This one is a bit nerdy. But it’s soooooooooo important to the success of your marketing efforts and the future of your business.

For this episode I sat down with Tom Leonard, a fractional marketing leader who specializes in operationalizing Media Mix Modeling and incrementality testing. 

We dive deep into the often confusing world of marketing measurement. We debunk myths about attribution and we reveal what truly drives customer acquisition. 

For ecommerce brands struggling to understand where their marketing dollars are actually working, this conversation offers practical insights on how to move beyond misleading platform metrics.

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Key Takeaways

• Attribution is broken: Learn why Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) tools often fail to deliver accurate insights, especially in today's privacy-first digital landscape, and why they can lead to poor budget allocation decisions.
• The power of incrementality testing: Discover how properly designed tests can reveal the true causal impact of your marketing efforts by comparing control groups against test groups, allowing you to see beyond your .com sales to impacts on marketplace and retail channels.
• Media Mix Modeling demystified: Understand how MMM correlates marketing activities with business outcomes over time, providing insights into diminishing returns and helping answer the crucial question: "Where should I put my next marketing dollar?"
• Avoid the high ROAS trap: Find out why channels showing the highest ROAS in platform metrics (like branded search) might actually be the least incremental to your business, and why cutting them first during budget constraints could be your smartest move.

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Tom Leonard:

How much is media contributing relative to customer base is a really nice place to start. And the benefit of running incrementality and media mix modeling is informing the model with some of that causal data.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we have got a doozy of an episode. We're talking about the three horsemen of measuring your marketing effectiveness. We're talking MTAs Multitouch attribution. We're talking M'S. Media mixed modeling. We're talking incrementality. It's going to be nerdy, but I also promise you it's going to be practical and it will make you more money. And so we'll hopefully make it fun as well. And so my guest today is Tom Leonard. We are LinkedIn friends first. So I saw Tom on LinkedIn posting about incrementality, talking about MMM, throwing shade on certain tools and stuff like that on LinkedIn. And I'm like, this is my type of guy. So I reached out, we had a call, and then we're like, Hey, we got to record a podcast. Let's create some insights for people on the pod. And so Tom is a fractional marketing leader. He's operationalizing MMM and incrementality testing, and I'm delighted that he's my guest today. So Tom, with that intro, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Tom Leonard:

Good. Thanks for having me, Brent. Excited to be here. And yeah, some of my favorite things to talk through, so excited to do it. Good stuff.

Brett Curry:

It's good stuff, man. So briefly, before we dive into the meat of the content here, what's your background and how did you become a guy who's operationalizing MMS and incrementality?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah. And what does that even mean?

Brett Curry:

That's a good point,

Tom Leonard:

For sure. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So spent most of my career thus far on the agency side at performance agencies. And I'd say the crux of how I got to where I'm now, or I've been reflecting back a little bit more on the why I have such a passion for measurement. And I was at a pretty hardcore DR agency, and it was right shortly after TRUBY for Action came out when YouTube was starting to invest in, DR. Moved into a new role we had created with a centralized group of basically people who had different areas of subject matter expertise and a few analysts that ran tests across a pretty large client base. And I was our YouTube SME, and worked with a couple analysts to run a bunch of tests. And really it was to evangelize how to, and is YouTube a platform to drive growth?

And it was really interesting because I started spending a lot of time on YouTube and then also connect to TV and broader programmatic video. And it was this really interesting, for me, the biggest learning was less about how to make YouTube as effective as possible, but more how to help brands think about demand creation as opposed to just demand capture. And frankly, the difficulty of getting brands to leverage YouTube relative to connected tv, because YouTube sat so close to Google ads and therefore last click attribution and see tv, you couldn't click and was sexier in a deck. And it was just this sort of recognition of the irrational kind of human behavior just in any sort of industry or any thing in life. But it sort of helped frame up this idea of you really have to do more than just, I don't know, represent logic or rational arguments.

You really have to also bring the easy to understand clear data. And that's, I think what draws me to incrementality testing specifically and why that's sort of the backbone of a lot of what I do now. And I think I use the word operationalizing, NMM and incrementality testing. And really what I mean by that is a lot of people will run medium mix models or run incrementality tests, but oftentimes they'll sit in a slide or in a report to be shown once, but never to be looked at again. And so what I'm really trying to do with brands now is how do you build a framework and a repeatable methodology to get insights from tests, but not just leave them as insights but to take action? Because the only way that you create value from any of these sort of testing methodologies and measurement methodologies is by acting on the insights. And so that's sort of what I mean by my funky little headline of those words.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good, man. And it's one of those things where data really doesn't matter if you don't take the right actions from it. And what's so interesting, and our paths are similar in that I got my start in actually TV and radio and doing traditional media, and then I got into SEO and paid search, but I loved video. Video was my thing, but I love paid search as well. And then when TrueView and TrueView for Action came out, I was like, whoa, these are all my world's colliding.

Tom Leonard:

This is

Brett Curry:

Video and there's some search components, at least some search intent involved there. And it's direct response. I've always been a direct response guy. I believe that marketing should drive an outcome, right? Advertising should drive a measurable outcome, and that should be measured in terms of new customers and profitable new customer acquisition. And what's really interesting, Tom, and I think this kind of feeds into the conversation we're having today. There was a period of time, so I grew up reading some of the classics. So David Ogilvy of course, but John Cap's tested advertising methods, Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising. And they would do things like they would run and add in a newspaper or magazine and people would clip a coupon and bring it in, or they would call a certain number and they would track it and they would have codes and stuff. And I remember thinking once I got into e-commerce, I was like, oh man, we've got so many tools.

The world is so clear now we have every piece of data at our disposal. And now the more I've gotten into it and the more I've matured, I'm like, we've got more data. But I don't know that we've got more insights, and I don't know that we've got any more clarity. In fact, there's maybe more confusion. And I think it goes back to what you said a minute ago, this idea of demand generation versus demand capture. We're really good at measuring channels and campaigns that are demand capture, meaning they're capturing demand that's already out there. That's harder to measure the demand generation, which is usually where the magic happens. And so super excited to dive in here. I think what might be useful is let's talk about what are these kind of three horsemen that I laid out there, MTAs, multitouch, attribution, and incrementality. So let's start with MTAs first. So Multitouch attribution tools, what are they and what is your take on them?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, big question. Great question. Yeah, I mean, MTA been around for a while, different flavors and ways of trying to make it work, especially as so much has changed in privacy and the tech and tracking landscape. But ultimately the goal is to try to give fractional credit to all the touchpoints along a customer journey with a recognition that the last touchpoint click or last impression is ultimately not what drove that person to purchase. That may be the last or the only thing that you might see in something like Google Analytics or your analytics suite. But there's this general recognition that that is not what drove the purchase. So MTA, the kind of promise, which I ultimately think is a failed promise, is whether all the different touch touchpoint and then how can you value those differently. So maybe you use first touch, maybe you use even distribution.

The idea of data-driven attribution was the holy rail or the Promise many years ago, and I guess still to a degree for some is like, how do you know this channel was more additive or more necessary and therefore should get more credit than that channel? Which I think makes a ton of sense in promise. I think in reality it's really hard and I would argue impossible to do, especially as a lot of the ability to track users at a one-to-one level degrades generally my perspective, I'm very bearish on MTA, so that'll probably come through pretty strongly. But I guess I don't think the toothpaste is going back in the tube in terms of the ability to track a customer across all these different touchpoints, especially as the ability to track through or impression based touchpoint erodes. And then you really get reliant on clicks, which I think then leads to a lot of all the issues that just last click in general has. So I think it's really hard to make a compelling case for MTA. I've seen too many brands, especially trying to build MTA tools internally and just be a huge time and resource suck. And then when you ask to compare, show the multi-touch view versus last click, it's like, I don't know, 80 or 90% only had one touch point anyways, that's all that MTA model could see. So is it really that much more useful than last click?

Brett Curry:

It's sort of multi-touch when that can be measured, but usually it can't be.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, and

It never really answers the causality question either, which we'll get to when we talk about incrementality. And I always kind of tell this, I think the short story of why MT A isn't really viable anymore as all the tracking and privacy changes. But I think the slightly longer story is the kind of recognition that just because an ad was shown or a click occurred doesn't mean that that medium was needed or that channel was needed. It doesn't answer the causal question, what would've happened without this ad running? Did somebody just happen to use multiple touchpoints as navigation or was it more convenient to click on one of these ads that happened to be served? But if you're not comparing that to some sort of control group to really hard to assign causality to the fact that there just was a touchpoint.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it is so good. And it's one of those things where I remember again, early on, you would look inside of Google ads or you look inside of Meta or was back when it was Facebook only, and you were like, the data's here. I see row ads and I see clicks and I see performance and all that. Then you realize, well, wait a minute, this isn't fully accurate. If I add the two together, that's double my total revenue, so I can't just rely on what's in the platform. And that got worse as I was 14 was introduced and other privacy changes were made. But then MTA came along and it's like, oh, finally we're going to get to see the full picture. It's going to decipher, decode the shopping journey, and we're going to finally see with a keen eye in perfection exactly what caused this ad or what caused this purchase to happen.

And then we finally realized MTA is maybe just a third option. It's like, okay, Google's imperfect, Meta's data's imperfect, and then mt A, it's just imperfect too. So now we just got three imperfect things to look at and make decisions from. And in some ways it leads to more confusion than it leads to clarity. And now I don't want to wholesale discard MTAs because I do believe there's some helpful insights that can be gained there, but it's incomplete and incomplete at best. And one of the best analogies I've heard, and this actually comes from Ben Ter, who's also a LinkedIn friend, but I met him in person as well, but he talks about this analogy of, Hey, if we're trying to measure what caused people to watch this movie at our movie theater, and we look at all these results and 30% say they saw a billboard for our movies, 20% say they saw a TV ad, but you know what?

A hundred percent say they saw the poster on the door. So we're like, let's just cut everything. Let's just do the poster at the door and that's it. And you're like, well, wait a minute. Everybody saw it. Everybody was walking in the door. But the movie poster is not what caused someone to purchase. It was the billboard and the TV and some of the other things, word of mouth and other things that caused them to come in. And so this idea of causality, super, super valuable. So that really leads us to incrementality. So talk about incrementality. What is it and why are you on a quest to operationalize it?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, it's really the best way, if not the only way to establish that a causal portion that we've been talking about. It has a distinct control group, so it has a counterfactual, it has what would've happened without this intervention, whatever that intervention is. And there's a handful of ways to derive that counterfactual that control. The most common would be geographic based. So like a match market test. I've got this market over here that historically has behaved similarly to this market over here. I can see that in an AA test, the lines sort of move similar to one another. They're not, if they're influenced by outside factors, they're influenced

Brett Curry:

In what's an AA test for those who don't know

Tom Leonard:

Before an intervention happens. So just over time are those lines essentially moving together? Are external factors or stimuli equally impacting both sides of that test so that you can feel confident that when you do intervene and it becomes comparing A to B, the delta is what was a result of that intervention. So oftentimes it's my Atlanta and I don't know Memphis, maybe some other midsize city that you've done this market matching for. Historically, they both look like this on a line, all of a sudden you turn off ads on Facebook in Atlanta, what happens to your top line that Delta is what was attributed or should be attributed to advertising in Atlanta. Whereas the flip side of that would be attribution would say basically anything that was attributed to that could be attributed to that would really, it should just be the gap between a world where that ad does not exist compared to a world where that ad does exist.

We can't take credit for everything. We can only take credit for as much above and beyond what would've happened anyways. And so that's the basis of incrementality testing. There's other ways to do it. If you use a Facebook or Google conversion lift study because they own that auction or anybody that owns an auction, they can do that hold out for you at a user level. They can track all of those users regardless of if you serve an ad. Good examples are maybe easier to describe in a first party data capacity. If you're running email, you may blast all of your customers and say, Hey, I sent an email to all my customers and this many purchased. They went back to the website or clicked it. But if you just said, Hey, I'm going to serve just to odd number of customer IDs and not to even number customer IDs, I can then just compare, forget about who clicked on ads, who did anything.

I'm just going to look at my backend. I know I exposed these users, but not these users 50 50 split. They've historically kind of done the same thing. All I did was even an odd and just measuring the difference between those two groups. So really any way that you can establish a true control that passes that AA test. So before you intervene, do they continue to look similar? Are they influenced at the same rate so that you can feel confident that when you do intervene with new media, retracting media, some new sort of test that you are confidently comparing to what would've happened in a world without that intervention?

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. It's applying the scientific method with some rigor behind what happens when I turn this channel on, or what happens when I turn this channel off? What is the actual impact of this channel? And what's interesting is I remember back in my early days of being in the advertising world, this was when online stuff was just getting kind of warmed up. I was talking to this furniture store owner and I'm like, Hey, what do you do? Do you invest in radio ads? Do tv, do you do newspaper? And so as I went through Themm like, Hey, do you do radio ads? And he is like, yeah, I mean, yeah, I sort of do. And I'm like, newspaper's like, yeah, there's a big sale, something will happen. I'm like, well, what about tv? And he said, yes. And his eyes lit up and he is like, when I run TV ads, I feel it. People walk in the door, it happens. And I remember early on in my online career thinking, man, that was so unsophisticated. Did that guy really know what's going on? But now looking back, I'm like, yeah, that's maybe all that matters. That is incrementality in a real loose easy just to observe with your eyes think because you had one. Totally.

Tom Leonard:

Which I think people take for granted. Yeah,

Brett Curry:

They do.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah,

Brett Curry:

That's not exciting. That's not like, where's all your data? It's in my cash register. That's where all the data

Tom Leonard:

Is, especially for smaller brands, when you have the ability to feel if something's working or not working, if you double spend in something that you think is working really well because attribution says it's working really well, and all of a sudden your cash just doubles, even though your attributed number scales linearly, something has to give, right? And what has to give is it wasn't really causing any additional top line growth. It was just really good at getting the attributed credit. So I think the feeling it in the p and l is definitely overlooked.

Brett Curry:

It's valid, and it is overlooked though. You're a hundred percent, especially now that we have so many tools at our disposal. And I think another way to look at this, and look, I'm a Google guy, YouTube and Google is kind of where I really got my start in online

Tom Leonard:

Marketing.

Brett Curry:

But listen, branded search is a perfect example here. What happens, we see this all the time. What happens if you turn branded search completely off? Now, I believe, and this is top of front of the podcast, there are strategic ways to use branded search and there's ways to run it and not waste money, but a lot of people could shut it off and nothing happens, nothing. Maybe sales get in a little bit, but you take meta meta's really working and you shut it off and you feel it. Sales go down and that's an incrementality. Same is true for YouTube if you're doing YouTube the right way. And so yeah, I really like this. And one kind of anecdote here to share, we just did a test with Arctic, Arctic coolers, Yeti competitor, my favorite cooler, my favorite drinkware as well. And so they wanted to see, Hey, can YouTube drive an incremental lift at Walmart?

So they had just gotten into most Walmart stores, coast to coast. So we did exactly what you laid out there. We had a 19 test markets, 19 matched control markets. So similar markets. So think like a Denver and a Kansas City or the example, use Atlanta and whatever else that's kind of comparable. And hey, let's run YouTube in one and not in the other. And let's measure then the growth in Walmart sales, and let's do a comparison between the two in Walmart sales. And it was remarkable. It was about an eight week test. We had three test regions, so 19 markets, but three test regions, test region. One, we saw an average of 12% lift in Walmart sales. The test region two was like 15% lift. And then our final test region was 25% lift. And there were some standouts, like Oklahoma City was up 40% and Salt Lake City was up 48%.

But it was one of those things where, okay, now we look at that and we can say, okay, YouTube had a big impact. And what's also interesting, Tom, is we just ran the YouTube portion at OMG. They also did a connected TV test in other markets, not related, didn't see a lift, didn't see a measurable lift. And so it could be lots of that was not to throw shade on CTVI like CTV, so maybe they just did a wrong or wrong creatives or who knows what. But it's one of those things where it's like, okay, if you do this the right way, you should see an impact.

Tom Leonard:

And I think touching on the piece that I didn't mention, the other beauty or value of incrementality testing relative to attribution or mt a is the ability to see beyond your.com to be able to see what's happening on third parties like Amazon, what's happening in store. If you get that data own an operated store or if you can get that through wholesale data, it really simplifies. There's so much complexity. And I think that's, again, one of the rubs that I have with MTA is all of them, all of the data you have to wrangle together to try to patchwork this kind of story together. Whereas in incrementality testing, it's pretty straightforward. It's what did I spend and how did I run that spend in these by market by day or by week, and what was my sales? What were my sales? What were my new customers or whatever metric I'd want to look at with that same granularity and same dimension. And that's really it because you're really just trying to understand the relationship that calls the relationship between spend and outcomes, all that kind of muddy middle in the middle, trying to get it at the user level, which again, not going back into the tube really simplifies things.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it does. And another thing that was kind of interesting that came a light doing this test for Arctic is all of the ads we tagged with available at Walmart, shop at Walmart, find on the shelves and Walmart, whatever. We measured everything though in those markets. So you could look at Walmart sales, online sales, so the.com and Amazon. And what's interesting is the push to Walmart really worked. It's a reminder of what you ask someone to do in an ad is what they're going to lean towards. Because in some of the markets, we didn't see that much of an online lift. We saw some clicks and stuff like that, but the Lyft was at Walmart. But we also saw a pretty strong lift at Amazon as well, because I think that just speaks to, there's some people that are just going to buy everything from Amazon right there, tell 'em to go online value pro proposition. Is it on Amazon? Yeah, yeah,

Tom Leonard:

Yeah. Here in a day or two, it's hard

Brett Curry:

To beat, dude. It's hard to beat same price in a couple days. I don't have to leave my house. But yeah, really, really interesting. And so we'll circle back to that of course, but let's talk about then MMM or media mix modeling. What is that? How are you using that? And then how does that kind of relate to incrementality testing? Because again, going back to your tagline, Tom, you did not say operationalizing NTAs. You said operationalizing m and ms and incrementality. So what is MM and how does that pair with incrementality?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, basically a big correlation exercise trying to suss out without a true kind of holdout group, what is the impact and contribution of each media channel and also what would happen without media. So trying to suss out a lot of the same questions as incrementality, but basically using correlation as opposed to having a true holdout group. So basically, and I'm sure all the hardcore MMM people and data scientists will thumbs down this or whatever you can do to podcast, but hey, in this period of time, sales went up and nothing could really explain that other than the fact that TikTok spend went up and essentially doing that at a mass scale over longer periods of time trying to take into account anything that could explain that. So you'll always kind of flag it with these are promotions that happen, it should because you're going to give a model at least like two years worth of data or two years worth of data, it'll bring in seasonality and try to understand those sort of trends.

So it's trying to pull out if not seasonality, if not promotions, if not some other things that we are flagging. And it wasn't price reductions, it wasn't all these pieces, what was happening in media that could explain that change. And so that's ultimately what MMM is doing. It's a big correlation exercise, figuring out roughly what is the channel contribution to a top line revenue or order number and what's really important. I think the nicest part or the best first step with M is trying to get an understanding of a base, which is what it's going to be called or intercept what without the presence of ads, does this model think that my sales would be such that I can then calculate not a total CAC of just looking at total new customers divided by cost, but incremental to media or remove base from that equation, how many conversions were contributed because of media as this model sees, which no model is going to be perfect, no measurement method is going to be perfect, but it's a really nice place to start to say, I knew I couldn't account all new customers to advertising, but what's a good number to use or to start with?

Well, it looks like, and this will depend on the maturity of the brand, but a really mature brand, I mean super mature brand, the big CPGs might be like 99% base smaller brand might be something like 50% because you've got this word of mouth flywheel, you've got product market fit, but trying to get an understanding of how much is media contributing relative to customer base is a really nice place to start. And the benefit of running incrementality and media mix modeling is informing the model with some of that causal data. You see that a lot and there's a really powerful feature of media mix modeling is saying, Hey, yes, that's a correlation exercise, can't pull everything out, but let me inform the model or at least restrict the priors it can use or the coefficient, whatever you want to call 'em, what it's searching for to try to find a fit in this model and say, well, I did a hold out test. I know you don't have the causal data, but we ran this in this channel and that channel and helping that restrict the model and giving it data that it can't have without that human intervention can be a really powerful flywheel.

Brett Curry:

So using your incrementality test data, feeding that back into your MMM model to make it more accurate and more causal and make that correlation

Tom Leonard:

Stronger. Because the two things that are really like you're really trying to get, but you don't get with Multi-Tech attribution or attribution in general. And you do get with the combination of media mix modeling and incrementality testing is the incremental impact, the causal impact of what would've happened without the presence of ads as well as the diminishing returns curve, which we know can be really powerful and important too, is what has happened over time as I spend in that sort of a feature of big feature of media mix modeling is understanding where are you on a diminishing returns curve? Is there if I keep spending more, I know it's not going to scale linearly, but are there channels that diminish faster? Is there more headroom in other channels? And it really becomes this true optimization game of where do I put the next dollar? Ultimately the question that every marketer, every finance team is trying to answer is, Hey, if I find $20,000 into couch cushions, where do I put it? And if I need to give back $20,000, where do I pull from to have,

Brett Curry:

I want to hang out at your house and look at your couch cushions and find 20 grand? That's

Tom Leonard:

Great. Yeah, it's easy to give it back, but yeah, right. We're trying to figure out what is going to be the least impactful if I have to give the money back and cut budgets and where is it going to be the most impactful if I have another $20,000? Because the answer is not going to be found in what has the highest or the lowest ROAS in an attributed view. And in fact, that can have the complete opposite impact that you want.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, it's really great. So I want to actually talk about that point in a minute where if you've got cut budgets, which hey, listen, there's been some uncertainty even as we record this, tariffs up, tariffs down, markets up, market down, whatever consumer sentiment is all over the place. So if things get a little bit tight, what are we going to do? We can't slash marketing, we can't slash growth. I think that sends you into a death spiral, but we might have to get pull back and get more efficient. And so let's talk about that actually for a little bit. So where can you be led astray? I think you just made a post on LinkedIn about this, right? Where you start looking at performance, which feels like the smart thing to do, looking at ROAS and whatnot, and you're like, well, great, well, let's just cut the lowest ROAS campaigns and channels. We'll be fine. How does that lead you astray? And if you want to talk about your specific example to help illustrate these points, that'd be great.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, totally. I think the other one you're referring to is I think branded search, which we were talking about earlier. And I love using both a, because it can be really, if a brand is spending a lot of money there, it can be a really great place to go find those savings without impacting top line. But also frankly, it's really easy to understand. I think most people understand that up and down the organizational chart across departments, everybody sort of understands the idea of, Hey, if somebody's already searching for my brand, do I need to pay to get that click and that conversion? And I found that just the fact that it's easy to understand can be a really good gateway to incrementality testing because it's easy to get buy-in. Everybody understands that idea, whereas it may be more challenging to express that idea in other types of campaigns.

But branded search is a good example, and the example that you're referring to, kind of a midsize brand that I was working with went through that exact exercise, had to cut budgets. They looked at up and down the campaigns they were running. It was like, Hey, we just got to make the best decision we can with the best available data. They were basically running p max non-branded search and branded search and p max and branded search where had the best attributed roas Best CPA non-brand was really hard to justify in a lower budget kind of environment based off the attribution data cut that leaned a little bit more into branded search as a percentage of their budget. And over the next couple months, new customers in total revenue was declining despite the attributed ROAS and CPA looking even better than ever. And that's where was brought in, looked at all these things, saw the loose correlation to non-brand and new customer acquisition and top line, just the general skepticism that many have around branded search, especially in a low competition environment, which they were in.

There weren't many competitors in the auction that we could see in Auction Insights. So yeah, ran a very blunt instrument match market test, which at a brand of that size and for a branded search I don't think is ever a bad idea. And yeah, no impact to branded search. It was about 20% of their budget, which was substantial that you can either make the decision, I'm going to put that 20% back in my pocket or save it for a rainy day or give it to some other place in the org or say, Hey, I'm going to redistribute this to something that I see in correlation data that might help drive top line backup. Let's reinvest that in non-brand as opposed to keeping it in branded. Again, complete opposite of what attribution would say. And you see that a lot frankly with branded search is an easy one to pick on.

Same with retargeting, but really anything that's especially challenging with the black box solutions that blend, and I'm sure we could do a whole talk show on p max Advantage plus some of the things that bundled together historically radically different levels of incrementality can be a real challenge when you're then measuring on attribution. But yeah, a ranty way of saying yes, finding areas to cut oftentimes if you follow the attribution kind of data can lead to really kind of impactful in a negative way business outcomes because the attribution view just does not take into account what would've happened without the presence of those ads like Incre Ality does. And so can definitely lead brands astray as they're looking to cut.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, really interesting. And yeah, max notorious for leaning into remarketing or branded search. If you're not diligent about that, it can lean into both of those things. And so got to be mindful of that. You also quoted something that totally ties into this. It's from a shop talk talk that you went to shop Talk the show, and I can't remember who said it, but if you see high roas, I know something is wrong and that the auto targeting is just finding existing customers. Do you remember actually who said that and unpack a little bit?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, I forget his name and I could look real quick. He worked for

Brett Curry:

Mic

Tom Leonard:

The Post Dan Danone, the big CPG. Yeah, I just really appreciated that quote because I mean always wonder if I live in sort of a bubble of being super passionate about incrementality versus attributed metrics, but that was just really refreshing to hear because I don't think that's the natural,

Brett Curry:

It's not

Tom Leonard:

Thought in people's

Brett Curry:

Head spend more,

Tom Leonard:

But I really think it should kind of spark some skepticism, especially when your goal really is to try to drive new customers.

My first, especially if you think about both incrementality in the context of a SC or pex that's blending retargeting and prospecting by default and knowing diminishing returns are my first dollars, yes, they're going to be the most effective, but if they are focused on people that are already buying from me and my goal in my head is new customers, I should be shocked that I can spend a hundred dollars and drive this amazing new customer revenue and not think that something is up or even over time as I continue to spend our BS meters should probably go up a little bit more. And I don't think they do by default. So I found that comment really refreshing.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I think that really illustrates that, right where it's like most of us would think, oh, ROAS is going up great, we're printing money. Whereas maybe you should say BS detector, something's wrong here. This campaigns leaning into customers that we're going to buy anyway. And I'll give two examples here to illustrate this a little bit more. And I'll also, since we've been picking on branded search so much, I'll share a couple of ways I think we should use it. One,

Tom Leonard:

If

Brett Curry:

Other competitors are aggressively bidding on, just know that if you're not Nike and you're not Adidas and you're not like Ford or something, it's not a lock. If it's a new customer, they could be swayed by a competitor. And that's generally how we like to separate it out is like, let's have branded search for returning customers and let's make that crazy efficient or just turn it off altogether.

Tom Leonard:

If

Brett Curry:

It's a new customer, then again, we want it to be very efficient, but maybe we want it on because we don't want our competitor to come in and swipe us to give and swipe our customer. And so one example of this, I did a podcast with Brian Porter, he's the co-founder of Simple, modern, great Drinkware brand has become a friend and they did a study incrementality study and they found, I'll get these numbers off, but it was like branded search was 10% incremental. So basically what that means is if it shows that I got a hundred new customers from Branded Search, I probably would've gotten 90 of those if I had shut it off, right? Only 10% were incremental. So then what you would need to do there is you need a 10 x row as on branded search for it to even make sense. If it's below that, you're completely wasting money.

Pair that with, and you and I were commenting on the House analytics, HAUS, Olivia Corey and team did 190 incrementality studies involving YouTube and they showed with tremendous amounts of rigor that hey, YouTube is probably 342 times more incremental, meaning if you see a one in platform, it's actually like a 3 42 in terms of incremental impact. And so wildly different between those two. But again, we're just so drawn to in platform row as man, we'll just say spin, spin spend on p max and branded search when really we should be saying, let me lean into YouTube or let me lean into top of funnel meta.

Tom Leonard:

I think both those examples too are really good examples. To me it also speaks though to the importance of cost per incremental almost being more important than incremental percent incremental. And that's something I always use with branded search. I think you and I have a very similar feeling around branded search. There's definitely a time and a place for it, and it's one of those things where it might not matter that it's 10% incremental, 10% incremental relative to what Google's attributing. If your attributed CPA is a dollar and now it's $10, but your margin when you sell a product is a thousand dollars like hammer that all day long, that cost per incremental is still extremely profitable and valuable. And same with the YouTube piece. If YouTube was four times as incremental as Google said, but your YouTube was crazy expensive, it still might not be worth it even though it's four times

Brett Curry:

More

Tom Leonard:

Incremental than the platform was making. And that's how I think a lot about this with connected tv where connected TV can be super powerful and maybe more so than linear tv, but if you can buy scatter linear TV for a 10th of the cost of CTV, well it just has to be more than a 10th as effective and it's accreted, it's a positive. So it becomes more of comparison of a cost per than just a blanket. How incremental is something which I always think is important to focus on and call out

Brett Curry:

To. Yeah, it's so good. I mean measuring something in terms of percentages can provide insights and help make decisions, but ultimately it's the cost per right. Translate that into real dollars to see if it makes sense. 100% agree with you, but I think this also goes back to and use your linear TV example, and I still love TV and connected TV and stuff. Again, I'll use YouTube just because I've got the numbers in my brain, but with YouTube sometimes we'll see a $5 CPM or a $7 CPM in certain audiences compared to other channels that are 15, 20, 30, 50, whatever. Totally. And I'm like, well, if we're reaching the right person and if the message and offer are good, how could this not work? And it's one of those things where it's like, okay, we're either one of those is off, we're talking to the wrong person, that's the wrong message, or we're just not measuring it properly and that's where we need to look at it. So did you have a thought on that? You another question on MM here in just a second.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, yeah, totally. But it made me think of the idea of, I think the reason I'm starting to become way more bullish on any channel that's historically been hard to measure where I think there's that arbitrage opportunity of costs are still relatively low because people haven't all moved in because it's easy to attribute. It'll be really interesting with a house example, does that inspire a lot more YouTube buyers? That's something that Google should have put out way long ago, but I think it would undermine undermine search and that's their bigger business. And I could do a whole kind of rant and I'll save you that, but the idea of incrementality first measurement probably wouldn't be great for the search business. So probably exactly, haven't been able to make such a good point that case on YouTube. But you think about all the channels that have historically been harder to attribute, that's where costs are deflated just from a supply and demand perspective. So when you can move in and get CPMs at five to $7 and it's really effective, but most people that are measuring through attribution don't know it's really effective, that's a huge win for certain period of time until everybody's flood, everybody and the costs go

Brett Curry:

Up the market. I'm sure there's a lot of people that were not excited to see that study from house like dang it, that means my costs are going up. I don't like that at all. So really good man. So we talked about incrementality testing and I think you can use tools like House and then there are others. We're just talking about work magic and there's a number of others you can lean into. Full disclosure, they're pretty expensive, but you can also do stuff on your own too. If you've got someone that can measure this stuff, you can do a little bit of it on your own. What about the MMM side of things? What's kind of the easy way to start there? Is there an easy way to start? What do you recommend to people

Tom Leonard:

There? I don't know. I dunno if there's an easy way to do anything. I think, well, I guess that's not totally true. I think there's some ways to run relatively easy incre tests. So I think that's the easier place to start. Certainly you can always ratchet up the scientific rigor. I think the problem with looking for an easy MM solution is anybody could run a model with Robin or there's a lot of open source packages, but just because you can run a model, it could say anything. It's not necessarily rooted in this can all of a sudden predict the future and tell you exactly the contribution from media. Whereas incrementality can do that a little more out of the box. You may have wildly wide confidence intervals, but it answers the question. It gives you the comparison. I didn't do it in this market, I did it in this market.

What is the Delta Media mix modeling? You could build a model to tell sort of any story. The proof is sort of in the pudding of if I do the thing that the model says, does it change my top line? Can I see over time that when I listen to the model that improves my top line? So it's a lot easier to get started with incrementality testing. You can run poor man's match market tests as I sort you can just sort of pick, some markets historically behave similarly and there's certainly some risk there, but with a model you might think that it's an amazing model. I just don't feel like there's a great place to DIY that together without some real scientific or statistical rigor. Or if you do, you've just got to try to prove it over and over by taking some big swings.

And that's really, I sort of feel like you can get away with the kind of feel it sort of tests without really running a true incrementality test or model. If you're a small enough business and you spend a decent amount on Facebook, maybe you're not willing to turn off Facebook, but are you willing to drastically increase spend and see if you can feel something at the top line? Okay, then what happens if you cut it in half? What happens? And start to understand those curves on your own is probably a less risky way than trying to, I've never done anything in R and I'm going to run or done any sort of medium amount. I'm going to try to run one. That's probably a risky proposition.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's a really good insight. I'm glad you answered the question that way. I think, yeah, leaning into the poor man's incrementality test or just leaning really heavily into a channel and measuring your top line if you've got a small enough business to look at that, but probably if you're going to lean into MM M1, you need a couple years of data and so to be able to make some correlations and you probably need to lean in to someone or a tool with quite a bit of experience because you can do that astray.

Tom Leonard:

And on your comment on cost too. I mean it's all relative and a lot of times where you're going to need a medium mix modeling is when you're spending a significant amount in a significant number of channels, which you're probably only doing if you are spending a lot total, which you're probably only doing if your revenue can support that high level of spend, which means that a tool may not be all that expensive relative to the opportunity you could derive from it, which is where I always net out.

Brett Curry:

So I'm paying 10 or 20 grand for a tool monthly, but it's allowing me to redeploy millions in ad spend. And it totally in completely makes sense. So Tom, this has been fantastic. I'm just watching the clock. I know we're kind of coming up against it, but one, I recommend people follow you on LinkedIn. You put out some awesome content. I love reading it.

Tom Leonard:

Thank

Brett Curry:

You. People should definitely follow you on LinkedIn and you are, is it Tom, what is your handle on LinkedIn? You are Thomas B. Leonard. Thomas B. Leonard. That's probably confusing.

Tom Leonard:

I'm very self-conscious of LinkedIn, so I'm glad to thank you for saying that.

Brett Curry:

I think it's good, man. I think it's really good. I like it a lot. Yeah.

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, it's been fun to start doing connecting with folks. Definitely an area that had a lot of excitement and passion for, it's fun to have these sort of conversations, so I appreciate you reaching out a while ago and that we could connect. Absolutely,

Brett Curry:

Man. Absolutely. So then if other people were like, Hey, I just want to talk to Tom because maybe you can help my brand or my business, how can they connect with you and who are you looking to or who do you feel like you can help?

Tom Leonard:

Yeah, definitely appreciate that. Yeah, reach out on LinkedIn. I spend time there. I love reading everybody's thoughts and content. So yeah, reach out on LinkedIn mostly we work with consumer facing brands that are trying to understand where to put the next dollar or where to pull in the scenarios. They have to really kind of rescue people from attribution, trying to better understand where they can get more with their ad dollars. I think to your point that you teed up now is such an interesting time or anytime that there's margin pressure, there's more scrutiny on a marketing budget. Really want to try to help empower marketing teams to feel more confident with what they're doing and ultimately the finance teams to feel more confident with what marketing team is doing. Hundred percent. That's where I love to plug in, but also just love to talk about this stuff probably more than I should. So always open to the conversation.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I talk about that a lot. I've read analytics and measurement books on vacation and my wife is like, what is wrong with you? And I'm like, it's interesting. I don't know. I like it. And so totally, we are just a different breed I suppose, but I love that. And then I think this is a great way to end it where if I've got an extra dollar to spend on marketing, where do I put it? If I need to cut a dollar of spend, where do I cut it from? And that's really what this approach is about MMM and incrementality. And so I think their necessities, I think attribution is broken and or misleading in so many different ways. There's some correlations there, so we don't have to throw it out completely, but I do believe you need to lean into MMM and incrementality for short. So connect with Tom on LinkedIn. And with that, we'll wrap. Tom's been fantastic. Thanks for the time, the insights and the energy. Yeah,

Tom Leonard:

Thanks so much Brett time. Glad to connect.

