Cody Plofker (Jones Road Beauty, Marketing Operators podcast) has run YouTube ads that stay live for two to three years without fatiguing — while most paid social creative burns out in a week. In this episode, he breaks down exactly how Jones Road builds YouTube creative that works, why incrementality is the only measurement system he trusts, and how to use it to win budget arguments with a board that only looks at last-click.

‍

Inside the episode:

• The YouTube creative mistake most brands make: too polished, not punchy enough — and why grittier, longer-form ads (60-90 seconds, even 2 minutes) often outperform short, clean ones
• Why audio hooks matter more on YouTube than visual hooks — because half your views are happening on a TV with the sound on
• How Jones Road keeps the same YouTube ad running for 2-3 years without fatigue, while Meta and TikTok creative burns out in a week
• The "16x9 conversion" trick for turning existing vertical social assets into YouTube ads without a new shoot
• Why incrementality is the only causal measurement system — and how Cody uses it to win budget fights with the board over channels that "don't look good" on click attribution
• How Jones Road found their YouTube post-treatment window kept "exploding" over time — the opposite of Meta, where results are mostly baked in fast

‍

—

‍

Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact and request your FREE strategy session today!

‍

—

‍

Chapters:

‍

[00:00] Intro — Brett Curry sets up the interview with Cody Plofker at OMG Commerce's NYC event

[02:45] Where YouTube fits in the marketing mix — a quasi-brand, quasi-direct-response channel

[03:24] Judging YouTube creative — hooks, pacing, and why longer ads can outperform

[07:31] Educational content and Jones Road's creative journey — from UGC to produced TV

[09:41] Foundation Stick launch — creator shoots and top-down vs. bottom-up production

[12:41] Why Cody co-hosts the Marketing Operators podcast

[15:30] Measuring YouTube properly — the 16x9 conversion trick and halo effects

[18:22] Incrementality vs. MTA vs. MMM — the case for causal measurement

[22:54] Reading individual tests and building an incrementality testing roadmap

[26:18] What's next for Cody — AI, new projects, and life after Jones Road

[28:37] Audience Q&A — roadmaps, baselining, and Jones Road's early YouTube hurdles

‍

—

‍

Connect With Brett: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQmbMwBW8LYDfFAqNqlgTGw
Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/
Request a Free Strategy Session: https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact

‍

Relevant Links:

• Andrew’s LinkedIn: /cody-plofker/

‍

‍

Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, JC Hite, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D'Allessandro, Stephane Colleu, Jeff Oxford, Bryan Porter and more

‍

‍

Transcript: 

‍

Brett Curry (00:12):

Hey, Brett Curry here. Welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. Today's a little bit different. I'm going to share with you a recording that was done live at an exclusive invite only event in New York City. I'm interviewing my friend and client and just a guy that I have a ton of respect for, Cody Plofker, former CEO of Jones Road Beauty, co-host of the Marketing Operators Podcast, my favorite marketing podcast on the planet. And so we go deep here on YouTube and YouTube success. And Cody's just a brilliant marketer. If you've listened to his podcast, you know that. But I wanted to get his take on YouTube. Now he and I have worked together. OMG runs YouTube for Jones Road Beauty, but I want to get his take and share that take with you guys. And so we dive into everything from creative. When does Cody feel confident in a creative to move forward with it?

‍

(01:11):

When does he feel like, "Hey, maybe we need to go back to the drawing board or we need to edit this a little bit." What creative length is he most excited about on YouTube? How does he think about educational content on YouTube? We talk about some of the journey that Jones Road has had with YouTube, and then also we talk about causal measurement. YouTube is notorious for under-reporting the actual results and platform. And so Jones Road leans into incrementality, which is what we recommend as well. So you get to dive into the marketing mind that is Cody Plofker, and I get to chime in a little bit as well. Now I also want to mention, if you've never been to one of our live events, this was actually recorded at the Google headquarters in New York City. These are invite only events. If you'd like to attend next year, next year we're planning on two of these events.

‍

(02:05):

Hit us up, go to omgcommerce.com, fill out the let's talk form and just say, "Invite me to the next YouTube event." There are some requirements to attend, but they are free to attend for qualifying brands. And so with that, let's dive in and please enjoy my interview with Cody Plofker. Let's talk YouTube. So this guy speaks at Meta Performance Marketing Summits. He's on the Marketing Operators podcast. He's vibe coding, and I always put a Y instead of an I in coding, so it's Codying. Anyway, that's a really nerdy thing, but he's vibe coding and doing CRO and stuff like that. But where does YouTube fit? From your perspective, where does YouTube fit into the mix?

