Ep 639: "The Creative Is the Brief": Pilothouse on AI Storefronts and a 20-21% Conversion Rate Lift

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and ensuring that the messages match to them. Ignoring the post-click experience at this

“juncture will cost you more than focusing on the post-click experience and like that's what AI and the”

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Grab your free brand audit report at esco.com/free-audent. That's ESQGO.com/free-audent. The links in the show notes. It's all Killer No Fillur and I am here with Daniel BP Performance and Creative from pilot house. Welcome to the back to the DC podcast. I think you've only been on twice, but I need to get that guy back on. How are you doing? I'm great. Yeah, like if you ever need me to come on, I'm happy to join you. I'm willing to talk about whatever. Well, I came up with a

topic today because it's one that we kind of like early on in pilot houses career. I feel like our expertise post-click was something that really separated us. It was this idea that

“and I think it's now more relevant than ever that like landing pages are so important to”

your avatars customer journey and I think you just told me you've got some cool things that were building there. So I'm excited to kind of dive in there. Just maybe start us off high level. What is your high level theory of the customer journey and the post-click experience and what brands should be thinking about today? Sure. I mean like metaphorically speaking, the post-click experience, it's like the middle child of the marketing team, right? It's like media drives all the

traffic there. The brand, they own the site and the page in between kind of like belongs to nobody and it's kind of just sort of exists and one party assumes the other party is loving it and everyone's neglecting it, right? So my experience every every creative, every brand team has a notion page, someone we're talked away called like landing page priorities Q3 and it's been that way since like 2022, right? It's just nobody. It's the last thing that people think about.

“Is it more relevant that like when I think about Endromeda and I think about Meta specifically”

in this idea of really meeting customers where they're at, having a whole range of creative that speaks to not only who they are but the circumstance they find them in Liam came on the podcast a little while ago and talked about circumstance testing, which I thought was really interesting.

Have a custom landing page and also the ability to create custom landing pages has never been

higher in the world of AI. So are our landing pages more relevant than ever today? They've always been irrelevant but it's always been very very difficult to kind of like execute them and we've directed a lot of our energy and our efforts in segmentation and personalization to like the pre-click creative and that's where all of our efforts have gone, right? Only recently with the advent of AI has the execution of landing pages and how quickly we can

deploy them, like finally catching up. So now because it's a little more effortless than it used to be, we're spending a lot more time focusing on it. Just a quick one before we get back into it, I want to know how deep are you planning to discount this Q4? Most brands are guessing. So we're building a benchmark report called Beyond the

answer stay confidential. Every brand operator who completed is entered to win a thousand dollar

gift card. We're expecting a few hundred entries, so these are probably the best odds at a grand you'll ever see. The link to the report is in the show notes. It closes August 23rd and we award the prize August 24th. All right, back to the show. How do you decide when when a client comes in? When you're going to be driving to their storefront, their PDP or you're sort of saying, okay, we actually, we have a very clearly defined avatar here. We want to make sure we have a

“a custom experience for that avatar. How do you determine when you want to get creative post-click?”

Frankly, like there's a few kind of like almost like technical prerequisites that like with the tools

that we use and and our approach, like there's almost more like technical prerequisites,

then there are kind of like brand or creative prerequisites. And like the way I think about it is it's easiest and it's best for the brands with whom we work. If they have, for example, they're unshoppified because Shopify makes it very easy to start managing the post-click experience. That they have a significant enough budget on meta to be able to actually kind of like test the differences in land and cages. And then we can deploy a landing-page strategy against those

kind of like platforms that then like ladder back into the creative strategy. So it's almost more of like a technical prerequisite that makes spinning up landing-pages a lot easier. Otherwise, we fall into that the same trap that we were like two, three, five years ago, where we're waiting so long to deploy a deploy landing-page that the that just doesn't work the squeeze. Could you walk me through an example where you created a landing-page a post-click

experience that beat the control that maybe the the brand kind of came into us with.

