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Get a Demo“Borrow cultural equity executed with real partnership compounds faster than anything built in-house.” What happens when a legacy brand like Lexus stops buying reach and starts buying culture? Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge), Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty), and Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) trace how Lexus is using Colin and Samir to reach an audience Lexus already has. One idea drives the partnership: reach your audience better. Cody argues AI generated UGC misses the point entirely. Connor Rolain reveals the four and a half percent lift from a recent cart upsell holdout test. Retention marketing gets the final word on why so few brands measure it properly. Powered By Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026 https://9ops.co/motionapp-creativebenchmarks2026 Aftersell https://9ops.co/aftersell-mops Haus https://www.haus.io/operators NeonPixel https://9ops.co/neonpixel Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel-mops Proppel https://9ops.co/weareproppel Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ Chapters 00:00:00 Life After Jones Road 00:01:59 Lexus Signs Colin & Samir 00:05:39 Reach Audience Better 00:12:28 Gap Taps Hailey Bieber 00:17:59 Can Small Brands Do This 00:20:15 HexClad’s Creator History 00:29:12 Benny Blanco Deal Failed 00:34:04 Creator & Paid Media Fuse 00:36:17 AI UGC Is Overrated 00:39:33 Where AI Creative Works 00:45:38 Cart Upsells Underrated 00:55:06 Retention Is Underrated
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All right. We are back with another episode. It's a beautiful morning for marketing operators. Um, we've got Cody at home. Cody, how is unemployment treating you?
It's wonderful. I'm loving it. I, uh, I went to Home Depot and Lowe's on Monday. I, I spent an hour doing yard work. It's, uh, having a great time.
Um, has your, has your Haus consumption gone up or down?
It's gone Down. I think it's not that I'm eating more meals.
I don't know.
Maybe I have a little bit more time, I guess. I hadn't thought about it as much. It's also been like super hot here. So I feel like they get really like melted. I really just still haven't gotten my hands on the ice cream. I don't know about you guys. So I'm still bitter about that.
Yeah, I know it's been, it's been 90, 95 degrees here in LA. It's perfect weather for some delicious— it's not ice cream, it's frozen dessert legally. Speaking, but perfect refreshing weather for it. Connor Rowland, how are things on your end?
Well, first off on that, Keegan said he's got 3 shipments earmarked for us when they restock. So, so Keegan's their VP of marketing that I met at Barb Brewist's D2C event this winter, and he's the hookup. So he's the one that sent us the bars. He said he's got some, some ice cream ready to roll for us. So, so as soon as they restock, I'm expecting a shipment. Maybe I'll follow up with Keegan, but nah, man, things are good over here. It's been hot here as well. I mean, it's like 100 degrees every day. So I went and cut all my hair off yesterday because I couldn't stand it anymore. But yeah, we're getting through it. I'm going to the mountains this weekend and it's going to be a little bit cooler. So I'm looking forward to that, man. It's been kind of unbearably hot.
But we can get right into it here. We've got a solid agenda. I've got a couple of points I want to hit, like news related. We're going to talk some creator partnership stuff. We're going to talk affiliate and attribution. We're going one of our favorite topics. And then I want to hit some over-under stuff towards the end here. I wanted to start, do you guys watch Colin and Samir, the YouTubers?
I used to, I haven't in a while.
So Connor, I would recommend them for you specifically because they're basically the only YouTubers I watch. And the fantastic thing about Colin and Samir, one, they're like, they're digital creators about the business of being a digital creator. So it's very meta in that way. It's about the industry. It's also the perfect YouTube channel to watch if you want to stay sort of topically in the know on what is trending on YouTube and what's not. So you probably get the benefit of like, you get the benefit of watching a bunch of YouTube channels. You get the benefit of being tapped in like kind of across the board, but in these like very sort of digestible chunks from Colin and Samir. And then they're thinking about it from like a marketer's perspective. They're talking about building like things we talk about all the time, building audiences, uh, content plans, production. I think you'd really like it. So they've been in an interesting position because you can imagine they started probably 11 or 12 years ago, like a really long time ago. They were obviously like the very first YouTube channel covering YouTube creators. And there's been this meteoric rise in the influence of creators today. I always joke like, you know, you could, you could track the cost of CPMs with YouTubers against the usage of the term creator economy, and it would be like one for one. And you could track that against like queries for Colin and Samir on YouTube as well. They just had this like very, they had the wind at their backs in the sense of like the creator economy growing and people's interest in the creator economy, like the behind the scenes stuff that they deliver, the demand for that increasing as well. Where they're at now is I think they're very open about like trying to reformat their platform. Like what do they want to be for the next few years? And they announced this partnership yesterday, which I think is seemingly relatively innocuous, but I think is like an indicator of something that's maybe a little bit more interesting. Um, it's this big, it's a, it's a very large, deep integration with Lexus. And it looks like Google was a part of the partnership. Um, and I've talked about this quite a bit just in terms of Ridge and our shifting of the way that we approach partnerships. But what they're describing here is they're moving from, um, sort of topical one-off ad read integrations into a more solid and deep and like conceptually aligned work. In the case of this Lexus partnership, it's a 4-part series where Colin and Samir are gonna get in their car, they're gonna drive across the country. I don't know quite what they're gonna do, but the interesting thing about that is their first videos 11 years ago, they would film straight from their car. So this is, it's called Colin and Samir Start Over. I think they're gonna be traveling across the world covering the creator economy to some degree, I'm sure. it's sort of a, uh, an homage to how they originally started their YouTube careers as well. And then the one thing I'm curious about from your guys' perspective, this is a line that stuck out to me. They said, we're moving from quote unquote, work with us to reach our audience to quote, work with us to reach your audience better. And I think that's like a pretty fundamental shift in how brands might be working with creators in the future. I just mentioned CPM earlier. We typically work with partners to buy distribution, that's how we think about it. And this is an example of like, Lexus clearly isn't thinking about this on a CPM basis as to how many of Colin and Tamir's YouTube viewers are we getting in front of, but rather how are we deeply integrating Colin and Tamir into how we speak to our customers ourselves? And I just thought it was a really interesting sort of new plot point in this transition of how brands are working with creators.
