E041: Influencer marketing strategy: how we’re product seeding, building partnerships & measuring EMV

[00:00:00] I went to an awesome HexCloud holiday party on Saturday so Cody I was just wondering invitation in the mail where should I be I'm thinking New York City gala style like just give me the rundown. Dude it was awesome you know we're a fully remote team growth team I should say I think we have one we have two people on the growth team out in LA and that's of like I don't know 12-15 people so it's awesome like you know getting to getting to hang and also like hang with people outside of a work context.

[00:00:30] It was it was really fun and and seeing like some of our friends of the brand there like you and Sean was always cool and I will give it to Jason and Danny they know how to throw a holiday Christmas party like that that was it was perfect. I thought the the HexCloud branded ice cubes were mwah. That's what I was gonna mention. Yeah those margaritas man are you kidding me those are tasty. Oh margaritas. So anyone go to HR the next day anyone get in trouble? I was taking shots with Pantyota at the bar so like I think we were all good.

[00:00:58] It's a great idea just get get get the head of HR drunk. Yes get get get HR drunk and it's a defensive move. Yeah right yeah nothing can go wrong then but yeah man it was fun I'm I'm glad you guys came out and it seemed like everyone had a good time. Dude it was yeah it was fantastic the ice the ice cubes were really memorable. Um I'll see if I could sneak you guys some some invitations. We don't do a holiday party like that which was super fun. There were a bunch of vendors uh like people I've known forever.

[00:01:27] Um Ridge just does the we do a Vegas retreat just the company. Our meta rep's actually there last year. Yeah what are the dates I want to make sure I will get it locked in. Yeah yeah I think it's like the third week in January or something. We do five days in Vegas it's really it's quite a commitment. Five days in Vegas that's a that's that's like that's like a month normal time. It's and it's a lot of it's a lot of working also I mean it's um it's like big days of working and then we do a bunch of dinners. We did go-karting last year.

[00:01:56] I saw Cirque du Soleil with a bunch of people so yeah. I'll just block that whole week off you guys and um we get some operators time in IRL. Oh yeah let's go let's go well yeah it was it was it was good to meet you in person Connor. Connor here here's my take on Connor in person. Taller than I thought. He's probably tall. Taller than I thought yeah and and and well what I'll also what I also appreciated about about Connor's appearance at our holiday party.

[00:02:24] The dude hung out like it was not a it was not a I'm gonna come for like you know there's the parties like I'm gonna go show up for 20 show face and get out of like Connor was down to hang. And it was off we had a we had a great time. We had an awesome time. Yeah, yeah, no, it was super fun. So as you know, we all use motion and they have been shipping a ton of cool new stuff.

[00:02:53] We wanted to talk through some of it classically the first new feature I want to talk about is something that we were already doing manually internally. And that's basically been a lot of motions roadmap is like figuring out what are creative strategies and the best brands doing manually in spreadsheets and in figment things like that. And how can they automate it and improve it and a great new example of that is creative highlights. It's a weekly creative leaderboard kind of like a billboard top 10 chart of what's working in your ad accounts. We've been doing this historically we'd say every week we send out to the whole team. This is what's working.

[00:03:22] These are the ads that are new to working and these are the ads that have were previous winners and are continuing to work. So the fact that this is automated is really nice as a pro tip. We start a lot of meetings this way. So if you're ahead of growth growth, you don't need to prep. You can just immediately pull in creative highlights to understand what's best performing some of the other new features that I've been excited about. There's a LinkedIn ads integration. So for the B2B marketers listening, you can check that out. And lastly, we've been looking at winning combinations.

[00:03:48] This is an advanced feature that lets you more easily extract big insights from all your creative testing variables. And there is a related new feature called naming conventions. One of my favorite things we haven't dug in here, but obviously this is this is in my wheelhouse. It automatically groups ads and comparative reports and just helps you get those bigger insights way less manual effort. So if you're ready to learn how the best DTC and e-commerce brands use motion to ship winning meta tick tock and YouTube ads, book a demo today or create a free account motion app dot com.

[00:04:16] And remember, if you mentioned marketing operators podcast emotion sales team, you can get 50% off your first month. We can jump right into we're going to talk about a bunch of influencer stuff today. But before we begin, I'd like to thank our sponsors motion rich panel pressure in house. All right. So guys, I don't know where you're at, but we're like we're reflecting on 2024 planning for 2025.

[00:04:40] We want to talk influencer specifically because I think we've all been taking different approaches and like kind of cooking up different plans for the new year. But I want us to start out like if we were. I'll start with you, Cody, you were reflecting on 2024. I think this was your first year of like any sort of significant partnership investment or influencer investment. How did it play out? What worked? What didn't like? How are you thinking about it? No, we actually we really haven't done much or any. We do a lot of seeding and a lot is probably relative. I think we could do a lot more.

[00:05:09] So so that's been, you know, we've done that since launch, but definitely scaling up. Still want to do better there. Still want to grow it faster and do better. So I'd say it's okay, but not not pacing as well as like the rest of the business. But we really have not done any paid. And we, you know, we work with Ashton, we work work with gate maker and we asked her when we were on like, what's the one feedback you would have for us? And she said, you guys should start paid. And so we're going to start in January.

[00:05:36] Part of our big one of our really big goals for next year is do a better job reaching a millennial audience. And I think creator partnerships is going to be a huge lever for that creative diversity will be this will be one aspect of it. So we'll kind of do it twofold. Our director of influencer is on Instagram, but it'll be more of like an awareness play. Like our main KPI will be like EMV row us. It'll be much more of an awareness play.

