2 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, uh, what we can push. And I thought this was, this was, uh, funny. You know, me as a marketer, I'm very precious about our ad creative, 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 fund 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. Two, I ran Motion's track 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.

[Sponsor Content] 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 at motionapp.com.

All right. We're back with another episode of Marketing Operators. It's just a Cody and Connor episode today. I guess they're always Cody and Connor episodes, but today there's only a single Connor.

Yeah. And it's still, uh, still Connor McDonald 60. I don't know what it says. 68, 69, whatever it is. You're 100%.

68. Yeah. 68 for 68. I tweeted Cal Ripken Jr. Um, cause I'm going to go. Yeah. I figure we'll be doing this for. Like at least a decade, two maybe. So like, you know, I'm hoping to hit, you know, he, he played like 16 straight MLB seasons. I looked it up afterwards, just unbelievable.

And did you like feel really good about yourself doing 68 podcasts in a row until then?

I'd, I feel, yeah, I mean, obviously completely different scales. Uh, I feel good about doing 68 podcasts because, you know, I was doing a lot of traveling. So I'm like, I think I've, I've, I've brought my mic stand to like 6 different states, 2 different countries.

Series.

I mean, I've gotten some, some, uh, some miles in while not missing an episode of Moparaders.

You're much better about that. I don't think I've done a travel one. I'm gonna— the next week for a few of them, I'm gonna bring my stuff. You've inspired me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, gotta set the tone. Um, but yeah, dude, I couldn't believe Cal Ripken Jr. playing 16 straight seasons. Just unbelievable. Um, on a different point here, I learned recently we're gonna hang out for the second time this year. You're going to the Beanstalk event in September.

Yeah, I'm excited about that. I don't know that much. Sean introed me to the founder and I just know Sean talks really highly of that event. It's funny because he tweeted about it and like, I've noticed this trend where anyone that's tweeting lately has to like, if it's not a sponsored, they're like, this is not a sponsored post. It's like, it's like, I love that the default is people just assume it's sponsored.

Yeah, yeah, true, true. Um, yeah, it used to be, it used to be Commerce Summit. You've never been before?

No, tell me about it. Have you been?

I have not been, but, uh, Commerce Summit, I've heard great things. I don't know why they rebranded to Beanstalk, but they have. It's historically been for CEOs, founders. I think there's 300 people last year. And then this year it is for— they're trying to do like 3, like large kind of segments. They have the CEO founders, they've got CMOs and CDOs, chief digital officers, and they have another track for like CFO types. And they're trying to like fill all those out because they want to appeal to more people, get more people involved while keeping it intimate. So it sounds like a really cool format for a conference and I'm stoked for it. I think, I don't know if they're still accepting applicants on their website, but I would encourage people to check it out. You and I are hanging out. I'm trying to get Zach Stucke out there. Uh, Krista Dalton, I'm hoping can come. Uh, there will be other people there as well.

Lots of friends of the pod. Might have to see if we can do a live pod again, you know, maybe make that a thing.

Dude, totally.

What is the, so what is the format of it? Like, is it normal, like summit? Are there like Yeah. What's the format of it? It seems like it's different.

So I just talked to Ray, who's one of the founders yesterday, and he was telling, I don't know too many details here, but it's less big stage speaking and more like they're trying to get people into, he called them boardroom discussions, 20, 25 people around a table discussing particular issues. So it's more like there's, I know there's a couple dinners involved. Uh, they, I think they went bowling last year. I heard some stories of Alex Beller from Postscript and Sean bowling together.

Um, I wonder who won that one.

Uh, Alex Beller for For sure. I see my money would be on, um, so yeah, anyway, that's like, that's kind of the format. Keep it intimate with like not that big of a conference, 300 people, and then they're going to break it out amongst a couple of different cohorts and then smaller, even smaller discussion, discussions, a dozen, two dozen people or so.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Uh, so when we were at the Meta Summit, I know like that second day they had those like breakout rooms, which was like, we didn't go to, it was like 400 people in a room that was whack, but I've been to some Meta events before where they'll have like a breakout room with like 20 people in it. And it'll just be like, hey, let's talk about creative diversity. And like, those are actually the most impactful, like, parts of it. So that sounds similar. So I'm pumped about that.

Dude, totally. I mean, there's so few— there's surprisingly few venues for small group discussions and like, that's like a workshop almost, right? Where you can really get into the details and share stuff. It's one of the reasons I love the, um, Postscript does a, uh, customer advisory group.

Dude, I was just gonna ask, are you going to the August one?

Yeah, I'm going to that too.

Third time we're gonna meet in person.

Oh, dude, they're crazy. It was so much fun last year, but it's the exact same idea. They get like 40 brands together and then they just want to discuss, you know, SMS and maybe retention. But there's not a lot of venues for that. It's one of the reasons why I enjoy doing this podcast so much is we get at least, you know, typically 2 or 3 of us, we just get to geek out on marketing.

For sure. Absolutely. That's what we're here for.

Sweet. So we can get into the episode. But before we begin, I want to thank our sponsors, Motion, Richpanel, AfterSell, Prescient, and Revo. We're going to hit a couple of things today, but Jones Road was in Vogue this week. I want to talk about that quickly. Can you talk about the launch a bit?

Not only was Jones Road in Vogue, I was in Vogue. Vogue Beauty. We had, we had an exclusive. So US Vogue covered it. We had to give them access day early to it for our sunscreen launch. So it's our 3 years in the making mineral sunscreen. So that's like a clean sunscreen that's mineral-based, non-chemical-based. It's a very challenging product because it's actually a very challenging product. It's FDA regulated. So it's the first FDA regulated product that we've had. And there's a pretty harsh stereotype in the industry with mineral sunscreens not being great on all skin tones. And, you know, the zinc oxide, the minerals are white. And so they can often leave a white cast and it's not loved by everybody. And I think the the marketing of that can be really challenging. A competitor, Tower 28, they, they launched just a single white, you know, shade recently, and they marketed it as no white cast, and they got destroyed for it, um, just pretty bad. So we, we were like, all right, like, we, you know, and we, and we did, we did so much testing and, um, and, and research and panels just to really make sure and get people's feedback. And we actually delayed the launch. We were actually planning to launch this in January, and I decided to delay it because, uh, I didn't think that we had the right shades for everybody. So we actually had to formulate a shade and add one in, which is probably a better time to launch a sunscreen in general. But yeah, it's what people have been asking for for a while. In like in beauty, there's a lot of like makeup products that like have sunscreen in them. We decided not to go that route for this one. Yesterday was pretty soft. I'm not going to lie. It's also Prime Day, so probably not the best time to launch. We kind of just had it locked in by that time and didn't feel like moving it around. So we definitely want to see better performance. It's only one day. Um, it was definitely the most stressful launch that we've had and really complicated with the reformulation, all that stuff. We had to do a lot of repacking and then even on the website. So like because of the, um, you know, so we just have one site. We don't have like multiple sites like you guys do, but we had to set up multiple PDPs and redirect to make sure, cause like we have to ship a different SKU to Canada than we do to, to US. Um, and, but those are coming from the same warehouse. So just probably the most complicated launch that we've had in general. And I would not say it went super smoothly, but something we're still very excited about the future. But it's been, it's been a week. I'm tired.

Totally. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, look, congratulations either way. I thought the Vogue, all the Vogue features were really cool.

Yeah, it's cool. I appreciate that. It's cool to see. I think they did a good job. And the Vogue Beauty one that came out of the Vogue Business, it's cool to see like your, your name, like my name and like like above the fold in a, in a, you know, top headline. So it's, it's cool. But obviously want it to perform well. But yeah, it's— we'll see what the feedback is. You know, I think the thing that's so interesting with a launch, especially like, like a beauty product, is like you spend so much time doing market research and trying to think about the messaging and the positioning and like, you know, create 100 ads and stuff like that. And you just have no idea what's going to hit. And it's not always what you think. So it's always interesting and on edge to be like, all right, let's get this data back in a week and see what what people are saying about it.