Brett Curry:

Absolutely. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. If you found this episode helpful, someone else in the D two C space or marketing space, and you think, man, they got to listen to this, please share it. We mean the world to me. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this insightful episode of the E-commerce Evolution Podcast, host Brett Curry sits down with Jhana Li, founder of Spyglass Ops, to tackle one of the biggest challenges holding back growing businesses: operational constraints. While many entrepreneurs excel at product development and marketing, they often hit a ceiling when it comes to building operational systems and processes. Jhana shares her expertise as a transformational operations consultant who has helped hundreds of seven and eight-figure businesses scale by creating systems that allow founders to work on their business rather than in it.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Vision Beyond "More Growth" - Jhana reveals why simply wanting "more" isn't a strategy and how to create a meaningful vision aligned with your personal goals. She explains why many founders reach their revenue targets only to feel trapped and unfulfilled.
• Creating an Environment for A-Players to Thrive - Learn why hiring top talent isn't enough; you need systems, clear expectations, and a culture that empowers them. Discover how to transform your existing team into high performers through better leadership.
• The Four Essential HR Processes - Jhana breaks down the systematic approach to hiring, onboarding, coaching, and firing that creates a high-performance culture. Her 14-day "bootcamp" approach to onboarding new team members is particularly eye-opening.
• The Power of Radical Ownership - Find out how transferring ownership of outcomes to your team members creates accountability and allows you to step into the visionary role instead of being stuck in day-to-day operations.
• Reframing the Firing Conversation - Discover why letting someone go can be an act of service rather than something to avoid, and how to approach these difficult conversations with compassion and clarity.

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Jhana Li:

We got all these all-star athletes on our team, we're saying, why the heck are you always three steps behind me? Why are you always waiting for me to make the next decision or hand out the next task or come up with the next idea? We get so frustrated and what we realize is actually we haven't told them where they're going.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we're talking about operations, operational constraints, operational bottlenecks, issues that you need to fix if you want to scale. Because here's what I believe most agency owners like me, most brand owners like you, you're really good at product, you're really good at marketing or scale or growth, but operations, maybe that's a part of the business. You don't want to think about a whole lot, but I guarantee you, without operational systems, processes, the right people, all of that good stuff, you will hit a ceiling and we're going to bust through that ceiling on this episode today. So want to welcome to the show, Ms. Jonna Lee, she's the founder of Spy Glass Ops. More on that in a second. Jonna, how's it going? And welcome to the show.

Jhana Li:

Thanks, Brett. I'm really excited to be here. It's going fantastic. It's spring here in Salt Lake City. No complaints.

Brett Curry:

Springtime in I love.

Jhana Li:

I know. I'm ready for it. Love

Brett Curry:

Springtime. And so John and I got to hang out at an event recently hosted by one of my business partners, Tom Shipley, called Deal Con. Jonna was rocking the stage talking about how to form good integrations if you're doing m and a, but it was all around ops. And so your company, John, us, by Glass Ops, you guys help with your transformational operations company, right? So you help with consulting, recruiting, coaching. You help seven and eight figure brands and businesses get unstuck and scale from an operation standpoint. Can you talk a little more about that, a little more about your background there?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, I think you covered it beautifully. So my background is as a COO, I was in that second in command operator position for multiple different successful startups, and that's where I really learned the tools of the trade. And then I had the opportunity to be an operations coach in this coaching program that had hundreds of startup owners in it. And that was really the big unlock for me, Brett, because I had hundreds of businesses pulling back the kimono, so to speak, and just showing me the reel of what's going on behind the scenes, what's not working, what's breaking, where are they struggling as they're scaling through 7, 8, 9 figures. And so I got to just compile all this data around what are the common patterns and themes that hold startup founders back from achieving, not just the revenue and the profit goals that they have for the business, but also the lifestyle, the freedom goals, creating a version of their company that can actually run without them.

And so that is really what I became passionate about. And four years ago I started the company to help entrepreneurs go through that critical stage of growth so that the company can start to become an asset, a machine that is going to run with or without them, and they're able to take that to a successful multi eight figure nine figure exit. They're able to take that to a lifestyle business that produces passive cashflow, but ultimately it's around unlocking the founder so that they're able to achieve the best version of their business and the best version of their life.

Brett Curry:

It's so great. And yeah, allowing the founder, the visionary, you've got brilliant ideas. And again, you're a product person, a marketing person, salesperson, whatever. For me, I'm all about setting vision, forming partnerships. I like sales, I like solving interesting marketing problems. I'm not an ops guy. I can respect a good system. I can spot a good system. I'm not going to sit down and design one, and at least I'm not going to do it and enjoy

Brett Curry:

Myself.

Brett Curry:

And so I've had the privilege of working with two amazing COOs throughout the journey of OMG commerce in our path to multiple seven figures. So I see the value there and I'm really excited to unpack this and give some insights to our listeners, but would love to hear from you what are some of the mistakes, bottlenecks, issues that you see founders running into when it comes to ops?

Jhana Li:

Oh my gosh, how long we got? Okay, so I would say that statistically, right? So we start all of our client relationships with a company-wide operational audit. So we've actually looked at the data and we've run these numbers and about 80 to 90% of the time, the key and critical bottlenecks holding startup founders back fall into one of four categories. The first category is strategic vision, meaning they don't actually know where they're trying to take the company or how exactly they're going to get to their revenue

Brett Curry:

Profit goals. We want to growth is

Jhana Li:

Our vision exactly more better. That's hot strategy. Strategy doesn't offer your team a direction to run in, and it ultimately leaves the founder pretty directionless in terms of what decisions to make and what to drive towards. So a lack of strategic vision or what's an interesting one that we see, Brett, is that they'll have a strategic vision that is totally out of alignment with their personal goals. So my personal goal is that I want a lifestyle business that's going to run without me, but the version of my company that I'm building is one where the product is totally reliant on me. Nothing can move forward without me, and I want to double revenue in the next 12 months. It's like these things are at odds with each other. And so we often have to hold up the mirror and say, which do you want more?

And then let's build a roadmap to get you to that and let's adjust your business and your plan for growing your business. So it actually gets you to the goals that you have outside of just work and revenue. So that's a big one that we see fairly often. The second big one is a lack of an operator, which should not be a surprise to anyone. And this is why we layered in operations recruitment as one of our core offers because either you've got somebody who's been in that role and is now no longer cutting it, in which case we have to figure out can they grow and can the business afford the time that it's going to take for them to grow into the COO that you need, or you do not have that person. Maybe you think you do, right? Maybe it's your wife, maybe it's your best friend, maybe it's a actual COO that we hired off on LinkedIn, but are they actually the person that you need in the role? Yes or no? And we need to go out and find that person because like you said Brett, you can respect operations, but you respect it enough to not touch it and to know the value of having someone who is an expert who can actually do the work.

Brett Curry:

And if the goal is getting that building, that machine, that machine that consistently produces results and spits off cash, you got to think about ops. And I really liked the way you laid that out. And I think it's one of those scenarios where we all do want more. We all do want to grow, but what will get you there is not what got you here. What got you here won't get you there. The title of that famous book, and I think that's true both in terms of your systems or lack thereof, your processes, but also that operator, right? Yes, the COO or the operator that got you to 5 million or to 10 million is probably not the same operator that will get you to a hundred million.

And maybe because people can grow and people can change and evolve, but generally speaking, you're going to have to either upgrade that person and upskill them or find someone who can grow you to 20 million, 50 million, a hundred million and that type of thing. So really great. So I love the way you identify that. So as you kind of lay that out, where do you see people in that, let's call it 10 to 50 million range? I know it's going to be different depending on the business category, brands that can still be a pretty lean team agencies, that's a pretty big team. What are some of the hurdles that they have to overcome? What are some of the systems they need to put in place or people they need to put into place to really become that operational machine?

Jhana Li:

So this really comes down to a couple of core categories, and the big one that I see in that 10 to 50 million range is that it comes down to leadership and not just can you as a CEO founder become a bigger, better version of yourself and the leader that your company needs next from you? Can you step fully out of our executive coach calls the three levels of entrepreneurship. The first level is producer where you're just showing up, you're doing everything. Okay, we probably got out of that a while ago. We stepped out of that level. The next level is leader. Great. So now can we be a leader that is able to delegate tasks, action, align a team, drive them towards a vision, that's the leadership level. And then the third level is visionary. Can we actually hand off day-to-day leadership of our team to managers, to department heads to people who are not only able to manage tasks but actually make decisions on our behalf? And when we're able to create that, we get to step into the third level, which is visionary, where our role, our highest value work is to make decisions and set strategy on behalf of our company and to have the vision, to hold the vision, to keep the team aligned around the vision, but to then to hand off the actualization and the execution of that vision to a team that we've put in place that we trust.

Brett Curry:

So hard to do, man, so hard. As someone who I do, I am a visionary, I'm not the integrator. And so I do setting the vision, casting the vision, but giving up control the vision or delegating decision-making can be quite difficult. Before we get there though, I do want to maybe step back for a second and talk about how do you clarify, and I've got some thoughts here on what we've done as an agency and some work we've done even recently internally. But you talk about the strategic vision and the strategic vision is not more do it better, do it more. That's not it. That's not clear at all. How do you coach people or what advice do you give them to say, okay, it may be clear in your head, but the way you're saying it is not clear to your team. How do you coach people in making that vision clear?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, a hundred percent. So the first thing is that we have to clarify. Two, we have to answer two questions and how, what does success look like? What is the finish line for this business? What are the north star goals and metrics that we are going to drive towards? So what looks like revenue, looks like profit, looks like a target valuation that you want to exit at. It's the finish line of the race that you are running. If you don't have a finish line, how the heck are you going to run the race? And so what we often see challenges around the, what is that? I talked to a dude at a mastermind who exited for 50 million million. So now I want to exit for 50 million. The challenge is that's the vision, 50 million, that's the vision. I did it right? But the problem is is that 50 million means nothing. That is a totally arbitrary number. It's not attached to any deeper meaning. It's not attached to any quality of life you're trying to create. It is throwing a dart at a dartboard, picking a number and saying

Brett Curry:

That's not good or the value, value you're going to be generating and offering to the marketplace to be worth 50 million. It says nothing

Jhana Li:

A hundred percent. So we pick these arbitrary finish lines and then what happens? It gets hard to run the race. And so we end up just switching the finish line and picking a different race, and we end up just pivoting and pivoting and pivoting and creating all these different sets of goals because we don't actually have fundamental and intrinsic conviction or attachment to those goals, or even we end up hitting those goals and then we feel nothing because it didn't mean anything to begin with. And so that's the existential crisis that we have to coach our clients through where they're like, wow, I really wanted to get to seven figures. I really wanted to get to eight figures and now I'm here and I'm more trapped by my business than ever. I'm falling out of love with my business. I've never felt less free. I'm not doing any of the things that I wanted to do or that I thought I could do by the time I reached this, why the hell am I doing this and do I need you to just burn this thing down and walk away? So strategic vision again is like, let's define the what and let's define the what against what actually matters to you as a founder, as an individual, as a human, and not just as an entrepreneur. And then let's make sure that the target you're setting for your business is actually going to get you what you want. So that's the first part of strategic vision.

Brett Curry:

So good. I'll share a couple of insights from some work we've done recently here at OMG because I really believe that setting the mission and vision and things like that, it really shows the team, this is who we are and how we're going to show up. And this is very clearly where we're going. And so I'm a big fan of statements and simple statements that carry meaning and that can help make decisions and help guide you. And so a couple that we've leaned into as an agency, and then I want to talk about the thing called the V two Mom. I'm curious if you've heard of that, talk about that in a second. But the first thing that we've leaned into here over the last couple of years is we want to be the most trusted, most loved digital marketing agency that feels like an in-house team.

Now, that may seem a little bit like a strange statement, most trusted, most love that feels kind of mushy, but here's what I believe that is tied to that trust piece that ties back to competence in the agency world. People want agencies they can trust and that they trust your expertise and they feel like, Hey, if I'm getting your feedback on something, I can count on it, I can believe it, I can take it to the bank, that type of thing. The most loved piece is when I figured I would get a lot of pushback on. But actually as I've showed this to PE firms that I know and others are like, dude, I actually kind of like it because, and we've heard this, we've heard this even from clients that are leaving OMG, they're like, we love you guys. We love your team, but we're leaving for this, that, or the other. Our team is we sold or whatever, but then also feels like an in-house team. And so it feels like an extension of the team. We've had people say to us, Hey, your team feels like my team. And so we crafted that in such a way that that should guide. How are we going to respond to emails? How are we going to show up to meetings? How are we going to respond in Slack because of those things? And so that's one of the statements. Curious how that strikes you

Or anything that sparks there.

Jhana Li:

I love that so much. It is a reminiscent of an exercise that we walk our clients through EOS calls it the three uniques. We call it the golden triad. And it is the three core characteristics that you from your competitors, why would somebody choose to work with you? And the example I always give is think about McDonald's versus a five star Michelin restaurant, right? Here's the vision statement. I so often hear Brett, and especially in the agency space, oh my gosh, we want to be the best. We want to be the best agency for e-com brands, but what is the best?

Brett Curry:

That

Jhana Li:

Means nothing to me. McDonald's is the best, but STO is a Michelin star restaurant.

McDonald's is the best at being fast, cheap and easy. Those are their three uniques. A Michelin star restaurant is the best at being a luxury white glove experience, farm to table, whatever. So what are the three uniques that guide your business, that differentiate you from others? What I heard you say was loved, trusted, feels like an extension of your in-house team. Cool. What's amazing about that is that now we get to go through our entire client happiness journey and anything that does not directly drive love, trust, or seamless integration, we don't do it. We don't do it. We don't have to do it because it's not why clients choose to work with us. And we get to become the best at those three things because we're not trying to be the best at everything else. Everything. And that's where most agencies and brands get stuck is that we're too diluted in who we serve in how we serve them uniquely well. We try and be everything for everyone and then we end up being nothing for no one.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's one of those things where you can do anything. You can be anybody. Your company can be anything, but it can't be. Everything can be everything. You've got to choose. You got to select. So I'm curious. We actually went through this process. Actually our current COO is the one that turned me onto this called the V two mom vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures. So I think this was actually designed by Salesforce and marketing off there. It's really cool though. So set your vision. So this is where we're going clearly what we just talked about, your values, so this is what we believe about ourselves and what we will or won't do to get us there. Then your methods are these are the things we're going to do in all these departments, high level obstacles, these things are standing in our way and then measures.

These are clear targets that we're setting for ourselves in all these key areas. So it's been really great as we crafted that, shared that with the team, I think it's, I've already heard it sparked some interesting discussions, especially around the measures. We've got this 50% profitability target within each department and it's triggering everybody to look at like, Hey, how is that going to impact the profitability of the department, right? Because I know we got this 50% target, so I don't know that the actual structure of the strategy really matters. It's way more about do you have it? Does it make sense? And is it guiding the team?

Jhana Li:

Yes, a hundred percent. And that's such a key. That final piece is the point, right? Because what you just said, Brett, you've got this incredible vivid vision in your mind. You as the founder know exactly what that finishing line is exactly how you want to get there. But if you haven't shared it with your team in a way that they not only see it as clearly as you see it, but also understand how they can uniquely contribute towards it,

Brett Curry:

What

Jhana Li:

You end up doing is disempowering your team to be proactive. Because now again, no all-star athlete can run a race if you don't tell them where the finish line is.

And so we got all these all-star athletes on our team. We're saying, why the heck are you always three steps behind me? Why are you always waiting for me to make the next decision or hand out the next task or come up with the next idea? We get so frustrated and what we realize is actually we haven't told them where they're going. So how the heck could they help us get there? How could they walk alongside us as opposed to behind us if they have no idea what to be proactive and what to drive towards? So no, the framework really doesn't matter. EOS has a great one, V two, mom love it. We have our own right? We call it the navigational chart. It's less about whether it's the right framework and more around are you being consistent with it, and then are you repeating it and coming back to it constantly with your team? It takes the average person seven to 12 times of hearing something before it actually sinks into their brain. So we say it once and then we're like, cool, did that. Everyone's got the vision. Everyone knows where we're going. Our job becomes to be the chief repeating officer.

Brett Curry:

We

Jhana Li:

Say this again and again. We articulate the vision and the values and the goals and the metrics and all of these things again and again and again. And to us, we feel like crazy people because we've repeated ourselves a hundred times and how can they not get it? And when you feel that way, I can promise you your team is only just starting to get it. Keep going.

Brett Curry:

So good, so good. And I've heard that forever in the marketing world, just about the time you're sick of hearing an ad or hearing a message. Only then is the market even beginning to pay attention, right?

Brett Curry:

Totally.

Brett Curry:

And it's sort of similar with internal communication as well. You got to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it before people even start to get it. And so

Really great. Well, let's talk people for a minute because I'm a firm believer. This is true in the agency space, also true in the brand space. Any business, you're only as good as the people that you have on board. And I was listening to a podcast founders podcast that I love, and they were talking about Steve Jobs and maybe Elon Moss, maybe somebody else. They were talking about how they don't worry about overpaying for great talent because what they've found in certain industries may be a little bit different depending on your industry. But Steve Jobs said, Hey, the best talent, they may be two or more times, two or three times more expensive, but their work isn't two or three times better. It's 10 times better, a hundred times better, the output. And so I don't worry about that. I am getting the absolute best of my team now. Everybody's on their own journey. And so finding the right person for you isn't going to be what Steve Jobs was necessarily looking for, but how do you coach people on finding the right people when to identify that they need to hire, and then also would love to hear any hiring tips that you have. I think this is something that scaling businesses are often pretty bad at.

Jhana Li:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Oh my gosh. So this pillar of team is probably where we do the most amount of work with our clients because again, it actually becomes the deal breaker systems, not the deal breaker strategy, not the deal breaker. Do you have the right people in the right roles executing the right things and running in the right direction? Without that, your business will never be able to scale you without that. You will be that point of escalation. You'll become the system where every decision has to be yours, every idea has to be yours, every sign off and every right task needs your eyes on it and every quality assurance. If you are feeling stuck running the day-to-day of your business right now, I can almost guarantee you a root cause bottleneck is team. Now to be clear, that doesn't mean the solution is we have to go out, fire everyone and then just double all of our salaries and that will

Brett Curry:

Fix the problem. Exactly.

Jhana Li:

What we most often see is that clients will have incredible team members on the bus, but what we haven't done is created a player environment. We have a players,

But we haven't invited them to bring all that they are capable of to the table. We haven't given them a clear strategic vision that they can be proactive and innovative and creative and run towards. We haven't empowered them so that they feel confident in solving their own problems. They have the critical thinking skills to do it, and they know what they're authorized to make decisions around versus not. We haven't given them the right systems and technology so that they can be efficient and effective in their role. We're having them run around chasing down information, picking up dropped balls, putting out fires that didn't need to exist to begin with. And so we're wasting all of their time playing defense and doing all this low value work instead of doing the really high value, high leverage things that you actually paid them for. So my number one pro tip around team is that before you go out and just get better people, make sure that you have created an environment where your current people are able to bring their best to the table. And what that fundamentally comes down to is us as leaders, us as the founder, and then the leaders that we put in place to again, manage that frontline team. Do our leaders know how to build and manage a players and manage a high performance team environment?

Brett Curry:

Sometimes you don't have a players on your team, you're not ready for them. You've not done the work to make your company attractive for a players or where a players can shine. And I actually was thinking about football while you were laying that out. Honestly, I'm a chiefs football fan, longtime chiefs fan from Kansas City, and they've had several situations over recent years where they'll have a wide receiver that'll leave and go somewhere else and they don't do very good and they come back and then they're on the chiefs. They're amazing. And it's because you got Patrick Mahomes as your quarterback and you got Andy Reed who's helping call plays. You got a system that's a winning system, and so maybe a receiver that really sucks for another team. You put 'em in the chief's environment and they're going to shine because of all the things around them.

And so I think that's one of the things we got to keep in mind. It's not the key is not just paying more for talent. That just means you're guaranteed to have more money going out the door. It could work. It's not just about hiring a talent, it's about having the system where they're going to shine and the environment where they're going to shine. So what are some of the things, some of the tips you lay out there for business owners, founders to say, am I ready for A players and if not, what do I need to do to get ready?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, great question. So I would offer a reframe, which is you probably already have a players. The question is what are you lacking that's inviting them or not to bring it to the table? The

Brett Curry:

Top may be you, not the team in place.

Jhana Li:

Correct,

Brett Curry:

Correct.

Jhana Li:

Yes. So right, there are four core HR processes that I think every team needs to have to be able to consistently attract and retain a player talent. You need your hiring process, your onboarding process, which is absolutely key. Do not skip onboarding. You need your high performance management. So that's ongoing management and growth coaching for the people on your team. And then you need firing. How do we systematically either manage people up if there's underperformance or manage them out where we determine they're not the right fit and we get them off the bus? These things need to happen systematically. What I often see happen is they're happening organically. We're hiring by dropping a job description on Facebook and then hiring the first person that comes along because we needed this person three months ago and I really just need this person. And you seem smart and competent, not a proven system, not going to get you the A player.

Most of the time onboarding, we skip entirely. We just throw 'em in the deep end and we say they're an A player, they should learn how to swim. Truly a strong onboarding process will three x your average employee retention and increase your average employee productivity by 72%. And that has nothing to do with the caliber of people that you're hiring and onboarding. That just comes down to whether you are onboarding them effectively or not. Hiring, onboarding, growth, coaching, right? Managing. This is the area where we get to turn our B players into A players. This is where we're creating an environment that invites them to be their best or not. Are we tapping into their intrinsic motivators? Are we creating an environment of clearly defined accountability and radical ownership? Are we paying our people fairly with scalable compensation plans? Have we defined clear and exact roles so people know what is my job and what is not my job? There's a whole checklist, Brett, I could even send it to your group. I've got

Brett Curry:

That'd be amazing.

Jhana Li:

Eight core pillars of what goes into a high performance, a playing environment. And I'm happy to share that with everyone because just by implementing those eight things within your existing business, your existing team, you don't even have to pay them any more than you're currently paying them.

Brett Curry:

They

Jhana Li:

Promise you you will get a productivity increase of a minimum of two x because that's just how big of a deal it is when you start turning on a high performance environment.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. And I want to go back to something I said a minute ago, just to clarify. The reason I shared the Steve Jobs of I don't care if I pay two or three x times for an employee, they're going to be

10 or a hundred times more valuable. That wasn't about salary, that was more about the right person can unlock things. But what I think is also really interesting about this environment right now is that there's a lot of A-players out there. There's a lot of great talent out there, and you can get them for a reasonable rate, like a good competitive salary. It's not the insanity that was kind of mid pandemic when everything was just off the rails. It's kind of more of a normal job market to a certain degree. And so there is good talent out there that you can find. So would love to have that checklist. We'll put in the show notes, we'll share that with everybody, but I also like the way you laid that out. So hiring, onboarding, ongoing coaching, and then firing. It's got to be systematic. That's to follow up process. But I think what most people will do are like, Hey, you're good. So come on board and figure stuff out. Watch this person. Watch that person. You'll get it.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Brett Curry:

Imagine if going back again, going back to a football example, imagine if that happened there. That doesn't happen. You bring on a player, you get 'em indoctrinated and what you do, they immediately go to their position coach, they go to all these practices, they're watching film, they're constantly being evaluated, everything, everything is thought of. And obviously we're not quite like a professional sports team, but we need to be more like one, right? If we want a performance-based culture, we could probably learn a lot from that structure. So

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. I love that.

Brett Curry:

I want to talk a little bit about hiring just because I think that's something that

Brett Curry:

It's a big one

Brett Curry:

Is intimidating to people. We screw it up so often. I can think about a couple of really bad mistakes that I've made as a business owner when it comes to hiring, but what are some of the, yeah, yeah, I mean we all do, but what are some of the hiring tips, insights, processes you recommend? Should I go with a recruiter or no recruiter? How am I going to find the right talent?

Jhana Li:

Yeah. Okay. So a couple of best practices when it comes to hiring, especially because for some positions or many positions, Brett, your clients are hiring remote team members, which is amazing. It means we get to tap into international job markets and all of these things. And also overwhelming because when we launch our average ops COO hiring funnel, we can get from 500 to a thousand applications. So how do we whittle that down? I always say that a strong hiring funnel is like a magnet. What does a magnet do? A magnet attracts, it attracts your ideal candidate avatar, right? You're a marketer. If we wanted to build a marketing funnel, what will we start with? We would start with our ideal client avatar.

Who is this person? What do they think about at night? What drives them? What motivates them? What do they want? Let's build that for our ideal candidate. I call the tool that we use for this, the job scorecard. We have to define success in the role, and then we build a hiring funnel that is messaged towards that person and is designed to be a magnet that will attract them through our process so that by the time they get to the end of our hiring process, we have COOs who have 20 years experience being like, this was the most incredible hiring process I've ever gone

Brett Curry:

Through. Wow,

Jhana Li:

I'm so excited to work with your client. When do I get to have my next interview? Do you guys have any other job opportunities available? You want them to be so excited because you have built this just for them? What else does a magnet do? A magnet repels. So this funnel should be so specific and so fine tuned that someone who is not your ideal candidate will self-select out. They literally will just stop. They'll stop going through the process. So while we may get 500 COO applications on our average job description, by the time our process is done and we're actually looking like we're looking at applications, we're looking at resumes, we're looking at the top 20 to 30 for that role because we have such a robust process that it will literally take out 95% of the candidates that apply because they're not the right fit. And it would literally be a waste of me and my team's time to have any sort of conversation with them or to spend a minute looking at their resume. So if you're going for a remote job market where you're getting overwhelmed by just sheer volume, rely on the process, let the process kick out 95% of people so that you're only focused on the 5%, that could really be that ideal candidate you're looking for.

Brett Curry:

That's so good. That's so good. I love that. The job scorecard and really thinking about how am I going to position this so they get the job done so that it meets its objectives so that I'm attracting the right person, repelling the wrong person, really good. And again, I think a lot of us that listen to us are marketers. If you own a brand, you're probably good at marketing, but you don't really put your marketing hat on when you're crafting that job scorecard or looking at attracting talent, but you kind of should be, right? There's quite a few parallels there. It's the same thing, isn't it? It's the

Jhana Li:

Same. Humans be humans, and it's a marketing funnel. Your hiring funnel is a marketing funnel for your ideal candidate.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's so good. So good. Any other specific tips you can give on the hiring process? What should that look like? Should you outsource it? Should you do it? How many interviews should you have? And I know there's all kinds of conditional statements there, but any other tips on the hiring process that you'd recommend?

Jhana Li:

So we have a eight step hiring process. I can walk through it very quickly if you would like, but not to get too deep into the weeds. Essentially, our proven hiring process is we launched the job description on the front end. The job description will take them directly to a written application. So the application is going to take them off of whatever job forum they're on, indeed or LinkedIn. We will drop JD into these huge, again, these huge ponds of candidates, hundreds of people. Thousands of people will see that job description, but only hundreds of them will click on the link and apply through our link. So that's a huge filtration system that kicks a lot of people out. Then we take 'em to the written application. The written application is quick. It's easy for them to fill out, but the written application takes 'em directly to a skill assessment. The skill assessment is where we generally see 80% of candidates plus stop the process. They literally just won't submit it because the skill assessment is hard. Back to marketing here, Brett. One thing we know about marketing funnels, the greater the friction in the funnel, the higher the quality of lead, right?

Yep. Same thing with hiring. So we make it hard. It shouldn't be

Brett Curry:

Hard to, what does that look like? I know sometimes, so it was one thing we do as an agency is we give them a fake project. Here's an made up client, and here's a bunch of scenarios. What are you going to do in those scenarios, right? Yes. How are you going to optimize this? And then we grade those answers. Is that what you're recommending here?

Jhana Li:

Pretty much, yep. It's two to three. I call 'em crunchy questions that again, your A player ideal candidate will have no problem answering why? Because they've done this at three other companies already. This is as natural to them as breathing, and in fact, they fucking love it. Such a nerd.

Brett Curry:

They

Jhana Li:

Get to the end of the skill assessment and they're like, oh my God, that was so fun. I cannot wait for this job. Most people, 80% of people will say, this is hard. This is going to take too long. I don't know how to do this. I don't want to do this. And they will, again, self-select apps.

Brett Curry:

Perfect.

Jhana Li:

So that's the skill assessment.

Brett Curry:

See you.

Jhana Li:

Yep. It's a big one. From there'll then start interviews. So we'll do a culture interview, a skill interview, reference interviews, and then we'll finally close them on the job.

Brett Curry:

That's amazing. That's amazing. Really, really helpful. So we've kind of set our vision, our strategic vision, and kind of mapped that out. And we're now talking about hiring. And let's talk a little bit about what that environment looks like that allows a player to shine. I know you've touched on a handful of things, but if we want a performance-based culture, what are some things we need to have in place for that to be true? So I'm assuming you got the job scorecard for when you hire somebody, probably a scorecard ongoing where you can show someone how are you doing and how can you do better type of thing.

Jhana Li:

And again, it comes back to onboarding. So we take that same exact job scorecard, and then on the very first day of that new person starting their job, I still personally do a culture onboarding call, right? How important this call is in this culture onboarding call, we cover vision, mission, right? Your V two mom, this is when you would share that this is your vision, your mission, your core values. This is the team they're going to be working with. This is the lay of the land, and this is your performance and cultural expectations. So I'll say things like show up on time to meetings and be on camera. Do I have to say that most of clients would be like, no, they're a players. I shouldn't have to say that. Set expectations. This is client. Think of your team onboarding. Again, like client onboarding. We know how important it is

Brett Curry:

For

Jhana Li:

Successful client onboarding, to have an incredible experience, to set realistic expectations and to understand, especially in a service industry like agencies, Brett, what do they need to bring to the table in order to be successful in this partnership? That is exactly what you're doing on day one. Here's us, here's what success looks like in your role, job scorecard. And then the third and critical component to this conversation is a transfer of ownership. The single greatest characteristic of high performance teams is radical ownership. So here's your job scorecard. This is yours. Now,

Brett Curry:

These

Jhana Li:

Are not my targets. These are your targets. These are not my challenges to solve my daily tasks to fix for you. These are your tasks, your challenges, your growth opportunity, your level up, and in fact that the next two weeks of training that we're about to launch into for you, that's yours as well. You are responsible for becoming the version of you for gaining the knowledge that you need to hit these targets and achieve success as measured by this job scorecard. Welcome to the

Brett Curry:

So good, so good. And some people would hate to hear that message, but the right people, it will light them up. They will love that. So even kind of you hint about some of those things, I would assume in the hiring process as well to kind of weed out the wrong people.

Jhana Li:

Yeah. Again, the hiring process is built for that ideal candidate, the person who should get lit up. When we then deliver that message in onboarding, if by some reason somebody has snuck through the hiring process and pulled a fast one on me, the onboarding is also intense from the culture call. We launch 'em into what we call the 14 day bootcamp, and I tell 'em, the first 14 days on this rollout are going to be intense. Why? Because I want to stress test you because the person that I met in the interviews is not the person I'm hiring. That is a shiny blow up version of the person that I just hired. The person I actually hired is a person who's six months from now whose kid is sick and they left the stove on and the mailman is here, and there's a client fire exploding. And how do they show up to the team meeting? That's the person I

Brett Curry:

Hired.

Jhana Li:

I want to know who that person is, and I don't want to have to wait six months to figure it out.

Brett Curry:

Tell me more about that. That is great because, well, we've made the mistake in the past of making the first two weeks month just so easy, and part of it's like we want to be a great place to work and we want to challenge people. We want to coach people. And sometimes we made it just way, way too easy, almost boring. That has since changed. But how do you stress test in those first two weeks? What does that look like?

Jhana Li:

So I want to draw a difference between hard and disorganized.

What does an A player want? An A player doesn't mind a high pressure environment. A player doesn't mind drinking out of a fire hose in terms of learning new information. An A player doesn't mind throwing themselves into something, getting their hands dirty and figuring it out. What doesn't set people up for success though, is again kicking them into the deep end. So we're just throwing you into things with no structure, with no organization, with no guidance around what you should be looking at, what you should be focused on or what success looks like. So our responsibility as leadership is to develop that structure. So that's what we call the 14 day bootcamp, and it's that blow by blow of for the first 14 days, you're going to train on these things with these people. You're going to watch these meetings, shadow these client calls, read these books.

We're going to give you all of the information that you need. We're going to front load it. And at the end of two weeks, the goal is that you are functional, not that you're exceptional, that you're functional in the role, and I'm going to download any and all information into your brain that you need in order to become functional. It will be hard, but we've got your back. Also included in that 14 day bootcamp is daily check-ins with their manager, end of week check-ins with me, a 14 day check-in around, where are you at? Where are you struggling, how are you feeling after your first two weeks? So there's structure to it, but that doesn't make it not hard. It just makes it hard with support.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, man, it's so good. So we are running out of time a bit, but I do want to talk about the final two things. How are we coaching someone and helping them really grow and reach peak performance? And then when do we fire people as well? So let's talk about both of those. What tips or insights can you share on the coaching and helping someone level up?

Jhana Li:

So the first thing is if you want a high performance team, coach them. Every high performer has a coach. Michael Phelps has a coach, and I hear clients say a lot, if I'm hiring eight players, why should I have to manage them? Management is

Brett Curry:

Coaching the best. Want a coach? Yeah,

Jhana Li:

Correct, correct. Right. And so I have not just coaching as in an end of quarter performance review. We do active growth coaching on a weekly or biweekly basis with our team members. So every week for new team members, every other week for veterans, they are sitting down with their direct manager. And what I am working on, again, included, I'll just send Brett, I have SOP and tools and templates for literally all of this. I'm just going to give it to your people. Does that work?

Brett Curry:

Amazing. Amazing.

Jhana Li:

Thank you so much. Yeah. So that includes in there a script and a one-on-one template for how I run these meetings. But essentially I am taking the last one to two weeks of their performance in the role, and we're using it as data. Where did you do well? Where could you have done better? What are you going to do differently moving forward? What are you struggling with? What's blocking you? I have a lot of clients who have a lot of fear around giving constructive feedback,

But you're a coach. Constructive feedback is literally your job. What you're afraid of is demotivating someone. What you're afraid of is making them feel bad. But that must to do with the culture, not the feedback. If the culture says that you getting feedback means you've done something wrong, then yeah, I'm going to be afraid to give feedback or receive feedback. If instead, feedback is an act of service and coaching to help every single person on this team level up all the time. I have team members coming into those meetings being like, what could I do better? This is what I struggled with. How would you tackle this? I feel like I really botched this meeting. They're looking for it. They're leaning into

Brett Curry:

It

Jhana Li:

Because they recognize it for what it is

Better, which is an active level of service, and they want to get better. So again, this is where we get into the less tangible side of team development, which is like, what's the culture that you've built around growth and feedback and failure? How does your team respond to failure? How do you respond to failure? If we can control the cultural context, then every single day my team is showing up, looking for an opportunity to grow. My job is to just hold up the mirror and say, Hey, here's your next gap. Here's your next opportunity. Grow this way.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. It's so good. Well, let's talk a little bit about the F word firing. So when is it time to fire and move on from somebody? What insights can you share with us there?