‍

Cody Plofker (02:45):

I'm a big fan. I mean, it's always been, we'll call it between 10 and 20% of our mix. And when things have been really good on YouTube, business has been really good. I'm definitely a really big fan. I mean, obviously Meta's going to be a big share of any D2C brand, but it's such an important channel for so many reasons. It can reach new people. Everybody's on it. It's the new TV. I'm a huge fan. You don't need endless supply of creative. Creative's really important, but it's one of the only platforms where you're getting really full screen attention from somebody. So the quality of impressions is great. So huge fan, think every, not every brand, but definitely for the right brands, it should be a really big part of your strategy and mix.

‍

Brett Curry (03:24):

Love it. Let's talk creative a little bit because Cody and I, we slack a lot on YouTube and creative and stuff. I remember we were working on some creative concepts together. We were slacking about it and you messaged me and you're like, "Ah, I don't think it's going to work. Thround of creative, I don't think it's going to work." I think it needs a little more. And I was like, "I think you're right." And so from your perspective, and this is a little bit different than Meta or other platforms, how do you look at a YouTube creative? When do you look at a YouTube creative and say, "This needs a little something extra before we start running this?"

‍

Cody Plofker (03:54):

I think I heard you say brand performance earlier when you were talking about YouTube, and I think that's a good way to look at it and just how I think about YouTube as a channel in general. It's probably like a quasi direct response and brand awareness channel. It's not like TV where you have a 15, 30 second spot and yes, you can get an offer in it, but it's really a top of funnel channel. It's not like Meta or something where it's just bottom funnel and you have to buy right then and there. And so I think you need a compelling story. I don't think it can just be product or offer. You do get a lot of time if you do it correctly to get people's attention. People are not scrolling, they're watching a video. And so as long as you could get a good hook, which is extremely important, and then retain their intention, you do have their attention.

‍

(04:36):

So the quality of impressions are really high, but what I found is you do have to be a little bit stronger on the direct response side. So those videos in particular were part of a hero TV video shoot, and I just didn't think they were punchy enough. So you need a good hook, but I think when you're scrolling social a lot of times and people have sound off, you need a good visual hook. On YouTube, often it's on TV, half of it is on TV. Almost everyone obviously is listening with sound on. So I think audio hooks are really important. Obviously there's a whole you don't pay unless it's a five-second watch. So you can actually try to be strategic about that and almost qualify who it's for and who it's not for. And then you still need good pacing, but it's not the super quick paid social pacing and then having a good story.

‍

(05:18):

And one of the things, two probably misconceptions, we've always found long form does better, just performs better. So those were short. So mashing things up, taking some branded assets, TV things, and adding more direct response. UGC, that's kind of what we did with that one. And then also everybody thinks you need the most polished creative in the world and you don't always need that. You can get away with and sometimes get better performance out of things that do feel a little bit grittier or you can mash them up as well.

‍

Brett Curry (05:48):

That's really good. I love that. And so yeah, sometimes it's a slightly longer ads and I mentioned under 30 seconds, you could test it, but we don't love that. It's like 60, 92 minutes. And it doesn't have to be exact either. It could be whatever length you want. And so that works really, really well.

‍

Cody Plofker (06:03):

And one of the other things that's nice is on a pay social or TikTok short form channel, creatives will fatigue in a week. You have to have so much volume. This feels a little bit more traditional. Yes, there's an algorithm, yes, things fatigue, but we've had ads that are running in our account for two, three years. So you do have to test, you should be testing weekly or biweekly, but if you get something that performs, you can write it pretty well.

‍

Brett Curry (06:26):

Yeah, I love that. And that's one of the biggest benefits of YouTube. And I think there is something to be said about for Meta TikTok, it's just like a volume play. We just get a bunch of ads in there. We're not overthinking it. We're trying to find winners that way. With YouTube, you need to be a little more strategic. You think about it as you launch it. We still got to test and find out, but you can be a little more strategic. And absolutely right, you don't have to nail it with polish, but sometimes the higher production ads, they do work on YouTube and sometimes they don't work on Meta. And so wherever you are in the journey, you got some TV ads, probably make them work on YouTube. You're all UGC or creator, we can probably make that work on YouTube as well. But I love the way you said it.