[00:05:59] But we're on Thursday, like soon two days, we're going to like finalize some of these contracts, but kind of work with a handful of creators, you know, test a bunch of budget. Um, where it'll be some combination of paid posts, whether they're kind of dedicated Jones road integrated with other things. So, you know, newsletter inclusion, some mix of reels and stories, maybe some tick tock be mostly brand stuff. And then we're also launching January. What this is the thing I'm most excited about a Gentio.

[00:06:26] So that they're the one I tweeted about, but they're like the SAS for YouTube creator partnerships, which I know that you guys do a ton of, or at least have. Um, but that's been a really, a lot of fun prepping for it. Their, their team actually came in to our office last week to like prep and plan and work on strategy. Um, so excited to talk about that, but I'm, I'm very excited about that. I'm 50, 50, if it'll work or not, but I'm excited. Amazing. I, uh, you're front running the agenda a little bit. We're going to hit all those points.

[00:06:54] Uh, we're gonna hit all those points. So, so, so, so for those listening, um, you've got a good sense of what's coming. Um, I, I, to double click on seeding quickly, I consider that influencer. So I think in the context of this situation, like let's talk about that being an influencer strategy product, seeding to people who have some amount of influence, um, kind of a micro approach. How did that go this year? Any, like any big learnings or like strategies you're excited about?

[00:07:21] I'm not super close to it, but yeah, I mean, that's been a big growth. I think we're probably like 40%. So our main KPI is EMV. We, you know, track that through tribe dynamic. So we're just trying to increase the overall community size and number of people that just happen to be talking about us on social on a, you know, weekly, monthly basis. Uh, and we've seen some pretty good growth there. Um, some of it is just acquisition related, just, and this is what gate maker will do. And they'll just find new people, DM them, we'll ship them stuff. And then our internal team currently will just build those relationships.

[00:07:51] And especially if people are, you know, they seem like they're more of a powerhouse, like they're, they're going to be worth it to build relationships with. We, um, one thing that we've done has been really successful because yeah, the retention of that, just like the same way you can be thoughtful about customer retention. It's the same thing for influencer retention. Like if people happen to be posting, um, build a relationship with them, follow up, keep sending them, you know, things. One thing that we've done for kind of these powerhouse macro creators, you know, anybody who we deem it's worth in us worth, uh, you know, worth it.

[00:08:20] Our team will actually meet them at the store and we'll do a store appointment. We'll give them a comp store appointment. So that's been great for EMV. That's just been a nice little, uh, you know, trick up the sleeve that our team has been, been able to do. So that's been kind of one of the cool things from this year. That's cool. What is, and what is considered macro in that? I'm so bad at like, and I feel like this is like a VIP customer. Like everybody has different definitions. Yeah. Um, I don't know if it's like 600 K plus or whatever. Like, I don't know if they have a strict criteria.

[00:08:46] Um, but it definitely somebody, you know, it's not a, they're not going to take the time to go to a store and spend the time of, you know, a store associates hour for somebody that's got 5k followers. Unfortunately, we'll probably DM them and send them a box. But yeah, if there's somebody who we think is like a really good brand fit and we really want talking about a, some posting about us, like that's a great way. Almost everybody posts that, you know, has done that. Dude. Awesome. Um, yeah, I think that's, I think that's really cool. Uh, Connor, you guys have more of a built out influencer program.

[00:09:16] So when you're looking at 2024, what are you thinking about? Yeah. Well, in retrospect, when you're doing that analysis, uh, yeah. Yeah. How are you thinking? For us, like the, the beginning of our influencer program is really seeding and like organic impressions on social.

[00:09:35] Um, this is, I'm like, I used to be one of those like influencer marketers that would like get too stuck up on like trying to attribute like last click revenue to influencers, which I still think there's like a directionality component to that. That can be helpful, but I am officially like past that and like, don't really think that's what to optimize for. Um, we tested like 2024 or sorry, 2023.

[00:10:03] We're like started playing around with this idea of like, let's just sign less flat fee deals and seed more. And we really liked what we were saying this year. We have scaled the living crap out of that program. Like our influencer team, um, ran by this woman named Anna Barker, who's a killer. We have a woman, our team named Steph. Um, well, I'm blanking out. Uh, I'm blanking on our last name right now. It's embarrassing. And then align growth. There's a lot of our like influencer seeding for us. And I am shocked. Like I'm looking at archive right now.

[00:10:32] Are we had a 1.5 billion impressions on tagged content this year, up 230% your rear, our total tagged contents up like 166%. Um, I really just look at impressions and, and CPM, but like EMVs up 165%. So we just like, we really scaled. We really scaled just like the total program this year. Like we were just seeding with a lot more people and like that stuff just compounds over time, right? Like people that were, that we see at the beginning of 23 are still posting this year.

[00:11:01] And, um, we also like, I think that a really nice job using influencer to fulfill certain business objectives. Like it was a very like, you know, top three objectives this year for our business was like the focus on growing non cookware. And we have grown the impressions in those categories, like an insane amount. So really, really happy with that. Um, we're going to, we're not going to change much year over year. We're just going to keep, keep seeding with more and more people.

[00:11:31] Um, so yeah, that, that's definitely like the highlight of our influencer program. I'm pretty happy as well with how we've leveraged micro creators this year. Like we kind of got away from that a little bit. Um, and then like the Q3, I met with the pay team. I'm like, I think we're kind of missing an opportunity here to like sign these like one-off deals for like, you know, anywhere between like a thousand to $3,000. Depending on the, uh, uh, depending on the creator just for paid media deals. And like, I was just chatting with London, who's one of our growth managers today.