Yeah, so one question I had for you in terms of launching new products, would you say— we use like a tier system at Ridge, so we have tier 1 launches for like new categories or like important new silhouettes. I know that you guys had, was it a toner in March or April?

We had, yeah, like a tinted moisturizer. So that was like our biggest of the year.

Yeah.

And then this is second biggest of the year.

Would you say like, did you guys approach it with the same sort of magnitude, or is this one taking like a backseat to the tinted moisturizer?

A little bit lower. We are also redoing our tier system to more closely match yours, inspired by, by us, because we had, we used to have A, B, and C launches and that wasn't enough. And then so we started doing like pluses and minuses and then that became too much. Yeah, it was like not enough differentiation and like, you know, where there was like a B+, but then it's like a B+ and a B-. I'm like, it was just like, what are even the differences? Like people would ask me like, what's the tier on this? I'm like, What are you going to do differently if I said this is a B versus a B+? Like, and so what we're trying to do, and this is very inspired by you, is like, we're going to do 1, 2, 3, 4, and we're going to create that template or that playbook. And again, it's always subject to change of like this launch. This is our playbook. Tier A, homepage takeover, new collection, breakout cards, TV ads, big shoot, all this stuff. Tier 2, not. And then I have questions for you about, about your, your AI stuff, but like, that's what we're trying to do. So this was probably a 2 in that we didn't do TV ads for this. We did a lot of paid social. We did, you know, decent influencer push, did direct mail, did not do out-of-home. So yeah, definitely a tier 2 for us.

Got it. Cool. Was there anything you learned from the tinted moisturizer launch that you applied to this one?

That's a good question. I think a lot more— we're a lot more messaging testing out, out the gate from the beginning is probably where we could have done better from last, last one and trying to just test that much better from the beginning and, and not just kind of like just go with something that we think is going to work.

It totally. So I think that's a really interesting one. We hired a VP of marketing in March. She was at Vegamour and then before that Wayfair. And Wayfair in particular, I think is so good from like a process perspective. And like, I think what I'm going to describe is an example of this. But we have, as we're like bringing things to market. So in the case of new product launch, we have one next week and I think it'll be launched the day that this episode comes out. So we're doing— it's kind of an odd product. We're doing women's tungsten wedding bands. So we have like your standard male wedding band in gunmetal black and then we've got about like gold and platinum and things like that. Great business for us. The founder's wife said, oh, I would love a tungsten band as an alternative to my diamond wedding ring so that when I'm traveling or working or whenever, like I have something so that I can be wearing a wedding ring, but it's not necessarily an $8,000 wedding ring or a $20,000 wedding ring or whatever. So that's what we're trying to find.

Don't be modest. You don't have to be modest on here.

Yeah, yeah. The, so that's what we're trying to position these new rings as. And I say all that because, okay, that's the, uh, that's the initial premise. Product team's like, hey, we built these, these tungsten wedding bands for women. They're slimmer. They come in this cool travel kit. There is a silicone band alternative. We have our Never Lost Forever Fit protection. That's like our standard ring offering. Um, here it is, marketing team. Now, as we're bringing that to market, we are like codifying the testing of messaging. So like we're saying we have a testing section in our marketing summary that's like, what do we want to test? And then from a channel perspective, how can we potentially test that? So in this case, it's like, is the better use case for work or travel? Like, should we be, should we try to position it for, uh, you know, like blue collar women workers? I almost think it could be like a FIGS type approach, or should it be for the business traveler who is, you know, always in new cities or new airports or something like that? So from the get go. We're going to test that initial messaging. And I think that's a good format. And I think that's kind of what you're describing with the mineral sunscreen.

So this is another reason for me doing the podcast. I'm stealing that. That's great. We're adding that to our creative briefs.

Yeah. Well, shout out Natalie from my team. She's brought that into the Ridge org. So, yeah, I totally agree. I think that's a good learning lesson. I am super excited to tell you about our newest sponsor, Revo. They are a retention platform for Shopify Plus brands. They start with signed-in shopping via accounts and getting to look loyalty, referrals, memberships, cashback, and so much more. They're constantly launching new features. I personally am super excited about the future of signed-in shopping for e-commerce brands and really accounts being the beachhead for just awesome loyalty and customer experiences and Rivo playing a part in making it a better experience to be a customer of your brand. Uh, and Ridge isn't the only brand using Rivo today. HexClad, True Classic, Dr. Squatch, Portland Leather Goods, Princess Polly, Kitsch, Pit Viper, and hundreds of more brands are using Rivo. On their Shopify Plus accounts. Uh, that is like a billion dollars in GMV. That is an insane list of brands to be listing off. Stuart Chaney, founder-led. He's all over Twitter. He's hands-on in Slack. Great team to work with. I also think they're kind of the next wave of SaaS. Um, you'll see Stuart talking on Twitter about being incredibly AI-oriented in their development and they're shipping better features faster than ever before. So excited to see what comes of Revo. I suggest you check it out at rivo.io. That's r-i-v-o.io. You had something about— you wanted to ask about AI.

Yeah. So as part of— I'm just thinking what we're saying, by the way, we also totally stole the entire Figma thing where we were doing some of this stuff in Figma for this stuff. I know we've talked about our go-to-market boards, but like we're— we still do our creative brief in Dex, but we do all of our like integrated strategy slides, like everything in Figma. I asked the team yesterday how they're liking it. Like everybody's loving it. So shout out to you for that one. Um, but as part of that, all that go-to-market stuff, I know you sent me and Connor a Loom a few weeks back of, um, some stuff you're doing a Claude and essentially trying to automate or use AI to make that process easier. Can you share some updates on that if you're using it, if you found anything like has been helpful? I think you made like a Claude project.

Yeah, totally. So I was describing this marketing summary. We get the product information from the product team. We put together a marketing summary and we put together kind of like what's the commercial goal? How do we want to approach this from a messaging perspective? There are tests involved in that. What else is involved, some historical information typically like we're going to launch a new colorway in a couple of months. So we'll pull historical colorway performance, basket analysis, things like that so that we're just contextualizing for the team or whoever's reading it, external partners, whoever. Like this is kind of the overview of the campaign. I put that together. That's currently still a very manual process where I saw a lot of success over the last like year and a half. Very simply was going from marketing summary to copy deliverable where we could just say, hey, um, with like a little bit of iteration in Claude, get to a really large copy deliverable so that we had hero headlines, messaging copy, email subject lines, ad copy, things like that. We have like a template built out. And a couple months ago, I was saying, and this is all a part of our go-to-market process, summary to copy, I'd hand those things off and then channel managers would would take those things and then they would go and create email briefs, landing page briefs, ad briefs, et cetera. Um, what I'm exploring now is I really don't see any reason why a lot of what we do is like mechanical to some degree. And also I am totally fine in a world of AI making things more mechanical so they can be better assisted by AI. I really, I think there's a future here where we can go from marketing summary to copy deliverable to if we have ecom briefs templatized that I could be populating all of those. Now all of a sudden I'm handing off like 80% of the campaign and the channel managers are just there to just improve it or inject new ideas. Like we are all the repetitive work of like, I've got to take, I've got to choose one of the hero headlines so that I can put it in my, you know, ecom brief that's going to the web designer. I think we could like compress that all down to like a 2-hour AI-assisted workflow. Um, so that's what I'm exploring now and it's like The process stays exactly the same. It just gets, it just gets compressed down really quickly. So, um, that's what, yeah, I've been tweeting about that and messing around with that. That is the two key pieces are templatizing everything and then just feeding those templates to Claude. And you need really good project instructions in the Claude project that says, hey, this is what you're doing. You're getting summaries. You're an expert copywriter and e-com marketer. You're getting summaries. You're filling out these templates. Is a little bit more robust than that, but like, that's basically the workflow that allows me to like, I'm getting way more of that done. I'm really only doing the e-com stuff right now, but it's, I'm getting pretty far downstream.