Jhana Li:

Yeah, so if we've done all the rest of this stuff correctly, then firing becomes actually a pretty easy process. We've got a job scorecard. We gave it to them on day one. We transferred ownership over those targets to them. We aligned their goals with company goals. We've coached them every single week, and we've established a regular rhythm where if there's a gap in performance, we're immediately calling it out, offering feedback and trying to correct it. What then happens if that person is still not able to perform? We have an immediate conversation, and it's a very simple conversation that says, Hey, this is the job scorecard. We covered this on day one. This is your job score card. We covered that on day one, and you're performing down here. Help me understand, what do you need for you? Again, radical ownership stays with them for you to close this gap, and what do you need for me to be successful in that?

So it's a growth coaching conversation to start where I call that the pep, the personal elevation plan. And that is, Hey, as soon as I see a gap, I'm going to call it out, and we're going to co-create a game plan for you to close that gap and take radical ownership for doing so. Then if I don't see that they've closed that gap, then we'll escalate to a pip. That's the last warning conversation of like, Hey, to be clear, you cannot have this job if you're not meeting the expectations outlined in the job scorecard. So again, help me understand why haven't I seen the change and what needs to change in order for you to be successful, because we both want you to be successful here.

Brett Curry:

So the PIP, that's the personal improvement plan, right? Correct. This is where you got to improve here else. This is going to fit. And my guess is, John, if you are a company and you're leading someone through this process after the pip, some people are going to make it a lot. People are going to be like, yeah, this price isn't right. Correct. The firing is not going to be a surprise to anybody at that point. You go through that process, it's going to be a pretty natural next step for you and for the person you're firing.

Jhana Li:

It's not a surprise. And what you'll actually see is people will just quit that phrase, manage up or manage out. Credit to Layla Hermo for teaching me that one. When you've done a great job of building a high performance, high pressure environment, people who don't like that, who don't want that, who don't want to be held accountable to constant growth and constant targets will leave. They'll literally just leave,

Brett Curry:

Which is akay even better, right? Than having to f

Jhana Li:

Fire, which is best case scenario. Exactly.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

This is so good, and one thing I'll share too, and we've had our ups and downs as an agency when it comes to ops and hiring and firing and things like that. But what I've also found too, because I think there's this fear that business owners have too, about firing. I can't think of a single time that we fired someone at OMG where I've had outrage from the team. Almost always it's like, yeah, I saw that coming, right? Or yeah, we got that. We did have to go through a couple of rounds of layoffs as an agency about 18 months ago. That sucked, and that sucked bad. A lot of agencies and a lot of e-comm brands had to do that. So I did get pushback there. People were like, how could you let this person go? I'm like, I know. I know. It sucked. But the firing piece, I've never had anybody. How could you, I mean, maybe the person's getting fired, but everybody else was like, yep, yep. Saw that Maybe you're a little bit late.

Jhana Li:

Do you want me to offer you a reframe so that even that person,

Brett Curry:

Please, please,

Jhana Li:

Is on board with it? And guys, this is, again, this is coming from me messing this up so many times because I really care about my team. I do. And so I don't want to fire them. I don't want to hurt them. Oh my God. Maybe they're going to get better. I'll give them just another month. Just another month, and then we all know where that ends. Anyway,

Brett Curry:

Right?

Jhana Li:

Here's the reframe. I will offer you, your job as a business owner is to create a vehicle for growth. Growth for you, growth for your clients, growth for your team. People deserve to be successful in their roles. They deserve to be able to grow with your business. And if they are in a role where they cannot be successful or where their pathway for growth had diverted from yours, then it is an absolute act of love and service to let them go and find the other opportunity where they will be successful that does get them to their goals. They deserve that. It is in fact selfish to let your own emotional discomfort at the conversation, keep them in a place where they cannot be successful. So when I show up to a firing conversation, that's the lens that I bring. And guess what? I still get coffee every month with half the people I've fired because they're so grateful and I'm so grateful, and we love each other so much, and they've found another job opportunity or started a business, and they've become these incredible next level versions of themselves. And all we did when we fired them was determine that, Hey, the next version of you can't be unlocked here.

That's okay. That's so okay. But it's time for us to part ways

Brett Curry:

And understanding that people desperately want to be successful.

Jhana Li:

They do.

Brett Curry:

They know that they're not being successful with your company if they're in this position, especially if you've got

Jhana Li:

A job scorecard,

Brett Curry:

Especially if you've going through this, measur them against that process, then they really know and they really know. Right? And one story that I heard, this was in the book, radical Candor, which is one of my favorites because I'm not naturally a candid person. So that book really helped me. But I love the story between Steve Jobs and Johnny. Ive and Steve would ask Johnny like, Hey, did you give this feedback to your teammate? Did you tell them this isn't good enough? And Johnny would be like, well, I don't want to hurt their feelings or whatever. And Steve would say, no, Johnny, you don't want to be nice. You're just vain and you want people to like you, right? It's like you've got to give people the feedback. And of course, we don't have to put on our Steve Jobs and show up just the way he did, not our personalities. But it's one of those things that say like, yeah, the frame you gave, it's actually not kindness. If you are, and maybe it's actually selfish if you're holding onto somebody when you need to let them go so they can go not be miserable somewhere and be successful somewhere,

Jhana Li:

Or you're holding onto that piece of feedback that you're unwilling to tell them when it's actually just depriving them of the opportunity

Brett Curry:

To

Jhana Li:

Know what the gap is so they can do something about it.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. So good. We could keep going. You've got me fired up for operations. I'm not even operations guy. This is amazing, John, this, I can't believe it. So good. So definitely share with us the SOPs. I'll get that out. We'll put that in the show notes. Anybody can get that. But also, I'm confident there are people listening that are just like, I don't need the SOPs. I just want to work with Jonna and her team. So how can people connect with spyglass ops? What does that look like? Who are you right for? Talk to us about working with you.

Jhana Li:

Yeah, beautiful. So guys, the best way to connect with me is actually on Instagram, and if you will add it into the show notes. But I'm just going to give you guys my entire resource vault. So DM me the code word vault, click on the link in the show notes, DM me on Instagram. It's the best way to get in touch.

Brett Curry:

What Instagram handle

Jhana Li:

That is at the Jonna Lee. So J-H-A-N-A-L-I, Jonna Lee.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And so DM you the word vault.

Jhana Li:

Correct.

Brett Curry:

You'll get the whole thing there. The whole all the goods, man. Okay. That's amazing. Jonna, this has been fantastic. I can't wait to review this, share this with my team. Really, really good. I know this is going to create transformational change for people that listen and apply and especially those that get your details and or work with you guys, but you guys are really, you're geared to work with brands, work with agencies, work with just service-based companies. You can work with just about anybody, correct?

Jhana Li:

Yeah. We work with online based startups, right? So eCom brands, given that you're running your business off technical systems, remote team building, that's the stuff we really specialize in.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Jonna Lee, ladies and gentlemen at the Jonna Lee on Instagram, connect with her there, DM her at the word vault and you'll get all the goods. Also put stuff in the show notes as well. So with that, Jonna, thank you so much. This was amazing. Thanks for bringing the energy. Thanks for bringing the insights.

Jhana Li:

Thank you, Brett, it

Brett Curry:

Was fantastic.

Jhana Li:

Appreciate it.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. And thank you for tuning in as always. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on the show? If you've not done so, please leave us a review on iTunes and if you know somebody who's struggling with ops share, share with them this episode and with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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In this timely episode, Brett Curry sits down with Nick Flint, Director of Email Marketing, to tackle the pressing challenge facing e-commerce brands today: how to maintain profitability amid rising tariffs. As import costs surge, they share actionable strategies for protecting your bottom line without sacrificing growth. Whether you're considering price increases, optimizing marketing spend, or leveraging email to boost customer loyalty, this episode delivers practical solutions you can implement immediately.

Key Takeaways

• Strategic Price Adjustments That Won't Kill Conversions: Learn how top brands are implementing 5-20% price increases, creating premium limited-edition offerings, and shifting from percentage-based discounts to flat-dollar thresholds that protect your margins while maintaining customer appeal.
• Cut Costs, Not Growth: Discover the hidden areas where you're leaking profits—from underperforming ad spend to unnecessary software subscriptions—and how regular P&L reviews can reveal thousands in recoverable expenses without compromising product quality.
• Email as Your Profit Preservation Tool: Capitalize on relationship-building email strategies that turn price increases into opportunities, including exclusive "lock-in" offers for loyal customers and subscription incentives that stabilize revenue during uncertain times.
• Inventory Intelligence for Cash Flow Optimization: Master the delicate balance between avoiding stockouts and preventing capital-draining excess inventory with practical forecasting approaches that protect your cash position.
• The Human Touch in Challenging Times: Find out why connecting authentically with customers through personalized communication may be your greatest competitive advantage during economic pressure—including specific question-based campaigns for your most valuable customers.

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- All right, Nick Flint, the buzz for right now and likely the foreseeable future is what do we do about the tariff madness that's impacting our industry? And so wanted to have you on here so we could talk briefly about what are some ways that we can mitigate risk, that we can protect profits so we can cut costs so that we can still find opportunity for growth and opportunity to thrive even in this climate. And so let's dive in. But first of all, how's it going? By the way,

- I'm doing pretty good over here. Really starting to dial in with some of our clients and the strategies that they have with these new changes and what they might see in their price structure, differences in the future.

- Great. Well, email's gonna play a big part of this. So Nick is our, our director of email. And I think now is the time we lean into the tried and true, right? Doing more for our customers, leaning into them more. Email is one of the, the most guaranteed returns and the lowest cost to execute on. So now is the time for emails. We'll lean into some tips there, but ultimately what we're looking for right now and whatever brand wants is how do I protect profits? How do I continue to grow? How do I protect profits? And I think ultimately the first thing, Nick, that we gotta look at is how can you increase prices and or increase profit per order without tanking conversion rates, right? Without killing conversions. 'cause not just as simple as raising rates through the roof, right? Raising prices through the roof because then people will stop buying. And so let's talk through some suggestions here on, on what we can do. So, so raising prices. One thing to keep in mind, Nick, and you know, we've been talking to a lot of our, our bigger clients. I've had 10 to 15 calls recently. We've been texting, messaging, you know, talking to clients frequently. And so one thing I'm hearing a lot from bigger brands is, Nick, they're just gonna raise prices. They're just gonna raise them, have not heard fully, you know, what, what percentage kinda lift that's gonna be that that's gonna be brand by brand, it's gonna be depending on the category, depending on how much room the brand thinks, they have to still remain competitive. Depends on the strength of the brand as well. But also a lot of people are just gonna raise prices, right? And so I think you gotta look at that and whether that's a 5%, 10%, maybe a 20% increase, it's gotta be on the table and you gotta be talking about it. One of the other things that we're looking at is how do we maybe bundle things and come with creative offers so that we can raise the a OV and and like the raise the profit per order. So what, what are your thoughts on both of those items? What are you hearing? What are you seeing?

- What's, what's funny is a lot of the stuff that we're looking at, you should be doing this year round, but it's really top of mind right now. Like

- Yeah,

- What does it come down to? Charging the right amount and then cutting your costs across the business when possible and trying to run a lean operation so you stay profitable. And it really comes to the forefront where you're starting to look at every dollar, every statement, every transaction coming through. Yep. So some of the easiest low hanging fruit that they can be doing right now to help raise that average order value, not give away too much margin. 'cause if you can not discount your products and extra 10%, that kind of combats that 10% extra that you're paying Yes. Over on your, your cost of goods coming across the seeds. So off the bat, one thing we've been shifting is the initial, just the popup offers on the site and the intro, instead of going with like a standard, you know, 10, 20% off your first order, we're putting a minimum threshold in there now. So, you know, $10 off any order of $50 plus if they're gonna spend 70, 80, 90 bucks, that $10 is gonna stay the same and not gonna be that fixed percentage versus 20% off of your $90 order. It's eight bucks that the brand saves.

- Yeah, I love that. So, you know, one, one of the, the best tools we have to grow our email list and grow our email marketing is the, is the popup in the offer. But nows may be a time to, to be less liberal with your, your discount. So make that a flat dollar amount so it doesn't scale to infinity. Also, maybe just raising the threshold for when that kicks in. So yeah, we're, we're going to limit that, right? I think the other thing to think about is, is, you know, how do we bundle products to, to, and create some interesting pricing there where we're, we're still getting more profit per transaction even while maybe our, our cost structure, our cogs have gone up. So I think that's an interesting one to look at. And it's something you've talked about Nick, and we, we've seen this with brands like Nike and others, is it's not just raising prices, but how do we introduce things like limited edition specials? How, how can we introduce things that feel more valuable and are more valuable so that we can charge a, a premium? So what, what are your thoughts on that

- For these limited edition items? It works for whatever level you're at. That, that's one kind of really unique thing about this strategy. If you're selling a $10 cup, launching a limited edition collab with someone, or even like a new colorway, you're just doing 200 of, you can now sell that for 15 instead of 10. Same thing on like the sneakers. Just like you talk about, you know, instead of $150 via sneakers, you're now going for 180 'cause it's a limited edition release. So if you can find some kind of way to implement scarcity with a new product, launch a new variant, we have a coffee brand doing this, they're leaning into more select roasts from around the world and they're really putting the emphasis on the Costa Rican farmers who are making these beans. And that's why it's slightly more per bag, but the quality's there and people appreciate it. And you also see people start to splurge on some stuff like that, you know, when they're starting to look at their own bank accounts a little bit tighter, you know, I'm not gonna go buy a new car right now, but you know what, I'll spend 15 for bank coffee. Might not my coffee. Yeah, totally. It's every morning then. Really good.

- Yeah, it's a really good thought that, that even when the consumer is, is pinched a little bit, even when the consumer confidence is low, it's not that they stop buying, right? We still, we all, we love to buy things. It's our favorite recreation, you know, retail therapy is a real thing, will always be a real thing. But yeah, how can you lean into something where, hey, okay, may, maybe I'm trading down in other categories, but I'm trading up in your category and and that's what you want to try to, to create there. So yeah, I I really wanna underscore, you know, this is not a time to cut growth costs, I believe, right? And, and this is, we were talking about this in our morning, Monday morning meeting today, Nick, where you know, David, David Ogilvy, legendary ad guy, the the guy behind Dove stoke and man in a halfway shirt and Rolls Royce and a number of others. He talked about, man, I I view advertising as an essential part of every product, just like I would an essential, an essential ingredient or central component. And just when times get tough, I'm not gonna cut, I'm not gonna cut the tires outta my Rolls Royce, you know, because times are tough. I I've gotta, I've gotta invest in that. And same is true for marketing. We don't wanna pull back on marketing otherwise we'll lose market share otherwise we'll, we'll create a death spiral potentially. And so lean into marketing, maybe you wanna lean into it in a more efficient manner. Maybe you raise your mirror, things like that, but don't but your advertising and growth budgets. But on the topic of cost cutting, Nick, I think this is a real thing, right? We've gotta look at how can we get lean? How can we be lean and mean right now? So what are some suggestions there? What have, what have you heard from others? What tips do you have?

- Especially on the SMS side of things, we're getting really tight with who we're sending to right now. You might have a 20,000 per SM person SMS list with, you know, 10 k those being engaged and the other 10 k is like, you're hopeful they'll purchase one day, they've been hanging around forever and you will send them those texts for the big launches or product drops. But now we want to tighten up that window so those SMS sends are to your more guaranteed segment, keep the revenue coming in from them and then as things start to normalize, then breach back out into that broader audience that you were looking at before, kind of that hopeful window you're spending some extra money on.

- Yeah, I love it. And you know, one of the other things we're, we're leaning into, you know, we do a lot with obviously Amazon ads and Google ads and YouTube and things like that is, you know, there, there are times when, when things are smooth and easy where, where maybe you kind of ignore some wasted ad spend, right? Where maybe there's some keywords that are not gonna performing with an Amazon ads with Google ads, but when times are good, you kinda let that slide. We audit, you know, dozens of accounts every month and we regularly see, you know, wasted ad spend in the 10 to 15 to $20,000 a month range, meaning you could cut that ad spend and sales would not dip. Now's the time to be looking at stuff like that. So don't cut your overall ad budget, but man, cut the waste. And so I think that's something you wanna lean into and look at right now. You know, one of the basic things we do all, all the time as an agency, Nick, is we at least quarterly and, and now I'd say you probably do this monthly, look at all your recurring expenses. What, what are, what are we paying for? What tools, what softwares, what are we paying for that we're not using? And we see this a lot where maybe you're like, oh wait, we're paying for three multi-touch attribution tools, right? We're paying for these two tools and those reporting, we don't, we don't need all that, right? And so what can we cut to get lean and mean? Because really I think right now we're kind of fighting and scrapping for every point, every point of profit that we can get. And so looking to cut expenses, cut software costs, cut, cut opex, things like that. What are the tips or insights you have on, on cost cutting? Nick,

- It is funny for that. That's one thing I don't recommend automating it is going over your p and l. Yeah. Like, yeah, QuickBooks could automate for you and shove into the different categories, but even for my own personal finances on Sundays, I sit down and I go look at every line item. And if I have a, a late fee for my gym, 'cause I missed a class, I punch myself in the arm for that $15 feed. I they hit you with

- Your wife's like Nick pushups right now.

- They, they get you with those cancellations. But looking at like cost cutting as a whole, get aligned with your inventory forecasting, sit on the extra inventory might have been a nice safe play and good to have in the future. And what if sales just spike up outta nowhere? Then I have the inventory for it. But really start to figure out how much you are selling through on a 30, 60 day basis. How much you need to be ordering so you're not running out of product. And then start saving some costs. 'cause you don't have a bunch of debt inventory sitting there in some kind of three pl

- Love it man. And this is also the time of you looking at your three pl. How can we cut costs there? How can we renegotiate? How can we lower shipping costs? Obviously talking to your factory, to your, your factory, to the manufacturers you work with. How can we extend terms, how can we maybe share in some of the price increases? So get creative there and, and really just look for any way that you can save and partner. Really nothing should be off the table because every point of margin matters at this point. And, and you know, another, another thing we recommend on the, on the Amazon side, we got a couple services we recommend where they will go and help you recover fees from Amazon because there's probably some fees you've been charged that you can get a refund on for a variety of reasons. But often that amounts to 1000, 5,000, $10,000 a month type of thing in, in recouped fees. So now is the time to look at everything like that as well. Try to save as much as you can without reducing product quality and without taking your foot off the gas pedal because you want to still be gaining market share and growing through this time. Now another thing we, we talked about Nick, as you know, hey, now's the time to lean into email marketing. So what are some creative things we can do to make our email marketing better that's going to lift sales, lift profits. What can we do right now?

- I really like leaning into the brand's tone and the brand's voice. And just remember that you're talking to other people on the other side of this transaction email or SMSI can see a lot of brands kind of just sending out this one way informational bit. One account I was auditing earlier today, a text, it was just super scientific, followed by read the blog post here. I'm like, do you think your customers really want to get this text and will it make them feel special like that the blog post? Like, come on, figure out a new way to phrase that and relate to your customers and work on your tone. You know, general population probably a little bit stressed out now as well. So connect with them on a personal level that'll make them feel more connected to your brand. And a great way to do this is just, you know, asking questions and having a real conversation with them. Especially if it's your top a hundred, 300, 500 customers. I always recommend sending out a question type email campaign to get those replies to help with deliverability and to boost your results in the future. But for now, if you don't have like the customer service backend to deal with a thousand replies, start with your top a hundred, 300 customers and figure out what question you wanna ask them and actually relate to them and have that back and forth conversation. And it's more likely could get you some referrals in the future when they send people your

- Way's. Really great. And you know, one of the other things I'll mention an idea that we actually, we did this a couple years ago for another client where they were about to raise their prices. They had not raised prices in quite some time and so they emailed their entire list. I think they started with our VIPs and then they emailed everybody, but they said, Hey, you know, we're raising our prices on this date, here's why. And I, and I think it's another way where email gives you the, the freedom to do this. You just explain this to your customers that hey, our cost of goods are going up 50% right now, so we're not raising our prices 50%, we're raising our prices 10% or whatever the case may be. But here's why we have to do a price increase. We just, we have to, right? But here's what we wanna do for you because you're a valued customer locking in the existing price through this date. And what's interesting about that is it, it's basically a sale. It's not a sale. 'cause you're not discounting, you're just saying we're about to raise our prices, but you can order right now. Now obviously there are a few things you gotta keep in mind there. If you're low on inventory, you can't do it if, if you're, you know, inventory forecasting is not precise right now you can't do it. But if all those things are good and you wanna raise a little bit of cash right now to kind of help weather the storm, it's a great way to do a quote unquote sale without doing a discount.

- Especially if you have a subscription based business. Hey, you know, subscribe now to get 10% off for every order moving forward. Yes. And that'll give 'em reason to not cancel in the future because we'll see those new price increases. Oh, if I cancel then I gotta come back into this new higher

- Rate. Yeah. And maybe, maybe make that offer just for subscriptions only. We're like, hey, we're about to raise prices, but not only are we not raising prices on our existing subscriptions, we're on this current discount. So get locked in now so that you don't have to worry about it later. And, and yeah, that creates predictable, consistent revenue, which is worth it in the long run. So Nick Flint, any, any final thoughts? How do we protect profits, cut costs? How do we find ways to win right now?

- Yeah, closing out in less than a minute here, focus on what's working for your business right now. Probably don't use this time to test out a ton of new things that are gonna cost you a lot of money. So focus on what's working for you. Communicate with your customers openly and like a human, actually connect with them. Look at all of your costs. And then lastly, consult an actual tariff lawyer. You know, yes, before you do something silly, like try to backend this secret deal with your manufacturer where they put it as half the cost when it comes overseas and you're gonna get audited and probably sent to prison, dodge all that by talking to an actual professional. 'cause it's hard to sell products when you're in a jail cell.

- Yeah, yeah. That, that cut in profits, reduce profits much easier to tolerate than prison foods. So I I like that. That's really, really sound advice, Nick. I appreciate that. And, and just final thought as we wrap up here is that even in the midst of tariff craziness and, and the way this all will, will shake out and likely change a million times here in the, in the coming months, there's always, always, always a path forward. There's always a way to win, there's always a way to grow, there's always a way to gain new customers. And so that's why we wanna bring you solutions. And so with that, we'll wish you good luck. Thank you Nick, for joining us and until next time,

- See you then.

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This is a recent recording from my appearance on Jordan West's podcast. There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the incrementally of YouTube after Haus Analytics revealed a groundbreaking report from 190 incrementally tests involving YouTube (link: https://www.haus.io/blog/do-youtube-ads-perform-lessons-from-190-incrementality-tests).

On this episode I share eye-opening case studies demonstrating how YouTube drives significant incremental growth - even when traditional attribution models fail to capture it. If you've been skeptical about YouTube's effectiveness or struggled to measure its impact, this conversation reveals why it might be the missing piece in your marketing strategy and how to approach it correctly.

Key Takeaways:

-Beyond Last-Click Attribution: Discover why obsessing over ROAS metrics can be misleading, and how YouTube drives significant business impact that often isn't captured in traditional attribution models but shows up dramatically in incrementality testing.

-The Real-World Proof: Brett shares compelling case studies, including a brand that saw Amazon sales cut in half when YouTube ads were paused, and another that achieved a 12-25% lift in Walmart store sales through targeted YouTube campaigns.

-The Anatomy of High-Converting YouTube Ads: Learn the essential elements of effective YouTube ads, including how to craft the perfect hook in the first 5 seconds, the importance of standard and "over-the-top" product demonstrations, and why 45-90 second videos often outperform shorter cuts.

-Production Value Matters: Unlike TikTok, YouTube requires slightly higher production quality (though not Super Bowl commercial level) - Brett explains the right balance and why combining polished footage with authentic UGC can be particularly powerful.

-Testing & Measurement Strategies: Get practical advice on how to properly measure YouTube's impact through geo tests, holdouts, search lift studies, and why tracking your overall MER (Media Efficiency Ratio) might be the simplest yet most effective approach.

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Brett Curry:

This is like TV advertising for our generation, but way better than TV advertising could ever be. Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today is a unique episode. This is actually a recording that I did. I was a guest on my buddy Jordan West's podcast and we dove into YouTube. Now, Jordan West is a pro. He is a master of TikTok shops. He's built multiple brands, and his podcast is the secrets to scaling your E-Commerce brand. And we talked all about YouTube. Now, the reason we dove into this episode right now, this is coming off the heels of really a groundbreaking research piece or research project that was released by House Analytics, HAUS. Olivia Corey and team there have done some brilliant work all around the idea and the practice of measuring incrementality.

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Brett Curry:

We're seeing the true impact of channels. And so they tested, they did 190 incrementality tests that involved YouTube with 74 brands, and the results were mind blowing. She was on a podcast with Andrew Ferris Albe on that podcast soon as well. But the idea here is that YouTube severely underreport or Google Ads severely underreport, the actual impact the YouTube ads has to the tune of about 70% underreporting. Or another way to look at that. The reverse is it's about 3.42 x more incremental than what you see there. So if you're seeing a one row as an example in platform, the actual impact is probably a 3.42 x ROAS or 3.42 roas, which is amazing. And so in this podcast, Jordan asked me about our experiences as an agency. We're known as one of the top YouTube ad agencies for D two C brands. So tell lots of stories, lots of examples on the creative side, on the measurement side ways we've used YouTube to grow retail sales, omnichannel sales, I think it's going to be informative, instructive, and hopefully fun. So with that, please enjoy the interview that I did with Jordan West YouTube ads.

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Jordan West:

Hey guys, Jordan West back here Today. I am so excited about this podcast episode. I have one of the experts in the space in the YouTube space that is Brett Curry on the podcast for I believe a second time, maybe even third time. Brett, welcome back to the show.

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Brett Curry:

Yeah, Jordan Min awesome to be here. It is for sure, at least the second time. And maybe the third, I'm not sure, but let's make this the best one yet. That'll be our goal.

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Jordan West:

I was so happy when you reached showed to me, I'm like, yes, I want to. I was really hoping we were going to talk about YouTube. I just said, Brett Ray showed. I'm like, I will have him on the podcast. I have no doubt that there's going to be tons of value here. So really looking forward to this. Brett, before we begin and really dive in, tell for people who dunno anything about you, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do. Totally.

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Brett Curry:

So I'm the CEO co-founder of OMG Commerce. We are a performance digital marketing agency. We focus primarily on D two c e-commerce and omnichannel retail brands, specialty with YouTube ads as we'll talk about today. But also all things Google. We lean into meta. We're full service on Amazon and we do retention marketing as well. So email and SMS, but I'm just passionate about marketing that works and marketing that builds a brand and also drives bottom line impact. So got team of about 40. We've been doing this since 2010, won some cool awards, been featured with some Google case studies and some other fun stuff. But at my core, I'm a marketing and business junkie, and so thrilled to be talking with you today.

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Jordan West:

Awesome, awesome. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think one of the interesting things that you and I were touching on before we actually pressed record here was this idea around trying to measure incrementality of some of these channels that are really hard to measure. So for me, everyone knows I've gone super hard on TikTok this year. I think the reason why TikTok shop was so interesting to me is that we always knew TikTok was driving business results.

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Brett Curry:

Yes. But

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Jordan West:

No one could ever tell you that there was no measure, couldn't

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Brett Curry:

Measure it,

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Jordan West:

Right? Because it just doesn't work like that on TikTok. It's not a direct response channel. In the same way now TikTok shop is right. Shop has changed all of that, and we have this nice closed ecosystem that you can measure, but I talk about this halo off of TikTok shop the entire time. But interestingly, YouTube is such a similar channel to me where it's like how many times do I, am I watching something on YouTube? I see an ad and I'm like, yeah, I should go buy that product. I totally forgot about that. I never in my life have ever clicked from a YouTube ad over into buy a product, never once because I'm watching something, but it's there with me. It's the TV of 2025.

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Brett Curry:

Exactly.

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Jordan West:

Yeah. And

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Brett Curry:

It's so interesting.

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Jordan West:

Walk me through this. What are your thoughts? Why are you still in the YouTube game and how do you continue to scale?

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Brett Curry:

I don't like to do anything the easy way. Apparently. I like to get beat up on a daily basis. So leaning into YouTube, it's a bit of a battle. A lot of people have rid off YouTube as a viable channel for growing their business. A lot of people opt to just pour all their dollars back into meta and hey, I'm a believer in meta ads. We spend on meta, even as an agency, of course, not just for our clients, but for omg, but for

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Jordan West:

Yourselves, of course,

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Brett Curry:

YouTube is so unique, and I love the way you framed it, and I fully agree with this statement. This is TV advertising for our generation, but way better than TV advertising could ever be. And I'll kind of set this up a little bit. So I got my start when I was in college in the early two thousands. I worked at a radio station and they got involved in some TV and stuff, but I just remember talking to local retailers, local furniture stores, local car dealerships, local restaurants, and they would tell me things like when we advertise on radio, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, I don't know. But when I run TV ads, people come in and people mention it, and they couldn't directly attribute, but they could feel it and they could see it. When the TV ads were on, people were coming in, right?

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Brett Curry:

That's incrementality. You shut TV off. That business goes away. And so that's what YouTube is now, and we've all just gotten addicted to last click or multitouch attribution models where we want to see the click. We want to see the evidence that this ad led to this sale or this result. Ultimately, I think we were all coming to that. We've kind of come full circle. It was like, oh, offline is so difficult. You can't measure it. Online is magical. You can measure everything. To always we're measuring online is really shortsighted and maybe not very helpful. We want to just as an example, lean in fully to roas. Well, if you want to maximize roas, just run branded search. That's the maximum

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Jordan West:

ROAS course. Of course. And then try scaling in.

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Jordan West:

Yeah, right. This is the hilarious thing. It is funny. I've been trying to lean in on how, for me, I owned a bunch of brands over the years and trying to lean in on how I can help e-comm brand owners, especially the smaller ones that we don't work with anymore. I'm trying to figure out, I'm like, how do I help you guys that are listening to this podcast? A lot of you guys are listening to this podcast, and profitability is an interesting thing. We've been obsessed with these marketing metrics that just don't matter What we see in branded search, what we see in most people running Facebook ads on bottom of funnel. I'm like, good. You think that looks good? Who cares? It doesn't do anything for your business. It's not going to make you profitable at the end of the day. This is something I obsessed with

‍

Brett Curry:

It off up, probably no negative impact to your business. Shut that off. You'll probably get all the sales. You're currently kidding.

‍

Jordan West:

Totally, totally. Exactly. YouTube again, I was telling you about a funny little small case study and from a colleague of yours that's running this ad accountant, it's us spending a ton, I think it's 20 or 30 KA month right now, but I will tell you it as we scale it up, right on platform, it's showing about a one return on ad spend. So normally you'd say, let's turn that off, right? Yeah. Well, when we turn that off, everything dies. There's no business. So that's number one. Number two, the MER is about 3.5, so I'm not dumb. I know something's happening there. So that's my sort of look at all of this of like, wait, we've got to get out of this granularity that we think that we know how a customer journey works. Come on. We'll never know how a customer journey exactly works.

‍

Brett Curry:

Customers don't know how their customer journey works. They don't know they're, they're seeing things and reacting and then reacting again. And they probably couldn't even stitch together their buying journey. So what makes you think you'll nail that with 100% accuracy? You just won't.

‍

Jordan West:

So tell me what you guys do. You've been all in on YouTube since I've known you. You're the YouTube guy, Brett.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah. I mean, this is what we're known for. A lot of big brands come to us because we've cracked the code, so to speak, on how to make YouTube ads work. And the good news is, while it's not measurable in the same way that meta ads are, or in the same way that search or shopping ads are, you can measure it. You've just got to work a little bit harder. You got to kind of triangulate the truth a little bit, but you nailed it earlier, Jordan, when you said, I've never clicked on a YouTube ad, right? YouTube is the TV of our generation. Nobody clicks on their tv. So you just use that as your comparison. And actually this is interesting. Over 50% of views now, and I've seen numbers show as much as 60% of all views on YouTube, just the YouTube app are on TV screens. It's the fastest growing platform or fastest growing screen for YouTube consumption. Yes, there's the option to send a phone or you can scan a QR code on those YouTube ads that appear on a smart TV or a connected tv. But that's so rare that usually you're doing something on YouTube, you're probably not going to do those things. And so it's just people don't interact with YouTube the way they do, even Facebook or TikTok. And so you have, I want to give you that at a core level. Yeah, go ahead.

‍

Jordan West:

I just want to give everybody a fun anecdote here. So my kids watch a lot of YouTube. They've got the few creators that they love. My daughters love Mariah Elizabeth, she does all these crafts and stuff, and then obviously Mr. Beast, right? Everyone, Mr. Beast,

‍

Brett Curry:

Mr. Beast. Beast. Yep. He's the best.

‍

Jordan West:

And there's these massively long YouTube ads in between, right? There's like 62nd. My kids recently came to me and they said, dad, I hope in the next election, now remember I'm Canadian and we are now going, right, of course. Just like everyone's making the swings. And so they come up to me and they're like, dad, I really hope in the next election that you're going to be voting for Pierre Polly because his tax plan seems really good. Remember this is 11 and 9-year-old. I've heard a lot of things about what he said, and I'm like, don't ever tell me YouTube ads don't work because exactly. You

‍

Brett Curry:

Have to be watching them, dude, that is so good. And I remember as a kid, for me, and this still was stuck in my brain and probably meant that I was destined for a career in advertising. I remember trying to convince my parents to buy Ginsu knives because I saw these great commercials and I'm like, guys, you don't understand. You can cut through a can of Pepsi and then you can cut a tomato without sharpening. And I'm just regurgitating the ad, but it's such a good example. So yeah, your kids are now a spokesperson for political qualities.

‍

Jordan West:

Exactly. Exactly.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's such a good story. Anything.

‍

Jordan West:

So what's funny is that this is years ago, I think this is 2018, maybe 2017 or 2018, somewhere around there. And we just had this little tiny agency at the time. Now we're kind of similar to your guys' size. I was actually just looking around 40 right now,

‍

Brett Curry:

And

‍

Jordan West:

I think there was three of us at the time, and my accountant decided to run for mayor, and I thought to myself, well, what's the best way that I can get him seen by everybody in the city that we live in? Abbotsford, it's called. It's like, how can I get him seen? And I was like, I think I'm just going to go to YouTube. And so I've made these really long videos of him. Remember he was a candidate that nobody knew. He ended up getting second place and getting about, I think it was somewhere around like 30% of the vote. And I was like, whoa. And even more, we have this meme account on Instagram called Asford Memes, and one of the posts on there was about his YouTube videos being everywhere. And I was like, crazy. Yes, this works. I wish I would've just tripled down on that.

‍

Brett Curry:

No doubt. No doubt. Yeah. Last kind of little anecdote that's related to this part of what we're talking about. We have an appliance store client, someone that I've known a long time there. They've got locations here in Springfield in Missouri where I'm based, but all over Oklahoma and stuff. So we've been talking to them for a long time about, Hey, give us a little bit of your TV budget, because they spent a lot on tv, sell appliances, give us a little bit for YouTube because we were running all their Google search ads and stuff like that. And so they finally gave us a budget, not a ton of budget, but some for a few key markets for one of their appliance chains. And they just came back to us and they said, guys in Q1 so far of this year, these stores are up 35% over last year. One of their other chains is flat, basically. And they're like,

‍

Jordan West:

Interesting. So you got to have a case study,

‍

Brett Curry:

A case study. Yeah. So I don't know if they want anything released publicly. So I've got a few case studies I can get into in detail with you, please. Yeah. Yeah, 35% over other stores. And the only thing they changed was taking some TV budget, putting it onto YouTube, and voila, they got more gross.