“And what was different about the landing-page experience? Why did it make it more effective?”

Yeah, frankly, we don't see a lot of the brands with whom we work coming in with customized landing-pages. Like that generally means like we're driving to like maybe a category-page probably the PDP, but there is no significant kind of like post-click personalization. So the tools that we've been deploying do take that into account now, they almost look at the creative in the creative in this situation as the brief and then match the message and match the experience

to that creative. Now that's a far massive departure from like showing up in driving a customer to a basic PDP page and actually welcoming them and customizing. And it's like the analogy I like to use is like imagine you walked into a store and you were like I want a 65-inch OLED TV and you know the salesperson was like yeah no problem. We've got that and then handed you the catalog like you be like um but you probably turn around and walk out in the frustration right? You you know what you want

and you weren't being met. You're just kind of like showing up in this room with no furniture in it. So like now we know so much and invest so much in the right message, the right targeting, the right interest-based focus, we can do that on the back side now and we just haven't haven't to that point. When we do and in kind of like the most recent pilots that we've been running on the pilot have a side. When we do that we see about a 2021% lift in conversion rates and that's

significant. Now this approach like using AI to generate landing pages in near real time is new to us but it is compelling enough that we're continuing to kind of like go down that road and invest it. Love it let's let's shut out the tool that we're using because it's it's a real

“interesting one for us because I've been you know this is I think my sixth year we've been doing”

to see and I think one of our first major sponsors first major sponsor for the event that we did we

had a bunch of their team members and founding team members come over to Victoria which was fantastic it's the Black Crow gang and I know Black Crow has kind of changed their value proposition over the years I think starting and maybe attribution and some predictive stuff but they're really zeroing in on this shop building post-click experience. Talk to me about maybe why we chose Black Crow and you alluded to it there. Literally we're creating landing pages on the fly but talked to

me a little bit more about like what this tool does and why we like it. Where we came from was likely where everybody's finding themselves now we were using AI to kind of really compress the generation of landing pages and that experience but we were defaulting to tools like a clawing for example or or even a chatGPT and others which are great but they don't solve a lot of the problems that that Black Crow does so like we can look at a piece of creative and use that as a brief for a landing page

us and what really kind of like a soldess on the partnership with Black Crow was that we can

enjoy the same amount of message match but like their background in predictive analytics and understanding the customer in browser really allowed them to improve the dynamic experience of the landing page itself so while we were segmenting and personalizing previously with AI augmentation what Black Crow offered was kind of like near real-time personalization and like that's

“a significant difference for example Black Crow will remember that you know like there was a consistent”

session across or persistent idea cross sessions and they will understand if a user is returning to the landing page and conserve up like a different experience which provides significant lift when it comes to things like conversion rates and they get the return on every time it's back. This episode is brought to you by Triple Whale, the AI operating system for e-commerce. Just a quick gut check for brand owners and media buyers. Have you started your Black Friday

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weak hits. The best part is completely free and there's no log in required. Just go to triplewhale.com/bFCM and start planning today. I remember when I had an event company we were working on all these ideas sort of like sequential remarketing where someone's come back. It triggers them into a new audience and they serve they get a new creative but that's where we're trying to do that with with pixels and audiences and things like that but to have it actually happen in real-time

post-click is pretty interesting. So how many variations are we like are we are we literally spinning out variations for all winning creatives kind of thing or how do we decide when to apply the Black Crow magic to a post-click experience? For sure and I won't speak for Black Crow here