‍

(07:05):

I want to underscore this. It can be longer, but it's got to be fast-paced. It doesn't have to be crazy fast-paced like some TikTok ads, but it can't be slow. It's got to have a pace to it and it's got to have that direct response element to it as well. Other things that you would, as you look at, these were the winners for Jones Road on YouTube or other brands you've met, what other characteristics do they have?

‍

Cody Plofker (07:31):

I'm always a fan of quasi-educational stuff. So again, it's not just a YouTube video educational, but just understanding why people are on that platform and it's either they're looking for something, so they're searching and using it as like, "Hey, I need to go mow my lawn or I need to learn how to do this." So they're in a learning mindset or it's an entertainment thing, it's the new TV. And so you shouldn't just be like, "Hey, here's this product. I have this product buy it." The more you can make it feel like it's something that people are getting value of regardless, and I think the same is true for anything paid social, but I think it's really important here, but you do have to obviously weave in the right sales mechanisms and direct response things into it. So I think if you can blend that and tell really good stories, that can be really helpful.

‍

(08:14):

Yeah,

‍

Brett Curry (08:15):

Absolutely. And what has been the journey for Jones Road? Because you guys tell really good stories, and of course, Bobby is dynamic. I mean, you watch her and you're like, "Trust her. She's an icon type of thing." How have you guys progressed in how do we get the right mix of all those elements you just described so that we can build these great YouTube ads?

‍

Cody Plofker (08:37):

Yeah, I mean, you do have to produce specifically for it or you don't have to. It's recommended, but again, it doesn't have to be this $300,000 TV shoot. You can definitely start taking paid social assets. Obviously, you should launch your 9 by 16s that are performing well. You still do want them and have them in the mix. And then there are a bunch of services or we've worked with some, but with editors where you can add frames and backgrounds. And even you can do this on your TV ads where you can run a 16 by nine landscape video, but with a nine by 16 vertical video in it and then your logo or a QR code or just some B-roll on the side of it. And you can test a lot cheaper and get some more longevity out of stuff. And then when you have something that works, one of the things that we've done well is, or we used to do, we would get traction, organic social would perform, we'd run that paid social iPhone style, and then we would go and when we did a production, we're not just blindly being like, "Okay, this concept will work," but we know this hook, the story is working, and we would produce it in a little bit more produced way.

‍

(09:39):

So I think those can help a lot.

‍

Brett Curry (09:41):

Yeah. And so you recently did, it was I think for the foundation stick launch, some of the creator shots that I saw, you guys did those, right? You brought creators into a studio as well. And so sometimes what you're doing is you're running ads from creators on paid social, stuff they shot, stuff they filmed, you're understanding these are the hooks and things that work. Now we're going to go, let's go professionally shoot some of those as well. Talk a little bit about that.

‍

Cody Plofker (10:06):

Yeah. I guess it's top down versus bottoms up where traditional brand campaigns are like, "Hey, here's this concept for this campaign. We're going to have a big hero spot. And then from that hero spot, we'll go and edit a few variations of it." And it's still important, especially for a brand campaign. And we did that for the foundation stick launch, but I think when you do that, you want to get just as much footage as possible because then you can edit. So we had TV spots, things like that, but we brought them to Brett's team and we were like, "Hey, here's what we have. I think they're a little too polished for performance. How do we add a little bit better editing in this? How do we add better hooks? How do we make them a little bit longer, mash them up?" A little

‍

Brett Curry (10:48):

Faster paced,

‍

Cody Plofker (10:49):

A

‍

Brett Curry (10:49):

Few of them as well.

‍

Cody Plofker (10:50):

Exactly. Yeah. Just have them hit a little bit harder. So that's a good way to do it if you have a big campaign or a shoot or want to extend TV. Even one time when we first ran TV ads, I was like, "All right, we have them, let's run them on YouTube." What we found, the engagement was very good on them. So watch time was very good. I forget the name of what you would consider a hook rate was very good on it, but obviously the conversion was not great. And so we just took the intro of those, took some of our UGC assets were performing well, put them together, sped them up, put some music on it. There are ways to extend the life of it, but then again, the other way is bottoms up, which is use the algorithms on social platforms, even organically, get some traction, even if you're testing statically, just know what hooks work, what types of concepts are working, scale those.