‍

Jordan West:

I mean, this is the thing that we've talked, and we've talked about this. It's funny because I'm on TikTok land over here and you're over in YouTube land, and these are the two things that nobody on Twitter really ever talks about because they can't measure them, and yet we all know that they drive both of these, drive this massive halo. Right? There is, I'm sure we'll talk in very generalizations here, but I was talking to a guy the other day who happens to do some advertising for one of the biggest supplement companies on Amazon, and they're the biggest supplement company right now on, or one of them out on TikTok shop. Their Amazon business has doubled this year with no more Amazon spend. All I'm saying is we've got, if you guys are going to get anything from this episode, just remember that in the meme curve, the person that is obsessed with Triple Whale is not the one at this end of the curve, right? Yep, yep. If you're obsessively looking at your numbers like that, that's not how you run a business.

‍

Brett Curry:

Totally.

‍

Jordan West:

That's not how you do it.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah. So true. So let me give you a couple of examples, a couple of additional examples, and then we may want to talk through too at some point. When does it make sense to start testing YouTube ads? When are you maybe not ready to test on YouTube ads? Because I will say, even though I am a believer in YouTube ads, I talk about it all the time. I speak on stages. I get invited to YouTube offices a couple times a year to teach brands how to do this. It's not for everybody, and it's not the place to start if you're a young brand, probably so happy to talk through that. But one case study that I think is really interesting, so this was a brand we worked with a number of years ago. It's a haircare product for women with thinning hair, and this actually works so well that now the founder, he sold the business and now he's a partner in OMG, which is kind of a cool fun first.

‍

Jordan West:

That's so fun.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So with Kiran, they were doing a lot with direct response tv, doing a lot with Meta and a few other channels, but they could not get YouTube to work. They tried it, tried and failed a number of times. So we came in, we remapped the campaign strategy, we tweaked their creatives because the creative were powerful, but they weren't quite built for YouTube, so we redid the creatives.

‍

Jordan West:

Are we going to get into that? Because I think that's an interesting thing to get into is what makes a YouTube creative amazing. Sure.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah. So we can kind of dig into our formula guidelines there on creative, but we tweaked the creative, we redid the campaigns. We focused on who we're going to target on YouTube because targeting is so important on YouTube, we went from zero to a million dollars in spend on YouTube and under 90 days while hitting their target CPA. So this was direct response, applicable sales. Wow. They had a high CPA ceiling, they had a landing page that converted really well. They had a great product. They had a high take rate on subscriptions so they could pay a lot for new customers. So it all worked, but that was just purely D two C. Now, what we found then is as we started doing that for months and months and months, we were asked to help them with their Amazon business, and they were like, Amazon's really taken off. Amazon is going like gangbusters. And so we started helping them grow on Amazon. We do full Amazon channel management. Well, we hit a patch where we had to pause YouTube ads for a bit due to some internal tracking and a couple of the things you had to pause it for a bit.

‍

Jordan West:

Oh, my favorite kind of AB tests where it's like, yeah,

‍

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

‍

Jordan West:

I was forced to do this. The credit card bounced and I didn't see it for seven days. The best tests.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It wasn't a credit card best, but they had to pause for a bit right when they did, because we had full visibility into Amazon, we were managing Amazon branded search cut in half, cut in half when we had to pause YouTube. Then we got YouTube back and they were rock and rolling again before long, but we were like, holy crap, that's pretty crazy. So basically we came to the conclusion that it was about a one-to-one ratio for every conversion. We saw D two C, we were getting at least one on Amazon, and one of the data scientists on the team was like, it might be two. It might be two to one for every one you're getting D two C, you might be getting two on Amazon. And so it's one of these things where were they in retail as well that were they in retail as well? They were not in retail. Now I've got another case that I talk about that there was fully retail in Walmart stores. That's incredibly fascinating. But this brand, no, they were multi-channel. So they were D two C plus Amazon plus a few other marketplaces. They were not in stores at that time.

‍

Jordan West:

Okay, okay. Insane. And also I think that we all brand people who have been in this game for a while are those things you do that you can't measure

‍

Brett Curry:

That

‍

Jordan West:

Is the right thing to do and actually drives the top of funnel business, but then you're convinced by somebody, maybe it's a new CMO, maybe it's a new somebody who comes into the space, maybe it's just a viral tweet on Twitter or on whatever we call that thing now that just shouldn't have gone viral because it was wrong. You must measure everything. I only scale things that are measurable. And then you're like, oh, okay, well I'm going to turn this thing off and then your business tanks.

‍

Brett Curry:

And I think it's important. We're certainly not making the case to measure less and we're not making the case to pay attention to your numbers. It's just that not everything can be measured the same way. I heard this, some of my team made this analogy one time. They were like, Hey, think about a light switch. You flip a switch and the result you don't see on the light switch, the result is over here with the light. I was like, this is a pretty good analogy where that's a really good analogy, Brett, like YouTube, you're running YouTube, you're doing this thing right here. The results are over here. You see the results over here, they're there. You've just got to look for them. And measuring them is harder. So I don't think you should measure less. I think you should measure more. I just think you should understand that ROAS is a bad metric overall if that's all you're looking at and the whole picture, understanding incrementality and real growth and real impact. It takes some work. It takes some work to measure it. So you got to look at everything. I can also show you a case study that might be helpful. It's from RTIC coolers, so coolers and drinkware, a Yeti competitors. Happy to dive into that or I think you may have had a question right there.

‍

Jordan West:

I do have a question I have to put in the middle here, Brad, I'm so sorry. But how are tools like Prescient and mms, do you trust them? Do you think that they are telling the full story? Do we need to move from an MTA model into an mm M model? Just what do you think about that?

‍

Brett Curry:

It's a great question. So I think there's a couple things at play here. I still like MTA tools. I think they serve a purpose. We have clients who use North Beam clients who use triple whale. I like them. I think we can gain some insights there. They got different models you can kind of play with. And so it can give some insights. Certainly, I do tend to think that an incrementality test plus an MMM type of approach is probably a little bit better. I would lean that way. But I think you can also do things like, hey, if you can track in platform performance and you can do things like incrementality tests on your own, which you can do that. You can set up geo tests, geo holdouts and things like that.

‍

Jordan West:

Totally just do holdouts, right? It's that simple. Just do a geo. Let's say New York and California are bringing you basically the same. That's right. California and Texas, just because they're similar and similar populations. If they're doing that, you can just hold out Texas and then you can know measure the impact. There's the

‍

Brett Curry:

Impact. And so there's also, there's some tools that Google can help you with. They'll do things like search lift studies, they do conversion lift studies, which basically is a way for them to do their own kind of holdouts and tell you the incrementality of a particular campaign type. Quite useful. So I think that can kind of get you on the right track. And I do think one of the best numbers, the best metrics, which you really don't need any fancy tool for is mer, right? Look at your total media efficiency ratio and watch how that fluctuates as you lean into one channel over another. Hey, when I really lean into YouTube for a couple of months, my MER improves and my top line grows. That sometimes simple is all you need, but you've got to be looking in the right places. I love MMM. I've not used prescient, but I've heard good things about them. But I do think the world is probably shifting more to MMM and incrementality tests and less towards MTA.

‍

Jordan West:

Yeah, yeah. MTAI think was something that we brought in when we needed it, right? And especially post iOS 14.5.

‍

Brett Curry:

Solve some real problems there for a bit. Yeah, for sure.

‍

Jordan West:

Absolutely. So Brett, I want to get into your case study and then after your case study, I want to hear your, so guys, stick around because Brett is going to break down what makes a perfect YouTube ad.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So excited about that. I guess about a year ago I was speaking at the YouTube offices in Los Angeles teaching a group of brands how to grow on YouTube. Met the folks from RTIC, which I was not that familiar with that brand prior to that point, but RTIC is, they sell wheeled coolers like indestructible, the best cooler I've ever had. They're direct competitor to Yeti. I think they're better and they're less expensive. They also sell drinkware. And I'm a big Tumblr fan. I drink a lot of coffee. Jordan, are you a coffee drinkers? Well, Jordan,

‍

Jordan West:

I drink a cup or two a day. My son got me this cup here. I dunno, like a liter basically.

‍

Brett Curry:

It's kind of cool. Yeah, love coffee. I go to bed singing about right as some of them big fan. But RTIC has drinkware that is ceramic lined. One pet peeve, and this is going to show that I'm a little bit of a snob when it comes to drink beverages. If you drink out of a metal Tumblr, it smells and tastes a little bit like steel, right? Almost like you have blood in your mouth, a little bit of that, right? The ceramic lining completely takes that away. It tastes like you're drinking out of your favorite ceramic mug or whatever. It's brilliant. Anyway, met RTIC. They were like, Hey, we want to get YouTube to work for us, and here is our hypothesis. Can you help us prove it? We want to see if YouTube will drive in-store sales. They were just put into all Walmart stores are almost all Walmart stores nationwide.

‍

Brett Curry:

They wanted to know if we ran some targeted YouTube tests, can we see a measurable lift in Walmart sales? And so we said, we love this idea. They had great creatives. We coached them a little bit and helped them with their creatives, which we'll get into more in a minute. But here's what we did. We basically did some studies with the help of Google to find what cities had really high category demand, meaning people looking for coolers and wield coolers, but then had varying ingredients of demand for RTIC. And this was all based on Google's search behavior. So we mapped out and we said, okay, let's do a test. Let's choose 19 markets that we think are poised for growth, got good store count, good inventory levels, things like that. Let's match those with 19 control markets that are basically the same size and same everything. And we're going to spend YouTube dollars in the test markets and we're going to hold out and the control markets, we're going to do that for five. And

‍

Jordan West:

There was Walmarts in all. Walmarts

‍

Brett Curry:

In all of them. Yeah, exactly. So then we could do, so it's a mashed pair holdout type study. So we lean in hard and we used all of our resources to build out the right campaigns and maximize views, and we did lean in heavily to connected tv. So that was a great placement for these ads. And we measured on YouTube. On YouTube. All YouTube's connected like YouTube's TV placements. Exactly.

‍

Jordan West:

This is now

‍

Brett Curry:

YouTube tv. A lot of people ask about that. I'm a subscriber to YouTube tv. It's a good cable replacement. That's a separate inventory though. It's powerful, but it's actually a pretty small percentage of YouTube views. And if you buy YouTube ads in the platform, like in the Google Ads platform, you're going to be on traditional YouTube. But here's one really crazy side note that ties into this. More people stream YouTube on connected TVs. So the good old fashioned YouTube app on connected TVs that stream any other platform. So YouTube, I

‍

Jordan West:

Do not doubt that even for a second,

‍

Brett Curry:

Bigger than Netflix, bigger than Hulu, bigger than Disney plus, it's bigger than Hulu. Disney Plus and a few others combined. It's bigger than Netflix, but not that dramatically. So we leaned in heavily to connect to TVs. There's so much inventory, there's so much. The inventory is insane. So many people aren't advertising here because they don't get it and they don't understand it. And so CPMs are pretty low compared to men and other places. A lot of opportunity here. So we did this five week test and we measured it all along the way. We did see Lyft and D two C, so we were able to measure those and track those. All the ads said, go to Walmart, go buy this at your local Walmart. You could click to find a local store through Google tracked people that visited stores. All of this was all about local, but we did see some D two C sales, right? Some people were just like, of course I'll buy it

‍

Jordan West:

Online course. No, I want to buy it now.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I want to buy it now. I want to buy it online. We saw Lyft on Amazon because a lot of people were like, yeah, I want to buy it now, but I don't want to buy it from your store. I want to buy it on Amazon because that's my favorite. So we saw that. But here's what we saw inside a Walmart stores. We had three different groups of markets. The worst performing group saw a 12% retail store lift in comparison of the test markets to the control markets, test markets 12% high degree of confidence lift over their control markets were very similar in size and nature and all that stuff. The best group was 25% lift over the control market. So basically they were like, holy crap, this is great. Let's do more of this. It actually lets us run a whole bunch of, or getting more of their business.

‍

Brett Curry:

Google was like, Hey, we got an agency excellence award for it. We really leaned into this more in the process too. We also did what's called the search lift study where Google can look at, hey, people that saw your ad versus people that didn't see your ad, what kind of impact does that have on people searching for your brand? So we saw a 241% lift in branded searches from this ad campaign, and this is where it's like, okay, you've got to kind of look at the holistic picture. And I will say, this is where YouTube really shines from omnichannel retailers. They can shine for multichannel retailers as well, but the results were stagger

‍

Jordan West:

Incredible. We don't have much time here. Brett, I want you to walk me through before you go, walk me through what the perfect YouTube ad looks like.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, there are a few elements and I've got a guide that we can mention that's free that walks through 17 of our favorite YouTube ads. It breaks down each one and shows. Great. We'll

‍

Jordan West:

Get that down in the show notes. And if you guys are watching this on YouTube, it'll be down in the description

‍

Brett Curry:

Below. Awesome. So the first thing, no surprise here probably, but you need a hook first. Five seconds is critical. People are, if it's a skippable ad, which is most of what we run, you got five seconds to really hook somebody. Some people are watching hovering with their finger of the mount over the skip button ready to click. So you got five seconds to convince them, Hey, wait a minute, check this out a little bit longer. So hook is important and what we say is you need to make sure you're hooking the right person. So don't come up with just some random hook explosion, something funny guy in a gorilla suit, something just wild. You want to interrupt the right person, right? So your ideal target, but then you want to up because you only pay based on

‍

Jordan West:

An actual view through. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you don't want the wrong, you basically want to be like, Hey, everyone else don't watch.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, you want the non-ideal shopper to skip because you only are paying for good views. And so you want someone to choose to watch your ad if they're in your market. So something to grab their intention, thought provoking question, a bold statement showing something right in their face. But it needs to be related to what you saw. So it needs to be related to the problem you're solving or the relief you're bringing or the enjoyment that your product is offering. So it's got to be relevant, a relevant interruption, a relevant hook to the right person. So the hook is critical. Next, if you're D two C, essentially most of our clients are retail in some way. It's got to be a product demonstration. You need to now show me the product in action. And Jordan, I like a typical demonstration. So what's the proper use case of this one? A good example is a flex seal, like the spray on thing to seal. If you have a leak, leak in your gutter or leak in a pot or whatever, you spray flex seal on your obsolete. So I like a standard use case demonstration. This is how you seal your gutters type of thing. But then I like an over the top demonstration. If you can throw that in there too. It's kind of like the, I dunno if you like the

‍

Jordan West:

Pepsi can thing you talked about before.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, exactly. So it's like the knife, the Ginsu knife commercial where they cut through the can or the old, old super glue commercial where they in one cut, put super glue in the bottom of a guy's shoe and stuck him to the ceiling, held it, and then he stayed there anyway. So show a dramatic product demonstration too, because you want them to see the standard demonstration and say, I could do that, right? But then they're also kind of skeptical. I like talk about Missouri, where I live is we're the show me state and our state animal is a mule. We're stubborn. We believe nothing. You got to show us before you believe us. Picture that your audience is from Missouri, right? You got to show them and they're going to be skeptical. Standard product demo and then over the top product demo. Then I like some social proof, so show me something that proves that other people like me love this product.

‍

Brett Curry:

So this can be reviews. So when we were doing stuff for native deodorant and we helped them really scale on YouTube, we said like, Hey, there was only over 50,005 star reviews. How could 50,000 people be wrong type of thing. So some kind of social proof. Then I like some kind of risk reversal or some kind of offer where it's like, hey, do this, try this, experience this. We'll take away the risk. And then a firm call to action. And so that call to action is, Hey, click here to learn more. Go to Amazon and buy it. Buy it from your favorite retailer. Something like that. So how

‍

Jordan West:

Professional does the filming need to be on YouTube? Again, I talk about TikTok all the time, right? It's the opposite, right? You don't want professional filming, it doesn't work. It's the antithesis. What about YouTube?

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's kind of the same with meta too. Sometimes it's the unpolished, the shot with the phone kind of raw candid stuff. It works on YouTube. You do need a little more polished. Think again about the frame that this is like TV and a lot of people are probably watching it on tv.

‍

Brett Curry:

A little more polished is important. Now we found that we've a lot of success with an ad that is professionally produced. You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on it, but you need good lighting and a good camera and good audio and things like that. But sometimes when you mix good production value with some raw stuff mixed in, so good high production value, then throw in some UGC either in the middle or at the end. That combination extremely powerful. Now we've also, we scaled this auto brand on YouTube a couple of years ago, and basically all they had was UGC, but it was really good UGC. And so we did UGC mashups, which just a whole bunch of customers showing their car, talking about why they love the product, things like that. But then we added some editing and some graphics and some transition that really made it look polished and that thing scaled like crazy.

‍

Brett Curry:

So it's definitely going to be higher production value than TikTok or Meta, but it does not have to be million dollar type of stuff that you see on Super Bowl commercials. You don't need that. And then I'll also say if you're running an ad on Instagram reels or on TikTok or TikTok shops, whatever, you can take that ad almost exactly how it is and run it on YouTube shorts. I will say though, I haven't seen as much results with YouTube shorts only as I have when you're kind of doing all of YouTube or you got YouTube shorts, you got YouTube on desktop and mobile and connected TVs, which takes all a little bit different format for each of those. That's when it really works. We've seen less of an impact when it's just YouTube shorts.

‍

Jordan West:

Last question, because I am late for a meeting.

‍

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

‍

Jordan West:

What length are we looking at here? Is there an ideal minimum length? And I am saying minimum because I understand that there probably is a minimum.

‍

Brett Curry:

There is. I prefer 45 seconds to three minutes as kind of an ideal length that if you could shoot for 90 seconds or 60 seconds, that's great. Ultimately it's got to check the box, it's got to hook somebody, it's got to be compelling, it's got to have the product demo and the social proof and the offer and all that. But usually if it's a little bit longer, the more you tell, the more you sell, right? The more you show, the more dough. I just made that on the spot. That's actually really lame. We've that are like 62nd cuts, outperform 32nd cuts when it's basically the same ad, just the 60 numbers, A 32nd, the 62nd does better with clicks and overall lift in sales. So generally speaking, we want to go kind of in that 45 to minute and a half range, but as much as three minutes can also work.

‍

Jordan West:

Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Where can people find out more about what you are up to and chat with OMG commerce?

‍

Brett Curry:

Absolutely. So omg commerce.com, click the Let's talk button and that's how you end up getting with our team. You can find my podcast there by clicking on resources. You can see the YouTube guide and up there as well. And then I'm active on LinkedIn, so hit me up on LinkedIn. Would love to connect to you. I do talk about all things D two C and retail and business and Google and Amazon and all kinds of stuff. So would love to connect on LinkedIn as well. Awesome. And

‍

Jordan West:

I'm looking forward to coming on your pod.

‍

Brett Curry:

It's going to be, let's do it, man. It's going to be a blast schedule talk TikTok shop. So I'm excited. Awesome. Well thanks again for your time today, Brett. Thanks Jordan. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear more from you. So let us know what topics would you like to cover on this pod. And if you know somebody that would benefit from this episode, please share it and leave us a review on iTunes. That would make our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

No one knows more about eCommerce growth than my friend Ezra Firestone. Arguably, no one is a more interesting interview than Ezra either. This episode does NOT disappoint. Ezra bootstrapped growth for Boom from $0 to $40mill + per year. He also recently bought another high-profile eComm brand (more on that in the show).This episode is straight fire. Here’s a look at what we dive into:

• How Ezra is approaching email marketing and email list growth in 2022. I’m guessing you’re missing his email strategy - even if you consider yourself an email marketing pro.
• How BOOM is approaching front-end offers.
• Why you should consider inventing a holiday and how BOOM has done that.
• Growing your SMS list.
• Plus MUCH, much more!

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Mentioned in this Episode:

Ezra Firestone

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

   - Twitter

   - Facebook

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

oVertone‍

Zipify Pages‍

Smart Marketer‍

Blue Ribbon Mastermind‍

Klaviyo‍

Postscript‍

Attentive‍

Dan Kennedy‍

Jay Abraham‍

Native Deodorant‍

Northbeam‍

John Grimshaw‍

Molly Pittman‍

Train My Traffic Person

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Transcript:

Brett Curry:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on what it takes to grow your business online. Season one is built on the old business adage that it really takes three things to succeed. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often.

Brett Curry:

Today, my guest is none other than the e-commerce legend himself, Ezra Firestone. If you're serious about growing your e-commerce business, then you have to pay attention to Ezra. And arguably, there's not a more interesting interview than Ezra Firestone. He bootstrapped Boom by Cindy Joseph from zero to now, $40 million a year in growth. He now owns and operates Overtone, a $25 million a year e-commerce brand. He also co-founded Zipify Pages, Smart Marketer, and he's the mastermind behind my favorite e-commerce mastermind, Blue Ribbon.

Brett Curry:

This is a wide ranging discussion. We talk about things like cold plunges and samurai swords. But yes of course, we spend most of our time talking about e-commerce growth strategies. We look at Ezra's really unique approach to email marketing, and how much of his ad budget he's dedicating to growing his email list. We also look at SMS marketing. And we look at how to invent a holiday, and what that looks like. And then we're also looking at how Boom is crafting and creating front end offers. You won't want to miss a minute of this show. I hope you enjoy my interview with Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability. All right, I am absolutely stoked out of my mind for this next guest, and personal friend of mine. We do some work together. I always count it a joy when I get to talk to this guest. And so, to have this uninterrupted time to dive in deep on strategies, it's going to be amazing, and I'm glad you get to listen in. And so if I look at, man, if you need tactics, if you need strategies, if you need help for how to take your e-commerce business to the next level, and if you need to get a little bit spicy, you need Ezra Firestone.

Brett Curry:

And so today I've got the man, the myth, the legend. He's flexing if you're watching the video. Got Ezra Firestone on the call. We're talking about eight top strategies to just blow up your business this year in a good way. We may not get to all eight, we'll see how it goes. But with that intro, Ezra, what's up, man? How you doing? And welcome to the show.

Ezra Firestone:

Brett, the Fury Curry, I'm fresh out of the cold plunge, dog. One minute, 30 seconds, 32 degrees. My whole body is red, I'm shivering, I'm shaking, we're podcasting. Happy to be here man, thanks.

Brett Curry:

It's hilarious. You hopped on the call and I was like, "Oh no, something's wrong with Ezra. He just doesn't look right." It's like, well, you just got out of a 32 degree bathtub. Of course, your body's in shock. But I appreciate taking the time to do this. And man, it's just always, always fun to chat.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, man. And just watching your journey, I seen you come up in the game from back in the day, when you had an SEO agency. You know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

From way back. I don't even know if it was 2008, 2009, it was a long time ago. 2010, whatever it was. And then to watch you rise to be one of the most prominent voices in the e-commerce world, and also to have a top 2% advertising agency, maybe you guys are top 1% at this point, I mean, you run all of our stuff. So it's been fun to watch your journey and just happy to be on the podcast.

Brett Curry:

Dude, thanks. It's been so fun to grow. I credit you and your community with a lot of that growth. And your approach to having fun, and doing what's right, and being extremely successful, and that blend, is awesome. Your motto, for those that don't know, is "Serve the world unselfishly and profit." And actually before we get into tactics and strategies for this year, and there's some amazing ones, can you talk a little bit about that for those that are new to the world of Ezra Firestone?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a description-

Brett Curry:

... Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's a description, not a statement. It's how I have seen things work. That when you are in a role of service, unselfishly with the goal of serving, you do profit by the very nature of serving. And it may not be monetarily. Maybe it's spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, energetically. But my goal is to serve. And I find joy in the act of service. I think there's a lot of value, and fun, and enjoyment, and good. And also in business, if you can truly serve a community, you will be profitable. And so I think that's just a description of how it goes. And also it's what I'm looking to do. I'm looking to serve the world unselfishly and also profit. I want to take care of my family. I want to take care of my community. I want to put resource towards causes in the world that I find noble. And I need fucking money to do that. Right?

Brett Curry:

Exactly. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And the way going to get that money is by helping a group of people out with solutions to problems they have.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, I love that. If you look at, what is leadership, what does it mean to lead a company or to be a CEO, it's really serving. Serving your team more than commanding and dictating.

Ezra Firestone:

100%.

Brett Curry:

And how do build a brand, how do you build a business? It's serving a community. It's serving the needs and meeting the needs of buyers. And so, yeah. I love it. So it's really, really just-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. And then just because you're serving a group, doesn't mean you can't sell them stuff.

Brett Curry:

Exactly.

Ezra Firestone:

Selling them stuff is also serving them.

Brett Curry:

Because people want to buy stuff, right?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

They want to have those needs met. And retail therapy is a thing too. So one of the greatest acts of service you can do, is sell a good product to the right person.

Ezra Firestone:

I'll tell you what dude. You and I both know that this last six months have been the most intense and stressful on the personal side of my life, with some health problems of some family members. And I done fucking discovered stress shopping, bro. I had never done that. I'm not a guy who buys shit that I just don't need or want. I'm willing to buy things. I have a lot of money, and I didn't come from money. I now have more money than basically everyone that I know, and I'm not against purchasing things. But I usually purchase things that I really like. I'll buy a nice espresso machine, or I'll buy a nice skateboard.

Brett Curry:

Which I've had espresso from that espresso machine. And you pull a mean shot of espresso, my friend.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. I will spend money happily on things that are enjoyable and that I will use, but I don't just buy frivolously, until now, dude. I bought six pairs of the same Chelsea boot. When I turned around, I was like, "What? I have lost my mind, dude." This is stress shopping.

Brett Curry:

Why did I buy this?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

I think one time I was on a call with you and you just recently bought like a samurai sword or something. I don't think it was actually a samurai sword, but it was some kind of sword.

Ezra Firestone:

A katana. Yeah, it was a Japanese katana. I use it to chop wood for my sweat lodge. So that was actually a useful tool. It's good for chopping kindling.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. That's awesome, man. Super fun. So people are buying right now. The economy's pretty hot, and certainly there are some issues too. But people are buying stuff. So let's dive in. You recently wrote a blog post, which I'm going to link to, so you can see this in the show notes, talking about eight top growth strategies. And first of all, for those that don't know the journey, talk about Boom by Cindy Joseph and how it's grown.

Ezra Firestone:

(singing)

Brett Curry:

Because you guys are set to do about 40 million this year, right?

Ezra Firestone:

So I started this brand in 2010. Took me to 2014 to make my first million dollar a year in total revenue. By 2016, I was doing 17 million. This last year, I did 42. This year I think I'll do 47. Top line revenue at about a 25% EBIDA margin, so maybe making six or 7 million a year in profit on that.

Brett Curry:

Which is amazing. Amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

I got about 30 employees at that company. I also own Zipify Apps, about a $10 million a year software company. Also a couple million bucks in profit on that, maybe about 60 employees there. And I just bought a company called Overtone Color, which has about 20 team members. It'll do about 25, 30 million this year. And I got Smart Marketer too. And I'm just a guy. I didn't go to college, I have no special skills, other than that I'm a good communicator and I'm willing to put my foot down and do the work, and ask for help when I need it. And I think my story shows that if... I'm a complete failure in the eyes of the school system. They labeled me a dumb kid, and someone who was not going to be successful. And I think for anybody who doesn't fit into the mold, who maybe is dyslexic, or maybe has some reason why the general society is telling them that they can't be successful, the internet opens up an opportunity for us.

Ezra Firestone:

And there's skills that we can develop. Advertising, direct response marketing, landing page optimization, copywriting, product development, podcasting, social media, that can support us in taking care of our families. And I didn't come from resource, and so I wanted to create that. And I've been able to, and I've been doing it now for 17 years. I got pretty fucking good at it. I made every mistake you could make. I didn't pay my taxes, I did all the stupid you can do. But I did it when I was younger, and earlier in my... And I didn't have podcasts like yours to learn from. I had a bunch of creepy dudes on an internet forum who were shilling fucking gambling and porn. That was when I got into the game.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Online marketing was a bit of a dark place back in those early days.

Ezra Firestone:

You didn't want to say you were an internet marketer. It wasn't good.

Brett Curry:

No, no, that was not prestigious. No one looked at that highly. For sure.

Ezra Firestone:

So yeah. So I've been doing it a long time now, I'm really good at it. And I've been talking about it since about 2011. I was one of the first people to start blogging about e-commerce. And by the very nature of being one of the first, I became popular. Not that I was anything special than anyone else, but I was the first to do it, and so I got real popular. And I've stayed in that space of documenting my journey. And I got a bunch of people who think it's cool, and follow what I do. And I'm pretty good at it, you know?

Brett Curry:

Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

And I've been able to successfully train and educate, and bring up in the game, thousands and thousands of internet entrepreneurs over the years. You being one of them who I've impacted.

Brett Curry:

Big time.

Ezra Firestone:

Not that I did anything for you, other than show you what I was doing. So yeah, so I like talking about this stuff.

Brett Curry:

It's been so amazing to watch that progression as well, and getting to see behind the scenes, seeing you operate with your team. So I've been to your house and I've hung out with the inner circle of Smart Marketer and Boom. And of course we were on calls, and our agency serves you and stuff. So I've seen you in a lot of different capacities. And man, you're the same leader behind the scenes as you are on stage. You care about people on stage or one on one. You're extremely smart and strategic, and you get marketing, and you understand human in nature, and you take massive action. All kinds of stuff we can break down. So it's been really fun to observe that and get the front row seat of that as well.

Ezra Firestone:

I can also do a cool poker chip trick. Look at this.

Brett Curry:

Is that right? Oh, look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Wait.

Brett Curry:

Look at that.

Ezra Firestone:

Hold on. Damn, that was not cool. I dropped it. Hold on.

Brett Curry:

We're going to try this again. So if you're listening, just take my word for it. He's a great poker chip-

Ezra Firestone:

My hands are frozen. My hands are frozen. We should probably get into tactics.

Brett Curry:

Do not attempt a poker chip trick out of a cold plunge.

Ezra Firestone:

People are going to be like, "Enough of this bullshit, dude. You should talk about some tactics." We should talk about some strategies.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So here we go. So let's dive in. One thing that we've seen you guys operate on, we're running this on YouTube for you, but you're buying more email leads. So talk about that. So this is top strategy number one, buying more email leads. What does that look like, and why?

Ezra Firestone:

Dude, nobody's talking about email. Everybody's like "SMS, video ads." This and that. Well guess what has always been since I've been in the game, about 25 to 40% of my business? Literally since '05, dude. Emails.

Brett Curry:

Email. Email.

Ezra Firestone:

I've been sending motherfucking emails since 2005. And it is to this day, it'll be 36% of Boom's total revenue this year.

Brett Curry:

It's crazy.

Ezra Firestone:

And nobody-

Brett Curry:

Email touches 36% of all purchases through Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, it's last click, dude. It's last click for 36% of my purchases.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

So why would I not be putting so much energy in growing that list? Nobody does it. Everybody just runs top of funnel video ads, conversion ads, and they hope that when somebody comes to their website, their onsite popup, or their card abandonment, or their exit intent, are going to capture the email lead for them. Great, do that. But also, you know what I'm doing? Gated content. I'm doing giveaways. I'm doing all kinds of different straight up lead generation campaigns. One of my best ones, is we use these things called pre-sell articles, which are basically articles that are story-based, like, "Five makeup tips for older women." Or "Seven makeup tips for women who wear glasses." Or "How to overcome perfectionism in your fifties." Or whatever kind of content that our community is interested in, that leads back to our products.

Ezra Firestone:

And we use those in our email auto responders, we run ads to them, we mail them to our email list. We use them everywhere. At every stage of the sales process. What we also do, is we gate them. So we put an opt-in front of it, and it says, "Hey, enter email address here to get our five makeup tips for women over 50." We run ads to that with a conversion objective for the lead event, the lead event fires on the thank you page. They enter their email address, guess where they get dropped? On the same pre-sell that I'm running at the top of the funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But now we have their email lead, and we put them on a automation sequence, to warm them up and try to sell them. And if they don't buy, we put them on our bucket list. I also run giveaways every six weeks. And basically those are my two main top of funnel lead gen strategies, is gated content and giveaways. But I'll do Facebook lives, and I'll do other things as well. But if you just do gated content and giveaways, you should spend about five to 10% of your total marketing budget on email lead generation. Because some people take a little longer to warm up than others. So if you're only running conversion ads, you're going to miss out on growing your audience in a way that could be beneficial for you.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. I love this so much, and it's something that we've observed you doing, and something we're talking about now with other clients. That, if you can grow that email list, and if you're properly running email marketing, you're going to be able to convert that at a really high rate. And so gated content, so information people want, and/or giveaways, great ways to drive that list. And I was looking through some of your notes here. Looks like over the last 12 months you spent about 200,000 buying email leads that have then generated 750,000 in sales. So about a 375% return on add spend. That's not bad. But that's not like-

Ezra Firestone:

And that's with excluding anybody who was already on the list, dude.

Brett Curry:

What's that?

Ezra Firestone:

That's with excluding anyone who was already on the list. So those are new leads.

Brett Curry:

Just strictly new leads. So that really changes the game, because you could be looking at those campaigns and thinking, "Well, I just drove an email sign up. I didn't make a sale there, so it's not really worth a whole lot." But then you've got to look at that whole picture. What did those email subscribers do for you over the next six to 12 months? And in your case, it's a 3.75 X ROAS, which is amazing.

Ezra Firestone:

Pretty sweet. I mean, not that everyone's going to have that result, but it's worth doing, still, nonetheless.

Brett Curry:

Exactly. So, all right, awesome. So strategy number one, buy more email leads. I'm sold on that idea. Idea number two, launch new products. So talk about how Boom is approaching launching new products.

Ezra Firestone:

So to have a successful e-commerce business, you have to get your repeat customer rate up. Ideally over 30% of total revenue comes from repeat customers, people who bought from you once before. The best way to do that is to sell them more of what they already bought, if it's consumable. Or to introduce new items that they might want from you. And by the way, if somebody knows you, likes you, trust you, you're putting out content, you're engaging them, you've delivered a good product, they're going to probably want to buy whatever else you have to offer if it's tangentially related to what they bought in the first place.

Ezra Firestone:

So what we do is we send a customer survey every six months to our two X buyers, and we give them a bunch of stuff, like "If we were going to add more colors, what colors do you want? If you could wave a magic wand, what products would you have us create?" We have a 20 question survey. We say, "Hey, five people who take this survey are going to win $100 gift certificate to the store". We get a couple thousand responses. Based on that, we figure out what products to make next, based on the desire of our community.

Brett Curry:

That creates your product roadmap.

Ezra Firestone:

As an example, 50% of people wanted a mascara, 46% of people wanted a lip gloss, and 53% of people wanted an additional color of Boomstick. We released all three of those products last year, based on that information. They were our three best product launches ever. We just released the Boomstick color last week, we sold 15,000 units in 18 hours. 650 grand in revenue in 18 hours.

Brett Curry:

Whoa. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again. You sold what?

Ezra Firestone:

We sold 15,000 units in 18 hours, dude. We sold out. 650 grand in 18 hours. Now of course I've got a mature company, but the point is that this process gets better over time. So when you're developing a new product, you're doing it in desire to your past customers, in relationship to their desire. And for us, you have componentry, formulation, and secondary packaging. So componentry is like, what is the component that it's going to go in? Well, the Boomstick, we already have that. That's great, we'll reuse the component we already have. The formula is, what is it going to be, why is it going to be that way, what are the benchmarks other brands are doing that we want to meet? We go through a bunch of iterations, we send it out to our best customers to test. It takes us about six months to a year to develop a formula.