That's awesome. That's really cool. So how much time are you spending like a week on trying to build this out?

Oh dude, uh, mostly just weekends and yeah, yeah. Uh, it was 4th of July last weekend, so wasn't as productive, mostly barbecuing and drinking White Claws. Um, but yeah, the weekend before it's super, super fun, frankly.

Um, So yeah, yeah, I know. I love my kids more than anything. And like, this is like, would be like, just like so nice when I have some time on the weekends because I don't have time during the week, but pretty much any like free weekend time I get, or if they're like with their grandparents or something, I'm like, I'm like vibe coding something, playing around with something. So I love that. Totally. But yeah, share whatever, dude, share whatever you can on that. Like, would love to, uh, to stay updated on that because yeah, I agree with you in terms of the like templatization of things and like moving in that direction. That's partly why we're redoing the tiers and making it a little bit more formulaic so that way we can put things in, in, in, you know, AI. So yeah, I think I'm very interested in that one. We're still working and I'm going to get a little bit more involved myself on like a copy project just because like I'll get copy from like, you know, like Facebook ad headlines and stuff like that or like landing page. And we have one copywriter for the team. How many do you guys have?

We don't have a copywriter.

Okay, then boom, that's even like better constraint. But like she just doesn't have the bandwidth to be everywhere and do copy for everywhere. So I'm like, Can we just take stuff and take some brand tone and pass stuff and then like have a project where like it's essentially like an AI employee that like, you know, a growth manager can be like, hey, here's the overall creative brief, here's like the direction, give me like 5 headlines for—

Totally.

For this test.

Yeah, yeah. And that is— yeah, that's like a really interesting process to explore because it's also— I think it can happen both ways. It can be like, hey, performance creative teams, like I need 5 headlines copywriter. It could also be like, look, tier 3s, you just need 5 headlines. And then all of a sudden the copywriter just has a way more robust brief. And she could be— and I, dude, I think if I was a copywriter right now, I'd be having so much fun with AI because like ultimately I think the people who are getting the most out of it are good copywriters themselves. Like it's really easy to get generic, fluffy, like meaningless words. But if you have good taste and can kind of curate it, it seems super, super fun in my opinion. So like Yeah, she could be delivering all the copy up front and then email would have largely what they need. E-com has what they need. Um, so anyway, it's cool that someone could sit in that process right now. I'm kind of like bridging that gap.

Awesome. I love it.

Um, cool. I want to talk about Prime Day a little bit. You know, everybody's freaking out this week and I'm sure we'll get more data over the next couple of days. Prime Day, Prime Day 1, Prime Day 2 down about 40% year over year.

Oh, so day 1 and day 2 now.

Both, both days.

Okay.

Uh, we're down 40% year over year. Now the big difference is Prime Day was only 2 days last year. It's 4 days this year. So Amazon's projecting, I think I saw 18% growth for Prime Day, but you know, I'm like a, I'm like a OCD about comps. They're comparing 4 days to 2 days. They've doubled the length of the sale and they're, they say that they think they'll be able to grow Prime Day sales 18%.

So they think the total revenue is going to be 18% more.

Yes, but they're not even including, they're just comparing to the 2 days. Like if you're going to be super fair, like if you're going to be more fair about it, I wouldn't even call it super fair. You should compare it to 2 Prime Days and Thursday and Friday last year, right? That 4-day period, the back 2 would be significantly smaller compared to the 4 Prime Days this year. If you were being fair, they're not doing that. They're saying 4 days this year, 2 days last year, 18% growth. So each day is obviously going to be smaller. I think yesterday we got to comping Prime Day year over year, and then today will be about a full day of growth if you're looking at it through that lens. So, okay. So I've got that data point. I talked to Steve Cook this morning because I was like, I don't think anybody quite knows what's going on. And I'd love your perspective on this as well. Um, why is Prime Day down 40% or whatever? Why do, why does it need to be twice as long in order to just grow 18%? Um, Steve Cook says spending power, which we talked about with him a couple of weeks ago, is that looks like it's slightly up year over year in July. So that data point says consumer spending is more or less the same year over year. Um, and I guess those are the, those are the two big things. So my question for you, Cody, is I know you guys are not on Amazon, but for brands that are having a softer Prime Day than expected. What do they do from here preparing for the back half of the year?

Can I ask you? Turn around for you because— yeah, let me think about it. Just because, again, Prime Day is not necessarily a focus or thing for us. Obviously, if we have like a different sale, we'll think about it. But what are your take or thoughts? Like, do you— obviously it's clear that it's going to be spread out and hurt demand for those days if you spread it out over time. But do you think this is still an indication? Maybe economy is not 40% down, but, there's a lot of softness going on.

Right. And I think that's like, I think that is one thing that I found really helpful is Amazon has been so upfront and honest about their projections. They told me you don't get that from any, like, you don't have Shopify coming out and being like, we think Black Friday is going to be up 10% year over year. They are being incredibly clear. Prime Day is twice as long. There's twice as many Prime Days year over year. We're only going to grow 18%. Everybody sees, you see it in the headlines, Prime Day down 40% year over year. So yeah, just a really obvious acknowledgement of some sort of difference in consumer spending.

Also, don't you even think them spacing, like doing more days is an acknowledgement of that?

Yes, exactly. Okay. So that was going to be point number one was that Amazon's best in the business. Nobody's going to be better at understanding consumer spending and projecting it. Um, I think brands can sometimes get skittish about extending sales or going deeper on sales and it's like, okay, the The biggest e-commerce platform in the entire world is extending sales in order to barely grow year over year. So I think brands can be more aggressive in how they do that. Ridge has taken that approach really for the last like year and a half. We'll just like, we were, we did our first like Father's Day extended sale last year because we weren't happy with the way results had gone so we can extend it. And I just think, you know, we're as direct-to-consumer brands, like the, the, you get to write the rules to some degree, there's downsides and you have to think you're You're going to have to comp this stuff next year. If you're expecting to grow, you have to be thoughtful about it over the longer term. But also the reality is people are spending money differently. And if you do want to grow, like it might require extending sales or going deeper on discounts. So that'd be number one. And then the second one would be, and this is what I just saw in a couple of group chats was, um, just projecting down Q4. The other thing is as a D2C brand, you don't want to get caught with a ton of inventory because Black Friday. Is flat year over year or something, right? Like, um, you just have to be realistic. You have to take the data points you're given and be realistic about your expectations for the business. And that should lead to better inventory buying, which I think at least for us, we're making like right now. So this is a helpful data point for us to plan for November and December. Um, and we're just trying to hedge our bets a little bit in the case that, you know, we find it extremely hard to grow during Black Friday or something.

Yeah, I agree with both those points. Absolutely. Yeah. To watch what Amazon does. I was at like a, like a small Meta dinner the other night and like, yeah, pretty much everybody I talked to is like more discount, more promotion this year than years past. Right. It's just like what consumers need right now. Uh, obviously. So yeah, definitely. We're, we are even leaning, like we're, we will do our first actual ever sale for Black Friday. Uh, we've always leaned away. We're doing more, you know, promotions, which are mostly gift with purchases or like a kit discount. And then, and then same thing. Yeah. Like, yeah, no Prime Day for us, but we, we will definitely use again our Memorial Day promo, which is similar to our Black Friday promo, as, you know, hey, here's how this went. Do we need to adjust our forecast? Unfortunately, sometimes it's a little bit too late for some lead times. Sometimes we can still make some differences. But as you get, you know, some pretty large orders in there, lead times are get, get longer. So that's the challenge. But yeah, absolutely. A lot of reason, I think, to forecast Q4 conservatively and it's a lot safer.

