Creators Over Reach: How to Rewrite Your Influencer Marketing

Um, we got Cody at home. Cody, how is unemployment treating you? It's a wonderful and loving. I went to Home Depot and Lowe's on Monday. I spent an hour doing yard work. It's, uh, having a great time. Um, has your, has your David protein 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 haven't thought about it as much. It's also been like super hot here. So I think they get 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 a bit er about that. Yeah, I know it's been. It's been 90 95 degrees here in LA. Um, it's perfect weather for some delicious. It's not ice cream. It's frozen dessert legally speaking. Um, but perfect refreshing weather for it.

Uh, kind of rolling everything's on your end. Well, first off on that, Keegan said he's got three

shipments, your mark for us when they restock. So so Keegan's their VP of marketing that I met at at bar bruises, D to C event. Um, at 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. They'll follow up with Keegan. But now, 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 can stand it anymore. But uh, 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 I'm looking forward to that man. It's been kind of kind of unbearably hot. But we can get right into it here. We've got a solid agenda. I've had 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. One of our favorite topics.

And then I want to hit some over under stuff towards the end here. I want to start. Do you guys um, do you guys watch Collin and Samir, the the YouTubers? I used to. I haven't 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 Collin 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. Um, it's about the

“industry. Um, 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 Collin 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, um, 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. Um, 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. Uh, 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 Collin and Samir on YouTube as well. They just had this like very, um, 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, uh, the demand for that increasing as well. Well,

“where they're at now is I think they're they're very open about like trying to reform at 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, 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 bridge 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 integration into, um, more solid and deep and like conceptually aligned work. Uh, in the case of this Lexus partnership, it's a four part series we're calling it to marry going to get in their car. They're going to drive across the country. I don't know quite what they're going to do. But the interesting thing about that is their first videos 11 years ago, they would, um, film

straight from their their car. So this is, it's called calling in some air start over. I think they're going to be traveling across the world covering the creator economy to some degree. I'm sure, um, but sort of a, uh, you know, mosh to how they originally started their YouTube careers as well. And then the one thing I'm curious about from your guys is perspective. This is a line that's 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

And this is an example of like Lexus clearly isn't thinking about this on a CPM basis as to

how many of uh, calling in to mirrors YouTube viewers are we getting in front of, but rather how are we deeply integrating calling in to mirror into how we speak to our customers ourselves. And I just thought it was a really interesting sort of, um, new plot point in this, in this transition of how brands are working with creators. So I want to talk about that. Uh, Connor, you guys do work across the board flagship stuff with Gordon all the way down to like product seating hundreds of

creators. I'm curious what is your, uh, what's your POV on maybe this partnership and then how partnership engagements are trending generally? The, this lines are 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, it's like, I mean, what is Lexus's brand awareness, right in the US, like it's not, or Oreo, but it's got to 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, uh,”

at least the way I'm interpreting this line, which is very different than how we think about creators. Because when we think about creators, it's like how do we reach new audiences that were 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 tan 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 going to get by 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, you know, 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, how I'm seeing this. Like this is almost giving like Lexus a new, a new flavor of like interpretation from their audience, which is really

cool. Um, 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 influence early in 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 high rocks 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, how do we activate with someone that's going to like tip everyone over the edge that we've driven to our site in the last three months. So

“so I think it's very different. Now, granted, hexclads, Tam, I think in the U.S. when we had”

tracksuit was like, 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. 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 for questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate in which formats really win? The report analyzes over $575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers in over a billion dollars an 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 in over half of ads actually lose. In promotion

“customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your motion dashboard with their”

run-eth 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 until the marketing operator

sent you. There's no way around being some mix up the two. I'm interested in this partnership and I'm going to think more favorably of Lexus because I am a fan of Colin and Smear. 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 Smear but may be excited about 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 Smear 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

of a brand that I have always heard of and then on the flip side you've got people like my dad

who drives Alexis who has never watched Colin and Smear doesn't care about YouTube but may find it fun that you've got these two 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 Smear's 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 Smear you knew who Lexus you know Lexus but now you're

going to know them more because you're going to 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 for Lexus to do something like this that's going to move someone like you deeper down the funnel because 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 going to get introduced to a via Colin and Smear 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 I 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 in terms of your products for it to to make sense like you know you think about like an apparel company like half day is 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 or while maybe maybe maybe it 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 podcast and

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 Excel but

action I go and so I don't know if you guys seen and I guess you can say you can call her creator whatever select but um gap did a thing with Helly Bieber I don't know if you guys have seen that but Helly Bieber is like essentially the you know it grow right now and is like in every like every partnership possible like she just did skims she did you know why I sell and like so this one was like there's been a bunch and this one was gap um hexclad hexclad in 2020 too

“it's not for good but it's not I think they're saying that's like jumpstarted everything”

well it's a poorly executed influencer partnership mad we learned a lot from that one so which I was just like read it real quick and I guess we can put a show notes but TLDR is actually talking about like relevant cultural relevance 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 so legacy brand you know tons of I what would assume funds and money but like really success for them

comes down to being culturally relevant and that's that's not built or that's no longer built with traditional marketing you know it's not really built with brand marketing I don't mean like brand versus performance I mean like what the brand is saying about the brands like it's not going to again Connor you're saying like comments me or are influencing you because they have your you know you're you're trusting your bought into their world um I don't think you're feeling the same

way if you see Alexis you know TV ad you know they're they're in Dern uh FIFA probably right so they're they're buying that so uh you're here's quick it's just like highlights what she said baro 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 to campaign blah blah blah the new model fine-work cultural equity is already accumulating and show up there

uh so I think that's like a pretty good um answer uh Ashton's a lot smarter than me so instead of just giving my own thoughts just reading hers but yeah what what do you think of that as that kind of like hitting do you feel like that's hitting the on your head of kind of like how you're thinking about it I think they highly be a partnership feels more celebrity like and you could see it people you know the um Kylie Jenner with the meta glasses the Sydney Swenie partnerships that came out last

year with american eagle like you get these like the women that these are all example 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 Swenie commercial is just like her in a room wearing denim jeans and they go super viral which like clearly that is like a culturally potent partnership that they can be a part of um Colin and smear think is interesting because like they are so far from that these are like

okay so 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 principal's hammer they're going to people that have relevance and have obviously like the tross I'm just explaining what influence a marketing is so I feel like I sound like an idiot but there's 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 it and I think this is an interesting”

um 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 they're like creative adjacent online millennial and it's like how can we go about doing that we're going to enlist Colin and smear 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 haily beaver you know like haily beaver you're activating millions and millions of people in the country she is like the it girl in so many ways Colin it smear's like a little bit more the narrower scope as to who you're you're speaking to um which I think is very cool uh and this kind of parlise 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 haily beaver Kylie Jenner um Bud Light wanted to hit Millennials better I don't know what their KP I would have been um 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 Taylor 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 um and I think that's a really cool like they have this target persona they have this very high level KP IS 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 potential it sure it wasn't a cheap deal by any means and I'm curious what your guys is

and those are the the point that I'm gonna 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 um 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 you know scopes and scales and again like I know it's celebrity like they're still our creators that are you know no it like mr. B's sound the biggest

“end is like if you want to reach not everybody like a ton and hey millions and millions you can”

do that but then you can go you can go calling to me or 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 a 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 of micro so yeah I think that's a cool thing it's like there's no one side so it's all creator strategy it's like every brand needs a creator strategy creator strategy

whether you're a gdc brand or whether you're a tiktok shop brand obviously whether you're you know a legacy brand trying not to get you know click like like unit levers is you know again it's one of those headlines but they are saying that they're um reallocating the majority of their media budget to creator like they're gonna spend over 50% of their media on creator which is obviously a big swing and you know they they have a lot of like smaller midsize like prestige beauty brands

