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Get a Demo“She has built an amazing system and an amazing flywheel.” What separates a performance creative director worth hiring from one who just manages a content calendar? Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) and Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) dig into what it takes to hire a director of performance creative today, why the creative strategist role has split into two distinct skill sets, and how AI agents are emerging as a serious ecommerce conversion rate optimization play. They debate whether a great creative strategist should be an operator or an ideator. The answer is neither alone. Both hosts unpack why less prescriptive creator briefs are now producing better-performing ads than heavily scripted ones. The hosts close with a quick over-under on the retention tools most brands either overinvest in or ignore entirely. Powered By Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026 https://9ops.co/motionapp-creativebenchmarks2026 NeonPixel https://9ops.co/neonpixel Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel Aftersell https://9ops.co/aftersell-mops Haus https://www.haus.io/operators Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ Chapters 00:00:00 Prime Day Check-In 00:06:35 Amazon vs Shopify Split 00:09:12 Super Bowl Ad Hangover 00:12:46 What a $7M Spot Costs 00:16:30 The Creative Director Hire 00:22:10 Operator or Ideator 00:28:45 The Age of the Yapper 00:33:03 The Bethenny Frankel Play 00:39:45 HexClad’s PDP AI Agent 00:51:00 SMS & On-Site AI 00:57:30 GA4 Gets a Second Look
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All right. We are back with another episode of Marketing Operations. I believe we're in the, we're well into the hundreds here. I think it's episode 120. People keep asking me, people keep asking me, it's come up a handful of times recently, uh, asking how long we've done it. Well over 2 years at this point.
We're going to be at episode 1,000 before we know it. I will, I will say, are we at, you know, the, the behind the scenes production team makes it very easy for us just to show up, show up every week and record. So it's been, uh, it's been fun, man. But yeah. What are we like, 120, 130?
Podcasters, they're like the new surgeons. Like, you know how, like a surgeon doesn't, like, you know, they've got people to prep the tools. They just kind of show up, they get suited up. Right.
It's all scheduled. The tools are there waiting for them. Exactly. The surgical tech's got it all laid out on a platter for them. They just show up and, and do the job. That's, you know, I, I never made the connection between podcaster and surgeon, but it makes sense.
Yeah. People don't realize that. Uh, People don't realize that. Um, all right, sweet. We are in the midst right now. This will come out in a couple of weeks, but we are in the midst of Prime Day. Um, how's it going on the, on the, the cookware front?
It's good. Yeah, we are having a solid start. You know, we, we try to do like the way that we think about our, our, our offers on more of a macro perspective is we really protect obviously Black Friday. as our like best deals of the year. But with our consideration period and how much we spend on demand gen, we'd like to roll out one more offer outside of Black Friday and holiday. That's like not as good, but it's at least like competitive with those offers. Last year, because we did the Super Bowl ad, we decided to do that with what we branded our big game sale, which was our February offer. We wanted to put our best foot forward. This year we did not do a Super Bowl ad. And we felt like the best time to do that would be like right smack dab halfway through the year. So that's kind of what we're doing for Prime Time Sale this year is, again, they're not our Black Friday deals, but they are our, I would say our most competitive offers we ran all year. So we're seeing some, some pretty awesome results, um, because of that. So yeah, yeah, good day one. You know, I think just talking to some insider, getting some insider info at, at Amazon and actually the category as a whole was trending down yesterday, at least our like kitchen and, and home goods category. And we did not. I think we were up a little bit yesterday, so I think we outpaced the category as a whole. But yeah, it's just interesting that home goods and kitchen as a whole actually decreased year over year on the first day last year. So yeah, I don't really know exactly what to attribute that to, but yeah, happy that we beat the trend on that one.
Yeah, no, obviously. I do think Prime Day's in a weird position, like them moving it up. They moved it up a lot this year. They always like kind of shifted around. You never really know. I'm always surprised at how little notice, uh, Amazon sellers get. Uh, but this year they moved it up basically a full 3 weeks out of Q3 in mid-July, all the way up until the very end of Q2 here. For us, it comes immediately after our Father's Day sale. I mean, which is definitely not ideal. Like we've got no ability to like rebuild the funnel or sort of build up any additional demand to capture on Prime Day. And, you know, I think one of the reasons they do that is just like it has deteriorated in its performance over the last couple of years. I remember it used to be like a thing, like people on Twitter would be tweeting about it. The group chats would be lighting up. Everybody would be doing like multiples, many multiples of what they would do on a typical day. And now that it's Shifted throughout the year. It's expanded from 1 to 2 to 4 days. Like I, um, I was, I was feeling a little nostalgic yesterday, uh, thinking about how, how much more of an event it used to be.
Totally. Yeah. It's interesting. Um, you know, you would think that, I think what the ideal, if anyone from Amazon's listening, uh, I think the ideal time, I mean, all of these brands run Mother's Day, Memorial Day, Father's Day, or some combination of those 3 sales, like from mid-April through mid-June. So, It would actually make a lot more sense if Amazon kicked back Prime as late as they could instead of it, but they're pulling it up earlier and earlier and earlier. Like, it just doesn't make sense. Like, it's, I don't know. It just feels like that doesn't make sense knowing that so many brands activate so hard during those, those like spring and early summer months on these other tentpole moments. Because we're in the same boat where like we activate hard for Mother's Day, Memorial Day. We don't activate as hard for Father's Day just because we have those 2 other activations right before. We still do. Stuff around it. So yeah, it's like we're in the same boat as you guys where we just haven't had like any time to kind of build up the funnel after we just launched these other mega sales right before it. So it is weird timing. It's still like, don't get me wrong, we're still putting out big net revenue numbers. It's just, yeah, like since last year, the growth hasn't been as big. So I do agree with you based on that data point. It does seem like the whole Like aura of Prime Day is, is kind of falling off a little bit. I don't know. I, I didn't buy anything yesterday. I don't know if you did.
No, no. Yeah, I was looking at it like our different categories relative to a normal day. And this is obviously gonna like significantly shift between different brands, um, and different types of products. But like for us, we were seeing between 3 or 4x of a normal Okay.
Is that, is that, um, just on Amazon?
Just on Amazon.
Okay. So we're well above that. I mean, we probably did like, God, I mean, 12, I mean, over 10x a normal day. So it still is. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, you know, I will say, um, my normal day, I was comping it to like, like week over week. So we were kind of in a Father's Day. I could find like a better, more realistic comp for what a normal, like late June day might be. Um, we still don't get up. We used to be, I mean, I remember the first couple of Prime Days, like I think it would be 8 or 9x. We've never seen, I think HexClad, you guys have the consideration period where during these big shopping moments, like there's just more, they're more potent for you all, I think. Um, but we used to see like many more multiples, 7, 8x a normal day. And I do think even with a fairer comp, it's like, we're probably looking at maybe 5 or something like that. It's just, it's just, um, not as exciting as it once was.
Yeah. I mean, what, I don't know if you can share this, what, how big, uh, like what, what percent of, like, what's your Amazon share of revenue for your, for Ridge?
Oh, it's like, it's historically been like 20%.