Ezra Firestone:

And then our secondary packaging, is what is the box, what's the write alongs, what are the inserts? We get all that together, we run a photo shoot for it. And then we do an early bird. "Hey, we're going to launch this new product. This is what it is. Get excited, sign up for it to hear about it first." And then what happens is, as they're signing up, and as they're posting on social about it on the thread, we're finding out what they want to know. They're asking, "Is it hypoallergenic?" And we're like, "Oh shit, we don't have hypoallergenic on the sales page. It is hypo allergenic." So we add that to the sales page. The questions they ask, they become the FAQs that we put on the... So we use the pre-launch as a way to build out the marketing material. Build out the FAQ, build out the sales page.

Ezra Firestone:

And then we launch it, run ads to it, do emails to it. And then it becomes part of our ongoing marketing. Put it in bundles. And you can do this too with products you already have. So you can reformulate them to make them better than they already are. Based on feedback, you can change the componentry or packaging, make it more sustainable. You can bundle it with other items to make a kit. So you can renew and make better products you already have, and relaunch them, as well as introducing new items. But for us, we are aiming to introduce four new items a year, which is once a quarter, which is hard to do.

Brett Curry:

That's aggressive. That's one a quarter.

Ezra Firestone:

It's hard to do when you're making them all from scratch.

Brett Curry:

It's hard to do, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's a huge, huge part of the business. So yeah, it's really important to continually making the products better.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And it's interesting that it's also fairly risky, too, to launch a new product. Will it go well, will it not go well? But the approach you're taking, it really eliminates a lot of the risk. You know that if you deliver a good product, which you guys do, you know how to do that, you're delivering exactly what someone is requesting, and exactly what someone wants.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, and they also then can become a new top of funnel sales processes. So we can run top of funnel ads now. So for our mascara, I mean, that's our second best seller of all time, and we can run it at the top of the funnel because everybody's interested in mascara. And we didn't have one before. So we couldn't run ads for it at the top of the funnel. So we were missing a customer acquisition funnel there that we were able to add to the business.

Brett Curry:

Love it. And so then this actually directly ties into it. So this is strategy number three. Create more front end offers. So talk about that and how that's evolved for Boom, more front end offers.

Ezra Firestone:

I think that's mature business strategy. For Boom, we did 10 years where we had one front end offer, which was our Boomstick trio.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Boomstick.

Ezra Firestone:

And all of our social proof, all of our sales funnel optimization, all of our pre-sales, all of our video ads, all of our email sequences, everything was about that front end offer. Just make that as deep as possible. Have marketing assets for it, loyalty assets for it. Just really work on that and scale that. And that's a lot easier to go deep rather than wide. And a lot of people have a thousand skews, and they can't do that. Like with this product, this brand, I bought, Overtone, I got a hundred skews. So it's hard for me to have one front end funnel.

Ezra Firestone:

But for low skew e-commerce, it's easy. You just pick whatever your widest and best seller, and most relevant seller is, and just focus on that. But once you scale that, now you got to start introducing new front end offers. There's only so many people who are interested in a multipurpose blush stick. Some people aren't interested in blush, but they're interested in mascara, or lip gloss, or brow gel, or whatever. So we've now introduced a bunch more products to the... You're right, my voice is kind of frozen. It's funny, I sound like a frog.

Brett Curry:

You're good, dude. Hey, you're so you're bringing the fire, even though I'm feeling cold for you.

Ezra Firestone:

I usually have such a rich, deep voice, man. Anyways, it gives us the ability to have more fish hooks in the sea.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Love it. Love it. Let's go on to the next one, and this is related to number one, but this is now strategy number four.

Ezra Firestone:

By the way, another front end funnel is one of those lead gen funnels, too. Even if it's leading to the same product.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Ezra Firestone:

It's a new top of funnel way of getting people in the mix. That's a new funnel. It doesn't have to be a new product.

Brett Curry:

Totally. And so looking at that, and what we've observed, working with Boom, working with other successful brands, is that a lot of them have one to three really successful top end funnels that they just push hard on, almost forever. And then with some tweaking and changing, and then you've got all your backend stuff as well. So, yeah. Really, really good. So let's talk then about strategy number four, growing your SMS subscribers. So diving into text based marketing. So, tips or suggestions you would give there for growing that list and utilizing SMS?

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, the 80/20 of SMS is this. Have the collection at checkout, where you're collecting people who check out from you, who click the little box to be collected. And have a two step opt in. First, get the email, second, incentivize for the SMS. So they come to your site, you say, "Hey, get 10% off, entering your email address". They enter it. "Hey, by the way, do you want an extra 5%? Give us your SMS". Klaviyo lets you do this, Postscript lets you do this, Attentive lets you do this, et cetera. Those are your two main ways to collect. And that's 85, 90% of the value. You can do other shit to collect, but it's not worth it. Just do that. And then when you send an abandoned card email and they don't open after 18 hours, slide a text in there, via Klaviyo. So connect it to your email logic, and do your-

Brett Curry:

Is that usually the way you do it, where you'll email first? And then if there's no response there, then you text?

Ezra Firestone:

Always. Yeah, because SMS is more expensive. So we'll use it as a... And you can only do this if you're using Klaviyo, because it talks to it. You can't have Attentive in Klaviyo, because they don't talk to each other. So if you're using Klaviyo, Klaviyo's a little more expensive for SMS, but if you're doing it the way I do, it doesn't matter, because you're only using it as a... You know? You're using it as a way to capture the people who aren't responding to email. Instead of just blasting them with both, and spending the money for that. So, if they don't respond to the card email, we'll slide an SMS. If we go purchase email, they don't cross-sell, we'll slide an SMS. And then once a week, you broadcast your bucket list with a piece of content or a sale. That's it. That's all you need to do. Have an opt in pre purchase, have an opt in at checkout, use it in your automation sequences, do one broadcast a week, your solid potato salad, you have 85% of the value you can get from SMS.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. You really go beyond that, it's just going to be tiny little gains. And potentially a difference-

Ezra Firestone:

It's not worth it. It's not worth it.

Brett Curry:

Not worth it. Not worth the effort.

Ezra Firestone:

Just spend your energy acquiring more customers.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, totally. And so those weekly broadcast on SMS, are you doing a mix of promotions and content?

Ezra Firestone:

So those will be content. The best piece of content from the week will drop via the SMS. And then if we're running a sale, that week, we won't send content, we'll send about the sale.

Brett Curry:

And your best piece of content pulling from the way Boom is doing it, it's based on blog, is that right? So you're writing blogs weekly or something?

Ezra Firestone:

We send three pieces of content to our list every week. Maybe it's a long form article, maybe it's a user generated content video, maybe it's a recap from a Facebook live we did. Whatever. We're sending content every week, at least three pieces, long form written articles, videos, user generated content. We've got a whole social media content engagement system. And so whatever worked the best that week, we'll drop to the SMS list. And then every six-

Brett Curry:

Nice. So you're emailing that content initially. So you're emailing-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, we're emailing that, we're posting it to the blog, we're posting out to social, we're amplifying it. We're doing the whole system. And then the best shit, we drop to the list, which links over to the blog. And we drop to the SMS list. And then every six weeks we're running a product launch or a sale. So that sixth week will be a promotion via SMS.

Brett Curry:

Got it. And anything you can say about response rates, metrics? How is SMS working in comparison to email? I know it's just designed to be a compliment to email, but anything you can say about stats, performance?

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah, I mean, SMS gets better response rates, but you have smaller lists. And you get way more unsubscribes. So it's-

Brett Curry:

And you got to be really careful about spam related stuff.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

People get pretty hot on-

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot you got to worry about with that. But basically it works really well, and you should use it as a compliment, and not instead of... And you should do what I'm talking about, which is basically 80/20 it.

Brett Curry:

Not really standalone. You're not going to just be like, "Hey, SMS is my one strategy."

Ezra Firestone:

Some brands do. Some brands do. But I think if you ignore email, what are we doing?

Brett Curry:

Right. For most people, it's just a beautiful compliment, and a way to really increase the effectiveness of email. But it is a compliment. Awesome. So now we're going to move into strategy number five. I actually love this one. I love all of them, this is all gold. But this is something that was kind of an aha moment for me. I first heard about a strategy like this, it was made be Dan Kennedy back in the day, maybe Jay Abraham. I go way back, man, looking at marketing stuff. But you're talking about inventing a holiday. So there's this idea that people need a reason why. They need a reason why I should buy now, they need a reason why your product is better. And sometimes an invented holiday is a great reason why you should buy now. So, talk about invented holidays, and talk about what you're doing at Boom.

Ezra Firestone:

So excuses to communicate are important. And we take everyone we can. We communicate on Earth Day, we communicate on Animal Friendly Day, we communicate on National Dog Day. Because people like that kind of shit.

Brett Curry:

They do. People like it.

Ezra Firestone:

And everybody has a dog, and everybody likes the earth, and so on and so forth. And we do too. And so we are always doing emails like that. Like, "Hey, it's Earth Day. And you know what? We care a lot about sustainability. And these are our most sustainable products, for these reasons." And whatever. And so we're constantly mailing on using the fake or created holidays as a reason to communicate on social and on email. And so we made up our own. We made Pro-Age Month. We are the first people to say pro-age. Now it's a commonly known thing. Now you've got a million knock brands, but we spent 40 million over six years, popularizing the concept of pro-age, back in 2010. And now Allure is stealing it, and it's like we have penetrated the mainstream with this.

Brett Curry:

It's awesome.

Ezra Firestone:

We've entered the zeitgeist with this concept. And so now it's a thing. And so we want to claim ownership of that, because we do own it. You don't never own an idea, but we created that movement. And so we created Pro-Age Month. And the month of August is Pro-Age Month. And we tell pro-age stories, and we've got a logo for it. And we are claiming our rights to the pro-age movement. The pro-age revolution that we started in 2010. And a good way to do that, was to create a holiday around it.

Brett Curry:

Create a holiday, create a month, and people love that. And it's such a great conversation starter and connection point. And if you think about one of the big components of building a brand, is just building that connection and that community. And sometimes odd or unusual holidays do that. And inventing your own holiday, I think it's brilliant. I think more people should look at it. And I think a lot of brands lend themselves well. Maybe it's not pro-age for you, and Ezra owns that anyway, so back off, really. Seriously.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, whatever. You could say pro-age if you believe in that. What I find, is most people say pro-age and they don't actually know what it means. Which is hilarious. They'll be like, "Pro-age..." this or that. And then they'll have anti-aging skin drops.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. "But cover your gray, and no more wrinkles." Yeah, yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

You've missed the point here.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah. But inventing a holiday, pure gold, I love it. Anybody can do it. And so highly recommend that as well. So we're getting tied on time, so we're going to have to maybe move rapid fire through some of these or just save some of them for the blog. But number six is, list products on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah.

Brett Curry:

What are you guys doing there for your brands? Talk about that a little bit.

Ezra Firestone:

Amazon will make up 20 to 30% of a good brand's sales. And you're going to miss those customers if you're not over there. And our-

Brett Curry:

Because some people only buy on Amazon. That's just it.

Ezra Firestone:

I mean, yeah. And we waited 10 years to put our products on Amazon, because we could fill the demand that we had with... Our supply chain could barely fill the demand we had from direct to consumer. But once we beefed up our supply chain, and we realized that adding to Amazon wasn't going to cannibalize our direct to consumer platform, we added our main product on there, and it just crushed. It just added 10 to 15% of incremental sales.

Brett Curry:

Immediately. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

So now we're adding every one of our products, once every two months, onto Amazon. You guys are running all of our ads over there, doing all of our A plus lists. All we do is do the customer support, and create the assets for the page. You guys literally do everything else. You run all the ads, you optimize all the pages, you handle all the seller support. You do fucking everything for us. So it's great for us, because it's a channel that really works, that we don't really have the expertise for, that you just do for us. I mean, we pay you for it, but probably not what you should get paid. Because I think you give us a deal. But-

Brett Curry:

We do. We do. But, gladly. We gladly give you that deal, for sure.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. So it's been really good for us.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's been amazing, it's been fun to execute on our end for sure. And one thing we noticed with you, we noticed this with native ... as well, client, friends. And we don't run their Amazon, but we observe. We run their Google and YouTube. Is that there's some expectation that when you launch on Amazon, there's going to be some cannibalization of your store's sales. And certainly that happens some, but this has been mostly incremental growth for you guys, right?

Ezra Firestone:

100% incremental. There's been no cannibalization whatsoever. Which is crazy, because I was sure there was going to be. We sell it at the same price, and some people just like to buy over there. And I think what was happening was a lot of people were seeing our ads on Facebook, going to buy on Amazon, not finding it, and then buying knockoff brands. Because they only buy on Amazon.

Brett Curry:

Buying something else. Buy knockoff. Yeah, we experienced that. That'd be a topic for another podcast. The copycats and the people that were...

Ezra Firestone:

...

Brett Curry:

... really leeching off of your brand name on Amazon.

Ezra Firestone:

Nightmare.

Brett Curry:

But yeah, nightmare for sure. For sure. But we're getting there. So yeah, big believer in Amazon. And what's interesting to me, and this is where Boom and Overtone are set up perfectly for Amazon, is that success on Amazon in the long term, and I think even right now, is based on building a brand. So taking the community building aspect, the brand building aspect that you're doing off Amazon, and do that on Amazon, that's where you see long term success. It's not just hacking the titles and the keywords, and the bullet points, to try to inflate your ranking, or using super URLs, or some other strategy to hack your ranking, but building a real brand.

Brett Curry:

And that's what you guys are good at, and that's what we're helping you with. And it's working. It's working on Amazon right now. So let's talk, and this will probably be our final concept for the podcast, and I'll push the final one, people to go check out on the blog post. But the seventh strategy for growth, is advertising on television. TV? What? Come on now. So what are your thoughts on TV? And this has been fun to watch too, but what are your thoughts on advertising on television?

Ezra Firestone:

I think it's really only for very, very, very mature brands. Because the minimum that you need to do it is 350 grand. Minimum. Just to test. And that's a two month test. And you also have to produce television quality ads. Now we were able to use user generated content. We spent 50 grand on a TV commercial produced by a fancy agency, and at flopped all crazy. And then we made our own ad, based on UGC that we had. And we crushed. So we're much better direct response advertisers than these TV agencies, it turns out. Which we should've known, because we've been fucking running direct response ads for 15 years. Makes sense we would know what would work, versus what they produced. Even though what they produced, it was a whole... We could talk about that another time. It wasn't very good.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ezra Firestone:

But it's hard to tell how successful TV has been for us. We've spent about half a million dollars over the course of six months, and I think incrementally, it has been successful. But we're having Northbeam, which is a company you hooked us up with.

Brett Curry:

Shout out to Northbeam, Austin, and the folks there.

Ezra Firestone:

We just turned it off, and looks like sales are down 15K a day since we turned off TV. We'll see. I think TV is great for omnichannel presence. If you're spending three, four, 500K a month on social media ads, you should add in TV at 10, 15% of your budget, to reach more people, and reach the people that you're reaching on social in a different area. And for us, we just turned it off to see how it's going to impact whether we run it or not. And so we're still trying to figure out the attribution on it, and how well it's working. But our sense is that it worked pretty well.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And that's a great way to test it. Turn it off, see what the impact is there. And it also helps tremendously to have a tool like Northbeam, third party attribution. Brilliant stuff, check it out. And we're seeing some similar things. So first of all, I got my start in TV, radio, print. So I still really like TV. I'm still involved in local TV just a little bit with a friend of mine. But I love this strategy. I think it is for bigger brands. But yeah, if you're spending multi six figures on Facebook ads, YouTube ads, then TV may be something that you check out. But along a similar vein, we're testing now, we tested it with Boom and with a few other clients. Creating some awareness, we call it awareness layer YouTube campaigns.

Brett Curry:

And again, you kind of need something like Northbeam in place, to really see the impact of this. But the idea there, is as well we're just going for low cost engagement, low cost views. We're seeing CPMs for some of these awareness level YouTube campaigns at six bucks, five bucks, which is crazy low. But there's something to be said, and this is marketing 101, old school stuff. If you talk to the right people enough times, with a right message, so right message, right market, right media, you're going to get results. And so obviously you got to be ready for it with budget, and you have to have the tracking in place to really make good use of it. But I love that you guys are testing TV. And I also love the fact that it wasn't the super duper polished stuff that worked. It was what we do. The UGC stuff that did well on TV, too.

Ezra Firestone:

Yeah. It was UGC. And we started doing video view advertising on Facebook, when iOS 14.5 happened, because Facebook lost all its data. So we started running video view campaigns to all the audiences that we used to run conversion campaigns to, to let Facebook build up some data of the people who watched most of our videos. And then we would follow up with those people and run conversion ads to them. And now we're doing that with YouTube as well. And I think that strategy post iOS 14.5 on both networks, where you spend a thousand bucks a day at our scale, running video views, or maybe 10% of your overall spend, is a great strategy. We're doing it at Overtone too.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, this has been amazing, Ezra. So that's seven of the eight tips. Hey, to get that eighth tip, check out the show notes, go check out Ezra's blog, smartmarketer.com, and get that final one. But Ezra, as people are listening, I know we got some super fans-

Ezra Firestone:

I'm cold, man. I'm cold. That's what's going on.

Brett Curry:

You're cold. Then yeah, you need to go warm up, dude.

Ezra Firestone:

I do. I need ...

Brett Curry:

Get your robe, get your blanket, go sit by the fire, or something like that. But for those that are listening and thinking, "I need more Ezra Firestone in my life." How can they connect with you, where should they learn more about you? Where should they do that?

Ezra Firestone:

I'm on Instagram @ezrafirestone, I'm on Twitter @ezrafirestone, I'm on Facebook, Facebook.com/MeetEzra. I'm on smartmarketer.com, which is a blog that I have, I'm on zipify.com, which are my apps for Shopify. But you can find me on social media. I'm on YouTube, all the social media networks. Whatever ones you use, I'm there. You can Google me on there or search me on there. And yeah. Thanks for hanging out, hope it's been some kind of helpful. Appreciate you, Brett. I love that you're between two ferns over there.

Brett Curry:

That's a hilarious show. And you're not the first person to say that. They're like, "Dude, are you between two ferns here? Are you Zach Galifianakis or what? What are you doing?" I'm a little more courteous to my guests and a little more on topic, but that show is hilarious.

Ezra Firestone:

It's awesome, dude.

Brett Curry:

But another plug that I'll make here as I'm sitting between two ferns, is, do check out Smart Marketer. Molly Pittman, John Grimshaw, running that with Ezra's leadership, Ezra started it. But some amazing resources there. Train My Traffic Person. So if you got in-house media buyers, you need to send them through Train My Traffic Person. You get to learn from me too, I'm a faculty member there teaching YouTube and teaching Google. But check that out, smartmarketer.com. Highly, Highly recommend it.

Ezra Firestone:

Thank y'all.

Brett Curry:

Awesome. Ezra, appreciate it, brother. This has been amazing, thank you so much. And see you next time.

Ezra Firestone:

Talk soon.

‍

I’ve never met anyone quite like Miki Agrawal.

‍

She’s incredibly creative. No really. She once hosted a “funeral for a tree” at an old cathedral in NYC hosted by comedians and actors. It drew a crowd of thousands, generated millions in free press and helped shed light on the toilet paper waste that her company TUSHY can help solve. 

‍

She understands trends in marketing. She knows how to grab attention. So much so that she was banned by the NY   transit authority from running subway ads. Which led to a PR fight that she won…and in the end, got more press and attention than if they hadn’t been banned. 

‍

She’s also warm and kind and FUN. 

‍

She’s created multiple 9-Figure businesses and has garnered some pretty incredible recognition. She was named "Fast Company's Most Creative People", “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum and INC's “Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs”.

‍

She’s also the author of #1 best selling books Do Cool SH*T and Disrupt-HER.

‍

In this episode we unpack Miki’s wacky, impossible-to-forget and wildly successful marketing strategies and tactics.

‍

Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

• How Miki was banned from advertising on the NYC subway and turned that into a huge PR win for her brand THINX
• How to use Accessible + Relatable language 
• How to create ads that are both effective and “fridge worthy”
• How iteration is perfection
• How to start with play to create great ideas

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

Miki Agrawal

   - Website

   - Instagram

   - Link Tree to Resources

TUSHY

   - Website

   - Instagram

Thinx

   - Website

   - Instagram

Wild

   - Website

   - Instagram

“Do Cool Sh*t” by Miki Agrawal

“Disrupt-Her” by Miki Agrawal

“Zero To $100 Million” on Mindvalley‍

Cap Con 5
Ryan Daniel Moran‍

Toto‍

“Funeral for a Tree” by TUSHY video on YouTube‍

Butt Con by TUSHY

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast. We explore hot topics on eCommerce and digital marketing. We feel feature some of the brightest minds, with some of the SPT perspectives on what it takes to grow your business. Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that, what it really takes to succeed is three things. One: have something good to say. Two: say it well. And three: say it often.

Brett:

My guest in this episode is Miki Agrawal. She's the founder of TUSHY, but she's also the entrepreneur behind several other wildly successful companies. I don't know anyone better than Miki at the, have something good to say and say it well, aspects of growth. And so just a couple of accolades. Miki was named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People. She was also named by Inc Magazine as one of the Most Impressive Women Entrepreneurs. She was also my favorite speaker, and she's also one of the favorite speakers that most of the events that she attends.

Brett:

We're going to dive into some crazy wild stories from her entrepreneur journeys. We're going to learn why she was banned by the New York subway from running ads there, and how she actually overcame that and then ran some pretty powerful ads on the New York subway system. We're going to talk about how she creates events that are just, blow your mind. Like, they had a funeral for a tree, and there's a reason why they did that and got millions of dollars in free press. And she talks about how to craft things that are both artful and fridge worthy, but also effective. And so, I think you're going to absolutely love this interview. And so, lean in, buckle up and enjoy this interview with Miki Agrawal.

Brett:

Over 81% of consumers are opted into text message messages from their favorite brands, and that's where Attentive comes in. Meet Attentive, the company helping thousands of innovative brands connect with their customers through personalized text messaging. Attentive's text marketing platform lets you grow your subscriber list, interact with customers in real time through two-way conversations and drive the war revenue. Brands who use Attentive see $55 in sales for every $1 they spend. See what Attentive can do for you, at attentivemobile.com/omgcommerce. Attentive: drive sales with text message marketing.

Brett:

All right, well today I am abs absolutely thrilled that my guest is Miki Agrawal. Now, I was recently at an event, CapCon 5 in Austin, Texas. My good friend, Ryan Daniel Moran was the host. And there was a star-studded lineup of speakers. Amazing, blow your mind speakers. And I got to say, Miki was probably my favorite. And I hope that some of my other friends that were speaking don't hear this, because I don't want to hurt their feelings. It's just that Miki was amazing. And so, Miki is the founder of a number of really transformative businesses. Most recently, TUSHY. Also, THINX and WILD. She's also author of some amazing best-selling books. Do Cool Sh*t. Disrupt-Her, which I'm actually in the process, I've gone about halfway through it right now. And even though it has "her" in the title, Disrupt-Her, instead of disruptor, it's for dudes too. Right, Miki? And so, I'm actually getting a lot of value out of it. And so, we're going to talk about growth and having an amazing marketing message, and thinking differently and all kinds of great stuff. So Miki, welcome to the show, and how's it going?

Miki:

Yes. I'm so happy to be here with you. And just, the thing that I just can't, I'm just so like, I love is that you have eight children, and you're sitting at the table with 10 people every night for dinner. That just blows my mind.

Brett:

Yeah. The level of noise at the dinner table is sometimes crazy. And we do this thing called highs and lows, where everybody goes around and tells their high of the day. You have to have a high of the day, you don't have to have a low of the day if you don't want to, but it is required to have a high. And the noise level is crazy, but it's also super fun.

Miki:

I love that you do that. That's beautiful, that's amazing.

Brett:

Yeah. So, part of what attracted me to you, Miki, and why I was so thrilled to chat with you afterwards. Is one, you're a master marketer. And the way you craft messages and the way you get attention, it's mind blowing, which is awesome. But you're also like, you believe in strong women, right? And I've got six daughters and I just, I want them to conquer the world. That's probably a weird thing to say, but I want them to just do whatever they feel led and whatever they feel passionate about doing. And so, love the energy you bring and the inspiration you're bringing to young women as well.

Miki:

Six daughters. I mean, it's just, yeah. Like, I think about the food bill just for that dinner, just for those meals, just now. It's just [crosstalk 00:05:10].

Brett:

The food bill is crazy. So I'm happy to talk about that with anyone offline. Yeah. So, when you include groceries and eating out, it's a median household income. It's a lot of money, yeah. But grateful to be able to do it. I wouldn't have it any other way, but it is completely [crosstalk 00:05:28].

Miki:

I love it.

Brett:

So yeah, it's awesome. Well, let's talk about a few things. So if you would Miki, give people kind of just the quick background on you. Because we're going to dig into some of the specific messages that you use at TUSHY and things like that. But give people the background. Like, how did you become this, because not only were you my favorite speaker at CapCon, but I've seen, you were voted best speaker at Inc and Fast Company, and some of these other big events. Everybody loves what you have to say. So really, how did you get here?

Miki:

Well, I'm one of three children, and the interesting fun fact about the three of us is that we are all born within one year. So I have an identical twin sister. The third sister, who's 11 months older. So we're actually, we're Irish twins.

Brett:

Yeah, Irish twins and identical twins [crosstalk 00:06:18].

Miki:

Irish triplets.

Brett:

Okay.

Miki:

So we're twins, plus Irish triplets, yeah.

Brett:

It's insane.

Miki:

Yeah. And then we grew up to a Japanese mother and Indian father. So my mother's from Japan, speaks with a thick Japanese accent. My dad is from India, speaks with a very thick Indian accent.

Brett:

I'm doing the audio book of Disrupt-Her. And you do the Indian accent for your dad, an it's just amazing. You do such a good job, yeah.

Miki:

But yeah, his most, the thing they always say is, he says, when he meets somebody, he goes, "Very good vibes". Or, "Very bad vibes." And immediately, because yeah, he can sniff people out just by "their vibes".

Brett:

By "their vibes", okay, I love that.

Miki:

By "their vibes".

Brett:

That's awesome.

Miki:

Yeah. And I grew up in Montreal, Canada. In French Montreal, in the south shore of Montreal. In a town called [foreign language 00:07:12]. And it's like, I grew up in French, like literally, we were the token Asians in the most French neighborhood ever. And so, it was really beautiful to grow up in this true mosaic of cultures. Japan, India, French, American. And then of course, Canada attracts so many, I mean, every culture, every religion, and they're all celebrated. And so of course, growing up in a household of just diversity and then going to school with just all diverse kids, I think we just learned to question everything. And to look at things from different angles. To be like, oh, this is how the Indians look at it, this is how the Japanese look it, how the French look at it, and the Americans look at it, this is how the Canadians look at it.

Brett:

It forces a fresh perspective, rather than just everybody being the same.

Miki:

Totally. So it's a mosaic versus melting pot thinking. And I think that that mosaic thinking creates beautiful picture. When you think about a mosaic image, and it's just this, all these colors and all these textures, and all of the different historical context of things, creates a different frame than just a single pain. So I think I was very blessed in just being born where I was born, to be given the various perspectives. To not just be like, okay, this is the way it is. It's like, wait, is this, or should I question it? And is there a better way, or is there more thoughtful way? Or that kind of thing.

Brett:

When did you realize that, hey, I might be an entrepreneur? Or have you ever? Like, is that really a conscious thought? Like, when did you think, hey, I'm going to build companies? And not just companies, but wildly successful and disruptive companies.

Miki:

Yeah. I mean, I think I'm just genuinely unemployable. I think I'm just like, you're not my Indian father. That kind of vibes. Where like, anytime someone told me what to do, blood would rush to my head and I would just get really frustrated. I would, I don't know, get triggered or something. But no, I think I just always beat to my own drum. And I think because of this questioning, because of this philosophy of looking at things from different perspectives, I think I just always had different ideas that I wanted to put out in the world. That entrepreneurship, when it was introduced to me, I remember, I'll never forget. I met my very first entrepreneur, standing in line in New York City when I was 22 years old, at this Armani party.

Miki:

I was invited to my very first VIP door, or whatever. [crosstalk 00:09:47] And I was like, oh my God, I'm so cool. It was like, Armani. You know, whatever. Back when it was really cool to go to those things. And I remember standing in line, and in front of me was this gentleman who I'd met. And his name was Graham, and he's now since become one of my dearest friends. But I met him randomly, standing in line in front of me then. I was 22, and he was in his mid-thirties when I met him. And I was like, "oh". Like, "What are you up to?"

Miki:

And he's like, "I'm an entrepreneur."

Miki:

And I was like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

And he is like, "I have my own business." And this is, by the way, in 2001, when entrepreneurship wasn't a school thing. Nobody was getting invested in, it wasn't a thing. I mean, Facebook wasn't even there until 2006.

Brett:

Now it's super trendy. Everybody wants to say entrepreneur, stamped that on their [crosstalk 00:10:33].

Miki:

Now, everyone. But back then, nobody. It was doctor, lawyer, investment banker, management consultant. Going to work for a company. Becoming a whatever at a company. Becoming a person who starts a business was just not even in the lexicon, in the zeitgeist of culture back then.

Miki:

And he was like, "I'm not in firm."

Miki:

I'm like, "What do you mean?"

Miki:

He's like, "I have my own company."

Miki:

I'm like, "Well, what do you do?"

Miki:

And he's like, "Well, I started a company called treehugger.com."

Miki:

And I was like, "Oh, that's cool."

Miki:

And he's like, "And I sold it." I think he sold it to Discovery Channel, whatever.

Miki:

And I was like, "Wow!" And then he, the next day, invited me to this brunch with a bunch of other entrepreneurs. And that's when it was my big ding, ding, ding moment. I can start my own company, I'm going to do that. And I think in life, we just get given these gifts of chance meetings. And either we kind of get opened by it or we close to it. And I was sort of just blasted open by the possibilities of that. And I think that's what really put me on the course of this new way of thinking and being, and then carrying forward.

Brett:

That's amazing. And I do want to, let's give kind of a brief overview of some of the companies. Just to give people some texture and some more context. So your mind was blown, and you're thinking, I could do my own thing. And then you have, and you've been wildly successful. Really at, essentially, everything. But can you give a quick rundown of the companies, and what they've done?

Miki:

Yeah. Well, I will first start by saying, one of the biggest stories that changed the course my life was when I was 22. After that time, 9/11 happened, and that was a huge turning point in my life.

Brett:

Yeah, because you were an investment banker, working down on Wall Street, right?

Miki:

Yes. The World Trade center was my subway stop every single morning. And it I was working at Deutsche Bank, in investment banking. I call it douche bank.

Brett:

Wow. Someone was asking for that, honestly, right? Deutche Bank, it's so close to douche, you're going to make the jokes, yeah.

Miki:

Know what I mean? Yeah. So yeah, when I was there, yeah, 9/11 happened. I was supposed to be there, and 2 World Trade Center was my subway stop every single morning. And I would walk upstairs to 2 World Trade Center, at the cafe there. And I would get tea with my girlfriend, who worked on the 100th floor. And then I would walk across the street to my office, directly across 2 World Trade Center. And then 9/11 happened, and it was the first day of my life, the only day of my life that I slept through my alarm clock.

Brett:

That is crazy and amazing.

Miki:

Yeah. And 700 people in my girlfriend's office died on that day. Two people in my office died. It was one of those, just like, you can't make this shit up. Like, this is not a real movie, that kind of level of unfathomableness.

Brett:

Unfathomable, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah. And so that single experience, again, it's those moments that I kind of really recognize as these turning points in my life. And that was a big turning point in my life. Where I was like, wow, I could die tomorrow. And when you're 22, you don't think about death. I feel like we start thinking about death after we have children, in a lot of ways. And I'm just always making sure I'm not going to die. Do you know? And I'm sure, with your eight children, I don't even know how [inaudible 00:13:50]. You know?

Brett:

Yeah.

Miki:

But death, it's just not a thing, when you're a kid, when you're 22, you're just sort of like, whatever.

Brett:

You're usually not thinking about it at all, yeah.

Miki:

Just not thinking at all. But then, because I had this near potential death experience, and people around me died, and I was just sort of like, wow, this is a real thing. And I really felt my mortality in that moment. And it was like, wow, I got to make every single day count.

Brett:

Got to do something, yeah. We're going to blink and we're going to be 70, right? And so, what are you going to fill your time with now? Yeah.

Miki:

That's right. And so yeah, for me, it was, I wrote down three things. The first was to play soccer professionally, the second was to make movies, and the third was to start a business. And that sort of set me on sort of a total path after 9/11,.I played soccer for the New York Magic, I worked in the film industry for a couple of years, and then I started my first business, which was in the restaurant space. And so, my first business was born out of a stomach ache. We know that famous thing, necessity is the mother of invention.

Brett:

Yes, so true.

Miki:

Yeah. So the first business was born out of a stomach ache, and I couldn't eat pizza anymore. It was my favorite comfort food, but I just couldn't eat anymore because it made me bloated and gassy, and just so gross feeling after I ate it. And it was full of bleached flour, processed cheese, sugar-filled sauces, processed toppings, it was all that. And so yeah, I basically started New York City's very first gluten free alternative pizza concept. And 17 and a half years later, we're still in business. Almost 18 years this year. In November, 18 years.

Brett:

Amazing. And it's called WILD, correct?

Miki:

Called WILD. Just go to @eatdrinkwild on Instagram. We have a couple locations in New York City, and one in Guatemala.

Brett:

And [crosstalk 00:15:42] for surviving the pandemic. I couldn't imagine owning a restaurant during the pandemic in New York City. That had to been just absolutely brutal. So grateful, yeah.

Miki:

It was nuts. My partner Walid is incredible, and he's such an ingenious person. He has lots of [inaudible 00:15:57]. Where actually what we did was, we opened up, on Seamless Web, three restaurants, out of our restaurants. So during the pandemic, not only did we have our regular standard fair, but we opened up two different restaurants, working out of our kitchen. So basically, we made tacos and we did burgers, or whatever, so that people could order from us multiple times a week.

Brett:

Oh, super smart, super [crosstalk 00:16:24].

Miki:

So, take away. And not just have our gluten-free pizza stuff every week, but they would have tacos one night, and different stuff. And so we just opened three different restaurants under the same roof during the pandemic. And then we got the outdoor cafe seating. And that, our business all came back. And it was actually incredible, because it felt like a bit of Europe being in New York, with all the outdoor cafes everywhere, and people walking around with the menu. It was just, it was very romantic, very beautiful. So the rest restaurants was the very first business I learned. I think I learned so much of the thesis around people and psychology in my restaurants, that then led to building Thinks and led to building TUSHY. Both now valued over nine figures, well over nine. And so I, what I learned at WILD was, when I stood outside my restaurant for almost seven years, handing out little pieces of pizza, just handing them out.

Brett:

That's how you grew the business, was samples, yeah.

Miki:

Exactly, yeah. And getting people to try. And I would also test. Like, if I said healthy pizza, people wouldn't come. But if I said, farmed fresh, healthy farm to table pizza, people would be like, oh, what does that mean?

Brett:

Yeah. Nobody wants healthy pizza. That sounds cardboard.

Miki:

Exactly.

Brett:

But farm to table pizza, interesting. And so, you were testing out those messages as people were walking by?

Miki:

AB testing, literally like email, subject heading.

Brett:

I love that.

Miki:

You know? And it was such, seven years of, it was genuinely like double PhD in human psychology and what led people to come closer to attract them, or to kind of move them back. And it was a really interesting thing. Just by standing, literally person by person, like hand to hand combat, just really getting to know people.

Brett:

Fascinating.