Yeah, 100%.

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 Precinct. Precinct is an MMM. In most of my moms, they use 60-year-old regression models. They're not really built for D2C. Precinct, you can get readouts really quickly if something is changing, which again, D2C is really volatile. So you can't rely on an outdated MMM that you're only going to get one readout a quarter. One thing I love about Precinct so much, you're able to see the halo effect. So upper funnel spend, which is 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 going to 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, HoloSox, Coterie, and 100 more leading brands. So highly recommend checking it out. Go to prescientai.com/operators to book a demo today.

So the kind of the crux of this episode, we wanted to kind of dive deep on Meta. We— I've talked about this on the podcast a lot. We had a lot of issues with Meta in Q4 2024. We spent a lot of time in December and Q1 kind of testing into what I think is a better setup. Cody, it sounds like you're going through a similar thing. Can you give a lay of the land of your experience the last couple of months and how you've been looking at it?

Yeah, and definitely excited to hear what worked for you guys. I've heard some on the pod and some, some not, but definitely want to learn because we're, we're actively in the roadmap right now. I mean, I think we've been— I don't want to say struggling, but definitely degrees of struggling. Like, again, we grew, we grew 50% last year. We're doing a lot right. But even like Q4 was not really where we wanted it. And then just like very on and off this year. What we found every time we tested meta, like I think there's 3 things, right? Like it's always been very incremental for us, which is great. Like we've ran probably 4 meta holdouts this year so far, maybe 5, 40%, 45% incrementality in those regions. So like about half of our revenue and new customer revenue is driven by meta, which is like amazing. So like at least it doesn't feel like we're wasting money on, you know, no incrementality, but not always reaching as many new people as we want. And so the split of new versus repeat has not always been in our favor, although we have just fixed that, which I am very excited about. And then not always profitable. And so fortunately for us, we're incremental now. It's on new. Now we just need to get the overall efficiency down. And so that's what we're trying to do. And so definitely I'm going to— I can share kind of how I'm going about this roadmap and, and doing it, but would love to kind of know like what you guys found, like when performance was not great, how did you think about it? Like what did you look at in the account? How did you come up with like a hypothesis for, you know, what you should be testing?

Yeah. So I do want to talk to that, but actually I would love some more details from you. Uh, to, to, to pare back what you said, um, you guys, incrementality has never been an issue. It was around new driving incremental new customer revenue. That seems resolved to some degree. Now you're trying to make it more efficient. You were tweeting this week about rolling reach. You're talking about an issue with reaching new people. Like, how are you even diagnosing that as like a potential area of opportunity?

Yeah, what I'm, what I'm trying to do is like do like first principles thinking, just be like, oh, here's a roadmap or like what's working for other people. Be like, what are actually the issues in our account? Like why is our— and so like I spent a lot of yesterday and last night doing it. This is actually awesome. So our data analyst is, um, is out on paternity leave right now where I normally ask him to do some of this. Obviously you could do a lot of this in Meta. Um, I saw this guy that had a free MCP for Claude to hook up to Meta and it also can hook up to Snowflake and stuff. And so I've been just jamming on that and it'll just create like dashboards and BI tools and stuff like that. And it doesn't like refresh over time, but you can like get data just by querying. So I've been looking into that, just trying to look at, you know, rolling reach and things like that. Just like I think that was my hypothesis, like, is it a reach problem, you know? Right. And so just looked at a bunch, looked at rolling reach, looked at cost per 1,000 accounts, looked at at spend and new reach, looked at CPMs, conversion rates, just like, I don't know if you ever do this, but like, I feel like most, we do a good job being so in the weeds. Here's how we're pacing against forecast. Here's how this channel is looking on a 1-day click. Here's percent of new, but it's like so in the weeds and I don't think we do enough zooming out to look like, all right, like how is just this entire account strategy just like trending over time? Because sometimes you just like, unless you have a really good close eye on it, you wake up one day and you're like, I didn't realize our CPMs are up 30% or something like, because just like each day it goes up. Do you, do you ever notice that or feel like that?

I had that feedback to my team. This was probably like Q1 last year. Like one of my pet peeves is the media buyers will put in their columns will be spend and then ROAS. And I'm like, dude, there's like so many metrics in between spend and ROAS that like we should be hyper aware of because we we went through, and this, this was, yeah, this was Q1 last year. It felt like, it felt like death by a thousand lashes, basically. Like, we were, we were letting things get like marginally worse over time, and then you look up and you're like, dude, things are way worse like year over year.

So we needed better—

I feel that. Yeah, better year-over-year comparisons more frequently. And then we need to— can't just be like, well, Rose is down on Facebook 40% year over year, and it's like, well, why is it? Is CPM? Is it click-through rate? Is it conversion rate? Is it AOV? It's like, there's, there's, those are the metrics in between, uh, spend and ROAS that like, the columns should be set up that way so that you are forced to look at those all the time. So yeah, we've gone through that. I think we're better at it now, but for sure, there's always, always a conversation.

Do you ever get those? It's like, oh, performance is down. We should pull back spend. It's like, all right, like we should pull back spend, but then what should we do now?

Yeah, totally. 100%. Um, yes. Yeah, that happens all the time. Pulling back spend is the right call, but it's like, look, our jobs are not to just like move, move budget up and down forever, right? Like at some point you need to— oh, so actually we— and I've been talking with the team recently because I think we can get much better at this. Nick Sharma had a good video about— it's exactly what we're describing and it's not a novel concept. He called it funnel diagnostics and I was like, that's good. I'm like, we need to be doing funnel diagnostics more frequently. Because I mean, and there's some things I do get that it's tricky for media buyers because like in many ways there's nothing that you can do about CPM. It's something that you should be aware of. And honestly, actually, there's not, it's not as if there's nothing you can do about CPM. It's maybe the hardest one to control because there are certain times where it's just like, look, your purchase optimized campaigns are, the CPM is up 20% year over year and your ROAS is going to be worse because of it. But there are things like, I do think bidding strategies play a role in CPM. Um, targeting definitely plays a role. So if it's up or down year over year, you should better understand why, like we're doing more, um, non-purchase optimized events. So our CPM is naturally a little bit lower because we have less purchase optimized. So it's like, so then it's even breaking it down further. What is the CPM on our purchase optimized campaigns? Let's look at that. Um, so anyway, there's like this funnel diagnostic process of going from CPM to CTR where it's like, okay, if that's up or down, it's a lot of the same things. Is it targeting? Is it creative? What are we comping last year? And then you have conversion rate and AOV, which are like maybe more onsite things or landing page things. But like, this is the— at Ridge, I'm hoping our media buyers are like the torchbearers for funnel diagnostics. As soon as you get there, you begin working across teams. If there's a landing page issue, you can work with e-com, you know, We'd look at email capture, like if email capture is an issue or is not hitting our targets and you could work with the retention manager, but it all comes together in like those 5 columns that I just described. And I think we could do a better job diagnosing where the opportunities or issues are and then like kind of running that back up the organization.

For sure. I agree with that. How often, like obviously there's different levels where there's probably stuff you do daily and weekly, but like how often are you wanting your teams to do like that, like zoomed out look back of like a larger year over year, like here's how we're pacing.