Okay. So we're not that far. I mean, we're in that, that like, yeah, we're in that range as well. Obviously during Prime Time Sale, it's like 4 to 1, you know, dollars on Amazon to dollars on Shopify. 'Cause we'll activate, well, we, we more or less do this. At least on individual offers, we more or less do the same offer on our individual products on the 2 channels, but they're very incremental audiences. That's also why I think that Prime Time Sale, Prime Sale still always works for us in spite of us running these other 3 offers is just because those other 3 offers or 2 offers, I should say, Mother's Day, Memorial Day, those are huge Shopify moments. And we do activate on Amazon as well. But they just, you know, those don't perform as well as Shopify. And then we activate on Prime and it, and it, we have a big moment. So I do think there's some, something to be said about, sure, we don't have as much time to like build the funnel following those other 2 sale moments, but I also don't think we just don't clear the funnel as much on Amazon. So like that funnel is still relatively built up, even though the .com funnel is a little bit more depleted. So we still see those big spikes just because I think the audiences that are buying from us on Shopify and Amazon are very different and you can see it through the The AOV is the number one thing that you look at the two and it's like, wow, these are just totally different marketplaces for you guys. So yeah, it's been interesting though. I don't know, the 4-day Prime event, I didn't know, I came into it this year with the hypothesis that we were going to see better growth because I felt like the consumer was more, even though they moved it up again, I feel like the consumer's a little bit more familiar with the 4-day event. Not the case. And maybe it's going to be more backloaded because people are building carts and they maybe haven't fully converted yet because there's a lot to sift through over this 4 days as far as like a consumer's perspective goes. But yeah, day 1 was, it was again, not bad. We were happy with the results we got, but I was just shocked to hear some of the category trends and it doesn't seem like the consumer's getting any more familiar with this 4-day event.
Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it trends over time. Um, you know, you mentioned one thing before we get into, we've got some, we've got some topics I'm excited about jumping into here. Um, but you mentioned not doing, obviously not doing a Super Bowl ad this year, not doing a big time sale. Did that make comps weird for you guys for that February period? Like, did you feel the lack of a Super Bowl ad year over year?
Totally. I mean, dude, it was more than the, it was more than February. It's like the comps for all of, when you do that big of a demand generation campaign, it makes your entire, honestly, it makes the entire One Age comp super weird because, and we were very confident in real time last year how that Super Bowl ad performed for us. But I think it became even more clear how much that did for us once we got through Q1 this year and even into the second quarter, mainly through kind of the core things we were looking at were branded search volumes, like going into Search Console and just looking at the year on year, like trend in impressions from our branded search terms, Google Search Console data, and then looking at the same thing in Amazon, like branded search volume. And like we saw pretty drastic drops in our total net branded search volume in Amazon and Google Search Console. And then when you go and look at Google, if you go to Google Search Trends, which anyone can do this and type in HexClad, and you look over the last, like whatever, enough time to include both last February and the February prior. You'll see that we were at like a 49 out of 100 last February in 2025, and this year we're at like a 40 out of 100 in 2026. So like you can clearly see across all these different data points that we just didn't generate as much demand this year or awareness. And like, I'm not shocked at that. The Super Bowl campaign we did probably drummed up 200, 300 million impressions. So yeah, I mean, we're, Luckily, from a revenue perspective, we're not like down, you know, I think our branded search was down like multiple hundreds of thousands of like net impressions and as per Google Search Console this year, but revenue-wise, we're not like trending in that direction, but we're absolutely, I think that speaks to how much demand a moment like that can generate when executed in the right way. Yeah.
Yeah. That's why I was curious about asking. It is one of those things where in the moment you can feel confident, you can kind of triangulate it and then What's often really helpful is like that following year you get an even better understanding of like, of what that total impact was.
I'm hoping we could do it again soon, right? Like, I would love to. The tricky part is, you know, there's a reason you see like the massive, massive brands activating for a Super Bowl. The main reason is not the amount of spend it requires to buy a 15 or a 30-second spot that year. It's There's a lot more that goes into it. You generally have to commit to that same level of media investment with that network that's hosting it for the following 3 years. So if you go spend $7 million on a Super Bowl ad this year, well, and NBC or CBS airs it, well, you have to go spend another $21 million with CBS over the following 3 years. If you're Geico or Dr Pepper or Doritos, that doesn't matter because you're spending there already. But if you're Hexclad or Ridge or Groon's where you don't have a massive, massive linear TV budget relatively, chances are you can't go and commit $7 million per year to national linear TV buys. Now, Fox is a partner of ours, so that's why we were able to go and kind of make that investment last year because we didn't have all of the requirements that we would've had with an H or a network we weren't partners with, but like, that's why we didn't buy another ad this year is because Fox wasn't airing it. And, um, you know, we're not partnered with any of these other networks.
That's interesting. Yeah, no, I had no backstory there. I, uh, might be in Ridge's future. We'll see. Once I've got like $30 million in budget to sort of allocate, uh, it's at the top of the list.
I think you need like, I think you need like $10 million. That is what I would say you need to shoot like ideate the creative, shoot the creative, buy the media, and then any sort of like accessory activations that you're gonna do around the campaign. I think that's probably like a good, if you feel like you can spend $10 mil, that's like a good, you're like, all right, we got a Super Bowl ad in the tank, I think.
[Sponsor Content] Motion just dropped their 2026 Creative Benchmarks Report and it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same 4 questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate? And which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers and over a billion dollars in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings, like the fact that only 4 to 8% of ads actually become winners and over half of ads actually lose. And for Motion customers, This report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your Motion dashboard with their Runneth AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionapp.com and tell the marketing operator sent you. Prime Day's good, and I love getting into the Super Bowl. The technical first thing we've got on the agenda here, I'm hiring a new director of performance creative, which I'm super excited about. Um, and I wanted to get your read on it. Performance creative, obviously, like I was, I was talking to my brother last night, actually. Um, our director of performance creative, uh, on the team now has been around for like 5 years. And when we hired for that role 5 years ago, like nobody was hiring for that role. And this is also where I give someone like Motion a lot of credit. Premier sponsor Motion is like, you know, Reza came on the show 18 months ago.
Yeah.
And he was extremely clear and they've been clear for a very long time. Like that is the person that they're building for. They're building for the performance creative or the creative strategist is what they call it. Because I just think over the last half decade, we've become like infinitely more data-driven and we've really built far more sort of toolings and strategies for like, how are we developing ad content? How are we thinking about it strategically? How are we iterating, et cetera?
Obviously.
like a core part of what we talk about on this podcast. So I'm super excited about hiring this new director of performance creative. And I think it's a good time to sort of like reflect on like what is needed from that role today. And one of my first thoughts is, and Ridge is coming from a unique position, but I think a lot of brands listening will find themselves in similar circumstances. We have a good team and we have a great system where I think about like, I think about adding someone to that system and I think we've got Uh, you know, we know what we're trying to do here fundamentally. We have the processes in pre— in place. We know what we want creative exploration to look like, creative iteration to look like. We've got the Notion workflows, we've got the project manager, all of these things. And I was just thinking about how I think performance creative leaders have become more system operators than like individual creative ideators. So I'm curious, like just your take on that and how it looks at, at HexCloud now. Like what is that balance? Where does, Where does, uh, you know, that, that more traditional, like creative exploration stop and like the, the system building begin?
