How to Get New Reach on Meta: Tactics & Data for Ecommerce Marketing

Last year, 6% of revenue attributed to our travel ads came from non-travel products. But for this period of time that we were looking at, it was over 40%. All of a sudden, we'd given Meta the ability to optimize and take credit for purchases of orders that we didn't really want to be generating with those ads and those ad dollars.

The non-conditional pixel is almost like, hey, find a rich customer who also is interested in travel. But when you had a separate event or a different pixel, find a travel customer.

I was inside this ad account. It was just a mess. It was so hard to see what was going well, what wasn't going well. In reality, all of it probably wasn't going well because they're trying to do too much all at once. We're here on episode 111 of the Marketing Operators Podcast. Guys, how we— I guess this is the first Connor, Cody, Connor episode in a while, so it's good to be back with the trio. How we doing?

I'm feeling good. I did my first Indian wedding this past weekend. Have you guys been to one of those?

I haven't, but I've heard they're unbelievable. And I think Cody was in an Indian wedding, so I'm sure—

I have been. Did you do a Bharat?

Yeah, we did. Uh, no, we didn't. But yeah, but some— my wife is Indian, so I had like a half Indian wedding. But I've been to a bunch. It's— they're fun, right?

They were a blast. Yeah, it made me feel old. I woke up Sunday morning and I was like, my ankles were hurting, my knees were hurting, my back was sore. Uh, so yeah, I'm feeling good now, but I, I needed a couple— I needed a good 36 hours of recovery.

Did you do like— was it a one-day thing or was it like a whole, whole multi-day production?

It was a multi-day production. I was a part of one of the dances.

I got—

I wore a— I wore a kurta.

So I looked—

look sick Friday night. Then we did the baraat— or Friday night. Then we did the baraat Saturday, which for those unfamiliar, for those who haven't had the pleasure of going to an Indian wedding, the groom gets like paraded in to the wedding ceremony area and it's just like a big party.

It is.

It was a blast.

Yeah, no, they're— they're really fun if you haven't been. The, the funniest part of mine is, you know, my side is not great at dancing. It's just all like, you know, Jewish uncoordinated people. And then like my, my wife's side is so good at dancing, it was just like so clear to tell who was from what side. Totally, totally. Also, Zane is totally going to clip this, 100%.

I was going to say, editor's note, we got to get a, a little overlay of Connor and his, and his outfit from the weekend.

Yeah, have that be in the thumbnail. Have that be the thumbnail.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's get into it. We want to start today off with, uh, some more reach testing tactics. I think we went deep, Connor, when, uh, we recorded our episode on some of the, uh, hey, what do you do first, second, third on tactics to, uh, unlock new reach for your brand and your paid media accounts and elsewhere. So Cody said he's also doing a lot of reach testing right now. So Cody, I wanted to start off there as like a continuation of the conversation that Connor and I had. So. Can you speak to what you're doing to test new reach right now?

It was so good, by the way, that episode I thought was really good. And I have tweeted in the past, like asking if anybody had like data on if, you know, there are times where you need to like break out ad accounts or pixels or whatever. And I hadn't really gotten great convincing. I feel like there's a lot of like theories. I think Connor's data that he had based on the, you know, the custom events and cross-category stuff and the Northbeam stuff was like, the most compelling data that I've seen. And so we're looking into that now as well, 'cause I didn't think or know that you could pull by it. So I think that was super interesting. And then obviously you did test it. So I was very, you know, I was in the car going to New York on Saturday when I was listening and I sent a Whispers Flow Slack to my team. I was like, you know, scheduled it for Monday, but I was like, hey, like if you guys listen to this, like we gotta look into ARIA. So I'm excited about that 'cause I think that's one cool thing.

Cody, what are you So like, how are you taking that? And because if I remember correctly, Connor, you were basically— you're optimizing your, I think, travel pixel, your travel event in your campaign setup for that specific purchase event versus your like overall purchase event, right? So Cody, how are you— what's like the application in Jones Road Beauty?

Let me like reset it for everybody because it'll have been a while since the episode came out. We faced an issue a couple weeks ago where our travel ads were no longer generating the revenue that we wanted them to. And it wasn't as even, it wasn't even as if the ROAS for Meta had like, you know, fallen off a cliff. It was, it was worse. And then the entire category was struggling. So we were trying to diagnose what the issue was. And what we found was just because of a number of decisions we had made, we'd moved to a non-conditional pixel. So the pixel was firing across all purchases. We'd consolidated our travel ads from their separate ad account into another ad account. And then there was also a creative component too. And I don't want to overlook that. There was just a number of things contributing to, um, there were a number of differences in how we were setting up our travel-related ads. And because of that, we saw a much higher percentage of revenue from our travel ads drive non-travel revenue. Last year, 6% of revenue attributed to our travel ads came from non-travel products, which I think is just negligible. That's always going to happen. But for this period of time that we were looking at, it was over 40%. So it was all of a sudden we'd given Meta the ability to optimize and take credit for purchases of orders that we didn't really want to be generating with those ads and those ad dollars. And that's really what we were trying to solve. And that's what Chloe finds so compelling and like, oh, hey, if you're signal engineering, kind of structuring your accounts a little bit more creatively that you might better align Meta with, you know, your ultimate objective of what you're trying to sell.

Yeah, I feel like it's like the way that you, you know, the non-conditional pixel. So just for everybody, that's like just your standard, you know, um, purchase event. It's almost like, hey, find a Ridge customer who also is interested in travel. But when you had a separate event or a different pixel, it's, um, it's find a travel customer. And I think that's, at least to me, the distinction. I'd be curious if somebody's like actually technical and understands a pixel better, but it's That's it. Like, what were your, what were your reach metrics? Like, outside of looking at, you know, the product breakdown, like, did you see anything in terms of new visit changes between them? New versus repeat split in Northbeam? Like, did you see anything on, on that campaign when you made the switches?

We didn't see much of a difference in percent new visits. I mean, the big thing is like average order value changes. The other thing that I'll say here that we've observed a number of times is even in like the most vanilla sort of default setup, We've been able to get travel ads to work if everything is clicking. Like if we've got good ads, good offer, if it's all working, then the, then the vanilla setup like will drive the results that we're looking for. But it's as soon as like there's not great content in the account or for whatever reason, if, if all of a sudden Meta has a difficulty in acquiring carry-on customers, we'll see it start to drift down and the average order value will go from being $360 where it should be to $140, which means the vast majority of purchases are coming from, you know, $100 wallets. Um, so that's really where it's just, that's the data that we're paying the most attention to. It's funny because you bring it up in terms of reach, and there's obviously a reach component. There must be a targeting component to all of this. Um, what we're looking at more than anything is like the post-click metrics of what, what kinds of revenue are we driving? What are the order values? When we spend money on these travel ads, are we seeing a lift in our travel top-line revenue, that subset of revenue that we're looking at every day. Um, so yeah, but I'm glad you got some, some takeaways as far as reach goes.

