Ep 641: Creator-Handle Ads Ran 70% More Efficient: Aves on Creative Coverage and Hyper Relevant Ads

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You either have to be camp-ball you or camp strategy. The real magic is actually when you combine both. When you're focused on volume, you don't take your head up out of the weeds and look at things to make sure you have coverage. And then with this strategy side, you just can't keep up with the amount of content

“that it takes to remain relevant. Creative is a beyond all that shows you exactly who you need to be talking to,”

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Grab your free brand audit report at esco.com/free-audit. That's ESQGO.com/free-audit. The links in the show notes. It's all killer no filler. I'm Eric and I am here with Aves. We just had a good 10-minute riff on all the memes that we love, so we won't go maybe clean you in on some of those at the end. But today we're talking about subjects we talked about all the time, creative coverage, and there's so much discourse going on in the D to C Twitter world right now about velocity and

people chiming in on what's needed in the space right now. I'm always interested Aves take on what

“you mean by creative coverage in 2026 on meta. Yeah, so something I'm noticing in sometimes I think”

contributing to the D to C discourse volume versus strategy, but coverage is a really good way of speaking about it because I think I mean this happens in all conversations on the internet today where it's like you either have to be camped volume or camp strategy, but the real. It's divisive. Yes, the real magic is actually when you combine both. So if you have a ton of volume, I don't see that working for people right now, like I've seen folks in this

space who said, okay, whatever, let's use growth to make a thousand ads that we'll watch in one month and their CPM spike, they stop finding their right audience, and nothing is really happening, and it's the same with like if you're too precious in your developing content for paid media,

like people, I've never seen Madman still haven't seen it, but I imagine in a very madman

Esquire where we have like the whiteboard and we do a ton of thought and research and then we put together a singular piece of content every two weeks doesn't work either, and so coverage is really about thinking about like what needs to be covered, and so not going based off of like what is just my opinion on volume or strategy, like what do I believe coverage is like really invoking what will actually work from a tactical point of view while addressing the like larger

strategic swings that people need to make. Let's talk about some of the layers in coverage because coverage refers to both like the format coverage. That's maybe traditionally what we might have

“called coverage was like you need to make sure you're covering all your image sizes and types,”

but then there's also the ad format coverage, you know like making sure you have you have stills and you have UGCs and you have maybe founder content, and then there's the dimension of the and drama, the arc of like the where the customer is in their journey and what who they are as an avatar, like coverage covers a lot. Is that accurate? Yeah for me now it's like the things that you mentioned first, the one we're thinking about like sizes, that should just be second nature of those

people marketing, and now for me coverage, the definition is really like are we making ads for the right

pre-determined strategy, right? So you start up the ladder by figuring out like who are the right

“people, who do we need to talk to to continue to grow as a business? And something that I've noticed”

a lot is folks will default in this part of the conversation to well these were the initial personas that we built out and these are the people that we think we want to talk to, and I was trying to challenge brands to give me a sense of a person and an avatar who we need to talk to to grow the business, because it's all well to do to talk to the people who already love your product and are fully aware of it. I feel like last time maybe we were talking about doughin, I'm in a dough

in dress right now, they don't have to hit me with like 900 ads, you know, like that's not really covering personas because I'm already in there. I don't know what I would show up as a paper,

so I remember it's like I'm already there and then what you really need to take about two is like

what are we using paid media for? Most of the time when people come to God with other house or when you start running ads, it's because you actually do want to grow your business. So again, it's like adding that layer of not only who do we need to talk to that already purchasing this product, but where is the opportunity for growth and expansion in audience? So are you even talking to those people? Because again, when I start talking to brands,

most of the time, it's like our bread and butter customer is like a woman in her 20s. And so we

“only make ads that appeal to women in their 20s. But if you want to expand maybe upwards in age a little”

bit and we're just not addressing it, then you're not covered in that way. And the same goes for product too. Product has actually been a really big part of how I've been making tactical decisions for accounts. And so I've got a couple of general reports that I'm pulling in where I'm sort of cross-referencing. Is it a lot of acronyms? But I'm looking at what products are functioning from an admin cap perspective. So what's like bringing people in for the cheapest. And then also

what is the most efficient for us to ship? And where are the margins to find extra profitability for brands in the focus on product? It's something that I see get dropped a lot as well. So we tend to ignore like net new personas. And we also tend to ignore that part because it's very nuanced. And you need to have a lot of data. But the sort of benefit of how we're all working with AI now is that we have these insights all the time. We're just not necessarily using them in the

most productive way. So yeah, I found my huge efficiency gains by focusing on do I have my product coverage handle. So maybe there's something that is we tend to think of it as like a

returning customer only skew. And we've never really experimented with showing it to folks on me like

paid top of funnel side and trying to really test into those products and find that extra