I fully agree with your take. You know, this actually doesn't, I listened to your Hot Takes with Austin and I actually think your hot take on like how, how weird the CMO role is actually applies really well here. Like I think on, on Hot Takes, you were saying, you know, today's CMO for an e-com brand needs to be like basically a data analyst. Like you really need to deeply understand your numbers and where they're trending and why, and like, But you also need to be able to sit with the team and like come up with like a funny campaign idea, like a very pure creative. And it's like no different here. I think about what a good creative strategist can do today. And it's like, of course they can come up with the ideas, but they can also produce the ideas like with an editing team. They can have a system around making the flywheel run like you just talked about. They also have to like have some level of data analytic capabilities. So it is one of the, it is becoming like, and I think that's why the creative strategist role is like harder and harder to find really good talent. And it's also demanding, like, I mean, good CS demands a pretty high salary nowadays for an e-com brand and it's for good reason. So I agree. I think it is like our CS lead is like, her name's Alyssa. She's awesome. She's very creative. She has great ideas and she is able to bring those ideas to life. I think her absolute superpower is operations. She has built an amazing system, an amazing flywheel with how we use ClickUp to manage everything from, all right, we've decided we're going to go execute this idea all the way through. Now we're reporting on the data with this idea. She is unbelievable at that. And again, she's still good at the ideation stuff. She still comes up with great ideas. She's very creative as well. And, but we have like, I think that's her strong suit. And then we have other people in the team, like for example, we have this woman on our team, Paige, and like she is awesome at like the blue sky thinking, big swings, net new ideas. And again, not that she's bad at the other stuff, but like just as Alyssa's very good at the operational bit, and I think that's her strongest quality, Paige's strongest quality is certainly the, like me when I come to her with some like wacky fun idea, I go to her and say, hey, like, can you work, can you like beat this idea up with me? I want to talk. I think there's something here. So like we've kind of, I think it's all about building a team that like you can't have every, like if you have 5 creative strategists on your team, you can't have every single one be, have their strong suit be like the systems building and like the flywheel operating. You also can't have all of their strong suit be the ideation because then you're going to end up with a bunch of people pitching great ideas, but none of it's going to get done in a systematized way. So I think it's like, No, I mean, brands of our size, like if you're a $100 million brand, you probably have 2, 3, 4, 5 creative strategists on your team. I think it's like building the team in a way where you have multiple people where all of their different strengths, like you can't have everyone be only good at the one thing. So yeah, it's, I think it's less about like every single person having all of those attributes and more about comp— like having different people have different attributes, and then you have this team where it's like super complementary to one another, and then you can kind of figure out as you go, like who handles which concepts and which parts of the flywheel and all that. I absolutely agree.
The one thing I guess I would include outside of like team, like, um, searching for attributes in team members to build like a functional, well-rounded system, 'cause that's like, it, it, it's good and that's like extremely applicable, like almost across the organization where you want the same thing with like, your retention team or anything else. One thing that I think that's interesting about performance creative, particularly over the last couple of years, is it seems like a lot of like the concepting, who's actually coming up with the concept, has really moved from the strategist to the creator where like, it felt like 4 years ago we were like, he, like we had, we were like really like briefing out, we want you to say, I remember seeing like really, and look, there's like a thousand ways to skin a cat and this is a perfect example of that. But I remember seeing really robust briefs sent to creators. We never got this far, but like, there's some sort of like DTC plant company. I remember getting one of their briefs and it was extremely well done. And they were like, they'd send this out to creators and they were like, this is what we want you to say. These are the shots we want you to include. Here's the A-roll. Here's the B-roll. Here's like direction on lighting, things like that. Like really robust briefs that they would send out to the point where they knew exactly what kind of content that they were getting back. And it feels to me like we've reached this point in performance creative, or at least a lot of people have decided to prioritize volume and a lot of volume is, you know, outsourcing some of those details, some of that briefing to the creator. People have been creating ad creative and UGC for a long time now. So instead of me having to tell you exactly what to create, I can just say, hey, I want you to talk about this product in a way that's authentic that you think people on TikTok will, you know, resonate with. Now I'm going to do that 100 times. And that's actually how I produce creative. And that's, that's probably one of the big step changes in how performance creative has gone from creative ideation to systems building is because the actual ideating has also been sort of outsourced to a degree.
[Sponsor Content] Yeah. Yeah. It's like the age of the yapper is what, is what really works well. It's like if in, in the, in the less brief, the more yappy, type of creator-led ads you get. Yeah, I agree with that. I think especially on the creator side, I still think, I mean, we're still producing stuff internally, especially with, as we've shifted to be more of like, we have this philosophy of like, make it for YouTube and just include safe zones for 4:5 and vertical videos. 'Cause we find that when we shoot stuff for YouTube, then we cut it in paid social specs and length and like pacing, it works really well. And then we get multiple assets for multiple channels. Like, you know, we have this ad that we're working on right now that we're calling like Sensational Durability that we'll launch probably in the next month. And it's all about kind of being ridiculous with the pan in order to demonstrate how durable it is, because that is our leading value proposition. It's, I think it's going to crush. I really hope so. We've been working on it for a long-ass time, but that's a great example where that has been like a highly briefed, highly planned, highly produced. I mean, this is like a pure YouTube ad. You could even argue it might even be like a CTV level ad. That's where like, I think a real creative strategist does shine still because you, it's again, it's, there's like very highly briefed and thoughtful and planned. And like, again, that's an example where you, I went to the team and was like, hey, I have this idea for how we can like produce an ad that's all about this value prop durability, but I wanna do it in kind of like a tongue-in-cheek funny way. So, you know, we're like running it over with a fire truck and like doing weird stuff like that. And then we transition into giving the more practical use cases. So it's not all about like flamethrowers and fire trucks and dropping off a building and stuff like that. But that's a good example where I went to Paige and I was like, hey, here's this idea. She took it and ran with it and has done like, that's pure, that's like pure creative work right there. And that was highly briefed, highly produced, a lot of steps along the way, a lot of back and forth with editors. to get it right. It's just like very different end of the spectrum than, oh, hey creator, here's our value props. Go talk about it in a super authentic way and like, send me your video when you have it back. And like, you have to be able to do both. And I think where some people even struggle with the latter now is they feel like they need to have a lot of input to be doing their job. When in reality, sometimes the less input you give a creator now is better because it comes back more authentic. And I think you almost have to resist that a little bit if you're someone that is like, oh, I barely put anything in the brief. Like, should I put more in here? It's like, no, you probably shouldn't. So it's an interesting, 'cause I agree. I remember when I was writing briefs to creators back in the day, it was like a lot more scripted, a lot more prescriptive. And now it's like, it's more about just briefing them and educating them on the brand, right? So their authentic ad comes back accurate and not like, you know, hey, you gotta lead with these value props. We don't want you to lead with our like tertiary value prop stuff like that. So, um, yeah, it's, it's a very interesting dynamic now. It's changed a lot. Quick gut check for the operators listening. If you are spending on TV or CTV today, can you actually say what it's driving incrementally? This is exactly why we work and have worked with Neon Pixel at HexClad for the last 3 years. We've grown with them a lot over time, and CTV has become one of our top growth channels. They help us treat premium living room TV, like a real performance channel. It has smarter household targeting. It has suppression of people who already know us. It has a very robust analytics backend. So we feel really good about the measurement. And ultimately, and most importantly, it is a strategy that is built around incremental growth, not just claimed attribution. We look at incrementality as the true North Star on measuring channels, and they're really measurement agnostic. They don't force us into their own black box dashboard. They work inside the measurement systems we already trust and help us understand what TV is actually doing. If you want to check it out, go to neonpixel.co and ask them to design a controlled CTV test on your numbers.