[00:12:01] And like, we spent like 250, $275,000 on this really amazing, like micro creator review style, like allow list ad at like, uh, I don't know, 50% higher one day click row as on our total aggregate for the year. Like I'm really proud of what we've been able to do on that front. And I think we're going to scale that across all of our, our cookware category or our non cookware categories as well next year. So that's definitely been a, been a highlight.

[00:12:26] And then the third thing I would highlight is like, like Gordon whitelisted just is always huge for us. Like we scale that to the moon and like, that's an obvious one, right? Like, of course, whitelisted ad from the Michael Jordan and cooking are going to work for a cooking brand. But I think the team's done a really nice job. Like we have a pretty full library when it comes to Gordon. Like we're, we're running hex mill ads and cookware ads and knives ads and like different channels. So like, I'm proud of how the team's been able to like, like, I guess, uh, optimize it.

[00:12:56] It's like, we're not just running like one piece of creative and putting all of our spend behind that. Like we have a pretty robust library with him now. Um, which is actually something that I don't think we did a good enough. Like we really leveled up our micro influencer game and in like the paid media context. I actually think there's a lot of things we can do better when it comes to leveraging all of our brand ambassadors more, um, in, in all paid media channels. And that's, we can talk more about that in a little bit.

[00:13:20] Cause that is a big area of our focus is like, you know, how do we, how do we leverage all these like really high cloud, high social proof people in, in settings like YouTube ads and Facebook ads and streaming TV ads where they can like really drive social proof and, and like connect their social proof to our value added products. So that's where we're putting a lot of focus and that's like a lot of our, my time spent right now is like thinking through what that like creative production roadmap looks like with all those people.

[00:13:48] Totally. What I think is cool is like, there's like a spectrum of creators, right? And I think, um, you guys both do product seeding heavily, which is like literally sending out product and getting posts for that, whatever that cost is free in, in some ways. Um, yeah, yeah. You call them micro influencers, which is like $1,000 to $2,000. And that's just for content or do those people post?

[00:14:14] That's like the specific scenario I'm talking about is just for ad content. Like we're not even requiring them in this deal to post. So like we're just want to leverage them, um, in the, in the paid media setting. Whereas like, you know, someone that has a lot of clout, like you look like a Nancy Silverton who was at the holiday party.

[00:14:32] And I regret not going and saying hello to her cause she's awesome. But like, and we have, and she's a brand ambassador deal. Like we have her on a bigger, broader deal, like multiple six figure deal. But like, if we were to only do paid ads with her, like that would probably cost us like still like 25, 30, 40, 50 K a month. Like, I don't know exactly. Like trying to find that in between between like, all right, you're not going to be on like a 12 month deal worth a hundred plus thousand dollars. Um, but we also don't need you to like do all the deliverables that those people do on a monthly basis.

[00:15:00] Like it's a very specific use case for those people. And like, I feel like we found a pretty good sweet spot and like price for value we're getting out of those people. Totally. Yeah. So, so we're talking about the spectrum here, product seeding, micro influencers for maybe just content, Cody. And then there's a range, then there's a really big range, right? Like we'll sign deals for a couple hundred bucks a video all the way up to, I think our biggest deal was probably a hundred thousand dollars in 2024.

[00:15:31] Um, do you have a plan for like the size of creator that you want to be working with? Yeah. So for, um, for like our, you know, what I'll say is like our, our brand, um, our brand, you know, influencer stuff. Definitely. We're, we're starting more with like a macro. I think Chris, you guys take, but like, I think we, we have to make sure the budgets are big enough for these tests where we are testing large enough creators to really see if we can move in the middle.

[00:15:59] Um, some percentage of our budget, whether that's 30 or 50% to be with, you know, a million plus audience size person. Um, obviously it's not just about the audience size, but, but that is one variable that I think is important. But then we also have to have the rest of our budget split in amongst enough creators because we don't necessarily know who's going to perform, who's going to, you know, resonate and whose videos are going to do well. Um, so I think it's, it's a combination of them, but we've definitely got some budget allocated for some larger swings and we're working with people.

[00:16:28] Um, I think a lot of that alpha is in the negotiating and building that relationship and the ask for the deliverables and what you're getting. And then hopefully we'll get some, you know, organic postings in there that aren't necessarily part of the deal. Um, but definitely also getting some, so yeah, we'll, we'll, I know that I know the agentio rates closer, like the YouTube stuff, like, but, um, you know, we're, we're definitely talking to some people that were, you know, 30, 40 K a month, but there's like a bunch of deliverable deliverables in there. Right.

[00:16:56] But it's wild what some people start with, right? Like some, somebody, and we're not gonna work with them. Like their initial ask was like 75 K a month for like whatever, a few videos. And I'm like, that's a million in a year. Like, yeah. It sounds like both of you guys have, or maybe Cody, you're just considering it, but Connor, you guys have it. These like retainer deals. An influencer is delivering a certain amount of content on a monthly basis and they're just getting a flat fee each month. I'm completely unfamiliar with that. Yeah.

[00:17:23] So we'll, we have like call it what we, those are what we call our brand ambassadors. These are, these are like, I don't, we probably have like eight or so. Um, maybe more maybe. Um, but basically, yeah, they have, they have monthly and yearly deliverables. So like they have monthly organic posting deliverables. Like you have to, you know, post and tag us in this many posts per month. We have to be like the exclusive cookware used on all of your cooking content. And then they have other deliverables like once per quarter, like you.

[00:17:54] Like you're required to come like and do a shoot with us. Um, you have to go to like two events or, or live streaming, uh, two events or live streaming events per year. Um, so that, that's basically how we have those deal structure. And these are like, these are bigger creators that we're leaning on time and time again for, for a variety of like, you know, business objectives. Basically we've done it, you know, more for the content side. So we've done very little paid earned media where people are posting. We've done a little bit, but no retainer.