So, I want to talk about that.
Connor, you guys do work across the board, flagship stuff with Gordon, all the way down to like product seeding hundreds of creators. I'm curious, what is your, what's your POV on maybe this partnership and then how partnership engagements are trending generally?
The, this line's, I've been like reading this line over and over again as you've been kind of briefing us in on this campaign. It's almost the way that they're positioning it is like, It's like, I mean, what is Lexus's brand awareness, right? In the US, like it's not Oreo, but it's gotta be like, I bet most Americans in the US know who Lexus is. So I think it's interesting that they're looking at this more of like, at least the way I'm interpreting this line, which is very different than how we think about creators. 'Cause when we think about creators, it's like, how do we reach new audiences that we're not currently reaching? So we're always thinking about it from like, What is top of funnel? How do we get more top of funnel by activating with new creators? It almost seems like they're saying this is like more of a middle bottom of funnel play, but like your audience, like the whole TAM that knows Lexus, they've never seen Colin and Samir like talk about Lexus, do an activation with Lexus. So like there's almost like a new lens that their audience that's already aware of Lexus is gonna get by viewing this content with Colin and Samir, which is interesting. And it makes sense when you're thinking about like a brand like Lexus or Oreo or McDonald's where like every American in the country knows who those brands are. So it's not really top of funnel. It's more like, how can we give a new impression to our existing audience activating with new creators, which is kind of how I'm seeing this. Like this is almost giving like Lexus a new flavor of like interpretation from their audience, which is really cool. We don't take this approach, right? Like we obviously are, when we go and try to activate with creators and we're sitting in the room with our influencer lead and our CS team and our media team, it's like, what creators are we not activating with right now that we should be? Because we think that our audience is out there, right? Like, should we go activate with a HYROX athlete? Because food is such a big part of that and fueling and cooking. And we don't think we're hitting that audience right now. We're not thinking. how do we activate with someone that's gonna like tip everyone over the edge that we've driven to our site in the last 3 months? So I think it's very different. Now, granted, HexClad's TAM, I think in the US when we had TrackSuite was like, or sorry, not TAM, our awareness was like 23%, 24%, right? So we're not at, you know, Lexus's level of brand awareness. Maybe one day we will be, who knows when that would be. But like, I think it's an interesting way to think about it for like a, 100% awareness type brand.
[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 $1 billion 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. There's no way around it being some mix of the two. I'm interested in this partnership and I'm gonna think more favorably of Lexi because I am a fan of Colin and Samir. So there's no doubt that like they are reaching their audience also in a really impactful way with this deep integration. And then you have the flip side, which is what you're describing of Lexus now gets to repackage what they typically do with this really like unique creator-first perspective. And then all these people who aren't familiar with Colin and Samir, but maybe excited about, uh, the one thing I should highlight, the partnership comes with like a multiple content deliverable package. They said there is like a hero video that's like cinematic and will run on TV. I don't know if it's cinematic, but like super high production value that will run on TV all the way down to like shot on iPhone, UGC style stuff. So it's this full package that Colin and Samir will be delivering on behalf of Lexus. So depending on where people are at in the funnel or how they engage with these people across different platforms, they've kind of got the content to fit. So yeah, you've got this idea of me in one bucket, Colin and Samir's audience, who is now gonna think more favorably of a brand that I have always heard of. And then on the flip side, you've got people like my dad who drives a Lexus, who has never watched Colin and Samir, doesn't care about YouTube, but may find it fun that you've got these 2 guys driving across the country doing fun stuff, and that commercial will resonate with him. So like, I think it's just like the development of that second one that Colin and Samir is advocating is maybe the future of how brands will work with creators, pulling them up funnel and just leveraging their content creation skills, their storytelling skills. to just reach people that they wouldn't otherwise be reaching.
One other note on that, I think this also makes, like, when you think about Lexus and the type of company that they are, and like, not just Lexus, but a car company in general, like you could say the same thing about Apple, like specifically with your situation where you like Colin and Samir, you knew who Lexus, you know Lexus, but now you're gonna know them more because you're gonna watch this activation. I think this makes a lot more sense when you're a car company and you're launching a new car every single year with new features and new bells and whistles, like the Lexus GX 26, 27, 28. Like, it makes sense for Lexus to do something like this that's gonna move someone like you deeper down the funnel. 'Cause now you're like, oh, I knew who Lexus was, but maybe I didn't know about the newest Lexus GX, but now I'm gonna get introduced to it via Colin and Samir. And now maybe you're that much closer to like purchasing a Lexus or you're going and talking with your friends and saying, oh man, did you see the new Lexus GX? Like it can do A, B, and C, and that's pretty cool. Where, you know, so I think you have to, I think that has to be part of your DNA as a company in terms of your products for it to make sense. Like, you know, you think about like an apparel company like Half Days where they're rolling out literally a new collection of products every single season. It's the same thing here. Like if you could take your existing audience and just do some sort of partnership like this that creates more awareness, more knowledge on what the newest, latest and greatest is. I think it makes a lot of sense. But if you're selling like, I don't know, some product that's not, doesn't have a ton of innovation happening to it every single quarter, well, maybe, maybe doesn't make as much sense. Maybe it does for in some scenarios, but I think that's just something that's standing out to me with like why this could work so well for them when they already have so much brand awareness in the USA.
So I think friend of the pod Ashton actually had a good, uh, now that I'm unemployed, I have too much time on my hands. I'm actually going on LinkedIn for the first time ever. And there's a different audience there than on X. So, but Ash and I go on, so I don't know if you guys seen, and I guess you can say, you can call her creator, whatever, celeb, but Gap did a thing with Hailey Bieber. I don't know if you guys have seen that, but Hailey Bieber's like essentially the, the, you know, it girl right now and is like in every, like every partnership possible. Like she just did Skims, she did, you know, YSL and like, so this one was like, there's been a bunch and this one was Gap.
HexClad in 2022. Let's not forget that.
I think they're saying that's what jumpstarted everything.
A poorly executed influencer partnership, may I add. We learned a lot from that one.