“but I think talk to like kind of like what's been working with us so I'm thus far in the”

pile that we've been writing on the pilot house side. The brands that it's worked best with so far are those that don't have like a massive like long-tail catalog but that we can concentrate on a few kind of like top skews and really the ability to generate landing pages like the time it is really compact but compressed like you're looking at like a minute or two to literally translate a storefront or landing page from creative into a new experience so you're kind of only

limited by the amount of testing and the budget that you want to do right thus far it's worked for us to focus on top skews and then roll it out a little bit more slowly just to give you a sense and in the pilots that we've run we're starting to move towards more of like a more significant spent so what encoding to you in terms of like lift in conversion rates and stuff like that they're not just like a little ad set that is kind of like sitting over in like the corner of

a client's ad's manager like we're starting to see these Black Crow powered storefronts on the pilots that we're running like starting to really consume like about half the budget that we're putting out there so like a fairly significant spent and so that's a long way to answer your

questionnaire and you're basically limited by the amount of creative that you have in your

in your ads manager and your budget and then how diverse are these are we talking small tweaks are we talking button colors how diverse are the pages and the experiences that end up being made like within the same campaign for instance quite a question I would say as diverse as the creative um that they are derived from so like you and this might not be the right analogy but the way that I'm I'm looking at kind of the creative on meta in this sense is like the ad unit now is the brief

for the storefront so like Black Crow AI does a good job of looking at the message looking at the copy looking at the image then diving into ads manager and then looking at the targeting and the interest in et cetera and then driving a storefront that matches very well that that that message so the variables are endless the nice part of it as well is that you don't have to give up control.

and exert a little bit of control over kind of like brand safe images titles etc and you can go in and you can adjust them on the fly as well so it does offer a little bit of a customization and a little bit of a safety net as well for those brands that are concerned around brand safety and then it tells like we're talking mainly around sales pages essentially or or so we excuse to call them I guess sales pages direct sort of direct response focused having the testimonials

in the right spot having the reviews in the right spot those kind of things but there's also like post-click experiences that are either like squeeze pages or ad returnals or quizzes or things like that when we talk about post-click are we mainly talking about sort of ad returnal based sales pages or does it encompass this idea of you know squeeze pages and quizzes and things like that as well.

“I mean look if when we're talking customer journey it is all encompassing right?”

it depends what you want to do at the end of the day right Eric like the storefronts that we're talking around a black crow AI are very focused on like a certain part of the funnel and like a certain conversion moment but when you're looking at kind of like the whole customer journey loop right the post-click experience for a brand seeking awareness to one seeking consideration to one

seeking like ultimately conversion is gonna change and the content that you serve up as part of that

post-click experience is going to change and something like black crow AI is very good down funnel when you're looking at like it's you know I use the term landing page to describe what what they do but it's it's more aptly a a storefront more than anything so that should reveal kind of like what the what the focus is there but yeah for for the customer journey when we're talking about like backing up a customer experience you're right it matters right like a matter story aren't that sure

“I think a two or three years ago we started reporting on this idea of the death of the third”

party cookie and I feel like the rumors of the death of the cookie have been greatly exaggerated because it's like all of these things like you know this idea that we're gonna lose the vision as to where customer who a customer is and where they are in their journey have you seen any degradation in that data or is it long live the cookie where are we with cookies I mean like you know what what what a talking point three years ago and like honestly like in retrospect what a nothing

burger right like the can was kept so so far down so far down the the street that yeah

that we've lost the can right so I think the reports of the third party the death of the third

party cookie were greatly exaggerated and like frankly replaced by the ability to target while ensuring that personally identifiable information kind of like remains person right and remains private so I don't think like we as marketers really gave up much in in in in in in that transaction and today with the kind of insights that we derived from from AI were in a better position now to be able to target those uh people that frankly want to receive our message

when and then you're talking about a 20 21% conversion lift which is extremely substantial what are reasons that brands aren't doing this at this point like what are brands saying where they're like no we don't we don't we don't really want that 20% conversion lift like what's going on there