[00:18:22] But for like, I don't even want to call it micro. Cause we've worked with some people that are larger, like some of our like core influencers that we will leverage for like social a lot. And, and our content, like they might have 900,000 followers. Um, but that's like the high end, but definitely we found that you can get a better rate if it's a larger thing. So if you've got somebody on a six month contract, um, so a lot of our like social content creators will do that. And instead of it being 3000 a video, maybe it's 2,500 a video if you're committing to three months.

[00:18:50] But what we have found so far in just like this influencer negotiation game is, you know, our overall cost or cost per piece of content will be a lot lower if we're doing these deals. Even if it's a month or a two month engagement versus just going to somebody and say, we want one post. They might make it up and say, Hey, that'll be, you know, 15 K. But if we're like, Hey, what if our budgets, you know, whatever, like we can't afford that proposal. So like, Hey, all right, well maybe the total amount is going to be more.

[00:19:15] Maybe it's going to be a 20 K, you know, investment, but I'll give you two posts, you know, one dedicated, one integrated, which happens like a lot in beauty. Uh, two stories, one newsletter. And like, you might get, you know, more total costs, but hopefully a little bit more bang for your buck. Totally. Yeah. 100%. And I think that's what's super interesting. At least when I am thinking about 2025, we had like a very, I'd almost describe the program as the word like linearity. It comes to mind.

[00:19:45] It's like, we do one thing. Like we're reaching out to people, we're signing deals. They're posting on our behalf. Like that is how the program functions. We're like a more modern influencer program today is really a mix of all of these things. Seating to micro to like mid scale to, you know, a list or, you know, celebrity deals. Um, and then there's some mix of like retention over time posting and not posting, like just getting content from the creator that you're promoting on your own channels. So we're trying to like better kind of round out that whole thing.

[00:20:14] Are you planning to do more seating? Like, I know you asked me about tribe and creator IQ earlier. Like, are you guys planning to do more seating and approach it the other way or not? Yes. Well, where we actually play the most and, and what worked really well for a long time. And I think has just become a lot more difficult to manage is we've really just operated like in the middle. We've worked with very few like celebrities or a list creators. Um, and then we don't do like micro or product seating either. We are, we are paying dollars for integrations.

[00:20:44] We're landing right in the middle and that's just become, it hasn't been as high performing in channel as it's been in the past. So what I really like to do is explore both ends of that spectrum. How are we strategically signing deals that are those a list of celebrity types? How are we thinking about it from like a content deliverable that we can use on other channels? And then the other side being like, how do we build out product seating, which is more of a volume game? Um, and I think we'll slowly have to piece out our programs that we, we encompass more of that spectrum.

[00:21:11] I would bet that I think part of the reason our product seating program has been so successful that we, we have Gordon. Like, I think the, the, the hit rate on us seating and seeing content from those people would be much, much, much lower if we didn't have Gordon. And simply because like, if you're a, you know, if you're like a up and coming chef on Instagram with 75,000 followers and you're like, oh, I just got gifted by like Gordon Ramsey's pan. Like I want to post and like be in this, like the same like thread with him. So I'm curious.

[00:21:40] I feel like you guys ramping up product seating in 25 makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider like you have Marquez now. And like, people might have that same like thought with like, oh, I want to be like, I want to be in like the same like thread of conversation that Marquez is in and like being Marquez is good, good, like good, good graces or whatever. So I would bet your hit rate on like, on people posting from seating will be better with, with him on board as like, this is one thing like Ashton shared with me.

[00:22:09] And like, she's just so smart. Like it was like brilliant when I thought of like part of our paid strategy for the stuff is like, who influences the influences? Who influences the influencer? You know what I mean? And you're almost trying to get some of these macro, these larger people that you put dollars in and they post about it. And then the people that look up to them and follow them will be more likely to just want to be part of that. So, I mean, totally agree. Obviously, same stuff with us for Bobby.

[00:22:33] And that's, that's one reason like at least Ashton has shared that we haven't really needed to do paid and a lot of other brands have to, to get to like the EMV. And I don't think we have great EMV for like size of our brand. But at least people want to post Bobby's brand or they want to post Gordon's brand or Marquez's brand. So I totally agree with that. You could definitely leverage this shit out of that. Yeah. You know, another thing like thinking about our program is for a long time we were like very spray and pray. Like I said, it looked like a, like a sales development role almost.

[00:23:00] Mass outreach, mass negotiation, mass sending out product, mass videos posted. Where, what I would like to do, and then this comes back to like, well, how are we measuring the performance here? Is almost like layer on a demo approach, right? So it's like if we really want to own tech and approach EMV from a tech perspective. Yeah. MKBHD as the flagship creator. And then we're seeding it with particular tech influencers, micro and pure product seeding.

[00:23:29] We're getting content that we can promote via paid. That feels like we could be getting, it feels like we could be creating a little bit of a flywheel there, right? People want to talk about it. They want to engage, which is something that we've never really done. And Connor, I think you're like very much in that sphere. You guys are going after chefs and people who cook. Like that is a type of content that you're owning. And we can do that a little bit better. How are we like really crushing the tech conversation across multiple platforms?

[00:23:59] Did you know that platforms over-report performance 65% of the time? In a recent study, House found that 82% of incrementality experiments showed that platform reporting was either under-reporting or over-reporting by more than 25%. And 60% of the experiments showed discrepancies of more than 50%. It's why marketers are moving away from platform attribution towards incrementality measurement in order to maximize their growth and efficiency. This is one of the many reasons that the three of us, Connor, Cody and I, all work with House. So what is House?