So I'll just like read it real quick and I guess we can put it in the show notes, but TLDR is Ashton's talking about like relevance, cultural relevance, and like that's really what they're buying. And a brand like Gap is, I think, in a very similar position to Lexus where it's a legacy brand, You know, tons of, I would assume, funds and money, but like really success for them comes down to being culturally relevant. And that's not built or that's no longer built with traditional marketing. You know, it's not really built with brand marketing. And I don't mean like brand versus performance. I mean like what the brand is saying about the brands. Like it's not gonna, again, Connor, you're saying like Colin and Samir are influencing you 'cause they have your trust and you're bought into their world.
Yeah.
I don't think you're feeling the same way if you see a Lexus TV ad during FIFA, probably, right? So they're buying that. So here's quick, just like highlights what you said. Borrow cultural equity executed with real partnership compounds faster than anything built in-house. The old model, gather your in-house marketing team around a conference table to concept a campaign, blah, blah, blah. The new model, find where cultural equity is already accumulating, and show up there. So I think that's like a pretty good answer. Ashton's a lot smarter than me. So instead of just giving my own thoughts, just reading hers. But yeah, what do you think of that? Is that kind of like hitting— do you feel like that's hitting the nail on your head of kind of like how you're thinking about it?
I think the Hailey Bieber partnership feels more celebrity-like. And you can see people, you know, the Kylie Jenner with the Meta glasses, the Sydney Sweeney partnerships that came out last year with American Eagle, like you get these like The women that— these are all examples of women who are like owning the zeitgeist in so many ways. And it's like, okay, all of a sudden you can put out like Sydney Sweeney commercial is just like her in a room wearing denim jeans and it goes super viral, which like clearly that is like a culturally potent partnership that they can be a part of. Colin and Samir, I think, is interesting because like they are so far from that. These are like nerds.
Like micro. Yeah, but they're— it's like a micro thing. It's like a very like—
yeah.
Okay. corner of the internet. So this is like a big macro thing, but it's still, it's like they're going to me, the principles, they're going to people that have relevance and have obviously like the trust. I'm just explaining what influencer marketing is. So I feel like I sound like an idiot, but they're just like going to a pocket of that and like borrowing that versus just trying to create it themselves.
I totally agree. And it probably comes down to, and I think this is an interesting thought as well, you know, Lex is saying we want to reach a certain type of audience. They're like, hey, we want to go after the like creative adjacent online millennial. And it's like, how can we go about doing that? We're going to enlist Colin and Tamir, not just to like sponsor their videos, but to bring them on board, produce commercials with them, do a big series. And now this is going to be like a multi-month campaign for us in order to tap into like this type of persona. And that is just to your point, Cody, um, a little bit more niche of a persona than who you're going after if you're like, we want to hit Hailey Bieber. You know, like Hailey Bieber, you're activating millions and millions of people in the country. She is like the it girl in so many ways. Colin and Samir is like a little bit more, it's a narrower scope as to who you're speaking to, which I think is very cool. And this kind of parlays into another question I had for you guys. I had a conversation with someone recently. They were at Bud Light for a while and we were talking about their celebrity partnerships, which is like very similar to this. Hailey Bieber, Kylie Jenner. Bud Light wanted to hit millennials better. I don't know what their KPI would've been. You know, like probably not brand lift. Bud Light, another one that's like ubiquitous, but obviously wanted to change their brand perception amongst a certain type of the country. And they did Miles Teller Super Bowl. They did Post Malone. And who else was in that Post Malone commercial?
Shane Gillis.
I'm like, yeah, dude, if you want to hit millennial dudes, I'm like, that's, that is like, that is like a great trifecta. And I think that's a really cool, like, they have this target persona, they have this very high-level KPI as to what they want to influence, and they have enlisted these like very notable celebrities to do that. Colin and Samir is an example of like Lexus maybe punching down a little bit where you're taking a mid-tier creator potentially. I'm sure it wasn't a cheap deal by any means. And I'm curious what your guys's And those are the point that I'm going to make is those campaigns are reserved for a very certain type of brand. Bud Light, Lexus, Meta. Like we're talking about people who are not really listening to this podcast. I'm curious, do you guys think that this campaign or like what we're talking about here in terms of enlisting creators to, the quote is, work with us to reach their audience better, is available to smaller brands? And what might that look like?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that's actually the cool thing about creator marketing is like, there's so many different ways to do it and there's so many different scopes and scales. And again, like, I know it's celebrity, but like, there still are creators that are, you know, like MrBeast on the biggest end is like, if you wanna reach not everybody, but like a ton and pay millions and millions, you can do that. But then you can go Colin and Samir, you can go, you know, mid, and then like, you can also work with creators in really any capacity. And I just think that's, it's just such a modern way of like how brand is built. And, you know, you can go with the Hudson playbook and it's like just affiliate armies of micro. So yeah, I think that's a cool thing is like there's no one-size-fits-all creator strategy. It's like every brand needs a creative strategy, creator strategy, whether you're a D2C brand, whether you're a TikTok Shop brand, obviously, whether you're, you know, a legacy brand trying not to get cooked. Like Unilever is, you know, again, it's one of those headlines, but they are saying that their reallocating the majority of their media budget to creator. Like they're going to spend over 50% of their media on creator, which is obviously a big swing. And, you know, they have a lot of like smaller midsize, like prestige beauty brands that I think they're doing it on, but still like there are legacy corporations like that. And this is like, you know, Gary Vee saying he's more on like social and stuff like that of like trying to revolutionize this stuff. So I think long answer, it's very scalable from these larger partnerships to You know, affiliate deals, content, things like that, and everywhere in between.