Miki:

And that experience led to this thesis, understanding, that again, built THINX and TUSHY. Which was having a best in class product. Like, if someone bit into it and they're like, Ugh.

Brett:

It doesn't matter, yeah.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:30] my underwear. Like tight now, I'm wearing my period-proof underwear. It was so amazing because, I started my period today, I went to my bathroom. You're like, I have six daughters, don't worry about it.

Brett:

So, it does not bother me in the least. Like, yeah, this is a common conversation around my house, yeah.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

Think of the podcast first, though. First to confess on the podcast, which I embrace this, I welcome, this is awesome.

Miki:

First of all, every single human being is here because of a women's period. So, you're welcome. You know?

Brett:

Yes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:18:59] Be more uncomfortable. Yeah. So today, this morning, I went to the bathroom and I was kind of like, there's a little bit of blood everywhere. And so I basically sat on my toilet, used my TUSHY bidet, washed myself clean, And then put my THINX underwear on. And I was just like, ah.

Brett:

You're like, this is amazing.

Miki:

I solved my own problem twice. Just now, in this moment. And that's when I was like, yeah, this is why these businesses are doing well. Because genuinely, they truly, truly, truly solve problems that we face every single day.

Brett:

Authentically solving the problem, not just identifying a problem and kind of addressing it just for a cash grab, but you authentically solve the problem.

Miki:

Needed it, yeah. Which is why in my book, Do Cool Sh*t, I talk about the three questions I always ask myself before starting any business. The first question is, what sucks in my world? That's to start with me, a problem in my world that sucks. And then question number two is, but does it suck for a lot of people? Because if it just sucks for me, then I'm kind of a diva or whatever, and who cares. [crosstalk 00:20:04].

Miki:

And then the third question, which I think is the most important. Which is, can I be passionate about this issue, cause, or community, for a really long time. We know the saying, it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. People don't want to sit in that discomfort for a really, really long time, and then they quit or decide to leave early, and they don't kind of get through it. I think about the entrepreneurs, I think about the musicians, I think about the actors, I think about all the people in my life who've made it. And they've made it because they've kind of grinded for a really long time. And they made through it, and they just stuck with their passion, they stuck with the thing they truly believed in. And so I think, yeah, what sucks in my world, has sucked for a lot of people. Can I be passionate about this issue? I think the passion piece is the most important. [crosstalk 00:20:49]

Brett:

It's super important. And this is something I think you may have shared at CapCon already with somebody else. But, tactics without the underlying passion are worthless or it's going to be short lived. Tactics only work for so long. Like, you've got to have that passion and that drive to push through all the messy and confusing and heartache and suffering that you have to go through as a business owner. And so yeah, the passion is super, super important.

Brett:

Now, why do you think you're so attracted to difficult things to sell? So we'll start with pizza first. So, selling healthy, gluten free pizza. When you started the business, gluten free wasn't trendy. Like, gluten free wasn't a selling point. It's not something you want to stick on all your labels. Because people were like, what are you even talking about?

Miki:

Yeah. And no one was talking about farm to table, no one was talking about [crosstalk 00:21:36], no one was talking about seasonal.

Brett:

None of that.

Miki:

This is in 2003-2004. I mean, it was still super nascent, all of those conversations, it was extremely different.

Brett:

Yeah. And when you started THINX, which is period-proof underwear, no one was really talking about periods. Or, not wanting to talk about it. And maybe some people don't want to talk about now. [crosstalk 00:21:50] But yeah, you just got to get over it. But then also TUSHY, a bidet. I still remember so many conversations just as stuff started to get in the news. People were like, "Oh, bidets are nasty."

Brett:

And I'm like, "How is it nasty to use water to clean yourself versus dry paper?" But anyway, you're choosing these categories that are difficult. Like, it's new to people or taboo to people. Why do you think [crosstalk 00:22:13]?

Miki:

Well, it's a culture shift that I'm interested in. I think from a creative perspective and as a creative challenge. Like, how do you change people's behavior, is the hardest change to make. And then how, how do you utilize innovation and creativity to do that? And so I think from a creative kind of person's perspective, it's like, wow, this is a really fun challenge to tackle. How do you get someone to change their behavior when it comes to food? When it comes to habits? Daily habits that they've been doing their whole lives, not even their whole lives, but for generations. To get them to try something new, and not only try it, but adopt it fully. I mean, that is why Toto hasn't made it to America yet. That is why the tampons and pads, which were invented by men, which is fine. But not that fine, cause they're made for women. So it's just, it's like, those are the most pervasive products in the world, because it's taboo. And so, how do we enter these conversations in a way that's artful? In a way that's accessible, and we're using the best in class product?

Miki:

And I think those, my thesis that I learned from the pizza, from the restaurants was that was that, was the three prong. Prong number one is best in class product. It has to be a best in class product. It has to be a big day that, when I clip to my toilet, it actually feels good, it looks good.

Brett:

It adds to the appearance of your bathroom. Like, it makes your bathroom feel better, cleaner.

Miki:

It makes it more upscale and cool. It makes people want to bring you to their bathroom when you're having a dinner party. You know like that? Or when you're wearing THINX, like when I'm wearing my underwear right now, I feel really sexy in them. I feel really taken care of in them. I know that I'm protect, I know that this product works. So, best in class product. The pizza, when I eat it, it tastes the most delicious pizza. It doesn't even taste gluten and free, it tastes the most delicious pizza you've ever tasted. So, best in class product, no question, that is baseline. Second prong, to really shift culture, is art. Using art to really challenge conversations.

Miki:

And I talked a little bit about this at CapCon. When I remember putting our first TUSHY ads up, or our first period ads up, out in the world, whether online or offline. People's first reaction were like, wow, that's so beautiful. And then their second reaction's, oh my God, they're talking about poop, they're talking about periods. Like, oh my [crosstalk 00:24:49]. But their very first reaction was leaning into the art and the beauty of that. And I think that, that opens up people's hearts and minds. Art just does that, and for everyone at every level, does that. It opens, art just gives people something to lean into. And I think when they're leaning into something, it makes them be curious. And so the first thing is, can we design from a lens of art? So, we hired all artists, we hired all creatives. I think art is such a beautiful lens to shift people's perspective. I mean, that's why people go to museums, people look at magazines, people look at nature as art. And a place to go and really open up our souls, open up our perspectives, change the way we look and see things.

Miki:

And I think that really lends itself to giving people the space to question their existing thinking. And I think that's all we need to do, is give them that space to question, and they can make the decision for themselves. And so then, that's the artfulness, the best in class innovation.

Miki:

And then the third part is the accessible, relatable language. I think we so often want to be so heady, and so clinical, and so technical, and so medical, and so academic, and sound really smart. And make everyone feel we've been and doing all this patent pending work and whatever. And it's just like, people don't care. They want to know, does it work? Does it make me feel good? Does it support me and does it support my life? Like, what's the point of this? Like, I don't care about your terminology.

Brett:

Patent pending.

Miki:

And like, I don't care about high sounding or smart. Like, whatever. And then, I tested all of that. That was all tested. I learned that, the more we speak from our space of truth, the more we speak from our place of that lit fire inside. We talked about that at CapCon as well. The more we speak from that real, true, authentic place, people respond. Because it's real, it's true. It's not coming from like, I wonder what they want me to say? And I'm just going to say it that way. That doesn't feel good, to receive that kind of inauthentic message. Like, imagine if you're receiving a text message from a best friend. And you can tell when they're being inauthentic or they're authentic. You can tell when your sister or brother is being authentic, you can tell when your wife or husband is being inauthentic or authentic.

Miki:

And so it's just that, can we write copy, can we text, can we write our messaging in the same way as we're texting our best friend? And I think that is such an important way to think about messaging to people. Because we're just being bombarded with advertisements, with so much people shouting at us. And we don't want that. We want authentic truth, we just want that juicy truth. And I think that truth is really what, that truth, coupled with art, coupled with the right beautiful aesthetic, the right innovation that you would want to use where, on a daily basis. That together, creates change, creates culture shift. And I've seen that time and time again. Across Wild, across THINX and across TUSHY. All three of them share the same philosophy of best in class product, artful aesthetic design across every touchpoint of our brand, and accessible, relatable language across every touchpoint of the brand.

Brett:

I love it so much. And really, when you combine all of that, plus you go back to the starting point from your first book, Do Cool Sh*t, it has to be addressing something that sucks for you and sucks for a lot of people. Right? So it's got to be that. And so then, when it's addressing a real issue, and then you've got the artful design and best in class, and it works. And you got the accessible, relatable language. All that comes together and it just works.

Brett:

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Brett:

What's so interesting and what was so powerful for me. And I remember talking to the guy that was sitting next to me at CapCon, and I made a couple comments about this. I've been in the ad world for a long time. So there's the brand building space of advertising, which is interesting. There's direct response, which I followed and studied for a long time. And I've worked in the infomercial space and stuff. But you have this ability to create stuff that looks beautiful. Like, you just want to look at it. It's an ad for a bidet, but you want to look at it. But, it also kind of makes you say, I'd like to try that. Like, I would like a clean butt too. I would to do...

Brett:

Because I think sometimes people, they go too far into the art. And it's abstract, and like, I don't even know what you're trying to say to me. Or I'm talking about patent pending, and all aloof, and who cares. So, how do you strike that balance and how do you create something that's fridge-worthy? As you'd say, artful and fridge worthy. But also, that connects and makes you say, I want to buy that underwear. Or, I want to buy that bidet. How do you do that?

Miki:

Yeah. Well so first, just to quickly unpack the word fridge-worthy, for those who don't know what that term means. Fridge-worthy simply means the idea that, you know when you walk into your home, and you go to your kitchen and you see your fridge? You go out, before, you go to grab a beer or whatever from your fridge. You see your fridge, and on your fridge are emblems of your life. You see pictures of your family members, of your eight children in your 10 person family.

Brett:

They take up the whole fridge, exactly.

Miki:

Yeah [inaudible 00:31:16] all over. You have invitations to weddings, you have little postcards from family members, you have little pictures of nieces and nephews. Or whatever it is, right?

Miki:

Hi, Stan.

Miki:

And my challenge to my team has always been, can you create something so beautiful, so artful and so personal, that it can make the small real estate on your fridge? That it can really make that small personal space on your fridge, that it can take up that space. That you can make something for TUSHY or THINX so beautiful, something so cool, that it can live in your home in some way. And so we design from that lens. And from that lens that, again, hits you personally and makes you feel something.

Brett:

It does cause you to shift and think differently. Now it's not just about, well, I'm going to choose blue. Like, you're thinking about everything differently.

Miki:

Yeah. Like, what is it that's going to make, how does it make me feel? And that's a different lens to creating.

Brett:

For sure.

Miki:

Yeah.

Brett:

So then, how do you blend fridge-worthy then with some true sales power, or some power to make people say, I want to buy this.

Miki:

So I always say to my team, in the art of it, I still need to know. I mean, it depends. Like you said, there's top of funnel stuff, where you want to create intrigue and mystery. And that kind of stuff is like, if you look at our TUSHY Bellagio spot that we just shot. I just shot this ad, where I finally figured out, where my friend is this genius rigging person. And he rigged 10 toilets with bidets on them, with our TUSHY Ace bidets on them. That we can play them like a piano.

Brett:

Like the Bellagio fountains?

Miki:

Bellagio fountain.

Brett:

I got to see that, then.

Miki:

I'll share, I'll text with you right after this. It's crazy. And so basically, it plays. So we made this like, (Beethoven's 5th). And just this wildly weird thing. And we don't show you very much about it, but it just says at the tagline at the end. Which makes you mysterious and makes you want to click and see what the hell this is. So there's that mystery and intrigue, which hooks you into wanting to know more.

Brett:

It's a curiosity play, yeah.

Miki:

Pure curiosity play, pure top funnel. Just stuffing people in. And then we spend the rest of the time, really converting them to the bottom, bringing them down the funnel. Educating them on the product, the value propositions and all of that. So that's the one strategy.

Miki:

The other strategy for top of funnel. I always think about prospecting. I always think about, how do you get people to both fall in love with our brand, with our ethos, with our playfulness, with our just [foreign language 00:33:56], with our love of life? They can feel it in this thing, but they're also understanding, what is the product? How does it work? Why do I need it? So it really answers those questions. And maybe like, why do I need it?

Miki:

Like, we just shot another commercial with the singing toilets, with the kind of the playing toilets. Where, it's this very Wes Anderson, weird thing. Where it's like, five people laying, they stick their heads in the toilets at once. And they're laying on these, which kind of represents the heated seat. And then all of a sudden, we start spraying. Like, I start kind of smushing ice cream on this guy's face. And then, this one woman takes a chocolate cake and squishes it in her white glove. And then she smacks it on the ass of white pants on this guy. So it kind of represents all taking a shit, basically, the chocolate looks like shit. And then the sprays go off, and then we get clean. And it's this debaucherous clean thing. And then we press the blow dryer, and then we're getting blow dried. So you're seeing the value, of how it works. Like, you're seeing, we press the remote, and then the nozzles go off and it starts spraying. It's clean. And then you press the dry, then it just blow dries it. So you see slow-mo, the hair blow dried. We walk out frame. So you're kind of, you're getting the idea of what this thing is. But you're still intrigued, tickled. You feel good vibes, you feel "very good vibes". You know?

Brett:

You're probably laughing. You're probably like, I can't believe I'm watching this. But it's also product demonstration in a really fun and creative and crazy way, which is super cool.

Miki:

Yes. And so, it's a lot of things. And I always look at, what are our best performing ads? Our best performing ads are the edutaining ones. Ones that are hilarious, and the ones that educate. Tells you, why you need it, how it works and how to use it.

Brett:

Yeah, totally makes sense.

Miki:

You know? But in a really simple, easy way. And so, yeah, it is an art and science, and they have to go hand in hand. And, creative and marketing always do sometimes have this natural tension, but I think it's a good tension if you have the right leadership.

Brett:

It's a healthy tension.

Miki:

A healthy tension, yeah.

Brett:

Love it. So one thing you talk about a lot, and I remember you showing these examples. That, you'll use actual statements from real customers. And you also talk about campfire stories, sharing campfires stories as a team or whatever, to kind of stir up creativity. So, can you talk about that a little bit? Like, how do you use customer statements in your ads? And then, what about campfire stories?

Miki:

Yeah. So, I always think like, our best advocates are our customers, our users, who love our products. It just, it makes so much sense. And so many times, companies are scared to, they don't want to bother their customers. But if customers love it, and you're asking them, hey, just fill in the blank. THINX is blank. Or, TUSHY.

Brett:

This is my favorite, yeah. Just fill in the blank. TUSHY is, fill in the blank.

Miki:

Fill in the blank. TUSHY is, blank. Just fill in the blank. And within 24 hours, we got 1000 responses. For things specifically, it was, THINX is Mary Poppins in my pants. THINX is strength, freedom and dignity for all women. TUSHY is...

Brett:

One of them was, eye candy butt bliss. I wrote it down. I got the thing.

Miki:

Yeah, eye candy butt bliss. It's like, TUSHY: you could eat off my butt hole. You know? And just like, my rusty starfish has never been so clean. Stuff like that, where it's crazy, hilarious, random.

Brett:

Especially when you know that it was a real customer that said it. It's like, okay, that's super fun. And I'm now totally entertained by reading this.

Miki:

Yeah, by real. And we always say, name of the customer, from a real pooping human. And so, we now use these campaigns, as actual campaigns and taglines for our company. Because our customers know what's best. And we don't have to oftentimes scratch our heads to ask ourselves, what creativity can we use? We can literally just reach out to our customer base, and they'll give us, and they're delighted in giving it to us. And if they see it in the world, they'll be like, oh my God, that's my line. And they now feel even more connected.

Brett:

And then they totally will put that on the fridge. They will totally put that piece, and share with everyone they know.

Miki:

And they'll share it with all their friends, tell everyone they know. And it engages people, attracts them. The same thing with PR. I talk about that a lot. Like, we do a ton of inbound marketing, inbound PR. And we've gone viral so many different times. And it's because, again, studying the psychology of people. Like, how do you create intrigue? How do you create mystery? Where, they want to complete the storyline. So often, people are like, send press releases, and hope that the press will write about them. But it just never works. It piles up on people's desks. Versus, you send these mysterious boxes where you have to assemble this thing. Or like, unscramble a riddle. So recently, we just launched our TUSHY Ace, part of our electric bidet seat with the most beautiful remote in the world.

Brett:

It's the heated seat, right? Which by the way, if you've never experienced a heated toilet seat, it is pretty magical, it really is.

Miki:

Heated seat, warm water, blow dries your butt. Best blow dryer on the market. It's not like where you have to still use toilet paper, because this is a nice strong blow dryer. And it looks an Apple product. It's the most gorgeous remote. Our design, it's just, it's the most beautiful product. And so, we were launching this. And our team, we were like, okay, we are going to create mystery around this product. And so, we put together these deck of cards. And these deck of cards that we made, we made actual TUSHY deck of cards, designed by hand, by my designers. And we had this instruction sheet for the press. And we said, pull out all the royal flushes.

Brett:

Nice. Royal flushes.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:40:03] And so, they'd pull out the royal flushes. And they had to unscramble the royal flushes, based on the riddles that they were given. Like, for the diamond royal flushes, this is the riddle. And you had to unscramble it based on the different words. The letters that appeared on the 10, jack, queen, king, ace. There was a letter hidden, that then unscrambled based on the riddle. So then, it made the press have to work hard to actually unscramble and send the responses. And then once they get the TUSHY Ace product and install it, they're going to feel they've accomplished something. Like, they actually, they feel so much better.

Brett:

And they're so engaged, and you've delighted them.

Miki:

They're so engaged.

Brett:

You've just made their day in so many ways.

Miki:

Instead of just sending them a product, review it. You're almost like, dance monkey, dance. Versus like, let me bring you into this fun, mysterious story with us. And we're going to be surprised and delighted together. And we're going this extra mile for you, to make you just regale in the delight. And I think that, that is what people want in life. They want to be just surprised and delighted. They want to be regaled. And like, "Oh!". And giggle. They want their heart to flutter.

Brett:

They want magic, they want mystery, they want excitement, they want to be kind of caught up in something. Right? Not just reading.

Miki:

Who doesn't want to be caught up in this ,"oh', moment. And it feels so good and it just enlivens our being.

Brett:

So, how did that work out? How was the press' reaction to that?

Miki:

Well I mean, this one, we just sent them out actually last week, so we're still underway. But guess what? The fact that we had almost, I think it was like 20 press asked for these cards. Because first, we were like, we're going to send you a mysterious package. Are you willing to take it? We need your home address, because we're COVID times. And so we had, almost 20 press gave us their home addresses, to send them the mystery packages. And so that already means that they're hooked. And we did this before, for THINX. Where we had people go and smash bricks, and they had to open the bricks and look for these invitations. And 80 people showed up to our event, after they smashed the THINX. 80 press RSVPed. We had another event, where we poked a hold in eggs, and put these mystery scrolls in them. And then all 20 press showed up to our event, because they wanted to crack open the egg and look at the scroll. And we said, you can't open them until you come to the event.

Miki:

So it's just, creating the mystery, creating the intrigue. It's human nature that, when they start something, they want to finish it. They don't like incomplete story lines, they like to complete story lines. And when there's an incompletion, there's still this intrigue, this mystery that keeps you wanting more. And so, we're in that storyline right now, with the TUSHY Ace, and I'll let you know how it goes, but I feel very confident.

Brett:

Yeah. That idea of opening and closing loops. Once a loop is open, people want to close and they want to figure out. They want to solve the mystery. That's why cliffhangers work, and all of those things.

Miki:

And in relationship and romance. When you're romancing, you're seducing. It's the same kind of storyline. It's so much fun, that game.

Brett:

Yeah. And I know you've got to go, so I've got two quick things. But I also want to mention, just briefly. You talked about two stories, two events. Because you're the master of doing these just crazy, off the wall events, that also work. So, one was ButtCon, and one was the Funeral for a Tree, for TUSHY. Are those outlined in one of your books? Because even if nothing else...

Miki:

Not yet.

Brett:

They're not? Oh, dang it. Okay.

Miki:

Not yet, but my next, maybe. I might have a Do Cool Sh*t sequel, and talk about TUSHY in that.

Brett:

We'll highlight that, or I'll find the story, that I can put. Anyway, I'll let the audience [crosstalk 00:43:41].

Miki:

I'm happy to share them really quick. I can share them over the next couple minutes, no problem.

Brett:

Okay, just do it quickly over the next two minutes, yeah.

Miki:

Sure, yeah. So again, it's all about creating unorthodox events, unorthodox gatherings. That make people go, "Huh? What are you talking about? What is this?" So we held two kind of events before COVID happened. And we're going to now resume them once COVID's now finally, hopefully at bay. But one of them was called A Funeral for a Tree. And the other one was called ButtCon. The Funeral for a Tree is, we actually held a real funeral for a dead tree at the Judson Memorial Church, which is the biggest memorial church in all of New York City. In Washington square park. We had a 400 seat capacity, and we sold out. And we had a 25 part choir. We had Matthew Morrison, the actor, is one of our dear friends, playing the reverend. We had his wife, Renee, who is one of my best friends as well, who played Maple, the wife of the dead tree. It was just the most wild experience. And the people who came...

Brett:

People were reading eulogies. Which, I got to hear one. It was hilarious. Just super funny and well done.

Miki:

I mean, it was just comedy. It was sad, it was beautiful, it was inspiring. It was all of the above, and people left so inspired to save trees. [crosstalk 00:45:14] And to do it by buying TUSHY, by doing all kinds. You know? But it wasn't a marketing...

Brett:

It didn't feel like a sales pitch. It didn't feel a, "Hey, here's your coupon for TUSHY." As you walk out the doors.

Miki:

For one second. It didn't feel like. It just felt TUSHY opened my eyes to these important things. [crosstalk 00:45:31].

Brett:

We are killing a lot of trees because of toilet paper, and here's how we can help solve that.

Miki:

That's right. 50 million trees are cut down every single year because of toilet paper consumption. 30 million cases of urinary tract infections, hemorrhoids. All these health hygiene issues, not to mention planetary issues. All these things could be alleviated by just using a bidet, using TUSHY, under $100 product. You know? But we didn't even say any of that stuff at our Funeral for a Tree event. That was, we just put on this amazing event, brought to you by TUSHY. And people just were like, this was the most inspiring theatrical event I've ever been to.

Brett:

You get an insane press on it.

Miki:

[crosstalk 00:46:07] ...

‍

They said, "What are you doing?"

Miki:

What are you doing here?

Brett:

And the press you got from both those events, to pay for that kind of exposure would be almost impossible. But you got it because you did some crazy stuff.

Miki:

Yeah. It was truly, again, another reminder that just, what you put in. When you put in, like, if you build it, they will come. And you have to build spectacles. Again, things that surprise and delight. Things that make people go, I need to go and see what this is about. And that's the most important thing.

Brett:

I love that, I love it. So I know, you've got to go. So just kind of in closing. If people are listening to this and they're like, I need more Miki Agrawal in my life. And so, where can they, one, go to find your books? But also, just experience your marketing. Because hopefully, this has opened your eyes a little bit. Like, you need to pay attention to what Miki is doing from a marketing standpoint, you're going to learn a lot. So, how can people get more Miki in their life?

Miki:

Yes. Well first, you can also always come check me out on Instagram where I answer most people's questions pretty directly. Like, people have questions, I'm pretty good about responding. So Instagram, just @mikiagrawal. You can also go to mikiagrawal.com. If you subscribe to my mikiagrawal.com page, you'll actually get one disruptive move every week to do for yourself and for your business. So it's 52 disruptive moves. So that's just on mikiagrawal.com. And of course go to helloTUSHY.com. Check it out, get a TUSHY bidet. It's the best gift of all time. Holidays, it's the gift. It's just the best gift you can do for yourself. I mean, period, end of story. From a health high hygiene, confidence, feeling sexy, feeling good perspective. And then you can also, oh, if you want to learn about the strategies. I mean, definitely, Do Cool Sh*t, Disrupt-Her, check out my books. But then, if you want to actually learn about all of my tactics, of all of my strategy and building my companies from zero to $100 million plus, I built an actual course called Zero to a $100 million on Mindvalley.

Brett:

Mindvalley, I'll link to that in the show notes.

Miki:

If you go to my link in bio on my Instagram, I link to a free masterclass, a one hour masterclass which goes into a lot of these campaigns. But then, it also links to the quest, the Mindvalley quest, Zero to a $100 million. So, definitely check it.

Brett:

Beautiful. Got to check it out. I got to check that out. I got to watch that. And I'm going through Disrupt-Her right now. I absolutely love it, I highly recommend it. I like the audio version. I'm an auditory learner. And you narrate the books, so I get to listen to more Miki as I'm driving around. So that's been awesome as well. So Miki, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for doing this. I've been inspired, and got some new ideas cooking around in my head. I know other people have too. So, really, really appreciate it.

Miki:

Yay. I was happy to be here.

Brett:

Awesome, thank you so much. And as always, thank you for tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What do you think about the show? What do you want to hear more of? Less of? Let us know. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Brett:

Are you a D2C brand spending over six figures a month on paid media? If so, then listen up. My agency, OMG Commerce, and I have worked with some of the top eCommerce brands over the years. Including Boom, Native, Groove, Monan, Organifi and dozens more. And every year, we audit hundreds of Google, YouTube and Amazon ad accounts. And we always find either significant opportunities for growth, or wasted ad spend to cut, or both. For example, are you missing YouTube ads? Whatever you're spending on top of funnel Facebook, you should be able to spend 30 to 50% of that or more on YouTube, with similar returns. So if you're spending 300,000 to 400,000 a month on Facebook, you should be able to easily spend a 100,000 to 150,000 or more on YouTube. Visit omgcommerce.com to request a free strategy session, or visit our resource page and get some of our free guides loaded with some of best strategies for YouTube Ads, Google Shopping, Amazon DSP and more. Check it all out at omgcommerce.com.

‍

Nick Shackelford was a pro soccer player for the LA Galaxy turned online marketing super star. You’ve probably seen him featured in FOUNDR magazine or speaking on stage of the wildly successful event he co-founded - Geek Out. 

‍

I first met him when we both spoke at Ezra Firestone’s event in Denver several years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since. Nick is a master of media buying. He knows how to build agencies. And he has a really fresh take on creatives. We go deep into his creative process in this episode. Here’s a look at what we cover:

‍

• How a lack of diversity in your ads could be killing your results.
• Nick’s agency’s creative process. This is pure GOLD.
• How to use Amazon reviews to jump start your creative process - This strategy is so simple, so effective, you’ll kick yourself for not having used it.
• How a tool called Monkey Learn can help you key in on the right words and hooks to use with your audience.
• Why audience targeting is nearly dead and creative is KING.
• How Nick uses Creative Strategist and why you should consider one too.
• How to work with the algorithm rather than against it.

‍

Mentioned in This Episode:

‍

Nick Shackelford

   - LinkedIn

   - Twitter

Geek Out
   - Website

   - Events

Konstant Kreative‍

Structured Agency

Design Pickle‍

No Limit Creatives‍

Penji‍

Video Husky‍

Chubbies‍

Facebook Dynamic Creative‍

Josh Durham‍

Groove Life‍

Aligned Growth Management‍

Necklet‍

Monkey Learn Word Cloud‍

Luca + Danni‍

Northbeam‍

Triple Whale‍

James Van Elswyk

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry Podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest guests with the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

In this episode, we talk about the creative process that will supercharge your Facebook and Instagram ads. My guest is Nick Shackelford. You've probably seen Nick on stage at one of your favorite e-commerce events, or you've seen him featured in Foundr Magazine or in a host of other places online. More about Nick in just a minute. In this episode, we talk about the fact that audience marketing is nearly dead and why creative is almost all that matters. We talk about how Nick uses creative strategists and how you should consider using one too. We talk about how Nick use Amazon reviews to kickstart the creative process. This approach is so simple, so effective, so powerful, you'll kick yourself for not having used it before. We'll also talk about a tool that you can use to choose the right words and the right hooks for your ads. Plus, we'll unpack Nick's entire creative strategy. So lean in, buckle up, and please enjoy this interview with Nick Shackelford.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry Podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, attentive, One Click Upsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

Well, I am absolutely geeking out about this episode and this guest. That was a little bit of a pun, you'll find out more about that in a minute. But, longtime friend of mine, absolute rockstar in the space. If you're paying attention to digital marketing at all, you've probably heard of this guy or seen this guy or you've heard the name. And so, today I'm absolutely thrilled to have Nick Shackelford, aka The Shack, on the podcast. And we're going to dive deep into really several things related to marketing. And if you've been listening to this season one of the Spicy Curry Podcast, we're really talking about three things, right? Have something good to say, say it well, say it often. Regardless of what changes in the online world, you've got to do those things. And so we're going to talk about what's working now, what's not working now, how to crush it like Shack does.

Brett:

And so a couple of interesting things about Shack for those that may not know, he was a professional soccer player for the LA Galaxy, and then decided, "You know what? I want my field to be online marketing rather than running around the soccer field." And so we actually met. We met at Ezra Firestones event, right, Shack? We both spoke at Ezra Firestone's event. I don't remember where that was or when that was. Was it maybe Denver, I don't know, three or four years ago?

Nick:

It was. It was Colorado.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. And I just remembered two things about you. One, you had an amazing strategy for influencer marketing on Facebook, two, you were rocking a killer hoodie, and three, you just had this swagger about you. And then as I've known you over the years, you always have a killer hoodie on. So what is the secret to getting great hoodies?

Nick:

Oh man, I actually am wearing one of them right now. This is an appropriate hoodie when you're just working at home 24/7. So this is [inaudible 00:03:41], which is another e-commerce brand that if you guys are in the space, they definitely do some interesting things. You should definitely talk to Davies. He's a smart, smart guy as well.

Brett:

Would love that intro, let's talk to him. You look like you're ready for a mountain expedition and/or you're ready just to chill at home and be super cozy.

Nick:

I like options, so the fact that I'm able to do both at a will is what I want to play with. But no, what you do, it's been fun to watch the growth of this, especially with the people that are doing it for a long time, because sticking with your theme of say it often, those that are usually saying it often are able to continue to be around because they've been preaching the same thing consistently. It might change a little bit, which trust me, I think 2022 so far, I mean, we're only 19 days into it. But yeah, there are a lot of things that have changed over the times, but we haven't stopped saying the same things, right?

Nick:

We talked about this at GeekOut. You came and you were like, "Hey, this is the consistent stuff that you have to do." And it's shocking... Maybe it isn't shocking, maybe it isn't. People forget what they have to continually do, and so reminding them over and over and over, they just might not be ready to hear it. So I always say, you always start with the basis so everybody's at the same page, but then you can get really to the nitty-gritty stuff, which you do so well, so I see you, brother, on this.

Brett:

Love it, man. Love it. So let's do this, we're going to dive into all the stuff you're doing right now on Facebook and Instagram and other platforms and what your creative genius is. And got an episode in season one here with Justin Brooke, my man, talking GDN, but I know I've seen him publicly say, "If you're not paying attention to Nick Shackelford, you're missing out, because Nick or The Shack knows what he's talking about." So tell me about GeekOut, or tell the audience. I know about GeekOut. I spoke at the last one in LA, and it was fantastic. I had so much fun, so much fun connecting with your group, with your audience. I could really nerd out or geek out. But tell me about that event and kind of what's ahead for this year.

Nick:

I absolutely will. Yeah, I was very fortunate you made it out there. GeekOut started five years ago now, and it started with the fact that I couldn't go to my partner and tell her, "Oh, babe, look at these campaigns. Oh my gosh, isn't this great?" Roll her eyes, she just didn't really care as much. And then [inaudible 00:06:04] James, he felt the same way. So we were geeking and nerding on all these things. We have a different vibe about ourselves, and what I mean... I literally have to explain this. We have the ability to deliver content and aggregate a room of people that want to learn, make money, and continue to build their business, but still feel open to talk about, "Hey, my employee just sued me," or "I'm going through this issue with my partner," or "I'm going...." these really intimate things that you don't feel comfortable expressing unless you're in a room that's safe and comfortable.

Nick:

And it just started happening organically, because I'm that way, right? I'm okay with things being very public. There's a couple things that I don't want to have super public, but I'm pretty much 99% out there on every channel because I do believe building in public builds relation, and there was no better way for us to do this except doing it in person. So this started, again, five years ago, and I remember we did it in Las Vegas literally on a couch. We thought we were renting a mansion, of course. Like all things in Vegas, you thought it was, and we figured what it really was. We got there, and I remember there was a putt-putt. One of the selling propositions on Airbnb was, "Oh, use our little putting green, and it was amazing." It was two holes, and I'm like, "Oh my God, what are we're going to do?"

Nick:

So we had a good run, but the thing that we never lacked was the quality of content. And so we've ran it back. We've done Tel Aviv. We've done Barcelona. We've done LA, Miami, New York, and we're gearing up for this year. We will be the only event that will do, I think, double digits of events this year. We're planning for 10. I think we'll probably, knock on wood because of where the world is currently at, get about six. And the first one starts in Dubai right before Affiliate World, and then we'll bring it back in for San Diego and Miami. Brett, I think I told you this before, it's the one business that I have that makes me the least amount of money but brings me the most amount of happiness, because you truly get a seed connection, and it's something that we've really, really gotten away from in the world for the various reasons that all of us are experiencing together, but it's just become way more important to me.

Brett:

Yeah, it was just phenomenal. I can't wait. I've been talking to my team about it. I've been bugging you for dates, because I'm blocking these out. I'm coming to speak at as many of these as I can or attend those that I can't speak at. It was just an amazing place to be, other like-minded, super smart marketers. I know you've had this experience. You were talking about talking to your partner. You can't really talk about ROAS. She doesn't care, right? I can't talk about ROAS to my wife. She glazes over. But you become acutely aware of how many acronyms we use in this space, right? ROAS, LTV, AOV, CLV. It's never ending, but this is your people. You can geek out about any of those things, but you can also talk about deeper stuff, people stuff, preparing for exits, buying companies. It's an awesome group, testament to you and to James, but just high level people, man. I would put it on the short list. If you could only attend a couple events this year, make sure one of them-

Nick:

[inaudible 00:09:22].

Brett:

... is GeekOut. I can edit this out later if I need to. Is there a rebrand coming too? Is it going to be GeekOut, is going to be something else? Or should we talk about that?

Nick:

Yeah, absolutely, we should. It's going to be called a GeekUp for two reasons. One, we have to level up, and so adding in that geek element is something that we still want to keep. And two, there was already a trademark called GeekOut Events. So as much of the branding I want you guys to be like, "Oh wow, that's so clever," I'm like, "Well, we kind of got into a situation."

Brett:

We're geeking out and leveling up. We're geeking up. This is amazing. Yeah, that's [inaudible 00:09:58]. Well, its going to be... I don't care what you call it, but GeekUp is super cool too. So if you attend only a few events, make sure one of them is GeekUp. And so I'll link to everything in the show notes. You can google it and check it out and stuff like that too. So fantastic, man. Any other notes on the event itself?