I think they're doing it on but still like there are legacy corporations like that and this is like you know Gary v's saying he's more on like social and stuff like that of like trying to revolutionize 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. 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 after self comes in. After cell helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor contribution margin and incremental profit by optimizing the highest intent moments card check out post purchase and even the thank you page brands like Hexclad, Ridge and Pilar increasing their AOV across every cohort using these zero risk upsels 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 after cell subscription no redesigns no risky funnels just better economics want to see how much money you can make with after cell go to aftercell.com/rocket revenue forecast put in your numbers and see how much more profit your funnel will make before

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 this 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 discussed it internally

and maybe you could share some of these details but at one point it seemed like and maybe the Hayley Bieber partnership kind of kick 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 sights really

“dark it's super technical it's kind of like skewed male I think as far as cooking goes um”

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 ex 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 we have done both because what we make sure we do is we we like to leverage these

creator partnerships in own media and that's the classic example of the line that you just rode here right like we're work with us to reach your audience better so like because 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 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 kind of like move them down the funnel and potentially convert that. And like we we think that as well at which is why we don't only leverage these partnerships in paid but we like to call out like cool creator like content in own media and actually drive traffic to it even though that's not like a typical DR email or text funnel um and yeah like we've we've tested into this in over time we made

“a lot of mistakes. I think the Haley Bieber example was that was the intent right like we want to go”

reach this like younger female demographic I think we we missed the mark on that because I think too much of the audience that saw that was like you know in 18 year old girl who's like oh my god just gushing over Haley and like okay like we we thought it would school maybe a little bit older in the people that this was resonating with you know we took some swings with Benny Blanco which is was another another similar swing um yeah that one was super cool and like the performance

wasn't great I thought we executed really well on it but uh the performance wasn't fantastic got we we probably should have leaned more into paid and then and then we started like getting like hitting the mark a little bit better alright so like well Bethany Franco right that was enough that was another one whereas the same the same thought it's like how do we tap into more of this like female demographic but but hopefully get it finding a demo that's more primed a 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 um put her some other oh and then like Nancy Silverton that's another great example like Nancy's a really really great chef female Michelin starred um that's another one we were like hey we think we can go reach new audience with Nancy or or like both reach a new audience and reach our audience better if we go make really

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 I think we are if you look at that data I think it it often does both right like we're reaching new audience but we're also like it's not like it's not like we've a hundred percent new visit rate or like like every account reached is new like we are reaching our existing audience in our ad accounts and reach new audiences which I think is 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 warrior 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 they're having a they're they're an awesome brand awesome product really leaning into like cleaning greeting ethos um and I think about how they do this well they go and they activate it with like micro creators that are hairstylists and like that's a brilliant way to reach your audience better if you're a hair care brand leaning into cleaning 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 and Instagram that's gonna say hey I actually like crafted this with Highlands I was the one testing all the prototypes along the way like this products the result of 25 iterations like that is the classic example of a 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

example of how they're they're able to like activate with a creator reach their audience better without spending you know God knows how much 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 he said we should have leaned into paid more and that's basically what you could distill this whole like Colin Samir and there's a Hollywood reporter piece down to it's like we're giving like we want to 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 on this podcast for a couple years now where in order to get these partnerships to work you can't justify via the distribution of the creator themselves a lot of the time it comes down it's 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's 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 it's like we have to be thinking about the the value of the distribution one way which is really valuable

everybody knows distribution is incredibly incredibly important and 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 percent or there needs to be some sort of like variable pay off where it's like hey let's get

a line and now we're talking about like a like a souped up version of the uh Hudson come for playbook where it's like create us content will pay you you know so much 10 grand up front covers all your costs you guys make a little bit of profit and then you can get two and a half three four percent 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

were beginning to experiment with at ridge you know the difference between hitting your numbers and missing them clear signal on what's actually driving growth it can get really really noisy there's so much noise you got platform data you got blended data MMM all the acronyms MTA experiments all of it all pointing in different directions the more you're spending the faster you move