[00:24:28] It's a self-serve experimentation platform that allows you to configure regional tests and control experiments to measure incrementality and identify points of diminishing returns. What does that really mean? They tell you, hey, these are the 40 zip codes you need to exclude from this campaign. And we can look at what results did you drive in the targeted regions compared to that holdout group. Really awesome. We use it all the time. As an example, we just identified a lot of our non-branded ring search and shopping campaigns.

[00:24:55] We're not nearly as incremental as Google was reporting. So we've been growing a ring business over 100% year over year and spending less on Google. So we've been able to be more efficient with every dollar spent. House is built with cutting edge methods by PhD economists and data scientists who have built these solutions before at companies like Amazon and Google. The House platform allows you to test all your marketing channels, both online and offline. Measure the impact across all your sales channels, DTC, retail, Amazon, and calibrate your platform reporting for incrementality with House.

[00:25:24] Discover your marketing's true ROI and unlock new growth with House. Go to house.io slash operators spelled H-A-U-S dot I-O slash operators to start your incrementality practice today. So I say that, right? And I'm saying like tech and I think a big unlock here will be like how are we inserting ourselves in the tech conversation around platforms. So another thing that we are thinking about is we're layering on this demo.

[00:25:53] We're layering on this like far right side of the spectrum, A-list creator. We're going to do product seeding. But how are we doing that across platforms? Like who is having discussions on Twitter or TikTok or Instagram or YouTube where historically we've been incredibly YouTube focused? From a channel perspective, maybe Connor, you can kick us off. What are you guys – how do you guys approach it? Yeah, so like with our –

[00:26:17] Yeah, like when you're looking at cooking content, like are you guys Instagram specific or YouTubers or is it just kind of agnostic across any platform? Mainly Instagram and TikTok. Yeah, as the core channel. We got in YouTube's like I think newer affiliate program. So – and they actually like handle a lot of the outreach and onboarding for that. So we've been able to kind of like kill two birds with one stone on YouTube because now we're like –

[00:26:44] I have this ping pong trick shot in my inbox right now from 602 of like this 407 – I haven't even looked at it yet but they're like 475 million views and there's a YouTube affiliate link like with our product in it. Like we're kind of – we kind of have YouTube covered that way. Not that we aren't going to, you know, do some more activations there because we absolutely are planning to do that this year. But like mainly TikTok and Instagram and we just like – we want to be everywhere in every product category.

[00:27:11] So it's not even just – like that's the beautiful thing about cooking is so many things are cooking adjacent. Like if you're a – if you're like a life – like a female lifestyle blogger, like you're cooking. If you're an athlete, you're cooking. If you're like a tech bro that's all about like optimizing their health, you're cooking. Like we have all these like niches that are – and I'm previewing a little bit of our 2025 focus here and I'll intentionally pause.

[00:27:38] But like we're more so going after categories independent of the channel. And like we want to hit – like if we're going to go after like female like mommy blogger, like I want to hit the female mommy bloggers on YouTube. I want them on TikTok. I want them on Instagram. But like we want that category as not as much as we want. Like, hey, let's go nail TikTok over the next few months. Like no, let's just make sure we're being like well distributed like as we go after that niche of creator. Yeah, totally.

[00:28:07] I've told you that before. I sent you a thread. There's like a bunch of crypto Twitter people like stoked on Hexclad because they really love cooking steaks. And it's like those are people they are not – I don't think they are necessarily consuming cooking content, following chefs on Instagram. But they care about, you know, what they're eating. And I think Hexclad plays a unique role in that. Well, and that guy that you sent me like when – because it was like 10 things you need to like optimize your life.

[00:28:34] And it was like one of the things with a good set of cookware and then people were following up and be like, what do you use? Like so much intent from his audience clearly. Like I guarantee you if we did like a short link UTM with that guy versus like a short link UTM with someone that just posts recipe content all day, I guarantee you that person would drive like 5x the amount of last click conversions like without a doubt. But they're harder to find. Like they're less obvious. So we need to kind of like find like the needle in the haystack with some of those people.

[00:29:04] And it's the same reason we use guys like Brendan Fallis. Like he's just like generally seen as like this cool, like kind of like fashion, like lifestyle type creator. He's not a cook, but he does cook. And like he's kind of like a trendsetter in that sense. Like we don't get great CPMs with him, honestly. But we do feel like just with who he is and the content he creates and the audience he attracts, that that's like a worthwhile investment for us just to be showing up in his content, you know,

[00:29:30] every so often when he's cooking and like get the tag post every month or every two months. Yeah, 100%. Cody, you guys kicking off the paid influencer program. Any channel focuses? For kind of, again, that organic one that I keep calling it, it's gonna be mostly Instagram. Reason being, you know, we'll chat about a Gentio YouTube partnership separately. So we'll handle that differently. And different team is actually going to be kind of owning that. And I'm not super bullish on TikTok. We'll do a little bit.

[00:30:00] And I think from like an earned media seeding perspective, totally fine with TikTok. Definitely want to be there. I think Instagram is still like so much low-hanging fruit, right? Like we haven't even done anything paid. But also like what I was explaining to like my team to thinking about it is like there's so much more volatility with TikTok. A, I forgot who, where I saw. I think a Gentio team maybe told me, but like where I saw the stat. I think they did, but like a very high percentage of the things that show on the 4U on TikTok are like 24-hour old content.

[00:30:28] So there's really no evergreen like staying power. Right. Obviously, YouTube is like the other end of the spectrum, right? Long form video, things can last and produce value for a while. But I also think, you know, let's say somebody gets 50,000 views on average on Instagram. They're going to be between 40,000 and 65,000 views on Instagram Reels. Maybe like a little bit more. But on TikTok, they'll be like 3,000, 3,000, 5,000, a million.