Well, no, I mean, just curious, just because theoretically, right, if it— you think it's a different customer, which is why you're doing the different event, then it should improve reach theoretically, you know, because you're reaching it. Totally. Yes, totally. Um, So that was why I was just curious. No, so we've, I mean, I've thought about it a lot and we've looked into it, but we never have broken out. We have things on the same pixel and I think yes, creative is extremely important and can't overlook that, but I think there's still times where it makes sense. I've talked to, for example, Mandarra, I blogged out about this and he's essentially said it potentially makes sense as long as there's a big enough difference between the two audiences. If A lot of it is the same and there's like, I'm just making up numbers, but let's say it's like 40% overlap. It probably doesn't make sense and it's probably better to consolidate. But if, if you're, you know, 6% overlap, like, hey, that's a very different signal and you might have to feed Meta that. And so I also liked how you looked at the data and remind me, you did a combination of like the custom events as well as Northbeam to see the, the what percentage of other product revenue is coming from?

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Okay, cool. I like that. And then, and then you have different pixels set up or you have like custom events that you're optimizing for?

We have, we've always had different pixels. We've been in the process of trying to figure out if we want to consolidate back down. Um, in which case we'd use custom conversions. And this is what I was saying earlier. Like, I'm still so split. It still seems, I get there's like cleanliness. And it's more by the book as far as our Meta reps are concerned to have a single pixel with custom conversions. I still am not quite sure on what the upside of it is when like we continue to see data that the conditional pixels seem to be good and effective in driving the revenue that we want them to.

I think there are also downsides to custom events, I believe. I think you don't get all of the modeling that Meta can do because it's a custom event.

Yeah, we were, we tested it early on and it was really good out of the gate.

Meta knows the system.

It slowed down for us.

—custom event.

I don't know if it's low cost again, that's what's performing best.

But standard, uh, yeah, yeah, we also—

we don't need to get too into the weeds here.

I've heard a lot of people say when they—

conversions, which are different than custom events, custom conversions are you just telling Meta that you want to be optimizing for a subset of purchases.

Account has moved to incremental attribution. We're still supposed to get a lot of the benefits of CAPI and everything else.

Got it. Okay, cool.

Good, good, good, good to know. Um, yeah, because I've had— I guess I don't know, but I've had some We've had some issues optimizing for some of the custom stuff. And I think you miss out on some. So maybe if you have like a ton of purchases, it's fine.

But yeah, so we're, we always have like some mix of lowest cost value for us is huge. And then like incremental attribution has worked and we're still running it, but it's, it started off hot and we peeled it back a little bit. But I talked to this guy, much lower AOV last week, and he's saying their entire account is, is almost incremental attribution now. And that like he was showing me some graphs and it's like, hugely up and to the right in their overall account performance since they started doing that. So I've seen it become like the entire account very quickly.

Yeah, I've seen some takes recently that's like, oh, there's no reason not to just do it. I'm like, no, like you should test everything. Like, like, you know, what works for one might not work for, for somebody else. For us, yeah. So this is the third time we've tested it. I guess the model has changed multiple times. And the biggest thing that really got me interested is, You know, again, we've really tried to push new reach and like AEB is really no longer a thing.

thing and is going away.

And so I, from what I, you know, have heard that it kind of like got pushed into this IA model. And so, yeah, we tested it with a, with a conversion lift and, and it looks great. So I would say we have the majority of our account on it. We still have some like old campaigns with VO.

I think I've talked about it before.

We made the mistake to your point where we pushed our account too heavy into VO and it was good short term, long term. It, it, it had a pretty big downsides. We were just paying more for every, you know, impression we, we drove. And yes, it was higher quality of audience, but it just, it just didn't scale. Right. Because not everybody's high value. So what I love about this one is our, our CPMs are much lower. Our reach is much better. We found some interesting data. So cost per incremental, better, right? Um, everything better. Click-through rate worse, actually, right? So CPM is way lower, click-through rate worse. Cost per checkout or cost per add to cart better, but we were not moving people just on IA. And again, it's same ad, same funnels, not moving people from checkout to purchase as well. I don't mind that. I think if you're like, the reason I don't mind it is we're still more efficient on a day one. Our cost per incremental is still better and we're getting way more add to carts. Now it's my theory is it's a colder audience who is not, has more objections and, you know, is dropping off a little bit more, but theoretically there's more of an incremental impact over time if you're driving, you know, the same CPIA, but with more add to carts or more sessions. So I was happy to see that. Um, but it obviously does have a little negative impact on conversion rate in, in the moment.

So you said CPM's down, click-through rate's down. Is the cost of traffic lower significantly? Is click-through rate down more than CPM is? I have to check that.

I believe CPM is down. More than click-through rate. So cost of impression significantly lower, cost of traffic lower, cost of, you know, and then that kind of backs out to cost of purchase a little bit lower with more traffic, more add-to-carts.

And how are you guys going about testing it? Like, are you just running, is there a house component? Is there a CLS component? Are you just changing it for certain campaigns and sort of looking at the difference in CPM and CTR and things like that and then deciding how to allocate budgets from there? Like, what does that testing process look like?

We went CLS primarily because we have house spots on some of these other reach tests, so we didn't have a house spot. So we went CLS. And I think that this is actually a very good one for CLS. And because we don't have any house spots right now, we're just testing a lot of reach things that are timely with campaigns. Our first step was to turn creative testing into IA. We, for whatever reason, I have my theories, We see a much lower percent new on creative testing. I think some of it is because our creative needs to be better. And so we're not winning auctions. And so you're going to get, you're not going to reach new audiences if you're not winning bids. Um, secondly, maybe it's like a budget thing as part of the bid. And so we have, that was like the first obvious one, you know, to do. And I think that's like that whole, like pairing up your optimization strategy with your creative strategy. So that was number one. And then we've just slowly been going through doing it campaigns. We feel pretty confident directionally that Northbeam metrics correlate with incrementality. So like percent new getting better on a similar one-day click ROAS is probably a very good thing. And so we've just been comfortable doing it that way. I'm asking my team to be slightly cautious because of this whole VO mistake where we ran again last year around this time, we ran value optimization, CLS. It looked great. And then we just scaled up a significant portion of our account on that. And I think that was a, it was the right thing to do short term, but it was a wrong thing to do long term. I just want to make, um, I want to be careful of that because I don't want to be like, all right, cool. This worked in this one isolated environment. Let's just, let's just do it everywhere. So, uh, if we get to a larger portion of our account. Like we need to, we need to have some type of check and balance. Maybe it's just a, another CLS, maybe it's a house account-wide, you know, 1 to 2 week test to be like, hey, now that we have 70% of our account on IA, like, are we still happy with that? Because maybe, maybe the answer is we want 30% or 40%. So that's, that's how we'll think about it.