Yeah. What, so the, the sensational durability concept, how was that produced? Was it done by creators or did you guys, like, I'm curious the level of investment behind that idea.
It was produced by our internal team, no creators. Actually, the woman who stars in the ad page, so the woman who briefed the ad page, she's also like the main talent in the ad as well. And she's like playing this, like the angle is like she's a scientist and explaining why and how our product's so durable. And it's like, we tested it through all these methods and then our internal team produced it and planned it. So they went to all these different locations. Some of it's in studio, but a lot of it's out there in the real world. And yeah, there's no, I mean, there is external talent. Like they, we had to hire people, like, you know, but not, not, it's not creators, right? Like we hired, you know, actors through some sort of website where you can act, like find people. So yeah, kind of like a more of like a pure ad, I would say.
100%. Like relatively traditional form of production. Albeit with the internal team. It's actually, I'm super glad you bring it up as an example, 'cause then I was, so that's kind of been my frame of thinking where I'm like, all right, I get to hire this new director. Let me reflect on like where the team's at currently. And what I would say is like, we started from a place of like, you know, 4 or 5 years ago, like, hey, we're gonna be pretty prescriptive with briefing. We're gonna get dozens of creators sort of like in our network and like, that's gonna be our system. And that has worked really well for a really long time. I think we've moved into the direction of let's do lighter briefing with more creators, but we haven't fully embraced it. So I think that's, that's one path that we could further go down. We're focused on TikTok Shop right now and building out the affiliate network. And it's like, that feels like a path for a performance creative strategist now where you say, hey, your job is not really to do briefing anymore. It's to build the system to you know, onboard creators and maybe you're doing the coaching calls and the general brand education and the review of what ads are performing and what aren't so that when you give a very loose brief of, hey, I need you to talk about, you know, this wallet for this sale, it's just gonna come back slightly higher quality. So I think that's one path to go where it is just, it is just more of a focus on volume. And then the other way that I had was like more of what you just laid out, the, the bigger shoot, the pre-production work, the like, let's actually, think about a very high-level concept and like, let's execute on a really fantastic 30-second YouTube ad or CTV ad. And those feel like, um, more likely than not will require different people. Like, I have to make that decision in terms of how do I want to further build out the performance creative team? And like, those feel like 2 pretty distinct paths to me.
I agree. I think, 'cause we're doing the same thing with the TikTok Shop affiliate content. I think the only caveat I would add, and even in this example, I would still argue you want to keep it light on the briefing. If you go and activate with a certain creator that's like speaking to a certain persona, you still, you might want to give that person a little bit more prescription on kind of the why behind the reason you're activating with them. Just because the last thing you like, if we go and activate with a mom or a dad style creator And the value props that that person is gonna hit on are gonna be very different than the value props that, you know, some kind of 33-year-old buff guy that's cooking a lot of steak are gonna hit on, right? The parent's gonna be all about, I love how quick it heats up and how quick it cleans up 'cause it's fast. I love that I can throw it in the dishwasher because it's efficient. Like they're gonna be all about efficiency. I got a family of 6 I'm cooking for and I'm cooking for them 6 times a day or 3 times a day. Like you might just wanna hit on that in the brief, but other than that, like you're still gonna let 'em cook, you know, you don't want to go too much deeper than that. So I think that's the only caveat I would add is it's not like a full throw 'em the same brief and see what they come to. Like there still can be varying levels of like pointing them in the right direction. So I'm curious what, I have a question for you, 'cause, you know, presumably I know you have like this person left and now you're hiring to like backfill them, but what's your current kind of creative strategy stack look like in terms of people? I imagine you have, you know, multiple creative strategists on the team at this point.
Yeah. Yeah. We have 2, 2 US-based strategists still. Um, we've got 2 offshore editors. We've got 3 designers. That's what we, that's what we would consider the performance creative team right now. Yeah. And one of those strategists is like a, is like a hybrid strategist and editor.
Okay. What are their, what are their skill sets? Would you say, are they more like great at the operations, great at the ideation, some combination of each? 'Cause I'm curious based on their skill sets, if you're thinking that the lead needs to fill a certain skill set more than others because you need them to like fit the puzzle piece the right way.
Yeah, I think I, and that's kind of what I was, what I was hitting at earlier. What we currently do well is like slightly more involved briefing and doing that at decent scale. And we are, we have been like sort of erring on the side of scale recently where we've begun activating with more creators and like continuing to produce more and more content. And then also we've been, you know, building out this affiliate program and performance creative has sort of bled into that as well. Like, let's make sure that the briefing and direction that our affiliate community gets is also informed by our creative strategy. So that's like, That's a side of the spectrum that we've been exploring that we are good at. We have a project manager on the team, and I think the system itself is like very well maintained and will continue to be so. So when I think about hiring this new director, it's really just, do we want to go further down the path of volume? And do I look for someone who comes from like a TikTok shop oriented, you know, supplement brand, like has activated thousands of creators in the past, is extremely reasonable path for us to continue down? Or do we actually try to round out the platform more and say, hey, um, you know, we're, we're looking for someone who has more, um, experience with, uh, the, the bigger shoots, the higher productions, the pre-production work. We can take maybe fewer swings, but they're more meaningful or potentially more impactful.
Right. So more of like a true, like creative director style background.
Like that sort of deal. Yeah. But, but But again, with the idea of it being performance-oriented.
I've been shocked at just like the amount of spend we've been able to get behind some of these bigger creators or smaller creators that we just barely briefed. And then they send us back an ad and it just like, it's, I think it's the secret's out now that we did a pretty big activation, not major, but like we activated with Bethenny Frankel and she's the perfect example where like you do not wanna overbrief Bethenny 'cause the reason The reason she works in ads is for 2 reasons. One, because she hawks products and her audience is there.
So just to be clear, I don't know who Bethenny Frankel is.