“bit of profitability is huge. I think to in this like unsure era when it comes to do to see”

Nikon like when we did the in person we were talking about meta has just been acting kind of funky for the year twenty twenty six. So finding not only like efficient scale but also just efficiencies within the already existing folks through like creative coverage. So again looking at the data and then looking at your suite of content in your creative program and saying oh shoot we're not even talking about this product and it is substantially more efficient that people

come in and buy it. Thinking about that kind of thing too and then again with the angles just really taking a step back looking at your creative library looking at your what's a live right now interesting like all we even talking about all of the the benefits that we know work. I think the problem with both volume and strategy is it to unique guiding stars for people is when you're focused on volume you don't ever like take your head out out of the weeds and look at things

to make sure that you have coverage you're just like sometimes making your business less profitable by focusing on the wrong things through volume and then with this strategy side you just can't keep up with like what is going on on platform and the amount of content that it takes to remain relevant. Yeah there's a very long wind answer. It's great answer. I mean there's so many it's like it's not even 40 chests it's like yeah space chest space chest that's where we're at super

interesting so give me maybe the anatomy so I like your example of the finding a product then maybe it's like a linking product or it's a product that brings people back the most or whatever some metric most cart abandon product or something and then you're creating custom ads for that product and then walk me through the product like is that is that ideally a creator ad is that like when you're talking about a product for instance is that often going to be like what's your

go-to suite to like address that niche or that opportunity. Yeah that's a really good question so I look at it from less of a like static motion creator and more of a like delivery perspective so it's like where do we tend to find people that are actually net new called traffic

depends on like what the issue is so cart abandon like the most cart abandon product is a really good one as an example because typically what that tells you is there's not a lot of trust and there's something that's like stopping people they're excited about it at the top of funnel but something stops them from actually converting and so usually what I've seen lately is

“white listings so ads that come from a creator's handle are performing sometimes like I think”

the last set of ads I was analyzing though it's not so running it and thinking about delivery having it run to the creator's handle was 70% more efficient than running the same piece of creator from the brand and so what that usually means is it's just generating more trust and buying from an actual person because that looks like it's coming from an actual person and it is they put together so I tend to think about like what seems to be in the way of this product

doing well because it's cart abandonment then I'll usually lean on like a whitelisting partnership and then try to back that out with the content that I know works middle and bottom of a funnel and so usually that static content branded as well as like overlaze addressing those conversion pieces but really thinking full funnel again and it's like okay so someone's gonna see this first

“coming from an actual human being giving a testimonial that they like it so they'll already”

have a first touch point that revolves around building trust and removing those conversion various because a lot of the time when we're briefing creator content we just think like do something fun and exciting because it's gonna limit the top of the funnel but trying to close the gap a little bit quicker and really focus on like what is the problem but the product we're trying to solve rather than what do we do for like say the top acquisition product for that brand

we're probably gonna have a whole different suite of creative because we just now that that's exciting and people buy it off of one click so when we're trying to get that same performance out of a product we know is harder to get people over the light on it's gonna be way more like technical from the creators handle and then a lot of return policy type of conversion friction remover in the middle and bottom of the funnel content I imagine with the economy

constricting as it appears to be or just while it's tightening a little bit these days

that just really drilling in on pain points it's got to be more critical than ever essentially

just because you've got to agitate people you really have to like help them understand what their life will be like with your product from multiple angles before they're pulling the trigger maybe more than they would a few years ago yeah the like interesting that I'm finding is actually delivering more on the selling the cloud type of stuff is working quite well because I do think one thing is tighten up economically folks like to imagine days when it won't be and they love like

it was inspirational aspirational value rather than just USB and problem adaptation which is kind of interesting and the easiest point of entry that I found is making really hyper relevant content and it's something that we're like actively right now rolling out a system for about houses that you can really cool which is just like I've talked with as a ton on adventurous here but we are all spending so much time on our own rhythms that the echo chamber that we all live in

is getting like smaller and so it's basically like airports right like we were just talking about

memes and some memes that I have seen every three videos on TikTok you've never heard of

so really baking that into your creative approach and understanding like I know the chanty beluga inside joke you know like the mango chutney song there's just different things happening