Yeah. And that's what's just so tricky is because you'll literally like, You just physically can't get it right. Like you'll always be under or over invested in IA and like, you know, and that's what we struggle with that all the time. And I actually love that approach because we're probably guilty of, um, we either do house tests or we're not running tests and we're just like observing the differences. So like we had examples of that in March where it's like, okay, yeah, we're, we're trying incremental attribution over here. We're trying custom conversions over here. And we didn't take like a deliberate enough approach to like, hey, we don't have a house test. We can't make this like a, a multi-week geo study, but we can put in a little bit more time and effort, run the conversion lift study, and like try to get some more directional reads within the platform. I think that's the perfect example of how to roll out some of these like more nuanced changes within, you know, within a given channel.

Yeah, I, I used to be like anti-CLS, like, oh, it has to be house. I'm coming around to it more, and just, just for speed, just for, you know, testing faster and then directionally, like you can get, there's actually probably some things where it's better. You get a little bit more precision on something. So I'm a fan and I think while it's really important at our scale to test non-purchase optimized things, which we'll talk about in a little bit, improving your reach on purchase optimized things, I think has a lot of merit. And so that's why I'm very bullish about this.

Cody, we saw similar data as you, like CPM half of what it was in our other purchase optimized campaigns, but outbound click rate was actually more than half, like even, even lower. So our cost per outbound was actually more expensive on the incremental attribution optimized than it was on our other purchase conversion stuff. I think like on, on your scaling note too, I mean, that makes sense, right? Like especially with all of these new optimization, like anything that's net new, chances are that there's a much lower ceiling on the amount of customers that Meta can go and acquire profitably early on in that new product, that new ad tech product, then like something that's been around forever, lowest cost or whatever. So I think like that's also something to be aware of. Like if you launch one of these new, these new optimization settings, like you probably want to be a little bit less aggressive in scaling up, just knowing that it's a new ad tech product and like the overall pool of people that you're going to go and target with that is probably lower than like some of these other ad tech product optimization settings that have been around for a really long time.

Okay. On that point, this is a really, this is a really nerdy in the weeds sort of deal. Uh, Meta recently redefined 7-day click. So they moved, it used to be 7-day click and then they'd include people engaging with the ads. Um, and then they moved it to 7-day click. It's really only like link clicks and they moved that level of engagement to 7-day click, 1 day engaged. Are you as familiar with this and do you know where you guys began or like what attribution setting you ended up using? I have no clue.

I need to go talk to our media buyer.

We, prior to this, were testing, we added views and we weren't sure about views and we were going to test like a campaign with views and I was like, well, it's kind of a moot point if we move to IA. Like, you don't, you know, there is no 7-day review optimization. So like, that's why I'm a little happy. Here.

So, and maybe that's a component. The point that I'm going to make is we actually saw CPMs increase quite a bit at the beginning of the month. And like one of my thoughts was, and we made a bunch of changes and things have gotten better, so I can't exactly attribute it to this, but we moved from our like more traditional purchase optimized campaigns that were using 7-day click. We just moved to 7-day click, 1-day engage, because if Meta redefines 7-day click and all of a sudden advertisers are bidding on a smaller pool of users because they're no longer including the engaged. It has the effect that you just laid out, Connor, where it's like, yeah, all of a sudden we're just, it's going to, prices will increase. Everybody will start bidding more for fewer people. So we just ended up moving to include engaged and like we've at least seen CPMs normalize somewhat.

Yep. Yep. That makes sense.

And what's so funny about that is it's not even like we're talking about reaching new people and reaching people more cost effectively to like drive the results we're looking for. Uh, we're just talking about like arbitraging the auction system, right? Like it's not even like, there's nothing even like fundamentally better or even anything that will sustain over time. We just think, hey, for this a couple week period, like we're at an advantage or a disadvantage by moving to IA or moving to 7-day click, 1-day engaged or whatever else.

One of like the biggest skills I feel like right now for like, uh, you know, boots on the ground, like growth team is like, operationalizing your incrementality factors. Like you guys talked about it with, you know, your view content campaigns or, you know, we talked about it with some macro partnership ads. It's like trying to just get that triangulation of like, okay, here's over a 2-week test what I think the incrementality is, or here's my incrementality factor for this channel. But like, here's how I actually make decisions on it. 'Cause it's so different. The reason I even thinking of it now is like, as Connor is talking about IA, it's like, theoretically you're, you might have, if we're reaching newer audiences, colder or whatever, like you might actually have a stronger incrementality factor. And if you just have a blanket IA of incrementality factor of 1.2x, right? And you believe, you know, Meta is more incremental than the platform shows. Well, now if they're changing how they report clicks, if you're doing IA, like that changes. And I think what I've learned from these is like, A, it's a very hard thing to pin down because it's It's changing so often. Um, and it's something like we talk about weekly. We're still talking about, you know, partnership ads and just ran a test on that to understand how we need to make decisions based on what we believe is driving, you know, the best incremental return on in our account. But it changes so often. Totally.

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Few other things we're doing. Have you guys— we're testing Reels trending ads right now. Have you guys tested Reels trending ads? All right, let me, let me, let me go first. So we have a few, again, our hypothesis outside of moving reach, uh, and improving CPMR and purchase optimized stuff is like, we think at our size and goals, A, we think we'll have better incremental returns over medium term by having some non-purchase objective. You guys have talked about it on, you know, a recent podcast of a lot of us do like view content. We do quiz completion, but also maybe there's value of having some upper funnel. And I would, you know, define that by video views, reach awareness. And then the other thing that we've talked about is like, I want to devote some money to reach. And to incrementally lifting awareness and consideration for the business. And I think that's important. So that's like a big part of what we're trying to do right now. And we're trying to tie that to like launches, campaigns, things like that, um, rather than evergreen in the moment. Right. And so one of the tests we're running right now is Reels trending ads. Uh, we're doing like a, probably a 5 or 6 week house test. Where we're doing Reels trending ads and essentially we'll be served, you know, in kind of top trending Reels in the space.

Yeah, so I think if I understand that ad placement correctly, Meta's identifying the most popular pieces of short-form content in given categories. Like I think we're looking into it for later this year. Like I think we'll be able to target like automotive and things like that. So they'll take the most trending content and as people watch that, your ad is the next one.

Yeah, I believe it's cool.

I don't— I'm so split on these. I think you're totally right that at Jones Road size, like, you guys should be exploring stuff like this. It just reminds me a lot of, like, you know, the YouTube masthead ads or, like, TikTok used to have the one placement where, like, everybody who opened the app would get, like, the ad at the beginning or something. I remember Mary Ruth Organics doing that. And that's just such a— it's just such, like, a brute force approach to awareness. Like, I'm not— I don't know. We haven't— we have— we definitely haven't committed to it. I'm, I'd love to see more data from what you guys see. The thing is, it's all trackable.

And that's what I tell our meta reps all the time. Like, don't pitch me anything that I can't run a test on. Like, like, you know how I look at the business. You know what my goals are. Like, if, if you think that this is going to have an incremental lift, like, and you tell a good story, like, I'll test it, you know? Uh, and so obviously we're running a holdout on it. Um, we're seeing a lift so far. I don't know if you guys— this is probably a bad thing. But Houzz has this new beta where you can get like daily readouts on your incrementality. Yeah. Do you guys have that in your account?

Yeah, I was gonna talk about that a little bit, uh, on this topic.