“the more the bad signal can cost you that's why we use house and we've been using it for years”

that's why the other marketing operators do as well they're the best tool on plan earth for measuring what we call incrementality which we talk about a lot on a podcast what is the true impact of your advertising dollars on your business we have causal MMM for channel level budget calls causal attribution down to the add level and architect their AI agent tells you exactly where your next dollar should go

and the results speak for themselves stocking solve a 41 percent lift in iRos using house

and you're not stuck with a help desk you get an embedded measurement strategy to actual help strategic better decisions their whole team is great we've worked with a lot of them they are world class there go to house dot i o slash operators h a u s dot i o slash operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data you know what's interesting about the bany deal is like that is one of the favorite activations i i've ever been involved with that hacks cloud we made a

really sit custom apron form we made this beautiful on brand custom landing page with the whole activation was like custom bany product with a few bundles to a landing page and then he ought to like four or five pieces of organic content driving to that page where she got her a great CPM on it we got like it was a sub 10 dollar CPM it was really great he made his amazing content distribution obviously the reason we're saying it failed is because we only sold like 30 thousand

dollars 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 two three four acts what we paid him on that deal and now in retrospect we we all know that like the way you we can actually get dry 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 bany boncos likeness and his and his handle would

have been you know three or four acts the cost of the deal but but it is interesting how like

forty thousand dollars in revenue on these products and we paid him a hundred 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 have made sense to activate with bany there's a chance they would have called this a success just because of the CPM that that they got on 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 in terms of

the organic distribution but it is interesting how you know Lexus isn't going to sit there and say how many Lexus is the Colin and Samur Sal. 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 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 or all

or always like did it try and revenue yes no okay that's the deciding factor if it performed well

or not but like I think personally I need to get out of that headspace more more and more as we scale because like that's just not always I think the bigger we get the less that is that become 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 and I totally agree one I think there's a really compelling case to make that like that sounds like a pretty solid engagement given CPM given the 30 thousand dollars in direct sales like that um depending on how you want to look at it uh maybe pencils it reminds you of what Ashton said what 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 hexcott then the Benny Bronco 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 uh 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 want to do this if more

creators and more brands want to do this we have to move down the list of brands who can afford to do this and create just have to become more flexible with pricing and like if we can cross that bridge a change in the mindset of brands and uh more flexible pricing as we talk about uh content independent of distribution I think um everybody wins that's my help. I also think one thing on this and I know we've talked about it and kind of ties into more of like our performance world like I think the

we're seeing like the like distribution and like for more gannick obviously it always goes away

because these are add platforms but it's kind of like merging together which is kind of your

“theory where it's like tiktok shop here you're in for distribution and now it's like you have to”

be on G&B Max and you know meta was like obviously now partnership ads are such a big thing but they're going into that world we're like I have the hypothesis that it's like G&B Maxification of everything and like I just think we're kind of going to that world we're 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 know platforms like um you know like a gentie or like a tribe where it's like

part of your creator strategy or you know giant part of your and I'm not saying anything we haven't

ever said you know million times more but like a giant part of your creator strategy and your

paid media strategy or like one and they're just like converging together and it's no longer like a separate thing or I'm like I'm just working with influencers for paid or I'm just working with them for for for creative like everyone's going to be different but um yeah these two 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 Lexus is doing with Colin similar 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's 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 Lex Cloud what's happening with us 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 count and it looked great

but like CPA's way lower so was AOV like engagement rate 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 but

yeah I think we've done a good job kind of piece in a part that tidbits that maybe brands can take action on quick gut check for the operators listening if you're spending on TV or CTV today can you actually