Probably like every other week or something. I mean, it will change, right? Like if we're a week into our Father's Day campaign, even a couple days into our Father's Day campaign, like that, that's the way that we should be thinking about it. But like a true deep dive, I don't think it's something worth, unless it's, unless there's some sort of performance in the business that warrants it, then it's just probably kind of like a biweekly check-in.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I'm thinking, and I'm also thinking of like what we can automate. Where it's like, hey, if this goes up by a certain amount, like, let's get a notification or something like that. Just because there's so much that is going on in the business that it's sometimes easy to miss it. But that's like, like I'm going to tell my meta team, like, I want rolling reach like every month, just like every month. And I, or like every 2 weeks. And I saw someone like built a tool that actually like you can do this because otherwise you would need meta. And actually with Claude, I think you can do it as well. But yeah, I think rolling reach and then like cost per thousand accounts reached is like just seems to be such an important metric and just keeping an eye on that. And yes, I think a media buyer should do it, but like if you can just automate it somewhere to have like that report sent to you and then have like a trigger anytime it goes above a certain amount or increases a certain amount, like I think that could be helpful.

Yeah. So, so you did this diagnostic, you know, process. And you— and your takeaway was you think it's a reach problem. You're not reaching as many people. What were some of the metrics that you saw in that?

Yeah. So we're spending slightly more year over year, making less and making slightly less and reaching less people. So we're spending more money to reach less people. And so the people that we are serving ads to, you know, just frequency is higher, higher on them or they're not converting to the same degree. So, you know, costs are up like, again, and CPMs are, are up, but they're not up super significantly. We're also running probably 40 to 50% of our account on VO now. So that naturally brings CPMs up. But which I'm, you know, slightly skeptical about.

What is that?

VO? Like value optimization. Oh, okay. Because our AOV up, dude, our AOV up, our AOV is up almost 20% year over year. Got it. It's pretty crazy, but our CPMs are up with that. But so, but the CPMs are not significantly up. Like, that's not the cause of the problem. And that's also probably not something that is within our control, is my guess. Like, click-through rate is healthy. It seems like, you know, not that our ads couldn't be better, but that's not like a giant issue there. But we're just spending same amount and we're reaching less people over time. And the, the, the new percentage is slower than it should be. And there have been times or inflection points where it's gotten better and worse. One thing I noticed is, again, and like, I think you'll reach more people as you're spending more, but it's just very loose anecdotal correlation to reach and the times that we're performing really well. I just plotted out last 18 months or whatever, it started January 2024, um, until now, looked at reach reach, spend, rolling reach, you know, cost per 1,000 accounts reached. And it seems like when we are either doing strategies to purposely reach new people or we just happen to do it by other means, like that is when our business has performed the best and been most efficient. And like, I know that sounds like so simple, but like just zooming out, that's the finding that we're seeing.

Totally. Yeah, I think that, I think that makes sense. Can I ask What percentage of budget's going to Meta right now?

We're in the 60s. We— the challenge is, so last year we had— 2 years ago we were probably like 80% on Meta, maybe 70%. And so we launched TV, we launched YouTube last year, like, you know, worked with House and really validated a lot of those, got, you know, TV up to 20%, YouTube up to, you know, 10%, 15%. And we, I think, neglected Meta. So this year it's been like, let's get Meta working better. I don't want to say that was the wrong call. Definitely like YouTube has slipped. We definitely haven't had the bandwidth, you know, focusing on there. It's, it's so hard to know how much to spend on TV. Definitely want to chat through that another, another day with you. But so I think we're spending a lot there, but almost all of it is on purchase optimization. And I think we've really been trying to break through creative and because I thought we did a pretty good job of different objectives, but I creative is not necessarily being like the biggest lever that we need to reach new people. It seems like we have challenges there within our account.

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I ask that because we probably more than you guys, just because we have such a small, like, repeat buying behavior that, like, we constantly need to be reaching new people. And it's actually like, for the first— I've been at Ridge for a for almost 9 years now. Um, for the first like 4, our marketing strategy was basically just get in front of new people. And that's why we were like, we were sponsoring everything. We were sponsoring YouTubers. We were sponsoring newsletters. We were doing, you know, we would do live intent. We would do, we were on TV early. It was just like, we're, I would say this all the time. If we could get in front of largely male audiences at an affordable rate, it would just kind of work. We had like a good problem solution. You've got this old wallet. We've got this slim one. That was like the strategy. And that's why we had to take such like a diversified marketing mix approach so early. And I've talked about this, but there are pros and cons to that. You also could have argued we should have just gotten extremely good at meta back then instead of trying to figure out how to spend money in all these weird ways. But when I hear reach problem, and we've done like, this was also Q1 last year where I don't remember exactly if it were, if If it were a reach problem, but I felt we were too meta-centric. We had like probably 80% of our budget going to meta. And it's just like, uh, if 80% of your budget's going to meta purchase optimized campaigns, at least for us, that seemed bad. It was, and I had mapped out like growth and MER against meta as a percentage of budget. And it was the highest it's ever been. And we were kind of like, we seem to be hitting a ceiling. So one of our first approaches was just like to better diversify channels. And that was, March last year we launched Twitter, we launched YouTube. We like very quickly adjust and then like immediately saw improved results. Are you looking to do that at all?

Yeah, I think we're, we're probably going to dual path it. YouTube has been very good for us in the past. I think we just have not found the creative wins on it lately. So definitely going to like first try to improve efficiency there. We spend like tiny amount on influencer compared to what we spend on Meta. And, and so that's going to be a much bigger focus and changing the approach to that program, but definitely looking to that to bring in, you know, new audiences and, and get new reach. Um, so that will be a big one, potentially trying to do, to do some of that, but I think also looking to, you know, different strategies on Meta right now.

Yeah, right. Totally. Okay.

So, but it's, but, but yeah, on that note, so it's clear where it is clear we are overspending because we can. With Meta being very incremental, right, and not profitable, we can get it to be profitable by just spending less. There's some point with less spend where it actually is hitting metrics. And then we have two options. We can either— or three— just don't spend that money, but you probably aren't going to hit your volume goals. Spend that money in another channel or spend that money in Meta on a different strategy.

Right. And the answer is probably a mix of the back two if you want to be a growing brand.

For sure. 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 brands, even mediocre ones, get ripped off by SaaS vendors in 2025. So many of them are charging way too much, overpromising and underdelivering. 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 Richpanel so much. It's about half the price of the beautiful software that we used before. It was built specifically with AI in mind. We made the switch to Richpanel 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 little worried about it, not going to 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 CX team from 18 to 10 agents. Since not before Black Friday, but since onboarding to Richpanel 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 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 Richpanel. Richpanel 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. You can go live in under 14 days. So check out richpanel.com and tell them you heard about them from the Marketing Operators Podcast. All right.

So you're thinking channel diversification. I'll talk through the Meta media buying roadmap or the testing roadmap that we kind of walked through December of last year through like March of this year, because our experience was a little bit different. We actually like we went into Black Friday with a Geolift study on Meta, really just so— and we've been doing more and more of this We just want that incrementality readout right before we're making important budget decisions. So it was like 2 weeks leading into the week of Black Friday so we could get a readout for YouTube, for Meta. Those were 2 big paid social channels or 2 big like scalable channels at the time so that we could know relative to one another which one's better performing and we can make a slightly better budget decision going into the week of Black Friday. And what we found at that point was Meta was really not very incremental. We were in like the teen percentage points and it was like, that is not— we were not efficient and we were really essentially not driving anywhere near the lift that we would need to. Um, so it was a slightly different problem.

Why did you think?