It's dangerous. It's like IntelliGems.

It's like, yeah, you're refreshing your CRO test like every 3 hours. Now you can do that in Houzz. Yeah. I mean, for us, it's, that's actually been a huge, 'cause like we are testing the, the, we're testing a bunch more upper funnel campaigns right now and That it's actually been amazing for us because we run these tests for such a long time. Like we've been running this, this upper funnel test. It's a 3-cell test. We're testing 2 new objectives. We've been running it for like, I don't know, 2 months at least. And we're about to end it and then go into our observation period because we launch our Mother's Day sales. So like we're kind of sitting in a black box for a long time. Like, oh, I hope this, like this test that took, you know, our entire holdout testing slot for 2, 3 months, like turns out well, but now being— I think they call it like cumulative. So you can see it like on a daily basis. And now I'm like super bullish because it looks really good. It's like really close to baseline and we're pre-observation window. So it's just giving me more confidence too. And it's— I'm hoping what it will even let us do is end some of these tests earlier and be like, all right, like this is almost at baseline with purchase conversion and we haven't even hit our sale period yet. So like, can I just make the assumption that, that this test is going to net out to be, you know, incremental and more profitable than the baseline we're comparing it to? And just run more tests quicker. I think it's a really cool— it's really nice for, for brands like us where we're like, we're not running it like we're never running a 2-week test or a 3-week test because it just won't pick up all the conversions. Like, we need a longer, a longer cycle. So it's been pretty cool for that. Our, our view optimized stuff is, is, uh, our video views rather, is looking really nice right now. So I'm excited to see how it trends as we get into the Mother's Day sale. I think it's going to shoot way up above that purchase conversion baseline. Yeah, do you see—

because so I 100% agree, it can also help you cut things. Again, you shouldn't do it too early. Yeah. But like, we have a test right now that's running that doesn't look good and we're probably gonna cut it early cuz like there's just no statistical probability that we'll hit our KPIs because it's so poor. So like that saves money, you know, for us having to keep it live. Um, the other cool thing is you can see now these two lines, I guess it's the discrete, which shows like the day by day. Um, you can see how they track over time. And I don't know, have you seen that those separate over time? Like right now, for example, Reels trending ads, let's say we need $100 cost per incremental. Well, we're at $188 cost per incremental, but we're 4 days into it. I actually think that's probably really good. Like, um, that is my guess. And so hopefully we see more separation in those lines. I'm happy to report back on it. Have you, have you guys noticed that in any of your campaigns, especially anything awareness-based to get more separation and more lift over time?

Uh, this is the first one we're running that we have this, this new feature in there. So now right now on the discrete, they're like very close. Uh, it'll be interesting to see how they separate once we get into the sale period. But like the cumulative is where I'm getting a lot of, a lot of interesting value. Cause like the cumulative, like video view, like reach is down, video views is higher than reach, closer to baseline. And now we're going to go into this post-treatment window and see how they change. So I'll, I'll follow up and let you know how these, how the graphs are diverging once we get into this post-treatment window.

Yeah. Especially for, for your guys', you know, consideration window. Like we haven't necessarily seen it, but we're, we're running more reach stuff now. Essentially everything we're trying to do, I'm trying to measure it 3 ways. And I'm trying, what I'm trying to do is put all the pieces together to drive the, you know, our media to where I think supports our business goals overall, which is like Obviously profitable performance, but really with a bias for future growth and reach. And what I mean by that is whenever we can on these things, yes, we're testing house with a, um, you know, bottom funnel incrementality. So our IROAS, new customer, you know, that they also now have GA4 metrics in as of yesterday, we're starting to get that backfilled on our campaigns. So like the first one it's applied on is a demand gen test we just ran. And so now I know that it costs us $2.50 for a lifted GA4 session, an incremental, which is like, cool. Now, how does that compare to our other ones? I don't yet know, but I will know soon. But like, that sounds pretty good because if, if I'm looking at a Meta cost per incremental of $100 and a YouTube, but DemandGen is lifting, you know, sessions at $2.50 and Meta is doing it at $4, like there's probably a better overall return over a longer period of time from DemandGen. Um, you know, that's kind of how I'm thinking about it. And so we'll have those and then whenever possible, we're also running like a, like a brand and consideration lift in on these tactics inside platform. And so hopefully just putting it like, I guess I'm just trying to put like the full funnel together of these approaches and then we can make a decision because I can't just allocate money just to reach campaigns if it's, if it's lifting reach, I'm like, I don't really know how to justify that on my P&L yet, or I can only allocate so much. Maybe I can only spend, you know, 1% of my media mix on reach. But if I can find that I get direct response, maybe I'm not quite hitting my numbers in a 2-week period. Like, let's say Reels trending ad stays the same and I'm at a $160 cost per incremental. Like, there still is a lift over time if, if, if theoretically reach is an upper funnel tactic that should take 6 months to materialize, like that's actually probably very good, I believe. But I think I need, rather than just a hunch, I need the other data sources together to kind of paint that fuller picture, if that makes sense.

Yeah. So you're, Cody, what you're saying is you're com— you're more comfortable, like when you're stacking these different measurement methodologies on top of one another, You're comfortable getting like 60% of the information and kind of going out on a limb and saying, okay, like theoretically this tactic is meant to play out over the course of 6 months, 9 months, 12 months. I'm only measuring it over the course of 2 months, but because it looks like it does across these 3 measurement methodologies over the course of 3 months, you're confident saying, okay, I don't have this hard data, but I am confident it's gonna net out how I want it to over the course of, you know, double the time or triple or quadruple the time. Yeah, I think so.

I think, you know, it would be really nice to run a 6-month test, but it's just hard to devote a slot to that. Yeah. But I think because we can get the other data where I wouldn't be as confident is to be like, okay, this is a reach test. It looked, it was a $200 cost per incremental, but it's reach. I'm just gonna, you know, I, I can't hold it to the same standard. Like theoretically, yes, you can't hold it to the same standard. It is a different goal. But I think you need some other data points that help to tell that story or validate it. And it might not be realistic to always run a 6-month test, but if I can run a 4 to 6-week test and I have the bottom funnel incrementality, that's okay. Plus the mid-funnel incrementality and upper funnel incrementality of reach, theoretically over time, that should work. And there's some data points that supports that story.

Yeah, I love this. So like one of the things it reminds me of, and I've mentioned it before in the past, is how, um, you know, people can think about your deployed ad spend as like almost something that you can hold on your balance sheet. I love the concept of this where it's like you were just in a better position if you've spent dollars in the past, and that— and we don't have— we don't really have a way of like valuing that in any way. Um, that's why like, you know, Allbirds just got sold again and they're like pivoting to AI and doing all sorts of weird stuff, but The Allbirds brand is worth something because of the dollars that they've spent, because of the awareness that they have. Like, it's worth more than just some random, you know, eco-friendly shoe that you just created today. And I feel like what you're saying, Cody, is, hey, let's look at incremental sessions, incremental add to carts. Let's look at incremental brand recalls. And almost in a way, you could be assigning value to those. And you're like, hey, if, if at the bottom of funnel, these are driving the same incremental return on ad spend, I'm generating revenue that, that shows up in my P&L based on the ads been that I deployed in this period, but hey, you know, I'm actually driving brand recalls way more effectively with this other tactic. Like you're understanding that that has value. You want to be building that up over time. And that's like, it goes back to the thing of like it being on the balance sheet in some way. I don't hear people talk about that much. I think that's extremely cool.