‍

(11:39):

And then when you hit some fatigue and need to go into a shoot or produce, you have a much better understanding of what's resonating.

‍

Brett Curry (11:46):

So I love that. I think you can treat some YouTube content a little more modular where you can say, "This hook from this video and then this demo from this video, those two are really working." And if we think about the transition, they could work well together. Sometimes it's like Frankenstein and it looks like garbage that you can't always do it, but sometimes you look at it and you're like, "Wait a minute, I think the winners here bring them together and now we got a really smash

‍

Cody Plofker (12:13):

Hit." And some of them your brand team is not going to love. Some of them I'm not proud of. We had the gray backgrounds when we had a four by five in the middle and then a black or gray background and they don't look amazing, but also sometimes that is what gets attention and is what's going to get people responding.

‍

Brett Curry (12:28):

Yeah. And you don't want stuff that just looks like garbage, but sometimes transitions that aren't super smooth, other things like that, sometimes it still just works. So you got to be willing to do it for sure.

‍

Cody Plofker (12:37):

Well, even because you get some of that movement and you get the shaky movement. Yeah,

‍

Brett Curry (12:41):

For sure. Okay, so Marketing Operators Podcast, I've been talking that up, not that you guys need it, but for the whole show here. Why do you do the podcast? And I've got some specific questions too, but why do you do it? Because you guys pour a lot of time into that.

‍

Cody Plofker (12:57):

It's fun. I mean, fortunately it's easy. We have a company, a production company, so we just show up and chat, but that's something I would do for fun regardless. It's just you can never know enough. And I think having a network of people that you can learn from and reach out to is the best thing. So I'm able to just learn. The two co-hosts I have, it's Connor who's a CMO of Ridge and Connor who's the head of growth of HexCloud. They're just really, really smart guys. And so sometimes I'll just have a question for them and they're not great at texting. And so if I don't get a reply during the week, I'll just ask them on the pod and be like, and so there's just so much I've been able to learn from it, and then also having guests on as well. I also think sometimes trying to teach, yes, it's nice to be able to teach and hopefully people can get value, but you also kind of learn and get to check your own understanding of things if you're trying to teach it and communicate it.

‍

(13:49):

And then also because of that, if I want to reach out and people are familiar with it and whatever, now I have a lot of friends who are in the space who I can lean on and I've given them value by them listening and I can be like, "Hey, I'm launching this new thing. What do you think I should do about this?" So just having the network is really helpful.

‍

Brett Curry (14:07):

Hey, thanks again for tuning in to the eCommerce Evolution Podcast. I want to take just a minute and talk about my agency, OMG Commerce. We've been helping e-commerce brands for 15 years, and that's like a hundred e-commerce years. And our specialty is finding opportunities for growth that other people miss and unliking channels that you're not currently maximizing. For example, YouTube. Most brands are sleeping on YouTube, and my belief is it's the biggest untapped opportunity for your brand. We're also good at adding up to eight figures in growth for Amazon brands. And so if you are looking for scale and growth profitably, that's what we do. We'd love to chat with you. We'd love to review your current marketing efforts, show you where there's missed opportunities and craft a specific plan for you. So visit us at omgcommerce.com, click the let's talk button, and we'd love to schedule a complimentary strategic review with you.

‍

(15:06):

With that, back to the show. It's amazing. One thing that I've found too, and I know this is true for you as a host, is I think about marketing all the time. I do it all day long. I love it. But every time I listen to the podcast, there's some little nuance. Or even when you and Connor from Ridge are talking about YouTube, I'm like, "Oh, I didn't think about it quite from that angle." And that's super, super valuable.

‍

Cody Plofker (15:30):

Yeah. Even my team would listen to a few of them and just be like, "Oh, they were saying that. We should test that." There's just great ways to get ideas of tests and things to implement.

‍

Brett Curry (15:38):

So one of the things you mentioned, and I saw Ridge do this, you mentioned, hey, you got a nine by 16 or whatever vertical video that's on social. One easy thing to do, and this is not a fancy name, we just call it a 16 by nine conversion. So you take that vertical video and you put something next to it, and then it looks. Y saw a little bit of that with the Jones Road Beauty ads where it'd be the two people, one person putting on the makeup and one before she had it on or the foundation, I mean. But I saw Ridge do this where half the screen was the ad, the other half was the wallet. It was just there. But it moved a little bit, so then you'd have the logo and the URL and maybe a QR code and stuff like that.