[Sponsor Content] Before Q4 hits, the smartest e-commerce operators aren't just asking, how do we spend more? They're asking, how do we make every visitor more profitable? That is where AfterSell comes in. AfterSell helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor, contribution margin, and incremental profit by optimizing the highest intent moments: cart, checkout, post-purchase, and even the thank you page. Brands like HexClad, Ridge, and Pela are increasing their AOV across every cohort using these zero-risk upsells. We've tested and they have no negative impact on conversion. It's just more free money in your pocket. And with Rocked Thanks, you can offset your AfterSell subscription. No redesigns, no risky funnels, just better economics. Wanna see how much money you can make with AfterSell? Go to aftersell.com/rocketrevenueforecast, put in your numbers, and see how much more profit your funnel will make before BFCM starts. Connor, I feel like you guys have done this extremely well actually, because the point that I was going to make, we can plot out, it's almost like a quadrant of like, let's start celebrity on the far end to like UGC creator on the other side of the spectrum. And then you have this other quadrant, are, are you using that person to reach their audience or are you using that person to reach your audience better? That's kind of like where it's laid out. Connor, I feel like Hexclad has a bunch of good examples and I don't know exactly how you guys discuss it internally and maybe you could share some of these details, but at one point it seemed like, and maybe the Hailey Bieber partnership kind of kicked this off. You were like, we want to go after women chefs at home. Like, we want to build brand awareness or affinity within this new demo that maybe we don't as naturally resonate with. You guys have always been kind of like, the site's really dark, it's super technical, it's kind of like skewed male, I think, as far as cooking goes. And I know a lot of those partnerships were dependent on you reaching their audience, but it also feels like you guys have done a fantastic job more recently of like leveraging these creators to now reach people that are in your email list who might not care about X creator at all, but they'll find it interesting that like you guys are creating a different sort of content than you otherwise would.
I think we've, I, we have done both because what we make sure we do is we, we like to leverage these creator partnerships in owned media. And that's the classic example of the line that you just wrote here, right? Like we're work with us to reach your audience better. So like, 'Cause we believe that, you know, if there's people in our list that like, if they see that we're activating with some person that they resonate with in some way, the same way that Lexus thinks that if Colin and Samir's audience sees them activating with Lexus in a certain way, that that's gonna like move them down the funnel and potentially convert them. And like, we think that as well, which is why we don't only leverage these partnerships in paid, but we like to call out like cool creator-led content in owned media and actually drive traffic to it, even though that's not like a typical DR email or text funnel. And yeah, like we've tested into this and over time we've made a lot of mistakes. I think the Hailey Bieber example was, that was the intent, right? Like we want to go reach this like younger female demographic. I think we missed the mark on that because I think too much of the audience that saw that was like, you know, an 18-year-old girl who's like, oh my God, just gushing over Hailey. And we're like, okay, like we thought it would skew maybe a little bit older and the people that this was resonating with. We took some swings with Benny Blanco, which was another similar swing. Yeah, that one was super cool and like the performance wasn't great. I thought we executed really well on it, but the performance wasn't fantastic. We probably should have leaned more into paid. And then we started like getting, like hitting the mark a little bit better. All right. So like, well, Bethenny Frankel, right? That was another one where it was the same thought. It's like, how do we tap into more of this? Like, female demographic, but hopefully getting, finding a demo that's more primed to buy. Well, Bethany's like posting product content all the time. Her audience is there to be sold to. That one hit and it's like, great, we hit a new audience, more female leaning through that one. What are some other, oh, and then like Nancy Silverton, that's another great example. Like Nancy's a really, really great chef, female Michelin-starred, That's another one where we're like, hey, we think we can go reach a new audience with Nancy or like both reach a new audience and reach our audience better if we go make really compelling ads with Nancy because she's so charismatic, she's so well regarded, and she's an amazing Chef's Table episode. And so we've gotten like closer over time, right? You have like Hailey Bieber, which like kind of missed the mark a little bit, and now we're getting closer and closer and closer. And yeah, I think we are If you look at that data, I think it often does both, right? Like we're reaching new audience, but we're also like, it's not like we have 100% new visit rate or like every account reached is new. Like we are reaching our existing audience in our ad accounts and reaching new audiences, which I think is the ideal scenario. And I think like back to your question of like, can, you know, do you have to be a Lexus or an Oreo or whoever to do this? Like, absolutely not. Like I think about There's this brand based out of Denver called Highland Style, and they're having a— they're an awesome brand, awesome product, really leaning into like clean ingredient ethos. And I think about how they do this. Well, they go and they activate with like micro creators that are hairstylists. And like, that's a brilliant way to reach your audience better if you're a haircare brand leaning into clean ingredients. Like, what better way to build trust and reach your audience better than to activate with, you know, a hairstylist that has 50,000 followers on Instagram? that's gonna say, hey, I actually like crafted this with Hylands. I was the one testing all the prototypes along the way. Like this product's the result of 25 iterations. Like that is the classic example of a brand that's not Lexus, like working with a creator to reach their audience better. I doubt they're reaching too many new people that way. I would imagine most of their ads, not with that, like those hairstylists are reaching the similar audience. But like think about the impact of like that message from that person at that time. Like that's a great example of how they're able to like activate with a creator to reach their audience better without spending, you know, God knows how much on, on, you know, whoever has the best hair of any celebrity out there, right? Like, I think that's a fantastic example. And I'm sure at some point they'll, they'll do some activation with, you know, someone that's got 10 million followers and it'll make sense. But I just think that that's a great cost-effective way that they've done that.
100%. Yeah. And so it's funny because you said like with the Benny Blanco partnership, you said we should have leaned into paid more. And that's basically what you could distill this whole like Colin and Samir, and there's a Hollywood Reporter piece down too. It's like, we're giving, like, we wanna partner with brands who want to further promote our media via paid. Like, it's as simple as that. And that's like, that's like the bigger shift. And I guess it's frankly not all that novel. We've been talking about on this podcast for a couple years now, where in order to get these partnerships to work, you can't justify it via the distribution of the creator themselves. A lot of the time it comes down to like, how are you creating content that will resonate enough that you can pay for it further. And then the only thing that's like a sticking point for me is the content itself. Creators are used to paying, getting paid a really significant amount to create content because they got that distribution. When we start thinking about the value of the content itself, and now I've got to go pay for it elsewhere, it just, it's not as— it will become really cost prohibitive. And that's the point that I'm going to make here at the very end that I think we have to sift through is like, We have to be thinking about the value of the distribution one way, which is really valuable. Everybody knows distribution is incredibly, incredibly important and creators can charge a lot of money for. And then the value of that content independent of the distribution is just significantly less. One of the reasons it's cost prohibitive is because at least, and I see this all the time at Ridge, is because we're just fundamentally misaligned on the value of that content. Independent of distribution. If we've got to go pay for it, it's either got to be like at a much lower cost so that I can reasonably put together a budget where my cost of content is not 40%. Or there needs to be some sort of like variable payoff where it's like, hey, let's get aligned. And now we're talking about like a, like a souped-up version of the Hudson Comfort playbook where it's like, create us content, we'll pay you. you know, so much, 10 grand upfront covers all your costs. You guys make a little bit of profit and then you can get 2.5, 3, 4% of ad spend for however much we promote it. And that would align everybody's incentives. So I think that's one way that we maybe see these things develop over time. And at least some of these things we're beginning to experiment with at Ridge.