I appreciate it. Yeah, that's what we're trying. I just, I just think I've been too short-term focused in the past. And I think that, I think that's hurt us. Um, but as a bootstrap company, I can't, just light money on fire, just do reach for the sake of it, you know? So we have those going. Um, we're testing this combined awareness and sales campaign. That's another one in Meta that I actually think we talked about on the, the, when we did the live pod at Meta Summit last year. So that's a fun one. Slow start, but I think that'll be cool. Kind of just like gives liquidity between sales and awareness and theoretically the awareness in like There's some modeling that like the intent is somebody that will be better in market. So that's a cool one. YouTube reach as well. And so that'll be the same thing. That'll be a house test, but we're also going to layer on, you know, in-platform metrics. Very excited to see GA on that one. And then out-of-home as well. We're testing a bunch of out-of-home. And I've kind of told my team, I'm like, I'm not really interested in dabbling. I'm like, we've just dabbled with out-of-home. We do, you know, $50K here or whatever it is. I'm like, I want to know, and I'd rather spend $200,000, $300,000 and know if it's working and then go bigger versus just dabbling. So, um, we have like a, a, a $100K test for this month, house test, plus we're doing, um, you can do like a brand recall brand, you know, lift with like an out-of-home vendor. It's a little wishy-washy. I don't know if I totally trust everything, but I think directionally it can give you some stuff. And then we're going bigger for a launch that we have next month. We'll kind of like double or triple that budget. And again, house test GA4 metrics in there as well. So hopefully we'll get some good answers soon. 'Cause like, for example, we did a house test on out-of-home a year ago and like 4-week test, I think it was called a 0.7 ROAS, 4-week test, probably really great for out-of-home. Like theoretically to the point we're having, that's really great. I think now that I'll get some data on some of the, the rest of the funnel, it'll help to understand. It was the only test we've ever ran where 100% of the incremental revenue was new customers. And you guys know how hard we struggle with that.

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Yeah, totally. On your out-of-home? Yeah.

That's just how it's doing like a period-over-period analysis, right? Like they're just comp— or I guess not period-over-period, they're just comparing just manually like the uptick in those markets you exposed out-of-home and then like Are they just like, what's the comparison then? Is it just like everywhere else? Is that how they're looking at it? And then like kind of putting it on the same level or like how, how are they doing that analysis? I believe I'll probably butcher it.

They're probably gonna, you know, say that this is way wrong, but it's, it's like a fixed geo test. 'Cause normally, you know, you set your goal and then House will give you the, the, you know, your treatment regions. This is different 'cause like we set the region based on where we want to do it just as a business. But then they kind of use that and then they build a model comparing comparable cities to, you know, to compare it against. So they cut— it is a geo test. It's just like the methodology is a little bit different. I don't know the specifics honestly. I just trust them on it 'cause they're a million times smarter than I am. But yeah, that's essentially how they do it.

Yeah, we're doing, we're doing a fairly big, a 6-figure activation for Mother's Day in a couple of cities that we are lower indexed on sales on. But based on some of the tech that our out-of-home vendor has, they think we have a high concentration of prospective customers. So that's how we're deciding to go and activate in these cities. So I'll, I'm going to hit up House because it's like a 6-week, you know, 6-figure out-of-home campaign. I'll see, I'll report back and see if it drove any lift, but Cody, I wanted to hit on the YouTube reach stuff because we've been going deep down this rabbit hole the last like 2 months after finding some of the stuff in Meta work really well, the non-purchase conversion campaigns. And I've been super happy with the YouTube reach and like the, all the non-purchase conversion stuff in YouTube. Like we're getting like insane reads in our MTA and impression relative to our purchase conversion campaigns. And we have really good incrementality factor. Like anchor points from some of the holdouts that we've ran. And I mean, YouTube media, as you guys both know, is already insanely undervalued. Like we see, I don't know, a fourth or a third of the CPM in YouTube demand gen campaigns compared to Meta purchase conversion campaigns. The reach and like view the non-purchase stuff in YouTube is like dirt cheap CPMs. It's unbelievable. And the new visit rate is like insanely high. It's been really cool to see some of the stuff we're scaling it.

Were you saying the MTA also looked good on it?

MT, I mean, yeah, like looking at like clicks and modeled views also looks really, really good relative to our demand gen stuff.

And then didn't you also say it drives like 7x Amazon to D2C lift on, on the one episode?

Uh, not 7. CTV is, CTV is much more lopsided on, on, uh, Amazon lift than, I mean, YouTube still is more Amazon than it is.com. I think the last one we ran was like 2 to 1 or 1.5 to 1 Amazon orders to D2C revenue or our D2C orders.

Yeah, I'm bullish on it. I mean, yeah, I mean, even amongst conversion campaigns, like, you know, we've talked about YouTube acts a little bit more upper funnel, like higher percent new, much, much stronger incrementality factor because you're showing it on TVs and, you know, and whatever. But like the frequency, not the frequency, but I guess you still have to hit somebody multiple times even on a demand gen, you know, YouTube ad. To get them to convert. And so it's like, well, why pay such a high CPM on those if you're gonna need multiple touchpoints? Like go up funnel with some of your budget, you know, to more cost-effectively reach them more. And so it should be a better overall, you know, outcome. So we'll see. I'm very bullish on it. Again, getting this GA4 metrics into house, I'm the most excited about. That'll be interesting. But yeah, I've heard that YouTube video view stuff can crush, can crush, crush for retail as well. It's like one of the stronger performers. So definitely super bullish on it. Probably more bullish on YouTube reach than I am on Meta reach.

We're doing view right now. We're doing reach and our reach is actually outperforming our view, which is interesting. So the more upper funnel optimized event actually beating out the view optimized right now in the prospecting. It's a sizable chunk. You're like, we're going to keep spending up as long as the efficiency and the net new are great and the CPMs are looking really good.

Have either of you guys ran like view content on YouTube with an incrementality test? I feel like that could crush. I almost want to run like a quiz completion custom event, but I feel like that could do really well.

Not with a holdout. We're just running it. We are running it, but not with a holdout.

Yeah. Or what was popular for a long time is like you'd run action sets. So like we would just include add to carts in the, in the conversion that we were optimizing for just so you could feed back that much more signal.

Yeah, I feel like that could do well, 'cause it's like, I don't wanna say you're fighting the platform, but if you like, if we're trying to really reach new audiences, again, good high quality audiences, profitable audiences, but like reach 'em there. It's like, I wonder if that's the way to play some of these channels, even like TikTok. Like I think TikTok, there is a strong incrementality factor compared to what you see. It's like just like a different behavior and it's like maybe like we should be running, you know, quiz complete, view content, you know, like signal engineering as like our main strategy on TikTok. It's like a hypothesis I have. and might like work with the platform more than kind of trying to fight it. Totally.