[00:30:56] And if you're paying somebody for content and you only get so many shots at that, like that's just very volatile. And I don't think the probability is in your favor. So for the paid perspective with our little budget right now, I think it makes much more sense to put it into YouTube and into Instagram. 100%. I think that's fantastic advice. Because it's really – it's easy to like want to hit a trending video on TikTok or whatever.

[00:31:22] But it'd be really expensive if you're paying per post because you're getting that like high variance outcome. Yeah. Yeah. I think TikTok has, you know, peaked overall and stuff like that. I think Reels is still on the up and up. So that's another one. But yeah, it's just the probability is probably just not in anybody's favor. Yeah. And so I'd like to start talking about kind of tools now. And we can talk about the important software that helps power the different programs.

[00:31:47] But why you're talking – a different team will manage the YouTube integrations versus the people doing the paid integrations for Instagram? Our growth team is going to do the YouTube. YouTube, it's, you know, we're largely considering it a little bit more of like a direct response endeavor. We'll be measuring it differently. We'll just be thinking about it a little bit differently. There's a little bit more data behind it versus our influencer team is primarily responsible for all of our, you know, relationship building, all of our seeding.

[00:32:16] They do manage our affiliate program, but it's not a large part of it. But so it's much more brand. It sits on our brand team, much more relationship driven. They will be playing a supporting role in the agentio stuff in the YouTube creator, but they won't be the lead on it. Got it. Okay. So the influencer team that I'm curious to talk about a little bit more before we get to like the performance side of it, what does that like tech stack look like? I know you guys are doing some cool stuff with analytics. Like what else is rolled up in there? Mostly it's Tribe Dynamics.

[00:32:44] So they're, they got bought by CreatorIQ, but they're like the big player in beauty. I know they're non-beauty. I know AG1 uses them and other stuff, but essentially they save any piece of content that you've been tagged in. They have this, and I think other people have now adopted it, but you know, this metric called earned media value, which is kind of like the main KPI for this type of a program. It's somehow, you know, like what it'll do, this is overly simplified. It'll weight different impressions differently, right?

[00:33:13] So like a view on the YouTube is not the same as a view on an Instagram story or on TikTok. So it'll give like different weight to those and video versus not, but anything that you've been tagged in, it'll save that content. It'll post that. So we're able to measure that. It's really good for like building lists and prospecting lists. You can, let's say like we have a new launch coming out and a new Miracle Balm shade. Well, we can easily pull a segment and our team can filter. Hey, give me everybody who has posted about Miracle Balm in the past six months, more than three times or something like that.

[00:33:42] So it's just really good for, for analyzing the data, saving content, being able to make, you know, build lists for any launch, any sends. And then you can get a lot of competitor data so we can see how we're tracking compared to our competitors. And you can actually see who's posting about them. We can see who are the top creators producing the most EMV for Glossier. And we can, you know, it's hooked up and we can obviously message them if we want to. So there's just like a lot of really cool data that's in there. So that's honestly probably the main one.

[00:34:11] Like obviously we got some affiliate softwares and, you know, that's the main one that we use. That's cool. So you can see who the visitors are activating with and, and go poach them. Exactly. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. I don't think archive does. We use archive and it does a lot of those things, but not that, not that I am aware of at least. Yeah. Cause what I have here is like, I was thinking about what are the different pieces of the program and I've got discovery, which I've got discovery. I've got deal signing. I've got content.

[00:34:42] So like, how are you actually trying to ensure that good content goes live? And then you've got at the very end attribution, attribution and analysis and things like that. And that's where like, it sounds like creator IQ both does discovery and attribution. We've got that a bit broken out. Um, we use it, we use a tool called gospel, which is the founder of, uh, who does stream these tube stream or something like that. He's like been deep in the creative space for a long time, but gospel is just a discovery platform.

[00:35:09] We can see trending creators who's up and coming, who's working with other brands. You can also kind of poach via that. And then our, our attribution and analytics is, is way simpler. We're still using click in a lot of ways, which is also something I'd like to change in 2025. We use post-purchase survey a little bit, but it feels as if, and I think we're all on the same page here. Like this idea of buzz being built, this, like the idea of EMV, um, is, it feels like a pretty good KPI.

[00:35:38] I struggle with it because it's such, it's like feels relatively soft as a metric. Um, it's hard to justify, like, it's hard to attribute any sort of like dollar value to that. I get that people are speaking about it, but anyway, so that's how we're thinking about it. Um, how are we addressing these different parts of the funnel between discovery and analysis? But Connor, you guys are doing archive. Yeah, we use archive. I like archive. Cause we'll basically like we, we, I give, and I work on in our like influencer team in

[00:36:07] general, some of their main key results are impressions and impressions per category. So like, that's one reason I like archive is like, if we go see, um, you know, a hundred people knives, we can pump them into our knives collection and then automatically see that content populate. And like, not to mention, it's a great, it's a great way to go and see like whole, you know, this person of the 20 piece of content we saw come in today, like this person, you know, by far had the most, you know, compelling video they made.

[00:36:34] Like, all right, maybe we go and approach them about doing like, like graduating them into like a paid ad deal. So it's really easy for that. You can just see all the content right in front of you. You can organize by collection. You can even like reach out to them through the platform if you want to get like usage rights and stuff like that. So yeah, I mean, we, we, we use archive for all that jazz and then we use super affiliate for our, our social affiliate program. So, and that's, and that's like, cause I've struggled too with that Connor.