Nick:

Well, okay, so the segue into what I'm focused on a lot right now outside of the three businesses is we started GeekUp because it was about sharing and learning and getting that feedback of what's happening, and that led me to Konstant Kreative. We have almost our first year under our belts, and it's purely content because... Dude, you're a YouTube guy. You do good YouTubes. We don't do YouTubes, but we do a lot of Facebook, and we do a lot of Instagram, and we do a lot of TikTok, and we do a lot of Snapchat. And I used to be such a big teacher and proponent of strategies and hacks and tactics. I'll raise my hand here, I was one of the biggest people talking about various hacks and strategies 2017, '18, '19. 2020, I got a little quieter. 2020, I got real quiet. In 2022, I'm on that same quiet band because it just isn't as sustainable as it once was. I don't want to say we did this on purpose, but I like to think I did or had a feeling, my spider senses, for the new Marvel movie, which is fantastic, is tingling, and I was like, "Dude-

Brett:

That is a good movie. And actually, quick side note, the new, or new-ish, depending on when you're listening to this, Spiderman movie got us into the whole Marvel series. We watched Spiderman No Way Home, and then now we're going back to the beginning. We're, I think, three movies into the... It's like 30 movies. If you do chronologically through the Marvel series, it's nuts, but my family and I, we're going through it all, so it's super fun.

Nick:

Oh my God, I am not a movie person, but I will watch though. It's culture. It's so culture. Okay. What put us into this position was understanding that content was never going to leave us, and so we put so much time and effort into building. We weren't first to do it. There's Design Pickle. There's No Limit Creatives. There's Penjee! There's Video Husky. There's so many other people that do this content on demand thing, but we had to do it ourselves, because arguably, I've never gone through a pandemic. I'm 31 years old. I didn't know what would happen if I couldn't understand how much revenue was being driven by each one of our employees across our entire company because I didn't know what I needed to go potentially [inaudible 00:12:26] so I didn't know what loans I needed to go get.

Nick:

I needed to know that I could do a dollar earned or average per each one of our employees contributing to the bottom line. Sometimes in just an agency space or sometimes in business space, you have admins or project managers that might not directly tie to bottom line. We know they impact it, but we don't really know what they drive. Designers are another one. Editors are another one. Copywriters are another one. Unless you're in this performance tower, you know each email or each thing you write, you get dollars back on. If you aren't structured that way, you're like, "Dude, I don't really know how much money's coming in from these people." So we actually built this service and fed it to ourselves. And I think the term is dog feeding ourselves.

Brett:

Yeah, so this is a Google term. So it's called eating your own dog food. They borrowed it from Purina or Puppy Chow or something like that, where literally that company, they would eat their own dog food. It's a metaphor for using your own stuff, right?

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

You believe in your product so much, you use it. Yeah.

Nick:

Oh, so thank you. I actually didn't know where that was coming from, and I'm glad you [inaudible 00:13:29]. We built it for ourselves because content... If you're like, "Nick, what are you about right now?" it's content, and it's volume of content at a cost effective rate. Listen, before the pandemic hit, a lot of people didn't really open up their mind to the quality of support, quality of company building that you can do offshore. I'm not saying outsource. This is a complete different thing. Outsource to offshore is completely different. Offshore are full-time your employees, your people, your values, your systems, your processes. Outsource is white labeling. You don't know what's going on. They're delivering you something, you're going to wrap in a bow, you're going to deliver. So I'm going to be very clear on that.

Nick:

This was something that when we started to understand quality of talent allowed us on the agency side to operate at 35, 40, 55% margin at times on various months, you can do the same exact thing on a content iteration, say. The only issue that a lot of people don't get right when they're like, "Hey, I need a performance editor," or "I need a performance creative person," it's because they themselves don't know what they want. Here's why. There's a subjectivity in this that everybody can't get away from in the romanticism toward a brand they own or towards the content that's being shot. I'm sure you experience this, or do you?

Brett:

Absolutely. Totally. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes we are our own biggest enemy, or often the brand owner is their biggest enemy in terms of getting creatives that work, creatives that actually connect and compel and move people to take action. Yeah, sometimes we're romantic about what we think that structure should be or what we think that message should be rather than focusing on... Let's not do something that's completely off brand, of course, but let's do what works. And sometimes you have the brand, or sometimes the agency gets in the way of that.

Nick:

It's so true because we're hired to do two things. Now, if you're hiring a branding agency or hiring a shop that needs to be really up here and be oh, really meta on things, God bless. I'm not in the space to where I can afford to create something that doesn't drive revenue. You're in the same boat. We have to validate the costs that we have for a lot of our partners. And so when you have this subjective idea of what happens, and I'll get into what testing, what we're doing now, what 2022, at least the bets that I'm making in this first quarter on how we're building out our testing and how we're building out our, at least our internal content structure. And actually, I'll fucking go into all the things, because I think the more that this information gets out there, it might actually spark some interest on your side, and you might have some interesting feedback for me too, so-

Brett:

Totally, totally. We're going to talk about one thing really quickly, and then I want to dive into the specifics.

Nick:

Okay.

Brett:

Actually, two things really quickly. What'd you say the name of the company was, the content company?

Nick:

Oh, Konstant Kreatives. Sorry.

Brett:

Konstant Kreatives. Awesome. We'll link to that in the show notes as well. But I could not agree with you more, right? I think in fact, back when we first met in Denver at Ezra's event, a lot of people were talking about hacks and here's little tricks and tips and things you can do to make Facebook and YouTube and all that work. And certainly, there's always going to be some hacks, but success is way more, way more about having great creatives, sticking to the fundamentals, and just being relentless, relentless on testing, relentless on looking for new angles, and then really just being consistent in what you're doing and doubling down on what's working. And so love that you're doing that. I got to learn more about your company there too so I can refer some people to you. But yeah, so let's dive in there. What is your process then for finding the right angle and getting that... Because you talk about volume of creatives too, right? You got to be testing pretty frequently, especially on Facebook. Not as much on YouTube, but especially on Facebook and Instagram. What's your process like?

Nick:

This is something that we think is an ongoing debate, kind of ongoing analysis. Let's think of it this way, you used to go to optimize campaigns at an ad level or an ad set level or even the structure of the campaign level, and we're having to do a lot of this before we even get to the campaign launch. What I mean by this is, before the conversation of cancel culture or before the conversation of inclusion really was being had, a lot of the ads that we saw were generally white males, white females across every brand, across every company, thin, thinnish, and you didn't really think about, "What if [crosstalk 00:17:49]

Brett:

Which is really just silly. But you're right, that's just the way it was. Yes, it was crazy.

Nick:

Yeah, it was silly. Listen, I'm not ignorant to who I am and what I am, but when you look at brands that are buying this, brands don't have this data. You can't run a quiz to be like, "Hey, what do you... " I guess you could, technically, but I don't know how it would come across us. "Who do you identify with? Or what do you identify as? Or what race are you?" You can't necessarily ask that, but that's the type of [inaudible 00:18:17] that you have to get done. Say, when we give a shoot or when we give content for others to see, "Hey, what do we need?" We usually recommend, "Hey, we need two different races and two different genders, and we need sizes of those genders to be appropriate to what we actually think is our customers buying."

Nick:

It's a great example, the Team Chubbies. Chubbies makes unbelievable male board shorts. I think they get an underwear too now, but makes male board shorts. And if you watch the progression over time of who was used in their content, fit male, white or black, fit male, white or black, little thicker, white or black, little dad bod, white or black, little larger, white or black. Do you know why? Because they're looking at all the-

Brett:

That's their audience, right? How many fit dudes are out there? Right? Most of us have dad bods. Not you, you're a former soccer player, but yeah, dad bods are everywhere.

Nick:

These are the frat guys that are buying it. And they literally... I've listened and watched the progression of this, and they're like... I'm sure that some people want to aspire to look great, but there's a point where you can get turned off by this, and you're like, "That's not really who I am." So it's this progression, this conversation of the testing begins at the inclusion of what's in the content. That's just a side note. I went on a tangent. I apologize there.

Brett:

Yeah, but I love it. I'll just, I'll key in on that. And so it's a side note, but it's important. A buddy of mine runs an athleisure business and they sell a lot of leggings. And so their models are very diverse, Latinos, African Americans, whites, every race, but also normal looking people, right? These are not all 98 pound supermodel. It looks like normal people, but they're joyful and they're smiling. And they are killing it because people look at it and say, "Well, that's me. That's my body type. That's my style." And it's so needed right now, so I'm really glad you brought that up.

Nick:

It's so true. And it kind of goes down to the typical structures that we run if I were to get a little technical in this. We still launch with dynamic creative. We still launch with... Dynamic creative is probably the first step. If we don't have a full hard belief, and this is the campaign structure, if we don't have a full hard belief in any one direction, whether it's like, we know this is worked in the past, but we're just trying to iterate on the value prop, or we're just trying to iterate on the USB, the box opening, we're just trying to iterate on a specific thing, we will still let Facebook choose or dictate the direction we need to go into up into-

Brett:

So by dynamic creatives, you just mean you're... Explain that for people that don't know the Facebook platform well.

Nick:

Thank you very much. So when launching a campaign, there's DCT, dynamic creative testing, which is a tool that you let Facebook choose. Essentially, you're going, "Hey, we don't want to impose any campaign restrictions to force spend," let's say on an automatic budget campaign, an ABO. You go, "I just need you to spend all my budget on these specific creatives that I, the media buyer, have told you I want you to spend on." And CBO can do that too with a little bit of limitations, but that's easiest communication I can give you on that. The dynamic creative testing [crosstalk 00:21:11]

Brett:

You're basically saying, "Hey, here's our creatives, and Facebook, you go wild and you find the winner."

Nick:

Exactly. We are not imposing a restriction on where money can be spent. We're letting the campaign dictate that. And that is... It's basically taking away the bias that we have of letting Facebook say, "Hey, we have this algorithm, we have this info, we have these consumers, and we're going to run this type of campaign on it."

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Now I will have some of my media buyers look at me and go, "Chef, I won't always run this route," but that's the baseline that we start with, because if somebody has pushback on me, say, let's say David or Scott have a conversation, they're like, "Nick, I actually believe that's not the best use of this campaign, because we're only trying to compare two main concepts." And we'll say, Bernie says, "We'll use the athleisure brand here." We want to understand which color way of these leggings are going to be the one that hits or which price point of these leggings are going to hit. That doesn't need to be dynamic creative tested. That needs to be controlled and tested equally across the board. So that to me has probably been the biggest change. Before, I would launch all with minimum campaign budgets or some sort of structure where we're going audience testing, kind of put that after the fact, because it's not as impactful unless it's going to be purely based on the content or creative and the structure when you go live with it.

Brett:

Yeah. I love that. And so really, I mean, if you look at what is our job as advertisers, whether we're agencies or in house or solopreneur, whatever the case may be, our job is to make great creatives, but to feed the algorithm, to let the algorithm, whether that's Facebook, YouTube, or Google, let... The algorithm's smart. And in the long run, the algorithm's going to do a better job than you are in a lot of ways, so how can you feed it and give it enough creative so that it finds the winners? Or how can you do a very specific test? Like you were talking about, right? I'm testing two creatives, because I'm trying to find is it black or is it pink on the leggings that are going to hit, or is it this price or that price? That type of thing, a controlled test, but either way you're trying to say, "I don't know the answer here on what creative's really going to work, but we're going to find out." And then once we find out, then we're going to go all in on that, so-

Nick:

Because you and I both have these conversations with brands that talk about, "Hey, what's your brand book? What's your stance? What do you stand for? And they have the idea of who they want their customer to be, but it's not always what Facebook will agree to be or Google will agree for it to be. You have to let the replies come in. You have to let the data speak for itself. And I'm shocked. And I don't know if this is in your portfolio, we have about 116 brands right now, 117, I believe. The amount of post-purchase surveys on where you've heard from me or what information they're gathering is probably less than 15%.

Brett:

Totally, a very few of our clients are doing them. I think you've got to do it though, because you're going to be surprised by the answers you find out.

Nick:

Exactly, especially understanding touch points now the attribution is dropping a little bit, touch points and understanding where these people are coming from or how much I should be allocating per channel. We had a very, very intelligent brand, I'll say maybe 2020s, called Rove Concepts, which are a large... It's a larger retailer. It's a furniture, so purchase path takes a lot of time. You got to include your partner. A lot of it is generated interest on Facebook, but a lot of it is actualized on Google, XYZ. And these guys were making... This is the first company or brand that came to Jake myself and goes, "You know what? I understand that we gave you these [inaudible 00:24:37] a platform. I don't know if you guys are actually impacting the bottom line because it shows Google having way more conversions than you guys." I'm like, "Heck is going on?" I'm like, "Well, okay, I get it. I'm sure there's... It's an expensive piece. There's thousands of dollars. Can we just put surveys on the back of this? Or do you have this already live, or can you share this information?"

Nick:

A lot of what we started to see was, although that might not have popped up in the platform, a lot of it was saying I heard first about you on Facebook or Instagram, yet the conversion value, all the revenue was coming from Google. And I'm going, "You can't tell me to stop or that's going to be lowered." So we did a hard test turning off paid social, top of funnel. What do you know? Numbers dropped. Yeah, we wouldn't have been able to cover [crosstalk 00:25:22]

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. I was just talking to a buddy of mine, Josh Durham, who used to be the head of growth at Groove Life and at an agency, and he talked about the same thing, doing those post purchase surveys and realizing that, man, 70, 80% of customers are going to say, "Hey, I first heard you on social, I first heard you on YouTube," or something like that. And I love Google, right? I'm a Google guy, but search and shopping sometimes takes the credit, especially branded search. You need to run it, but branded search often takes credit for a sale that, really, Facebook or YouTube generated, right?

Nick:

Sure. Preach to the choir [inaudible 00:25:59]

Brett:

Yeah, yeah. So, hey, I want to circle back to creative really quickly, and then we can talk attribution again in a minute, because there's some important notes there. As far as creatives go, what is your process? How are you guys coming up with hooks for the actual creatives, and what types of creatives are you launching with? I just want to give people ideas on what should they be testing next or how should they go about their creative process, or how should they talk to their agency to get them to do things more like you guys? Can you talk about your creative process a little bit?

Nick:

I can, yeah. We have one baseline process that we run with or usually use outside of if someone already gives us [inaudible 00:26:39]. Say a brand was coming to us and they already really had, "Hey, we know who our girl or guy is. Here's what we've learned outside of optimizing and looking at the current campaigns," we start with this process where we begin on Amazon, we begin with Reddit, and we begin with competitors. We don't go to the own brand stuff just yet, because we don't want any biases coming in from marketing messages that consumers might be regurgitating back. If you look at Amazon, there's very honest reviews at one star, two star, and even the three star, very honest reviews that use layman's terms that are common, that they're looking for solutions or points. And a lot of it on Amazon, actually, they don't really care about the brand itself. From the experience, from the information I have, they're not necessarily going to Amazon to find Lulu Lemon, they're going to Amazon to price shop. They're going to Amazon for the efficiency and the effectiveness of getting that product as quick as possible.

Nick:

You're not going there looking for a specific brand. You're usually typing in the product in which you need. Hydration packets, coats, clothing, that's the things that you're really searching for, so you usually get people that don't really about crap about who the brand is or what, and they're not going to hold back from you, because it's pretty anonymous at that point, or what have you. So what we started to find out is, before a brand would come to us and before they're like, "I don't know what talking points or hooks or explanations that need to be in this piece of creative," we go to the Amazon reviews. We probably export between 50 to a hundred. We drop it into a word cloud.

Brett:

So you're looking at the actual reviews from those customers or from competitors and from that category as a whole?

Nick:

Correct. Thank you very much to the clarification. We do not go to the brand own yet. We go from the competitors of the same exact product. So if I'm selling leggings, I'm going to the number one competitor with the most amount of reviews, similar in the legging side. I want to know why this product is winning. I want those five stars and four stars, isolate those by themselves. And I want those one stars and two stars, isolate them by themselves. I use three as a lever if I don't have clear messages of things to say or not say based on the four and fives, and the ones and twos.

Brett:

Got it.

Nick:

Four and five might be skewed.

Brett:

Right.

Nick:

One to twos might be skewed, but the threes might you my answer if I don't find it in the two buckets tracking with me.

Brett:

Totally. And this is brilliant by the way. I absolutely love it, yeah, because you're looking for real pain points, real motivators, real things that customers care about, and you're looking for their language, which just makes all the difference in the world.

Nick:

Because we are going to do market stuff. We're going to try and be cool and cute and playful. We'll do our best to not, but we sometimes fall into these categories. And I'll use one brand for this called Necklet. Necklet created a latch system that's magnetic that allows for stacks of jewelry to not get tangled. Brilliant. For women, or men, mainly for women that are wearing necklaces that don't want it to be tangled because they want to wear multiple, it's absolutely brilliant. It's genius. And the mechanism is a magnet on the back. What is it solving? Is a magnet strong enough? Is it latching? Does it pull your hair? These things are questions that the brand might not necessarily know. But guess who's going to know? The people that are buying it and the people that are leaving those reviews on Amazon. They [inaudible 00:29:51] will tell you exactly how feeling, whether this is a dumb concept or not.

Nick:

So we found out a lot of this. No matter how beautiful it might look, no matter how the feeling of joy might be portrayed, the mechanism is still the most unique value proposition for them, so we better go speak specifically towards. That, to me, was after we got from a competitors, put it into a word cloud. I think the easiest one you guys could use is probably Monkey Learn. It's called monkeylearn/wordcloud. I think you have to potentially set up an account. It's free, but if anybody else has a word cloud generator that is better than that, please hit me up. I'm always looking for more tools.

Brett:

Monkey Learn, and you're looking for... And this is like a word cloud builder?

Nick:

Yeah. So it's called Monkey Learn, and then it's a forward slash word-cloud or wordcloud. I'm not sure exactly on [inaudible 00:30:36], but I can pull it for you right after this. And that way, I'm able to aggregate all my star reviews. I would say it's easier if you... The more, the better. The more, the more accurate. Drop it into this word cloud, and it's going to generate and pull up the most commonly used words and tones. And that way, now here's your messages. Here's your information. Here's the things that you need to use. This, Brett, I'm telling you, this thing has allowed processes. Because if you don't know where to begin, that's where you go right away.

Brett:

Yeah, because if you don't have something like this, you're just going to begin with that discussion around the boardroom. It's going to be virtual, right? But you're talking to the client, you're talking to the brand owner, you're talking to the marketing director, and you're like, "Well, hey, our customer is this, and they believe this and they want that." And that's valuable, but this is amazing, where you're saying, "Okay, let's see what the people, the real customers are actually saying, and let's aggregate that. And let's look for tone and let's look for actual words." Yeah, just absolutely brilliant. I love it.

Nick:

The next step that we take from is... Say we already have this, say somebody already has this understanding, the next step that we have here is, where are you lacking? Where do you think your brand or your audience has not been addressed? This is usually right where we get in the conversation of inclusion, usually where we get in the conversation of, it seems like we're over indexed on a certain demographic, a certain gender, certain size. That, to me, is something that we really, really spend a great amount of time. We're very fortunate. We're in LA, so we have a melting pot of people to pull from, and that's something that we know, as a unique advantage, we have to leverage. So that generally is our second conversation that we have, of like, where can we do some tests to where we're not doing something that's not on brand, we're not doing something that we have fear of isolating a consumer, but we have the ability to actually get real learnings in a direction that we never ran before. Here's an example, Luca Danni, which is [inaudible 00:32:29]. It's a bangle and accessory company, bracelet.

Brett:

It's called Luke and Danni? Did I hear that right?

Nick:

Yeah. It technically reads Luca Danni, but Luke and Danni is what it is, and they sell bangles, they sell bracelets. Well, in this test, they usually always show the wrist, and it's the wrist of the woman buying it and the various women buying it. And they actually started seeing a little bit of a performance increase on the thicker in which the wrist began to [crosstalk 00:32:59]

Brett:

Interesting.

Nick:

And I'm like, why is this? Then you look at the export of the purchasing behavior of the people buying it. You have the strong representation of the Bible bell, strong representation of the south, strong representation of a little bit of the east coast. But you're like, "Wow, okay. I think some of our demographics are not the assumed thinner audience that we once believe there to be, so how do we mix this up?" So now we have wrists of all shapes and sizes. You hear me?

Brett:

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're there. I thought I lost you for a minute. Yeah, so wrists of all shapes. This is so important. What's really interesting, I going to key in on something that Ezra Firestone mentioned to me a couple years ago, where they notice, BOOM!, their brand BOOM! and Cindy Joseph, it's really women over the age of 50, skin care, makeup, and really good stuff, but they found... They thought, "Well, what if we went a little bit younger with our models, or a little bit younger with our ambassadors that we have in the videos." And they started getting complaints. People were reaching out saying, "That's not me. This person is younger than me." Right? We sometimes forget that people really are looking for, "Can I see myself in this video? Can I see myself in this product. And is this for me?" And if it's not, then they're likely not going to buy, right? And so fascinating test, that, hey, thicker wrists, bigger wrists lead to better results. Diversifying your models leads to better results. You got to explore and got to test. That totally makes sense.

Nick:

Anybody can do this too. That's probably the biggest thing that I want to drive home, is those testing of using Amazon first and Reddit first because the natural communication, community already being built there within your competitors. It's not rocket... The way you present that information, the way you speak to it really will pull in on the expertise that you have, but this isn't rocket science, man. We have anywhere between 100 to 150 brands at any time. And if anybody's looking for analysis of their creative or performance or angles or whatever they're taking, they go this direction, because they know they can get it, they can get it quick, and they don't need to wait on other people to do it. So it's something I would definitely like to pass that forward.

Brett:

Yeah. Love it. What else? What do you see working on Facebook right now? And I know that this stuff has a tendency to be short lived, but in terms of length of videos, what are you finding that's working, or maybe, maybe there's different links, different angles for cold traffic versus remarketing? What are some of the kind of tips and ideas you're seeing there?

Nick:

Well, I'm going to caveat this [inaudible 00:35:25]. We are using two tools. So we're using North Beam and we're using Triple Whale, because we are making-

Brett:

Both fantastic tools.

Nick:

I completely agree. We have to make sure that we're looking at the correct amount of information or data and it's purely based upon a third party tool that's giving me the direction of, okay, this campaign, this ad set, this purchase path is making the most sense for us, so-

Brett:

Yeah. And just a quick note here, because I know the guys at North Beam and at Triple Whale, great platforms, but I'll talk North Beam for just a second. The way it works, it's basically first party data. So they put a first party pixel on your site, they put DNS record there where now they can have an infinity timeframe-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... click attribution, right? So instead of attribution being only seven days, right? So after click happens, and after seven days, Facebook can no longer track it. With something like North Beam or Triple Whale, you track it forever, right? And you can go back and say, "Hey, this one YouTube click or this one Facebook click led to a customer who bought 20 times." Right? You can see all that data, because then these tools integrate with Facebook, Google-

Nick:

Yes.

Brett:

... Shopify, your email platform. They pull all that stuff together. So anyway, this isn't a commercial for those tools. We don't make anything from those tools, but you need that data to know what's really working and what's not.

Nick:

Well, we never used to have... We always needed this.

Brett:

We both needed it, yeah. And [crosstalk 00:36:42]

Nick:

We can get close without it. And now we can't. So now when I'm looking at campaigns, so I'm looking at what's working. Right now, let's go January 19th, 11:50 AM, Wednesday, 2022. What's working right now is images. I'm now getting images with plain background colors, bold colors. I'm saying yellow blues, pinks and purples, and big bold text. Call outs of the pain points of the consumer. And if I were to be more specific, this is primarily top of funnel, and we're having very minimal branded elements here, because all I'm trying to do is build engagement, build a little bit of direction that I'm trying to go in this place, it's just the right path for me to go down towards, and it is the quickest thing that can be launched. It is the easiest thing that can be made.

Brett:

Yeah.

Nick:

Pain points, value propositions, big, bold colored text, and maybe, if you really want to include it, what does the product look like? Is can just be a product on a white image or somewhere the left or right side of things. We're using this top of funnel aggressively for two reasons. One, if we can get the engagement, and if we can get some sort of understanding of people agreeing with it, or maybe it say other way, not agreeing with it, but that you're usually just seeing the comments, the shares or the engagement overall, I know I'm on the right path. I need to make an image or a more detailed image, shorter video or longer form video to run top of funnel. This is Facebook specifically. So our launching period right now is major callouts with the value propositions or with pain points that we believe for each brand with that color text to kind of pop off page. Second, if that is already being done or something that's already going down that path, we are going with 30 to 45 second videos.

Nick:

I was a huge proponent of sub 30, generally around 15 seconds, but I need this bigger audience for people to pull from, because things on platform, the pools of remarketing are not as quality as they once were because of the drop in reporting. So the more that we can have people engaging or watching the videos longer, I'm running all of our remarketing, or at least our reengagement middle of funnel, off of these audience and pools of creative that we're actually spending more time, that these consumers are spending more time on.

Brett:

Got it. So you're running... So yeah, I remember, and I'm not a Facebook guy, but I remember people talking about, "Hey, shorter creatives are working 15 seconds and things like that," which I'm sure is still the case to a certain degree. But what you're saying, and this totally makes a lot of sense, is 45 seconds, 30 seconds to 45 seconds to your cold traffic audiences, because then you can remarket to people that have watched half of that or all that or whatever the case may be, and now that's a much better audience than maybe the remarketing audiences you would get from someone who engages with a 15 second video. Did I understand that correctly?

Nick:

You did, because we need the... Well, for just a stronger audience. And I don't know what happened. I think the biggest thing that we've seen, if we're talking remarketing, the content, I'm not too sure. I wouldn't feel comfortable speaking about what's working across the board for our brands because it's very [inaudible 00:39:44] and very particular.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah.

Nick:

But one thing that is been a constant is, we need more periods of time. We used to be able to be very segmented, and like, "Cool. One to seven day, you're going to get this message. 8 to 14, you're going to get this message. 15 and on, you're going to get this. It's not working for us. We can't get... I hope it is for others because it was so incredible to push them down a purchase path, but we're going 30 days, 45 days, the largest pull in which we can get from, I think the largest pull is probably around 90, but the biggest pull that we can pull from, I want that to be my remarketing pull, and it's just a mixture of various engagement testimonials of videos of them reinforcing the product or the brand. That's the only thing that I know I can get some consistent benchmarks on, because other than this, there's just no consistency.

Brett:

Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And as platforms are being more restricted on audiences they can build and how they track and how they report, I think in a lot of cases, we're just going to have to simplify, right? Some of the hyper segmentation of this seven day audience, 14 day audience, 30 day audience, some of that is going away. We're seeing that on Google too, actually, so I think that's probably pretty widespread at this point. Going simpler, going broader makes sense. How are you coming... Because I know, especially on Facebook, Facebook is hungry for new creatives, new concepts. How do you go about refreshing content so regularly and finding winning angles? Any insights there on process that you can share?

Nick:

So I don't have a... Ah, I got some stuff. So I don't have a firm one on this because it really is going to depend on budget. So I'll put a caveat there. The more money you have, the general amount of testing that you can do at higher volume. The only difference between a big budget and a little budget is that a big budget learns quicker, so it's no difference. The process is [crosstalk 00:41:37]

Brett:

You're doing the same things. It's just the speed at which you're doing them is what the budget really dictates.

Nick:

Exactly. Exactly. So I want to put, "Oh that's my brand is not spending 25,000, 50,000, whatever it is." I can't do that. You can, you just can't do as much or as quick. We did start the Konstant Kreative, why we built this is because we believe that there's an internal revision of content. There's an internal revision in planning of strategy for content. And then there's a marketing message. Generally, if it's evergreen, without talking about mother's day, father's day one-off moments, if the general process is happening, we are iterating on a seven day and a ten day window. Let me explain. Our current organization structure is, we operate in a pod system. So we have our copywriter, our senior media buyer, junior media buyer account manager, and channel specific buyers that we need to plug in.

Nick:

But the general makeup is admin, media buyers, strategist. We then started to build a new department, which is our creative strategist. Their core role is to analyze campaign performance on creative specifically. They don't care about the audience. They don't care about interests. Just the performance of the creative. Give that feedback into the client. Give that feedback into our creative director to shoot more content. And their job is to come up with the concepts of, "Here's why here's where I think the angles are going to be going towards." Now, it's various and different for all because the budget's going to be different for all, but it's usually out of two things. The increase of quality of life, that's one core concept, core understanding. Why is this product going to increase the value of my life or make my life better? Then, in the same flip side is, if I don't have this, how terrible or how poor or how unfortunate or how much struggle will my life have?

Nick:

So with those two deciding factors of how much I'm going to increase or how much I'm going to decrease, then we come into the concepts of positioning for each one of these products. So with that frame of mind, we have a seven day sprint to a ten day sprint of analysis, seven days to get the campaign running and live. First two, generally speaking, are not spending a tremendous amount of money, unless something works or unless we have... This is a commitment that the brand or us have [inaudible 00:43:48]. We are spending this money. We got to learn. I say 10 days because there's a little bit of updates attribution. You know, if you're running Facebook, data comes in very sporadically, so we want a little bit more time to run this. It's unfortunate because, at least for our team right now, gone are the days of launch a campaign on one day, slam budget on the second day, turn the campaign off on things that didn't work by the third day. That's more drawn out to a five day, seven day [crosstalk 00:44:14].

Brett:

Yeah. Totally.

Nick:

So if I sat there and go, the analysis that the creative strategy team needs to be doing is on that three day, five day, seven day, ten day window, because that's going to include a full week plus weekends and give you back on that Monday, because you're usually not going to get that launch data on that early, early day. To me, this is an ongoing iteration, it's an ongoing sequence of conversation with the brands, and I'm actually doing a pretty decent case study on what's happening on this. I'm going to unveil it live at Affiliate World, because we're working with Motion app-

Brett:

Nice.

Nick:

... which has some really good data on what's happening, where it's happening, and what insights that are having on their campaign, elements needed in creative. And then we have a large volume of assets on the constant side. So I'm trying to pull all the assets that we've seen perform before and all the assets that we've seen being requested, trying to pull a correlation between the two. And it should be some interesting stuff that we're going to find out, because a lot of this that people don't have, and I hate to hate to call it out, but they don't have a process of feedback loop. They don't have the understanding of when they need to go back and analyze and launch it. They can come up with great ideas, but how long does it take for them to make that test, or how long does it take for them to get information back to the people to create more?

Brett:

Just absolutely fantastic. So unfortunately, we're kind of running out of time, which is a bummer because I would like to continue to geek out or geek up here with you, but I want to kind of go high level for just a minute and just a few questions that I think will help anybody. And I think as people have been listening, hey, we got really technical, we got into some details, so pass this on to your media buyer. If you are a media buyer, I'm sure you're just salivating and loving every second of this. Let's talk high level, Nick. What should people be focusing more on in the coming year? And what should they be focusing less on? Meaning, kind of how are things shifting? What do we need to be really keying in on to get results? And maybe, what are some things that used to be important to pay attention to that now aren't?

Nick:

Great question. Fantastic questions. If you're media buyers or your agencies or your team is coming to you with audience insights or campaign structure insights, I would encourage them to let that go and encourage them to stop spending the time in finding structures and more spending the time on the research of what are these campaigns doing? What are the messages being said in the creative or content? And it has always been content first.

Brett:

All right, Spicy Curry listeners, here's the deal. Nick's audio cut out towards the end. Now, the good news is you heard 99% plus of what Nick had to say, but what you missed is kind of important. You missed how to get a hold of Nick. How can you follow him? How can you learn more about him? How can you get in touch with his agency? And so I'm going to tell you right now. The first thing is you have to follow Nick on Twitter. His Twitter game is an A plus. If you're in the DOC space, e-comm space at all, you got to follow him. And his handle is @iamshackelford. So letter I A-M Shackelford, so check that out. His agency is Structured. So structured.agency, check it out. They cut their teeth on paid social, but they also, Nick and Chase Dimond run an email marketing agency, so check out structured as well.

Brett:

And then one of my favorite events now. I think you should check it out. The events do get a little bit technical and nerdy, but GeekOut that Nick runs with James Van Elswyk, great event. So that's geekoutedu.com. So, check that out. You will not be disappointed. And as always, we want to hear from you. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with friends. Also, this is a brand new podcast, so go give it a rating on Apple iTunes, if you don't mind. It will make my day. It will allow other people to find the show. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍

Few people understand Facebook Advertising and Direct Response Marketing like Molly Pittman. You’ve probably seen Molly on stage at events like Traffic & Conversion Summit or Social Media Marketing World or you’ve seen her and Ezra Firestone create amazing content through Smart Marketer. In this episode we dive into a subject that is often glossed over - creating great offers and building acquisition funnels. Without a great offer, your ad efforts will fall short. And great offers aren’t just about discounting. 

‍

It’s the perfect subject to help you win in a privacy-first online world. 

‍

Here's what we cover:

• How Smart Marketer and BOOM are building and launching new acquisition funnels every month.
• How to test offers via email before investing in ad dollars.
• What metrics we should pay attention to in a post iOS 14 world.
• 3 ways to get more testimonials.
• What is likely to change in the future and what most likely won’t. 

‍
Mentioned in This Episode:

Molly Pittman

   - LinkedIn

   - Instagram

Smart Marketer‍

Smart Marketer Podcast‍

Ezra Firestone‍

Traffic & Conversion Summit‍

John Grimshaw‍

BOOM! by Cindy Joseph‍

“5 Makeup Tips For Older Women”‍

“The State Of Paid Ads In 2022”‍

“Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert

“Good to Great” by Jim Collins‍

“Turning the Flywheel” by Jim Collins

Transcript:

Brett:

Welcome to the Spicy Curry podcast, where we explore hot takes in e-commerce and digital marketing. We feature some of the brightest minds, some of the spiciest perspectives on how to grow your business online.

Brett:

Season one of this podcast is built on the old business adage that all it takes is three things to grow. One, have something good to say. Two, say it well. And three, say it often. My guest today is Molly Pittman. She's the CEO of Smart Marketer in partnership with Ezra Firestone. We're talking about crafting irresistible offers and building acquisition funnels for e-commerce.

Brett:

So, lean in, buckle up, and enjoy this episode with Molly Pittman.

Brett:

The Spicy Curry podcast is brought to you by OMG Commerce, Attentive, OneClickUpsell, Zipify Pages, and Payability.

Brett:

My guest today really needs no introduction, but I'll give a quick introduction just in case. Today, we're talking about a variety of things. We're going to talk about getting the right offers, and we're going to talk about acquisition funnels. We're going to talk about getting the right mindset as a market, as a media buyer, and as an advertiser.

Brett:

I have the one, the only, Molly Pittman joining me on the show today. Really, if you haven't had the privilege of hearing Molly Pittman, well we're about to fix that, but you've missed out. Molly is a legend, debuted at Trafficking Conversion Summit. It's been years and years ago now, I don't even know how many years. But just blew up and everyone was like, "Man, Molly Pittman is the best," and she is.

Brett:

Now she's partnered with my buddy, Ezra Firestone. Molly is the CEO of Smart Marketer, and I get to observe what she's doing there, what the team is doing there, and they're cranking out amazing content, amazing training that I get to be a part of at some level, which is super fun for me. We're going to dive into what's working now and a variety of other things.

Brett:

Molly Pittman, welcome to the show, and thanks for taking the time.

Molly:

Hey, let's do it. What's up, Brett Curry?

Brett:

What's up? What's up?

Molly:

I'm so happy to be here. I'm so happy to be here. Hello to all of you listers. You're listening to an awesome podcast, huh? When Brett reached out to do this, I was like, "Hey, it's about time." I know you've had podcasts in the past, but excited to hear you more regularly. Yes, love working with you Brett, from the agency side of things, the faculty side of things at Smart Marketer. All of our students love everything you have to share. So, thank you for having me.

Brett:

We get to collaborate on some content. Any time I can go somewhere and hang out with you, John Grimshaw, and Ezra Firestone, I am saying yes to that. Anytime I can make it happen, I'm doing that, because you guys are awesome. [crosstalk 00:03:14].

Molly:

I don't know how much work we get done, but we have a lot of fun.