Oh, Bethenny Frankel is, she's kind of like, she's very, a very successful entrepreneur. I think she has this brand called like Skinny Tequila. It's like some sort of, I don't know if it's an NA, like mixed brand, like type product that you mix with tequila or if it's like alcohol infused, but It's like Skinny Girl Tequila or something like that. She's super successful. I think her, she's like one of those kind of like HGTV, not HGTV, like Bravo. Sorry. She's like a Bravo personality. So she's really like, my mom watches stuff with Bethenny Frankel in it. And like, I would have to look up where she, she was on those like Bravo TV shows for a long time. So, but if you go look at her page, I'm curious what her like initial like kind of path to fame was, I forget. But if you go look at her page, she hawks products. Like her audience, she's attract— she's inherently attracting people that sells products. And I think you see this time and time again where a brand will activate with some large influencer and then they're like shocked that it didn't perform that well organically, at least because they don't hawk products and their audience isn't there because they want to get sold products. They're there because they like the content, the lifestyle, the whatever of that creator, that influencer. Bethany's not that. She is talking about and reviewing products all the time. Her audience is there for that. That's one reason she works. The other reason is because we don't, you know, she's very authentic in the ads she makes. So like we didn't send her an overly prescribed brief. We got something back that was super authentic. And on the surface level, you're like, wait, we paid what for this? Because it's just like, again, it's like, Single shot, barely edited stuff. But then you, we get to the end of the term where we spent like 7, 8x on those ads, what we paid her. We got a huge ROI on it. And it's like, yeah, we didn't, we'd let her do her thing and it felt very authentic to her. And now our competitors realized that all of a sudden, 3, 4 months into our deal, all of a sudden she's popping up on an ad with Caraway. We're like, all right, maybe we should have, maybe we should have had some exclusivity in the deal. I don't necessarily think that took away from the performance of our activation with her, but I think those are the things to think about with these creators is, are those things like, are they gonna be able to come in and sell a product in a DROA? I don't think that you have to necessarily, like they don't have to be doing this organically for them to make a good ad and for it to work and pay. That's not what I'm saying. But still, I mean, I think we've all had experiences where we've tried to get someone that's not used to selling products on paid social. And then you go and say, hey, can you make an ad about this product? And like, it just doesn't come back that good because it's not a native format to them. They're not used to doing that. So I think I'm not saying they have to be doing it organically and have to have attracted an audience organically that's interested in that. But oftentimes these people don't know how to like sell a product in a DROA way. Bethany does, like she really does. And there's a reason you're seeing A lot of brands activate with her. There's a reason you're seeing a lot of brands activate with Eric Eichmann, I think is his name. You know, he's that fitness influencer that he does tons of brand deals. He's good at making ads. He knows how to sell products. He knows how to like do it in a way that's fresh for each brand. If you were to go and activate with, I don't know, Aaron Judge or some other athlete, chances are they're not gonna be able to like make a DR product-oriented ad the same way that Eric can. So it's really important to like think about those things before just thinking about the surface level, like, oh yeah, this person, I'm gonna slap their name on our product and brand and it's just gonna work. It's like, well, not really. I was actually, I actually saw an ad, my friend Cam sent me an ad from Giannis, Giannis Antetokounmpo, or however you say his last name. And dude, it was a GoPuff ad. And I was shocked at how good he was. I never thought Giannis would be like good in an ad. And it was amazing. It was like more of a high-produced, like scripted, like kind of what we were talking about earlier. But I was like amazed at how good Giannis was. I was like, damn, this is gonna open up so many doors for Giannis 'cause brands are gonna see how good he was in this ad and go in. And it was really funny. It was like really tongue-in-cheek funny. And it was one of the, I just would, I didn't expect him to be like that good in front of a camera making an ad.
Yeah, there's a bit of a spectrum there between like the, the Bethenny Frankels, like being more social native to like Giannis being in the TV commercial. Um, quick, quick aside here, Giannis related. Um, and then we could jump into the AI agent point you wanted to hit, but did you see there's a Kevin Durant and Drake ad out now for Kevin Durant's new shoes and Drake is fantastic in it.
Um, that doesn't shock me. I mean, Drake's an actor. I was watching Degrassi. I was watching Degrassi when I was like, 11 years old, you know?
Totally. No. And he's like, I mean, he is, he's just a raw entertainer for sure. Like has the, has the, the true acting background. Um, so of course, like, I guess it shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Uh, but I just saw it like discussed on, on Instagram and people were like, people had for— they were just acknowledging that they'd forgotten how good of an actor he was and that he just like absolutely crushes it in this Kevin Durant commercial. Um, really, really cool.
I gotta check it out. I'm gonna pull it up in a tab so I don't forget. Oh, it's a Nike commercial. Okay.
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I am just so bullish on this use case for AI. Like, I think our initial inspo for this, our muse for this was Rufus on Amazon. And now I'm actually looking and it's like Alexa for shopping. So I don't know if they like sunsetted Rufus and now they have Alexa for shopping, but for anyone that doesn't know, Rufus is basically this on Amazon. So you could go to Amazon and you could say, hey, I'm having, I work a desk job. I sit at a desk for 8 hours a day. I'm having back problems. I'm trying to figure out a solution here. And you can type this into Rufus and it'll basically come back to you and say, all right, thanks for the info, Connor. Here are 5 products that could help your back issues because of your desk job. And it's actually a really, really helpful tool, especially when you're looking at a marketplace like Amazon where there's hundreds of thousands of products. But I also think it applies well to a D2C brand when you have multiple categories and a lot of spread in your products as well. If you're a one product brand, probably not. But at HexClad, we have more and more and more categories every single year, every single month. We also have a very high price point. So I'm actually, I'm very bullish on this AI agent embedded into a Shopify brand that's trained on all the context of the brand. and putting that in, basically testing into it like you would with any CRO play. I think this could be a massive improvement in conversion rate, maybe even AOV, because theoretically, if you give it the right context, like the same way that navigation wins or like product category testing, or like when I say product category testing, I mean like product category discoverability testing, it generally drives up AOV. So I'm very bullish on these embedded AI agents on brands' websites. Sites and those being able to really improve conversion rate and AOV because more questions are getting answered. You're able to break down friction in a more custom way. You're able to make your products more discoverable. So that's something we've been working on in the background now for like a while actually. We've been doing a lot of like RFPs for different options out there. They're becoming more and more common, but our vendor that we're already working with is actually rolling out a solution here. So we're about to get going with We're not ready to launch it, but like we've decided who we're gonna work with and we're about to like give it all the training and build it out. And then the first place we're gonna test it is right at the point of conversion on the product page. And I'm just super bullish on this for our brand because of our price point and our category breadth and a bunch of other things. And I'm thinking we're gonna see this become like, this is not, it's not, we're gonna not be the first one to do it. Who's the Who's the big pizza oven brand that everyone knows? Not Solo Stove. Ooni. Ooni's another muse for us on this one. They have, if you go to their product page, I think you'll see it right on there in their shop section where you can just go and ask it. I think they had it on here. Yeah, you can go and see it on here. They have a little like, person icon now. I think this is where we, where we first saw it and we were really inspired by these guys. So yeah, I'm just super excited about it. I think it's going to become, I think a year from now, like tons of brands are going to have this in various spots on their website in order to like be a CRO play.
So you guys are starting it on the PDP. Will it live as like a little widget in the corner that someone can like, a help icon that someone can click into and ask a question?