“for different people and so what's really like breaking through I think as things tighten up”

economically and especially heading into Q4 is content that is bespoke and like hyper relevant to what you've been being it's no longer just like okay these are pain points that someone like yourself might feel it's like this is the exact type of font that you're expecting this is the audio that you've been hearing everywhere this is like the camera angle that people use even it's really interesting work and I will say it's been very fun to assist mine but also very difficult

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one day I hope you can just publish the like a whole book of ads that you've made over this period

“because you also just leverage humor in such an interesting way like I think is it accurate to say”

that I like hyper relevant creative a lot of it comes down to being really knowing with the audience

or that's one approach what approach that I think you've used really well is being really

knowing with the audience in a way that also ingratiate yourself because you you'll call on a memory or a sensation of like a particular avatar that you're going really deep with a nostalgic font or image or or whatever right yeah it's interesting because it's like this is more pine sky but it's like we are also all getting a little bit less human in a way or in a scary way but just in like a we're all very like I have been finding it sometimes I'll like I do a

page of journaling every morning and sometimes I'm like trying to like be more efficient about my mindfulness and it's like what is going on yeah how you do this type of cyborg theory in university way back in the day and it's like technology does change you and we're using we're deeply

integrating with technology right now so it's not you're not far off yeah yeah we're all becoming

“less human so I think that like being able to really understand and speak to someone it creates”

like a little sparkle I think in people where it's like this is activating something in me that I wasn't necessarily expecting I was also there's a screener of him but I know but she's got a master's thesis in like cybersycology and she was talking a lot about the distinction between people who mate content versus like quote unquote lurkers and most people are lurking on the internet like most people do not 98% yeah they don't create they just consume

and so I think about that a lot it's like they're only here to look at stuff which is a very interesting thing to think about and then when we think about two like this is again really like by the sky but most of the time people are doing something else when they're on their phone that is something that really has shaped the past year of my work it's like most of the time some is on the toilet they're waiting at the doctor's office hopefully they're not driving

but often they are they're waiting for a clawed answer they're waiting for a clawed answer is got to be the number one fastest use case of people jumping on their phones and it like creates a really interesting way to approach the work because they're not they're not doing this like they're coming on to consume content passively they're not like going to the movie theater by the way I went to see the Odyssey and I saw a woman coin Instagram the entire time

the entire movie which is a long movie and it was a good movie like keeps you engaged no not even doing anything just possibly scrolling on also really interesting I will say she was like probably boomeranged like not like young interesting behavior though you know as I do not it except for like unskippable YouTube content which most of the time you've got YouTube on the background but I've been saying to it's like at the oven if you're doing any

mobile game stuff is the only time that someone's like watching the ad truly yes they're content

“locked in that case yeah so great super interesting that was a great riff I think you we kind of”

talked about this a little bit but you have a note here as well we've been saying creative is the new targeting since 2021 or so I think and it's become true it is a hundred it was true back then but it's even more true now so how do you how do you parse that phrase when when you hear it yeah it's a really interesting one because I think we all just started saying it but no a new one we're saying that's true that happens it's true really like I feel like

sometimes with a you call me like a manifest or own destiny because we all just started saying it and now it's a truth but for me you can't know these two truths which are creative is a new targeting and then if you're on the volume side of things thinking okay well I'll just make us out of an hour and that will find the right people it's obviously not gonna do that and it's the same with saying that creative is a new targeting but I'm only gonna make one really gorgeous video

ad and ship that I think I I made a note that I would say now it's like you can smell a bunch of

painfully make a single strand of like homemade spaghetti put every piece of saffron you want in

“that dough that's not gonna bring anyone you have to think about how you are dressing the product”

which is like the like I wouldn't eat a red sauce but I love Pesto any day of the week so it's like knowing what the right sauce is to put on top of the pasta is how you actually unlock that idea of creative is good of your targeting because if you're just doing a bunch of stuff who are you talking to like it's all different it's all random and like I said before you're

never coming up to think about am I talking to everyone I need to speak to am I talking to new people

just making stuff and hoping that it finds the right people but with this new approach that we're taking on the pilot house side of like hyper relevancy it's like I know for a fact that this is gonna reach the right people because I've done their research and then automated a system that allows me to pump out content that skill that you know like three weeks ago everyone was saying kind of chic don't know what that means still but I was using it and adds to address people

sort of in that cohort of like millennia women still know clearly what it means to be kind of chic like genuinely don't want to but for that it was like right this brand knows the language they know what we're talking about so trying to like figure out what the right sauce is for the people you actually want to talk to and then just getting the wraps in and throwing it over like a bunch of short from video or using it in your ad copy really doing the research to figure out the sauce

and then that'll bring the people to the restaurant check back in ask if they want some fresh ground pepper make you say when with the parmesan given the full experience I think that analogy came from I've been watching a ton of old according to my house. Nice. Really on the accord roundy frame but yeah it's like if the creative is going to be the new targeting then the creative has to be made for the people you want to speak to. It's not just gonna magically find