‍

(16:15):

But you look at it and you're like, "That's pretty simple, but it also looks good and it works." Any other good YouTube lessons from the pod or things that have been things you've tested, learned, observed about YouTube from the pod?

‍

Cody Plofker (16:34):

One of the most important things I think to YouTube and something I've been a really big proponent of and I think the industry is getting much better at is how you think about measuring the channel. It can be one of the most effective channels for reach, acquisition, whatever you want it to be, if you're measuring it properly. And I think so many teams are so used to measuring paid social on a click attribution basis. And obviously you talked about incrementality a lot so far in measurement and just in general, the entire industry is getting much more sophisticated as things get more challenging and everything, but you have to measure YouTube properly because half of it, I don't know the current status, but half of it is happening on a TV. There's going to be no clicks there, but it can drive a tremendous amount of, not even reach, it's not even just top of funnel, but acquisition for you if you measure it properly, especially if you're in.

‍

(17:21):

House has a lot of data on this, they publish really good things. Amazon as well, there's much higher halo effect from video channels like YouTube to Amazon to wholesale as well. And so you might think, and I've seen a lot of times where brands don't think that YouTube is performing well because they compare it to a Meta on a click attribution basis and it's actually providing much better returns. It's longer term. So one thing that we saw before we really got sophisticated with incrementality measurement, there was a much higher revenue multiplier over time. So whatever our one-day ROAS was compared to a 28 day was much higher on YouTube. We were able to reach new people, new to brand who maybe took a little bit more time to mature. The value of them was higher. And then obviously there's much higher delta from a click to a view in terms of revenue.

‍

(18:17):

And so just knowing how to measure it properly and making sure your team is aligned there is really important.

‍

Brett Curry (18:22):

We hear people say, "Hey, what do you think the one day click ROAS is going to be on YouTube?" I'm like, "It's going to be terrible. If that's all you measure, then we should not do that. Do something else." But the impact will be there. I heard you guys say, again, going back to the pod, but you talked about, I think you said this or maybe it was one of the Connors, but there's ever been maybe a better mid-funnel acquisition channel than Meta. It just crushes for mid-funnel. But what you get within a pretty short window is kind of what you're going to get. Like you look at a post-treatment window from Meta, it doesn't change a whole lot. You look at a post-treatment window, meaning you run a test and you just observe for a longer period of time. On YouTube, sometimes it explodes.

‍

(19:03):

And so how do you view incrementality overall? And then I've got some more nerdy questions for those that are really building an incrementality roadmap, I got some nerdy questions, but how are you viewing, because I know you're a fan of incrementality, how do you view it in general?

‍

Cody Plofker (19:19):

I mean, if you have to pick one, one measurement system for your business, that would be it. There's pros and cons of everything. There are the pro of in-platform attribution or multi-touch attribution, it's really fast. You get a lot of data, but the con are it's going to overemphasize bottom funnel channels that are click-based and it's not always incremental. There's no causation.

‍

Brett Curry (19:45):

Sometimes the best channels in platform are the worst from an incrementality.

‍

Cody Plofker (19:50):

And everybody's probably had stories of a board member or executive being like, "Why aren't we spending more on..." I'll say retargeting. I'm not going to say another channel, but maybe why are we spending more on retargeting? I was like, "Well, we can't. Also, it's actually not even incremental. And the thing that's driving retargeting is actually the thing that doesn't look good that you want me to cut my budget on." So I think incrementality can answer that. And then there's MMM, and I don't know anyone who really likes their MMM. It's slow, it's complicated. Again, it's also not causal.

‍

Brett Curry (20:17):

It's a correlation, which going back to school or whatever, you can't have causation without correlation, but you can't have correlation without causation. And so it's maybe telling us, but it's not a complete picture.

‍

Cody Plofker (20:28):

And so incrementality is the only one that is causal. It's the only one where you are doing an experiment and you're controlling one variable at a time. And so you're able to say, "Hey, this is a region where I'm running YouTube ads, and this is the reason that I'm not running YouTube ads, and everything else is the same, and I'm getting this many more customers in that region." So that's the benefit of it, and you get an incredible amount of precision. The downsides is you don't get results within a day. It's two weeks at the earliest. If you're trying to do anything moving up funnel, you really need to be much more patient and you get a snapshot in time. And so a lot of brands will test incrementality and they'll say, "This is how this channel performs for us. This is the IROs of that channel." Well, it's like, "That was the IROS of that channel in September for two weeks at $5,000 a day in spend." But you also can't run a test all the time, so we're running businesses, not controlled science experiments.