I think our first place we're going to test it is actually like below the cart, not as a flyout. Like, I think we're going to have like a default open chat box and like have some sort of like default copy that invites someone to ask a question. We're going to test into a bunch of different UX on it over the course of 3 months. So we'll see which one we end up testing into. But yeah, point right at the point of conversion is where we're going to initially launch it. But I could see this. I mean, some people I've seen brands have like an open question chat bar as their like hero section before, which is really interesting. Now that's usually brands with like, I'm talking like car parts brands, right? Where you have to like, what car do you have? It's like, I have a 2025 Jeep Cherokee. Like that's more of the use case there. I don't think we'll be that level of like front and center, but I think there's tons of spots that this could this could work. It also turns into an amazing first-party data source because you can go and then look and aggregate and look at all the things people are typing in and see, oh wow, 50% of these inquiries are about topic X. We're not addressing that in our ads or in our emails or anywhere else. Like we should go build funnels around that. So I think it'll also inform our marketing stack over time as well, which is going to be fun.
Yeah, I'm super interested to see the different UX patterns that people experiment with over, you know, the coming years. What I've seen most commonly is like that little flyout thing at the bottom, which I'm not a big fan of.
That's what Uni has.
Yeah, that's what Uni has. And I get it. Um, it doesn't feel all that intuitive to me. It's still very like proactive. I don't think people are used to like that form of interaction. You brought up the, I really liked the search being an entry point into AI-assisted shopping. Um, you know, Google's so good at this at this point. I like don't Google stuff all that much anymore, but like the experience of, I forget what I was searching for the other day. I was looking for somebody's age and I just like Googled their age, got an answer with their little knowledge box thing, and then I needed additional information. So I was immediately able to turn that into an AI chat interface. And I'm like, that's almost like the ideal.
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interaction. We're like, give me the clear, uh, the clear information that I'm looking for. It's likely just indexed or whatever else. And then as I need to explore that further, then it becomes AI assisted. And I think that could work really well within a Shopify store. And we just see so, I mean, we're, we're like, we don't even have a very big catalog and we see so much engagement with the search bar. As we've expanded categories and products over the last couple of years, like we've spent more time getting the right search interaction in place, like making sure that it's available on mobile in the nav, that once you do search, that that SERP page is actually like pretty decent and strong. And it's like, you have so much intent and understanding of what that person's looking for. That feels like a very high leverage touchpoint to maybe be more AI sort of augmented.
I think, I actually think most people are like, oh, AI is going to take everyone's job. I think you probably agree with this. I just, I've really, I really generally disagree with that. I think AI makes you more powerful. It makes you more productive. I don't think it's, I think it's, there's a lot more enhancement of your job than it is taking jobs. I think this is one of the use cases where I think it should in theory reduce headcount on CS, because if you set this up in the right way and you give a tool like this all of the right context, in theory, you sh— it should drive down the CS tickets that your team's getting. So I would hope that because of that, you're able to actually reduce headcount on like the amount of customer service agents that you have. This is one of those use cases where I'm very curious to see, hey, we've been live with this for 3 months and then going to our CS team and seeing if they're noticing any trends on volume of customer service tickets coming through. I would hope that they're seeing less because we're able to answer a lot more of those questions in real time and get those conversions. sooner and not have to get people to reach out to a customer service line, talk to an agent, a real agent, not an AI agent. That'll be very interesting to see. But like, if you go to Simple Tire, again, like their hero section is a search bar, you know, it's search by vehicle, search by tire, search by rebate, search by yada yada. You know, this could even be like a quiz replacement at some point if you have some pre-templated search queries.
100%. Um, yeah, yeah. Uh, quiz replacement's a good one. 'Cause quizzes in many ways, like forms are like, because code wasn't good at, you know, inferring what someone was looking for. It was like you had to collect the information in a very structured way in order to act upon it.
And now it's like, look, like static logic.
Yeah, exactly. Now you can just like type in whatever you want. You can misspell it and like, and, and we're pretty good at actually kind of closing the loop there. Um, you mentioned it being a good, uh, source of first-party data. Have you guys been using the Postscript, um, AI shopper tools? It's like very similar. They've positioned it very similar to what you're describing, where instead of being on site and on the PDP and having a question and, you know, asking this AI shopping assistant and getting the answer that I need, that can be happening off website via SMS, naturally a conversational platform.
Yeah.
Um, and that they're also collecting that first-party data and that can help you, you know, segment and identify intent and things like that.
I think we are, honestly, I would need to check in with our retention lead. Um, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure we are because he's like all on top of all these like newest tech options to optimize and find those incremental wins in those channels. Are you guys using it?
Um, yeah, we, and like, Because it's one of those things, it just feels, I actually had this thought like a couple months ago and like my team's acting on it now. There's just a handful of things in SMS right now that feel inevitable. And the 2 to me are RCS. So the rich content sending, just making it more dynamic, better links, you get carousels, you get better, um, insights into like delivery metrics and things like that. You actually begin getting, uh, like open rates on SMSs, which is super cool. And then the second one is AI, and it's just a matter of like, how do we wanna implement it? And I'll give you an example. I said, with the website example, it's like you've got the PDP, we surface an AI chat on our help pages, and that's one way we just try to like deflect tickets that would otherwise have to be answered manually by a team member. Search, I think, is an interesting touchpoint. One of the ones that I'm most excited about within SMS right now, 'cause it's the exact same idea, If someone signs up for SMS, they receive the welcome series, they get 2 messages, they haven't converted. We have a prompt and it's just an open-ended ask of like, what else, what else do you need here? Like, how can we help you? And it becomes just conversational at that point. And the AI manages that. And that feels like a nice, like, interaction point to me. It's like, we're, we're capturing a ton of value. We're, we're able to deliver most of the information that they need. And typically it's like a promo code or like a little bit of the, like, you know, the standard welcome series sort of messaging, but it's after that point where it's like, they could need any number of things. And now we're going to let the AI sort of like figure out what that is and push them down the path that, that we think is best. Um, so I just think we'll find more and more examples of that, like augmentation throughout the shopping experience.
Yeah. Cause what I'm, what we're talking about on like the onsite agent is the same thing, just different channel, a little bit further up funnel. Um, I agree. I think this is, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if customer success teams are able to be cut in half or a fourth of the size because brands are implementing this onsite in SMS, anything that's just like easier to have a back and forth interaction with a real person. When I say a real person, I mean like a real prospective customer on one end and then obviously AI on the other end. Yeah, I fully agree. I think this is This is absolutely the direction we're heading.
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Love it.
I wanted you to, we're gonna over, we're gonna do an over-under-rated exercise here. I wanna jump into, we're talking about SFS a little bit. And the first, the first one I wanna hit here, I've got email deliverability vendors. So I hear this come up more and more. I think you and I have talked about it. There's, there's people, there's software vendors today who are helping you get better email deliverability, better open rates, landing in the inbox more frequently. People might be, and the, the, the, the, the point of the game is like, you also have to assess how, what is properly rated today, right? And then it's like, and then, and then you can decide whether it's over or underrated. So, so let's start with this one, uh, email deliverability as a, you know, as a software, the vendors, however you want to define that, over, over, under, or properly rated.