Lex Cloud for the last three years we've grown with them a lot over time in 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 is a very

robust analytics back end 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 is the true north star on measuring channels and they're really measurement that 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

Cody I'm a pass it to you first over or underrated right now on AI generated UGC it's overrated because 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 hate like you guys remember like

“initial UGC it was I'm I'm old enough to remember that where it was actually like custom”

or submitting content and now it somehow it just turned into anything that's shot low-fi so like

and it's just like a testimonial thing so now 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 five form of of ad creation I think AI has a ton of value in creative production I think that is the wrong way to do it doesn't mean some brands aren't going to be successful with it and it'll

perform I just have very little interest that and I think you know I I'm more agree with like Adam Miseries take which like I think this is why there's a rise of the upper because there's no edits there's no cuts it's it's it's it's the realness the unpolished stuff that can't be

fixed it's like when people say they almost like getting typos and emails now because 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 very bearish on it”

I think it it's overrated when you're trying to like emulate like a 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 be role like that those are the like if you to bucket the visuals those are the visuals that you're showing I think I agree with U 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 with AI where we actually have

found some big wins and we've actually scaled some ads is 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 um and I'm specifically talking about like how do we take a winning UGC ad and like poured it over to toward German account or our Japanese account or whatever it is so I'm took 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 we're like I'm a big fan of things like flora we're like you're taking the stuff that your brand has shot outside or whatever and you're like changing the background 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 voice over like huge fan of that I just don't

think it should be trying to represent as people and I and I'm actually very bullish on AI where you're not trying to represent as people and and AI status 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 probably net new so emulating like true human content you're bearish on but like 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're crushing the like weird Pixar animation like ads were like everything created you bullish on that yeah I think so I think so because 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 don't have a guard up because you're like okay that's not trying to be real I think one is like oh is it trying to be real and again there are I know there are brands printing with AI usually so it can work I just want to be super clear I'm not saying it can work I was just going to say this is not usually see this is a side

note but I have to bring it up because otherwise I'll forget I saw this ad from goat culture a

the human body and it was like talking to 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 I had

“yeah and that's like that's what I'm like if you look at uh gut culture's got some examples but”

if you look at the IMA IMA it is the one that I was looking at recently the IMA it's the Marsman 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 um 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 and not even I like Cody's point

a lot around um it being overrated to emulate human content I also think from like a um 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're doing at ridge gut culture running so lean that like we're being a little bit more experimental on the AI side um but ridge we've got a great efficient system for like generating content it's 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 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 let's like create recreate and try to like increase the volume of what we currently do well is an overrated tactic I want to make sure I understand what you're saying because 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 I make sense I mean like a lot of um 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 ridges 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 at the best case scenario it's like it's like we're 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 the weird animated ads are more interesting is because literally everybody in their mom is creating these 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 most brands treat customer support as a cost but with AI every support conversation is now a chance to increase retention recover revenue and grow your LTV rich panel doesn't just use

AI to answer tickets they allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support you can test different windback offers on refund requests subscription save offers during cancelations and product recommendations that turn chats into sales plus they guarantee you're going to save money 50% of your support volume automated in 30 days or your money back that's a pretty good offer if you ask me so at richpanel.com/demo they'll build an AI support team live for your business

and show you how it can drive incremental revenue for you this is why like playing an international market has been so much fun for me this year because you can see like where the US was with certain types of ad creative five ten five you know the I've set this before like our Japanese markets the perfect example we're like we'll launch a new UGC ad

in the account and by the way these Japanese traders make amazing UGC like granted we're given

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 been fun to like it almost reminds years 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 almost like

like our US ad account you know five eight years ago and then like let's go try that in the Japanese account all right cool I get another one here over underrated cart upsells

“I think they're I think they're they're properly rated but I think that we've we've talked”

about this before on the on the pod is that not enough brands they like see the the upsell revenue and like oh that's all incremental but they don't do like a truce but 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 conversion rate came down even though the upsells generating however much dollars in revenues