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You know what's interesting about the Benny deal is like, that is one of the favorite activations I've ever been involved with at HexClout. We made a really sick custom apron for him. We made this beautiful on-brand custom landing page, but the whole activation was like custom Benny product with a few bundles to a landing page. And then he owed us like 4 or 5 pieces of organic content driving to that page. We actually got a great CPM on it. We got like It was a sub-$10 CPM. It was really great. He, I mean, he has amazing content distribution. Obviously the reason we're saying it failed is because we only sold like $30,000 worth of the custom products and/or the bundles that we also put on that page. Like we were hoping that through that organic content, we were going to, you know, sell 2, 3, 4x what we paid him on that deal. Now in retrospect, we all know that like the way you, we can actually get sales out of these deals is through paid and like, that wasn't the reason we didn't do paid is because obviously to like put, run ads with Benny Blanco's likeness and his handle would've been, you know, 3 or 4x the cost of the deal. But it is interesting how like we think about that as DR marketers. Like I'm sitting there saying, oh, well, we only did $30,000, $40,000 in revenue on these products and we paid him $100 grand. So like, this was a failed deal. Now, if we were, I don't know, Lexus or I don't know, some other brand that would've made sense to activate with Benny, There's a chance they would've called this a success just because of the CPM that they got on the content itself. So like I sit here and say it was a failed influencer partnership. You could argue, you know, parts of it succeeded in terms of this organic distribution. But it is interesting how, you know, Lexus isn't going to sit there and say, how many Lexuses did Colin and Samir sell? No, they're going to look at like impressions, CPM, and then just like qualitative, like was the engagement on this good? Like, did we, do we think that it hit and resonated and like, did people engage with it in a positive way? So it's just, it's just like funny to like, you know, our, us talking about it and what success looks like is so different than like Oreo and Lexus and insert other, you know, multi-billion dollar revenue brand. We're all, we're always like, did it drive revenue? Yes, no. Okay. That's the, that's the deciding factor of it. if it performed well or not. But like, I think personally I need to get out of that headspace more and more as we scale because like, that's just not always, I think the bigger we get, the less that is, that becomes. Now granted, it still is for the most part our key KPI, but I think as we get bigger and bigger and bigger, there's more and more initiatives that like we just can't measure that way and nor should we. We're going to make bad decisions if we do.
Yeah. And I totally agree. One, I think there's a really compelling case to make that like, that sounds like Pretty solid engagement given CPM, given the $30,000 in direct sales like that, depending on how you want to look at it, maybe pencils. It reminds me of what Ashton said, what Cody read out, but just like being a part of culturally relevant moments and like, and working with the people who are influencing culture. If that is anywhere near some sort of KPI for HexCloud, then the Benny Blanco thing just like makes sense. And that's how Lexus and Bud Light and American Eagle are like really thinking about these things. not penciling them on like a DR basis, but like, I think there's a multitude of ways where you can be getting value from these sorts of partnerships. My point is just, if more brands wanna do this, if more creators and more brands wanna do this, we have to move down the list of brands who can afford to do this and creators have to become more flexible with pricing. And like, if we can cross that bridge, a change in the mindset of brands and a more flexible pricing as we talk about content independent of distribution, I think everybody wins. That's my hope.
I also think one thing on this, and I know we've talked about it and it kind of ties into more of like our performance world. Like, I think the, we're seeing like the distribution and like from organic, obviously it always goes away because these are ad platforms, but it's kind of like merging together, which is kind of your theory where it's like TikTok Shop, you're doing it for distribution. And now it's like, you have to be on G and V Max and You know, Meta was like, obviously now partnership ads are such a big thing, but they're going into that world where like, I have the hypothesis that it's like GMV maxification of everything. And like, I just think we're kind of going to that world where like the only way to get distribution or make it make sense is going to be with ads and it won't be seen as like a separate thing. And then you have, you know, platforms like, you know, like Agentio or like A Tribe where it's like part of your creator strategy or a giant part of your— and I'm not saying anything we haven't ever said, you know, a million times before, but like a giant part of your creator strategy and your paid media strategy are like one and they're just like converging together and it's no longer like a separate thing where I'm like, I'm just working with influencers for paid or I'm just working with them for creative. Like everyone's gonna be different, but it's, yeah, these 2 things are just like completely coming together.
I do think for the most part, for our listeners, I would guess, I do not think that what Alexis is doing with Colin and Samir applies to them, like reach your audience better. I still think for the most part, Now again, I think if you're activating these in the right way, you're doing both. But for the most part, when you're thinking about like, which creator should I go activate with? I do think it generally should come from the lens of like, how do we go reach a new audience that we're not currently reaching? Like, and that's still like at HexClad, what's happening with us? Like we just launched our egg pan and rice cooker ads and like very different KPIs that we're seeing in Meta compared to the rest of our account. And it looked great, but like, CPA is way lower. So is AOV, like engagement rates, CPMs are all different. Like we're clearly reaching a new audience here. And I would still say that 80% of the time, 90% of the time, like this is the goal with any of our creator partnerships that we're running versus what Lexus is doing with Colin and Samir, which is like, how do we make people that already know Lexus see Lexus a little bit differently because of the partnership that we're doing?
Yeah, I totally agree. I, but I, yeah, I think we've done a good job kind of piecing apart the tidbits that maybe brands can take action on.
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Cody, I'm gonna pass it to you first. Over or underrated right now on AI-generated UGC?