Well, I'll, I will say like we were just kind of confused by the whole thing. Like I did a lot of deep diagnostics at the time and, um, I don't think there was a clear answer to me aside from we were 100% purchase optimized. Because the thing that was confusing about it was, and there aren't many times where we've seen this, where like it was actually a discount to what we were measuring, like even in Northbeam, like it was less than our one-day click ROAS. So it was like, so that's crazy, right? Like you're seeing people click your ad, come through, convert just within a one-day click basis that goes up over time. And then now we're getting a house readout that says, um, it's actually only a fraction of that was incremental. So it was like, well, what are you going to do? I mean, you're, you have ads that people are clicking and buying, like you're doing everything you're supposed to do. It just seems as if they would have purchased otherwise. That's what, that's what the house readout told us. Um, so from that perspective, it seemed as if, oh, hey, yeah, really just 100% of purchase optimized campaigns, spending 100% of our meta budget on purchase optimized campaigns, probably not the right idea. These people are so qualified that they would purchase otherwise. That's what the data is telling us. So like, how do we How do we, you know, test out of that to get more incremental results?

You're— we're— in our case, we're reaching people who— again, it's, it's still incremental for us, but we're reaching people. It's just more expensive than we want. We're reaching people who are existing customers. You were actually just reaching people who would have purchased anyway. So like, it was actually not incremental.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so that's why there's like— what you and I are describing are pretty different issues. And that's why we moved to We just started spending more dollars up funnel. So we spent a lot less. I mean, we did what we're in the middle of, we're at the very end of November and December at this time. We end up spending way less on meta. So like just from the point you made earlier, it's like, let's just move ourselves way down the cost curve.

You went AppLovin, right?

We were seeing incredible results on AppLovin and I feel very confident in the dollars that we spent on AppLovin at the time. I also think these issues are correlated to some degree. Like, if we're being honest, like it comes out months later that AppLovin was seeing who Meta was bidding on in the, what's it called, the Audience Network. So like, it did seem as if, and this was a part of like one of the investment firms, like short reports or whatever was like, hey, it looks like AppLovin is basically front-running bids for Meta. So I do think AppLovin performing as well as it did made Meta worse at the time.

Sure.

It made Meta less incremental. Yeah, totally. So we don't need to hit on this point too much, but I think Meta became incremental as soon as we pulled back spend on AppLovin. And actually the only other point that would make there is in hindsight, what we should have done is just pulled back even further on Meta. The thing was AppLovin was driving very incremental purchases and revenue more incremental than Meta. It was just cannibalizing Meta completely. So in a perfect world, we would have just like basically switched those budgets for the time being. Um, and, and that would have been the most efficient thing to do. And we ended up kind of in like a middle ground where we pulled back Meta.

What percentage of your, of your media mix was Meta prior to, you know, the original not great test? And then like, what did you pull it down to?

So it was probably, you know, probably 60% or something. And then for December it was like 25% or lower. Okay. It was a huge— it was a huge pullback. So we pull back spend quite a bit. We test— we have a number of house tests that we ran over time, but we really just started— began testing top of funnel as a percentage of top of— when I say top of funnel, we bid, we optimize for view content events. So that's technically a conversion event as far as Meta is concerned. Our reps jokingly call it like the highest point in the bottom of the funnel. It's like, but it's view content and what I like about the funnel. Yeah, yeah. The top of the bottom of the funnel, which is like, I think a little bit unfair. We're bidding for PDP views or we're optimizing for PDP views., and we're landing people on landing pages. What we're optimizing for is someone hitting like 2 or 3 pages. We're optimizing for a browsing user, which is like—

By the way, it's TOBOF. TOBOF. If you are curious out there.

Yeah. All right, cool. Coin in the new acronym. Um, so that was like our main optimization event. And the reason why we moved to that was because, and this was a sign that meta was like not working the way that we intended through the week of Black Friday. That was one of our highest performing campaigns was something that was just optimizing for view content. So So not only did meta become a significantly smaller percentage of total budget, but also we had this random couple campaigns optimizing for view content that we were spending a lot of money on. So we came out of this period and say, hey, let's explore that strategy further. How much of our budget can go to this? We also thought more critically and kind of reoriented what content was running for different optimization events. So like, thinking we're trying to introduce ourselves to people for the first time in The view content optimized campaigns. Let's run more videos there, more problem solutions, things like that. Those are a little bit softer because I'll also say the process that we went through is not particularly scientific. Like, uh, our, our, um, director of media buying described it as like, we're kind of like, we're kind of like in a dark room and we just have like a flashlight and we're just kind of like searching around for like signs of success. I would love for it to have been perfectly scientific, single variable tests that we're like identifying over time. This was let's try a bunch of new things at once. If directionally we're moving in the right direction, let's continue doing that. And that was anyway, that was like the initial test.

Can I talk about that for a second? Yeah. So we have the same house rep. We have, we have Noah and obviously, you know, both, both have worked with Nick as well. And I thought one of the points of, you know, or ways we should be testing and thinking about like incrementality is to limit variables and control variables. And one of those variables being like seasonality is like if you test things at different times, you can't necessarily infer results because it could be due to that. But and so I was expecting to do a lot of two-cell tests or even three-cell tests with like same different strategies at the same time. And we're actually taking an approach that's like account-wide holdout, change one thing, run them sequentially, and then just see like, does that change overall account readout. Yeah. Is that— and that's kind of how you guys tested, I believe.

That is how we did it at the time. Okay.

I—

okay. So yeah, what you just described, I've thought quite a bit about. And actually, I think, yeah, seasonality is a big thing. What we did for this period of time, this like 8, 10-week period, was running different strategies. There were 2 and 3 cell tests involved. We ran them sequentially. We saw IROs increase over that time. And by By the time we hit like late January, February, we were getting like, honestly, like some of the best readouts we've ever gotten from Meta. Um, but seasonality is a factor there that we're not adjusting for.

Um, Nick's point though, when I, when I pushed back on Nick's point was like, we're trying to find a big enough improvement in performance that like it's not going to be caused by seasonality alone. Like if you're trying to find like a few percent swing, like you should probably get more precise, but like we're also, cause you're also making big— you're not changing attribution settings. You're not doing a 7-day versus a 1-day click, right? Like at these times, that's like the button color. You're testing moving 30% of our account to a new strategy or something.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So, so I agree with Nick in that case then. Yeah, we were looking— we needed to make such significant improvements that like we could just do it sequentially and the improvements couldn't possibly be, you know, knock on wood, couldn't couldn't possibly be completely described by seasonality. Um, but it's definitely a factor. I mean, even to the point that I made earlier, during that period, we began spending less on AppLovin. And another, like, another big thing was we launched new products towards late January. And this was a big learning for us is we found new products are extremely incremental. We had one readout that was so incredibly good. And we saw, like, I forget, 30% of our budget was going towards new product launches. And we were like, well, that is a really big variable in this test. Now we've got this great readout, but this one is significantly different than early January when we had no new products. So then we began breaking that out and we said, oh, actually new products are, I've said this before, 4 to 5x incremental ROAS by far the most profitable.

So, and did that change your, your distribution in your account and have more spend and focus on new?

Yeah, totally. So we've, and that, that's been a big change year over year, but we've also in parallel began, how do we drive better incremental kind of evergreen results? And that's when it's come down to like the video content, the event optimization, the percent that we're spending on that event optimization. So those are kind of the large, you know, learnings that we unearthed. It's really dictated a lot of the strategy for the last 6 months.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that and I think that's what I was going to dive into today in our account is like almost like the, the data that I looked at is like reach and new reach segmented by product offering or line or like naming convention. To see like, are we doing a worse job reaching new people on Miracle Balm because we've spent probably $100 million on that SKU versus like, is our tinted moisturizer doing a better job and should we have more of our investment going into that?

And then are you guys running—

well, are you running partnership ads? Yes. And finding a lot of success with it, actually. And we're essentially 10x-ing. That's part of our influencer focus as well, is like, how do we then just like get more in the, in the funnel pipeline. Yeah, we have, I would say probably 30 to 40% of our account is on partnership ads right now. And efficiency is probably, it's like very similar. What I don't know is reach. That's another one I want to look at and test.