I think 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 interest because I think most brands myself included haven't like tested like a whole doubt 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

“because because I don't I don't really know but I think they can kind of be very very under-optimized”

and I don't really know the not for a cart but I have seen like huge swings and 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 it'll it'll make a pretty big difference so I know that that's my evidence error that like they do actually work but in cart I don't know like I've seen and again they're testing so fast they're always changing but um you know I

may 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've cart upsells now so maybe that's maybe that's the the sign but I think that's a really interesting test and I would be interesting just to test the whole doubt 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 y'all look let's just like let's just run a whole that like let's just hide completely hide like all of the upsells and we saw a drive like I want to say it was like four

and a half percent lift site wide it's like mad at somebody it's a multi million 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 whole that I think for many brands like y'all find that it is surprisingly incremental. Two 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 rich this was years ago but

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 it like 30% off or whatever and it's and it got a crazy high attachment rate I want to say it was like 12 or 15% attachment rate really high at least from what we see with typical behavior 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 so 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 when I say we see you know five 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 in the reason I say they're underrated because I think a lot of people will 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 car what are you up selling them what are those complementary items alongside of them how many of them are there it's just like such a high intent and high value touch point 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 where 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 going to get like some sort of incremental yeah I guess I guess you can consider an incremental buyer somebody is adding that wallet to their

car they're not sure if they want it somebody says oh well I'm also going to get 30% off this thing

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 complimentary is there someone who's adding that item to their car the wallet they're obviously interested they're beginning to check out 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 there's supposed to go

this slim wallet lots of people abandon cart as we all know massive drop-off that happens between you know checkout or add to cart and checkout um that coin traction solves a problem so now that we are offering value in 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 Clayveo we have SMS we have Shopify there's not really we have them after sell which does you know checkout upsells and post purchase upsells but there's nothing that really unifies like PDP to cart to check out 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 we are not as mature as we could be a hundred percent

of great so I have some thoughts on this because I actually had been working on it and and built built and upsell app because I had the same thoughts so rebuy used to be really popular and

“common back in like the D2C 2.0 days and I think the my guess is people moved away I don't hear as”

much about it because the pricing was just crazy like it was like a variable cost right and then like after sell came in I was like well you could just pay a flat fee and you know we can do almost everything but it it seemed like so after sell they have an app called up cart I don't know how much they like talked about it so they have like you know you can do some I don't know if you can do in hard yeah there should be one place in one operating system where you do all of your upsells from your

post purchase your in cart your PDP your in checkout as well one of the things I've noticed so like in after sell you can build tests quickly you can get your logic otherwise like we use custom metaph fields for you know our jrb I'm gonna stop saying we at one point but you know I'll sell

say it and so that was what we're using so first of all you can't really test them without like

setting up code and stuff like that so it's it's just not easy to set up early experiments without you know obviously it's easier with clawed and stuff like that but so it's like let's build and app where you can just set up an AB test in there it was like step one just like same exact thing have it looked visually the same in the front end but just be able to like set up a test I want to change these products I want to test two versus three things like that and then also

“like first one so thinking like what is the best way to do logic like how can we”

like we're probably so to your point so under optimized on what the best upsells are and part of it depends on your goals are you looking for AOV looking for revenue procession margin procession but like I think there's probably a decent amount of alpha that you can get there just by testing and all of it is possible on an intelligence with code but you know I just wanted to wave like a marketing team could go in and do it and then I also think it's really cool to try

to think about like auto merchandising and bring some AI into the process to be able to you know use data you know and auto merchandise based on attachment right so things like that so that's kind of something I had been building but I agree with you I think they're very under-optimized

and something should be tested more people are the most important part of your business