It's overrated 'cause I don't get what AI UGC is. I love AI, I hate AI UGC. UGC is supposed to be user-generated content that real people submit. Not even like pay, like you guys remember like initial UGC, it was, I'm old enough to remember that where it was actually like customers submitting content and now it somehow it just turned into anything that's shot lo-fi. So like, and it's just like a testimonial thing. So no, I think the most overrated thing in the world and shouldn't even be a thing. Okay.
How do you feel about AI-generated ad content? Like emulating the like customer or just like creator focus, removing the human creator from this like lower-fi form of ad creation?
I think AI has a ton of value in creative production. I think that is the wrong way to do it. It doesn't mean some brands aren't gonna be successful with it and it'll perform. I just have very little interest in that. And I think, you know, I more agree with like Adam Mosseri's take, which is like, I think this is why there's the rise of the yapper because there's no edits, there's no cuts. It's It's the realness, the unpolished stuff that can't be faked. It's like when people say they almost like getting typos in emails now, 'cause it's like, okay, I can tell a person wrote this. Like, I think that is a response to this. And so I'm very bearish on it.
I think it's overrated when you're trying to emulate like a true UGC ad, which like, I think in my opinion, when we're shooting a UGC ad with someone, we want creator to camera. and B-roll like that. Those are the, like, if you had to bucket the visuals, those are the visuals that you're showing. I think I agree with you, Cody. I think it's so overrated when you're trying to, like, we have not been able to get UGC showing creator to work with AI where we actually have found some big wins and we've actually scaled some ads is non-face creator. I think it's actually, I think it's well ranked in that. And I think you can actually use AI to create, and I'm specifically talking about like, how do we take a winning UGC ad and like port it over to our German account or our Japanese account or whatever it is. So I'm specifically talking about it for like language translation. We have had some success and have scaled a lot of ads doing that, but like we have not figured out the creator stuff.
That's like post-production, right? Where like, I'm a big fan of things like Flora where like you're taking the stuff that your brand has shot outside or whatever, and you're like changing the background or you're changing like the angle of the model or the orientation of like the model or person. Or again, if you're doing a mashup and you use like a little bit of like AI voiceover, like huge fan of that. I just don't think it should be trying to represent as people. And I'm actually very bullish on AI where you're not trying to represent as people and AI statics or even like AI stuff where it's like clearly AI. I think though, that's just the one area it shouldn't be applied to is trying to pretend a person, but to scale your efforts from actual creative. Love that.
Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. You're talking about like net new.
So emulating like true human content you're bearish on, but like, uh, I was going through somebody's ad content the other day, one of the, one of the big supplement brands and they're like, they are crushing the, um, The like weird Pixar animation-like ads where like everything's created, you're bullish on that?
Yeah, I think so. I think so. 'Cause it's, it's, it's interesting. I mean, I have been duped by good content that's AI and it's like, sometimes you don't really care if it's like makes you laugh or entertaining, you know? But I think you, you, you don't have a guard up 'cause you're like, okay, that's not trying to be real. I think when it's like, oh, is it trying to be real? And again, there are, I know there are brands printing With AI UGC. So it can work. I just wanna be super clear. I'm not saying it can't work.
I, I was just gonna say, this is not UGC. This is a side note, but I have to bring it up cuz otherwise I'll forget. I saw this ad from Gut Culture a couple weeks ago that was like this, this like personified like bacteria or organism that lives in the human body. And it was like talking to a camera inside your gut and showing this like animated depiction of what happens in your gut. I love that. I was so entertained by that ad. Yeah.
And that's like, that's what I'm talking about. Like, if you look at Gut Culture's got some examples, but if you look at the IM8, IM8 is the one that I was looking at recently, the IM8s, the Mars Men of the world, like a lot of these supplement brands are like really owning that because it is like fun content to consume. It's not getting created otherwise. So I think you get that like unique factor and then really, especially as it relates to supplements, like supplements, it can be educational. You could be in the gut, you could see the, some bloated body or whatever. Like it could just, it can be so overly visual.
I loved it. It was so good.
I do also like Cody's point. Oh, not even, I like Cody's point a lot around it being overrated to emulate human content. I also think from like a time and resources perspective, that's like the last piece of content that we should be spending our time trying to figure out an AI workflow around. Like most brands are like, they have a path to creating it. That's what we do. And at Ridge, Gut Culture, we're running so lean that like we're being a little bit more experimental on the AI side. But Ridge, we've got a great efficient system for like generating content. It's really strong. It's really affordable. We understand that workflow. We're best off creating AI creative outside of that workflow. Like, let's figure out how to do the weird render or the weird animated videos or the high quality render videos that we weren't doing otherwise. That's actually net new to our program. So maybe that part is underrated and the like, hey, let's like recreate and try to like increase the volume of what we currently do well is an overrated tactic.
I wanna make sure I understand what you're saying, 'cause I think I agree. You're saying more brands need to like, when you're experimenting with AI, you can't expect your existing workflow to produce that. Like you need to actually go and do the like one-off project that's not scalable within your system to like tinker, experiment. If it works great, then you need to figure out how to like create an actual like flywheel around it or like a system to like produce that type of creative, right? Which, which that makes sense.
I mean, like a lot of, a lot of like the tools that we see and like the, I did a demo the other day and it was like, what they're trying to do is recreate the exact type of ad that Ridge is really good at making now without AI. That's just even, even if we're able to completely replace our internal system, maybe we save on costs, maybe we increase volume. It's not that additive. Like best case scenario, it's like, it's like we're, it's, it's largely the same. And I think that's where Cody's getting where like, oh, I think that's where Cody's getting is like, it's just not all that additive. What is more additive is if you are creating content that you couldn't otherwise do. And then I think Cody's other point, which I also like, is if everybody begins creating that type of ad, it just becomes white noise. It just becomes noise to the user on social. And that's why yapper ads are more interesting or the, uh, the weird animated ads are more interesting is because literally everybody and their mom is creating these like quick cutting UGC videos with like, you know, some B-roll spliced in between. It just becomes less effective because it's become so Commonplace.