Or I think I would not be at all surprised if it's like a much larger percentage of everybody's budgets, especially maybe like if you're spending over X amount or something, then I wouldn't, I wouldn't be at all surprised if 30, 40% of your budget shouldn't be going to not necessarily reach campaigns, but like highly constructed sort of thoughtfully designed campaigns that are, that are optimizing for a certain event. Um, the point A couple points that I was going to make. One, YouTube views makes a ton of sense, partially because so many views are occurring on TVs now, whereas people are just not, they're just not taking action from their, you know, from their smart TV at home. So like, if you want to tap into that inventory, like, moving up funnel makes sense. YouTube's always been one of those things that has been, uh, kind of at a disadvantage in Google's attribution system. So I said this about Snapchat a long time ago too, where it's like I think you're almost better off optimizing for non-purchase events on platforms who don't really know who's purchasing. If, if, if Google Ads is just losing a lot of attribution to search and shopping, then like it gives you that much more reason to loosen the reins on, you know, your—

yeah, don't pay a premium for, for media that is not really smart. Then, then you have to go cheaper if it's not going to convert as well.

Totally. Um, the other thing I was going to say, just like the whole list that we're hitting here is really interesting because some of it's like feels like we're fighting the platforms or like hacking them a little bit to like align with what we're trying to do. And then I, I love the stuff that Meta is coming out with, whether it's the, um, the CAS campaigns, incremental attribution. Like, these are like, these are true purpose-built features that are like trying to align the platform with what we're trying to do. And, um, I just think they're like far and away doing it better than anybody else. Oh, definitely.

They're very, very— I'm excited for the Performance Summit because I imagine they'll announce some of them like more formally or focus on it, but it's very clear that Meta is very focused on this and, you know, making a lot of big changes and realizes that there were issues, but also like there's a lot of really cool stuff. And yeah, they're, they're the fact that not only they have incremental attribution, but that it's actually working so well is like a huge unlock. And then, and then one thing on this. The creative, I haven't been talking about the creative as well, but like this is also not our typical creative. Like we just did a giant shoot with a new partner for, you know, upcoming launch. We've done a lot of like more like brand forward creative. Like that's a huge lever and tying the creative to these different channels. Like YouTube views is like probably your TV spots. You know, those are not your 90-second DR mashups probably. And so just tying that together and kind of, trying to build that storytelling muscle, get better at that, and build upper funnel creatives are very different than, you know, what our team is normally used to.

So if you are, I wanna ask you guys a question about like operations here. Connor, when I was in LA and you came to the office, we talked about a brand where you're like, hey, like I was inside this ad account and it looked like they had like listened to a bunch of our episodes and kind of like dropped all these things into the ad account all at once. And you're like, it was just a mess. Like, It was so hard to see what was going well, what wasn't going well. In reality, all of it probably wasn't going well because they were trying to do too much all at once. And if there's one thing not to do, it's, it's don't just go into your ad account tomorrow and set up an incremental attribution campaign and a combined awareness and sales campaign and a view content and a reach and all these things. It's like, you gotta have some, some roadmap here. Like these things should happen stepwise so you can really isolate the variables and be thoughtful about how you're setting up these tests. So. Yeah, Connor, maybe I'll go to you since we were talking about this last week, but what is your advice on just like creating a testing roadmap where it's like, hey, how do we— like, we have this laundry list of, of like, let's call it like objectives or purchase optimization settings that we want to test in Meta. Like, how do we do it in a thoughtful way, um, to like increase our surface area of, of finding some wins with all these?

Yeah, so I think we hit, I think we hit a couple of them earlier. Like, my My priority list would be if we're testing new tactics, you know, you go geo lift test, you conversion lift study. Geo lift test is going to allow you to, it's more holistic. You get Amazon in there. If you're at risk of any sort of like potential attribution break, like we've found some really interesting wins in our wedding band business targeting women instead of men. And it really appears like there's some sort of attribution break there that Meta is not getting credit for when we're just looking in platform. So Geolift, the number one preferred way for us to roll out tactics. You get limited slots. So then if you can be doing more conversion lift studies, that should give you directional reads. And then we do this all the time. So I'm really not super opposed to it, but it really, um, can get confusing over time, but like launching new tactics, whether it's incremental attribution or whatever else, and then just creating some sort of comparison. It's not, you're not even testing it at that point. I talk about this with my team too. I'm like, we're just trying, we're trying something. Like, you can't tell me this is a test. There's no experiment. We're going to do something new. And then if you're really deliberate and thoughtful about comparing it to the previous period or to other campaigns, and we can use these like sort of supplementary metrics, like percent new visits and things like that. Like you can, I believe that we can be introducing new tactics without like a tried and true experiment, but that would be the list of priorities. And then that would be like identifying whether some of these things might work. And then as you test them as a percentage of mix, then you get back to the importance of like conversion lift studies or, or house, because I think it's really difficult to, without a true experiment, go from 0% of your account being incremental attribution to 100% of your account being incremental attribution. So as you roll it out, I think testing also becomes more important. Yeah.

And I think, I think like the, the approach of, hey, we're just going to try this and we're going to compare it to other things in the account. That's a lot more valid after you've done some more of like the controlled experiments. Like if you know Meta is really your core channel, like if you're a $10 million brand and 80% of your spend's on Meta and like you haven't even ran a geo holdout, but you know, that's what's driving the most of your, of your revenue. Like, yeah, you can go and roll out incremental attribution and just compare all the all the metrics to your whatever top spending, you know, lowest cost campaign. And like, you should get a, a pretty good readout and like understanding of what that's doing. I mean, that's what we're doing with some of our YouTube non-purchase conversion stuff. It's what we're doing with some of the destination testing we're doing in YouTube. And like, the only reason that works is because we've ran a bunch of holdouts on YouTube and we validated the incrementality of the demand gen campaign. So now that like intra-channel comparison is really strong and I'm confident making decisions where like, I wouldn't do that with a TikTok where we haven't ran like a long-tailed, uh, lift test in a long time. Like I just wouldn't be that comfortable doing it that way. And then it's evolving.

Like we've probably, we've probably changed our roadmap 6 times in the last month just as we're trying to coordinate all these different strategies and tactics. And so it's evolving and you just have to prioritize and be like, all right, we have a certain number of slots, what do we need to do? But we've got, you know, different strategies on different channels that are coming together and we work with our media buyers or reps on each one. And you know, oh, if you, oh, if we ended this one, this date, here's what we could put in. Been trying to maximize the slots cuz you have so much you wanna test, but you only get a certain number of slots. So it's always evolving and you just need somebody on your team who kind of owns it and is sliding things around as, as things change and, and prioritizing. And then yeah, determining what has to be a proper test, what can just be a, experiment and getting some data on. And some of it is like, hey, we're comfortable spending this much per day. And then here's the metrics. We know Northbeam, whatever it is, when we get to this level of spend, that's where I think we should plan another, another test. But yeah, otherwise it's not always worth it. If you're spending a few grand a day on a channel and you want to spend another thousand, like that's not your highest impact for, for a business, you know, if you're spending a bunch. So you just have to prioritize it. All right, cool.