and finding real a players is hard and incredibly time-consuming that's why I want to tell you about propel propel is honestly the best recruitment agency that I have personally work with they are marketing and operations specialist say source talent from US, Latin and beyond for top econ brands like Jones Road like many others that you know and love at Jones Road we've hired over 12 people through them we've hired video editors graphic designers we have multiple retention

managers creative strategists from them what I love is not only they easy to work with their quick but they work on performance so you only pay a one-offie only once you hire somebody you don't have to pay you know any retainer no-on going fees plus every hire comes with a three-month guarantee so I highly recommend them they've worked really great for us we've a really great team that they've helped us source I had to link in the show notes and submit the form to get 10% off

your first hire some mix of underrated improperly rated we've probably got room for one more by the way just one one like comment on that because before I was like oh I don't I don't have a good answer because I don't think most people have tested I have to remember if if there's anybody that has tested it it's probably rich I feel like you guys have tested everything you guys are are the top 0.1% of intelligence users and how's users for a reason we were in the 100%

as a subpoint retention metrics generally all right so I used to think and I still do think that

incrementality retention is very underrated I think a lot of the things that are done I think in general like my my issue with retention is like people think about it as like email SMS and 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 you know then it's it's more important like I care like if it doesn't cost you that much money send 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 because you know you see need like a data analyst to set it up and build segments and right

sequel to do it and Olivia kind of had a really good point in perspective actually is like it's not really worth it for 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 and come tell you something and there's one area where you can kind of just go a little bit more of vibes and and directionally correct like it's retention but yeah I think the most sophisticated teams are doing it and should be doing it more do you call underrated right now because because very few people are doing it all right this is probably like the worst content ever because I'm gonna say it depends like if you're like a seven or even

“like small figure business like you should probably just focus on getting up this this the great”

flows and you know directionally you're probably fine if your J4 Clevio metrics improve and you test a flow you know with a well welcome flow and and you know you go with the one that has better open rating click rate and better revenue per user like that's nine 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 the measurement

of incrementality and email marketing I am just surprised the reason I've 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 way fairs and the nectar matrices 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 um the average like very large brands do not have access to those tools it feels like we're in the very early endings 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 Clevio's like look you get a 35x ROI on Clevio such as us insane insane claim but like

“that is what yeah I'm sure that's what revenue reported by Clevio is relative to their cost”

and because of that like very few people are incentivized to say like hey what is this actually and then once you like are 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 Clevio once you get down to that point uh then you can actually begin doing more like tactical and strategic initiatives like you you've you've uh 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 common place in the industry so I feel retention metrics underrated right now I think people are using rich 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 in incrementality and retention both underrated in my opinion well what's nice about retention is it's so

easiest setup user level holdouts like you you can't really do that in your meta account but like if you're trying to test something in Clevio like we're doing this right now without our signal we're gonna we're working on some personalization stuff we're gonna say great we're gonna take take that cohort of people that it would make sense to put into that and we're gonna hold out

20 percent we're gonna put them into our regular welcome flow we're gonna say the other 80 percent

put them into our personalized welcome flow and like it's so easy to measure the lift between open right click right RPU all the things and you just can't do that in other channels um but like if you're just thoughtful with how you set these up you can do user level holdouts on literally

really smart and they're just baking that into their platform like they run out they run a user level

holdout on every single thing they do always on because Michael super smart and knows that

“that's what marketers care about um I think yeah I mean like that's if I was how it was like”

I wouldn't be um building this into my platform I would just be trying to educate people on like like like they could have a service wing right that's like hey you don't need us to 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 clavio”

or post script or whichever platform you can do a user level holdout and like that's what that's what we do right like we just do a user level holdouts and that's how we like optimize those channels and um it's it's it's really just a different way of doing it means the same way

“meta does their their user level conversion left 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 post script before we had data analysts and data warehouse post script ran them for us and we found great results but they were confident and

and we've they've partnered with us closely on that and they post pilot 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 post script intelligence house post pilot I love it incrementality

first vendors incrementality operators