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This is why like playing in international markets has been so much fun for me this year, because you can see like where the US was with certain types of ad creative. 5, 10, 5, you know, I've said this before, like our Japanese market's the perfect example where like, We'll launch a new UGC ad in the account. And by the way, these Japanese creators make amazing UGC. Like, granted, we're giving them a good brief, but like, we'll launch a new UGC ad that's incredibly well done. And all of a sudden it's like a fourth of the CPA that we're seeing in the account L30. And it's just like, it reminds you of the good old days when like you could launch a really good UGC ad in a US ad account and it could totally change the account. And like, you could just scale so aggressively with it. It's, it's been fun to like, it almost reminds you, it was like, oh yeah, this used to be like a very new to like the ad market as a whole. And now in the US it's just like so saturated. So I think I'm, I'm almost like thinking your point you just said, Connor, but in reverse where it's like, oh, I wonder what worked in like our US ad account, you know, 5, 8 years ago. And then like, let's go try that in the Japanese account.
All right, cool.
I got another one here. Over-underrated Cart upsells?
I think they're, I think they're, they're, they're properly rated, but I think that we've talked about this before on the, on the pod is that not enough brands, they like see the, the upsell revenue and they're like, oh, that's all incremental, but they don't do like a true split test on it to see like what a revenue been against baseline. So I think that, that part of testing is underrated. Like you could, in theory, you could have introduced such a intrusive experience that overall your revenue or conversion rate came down, even though the upsell is generating however much dollars in revenue. So I think they're properly rated, but I think that part of it in terms of like making sure it's actually incremental is very, very underrated and not thought of.
I have a hard time giving an answer to this because I think most brands, myself included, haven't like tested like a holdout of like having versus not having where we've tested different offers, different UX and stuff like that. But I've never tested not having them there. And I think that would be wildly fascinating. And 'cause I don't really know, but I think they can kind of be very under-optimized. And I don't really know the, not for cart, but I have seen like huge swings in, you know, like unit velocity when we've changed or had to change PDP upsells. If we like are out of like a brush or something like that, like, well, it'll make a pretty big difference. So I know that's my evidence there that like they do actually work. But in cart, I don't know, like I've seen, and again, they're testing so fast that they're always changing. But I know IM8 is changing their offer a lot, but for a while they had, they didn't have upsells in cart and they had like a big like social proof card and they were using real estate for that as well and like going for conversion. So again, I'm sure it's tested for them and they have cart upsells now. So maybe that's, Maybe that's the sign, but I think that's a really interesting test. And I would be interested just to test a holdout with like a, without upsells as well.
Yeah. So, so we did this recently and that's why it's been top of mind is we were looking at the analytics and I was like, yo, look, let's just like, let's just run a holdout. Like let's just hide completely hide like all of the upsells. And we saw it drive like, I want to say it was like 4.5% lift sitewide. It was like mad. It's a, like it's a multimillion dollar, like little widget there. So. Yeah, I think, I think, I think cart upsells are underrated for a few reasons, I guess. I think one, if you do run a holdout, I think for many brands, like you'll find that it is surprisingly incremental.
Mm-hmm.
2, you know, and I've talked about this a bit in the past, but it's been a really long time, is we've seen behavior where with the right product upsell, not only can we offer someone value, But like we can solve a potential pain point. So for Ridge, this was years ago, but, um, we have a coin tray that like allows you to keep coins in your wallet if you need to. And, and we, you know, we'd run it in the upsell at like 30% off or whatever. And it's, and it's, um, and it got a crazy high attachment rate. I wanna say it was like 12 or 15% attachment rate, really high, at least from what we see with typical behavior. Um, so not only was it good value, got highly attached, but it solved someone's like potential problem. So we saw people convert at a higher rate as well. actually, I always say this, we sold more wallets because of our upsells. And that's really what drives like a lot of that incremental revenue. When I say we see, you know, $5 to $10 million in like incremental upsell revenue, that's not just from the products in the upsell, that's from people converting at a higher rate and us selling more of our hero goods because of this like, you know, upsell system that we have laid out. And then the last one that I would say is, and the reason I say they're underrated is because I think a lot of people, We'll set up an upsell. They'll set up a progress bar. They work well enough. You see the good engagement, whether or not you do a holdout and it like just seems to work. And I just think that there's like significantly more like iteration that people can do to make sure that based on the product that they're adding to their cart, what are you upselling them? What are those complimentary items alongside of them? How many of them are there? It's just like such a high intent. and high-value touchpoint that I think we largely, because it works so well naturally, um, maybe under-optimized.
What's your hypothesis on why it drove, it drove so much more revenue in your core wallet business on that specific example?
I mean, at this point in time, like we're, we're outside of a promo period. We're selling full-price wallets. I think just having any sort of like value messaging is valuable. You were gonna get like some sort of incremental, yeah, I guess, I guess you can consider it an incremental buyer. Somebody is adding that wallet to their cart. They're not sure if they want it. Somebody says, oh, well, I'm also gonna get 30% off this thing right now.
Great.
And they'll add that and they'll convert because of it. And that's an incremental, not just CoinTrade purchase, but also a wallet purchaser. And then there's someone, and this is what actually what I think is a little bit more interesting, especially when you think about outside of value. What is the, what is, um, the benefits of these products being like highly complementary? Is there someone who's adding that item to their cart, the wallet? They're obviously interested. They're beginning to check out. Um, they could very well abandon their checkout because like they might not know that the wallet's great for them. They're imagining themselves going from a big bulky wallet where they're keeping receipts and change and cash, and now they're supposed to go to the slim wallet. Lots of people abandon cart, as we all know, massive drop-off that happens between, you know, checkout or, uh, add to cart and checkout. Um, that coin tray actually solves a problem. So now that we are offering value and solving a problem, we are able to sell more of these coin trays that drives revenue in and of itself. We're also able to convert people at a higher rate who add that item to cart. And that's actually where we create most of the value of the upsell.
That makes sense.
I also think, and you kind of brought this up, Cody, with the PDP upsells, I'm always surprised that we don't have, there's not a more standard, like infrastructure layer for upsells. I don't know. We have Klaviyo, we have SMS, we have Shopify. There's not really, we have, um, AfterSell, which does, you know, checkout upsells and post-purchase upsells, but there's nothing that really unifies like PDP to cart to checkout to post-purchase. And I even think that like, it's in my mind is a point where it's under, it's undervalued. It's underrated. Like, We are not as mature as we could be.