Because that one, that one, that's something that we've found success with. And I think these are, okay, well, I'll backtrack a little bit.

Bit.

This is an example for us of, um, it's not, it's not solving the reach problem, but for us it's solving the incrementality problem. Um, and it's really just like, how are we, how are we like repositioning Ridge in a very unique way? The best example, actually the few examples that I have are one, we were running this like Joe Rogan clip last year in like August, and it was performing extremely well. High click-through rate, high conversion rate, by far best ad in the account. Um, and I was like, oh, we must be reaching new people here. So then what I did was I actually did rolling reach just for that ad. So you can look at like how many people, I'm not going to get the, how many people did I reach like year to date, not including that ad and how many impressions did I serve? And then you could add that ad back in and say what percentage of the people that I reached with the Joe Rogan ad were new to the account year to date. And it was extremely small. Everybody had seen our ads already, so it wasn't solving the reach problem. What it was solving was that they were interested in this content. Um, they were probably, I don't, this is a little bit vague.

And that was an existing product as well.

Existing product.

Yeah.

We're selling gunmetal wallets. Um, but I think that idea where it's, hey, you've reached all these people. You just need to, you just need to really show them something that feels new in order to get them to act. Um, Joe Rogan's an example. Partnership ads are an example. That's why I brought that up. We've been seeing success there. And I think it's a similar thing where where it's not necessarily new people we're reaching. It's not even necessarily new people getting to the site, but they are now converting because they're ready to. So we're driving better incremental results. And then Nunes is obviously an example of that where it's like, look, we've got 10 million Ridge Wallet customers. We've served billions of impressions over the last just couple of years. People don't need to know what it is. They need to have a design that they want. So when we launch the cool tattoo design, it ends up performing extremely well. So we're trying to find those like pockets of of newness that like drives better incremental results. But to my point, not necessarily reaching new people.

All right. So here's, here's what I wrote down. Tell me if I'm missing anything or anything about it. So there's new products to reach new audiences. There's new products for the same audiences. There's old existing products, new audiences. And then you have new message with same product and same audience. Yeah, just like the different ways to maybe think about improving performance. Totally. Anything that seems to be missing in there?

No, I think you got it.

I think that's an interesting way to think about it though, because I think so much of our time has been how do we improve reach? But I think, yeah, I think that's really interesting. Um, it's like those are probably the different levers and different things I think to test through and just kind of making it like systematic for that. Because I think partnership ads is interesting and we have had a lot of success with that. And so I'm curious to look there as well. Like, does it seem like we are reaching differently or we're just hitting them up with a different message, right, than what they've been exposed to before? More just like creative fatigue, but not creative fatigue for reaching new, just creative fatigue for like giving a new message or like a new reason to buy now for existing.

Because also, do you know how many people you've reached over— like, were you looking at a 2-year period?

Yeah, I don't know the numbers, but it's millions and millions.

You guys are going to run out of people. Everybody's going to run out of people. Like, there's only— I guess you have international markets now, too. But, you know, whatever. There's how many women? How many women could possibly buy Jones Road in the US? And it's like you for sure hit all of them once over the last 2 years.

So here's the— yeah. And again, product development is a really big focus and a lot of it will be for next year. We have a, a conversion lift with Meta right now for millennials because we've tried to reach millennials and our spend has continued to like, we'll make creatives that we think are good for millennials and our spend has continued to go to an older audience. And so we were like, let's just break out spend. So we gave it its own, its own ASC, you know, its own campaign, but actually just like limited the age groups that it can, can go to. It has the same exact cost per incremental as in a conversion lift compared to our like standard, you know, so it's in a sandbox. So like, I haven't looked at the reach metrics and things like that, but to me, they're— that is promising. And I'm trying to think how that gets incorporated into this like overall test roadmap that we, you know, want to do. But there are— we, we probably have to look at the data. We've probably reached way less millennials than we have older customer— older audiences.

And so, or at the very way lower frequency.

Sure, sure. And I think like maybe it's a— maybe it's— we just— the same way you took view content up to 40% of your account, like maybe just this one campaign on purchase optimizing and the creative is very millennial specific. There's a ton of partnership ads in there. Maybe that just becomes 40% of our account. We just run that for a test or that's one. Maybe we reach— we go to reach specifically with them. Like maybe we— maybe we don't need a reach campaign or whatever view content campaign. To reach them, we just have to spend more on them in general, you know, and like, totally spend to it with its own campaign. Maybe we do have to reach them. But I'm very— as much as we're struggling right now, I'm very excited about this test, the millennial test showing up. Energized. Yeah.

Energized. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I was talking to someone. I did. I've been feeling this hardcore, but like they were saying how— I mean, in reality, I've got like half a tweet drafted up that says this, but like our jobs are basically just to, well, at least from a paid media perspective, allocate budgets across like a ton of different cost curves. And what you're saying is like, yeah, you're, you're really far up on the, um, Gen X. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Gen, Gen X cost curve. You, you should probably spending less there and you're in, you're at a completely different place on the millennial cost curve. You're on a completely different place of the, uh, you know, You guys are in the UK? Yeah. The UK cost curve, right? And it's like, you basically are trying to allocate dollars as efficiently as possible across like all these different dimensions. Um, and it's cool. And we're in a very similar spot where we found, going back to my point around the new products, I was actually really worried last year that the new product launches performed really well on Meta just because we were cleaning up demand from like emailing millions of people, sending big SMSs. It's all over the site. I'm like, I'm worried these people would convert regardless. Was not at all the case. I couldn't have been more wrong. These things are like multiples more incremental than everything else. We are at a way different place on the newness cost curve than we are trying to sell black and gunmetal wallets. So it's like you're just trying to navigate your way to different parts. And, um, and it's one of those things that's just never perfect, but like you have to, as long as if you're getting it directionally correct, you can kind of feel that in your business, which is super exciting.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm, I'm excited to see that tweet because that's like a hard one to summarize. And a few characters. I might have to be along for you.

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That's a great question. And I agree with that. And I think that's something that Um, it seems to be working really well for a lot of brands. I've talked to Nick as well about a brand that was spending like a ton and all on purchase, but that, that was their strategy. Just being like very specific, like upfront on who it's for, like overly specific. Like if you are a millennial, like AG1 does a pretty good job of this as well. And they have, um, tailored landing pages. I think Loop Earbuds does a really good job, I've heard. So I definitely agree with that, like horizontal scale. Uh, not doing an amazing job of it with right now. I think we're doing a better job on the creative with partnership ads. We're essentially running them to the same landing page. And so we are actively working on our roadmap specifically for those millennial personas because we still want to get the overall efficiency down, right? And that'll help, you know, scale. Um, but I think definitely, so like a lot of the, uh, a lot of the ads that we are running are mom-focused and a lot of partnership ads. So like we're going to brief a lot more creators on those mom-specific And then how do we get those landing pages to closer match those? Um, at the very least, like our images just need to show millennials on them and not older people. And like, that's hard to do on a whole site, but like on a satellite site on a funnel, that's much easier to do. I even actually am curious about like our funnel and like, as we run things from a landing page to a quiz, like I don't, we've never tested that on millennials. Like maybe that performs differently. Um, so like even like the layout of the funnel, we're going to going to test and experiment with.

Yeah, totally. I mean, like, even the quiz sounds a bit more Gen X to me, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, Zoosk is like the dating site for Gen X plus, and they, they run a bunch of like open web funnels, you know, like how to find your life partner or whatever. It's just not, not as much of like a 30, 31-year-old.

Yeah, not, not, not, not totally. Yeah. So I think probably shorter funnel, like, you know, creative styles are even different. So Oh yeah, I think you have to tailor it. I think we can do a better job. So that's part of the reason I'm excited is because we, we probably did like a minimum viable product where we have the creative, but we don't have the full funnel. And I think if we're getting good performance with that, it just shows that like as we test into more of that, it's worth dedicating the resources to do so.