Let's wrap there. Let's wrap there on the NewRidge stuff. That was, that was really great. I want to ask you, Cody, about this creator partnership. Do we want to go there next or is there a different, a different part of the—

I, in a very self-serving way, would love to talk about this a little bit.

Yeah. Okay.

I would like to take this opportunity to mine Cody for information for, for reach purposes. Yeah.

So Cody, you, you tweeted a couple of days ago or this week or whatever about, uh, your Jones Road Beauty had their biggest creator partnership to date. A ton of what I thought was really cool about your tweet is it shifted away from what you usually talk about, which is like incrementality, performance marketing, data, performance metrics. And it really hit on all of the fun experiential out-of-home stuff they are doing. So like you had an IRL event, you did an Agile truck that really emphasized and highlighted the partnership. So I wanted to ask you about that. Like, who was it? Like, why did you do it? And like maybe summarize the experiential bit. But I want to also ask you about the part that you didn't tweet about, which is the performance marketing oriented part of this deal? 'Cause I'm sure there's, knowing you, I'm sure there's a ton of like, hey, we're definitely gonna calculate an ROI on this part of the deal. And then like your tweet was more focused on the, the experiential brand forward stuff that like you probably won't calculate as much of an ROI on. So could you just like, yeah, clue us in on what this partnership was and hit on some of those points?

We talk about incrementality a lot, but how do you actually operationalize it? To make your business better.

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Yeah, definitely. So a few of our big rocks for the year, creator obsession is one. You know, it's just, it's a creator economy and we've been, you know, we've been too traditional as a brand and, you know, creator economy is everything. And if you look at, you know, consumer trends and everything, it's, it's, it's, you know, extremely important. So we have wanted to do partnerships and we didn't really wanna do like a traditional celeb one. We wanna do things that are, you know, super authentic. I mean, it's gotta be that, right? It's, it has, so A, we want to work with creators for multiple reasons. Um, and, and, you know, hopefully don't have to explain why, but that's who people want to hear from. That's who it's getting attention. You know, it's gotta be somebody who's really authentic and is a really good fit, you know? And I think even like we've struggled to really figure out some of them and we've talked to a bunch of people and it just, you know, things have fallen apart 'cause it's just like, you don't want to be like, oh, here's another, like there's so many partnerships. Like, oh, here's another one. One. So we still want to do like a more in giant ones, but it's, it's, you gotta find the right fit. So we want to do partnerships. We want to do more IRL, just bullish on it. Obviously, as you know, Meta gets harder or whatever, like people are on their phones all day. Like people are craving connection. We have our stores, we're doubling our store footprint. So that's a big component. Sampling as well. You know, we just got our first samples. This is really our first sampling event, but super bullish on, on that as an overall strategy for us. And then just, yeah, overall brand building, which is super, you know, generic. But I guess if you had to make that objective, that's improving your awareness and your consideration is how I would say that. So that's kind of the why behind it. And so trying to create this whole holistic 360 campaign. The way it started, so the creator's name, she's wonderful. She's a perfect partner for us. Really authentic fit. Her name is Emily DiDonato. So she's a model. Has been a cover model, has been, I think she was, you know, Sports Illustrated, Vogue model, like all of the magazines. And so she's somebody even like we wanted to work with as, you know, a model. And we started working with her as a creator. She's also a creator. She's a mom. She's an entrepreneur herself. So has like, you know, the makeup look has just like, we just have a lot of similarities and, you know, she's a great fit for us. She was our top whitelisting creator for most of last year. We started working for her about a year ago. And so it wasn't like we just like dove into this partnership. It was kind of just starting more natural and, you know, just had a really good relationship with her and her team and, you know, performed really well. Bobbi has actually done her makeup in the past. And so, you know, they had a small relationship and she actually approached us about it. We had wanted to do things, but, you know, she's also known for blush. Like, you know, just people know that about her. Her, um, that she just loves blush. And I was like, hey, we're, we're— it's funny you say that, like, we're redoing this blush and you think it would be great. What I, what I thought was really important is, um, you know those campaigns where it's like, oh, this person's our new chief creative officer or whatever it is, but it's like just like a PR stunt? Like, a lot of celebrities now will be like given this, you know. Like, I didn't want it to be that. I wanted it to be— because I think people are very skeptical, and so I think the story matters so much. And so like she was actually very involved in product development and obviously anything we were doing, it's like, let's get content of this. Like, 'cause thinking about even as we're developing these products with her, how are we gonna, you know, bring it to life and tell the story? So we made a, she, you know, she was a chief blush officer was, you know, the title we gave, just cute little title, did like a director's chair. She had her own shade in her name, you know, pretty big, you know, holistic thing. So she was really the main shot model. We shot all shades on her, but we gave her one in her name and her signature is on the pack. She was involved in the, you know, development, all of it. She was the main model. So, you know, you go to our website right now, she's on that. Any, you know, print, any retail, you know, print that we're doing, she's all on it. She's on our out-of-home, she's on, you know, the Agile trucks. It's— I also think creator stuff is great. A way to get into people's worlds, right? Like Crux will do this if they want to get a certain demo, they'll do like a partnership with a shoe. And like, I mean, Connor Ridge, you guys have talked about it a lot. Like it's a great way to get into it. It's like, it kind of gives you permission to play somewhere where maybe as a brand, you, there's like an overlap, but you wouldn't be able to play in that, in that space by yourself. And so, you know, there's a lot of people now that are, she gave us, you know, we were able to seed to her, her, her community. And there's a lot of people now that, are getting into our world and, you know, because of that and whether they're larger creators, whether it's followers of her. So that's a component. Part of the deal is in-person events. You know, we didn't know at the time, but it's amazing, you know, that she was going to be 8 months pregnant doing the events. But so we, you know, did these events at the stores and kind of combined all of them. So that's kind of like the whole, you know, 360. It's been very successful. You know, a little bit too successful. We're gonna have some stock issues, but working through them now, but it's been really successful and I think gives us the confidence to, to do more.

Uh, so one of my questions is, um, one, fantastic. Thank you. It's also super cool. I mean, we've been talking about this for a couple months now. I feel like the 360 campaigns are just like in vogue. Um, you know, between like the Marty Supreme stuff or the Ramp stuff, it's like people are really trying to get creative about how to activate across channels. I think to your point, consumers are super interested in seeing real world experiences from brands, especially as just like everything becomes digital and AI. It's like the more you can stand out there, the better. Um, I'm curious if or how you guys leverage some of the offline stuff, the, the out of home, the trucks, the in-person events onto digital channels. Like, is there, did that happen at launch or is it like, hey, we have this launch moment and then we have sort of a a sequential rollout of all these IRL, you know, events happening that we're gonna then tease out to our email list, post on social, et cetera, et cetera?