So underrated. So underrated. We've, I think email, I think I said this like a few months ago. I think email is one of those channels where these, call it tech partners or like technology overlays on your kind of existing levers, which is just like creative and email. The levers in email are no different than the levers in paid. This is one area where I think there's huge upside when you activate with these technology partners. Whereas I don't feel that way with paid social. Generally these like audience targeting tech tools, at least in my experience, haven't driven much of a lift. We've tested these email deliverability vendors, which is more or less just helping you land in more, it's like technical updates that help you land in the primary inbox more. We've done holdouts and they've driven significant lift. So I think they're wildly underrated.
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So I love this.
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Yeah. So I also think they're underrated. I also think they're underrated. There is going to be a question very quickly over time as to how much brands should be willing to pay for them. Like, like we're going to all have to be conscious of that. I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of those things. Uh, well, maybe I was, it's a little, I think we're early to the trend right now. I think a lot of people aren't using anything. I agree with you. We've seen fantastic results of onboarding some of these people and just getting better deliverability.
Yeah.
driving revenue because of that. It probably becomes commoditized over time and therefore not ideally not a big software cost. So like, that's the only thing that I would break out quickly for brands, extremely underrated currently for it being the crux of your business model, I think might be a little overrated right now. If I was going to like, if I was going to give, give, give my sort of my outlook on it over the next like 18 months.
Yeah. And then like also once everyone, or once it's the status quo to Use it. Okay, well now all brands or 85% of brands are showing up in your primary inbox and now you're back right where you started because now there's the same level of noise. It's just in your primary inbox and not in your spam or promotional folder. So at some point, I agree, I think it's going to kind of go back towards the mean rather. So if I were one of the leading brands in this space right now, I'd be scaling fast and selling fast probably because over time, More and more brands are going to be showing up in the same space and then the incrementality of it starts to, starts to fall probably.
Totally. Yeah, I totally agree. One, I like your point a lot and I hadn't made this connection of it being valuable on the, you know, in this case, email sending side of things and this sort of technology not being valuable for paid social. I talked to someone else recently and they were like, look, we're going to look at your email list. We're going to build these, um, like likelihood to purchase scores. And then we're going to like push these people back to Meta so you could target them there. And I was like, I couldn't have less of an interest in that. I'm like, that just feels so like, like an artifact of like 2018 that I would have thought was like really cool and interesting. And I'm like, now I'm like, look, we like might have exclusions on some campaigns. Like that's as, that is as like targeted as we're going to get. So a lot of these people trying to build like Meta audience tooling, I would call overrated.
Like I just never, I never see them actually I never saw them work even like 4 years ago. I feel like they didn't work. Now, what I will say is I do think event matching tools are properly rated. Okay, good, good. Like, you know, the, you know, 'cause that makes your, that's, I mean, that's a signal engineering play at the end of the day. Like, I think if you have a 5 outta 10 event match rate in Meta, like if you go to your events manager, I think that's a problem. Like your data quality's not as good as it should be. That's one of those ones where it's hard to, fully quantify how valuable it is to take that from a 5 or 4 outta 10 to a 7 or 9 outta 10. But I believe, and that also should help you with exclusions. If your event match rate is better, well then your exclusion should be stronger as well. So I'd actually think those tools are like the Elevars of the world and the Blotouts of the world and the, I don't know, there's a bunch of those tools now. I think those are, I think most brands at scale should, maybe even brands that not at scale, like if even if you're like a $10 million per year brand, I think most brands should have a tool like that. To make your just data quality in Meta and elsewhere good. 'Cause it's not just Meta, right? It also, like, if you have an LTV and you're, and that also helps, for example, if you have someone that signed up for your email list, then 2 months later they come back and add to cart but don't convert, that also helps you match them in that channel as well. And you're now, you're getting more people into like your abandonment flow. So I think that does help the whole funnel a lot, but—
Absolutely agree.
Yeah.
Elevar is fantastic. I think that's like, I think it's reasonably priced. It's been a long time since I was a small brand paying for Elevar, but like we used to, every time we set up an international store, Elevar is like a part of the launch. It's like, yeah, let's just get all the pixels and all the events and GA set up in a way that's like, it's just all strung up the way that you want. Um, I think that's a good one. I got one more on this point. So actually, just to say for those listening, uh, if, if people are interested, Uh, we use Tie for the email deliverability stuff. I've heard good things about Maverick. Um, totally. Uh, we, okay, we talked about LFR. The last one is this tool called Shopdin that we started using, and this is such a funny part of this stack. It is, uh, it works in your checkout and it's like a more dynamic form of email capture. And what it does is if the, if the shopper is in a state where it's compliant to have the email opt-in auto-checked, it auto-checks it. That's, does that make sense? That's what it does. And it's a no-brainer.
It's a huge— What does that, hold on, what does that mean? Because like, so if they're in a state, it auto, what is it? What do you, all right, so what are like the, what's the logic where it would auto-check it?
Um, you know, like compliance, like auto, uh, like opting people into marketing at different touchpoints, whether it's like your, your email, like your email capture and it like, cookies are a part of this conversation, like different states, CCPA is different than GDPR. Um, so you just get all the, in all these different regions, uh, you have different compliance laws.
Oh, I see.
And a lot of people just default to like, hey, let me just do the safest option everywhere. And all Shoptin does is like, it just localizes marketing opt-in by where that person is.
Um, I see. What's it called?
And it's just a, it's a Shopdin with a T in the middle, S-H-O-P-T-I-N. And, um, yeah, it's just one of those things. Also, I feel the same way that I do about email deliverability where this probably gets commoditized over time as well. Um, but it is just one of those, it's a little part of the technology and whether you wanna call it e-com or retention, it like will improve opt-in rate some amount and capturing those emails and being able to send a few more can really compound over time.
So.
I think, um, we started with email deliverability, over underrated. We both said underrated. I think retention tools generally, like there is a lot of what we're discussing here is where, where is software and technology still impactful? And, uh, I think we explored that pretty well. I'd describe all of that as relatively underrated right now.
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All right, can we go? I have one that I want to hit on.
We're not going to get through the— we're not even going to get close to the full list. What do you want to hit next?
All right, GA4. GA4, over or underrated?
Uh, okay. Uh, I'm gonna go, so again, people hate GA4. This one's actually super, I think this is a super easy answer. People hate GA4. Google Analytics, or Google ruined Google Analytics. Like it's really, it's really not good. Um, it is underrated.
Uh, yes, I agree.
It's, it's gotten to the point where it's so hard to use and people have written it off so much that they forget that there's really still a lot of really valuable information in there. The reason I put this one on the list is we're in the middle of our theme test. We talked about it last week. GA4 and building segments based off of Intelligems testing cells is still extremely valuable. And we got like extremely granular, like page-level information between the 2 segments. And it's just hard to get that data elsewhere. So I'm calling it underrated.