‍

(21:17):

So you do have to put the pieces together and compare a few of them to see how things change. But definitely a huge trend. Again, especially when you are not going to have great click-based attribution, no one cares about what your clicks are on TV because there's no clicks. I almost think it would be easier to just sometimes forget about that completely because there's a huge impact. Even just within a Google account, your shopping is going to look better, your PMAX is going to look better, your brand search is going to look better. But again, if you're also measuring your organic search, it drives a tremendous amount of that. So there are ways to look at it, and you can do things. You can look at post-purchase and say, "Hey, as I'm spending more on YouTube, are more people saying they're finding me on YouTube?

‍

(22:00):

Is my organic search and my direct traffic going up as these going up?" But then again, if you're on an Amazon, if you're in wholesale, you can either just track trends, but also run incrementality experiments and see a lift in those channels as well.

‍

Brett Curry (22:14):

I think the most powerful thing I heard you say is your board is wrong about marketing and to prove them wrong, run incrementality tests because they're going to get you to run more remarketing or more whatever. Well,

‍

Cody Plofker (22:25):

It's also the only objective thing. Everyone, my challenges with attribution is you could change all the different models and everyone has a different interpretation of it. Oh, if you look at a first click or a last touch, and this is the only one where it's like, "We ran this test, these were the results of it." And it's much harder, esppecially if you're a marketer and you've got to go and fight for budgets with the board or something like that. It's the only one where you can really be backed by data and be like, "This is the results of this. This is why we need to be putting more into it."

‍

Brett Curry (22:54):

Love it. And you and I have been a part of several incrementality tests together working on stuff, and it's one of those interesting thing. I really kind of view this like a sports team, like you watch a coach for a major college sports team or NFL or something, and highest of highs, lowest of lows, man. Those wins are fun. The losses haunt you in your sleep, right? How do you view different tests? Because we've had some smash tests, we've had some weird tests. How do you view individual tests? We've talked about this a little bit, but how do you view individual tests for incrementality? And then how do you think about an incremental roadmap, a testing roadmap?

‍

Cody Plofker (23:28):

Yeah, again, one test is just going to tell you snapshot of time, those specific considerations. And so one test is really not going to tell you that much. When you start multiple tests, then you can start putting the pieces together. And one of the big scientific tenets is reproducibility. And if you can run a test, we'll call it a non-brand search test, and you run it different periods of year, different budgets, different strategies, and it looks good in all three, you can be like, "Okay, I'm pretty confident in that.That's a good strategy." I think the challenge is when either you run one test and it looked good, but maybe it was a promo period or something like that, you can't just be like, "Oh, YouTube's great. Well, maybe it's great during a promo period or maybe not." And so you do have to really take stock of what is changing amongst those tests.

‍

(24:15):

We had a bad test where we shifted a lot of our budget to a new launch, and that was our hypothesis, and then we shifted it back and performed significantly improved. And so you just have to look at the variables between them and hopefully when you do multiple tests. But also, again, one of the good things about incrementality is you get very little data. You look at, "Hey, what is our incremental revenue? What is our spend? What's our incremental revenue? What's our incremental ROAS?" But you're not looking at impressions, you're not looking at conversion rate. So you have to then back into that and be like, "Okay, let's have a hypothesis. What did we change? Let's go try to validate that a little bit. Did our conversion rate drop? Did our spend to these placements go down?" And then that informs your next test in your roadmap.

‍

(24:59):

It's like have a hypothesis, run a test, go and validate it or look at data to tell you a story. And then it's like, "Oh, you know what? This one didn't do well because we saw these placement shift. For our next test, here are the things I want to iron out." And either you should be changing one variable at a time, but sometimes when your performance is so bad, you don't really have a choice. And so sometimes we'll be like, "All right, cool. These are the three things. We're going to change all of them because I think if we change one, it's going to be just too long." Yeah,

‍

Brett Curry (25:27):

We're running a business, right? We're not just doing testing for fun. Sometimes you got to take bigger swings, for sure. Yeah. One interesting thing I've seen is there's a big brand that a lot of you guys would know, but I did get permission so I won't share too many details, but they've got three peaks throughout the year. One's back to school, one's holiday, and then there's another one. But they found that they spend into demand and things go really, really well. So if they lean into YouTube hard for those peaks, highly incremental. They lean into YouTube other times of the year, not very incremental, but it's different. Other brands, you can run YouTube during slower periods of the year and see great results. And so you really have to think about it seasonally and what's going on, and then have a POV, have a hypothesis, and then keep testing.