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Some mix of underrated and properly rated. Uh, we probably got room for one more.
By the way, just one, one like comment on that, 'cause before I was like, oh, I don't, I don't have a good answer 'cause I don't think most people have tested. I have to remember if, if there's anybody that has tested it, it's probably Ridge. I feel like you guys have tested everything. You guys are, are the top 0.1% of Intelligems users and house users for a reason.
We were in the 100th percentile for Intelligems testers. One is incrementality in retention, over-underrated. I've also got kind of as a subpoint retention metrics generally.
All right. So I used to think, and I still do think that incrementality in retention is very underrated. I think a lot of the things that are done. I think in general, like my issue with retention is like people think about it as like email, SMS, and not enough of like holistic retention and using those as tools to improve retention. And so I think there's just a lot more just like click-based attribution that people are using and doing. And obviously we know that doesn't always correlate to like actual incrementality. So I think it's important, especially when you have a variable cost, right? And you're doing direct mail and you're doing SMS and Then it's more important. Like, I care, like, if it doesn't cost you that much money to send an email, like, it doesn't totally matter, but I think it's really important. That being said, I used to ask House to build in, like, essentially just like a dashboard to be able to set up these experiments, 'cause, you know, you used to need like a data analyst to set it up and build segments and write SQL to do it. And Olivia kind of had a really good point of pushback. She's like, it's not really worth it. For them to build for like a product because like brands won't pay that much for it because they're not, it's not that much money. Like it's a lot more worth it to pay, you know, for a house or something like that because it's like, okay, this is helping us make decisions with a lot of money. It's not that it's not important. I just think in like the hierarchy of things, like if you're gonna test incrementally in something and there's one area where you can kind of just go a little bit more off vibes and directionally correct, like It's retention. But yeah, I think the most sophisticated teams are doing it and should be doing it more.
So you call it underrated right now? Because very few people are doing it.
This is probably like the worst content ever, because I'm gonna say it depends. Like, if you're like a 7 or even like small 8-figure business, like you should probably just focus on getting up the great flows and, you know, directionally you're probably fine if your GA4 or Klaviyo metrics improve and you test a flow, you know, with a welcome flow and, and, you know, you go with the one that has better open rate and click rate and better revenue per user. Like that's 9 times out of 10, probably the right one to go with.
I actually completely understand Olivia's point where it's like, yeah, it doesn't seem like a great space to build a software product around the measurement of incrementality in email marketing. I am just surprised. The reason I have retention metrics generally is like, I can't help but think retention as an industry right now, or as we know it, because if you go to like the Wayfairs and the Nectar Mattresses of the world, like I'm sure they're doing extremely intricate. I've spoken with like VPs at these companies. They are doing extremely intricate data analyses of all their tactics and like really teasing out like what is driving performance and what's not. The average, like very large brands do not have access to those tools. It feels like we're in the very early innings of understanding retention programs. It's similar to the upsell point that I just made where it's so easy to report on such good metrics. You know, Klaviyo's like, look, you get a 35x ROI on Klaviyo. It's like just the most insane, insane claim. But like, that is what I'm sure that's what revenue reported by Klaviyo is relative to their costs. And because of that, like very few people are incentivized to say like, hey, what is this actually? And then once you like are kind of distilling that down to like, yeah, we might be getting a, I don't, I have no idea. It's probably still really good 12x or something ROI on Klaviyo. Once you get down to that point, then you can actually begin doing more like tactical and strategic initiatives. Like you've removed all the obfuscation of this like amazing revenue attribution reporting. To like, this is what's driving your performance. So this is where you should be spending your time. And I'm just surprised it's not more commonplace in the industry. So I feel retention metrics underrated right now. I think people are using Ridge, like, you know, absolutely guilty of this. The most rudimentary forms of measurement as it relates to retention feels like it changes over time. Retention metrics, incrementality and retention, both underrated in my opinion.
Well, what's nice about retention is it's so easy to set up user-level holdouts. Like you can't really do that in your Meta account, but like if you are trying to test something in Klaviyo, like we're doing this right now with Outer Signal where we're gonna, we're working on some personalization stuff. We're gonna say, great, we're gonna take that cohort of people that it would make sense to put into that. And we're gonna hold out 20%. We're gonna put them into our regular welcome flow. We're gonna take the other 80%, put 'em into our personalized welcome flow. And like, it's so easy to measure the lift between open rate, click rate, RPU, all the things. And you just can't do that in other channels. But like, if you're just thoughtful with how you set these up, you can do user-level holdouts on literally every single retention channel you have. And then like tools like Postpilot, they're being really smart and they're just baking that into their platform. Like they run a user-level holdout on every single thing they do, always on. 'Cause Michael's super smart and knows that that's what marketers care about. I think, yeah, I mean, and like, that's, if I was Houzz, like I wouldn't be building this into my platform. I would just be trying to educate people on like, they could have a service wing, right? That's like, hey, you don't need us to like prove out incrementality in your own media channels, but like we know how to do that and here's how you should design an experiment. Like here's how you should go set it up inside Klaviyo or Postscript or whichever platform you can do a user-level holdout in. Like, that's what, that's what we do, right? Like, we just do user-level holdouts and that's how we like optimize those channels. And it's, it's really just a different way of doing it. I mean, it's the same way Meta does their, their user-level conversion lift studies.
When evaluating vendors, retention vendors, I have a lot of trust for ones that will partner with you to run a holdout, and I would run from ones that will not allow it. And I can tell you Postscript, before we had data analysts and data warehouse, Postscript ran them for us and we found great results, but they were confident in it. And, and we've, they've partnered with us closely on that. And then Postpilot as well has always, has always done them, but there's definitely some retention vendors that we've tried to set them up and incredible amount of pushback.
There's an incrementality alliance forming. All friends of the pod, Postscript, uh, Intelligems, House. Post-pilot.
I love it.
Incrementality first vendors.
Incrementality operators.