I agree. I think, so here's where I think it's, It's not underrated. I think like we use Edge Mesh for site speed and they also have built on that server-side technology. They have an analytics suite and like server-side analytics is a lot, like it's always less leaky than client-side where pixels don't load or UTMs don't load. So like, I think if you're a brand that has a tool like server-side analytics, it's, you don't need GA4 anymore. However, If you're a brand that doesn't have that, I think GA4 is wildly underrated. Like I was talking to this apparel brand and they were trying to do some non-purchase conversion event stuff, and I was trying to convince them that like the, what they were doing wasn't working that well and they should try some other stuff. The first place I went was GA4 and I did like a campaign UTM and was like, well, look at the time on site. Look at the amount of like actions these people are taking relative to some of the other campaigns that you're doing. I still think there's really good data in GA4. I was also looking at like, they had really high frequency because they're running like 1%. I was just like doing a quick audit for them and trying to give them some quick advice. And like, they're like running 1% lookalikes. I was like, well, your frequency here is 4, but if you go into GA4, because they don't have some of these other tech tool or analytics tools, you can see that it's still driving a lot of new user growth to your website. So it's like not great that it's a 4 or 5 frequency and like, prospecting, but it is still driving first-time website visitors. You can still extract a lot of that information and like it helps you triangulate what's going on in your various marketing channels. I don't think people spend enough time in GA4, assuming they don't have some of these other, like they don't have Northbeam, they don't have an EdgeMatch, they don't have, you know, some of these other tools. And House is maybe going to give GA4 a resurgence because House is, you know, building that integration with GA4.
Yeah.
So, you know, GA4 could have a renaissance coming on the back of, you know, one of the best measurement tools out there, Houzz. So I agree, underrated, especially for brands that don't have as robust of an analytics suite.
Yeah, that's a funny, yeah, that's a really good one. It's a really funny point around Houzz making GA4 more relevant, or even I brought it up, really the only reason I used GA4 was because it was a complement to Intelligems. So like there is, And the other thing about it being underrated from an industry perspective is it's free and basically everybody has it. It's not like it's not there. Like if I'm, if I'm Houzz or if I'm Intelligems, like it does make sense for me to have integrations and documentation because like everybody's got it. You brought up, so I don't, I'm unfamiliar with Edge Mesh's product. You brought up Northbeam and like, I would love for Northbeam to make GA4 less relevant, but like a lot of their stuff is still GA4 is like page-oriented, right? It's like really about like the website. I think Northbeam has made like the source medium report of GA like inapplicable basically. Um, but just like, you know, basic like page visits, like you can't really get out of Northbeam. I would love for them to build a public—
Time on site, stuff like that. Like average, like events per, yeah, there's all sorts of web analytics that you get out of But even Edge Mesh, you don't get time on site data. So even there are certain things where GA4 is still kind of the only option for that data, which is interesting. I'm shocked that you can't get everything in some other tool now. So yeah, maybe that's the next opportunity. If someone can build a better time on site tool than GA4, then GA4 will officially be done for.
I think I've got, I've got one last one for you.
Okay.
It's a joke one. It came up recently with a friend. Over, underrated, waving at the end of Zoom calls, the physical wave.
I think it is. I think it's underrated. I think it's underrated. I don't, I don't think you should treat, like, if I'm having a conversation with someone, I don't think I should treat it any differently on a Zoom call. That is, I don't think I should treat it any differently than if I I'm having a conversation with someone in person. Like, I think the social norm should still like cut through digitally. Like, it's not like you just like hit end and don't say goodbye.
That's totally—
that'd be weird. I'm like, I'm usually throwing up a peace sign or a wave or a salute. There's some sort of acknowledgement.
Physical acknowledgement.
Yeah. There's a physical acknowledgement that we are wrapping this conversation. Underrated.
Dude, I absolutely agree. I also think this one's easy just because waving at the end of Zoom calls, like get online. Like people act like it's really, this is why it came up. I was, I was talking with a friend and they thought it was really cringe. And I'm like, dude, not at all. I'm like, uh, uh, uh, one, there's, there's multiple reasons for it. I like the one that you said, hey, we're talking face to face. We're ending the call. Some sort of physical acknowledgement is just common courtesy that we should extend from the physical world into the digital one. I personally am supportive of that. The other big one is when you're on a big call, 15 people, everybody's muted for the most part. There should be some, there should be like, it's just common courtesy for there to be some sort of acknowledgement. You're not, not everybody's going to come off mute and say bye. I'm like not a fan of that. I always think that's kind of like a weird, like sort of online thing that people do.
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The subtle wave, the subtle acknowledgement, I think is good. I think we gotta, I think we gotta embrace it.
Or another good example, if you have to leave early, you know, I usually drop a little, hey, gotta jump. Appreciated the chat. We'll talk, we'll talk later. You hit enter on that, hit 'em with a wave, leave. I think that's perfect. That's good. It's actually, I feel weird. I feel weird when it's too abrupt, like at the end of a call, it's like, oh, Oh, we're done. Okay. It just feels, it's like there's no closure to the conversation. It's like, oh, we just hit, hit leave. And yeah, it's weird. It's, it's just like, it doesn't feel right.
I absolutely agree. You know, um, all right, this is a little bit of an aside. I, there's a book that I really love called Culture Code. It's about building high-performing teams. Um, it's a great book. They go through way different types of teams also. Like they, they talk with the people or they, they talk about the people who watch the nuclear bombs, the nuclear warheads. They talk about, they probably talk about like Navy SEALs or something. And then the one that I'm going to say is Greg Popovich, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, and the culture that he builds. And one of the things that they talked quite a bit about with Greg Popovich is just like the way he carries himself between players physically. Like they said, he'd show up to practice and he would like acknowledge everybody one-to-one and he'd like, you know, a light like touch on the shoulder, like these very like physical interactions, very subtle, were like a great way for him to be building rapport rapport and connection between him and his players. And like, I read this book years ago, but what stood out to me immediately is like, you lose all of that immediately when you have a remote team. And I don't think the wave at the end of the Zoom call is like the difference between building a high-performing team or not. But I think caring about those small interactions is good. And what reminded me of it is when you say, yeah, the abruptly ending calls and like everybody just hangs up. Nobody says goodbye, nobody waves. Like there's no sort of proper ending. I do think ends up having like long-term impacts on team trust and team dynamics and things like that.
Yeah. Well, one, I'm excited to read that book. It sounds like, yeah, I do think like great leaders have like a super high enhanced level of, I think that's like an emotional intelligence thing. I also, you know, I'm in LA right now. I come out here once a month, once every 6 weeks. Whenever I'm out here, I feel like I just don't get much work done because it's just like seeing people added meetings, vendors are coming out to get together with us. And I think over time I've learned that that's okay. And that like the value of me going and having a chat with someone on the team, like unplanned for 15 minutes in the kitchen is probably more valuable than me taking that 15 to 30 minutes and like getting some work done. It's like, unless it's like something that has to get done today for like something tomorrow. It's like, you know what, I can get to that next week or tonight when I'm not in office with the team. And like, it's okay. I used to like feel anxious about that. It's like, no, this is why I'm here. Like to get this face time with the team and to be able to like go and grab a beer with them at 5:30 when we're done for the day. So I agree. I think, and I think it's hard to, it's really hard to replicate that digitally. It just, so these small things, I agree, do make a big difference, even if they, They don't seem like it. You can feel it, right? Like you can, it's like intuitive. It's, and it's like, oh, that felt weird that we just like all abruptly ended that and didn't say goodbye. Yeah, it's a bad vibe. You can feel that stuff.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, you heard it here first. Waving at the end of Zoom calls, dramatically underrated. Um, all right, dude, let's call that an episode. Super fun.