‍

Cody Plofker (26:18):

Yeah.

‍

Brett Curry (26:18):

Awesome. Very good. So hey, let's see. I want to hear what's next. What is next for Cody Plofker? So if you're not following Cody on X, do that right now. Open your X app, follow Cody, pay attention to what he's doing. I've gotten really into Claude and been Claude pilled as some say. I'm checking out other things. HQ, he turned me on HQ which has been great. I think oddly enough, you convinced me to try HQ before you did, which was weird. But what's next for Cody and what are you doing with AI, man? Because you're cracked, as they say.

‍

Cody Plofker (26:53):

Yeah, I'm not going to take any jobs. That's definitely. Don't

‍

Brett Curry (26:59):

Think - No job

‍

Cody Plofker (27:00):

Offers for

‍

Brett Curry (27:00):

Cody, even

‍

Cody Plofker (27:01):

Though you want to. It would have to be the perfect thing. So I'm probably not going to do that. I'm going to obviously take some time going to Austria next week, so a little family vacation. And then just trying to explore and find things that I think are fun. Again, I was just working and there was so much not fun parts of the job, so I'm like, what would just make me excited to wake up and build? And so I think it's such an incredible time right now. Everyone, not everybody, but I know a lot of people who are leaving bigger brands and starting their own brands. And obviously with AI, it's really such an incredible time where you can do a lot. And so that's what I'm excited about. So I guess I can't share too much, but we'll have something launching soon and it'll be a good mix where working with a really good team and people I really want to learn from, which will be great.

‍

(27:48):

And I think that's really important. It's just don't be the smartest person in the room. Get around people who you really respect and want to learn from. Do stuff where I'm just like, what do I want to do that I'm fired up to work the next day? If I do some consulting calls and I don't look forward to it, I'm not going to do that. And then obviously AI, I'm just very, very obsessed with it. And so that's what's fun and so playing around with it.

‍

Brett Curry (28:11):

Yeah. I found that during my AI journey, there's a few voices that I'm paying attention to for what should I test next? What should I try next? And you're one of those voices, so I really pay attention. We are nearing the end of our time. Are you cool if we open up to the audience for a couple of questions? So let's do this. We've only got probably time for a few, but what questions do you guys have for Cody related to anything we've talked about here? So we got a question right up front here.

‍

Audience 1 (28:37):

An incrementality roadmap. How do you guide companies and brands on starting that process?

‍

Cody Plofker (28:43):

That's a good question. I haven't, so I can tell you how I think about it, but I haven't. So is this just how would you start incrementality at a new company in general? Again, how

‍

Audience 1 (28:52):

Would you build an incrementality roadmap?

‍

Cody Plofker (28:56):

What's the purpose? What's the goal or problem you're trying to solve? Say

‍

Audience 1 (29:00):

Incrementality of

‍

Cody Plofker (29:02):

Promotionality. Okay. Yeah, hypothesis. I think the biggest one is first principles and hypothesis driven. What's the issue? Do we think we're overspending? Do we think we're underspending? But I think asking those questions and what is our hunch? What do we think by multiple data points? And then also what's going to make the biggest impact to the business? If we test Pinterest that we're spending $1,000 a day on and that looks great, we spend $2,000 a day, is that really going to move the needle? Or if we're spending 50 grand on a channel and we find it is looking terrible and we can reallocate that. So just having some framework for how you think about the priorities of the test, what's going to make the biggest impact, and then obviously what's the goal? You can use incrementality to find channels that are underperforming and cut, and all of us have some channels that are underperforming, but also what's really performing well and we can go scale or what is something that we need to fine tune our strategy a little bit.

‍

Audience 2 (30:00):

Great question. Ben over here. Hey Cody, big fan of the pod. Thinking about digging into YouTube, in incrementality, how do you look at allocating slots to baselining versus new tactical opportunities? It's something we're focused on right now, which is how much do we want to spend baseline and saying sequencing period over period, we're improving versus testing the incriminality of a tactical improvement?