Yeah, good question. Um, hope we actually were supposed to have one event prior to launch and we canceled it because, um, she's 8 months pregnant. We, we wanted to give her a break a little bit, you know? So I think we probably overcommitted a little bit and so we were like, hey, we, we, we really wanna prioritize like the bigger event. And so we did one like a week after. We definitely wanted it the week of launch, but yeah, I love social proof at launch and building community. Like Rode does the best job of it. Like if you look at their store, like they don't announce a new product that's coming out, like their community announces it. That's like really big in beauty. So I just think like the more social proof and creators you can get talking about something prior to it is great. And just building that feeling you want, whether it's, you know, FOMO or connection or community. And so I, I, I love kicking off with that stuff even prior to it. If not, um, doing it at launch, I think is really cool. I think it's something I'll say 4 out of 10. I want to be 7 out of 10, 8 out of 10. I think, you know, we just hired a new social person, but like who, who starts next week. But like, I think we can do a much better job of that. Um, I think we did an okay job of it, but of, of doing it better strategically and then just the, the volume of it. Of like making it look really cool. So I think it's primarily social. I am like, but again, everything, like we got a lot of, we got street interviews, right? So we, our team went around and street interviews, those will get in the ad account if we think those are worthy of it. So I think everything is a content flywheel. I think like, you know, Connor, you were in Comfort right now. Like from what I've heard, it's like the primary reason Comfort does trucks is to get content. Like they do agile trucks and Tom told me like, it's like, it's like, it's all flywheel.

And that's what I was kind of getting at. Like, do you, uh, yeah, that flywheel is what I'm probably most interested in as well. It's like the digital, the validation you get on digital by having had the real world stuff. Um, and that's why I was curious also, like, even testing out of home in a silo might generate a positive, you know, incremental return, like you mentioned, but also it might lead to like your best ads or whatever, right? And then you're running them all over the country. Your, your billboard in Dallas could be driving sales in Jacksonville. Um, was there anything about the partnership that you're like, this really worked and I want to like expand on this idea? And are you willing to share it on a public podcast?

I mean, yeah, we want to do more and we want to do bigger ones. Yeah, it's the, the trick is I think just there are so many partnerships that brands do and we're trying to be really intentional about someone actually loves the product, loves the brand. We love, like, there's a really good story there. I just think it's gotta be like the story first. We've got, you know, the Bobby Formula One that we talked about that's coming up in a few weeks. And then I think as soon as we get a little data on that and this one, sitting with the team and just being like, all right, what, what are we doing from here? Where do we go? It's just like anything we do trying to get, you know, traction and be like, what do we do? And like, same thing, like on Monday, it was a great event on Sunday, on Saturday, but it was like, all right, let's do a quick postmortem. What went well? What can we improve? You know, some of the feedback was, could have done a better job, could have gotten more people to the event. It was good, but could have got more people there. Uh, could have made it look better on social. We handed out 400 samples. We should have handed out 4,000 samples, you know? Um, so I, I think with everything, it's just like, all right, cool. This was great, you know, but we can always do better. Um, but yeah, same. I was just trying to find traction, signs of life. Right now we have one Rivian. I, my team thinks I'm crazy. I think we should have 4 of them. Um, just for the country. And so as soon as we see some signs of success with this program, we're, you know, we're gonna get a few of them, I think.

I love that you didn't, like, you minimized your risk. Like, the first thing you started with was, she was our best whitelisting creator of all of last year. So like, you had a ton of confidence that this more 360 activation was, was going to work really well. And like, we have certainly switched up how we do our influencer deals to be more in line with that. We're like, historically, like 2, 3 years ago, I'd be like, all right, let's go sign like a 12-month deal with this creator, all these monthly deliverables. And now it's like, hey, let's go sign a 3-month deal that's mainly paid media oriented. And if that works, then let's think about expansion into more of like a, a 360-style campaign. So I think that's like, that's, that's, I think a really good takeaway is like you, these things are expensive. Like I'm, I'm sure you're paying her a lot of money and it's well worth it, but like, you had the confidence it was gonna work and get a good ROI because you did all the whitelisting that you did last year and you had that data to lean on. And I think that's like a really good takeaway for the audience is like start small with these creators. So you're not, so you're kind of like hedging your bets a little bit.

Yeah. You just, you, yeah. I mean, I, if in an ideal world you can, that would be the best, but sometimes you just have to go for it, you know? But I, I don't know. I feel like partnerships are a risk. I'm trying to, I'm trying to be comfortable taking more risks again, being really thoughtful about it and, you know, making sure it's the right fit and the story is there. But, uh, trying to be comfortable taking, you know, bigger bets. And I think now that we've taken some, it's like, okay, cool. How do we kind of build on it and, and do next one? But yeah, if you can start small, um, but I, I just think, you know, the story, what's the story? Always coming back to that and, and then making sure the story is there. 'Cause that's what's gonna resonate or not resonate with people. Cool. Oh, and then the last thing, so on performance, how we're activating on performance, we built some landers for it specifically, tons of whitelisting from her. Obviously the top ads are, you know, via her telling the similar story. Like we're obviously trying to sell products, but we're still trying to weave in. So like I, you know, in Claude built two new landers for this. One is like very similar, like base template, But one of them called a performance LP, the other one a story page. And I would say like 50% of the pages is the same. But let's say the story page has, you know, a video embed section that has a hero video in it. It doesn't have a full buy box that you can click on. It has like a mini buy box that sends to the PDP. It has like just more content modules that like our, our reach traffic is running to. And then our performance page has the full buy box that you can buy on. It's got the review widget on it. Like it's just a little bit more DR. And so, but we still want to tell the story 'cause A, I think any partnership you have to answer that quickly. And then B, just for a, from a brand moment, we still think some of that is important for the campaign. Totally. Oh, and then one thing, just like if you're working with creators and stuff, like the one thing that's great, like there's people posting that have not posted about us in years or whatever. Like it's such a great way to get into people's world. I'm sure you guys have seen this from the partnerships that you guys have done. Is, you know, you partner with creators and celebs and like, you can use them as a pull to kind of, you know, get in people's world. And it's all about then how do we capitalize from there? How do we build relationships with these people that are now getting into our world?

Or are you saying this creator activation is rekindling like conversations that you've had with other creators and celebrities in the past?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even if they're just like starting to, post about us, right? 'Cause they post about us with the product that we sent to them. Oh, sure, sure, sure. From Emily's List. Totally. And so I thought, but so now it's like, hey, how do we, how do we just, you know, rebuild that relationship or build a net new relationship? But same thing, like you guys probably have people that wanna, you know, support Marques and, and, and post about him that, you know, you know, may, maybe hadn't in the past and then hopefully you can build relationships with them. Totally. Sweet.

Well, thanks for the run-through on the activation, Cody.

Classic split. We did about 55 minutes deep, you know, media buying, uh, reach tactics, and we squeezed in 12 minutes of a great 360 brand activation.

Who says we don't have range? Yeah, no protein content though.

No protein content. We've been, we've been light on the protein content.