Totally. The one thing, at least the way that I've been thinking about it, is I don't mean to blow up Dan's spot, but like everybody should check out the Create ad library. It's not a, it's not a big lift. Okay, dude, it's actually even cooler than that. It's not a big lift. They have 5 reasons. They're only slightly tailored. It's a lot of, a lot of them have the same reasons. It's really just like the hero image and the headline that are like changed for these different personas. I've been building them out for, I've been building out similar looking pages for some of our different categories and even like a little bit more niche, like silicone rings, or I'm doing one for the women's wedding bands now. I did it for travel, etc. And I've actually been using ChatGPT to write the reasons and then I'm just like plugging those into a template and I'm like, oh yeah, the vision's here where if this were to work, which is still a question mark for us, like we could have so many of these. It could just be a part of even small launches could be like, it's actually not really tied to launches, but like if we're seeing what, uh, women's wedding band work, I'm like, oh yeah, we could be creating 2 of these a week or like 5 of them in a weekend. Like this is not is not all that hard. So that's a sort of like, and it's strategy, persona-based targeting that I think will help with horizontal scale and feels more achievable than ever before. Aggressive templatization. Aggressive templatization is what I'm saying, man. You know, I did send one of your guys' ads to my team just yesterday. It was this, it's a shot of the hero kit. And it says Busy Mom Starter Pack. Busy Mom Starter Pack Zero Kit. Dude, I'm sure. I forget where I think someone shared it on Twitter actually. And I was like, this is great. And what I liked about it was I told the team, I'm like, yeah, it feels like it could be busy mom here, but it could just as easily be something else.

Someone that's working same, same kit or maybe different kit, but Coastal Grandma Starter Pack.

100%. And my team will sometimes say like, yeah, we should create a kit called, you know, like the, um, Um, uh, you know, whatever, college kid kit. And I'm like, we don't need a new kit. We've got all these kits on the site. Let's just say it's for college kids at the ad level, maybe in the 5 reasons page. And like, maybe that works. And it's that level of like, uh, it's like just repackaging that like, um, we could be doing more of.

For sure. For sure. No, it's helped. Again, we can do way more of it. And so we're going to, we're going to plan and test, but I agree with that.

So coastal grandma, huh? That's, that's what's crushing right now. Yeah.

That's our, that's our Gen X audience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Well, cool, man. All right. Any other meta points you want to hit? I feel pretty good about that rundown.

Yeah, that was helpful. I think that answered all my questions. So where are you guys at today? Like, do you feel like you're at a good level? What's your account like? Do you still have a lot on view content? Do you have a lot more of your spend on new products? Like, where are you guys at today?

Oh yeah. So we have A lot more of our spend on new products. That's, that's for sure been— this year's been super spotty. We've had some like fantastic months and then like June was fine. So we're like, and I've said that before, like, like, so some weeks have been like really okay. And then other weeks are like absolutely crushing. Um, that's largely dictated by new products. I tell Sean this all the time, but like, I think it is the most impactful thing we can do for our business right now, the EDC business. The, the most impactful thing we could do to our business is introduce really large TAM categories. So we're excited about wedding bands and travel and things like that. But if we're just talking about making the EDC business bigger and more efficient, it's new wallet designs. It's like the easiest money we'll ever make is just like new cool stuff. And then now that we validated that we're not in fact just like cleaning up existing demand, that we're driving extremely incremental and profitable results, We have a new product right now and it's like 30% of our total budget on meta. We're spending like, you know, $20,000 a day or whatever. So yeah, so, so that, that's the big one. We have targets now for top of funnel. So we're always running top of funnel, these view content optimized campaigns. It's often not at 30% of the account. It's often smaller, but it kind of ebbs and flows with where we are above and below target. So it's like if purchase optimized isn't performing, but top of funnel is, then it it can, you know, creep up to 20, 25% of the lifetime.

What do you consider like, uh, top of like view content performing? Is that like based off an incrementality factor?

Yes. Yeah. So we've like, we, and we've ran a number of top of funnel lift studies this year now, and we just have a relationship between like what we observe there and what we're seeing in, um, Northbeam. And so we have a Northbeam target that we use on a day-to-day basis. And then if we're above that target, we can increase spend.

That makes sense for sure. I feel like it would be interesting to like figure out— I don't know what the metric would be if it's like rolling reach or new reach or cost per 1,000 accounts. And like as that begins to dip to like, you know, put more spend into that and just like toggle it based on that.

Super cool idea. That would— I mean, that makes total sense. It also like it seems different in and out of promo periods a little bit where I'm like, I could also see it being Uh, you know, hey, in, in late April, early May, before we're getting into Memorial Day and Father's Day, like it should be a higher percentage of budget. We also see that kind of happen regardless where that top of funnel seems to more often outperform purchase optimize. So, so when I say that, I just mean it is, it is closer or above its target more than purchase optimize is, right? So relative to each of their targets, it is like quote unquote performing better. And that is when it would become a larger percentage of budget. And it feels like that naturally happens outside of promo periods. So not only does it seem to be hitting our targets, but we're also theoretically building the funnel, right? We're reaching new people. We're doing it more cost effectively. Um, then we go into promo periods and the purchase optimized stuff seems to hit budgets and be the most scalable.

For sure. For sure. My question— last, last question on this. Like, so did you go straight to 40%? I know you were running before that. Did you go like, oh, let's test 10, then that worked. Let's go 20. Let's go 30. How'd that shake out?

No, we went straight to like, I think we went straight to 40%. We were taking big swings. Yeah. And it was also like, at 10%, I'm like, it's just, it'll be too noisy. I'm like, let's just like, let's just figure out whether there's like any sort of potential here. Because the last thing that I wanted was Um, you know, inactionable results. I really don't just want to go another 3 weeks and be like, well, it's 5% better and it was 10%. So like, let's creep it up to 20%. I'm like, let's take, let's take big swings. We were totally just throwing stuff at the wall, running tests sequentially, trying to get incremental ROAS to improve over time and then measure, well, what are the changes within that? And that's, uh, event optimization, percent of budget, whether there's newness or not. And that kind of has, has guided the strategy. The truth.

Love it. And, um, were you on 2-week tests? Like, how long were you letting each go for?

Or 1 week? They were like 2-week tests. They might have even been more. I don't know off the top of my head, but at least 2 weeks.

Okay, cool.

The other thing that I'll say is just, just quickly, because we, we've taken this approach of like, and I know you have as well, you, you were describing it earlier, but like really measuring different ways to spend like in a silo, right? Like we did for Father's Day, we ran whitelisting tests tests, or sorry, partnership ads, they had their own house test. So it was like, we just want to understand, we're not worried about the account level. We just want to understand how this $80,000 in budget performed. So we've been doing that. And then we have all these strategies and these readouts. And then we're like assembling how we want to spend all of our budget from there.

Yeah, I love that. That makes sense. Yeah, I think like there's probably some level of like, tactical test, whether it's like a sandbox or not, where it's like, all right, let's just test like partnership ads on the side or let's test this campaign style. And then like if that seems to be working, let's get and go and make that a big part of our account and test that with an account-wide test.

Totally. 100%.

Yeah.

And we're— yeah, you're absolutely right. We're going to do that. I think we're in the middle of that now is like a full meta account holdout. So you can test these strategies, you put together your like whole account strategy, do a whole channel holdout, then you go from there.

For sure. Yeah.

Love it. All right. That's a wrap on another episode. Thank you again for listening. Thank you to our sponsors, Motion, Richpanel, AfterSell, Prescient, and Revo. As always, like and subscribe, leave reviews. I've been reading those and we'll see you again next week.