‍

Cody Plofker (30:28):

That's a really good question. Depends how good of a feel you think you have for the baseline. And if it's probably been a long time or things change either in the business, your strategy, it probably makes sense to take some time and just be like, all right, here's where we're at right now. And not to get too in the weeds of test setup. I guess you could do it if you ran a three cell, you could get a baseline and then let's say you're trying to run a new strategy, so now you got to hold out because you could do a two sell or a three sell and then it's like, all right, let me test my business as usual and then let me test one other change on this one, whether it's spending more, whether it's different objective and you could kind of test both.

‍

(31:05):

Otherwise, if it's been a while, yeah, probably makes sense. Take two weeks, get a baseline, and then you can build a hypothesis of where to go from there.

‍

Brett Curry (31:13):

Do the two sell versus the three cell, getting nerdy up here. I love it. So more on a break if you want to chat about that. I think we have time for one more. Yes, Johnny.

‍

Audience 1 (31:22):

Hey Cody, what was the kind of startup experience on YouTube as a channel for you that first year or two and what were potentially some of the shockers or hurdles that came up that weren't expected?

‍

Cody Plofker (31:35):

That's a really good question. So we probably started spending on it when we were. It was probably the second channel. We probably obviously Google, but it was really mostly brand and stuff like that. There was never a ton of non-brand and I was always really bullish on it. I though it would work really well for us. And we probably got a point where we were spending five to 10K a day before we did incrementality and it was kind of like, how is it working? It's probably not working terribly because it's enough of our spend now and I would notice if it wasn't, our MER wouldn't be as good, but I'm like, maybe we should be spending more. I don't know. Obviously we would look at Northbeam, we'd look at in platform, but it's not going to look good at other places. Post-purchase looked really good.

‍

(32:18):

So there were multiple sources and some looked good, some didn't, some didn't look good and had a hunch it was good. And this was even before I knew about incrementality because post-purchase was good because total business was good. But again, didn't have the confidence to scale it based on what we were comfortable with at the time was click-based attribution. And we also had a challenge where we were very reliant on one channel on Meta and we weren't reaching enough new people, but also wasn't really ready for TV. We didn't really want to go and do a 200, $300,000 shoot and test complete new thing. This felt more familiar. So that was when we brought it on. I actually think that was our first house test ever. I think they even called it the Cody for a little bit, but we tested YouTube because that was our hypothesis was like, "Hey, we think it's doing pretty well and we need to..." First of all, first question is baseline, is it doing as well as we think it is?

‍

(33:14):

How do we proceed from there? We either have to cut it, reevaluate our strategy, or we found it was actually really, really good. We found there was longer post-treatment, much better incrementality factor, which is how does your incremental results compare to your end platform? So that was it for us. We kind of got to the point and was like, "All right, it's worth investing in this new measurement philosophy and strategy because we think we can make much better decisions." And we just didn't really have the answers. And so I think that's pretty common where a lot of brands will do things well, they'll find performance, but a lot of finance teams are like, "Hey, your results are so much better on this channel versus YouTube. Why am I going to give you more budget for it?" And marketers will just have a hunch of no, because they're the ones that are closer to the action.

‍

(33:56):

They scale budgets and they see the business look better, but they don't quite have the tools to prove it out. So it was really helpful for that.

‍

Brett Curry (34:03):

Amazing. All right, that is officially time. I'm watching the countdown timer. Wasn't that good, man? It's awesome. Give it up for the man, Cody Plofker. Hey, as we wrap up this week's episode, I want to mention if you're a great brand, if you're scaling high seven, eight, nine figures in D2C or omnichannel, we should potentially talk. We've worked with some of your favorite brands and we'd love to consider working with you as well. We are masters at unlocking new channels like YouTube, unlocking new scale on platforms like Amazon where we can add up to eight figures in new growth. We've got multiple ways we can work with you. So we can do the full service thing and work like a partner with your team and really run everything or we can offer consulting. So maybe you've got an internal team that really knows their stuff, but there's an area they don't know really well and they'd like to get some consulting, we can do that.

‍

(34:55):

We also have tons of free guides, free resources, free materials you can check out, all of that. Get started at omgcommerce.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.

‍