[00:37:02] I'm like the, you know, not achieving or not optimizing towards like a last click based conversion and revenue and like an overall return on outspend. But you know, that's ultimately too, why we rolled out this social affiliate program. Cause I actually think that like, generally speaking, like, and this is what we found over time by, by testing out using like short links and, and content and whatnot. Is that like, like most of these people, like you look at the cooking space, for example,

[00:37:28] like if you follow Salt Hank, for example, who's a influencer that we used to work with, like you are not like, you are following Salt Hank. Cause he makes really cool cooking videos. Like it's really fast paced. It's shot on like a really high definition camera. He's making like really creative things that are like just genuinely fun to watch. You know what he's never doing? He's never shilling products. Like his audience is fundamentally not there to be sold products.

[00:37:56] And then you go look at like a social affiliate and like, that's all they do. Like their audience is there to be sold products. So that's like part of the, like, that is a big fundamental reason that our like thinking has shifted. Cause like, yes, he might not be selling products directly, but there's still value obviously to be the cookware of choice, you know, from Salt Hank, who has a lot of respect as a, as like a sandwich chef in this space. Now the, the, the key is, or not the key, but like, I think the, what we want to try to

[00:38:25] do is maybe find those people that do a little bit of both, right? Like some of these like female, like lifestyle creators is kind of where that like overlap happens. We're like, yes, it's still lifestyle content, but you go look at like Bethany Frankel's Instagram feed. Like all it is, is her talking about products or a lot of it, I should say. And like, she's one of those people where I actually think she checks that like brand ambassador box. Cause she's aspirational.

[00:38:52] Like a lot of people look up to her and like, you know, if we had Bethany Frankel, we kind of have that like, you know, rich housewife mom category, like covered, but she's also like in many ways an affiliate because her audience is there too. Yeah. She was not exactly. And like, so with her, we actually like, we product seeded her and she posted organically didn't tag us just like was cooking something. And I had, there was like 25 comments. Like, what is this cookware? What is that? Like, what are you using here?

[00:39:21] Um, so she's actually one that we are like, she's like one of the examples and one of the like niches that we're very interested in is like, yeah, she's, she's checking all these boxes and she's in a category that we think is very food adjacent, which is like, again, the kind of rich housewife niche is, is what we've called it. Um, so like you do find those people, but I think those are a dime a dozen. Um, it's like, you gotta understand that like very much like the ad you put out there attracts

[00:39:50] a certain type of person, whether it's like a pure brand product explainer versus like big, bold, punchy 50% off. Like it's the same thing with an influencer's audience. Like they're there based on the content the influencer is posting. So if they're not selling products a lot, well, you shouldn't excel, expect them to sell products organically. That's not the case with paid. Um, but like organically you shouldn't expect a recipe creator to go get a ton of like revenue attributed because their audience is there for that. So then how do you set, like, how do you set budgets?

[00:40:20] How do you decide like how to invest time and energy? We try to look at it as a percent of top line revenue. Um, generally speaking, I actually think we've been pretty efficient from, from people I've talked to generally, it's like 1% of top line revenue. I think like Connor, I was talking to you a lot about this, like a year and a half ago, I think. Cause we, it's like hard, like how do you set your budgets? Um, so like we look at like 1% of top line revenue or under as a starting point.

[00:40:46] And then like, I know other people will look at like 10% of ad, ad budget as a starting point, but it's also, I mean, it's so dependent on your brand. Like I can go and validate more influencer budget. Cause all I have to do is go and say, well, look at the top line impression growth and the CPM on that. Like, why would we not go invest more in that? Or, Hey, look like this knife ad from this brand ambassador creator was by far our best knife out of the year. Like how could we, you know? So it's very, I think you just, all you really need to do is decide on a starting point. That's not going to break the bank.

[00:41:16] Like it's easier to scale up and it is back. And then if you have the data to support more budget there, it's like, okay, impressions are great. CPMs are great. We're getting great ad performance. We're getting good last click revenue performance. Then I think you can scale it up. Um, so that's what we're doing. Like now this year, we're starting to have those budget conversations. Um, now, and generally speaking, like our finance team wants to spend the same amount on influencer and I'm like, okay, I'm good with that as a starting point. But just so you know, like if we start to see some of these like KPIs really taking off,

[00:41:45] I might come and ask you for another million bucks to spend on influencer because, well, cause why wouldn't we? Um, so it's all, I mean, you gotta like, you know, make your argument with all your data points you have, like the same, the same as anything in performance marketing really. And then do you break it out between like, Hey, this, uh, let's say 1% of top line revenue is going towards influencer. Do you then split that out further? And you're like, we want half of that going to people who move product and half to like lifestyle people that we just feel good about being a part of that content. Yeah.

[00:42:13] We'll break it out between like brand ambassador, which is like these, you know, the, the highest like kind of level you can get to in our program. And then, then you have like ad related, like white listing ad content is another bucket. And then you have product seating as a third bucket. And then the fourth bucket we look at, and this is, I mean, I'm sure there's probably a variety of ways to do this. Just how we do it. And then the other bucket we have is like organic social, like here's your slush fund per

[00:42:42] month to go and activate with whatever creators you want to activate with to support like national cheeseburger month or like, um, you know, Asian Pacific Islander month when we might activate with like a, like a creator that's local to that area and like do some recipes that are like local to that. Like, so then they have their own budget, um, to go and activate there. But that ultimately all rolls up into like our overall impression count, um, that the growth team is operating off. So the kind of like four different ways to, to break it out basically. Um, and again, I don't think that 1% is the rule.

[00:43:12] I think there are certain brands where like 5% makes sense. 10% makes sense. It's like very dependent, like cooking such a terrible category, right? That's like so hot on social. So it makes a lot of sense for us. Whereas like, if you're selling, I don't know if you're like Tyson at, at Nectar, like, well, probably not. Like, I don't think that's, I could be wrong, but I don't think that's as like hot of, of an area to, to share on social makeup's a huge one. Like people are doing all sorts of makeup tutorials, obviously. So it makes a lot of sense. Totally. Yeah.