“someone who's going to purchase from your brand like you need to first know who you want to talk to”

and then how they want to be spoken to and what is the language that they use not like English versus French but kind of she versus Chanti Beluga you know like sports that's the name of the podcast just confused the hell out of everyone try to listen to this no I'm with you on the pasta metaphor for sure and it's just about that intentionality do you have anything else you can offer the audience on how they can think about creating a system

by which they can pump out hyper relevant content. Come talk to me. Yeah come Beluga I pilot has lead form and talk to me because I guess that we are rolling out a like standardized system do this

for everyone but I think the first thing is in knowing what your persona is what are the

consuming is step one and anyone can do that you don't have to come talk to me to do that. I will say like when I started doing this work I would often be too focused on the biggest creators in this space and then I would look to them as inspiration of sort of how do I make relevant content and since then I've really started looking into like other brands and then also sort of small timid level creators who fit into the bucket of persona that I'm speaking to and so I try to

really focus my efforts on looking at what people are doing or talking to that similar audience and then doing that at scale again I'm not going to tell you come down but here's something out but really start with just figuring out like what are they watching what is funny to them? Did they know chanty buruga yes or no and then going from there and they know Professor Cindy yes because we're all in our own spaghetti strands and all that confused things but yeah

in different restaurants yeah we are all in different restaurants I think it's like a really fun time to be someone who likes to make I kind of just got a lucky balance in life because I like making a lot of content and I also like making highly index on my persona content and it

“just so happens so that's what works right now so I'm going to get spot on having a good time but”

it's definitely like Daniel or VP of performance in brand here but as we always joke about like

you now need more content that's better than ever easy yeah it's too easy I just this is come out two weeks from now because next week I have one with Daniel about landing the landing page experience and I was just what like I think you know when you're you're building all the usually creative concepts curious on your side how how you see landing pages being used or storefronts like dynamic storefronts or storefronts that are based on creative or based on

avatar any any comments on those yeah it's really like it feels almost full circle because I remember dude we were talking about this like so long but doing it all so manually and it would take

that we've been talking about in this episode actually grabs the conversion which is similar

“to like what we were talking about three years ago it's sort of like you can do more”

extra now with some of the tools that are coming out and that we're partnering with on the pilot outside but it's like an insurance policy is how I usually think of it or it's like like steaming your clothes before you were done like you could spend $2,000 on a t-shirt but if it's wrinkled it's not going to look nice so it's like if you spend all of this time and money working on your like the ad program side of things and they land on a PDP that has nothing to do

with but they were just looking at and doesn't have any like cool features or like video content

on pages is a huge experience for people now nobody reads anymore fine nobody's reading

so it's like finding ways to loop back to what you presented to them in the ad in a way that is a little bit more fleshed out like it's only going to help drive the conversion and like I said you kind of what we use this analogy to like you might as well not fill a bucket with a bunch of holes in it and that's sometimes what we do if we do all this work on the ad side and then we just send them to the home page so like you know especially with like I'm noticing the landing page

stuff really helping on the sort of product persona side in verticals that are more subjective so like jewelry clothing a common issue that I even used to see on like friends I was working on was you'd maybe feature like a lifestyle image of someone in a dress and then people in the comments section would be like which one is it I was just on the homepage I don't know how to find it I can't search for it so it's like making the purchasing a little bit easier now because we can send people

directly to what they were looking at and then really work on some of the functionality pieces as well like in-card ourselves bundling and all. Last thing I was just doing we have this tool that scoops all of D to C twitters the vibes on D to C Twitter and one of the interesting points that I saw a lot of operators echoing was just the importance of copy and I feel like when we talk about creative we mostly are talking about the image or the video in a lot of cases where are you at

“these days with how important the copy in and I guess the copy can be what's in the video as well but”