Brett:

A decent amount of work.

Molly:

I'm kidding.

Brett:

Totally. When we get together, like the last time we all met at Ezra's house, Ezra just cooked some really fancy, simple... He went into full-on chef mode for everybody, and it was pretty amazing.

Molly:

Hey, Ezra is the servant leader. I think we were there-

Brett:

He really is.

Molly:

... hosting a live workshop, and Ezra was like, "Hey, my job right now is to cook and make sure you all are fed." Good example of leadership right there.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:03:49] make some lattes, or pour some espresso shots. He had this amazing espresso machine-

Molly:

"What do you need? I got it."

Brett:

Yeah. The funny thing is, I'm like, "So Ezra, are you going to drink some espresso?" He was like, "No, I gave that up." He quit. All right, so you're just making for everybody else.

Molly:

That is something that I love about what we're doing at Smart Marketer, is its different from any culture I've ever been a part of, even if it's a day of consulting inside of a business where we really do have fun first. We get our stuff done. We meet our goals. We serve the world. I think that that fun part is what a lot of people are missing out on. It is okay to have fun, and it actually makes the rest of it way more enjoyable and profitable.

Brett:

It's stress relief. It allows you get the right mindset, like fosters creativity when you're having fun and enjoying what you do, and enjoying who you're doing it with. Yeah, you guys do such a good job with that, and Ezra kind of drives that forward where it's like to serve to the world unselfishly and profit that mantra is true. It's not just something that sounds good, or sort of feels good, or looks good on a shirt. It's the way you guys live and the way you guys operate.

Brett:

I think it's part of the reason why we get along so well. We're huge advocates of culture, and putting people first, but also letting people shine and be themselves. You should enjoy working with one another. It makes a difference.

Molly:

Have more fun, y'all.

Brett:

And have more fun.

Molly:

It also allows a lot more longevity in this business. This year, I've been doing this 10 years, which isn't as long as a lot of you, Brett, or people like Ezra, but it's still a decade.

Brett:

Wait a minute. That sounded a veiled "old person" comment there.

Molly:

Well no, I just know your story.

Brett:

It's all good.

Molly:

You have seniority.

Brett:

A little bit. A little bit, yeah. In Internet years, a decade is forever. Yeah, I started like 2004, so I'm definitely the old dude when it comes to all that.

Molly:

Yeah, but you know a lot of my story where I had the opportunity to intern, and then become the VP of Marketing at Digital Marketer, and had an awesome time at that company. But man, I was grinding then. A lot of times, I felt like crap. To be in a situation where I still get to serve the market, still get to teach, still get to be in this business, but feel really good about it, the best part of it is I know I can do it for so much longer now.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah.

Molly:

It's a long game. It's not a short game, y'all.

Brett:

I'm really glad we brought this up. It was not planned. That feel good, have fun, and it will bring out the best part of you when you work as well. You'll be able to produce better when you're doing those things.

Brett:

Let's dive in, Molly Pittman. We've got a lot of ground to cover. We're going to talk mindset. We're going to talk tactics. We're going to talk strategy. I also want to talk about your dog rescue. We'll get to that in a little bit. Let's talk about offers for a minute. Those that have been listening, and hopefully you're listening to every episode in season one of this podcast, we're talking about something good to say, saying it well, saying it often.

Brett:

One of the things you and I were chatting about, and I love this, is that you're really focusing on your offers right now, and what offers are working, and what offers are not working. It really digs into that saying things well, and also saying them often. Talk to me a little bit about... We have two angles we're going to look at. We've got Boom on the e-commerce side, Smart Marketer which is kind of on the info training side, but what offers are working right now?

Molly:

Yeah, great question. First, I want to talk about what an offer is. I realized during our Mastermind call last week that people use this word to describe a lot of different things. That causes confusion in itself. There are a few different ways to talk about an offer. Really, what I'm talking about today are acquisition offers. Essentially, what vehicles are we using to start a conversation with someone who's never heard of our brand before, and turn them into a buyer?

Molly:

A lot of times, that means a lead magnet, or a pre-sale article, or some sort of coupon. It definitely depends on the business and where you are currently. The more, especially post-iOS 14 with all the crazy stuff happening in paid media right now, the more that you can focus on your offers, the better that everything is going to go. I mean that in a few ways. Number one, putting more time into offer creation. I would say in both businesses, other than making sure our products, the things people are buying, are good. Other than that, I would say offer creation is where we spend most of our time, at least at the C level.

Molly:

When it comes to marketing strategy, offer creation is where we spend most of our time. Sometimes, we'll release an offer that John, Ezra and I have maybe spent 15 hours discussing. It looks like an opt-in page that took 30 minutes to write, but so much time and effort went into the psychology of what it is, and the delivery of what it is, and how it sets us up to sell. It's really, really spending time here. As the CEO, I'd be like this is one of my still most important duties every single day.

Molly:

The second part of it is thinking about the way you deliver it. People miss out on this part of offer creation because what we don't realize is that someone might be interested in solving a particular problem, or they might be interested in a particular topic. But they may not be interested in the way you're delivering it. Let's take Boom for example, a pre-sale article that Ezra has been using for over five years, that's the best acquisition offer ever created for that business is five makeup tips for older women. Simple pre-sale article, we optimize for purchases, there are different products on the page. It's an amazing, amazing pre-sale article.

Molly:

Well guess what? It also works really well as a lead magnet. A way we've been able to scale that business is to take that pre-sale article, turn it into a simple PDF, and put it behind an opt-in wall. There are some people that would rather give their email in exchange for an asset, and see that as higher value. There are some people that would rather read an article. So, this isn't just about the creation of new offers, but also the repackaging of assets that you already have to deliver them in a way that's going to reach more of the market that you're trying to reach based off of how they like to consume information.

Molly:

It's why videos and still images are equally as important on a paid traffic platform, because there are some people that like people. There are some people that react images. It's important to keep both of those in mind.

Brett:

I love that. So, what is the offer, and really crafting it and thinking about how do we make this offer irresistible, how do we craft this article so that someone says, "I have to have that. One, that designed just for me. Two, that's solving a real problem or it's meeting a real need. Three, I got to have it right now." [crosstalk 00:11:29] those things. Then also, how you actually deliver it.

Brett:

I want to break that down just a little bit. You had mentioned that sometimes you, John, and Ezra spend 15 hours crafting an offer where it looks like just a simple page, but you're really thinking about this. This goes way beyond the, "Oh, should we do a 10% discount? Or a 15% discount?" That's what I want to talk about here.

Molly:

Yes, but it's also different. What I would see, I would say, in 90% of students, is they spend those 15 hours on the ad, and "Oh, the offer, I'm just going to throw a page up there." It's like, no if you have to choose, it should actually be the other way around.

Brett:

The offer, yeah. Yeah, it totally makes sense. Walk us through a little bit. What is your process as you're thinking about crafting an offer? What questions are you asking? What are you thinking about? What do you want to have in front of you as you're building that irresistible offer?

Molly:

Of course. The first question is, what do we need? What need is there in the business that we are solving with this offer? So, the need might be "It's Q4 and we want to monetize, we need a sale, we need a promotion." Or the need might be, "Hey, we need more of an evergreen acquisition offer-"

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:12:48] need as business [crosstalk 00:12:49].

Molly:

As a business, exactly.

Brett:

Yep.

Molly:

So, is it more promotional? Monetization? Or do we need something more acquisition that's evergreen that's going to continue to bring new customers in? It always starts with what does the business need right now? We try to create one of these in each business once a month we're creating a new offer. A lot of times, we're using other offers that we've created in the past, but we try to create one new offer every single month. It first starts with "What do we need? What does the business need right now?"

Brett:

Awesome. Then what comes next? You understand "This is what we need. We need something evergreen. We need a quick hit in this area. This is what need as a business." What do you look at next?

Molly:

What are we going to sell? What is the true end goal of this offer? Maybe the end goal is for Smart Marketer, we're going to sell our Smart Paid Traffic course, and we want to do that on an evergreen basis. We always work backwards with offers. If you don't, you're going to end up with a funnel that doesn't really make a lot of sense, that might have a really attractive front end offer, but doesn't transition to the sale, which is the opposite of what we're looking for.

Brett:

Yeah, totally, totally makes sense.

Molly:

Then we pick-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:14:10]. Yeah, please keep going.

Molly:

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Then we pick the medium, so what medium do we feel is best suited for this particular scenario? That definitely comes down to business type. It comes down to what's already working in our business, what can we do more of, also what can we do that's different from what we've done in the past because maybe we have four or five evergreen acquisition offers running in our ad account. To add another, we either need to go after a different audience or we need to have a very different offer type that isn't going to compete with what we're currently doing.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Let's look at some examples here related to Boom that I think will help people a lot. You guys are working on an acquisition funnel every month, and that acquisition funnel I would assume, starts with an offer. Is that where that begins?

Molly:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Brett:

What does that look like? Can you talk about any examples there for Boom?

Molly:

A great example of this is going back to "Five Makeup Tips for Older Women", the pre-sale article. We know that that works, so we know that this audience wants makeup tips, or they want to have discussions around makeup. What is something similar but different that we could do? Last year, we launched a lead magnet. We switched the delivery. It's not a pre-sale article. It's something you're opting in for. We're collecting the email address, and then going for the sale.

Molly:

So, using what we know works, but changing the conversation a little bit. Instead of five makeup tips, it was, or is, a 10 Minute Makeup Guide. So, still speaking to makeup, but now speaking to women who are less maybe concerned about the tips, but are more interested in the fact, "Holy crap, this only takes 10 minutes." That's an awesome speed and automation hook. That would be a good example of saying-

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:16:16] how to take care of your makeup, or how to do your morning makeup routine in 10 minutes or something like that, that's kind of the angle or the thought?

Molly:

Exactly. That came from a need of we have scaled the current evergreen acquisition offers as much as we can across our paid traffic sources. We need something new to talk about. We need to be able to walk into the party and have a similar, but different, discussion. Okay, let's change the topic and let's change the vehicle in how we deliver it.

Brett:

Yeah, that's awesome. The five makeup tips, and yeah we've had the privilege of running that on YouTube for four years or five years or something, and it still works. The five makeup tips is great. It does appeal to the curiosity. People are like, "Okay, well I would like makeup tips. I'm over 50," and I should not, by the way we were talking old jokes, I'm not over 50, and I'm not a woman either, so you're thinking "I want to know what these tips are," so there's a little bit of curiosity and there's also some benefit there that you want to get, which is cool.

Brett:

But this 10 Minute Makeup Guide, that's speaking to someone who says... It really resonates well with that over 50 powerful women audience that Boom is after, is they're like, "I don't have time for makeup, and I don't want to take the time. 30 minutes getting ready for the day, no way." How did you guys land on that? Was that something that you heard consistent feedback from customers? Is there something you guys started to pick up on, because you know the customer? Where did that come from?

Molly:

In both businesses, these ideas usually come from the customer, or feedback to anything that we're doing from an organic standpoint. In our businesses, that's the benefit of social media. It's not that we're going for all this organic traffic, which is nice, but not always sustainable. We use social media as a way to test different conversations with the audience. Usually, this starts, for Smart Marketer, as a blog post, for example, and Boom, too.

Molly:

Last year, we've released a blog post about our "Love Demo Love Formula" which is a formula we teach to [crosstalk 00:18:23]-

Brett:

Formerly known as "The Testimonial Sandwich", so there was the artist formerly as "Testimonial Sandwich", that "Love Demo Love". Feels better.

Molly:

It's a formula, a template that we teach for ad creatives. We see that that does really well on the blog. The email has high open rates. People are spending a lot of time on that page. They're clicking on whatever call to action is within that blog post. Wow, this is something our audience is interested in. Can we turn this into some sort of acquisition offer? Sometimes, it also comes-

Brett:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:18:54] clarify, just so people understand because you may be lost like, "What are you talking about? Love Demo Love, and with Testimony? What the heck?" It's Ezra's tried and true ad formula of starting with a testimonial, a real user-generated content testimonial, or maybe a couple, like one to three, product demonstration in the middle, product video demonstration in the middle of the video, and then you close with more testimonials or more love. So, "Love Demo Love", and also what used to be called the "Testimonial Sandwich".

Brett:

So, anyway, I just wanted to clarify for those that are like, "What are you talking about?" All right, go ahead.

Molly:

A lot of times, it comes from conversations with the audience, a response from the audience. Then sometimes, it comes just random inspiration. For Smart Marketer, an offer we're working on right now that's going to happen soon is the "State of Paid Advertising in 2022", which is a free four hour workshop. It will show an analysis we did of over $60 million in ad spend. That just came from a random idea I had in the shower, what would this audience be interested in, how can I help set them up for 2022? It's not always coming from the customer. Sometimes it's just a random idea that comes in when you give it space.

Molly:

Usually, it is coming from something that already exists, or that we see from competition, or other people out in the market.

Brett:

Just an interesting side note, are you an idea in the shower person? Is that where your ideas come from? I'd just be curious to know where do your good ideas come from? What's the space where disproportionately you have good ideas coming from that space?

Molly:

It's really whenever I give it space. That's the key. It's usually, in today's world where things are so busy, forced space, time away from my phone, which is the shower, which is driving in the car, or hiking. If you guys are interested in this topic, read "Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's one of my favorite books. I read it in 2015 or '16, but she basically explains how this works, like how does creativity actually work and how can you set yourself up to be more open to cool ideas? The cool ideas are out there. Most of us are just too shut off, too busy, too addicted to what we're doing to allow the ideas to actually come in. So yes, any time you give it-

Brett:

What was the name of that book again?

Molly:

"Big Magic".

Brett:

"Big Magic". Love that. I'm going to check that out. Just a quick note here, because I've always found this fascinating, I have zero good ideas in the shower. I really don't know that I've ever had one positive, useful, meaningful idea from the shower other than "Hey babe, we're out of shampoo." That's all I think about in the shower. However, for me, two places that I get disproportionately high amount of good ideas, one is if in the morning if I get up when it's still quiet, and I have eight kids so it needs to be early in the morning when it's quiet, but if I feel like I'm ahead of the game, if I feel like there's nothing that I have to do right that second and I can just kind of sit in the quiet, good ideas come from there.

Brett:

The other place, and this is an odd one, but on airplanes. I sit on an airplane. They shut that door. I never pay for WiFi, I just don't want to. Some of the ideas that have shaped OMG, that have shaped the agency, came from me sitting on an airplane. I don't know why. That's my shower time. I even said a few times, I'm like I should just go fly somewhere and then fly right back, and I'm going to get great ideas.

Molly:

A lot of people do that. I have a friend who took a flight to Hong Kong and back, and never even stepped into the city just to write a book. The reason for that Brett, those are different forms of meditation. It's the same thing. It's essentially cutting off stimulation that is-

Brett:

Right, there's nothing else.

Molly:

... keeping your brain busy so that your mind and your soul can be quiet, so that these ideas can really formulate. That's the key.

Brett:

I love that. I love the fact that I'm not the only one that loves... I don't even like sitting on airplanes, but I get the best ideas. Anyway, cool. That's awesome. Cool, so thank you for chasing down that rabbit trail. I think that's so useful. Where were we though?

Molly:

We were talking about offers that are working right now, and I was chatting about the 10 Minute Makeup Guide, the workshop we're doing for Smart Marketer, and just saying that lot of the ideas comes from what you guys say, what we see as a need out in the market. A lot of them are random, unique, creative ideas, which are fun too.

Brett:

So, really fostering both, so you kind of need a vehicle or a mechanism to collect that feedback from customers, and then you need to create space for yourself to have these good ideas, and then bring it together with your executive team to get the idea when you're relaxing or whatever, and then you bring it to the rest of the executive team and you hammer that out. It may be 15 hours, but at the end of that time you've got a killer offer that you can really use to grow the business.

Molly:

Yeah, Brett, and some other steps that I didn't mention there, just to sort of round out the actual tactical, how do we get it out the door. Once we have the idea and we feel good about the offer, we feel good about its ability to do what we need it to do in the business, then we go into action mode actually creating this thing. That usually looks like a brainstorm call with our copy team where we discuss what is this, and how is it going to be presented?

Molly:

We talk about the big hooks, what are the big selling points of this offer, what problems does this offer actually solve? Of course, how do we want this to be delivered? Is it a PDF? Is it a pre-sale article? Is it a simple opt-in page where we're giving a coupon, like you said? How will this be delivered. Then they're able to go and make it sound good, not only the page in which we're selling the thing, but also the delivery of the thing. Then of course, that's passed off to design, it's passed off to our ads team and everything starts to get into motion.

Brett:

It's so good to get copy involved early, because that's such an important part of everything else. You have to be able to really strike that cord and make people want it, and copy is such a huge part of that. I love that you do that fairly early on.

Molly:

Yeah, and it's not just writing the copy that is the offer. It's also the selling of the offer. Even if it's a free thing, you're still selling someone on the idea.

Brett:

Totally. Totally, yeah.

Molly:

Every new acquisition funnel is first tested through an email promotion to the list, because we don't want to go out and buy-

Brett:

Okay, so you build the product, you test the email, email to the list first.

Molly:

Yeah. Of course, it's always going to convert better to your list than it will to paid traffic. We want to test it to the list first before we start to buy ads, mainly because we want to see of course, what's the conversion rate on this thing if it's free, and does this actually generate sales? We can create offers all day, but if it's not meeting the need of the business, then it's not going to work. It's first tested to email. That also gets some good traction going on your pixel so that Facebook and Google can start to see what types of people are taking action on this page, get some momentum.

Molly:

Then we stop for a second. We look at heat maps. We look at conversion rate. We look at the performance from a data standpoint. We make any optimizations that we might need to make, and then it's ready to go to you and your team, and hand over to our media buyer for paid ads.

Brett:

I love that. I love that. So, you're testing to the email list first to understand does this convert. And hey, if it doesn't convert to your list, it's not going to convert to cold traffic.

Molly:

Exactly.

Brett:

So, does it convert, and at what level, and kind of understanding that a little bit. Then you're going to run some ads and start getting conversions, trying to pixel, finding out what's what. You pause that. You then look at heat maps, make some tweaks/optimizations to the funnel itself. Then you go ham on the advertising at that point.

Molly:

Then it's hopefully ready for scale. Probably half of these that we create don't work still to this day. That's okay. We say, "Let's put it on hold for a second." It's never that this just doesn't work, and we're not going to use it ever again. It's "Hey, let's put this to the side and try to figure out why it didn't work, and maybe we can use it later." There are a lot of times that we just can't get it to work, and that's okay.

Brett:

Right. Really, you guys are the best. You're the best in the world at some of this stuff. If you've got a 50% success rate, what's everybody else going to have? That's likely to be 50% or maybe less even. What's interesting, we just walked through that four step process you guys go through, most people it's like think for five minutes about an offer, maybe it's more than that, but think about an offer and then "All right cool, let's throw a bunch of media behind it to see how it does," where you guys are testing with your audience or email list, you're running some small tests and ads, you're getting data, you're optimizing and then you're going big. I love that so much.

Brett:

It kind of goes back to one of my favorite business principles that comes from Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great", and a book called "Turning the Flywheel". He's an awesome... I'm sure everybody's heard of him. He talks about this concept of firing bullets and then cannonballs. He used kind of this old warship analogy. The idea is fire bullets to make sure you got something that works, and then fire a cannonball rather than a lot of people fire a cannonball and they use up all their gunpowder, and all they've got available, and they're like, "Well now I've got nothing."

Brett:

So, test small and then go big.

Molly:

Also, understanding that these offers are not channel-specific. A lot of people create an offer, which they don't spend a lot of time on. They set up a Facebook campaign. They run it for a few days, and then scrap it all. "Oh, this offer doesn't work, and Facebook ads don't work." It's like guys, no it's so much deeper than that.

Brett:

Totally. Totally. Your kind of creating these acquisition funnels then for Boom, and spoiler alert, Boom is going to be releasing new products this year, which is great. Your kind of creating one of these acquisition funnels for each product. That was another thing too with Boom, and Ezra talks about this a lot, that it was just the Boom stick trio, or just the boom stick, that's all that you really use for cold traffic. Now you're building these acquisition funnels for other products, which is huge, and which is going to be a game changer.

Molly:

Look, honestly acquisition funnels are way easier for e-commerce than info or services.

Brett:

They are. They are. No doubt.

Molly:

Info and services takes way more of relationship buildup before someone purchases. It's mainly lead generation through a workshop, or a webinar, or a lead magnet, or a challenge, or a mini series, or whatever the hell people are doing today to try to convert someone into a customer or client. It's a little bit of a different ballgame than e-commerce. A lot of the plays with e-comm can be easier. A lot of the offers that Boom runs are simple. It's direct to a product page for a lip gloss, direct to a product page for a mascara, direct to something that's a direct sale essentially. Where with info, we've got to dance around it a little bit more. The offer creation is even more intensive for that business type.

Brett:

Yeah, it is.

Molly:

Like me. Good lesson, what Ezra has been able to do with Boom I think after working with us at Smart Marketer, is realize that there is a huge hole in the e-commerce space for offer creation that isn't just a giveaway, that isn't just direct to product page, that isn't just a coupon. That is a big reason Boom is able to excel, because we do understand pre-sale articles. We do understand lead magnets.

Molly:

Boom is even doing webinars. They're called "Ladies Night". These principles work for both business types, and there's actually a much bigger opportunity in e-commerce to get more creative with your offers because other e-commerce businesses are simply lazy or don't know how to go about it.

Brett:

You nailed it a little bit ago when you said that in a lot of ways offers for e-commerce, it's simpler. It's more straightforward than it is to do info products. Info products, you really got to get to the core of what this thing, and what is it going to unlock, and what are all the emotions we're trying to tap into here, and uncover here.

Molly:

And give way more value first.

Brett:

Yeah. Yeah. How do you do that? So kind of blending some of those principles, it's super powerful and it's definitely helped Boom get to where it is today without a doubt. Cool. We've got a few additional things I want to talk about, and not a whole lot of time to do it-

Molly:

Brett, hold on. I want to add one more thing. This is one of the biggest reasons that you might be failing to scale as an e-commerce business. If you are only relying on the people that are clicking from a Facebook ad, and directly converting and buying a product, you're missing out on a huge part of your market that just isn't ready to buy in the moment. If you're able to generate the lead, if you're able to nurture them via email, if you're able to set up a funnel where they get some sort of discount, especially if you add some scarcity, your scalability will increase in a way that you never understood, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your advertising. It's just that you are having a conversation with a different part of the market. That's all it is.

Molly:

So, if you are struggling to scale, it's probably not the ad platform, and B, the e-comm company that is willing to go outside of the box.

Brett:

Yeah, totally agree. It's not just I need to bid differently, I need a slightly different campaign structure in my ads manager or inside of Google Ads. Those things may be true, but often it comes down to offer and having the right funnel. Are we actually getting people to give us their email address and get a direct conversion as well? Do we have a nurture sequence? Do we have a remarketing sequence built in? All of those things really unlock the ability to scale rather than just "How do I bid differently or change my campaign structure?"

Molly:

Brett, I would say that your most successful clients, and the ones that you like working with the most are probably strong in this area. As an agency, that's a dream.

Brett:

No doubt. No doubt.

Molly:

The issue you usually have an agency is that you're great at running ads. You only have a few places to run ads to. There's only so much you can do.

Brett:

Yeah, that's one reason we love working with Boom.

Molly:

Just emphasize.

Brett:

You guys get it, and we're just able to work together and crush it. That's fantastic. Cool. Any quick insights, and I kind of designed this podcast series to have a long shelf life, but let's talk about a few trends. What's working right now, or what are some trends inside of Facebook ads that you're seeing right now?

Molly:

Good news is, as we do each year, we're seeing a huge decrease in ad cost at the beginning of the year. Almost 50% cheaper in most of our ad accounts in the analysis. We did over $60 million in spend than what we were seeing Q4, which is a huge relief with the dumpster fire that Facebook was the last six months of 2021.

Brett:

No doubt.

Molly:

That's a huge sigh of relief. We're also starting to see more accurate reporting, or at least I think we're all getting better as marketers getting our stuff together from a tracking standpoint. So, things are looking up, and we are working on offers, working on creative and copy right now so we can really take advantage of the next few months of cheap traffic, and try to do everything we can to set us up for a big Q4 again this year.

Brett:

I love it. Just one thing to keep in mind, this is going to likely always be the trend. Advertisers panic in fourth quarter because costs are going through the roof. But the costs are going to come back down in Q1, so be planning, and be thinking about that, and what's your acquisition strategy going to be in Q1 and then as you lead into and get ramped up for Q4. So, that's awesome.

Brett:

Any other specific trends you want to talk about now? I also want to dig into a mindset just a little bit, which will be fun.

Molly:

Really quick, I wouldn't say this is necessarily a new trend for right now, but it's something we've been preaching for a few years that I just literally cannot emphasize enough. I was actually just on a training call with some of our students, and one of them sells physical products. He's in the snack and wellness space. His Facebook ad results that I was looking at were incredible, $0.04 clicks, 15% click through rate, $3.00 add to cart, numbers I have not seen in years.

Molly:

Guess what he's doing from an ad perspective? It's native advertising. It's user-generated content. It is simply telling stories about people in their own words the experience that they had not even specifically with your product. This was a weight loss product. So, his best performing ad was a picture of a beach with an arrow to a certain area of the beach. The copy was telling a story from the customer's standpoint of, "Last year I went to this beach and I couldn't even walk up the stairs without getting out of breath. I felt terrible, and my health wasn't great. This year, 12 months later, I've gone back to this beach. I've lost 90 pounds. I was able to run around, and I really enjoyed myself."

Molly:

Those weren't the exact words, but that's how simple it was. It wasn't an ad about the product. It wasn't an ad about how great this product was. Absolutely nothing about features. Really, not even a lot of benefits other than the benefits that were woven into the story. This isn't necessarily new, but it's what people are still missing out on when it comes to Facebook and Instagram. These are true social platforms. People are used to engaging with stories from family and friends. Use imagery and copy that is that. It's really that simple.

Brett:

I love it. I don't really ever see that changing. We spend a lot of on YouTube and running YouTube ads, and we're seeing similar things in that videos, and usually you need slightly longer videos on YouTube than you do on Facebook in most cases, but still that user-generated content, those testimonial videos that you could weave into your YouTube ad works there too. I think it's always going to work. As long as it's an authentic, genuine testimonial that really hits on "Here's how my life has changed. Here's why I love this product. Here's my story," people eat that up. I think people will always eat that up if it rings authentic.

Molly:

Because it's a testimonial, that's not what makes it work. We chat about this and then students submit a testimonial, and the first line is "I love this product so much." It's like, guys that's words of customer, but it sounds like an ad. We need to start with things like, "As a mom of two, I didn't think I would have time to do X, Y, and Z." How much more relatable is that? It doesn't feel like you are being sold to.

Brett:

Yeah, one time we had a prospect, and we ended up not working with him. He submits these videos and you could literally read the people that are supposed to be customers. You could watch their eyes reading from a teleprompter. I'm like, "Guys, this not going to work." You want people to be sharing real emotion and their real story.

Molly:

Yeah, well sharing a life story. It's not about why the product's great. It is sharing their story and how it fit into their lives. So, we ask three important questions to get really good testimonials. If you ask these questions, it will set people up to give you really good answers. What was life like before you bought this product? That has them describe that undesirable before state, starts to tell their story. What is life like afterwards? Now they're talking about the after state, the benefits, how much better they feel. Then if you were to re-commend this to a friend, what exactly would you say? When you say it like that, they take off their "I'm a salesperson for this company" hat, and they put on their "Oh, I'm writing a message, or speaking a message to a friend. I'm going to be real about how this product helped me."

Brett:

Love that so much. Actually, since I'm such a believer in testimonials, but getting authentic ones, I created "The Ultimate Guide", I don't remember what I called it, but how to get authentic customer testimonials. It's on the OMG Commerce website. Check it out. I'm not sure if I have those exact [crosstalk 00:40:34]-

Molly:

That's sounds like a good offer for your agency, Brett.

Brett:

It's a good offer. Yeah. We can do that as an offer too for Smart Marketer. It's so true. The difference between a really good testimonial and then an average testimonial is two different planets, two different universes. Getting a good testimonial is worth it's weight in gold. Having one that's average, is really going to do nothing for you, or one that's weak. Anyway, I love that.

Brett:

What was life like before? What was life like after? What would you say to a friend? I love that so much. It's also good, you want to give someone a little bit of help as they're creating a testimonial. Otherwise, it feels like they're staring at a screen and not knowing what to say, or looking at a blank page or whatever. So, giving them some help is key, for sure. I love that. Love that.

Brett:

Let's take just a couple of minutes, and we're going to be short-changing this topic for sure, but I wanted to take a couple of minutes because this will be fun and I think it's useful. It's been a difficult road the last couple of years for e-commerce, entrepreneurs, media buyers, online advertisers, not rough [crosstalk 00:41:47]. E-commerce has grown tremendously. That's been good. E-commerce has grown, so no complaints there.

Brett:

But it's challenging times. I know you train a lot of people, you train a lot of entrepreneurs and media buyers. What are you teaching people about mindset and how mindset impacts results?

Molly:

Mindset is everything in this game. I don't think any of us are maybe even better marketers than one another. It's your willingness to stay committed, and to continue forward. It's what we talked about earlier with us being okay with half of the work we do not actually being used. Or as a media buyer, it's not even about who can set up the best ads. It's about who can continue to troubleshoot and optimize to make each piece of the campaign better so that they can move forward.

Molly:

This is personal development, a concept that most of you have heard of before, but it's really the difference between having a scarcity mindset, or having an abundance mindset. For me, I choose to be grateful. I choose to not get upset with these paid traffic platforms. I choose to look at things with the glass half full. I think that if there was anything unique about our culture at Smart Marketer, that is it. We have all chosen this mindset.

Molly:

There is going to be trouble in anything you do. I think as a human, the last few years have been hard. It's easy to get down. Of course, I still get frustrated, angry, depressed. All of those things occur. But I try to choose to bring positivity to our business, try to bring it to our employees, to our offers, to the trainings that we provide. It really is a completely different experience when you choose to do that.

Brett:

Yeah, I love it. I'm a really positive person. I'm naturally upbeat. I'm a glass half full kind of guy. But I have my moments. I have moments where I want to curse Tim Cook for the latest iOS update, and why are you killing a good thing, Tim Cook? Or whoever else is making the decisions at Apple. We can get in that mindset. It's okay to be frustrated and complain a little bit, but don't stay there.

Brett:

Get to a better place, because you're right, it's not just who's the smartest, it's not just who has the best campaign structure, but who can show up consistently and do the right thing, and who can be okay with "Okay, I got one, two, three campaigns that I wrote that didn't work, but then I had an offer that hit and then it scaled to the moon." Who could handle that?

Molly:

And who-

Brett:

Yeah, please add to that.

Molly:

[inaudible 00:44:31], and who actually cares? It's why I so believe-

Brett:

Exactly.

Molly:

... in the mission of our business that Ezra initially set out, serve the world unselfishly, and profit. If you truly care about the group of people that your business serves, and you care about the way that you're changing their lives, even if you're selling a toothbrush and you're helping their mouth to be cleaner, it doesn't matter. If you truly care about that, it changes the energy of the business.

Molly:

I can tell you, if you asked me "Molly, what is the difference between students that succeed or don't succeed, or friends that I know in the industry that have done great things, or people that are struggling," it really comes back to mindset, and it comes back to an authentic, genuine, caring for the group of people that you're serving. If you have that, and you stay consistent, there's no way that you can't make this work.

Brett:

Yeah, it's so true. If you can really be passionate about your customer, and I would even say about your team, then that's way more powerful than just being passionate about your product. I think both are important, but being passionate about your customer and about your team, that's really where's it at. One thing I discovered for me, and hey I've got lofty goals, I want my business to succeed and I want to it to grow, I think entrepreneurship, and businesses, and capitalism offer a lot to the world. If it's just about money, I burn out quickly. I get to a point where I'm like, "I don't really care anymore."

Brett:

But if I think about who I'm serving, and I think about that business owner that my agency is helping accelerate growth for, if I think about team members who were helping accelerate their individual growth, and I get to see someone step and lead a call, or mail a presentation, or come up with a strategy.

Molly:

Nothing better.

Brett:

I'm like "Whoa, I never thought of that." That is so fun for me, and so rewarding. Then when you key in on that, then guess what, the profits are better too, and then the business grows better too.

Molly:

Brett, aside from the money, I saw a study last year that rated digital marketing as the most stressful job or career path out there, even above brain surgeons, or people working in the medical field.

Brett:

That's crazy, yeah.

Molly:

I believe that. Think about it, we're basically day traders.

Brett:

[crosstalk 00:46:47] so much out of your control, and that's a scary thing. There's so much out of your control, it's scary. Yeah.

Molly:

Exactly. To be able to sustain that, and the changes, and the stress, and the fact that what we do never really turns off unless you choose for it to do so your mindset and who you are as a person, and how you treat yourself and the people around you, that is will what will sustain you moving forward more than anything else.

Brett:

Love that. So good. So good, Molly Pittman. All right, so people that are listening that are like, "Holy cow, I need more Molly Pittman in my life," where do you suggest people go? Obviously, there's lots of stuff people are going to enjoy at SmartMarketer.com, but where should someone get started, or what are some cool things, what are some offers you got going on right now?

Molly:

Yeah, check out SmartMarketer.com. There are some free resources there, depending on what we have going on at the time. I know this is coming out a bit later, Brett, so we do have that State of Paid Advertising in 2022 workshop coming up. We have lots of free resources on our website. If you want to follow me, I'm most active on Instagram @MollyPittmanDigital. I also read all of my DMs, so if you have questions, thoughts about this, I love hearing from you all and I would love to hear from you on Instagram.

Brett:

Instagram, check it out. What's your handle again?

Molly:

One more quick thing, Brett.

Brett:

What's your handle again on Instagram?

Molly:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Brett:

@MollyPittmanDigital.

Molly:

Of course, if you like this format, you like podcasts, John, and Ezra, and I do have a podcast, The Smart Marketer Podcast. So, check that out.

Brett:

It is an intact podcast, where you get to be a guest for a couple of episodes. It was tremendously fun. Check out the Smart Marketer podcast. I'll link to all of this in the show notes as well so it's easy for you to access. With that, Molly Pittman, any final words? Any final words of wisdom, re-commendations, or asks of the audience?

Molly:

Keep doing it. Just keep at it. Take care of yourself. Maintain that balance in your life. Don't get sucked into this world so that you lose who you are. Or if you do, quickly bounce back from that. Just enjoy. We're living in a really cool time as humans, and there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. When have we ever had the opportunity to do what we're doing from a business standpoint?

Molly:

It's complicated, but also the world is truly at our fingertips. Find a group of people that you align with, that you're interested in, that you want to help, and figure out how you can serve them, and figure out what you can sell to them. I just always go back to being grateful that we are able to work in this way. It's really, really cool. Hopefully, you guys enjoy it too.

Brett:

I love it. It's a super challenging industry. It's always changing. It's very stressful. But man, it's fun. It can be fun, especially if you have the right community around you. If you can find that balance man, it's an awesome place to be. Check out Smart Marketer. Check out the community. Get to know Molly Pittman. Follow her on Instagram.

Brett:

With that, thank you so much for tuning in. This show would be nothing without you who tune in and listen faithfully. If you haven't rated the show, please do that. Leave a review. It helps other people find the show. If there's somebody that you're listening to this and you're like, "Whoa, this person needs to hear this episode," then share with them. That would mean the world to me, and I know it'd make a difference in somebody else's life as well.

Brett:

With that, until next time, stay spicy.

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