“honestly I think that's a holdover right and like if you had asked me like the economics never worked”

we know that personalizing creative is cheap right like we know we can go right five hoax and pump out five statics or you know five pieces of creative generated content no problem we were good at that now but like personalizing destination pages like back in the day used to mean build in five pages that had to go through like design dev like QA deployed like it was months literal months right so teams would build one page and then point it everything at it and then maybe would update

it once a year uh and it felt a couple of owners like media owns traffic and brand or the web team

who never owned the page and then that blender really like belonged to to nobody at the same time

like that cliff got way more specific right like ad platforms allowed us to like target and get down more more narrowly and we we started to understand like the benefits of like niching down in our messaging but the destination state is it broad as it was now we can take that same scalpel that we're taking to creative and we can take it to the landing page uh and the economics work now so that the honest answer is as marketers I think we're only coming to terms now that

the post-click we've always recognized that the post-click experience is important but the economics never worked and now it generating a post-click experience it is as easy as that that pre-click experience right I feel like it's a debt we all we all are living with these like big pools of debt about like what is possible and we're only like I just yesterday was like you know I've been using cloud for everything and I'm pulling like things into cloud and spreadsheets

like yesterday I had this like cascade to be like oh my god I just need to connect cloud to

“click up and to riverside into this and to that and I can stop doing all this and now I need to”

get to the next debt level I have is to get it to a system where cloud knows once I've recorded a podcast and I it just knows when to do all these things automatically we're sort of like we're very much human in the loop still but it's like every everyone sort of has these pools of of debt about what is even possible with AI that we're all just kind of coming to reconcile. For sure I mean like for me it was really instructive or like really illuminating was like oh okay

we've got to create a post-click experience now we've got to write a brief like here we go again

like what are we going to do then I came to the realization like the creative is the brief and like

in this day and age like you don't take into its most reductive and like pushed all the way up to the top of the funnel that pre-click experience whether it's a static ad or a video like that's the brief and now we can take that creative and feed it into the system that you're talking about and what is open at the end is an experience that matches that pre-click experience so there's really the work is already done right it's really just kind of getting your house in order

after after the fact right and it's not as difficult as it used to be and in fact it can all kind of like be streamlined into into one brief now more or less. This takes me way back to my Google AdWords days and this is like 2006 or '7' even and I coined the term way back then funnel congruence and it was just this idea when we were first advertising on a meta-way back in winter 2010 2011 and we were making our ads kind of look like the meta platform you know we were

running ads for toolbars or this or that we were kind of making the ads look like the meta platform the ads looked like the meta platform worked best and then when we created a landing page that looked like the ad it worked better and it's like this concept has been around for a long time but as you say it's just a matter of it being super technically feasible now and like you say the work

is already done it's just a matter of realizing it and dumping it yeah we've always intuitively known

that like message match was like inherently important right but it we just didn't have it we didn't have it in us the kind as marketers to kind of like fight that battle and like that's the real difference in the age of AI is it's like it's a great level set the strategist can now own or orchestrate the post-click experience much more easily and we don't need to engage IT and or like the media team or never the strategist can create the post-click experience and then

provide that as part of like the whole customer journey that their message is is targeting and like I mean that that's frankly the big difference between even now and 12 months ago all of this can live kind of like within the kind of a strategy or a content manager or a generalist quite

“frankly let's leave it there all killer no filler if you want to work with pilot house you want”

to work with Daniel you want to work with as we you know become black crow kung fu experts you just got to go to pilothouse.co fill out a form say you heard this podcast and you want to work with us because we want to work with you any final words for for those brands out there considering embarking on landing page journey that they they haven't already what i would offer is like the work is already done i mean you've already invested significantly in the personas that you're

creating and ensuring that the messages match to them ignoring the post-click experience at this juncture will cost you more than focusing on the post-click experience and like that's what AI and the partners with whom we work and the the focus that we put into the post-click experience

“at pilothouse now that's what we recognize all right well we'll leave it there thanks for”

coming on again today Daniel this is great thanks so much really appreciate it thanks for listening to today's episode if you're not getting the D to C newsletter you can subscribe for free at direct to consumer.co and if you want to learn more about pilot houses all killer no filler services and take off to pilothouse.co i'm Eric Dick and this has been the D to C podcast we'll see you next time