I'm thinking about the ad text how do you think about ad texts and how much emphasis to put because it could easily be an afterthought it'd be the kind of thing where it'd be like have clawed look at my ad and write a great direct response thing how where do you come down on the importance of ad copy right now? I feel like I will say if you're just listening in this episode I sat up straighter when Eric asks this question because I love this. I start with copy in my own

process and I'm calling it and I have the results to say like I make very good ads. I start with ad copy an creative copy before I start with a visual idea and usually you mentioned like I do use a lot of humor I will sometimes like I feel like in a comedy challenge on RuPaul's Drag Race like I'm writing down on my ad time jokes and that I'm figuring out how do I connect those into

like a visual representation. So I always start with copy and I don't use any AI in my process for

copy because it's my background and skill set but it is really important in both your actual ad creative and then need like that's attached to it. We recently, uh, whether larger accounts are apologize. I can't remember the exact numbers but we ran like an ad copy test and we did see results

“from just shifting the ad copy and it's the easiest thing in the world to do. I think good copy”

because I mean I also could write about this forever because we've seen such a flattening of language because so many brands are so dependent now on AI for ad copy and it's very funny to me that we spend so long talking about stopping this scroll and doing something different and there's a real opportunity now I think for people who either have experience as like good copy writers or if it's just a skill you want to pick up and learn like developing that brand voice and then

understanding how to write for a world that does not read is a very like interesting and fun challenge to choose one because I did it my full edit for myself all the time and there's too much copy in this or it's like the language isn't clear enough so it's very important it's very like good work to do and I think previously when we were all running like a ton of iterations copy kind of got left behind because we would make you know one version of a static ad and then

too much abundance of copy but now because creative diversity is so important and you want to try different styles I think copy is really a big part of that and I feel you probably seen him Eric like all make an ad that's just an emoji no product but really strong copy and it performs exceptionally well like it brings in like over six figures on a weekend and it's like okay well

“that was an emoji that is free to use and just really strong copy that you have to do that like”

persona work first and the relevancy pieces like we're talking about speaking the right visual languages but also like I make a difference or things like that like really manipulating the language in a in a way that makes people feel like a chutney excited I'm excited to release this podcast because I think it's been a perfect example of a all-killer no filler is one of the best ones I think we've done in a while you absolutely killed it if you're listening to this and you're like a

creative person send this to another creative person send this to another another send this podcast to another creative person and say hey you want to hear this riff on creative coverage because I think

it's a really good one and as always if you want to work with Aves and the amazing pilot us team

just go to pilehouse.co and fill out a lead form tell them you heard this podcast and you want to get to work on your creative coverage yeah again like the like work and systems that we put together for the relevancy piece I don't see this is like the most salesy I don't see anyone else doing and I was just trying to call talking about this like I have taken this work that I started doing with some brands years ago and now I'm creating product based on this sort of relevancy

index that's I'm creating product that's selling out so it's like I have a couple adventures we'll be returning we're gonna talk about building brand versus like product focused brands where you're just looking at like how do I produce something that people will buy because I'm noticing

this more and more people don't really care always about where it's coming from like you just

want to buy whatever like fidget is cool right now it doesn't matter who the brand is I just want that item it's like the relevancy stuff it starts with strengthening up you know you're paid media programs but it always ends up lifting the entire brand not to again talk about I be like this is another me and Daniel thing where I was like creative is the be all end all but it's

“kind of true because it shows you exactly who you need to be talking to how to talk to them and then”

once you start getting that into your product development pipeline you're printing money it's too easy and that's what we've got to be doing this Q4 I'm excited to catch up with you again soon about Q4 Q4 Prep and all of this I think we could maybe go deep on copy one type of cool to get could be a couple people on the pilot outside together and go deep on on some more copy stuff but this was killer thank you so much Aves also you got to age around summer vacation right now

with adventurers but brands keep rolling in which is amazing so if you also you have to go back

and find Aves back catalog of adventurers and then you said you're planning a few episodes in the before Q4 like when you when are you thinking of coming back with a few new ones so we're coming back in September after Labor Day um there was a steady until the holiday season it's been nice yeah I took a little summer sabbatical specifically to build out some very cool systems so now it's like we we got the work ready to roll with the systems ready to do the work I don't know

pasta pasta pasta pasta pasta ready to boil have you seen that deal of the robot in a restaurant it's like a kitchen run entirely by AI robots but they're like oh my god we're aggressive but they're like they were trained on Gordon Ramsay just like you they were trained on Gordon Ramsay so they're like call each other planks and doing various things like that wow there's the funny thing

“they're so like ungrateful and they're just like mixing things like crazy that's us that's what we're”

okay thanks for listening to today's episode if you're not getting the D to C newsletter you can subscribe for free at directorconsumer.co and if you want to learn more about pilot houses all killer no filler services take off to pilothouse.co I'm Eric Dick and this has been the D to C podcast we'll see you next time