[00:43:40] Uh, Cody's mentioned Ashton wall a couple of times who was the CMO at color pop and you know, they got to nine figures only doing influencers. So clearly that was many percentage points of their, of their revenue. We've been talking about upper funnel channels a lot, especially leading up into, you know, peak moments. And honestly, it's been one of the biggest unlocks for us as a business is, you know, helping us reach net new customers and getting them into our funnel. But the challenge is historically, the stuff is very difficult to measure.

[00:44:09] You're not going to see it, you know, in platform row S clicks. So one of our secret weapons this year has been prescient AI. We onboarded with them about midway through the year and it's been a game changer and helping us to measure some of these very difficult to measure upper funnel channels like TV, like linear TV, like streaming. They've been able to move really quickly that the team's been great and actually get betas up with new channels that we've been testing. So it's been great. We've been loving it. We're able to, to see and forecast if we were able to scale and spend on some of these

[00:44:39] channels, you know, what our incrementality would look like. Prescient has become a really important part of our marketing workflow. It's, it's one of the main tools that we use to set our budgets every month. And yeah, it's just become a really important, you know, part of our stack that we feel like we can't live without at this point. We'd love the unbiased cross-channel measurement it has. Also love the halo effects where we're able to actually see how it's impacting, you know, we're just on DTC, but I know brands that are on Amazon, they're, they're able to get halo effects to actually see how their upper funnel spend and their DTC spend is impacting Amazon.

[00:45:08] So it's just become a really big part of our workflow and I can't recommend it enough. We're using it. HexCloud is using it. Symbiotica, Coterie and dozens more. Impression's blowing up from everyone I talk to. Can't say enough good things about it. If you want to try it to measure some of these upper funnel channels that we're talking about, go to pressionai.com slash operators to book a demo. Cody, how are you thinking about it? Yeah. So when, probably like a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, I was talking to Ash

[00:45:34] about it and me being a performance marketer, I was like, all right, we got to scale up this affiliate program. We got to do paid and she, and then this, this guy, really good name named Connor, Connor Begley, who's the chief strategy officer of creator IQ shared some data. And this is, this is mainly around beauty. And again, you got to like know that beauty is traditionally, you know, sold through wholesale. Anything that has more of a wholesale distribution is going to be more brand building than, you know, direct response e-commerce.

[00:46:03] So most beauty brands are, are coming at it from that perspective. And so beauty is usually very brand based and forward. And there's a lot of data that, you know, the best EMV programs are really built on seeding, gifting relationship strategy. They're not, you know, there's less of a correlation with affiliate, less of a, of a correlation with paid. So I think while it is harder to obviously attribute some type of ROI on a thing like that, which is really challenging.

[00:46:32] Um, I was at the creator IQ event and actually spoke at it, uh, this summer and, um, they had this guy and Connor shared this data as well, who was like some, you know, SVP of analytics and everything at SD Lauder companies, which, you know, they own a ton of, of beauty brands and they built MMMs, medium mixed models based on measuring obviously all of these channels things. But one of them being EMV earned media value and different funnel stages.

[00:47:00] And what they find, they found is the strongest predictor of, uh, consideration and future revenue growth was earned media value. So EMV influencer activity does a great drive drive. It does a great job driving, uh, you know, desire and considerability. Um, and, and, you know, anecdotally like Connor from tribe has seen a really strong influence

[00:47:24] between like who is hottest on EMV and, you know, future revenue growth of like public beauty companies. Um, almost where you could like trade stocks based on that if you wanted to and had access to the data. And so that's one of those things, at least seeing that data, it's still very hard for me day to day to see the correlation between our brands influencer program from the organic side and our growth. And I think we probably should like, I'm, I'm even, I even, uh, am asking Ashton and it's

[00:47:52] like, I know I, I, I see this data. I sit in these seminars. I'm like, yeah, we should be doing way better job. We should be spending more on our like brand based EMV program. But like, it's obviously one of those things where then you're actually looking at your P and L it's like, it's harder to justify. Um, but that is at least how we look at it. It's just like, we want to see this organic program growing. That's, you know, more people talking about you on social is better. So that's the majority.

[00:48:17] But again, that's why we have things split between, um, organic, right. Our influencer team, which is not our brand team and then growth running the YouTube partnerships because very different goals. We're choosing very different creators. Um, the reason we can have our, our affiliate program being run by our influencer team, just because it's not a top priority for us. We've kind of de-emphasized it. Uh, we still do it, but it's kind of, um, an adjunct to our relationship building. It's like another way to get people to post.

[00:48:46] And we just kind of happened to mention it, but it's not like what we're leading with. We're not kind of going on, you know, uh, social snowball or super affiliate and being like, Hey, here, you know, we're an affiliate. And again, we do a little bit. We're on the YouTube affiliate program, but that's, that's the main reason why. Um, we'll still like when we do this paid stuff, we'll still add these creators to our post-purchase survey. Like there's still, hopefully we'll see some effect. Uh, totally agree with what Connor from XCloud said about having some people that are just desirable and great for brand credibility.

[00:49:15] Uh, and some people that just move product and some of them are not like we, there's this one creator of this one affiliate we have. I think she has like 180,000 followers. So not huge, just moves product. Anytime she posts about us on her stories, it's like 5k revenue, um, and without a huge audience. And so there's people that are obviously way bigger that don't move product. And there's so many factors to that. Um, so yeah, that's, that's mainly how we will do it. But I'll say like, I have to, I'm constantly checking myself on it because we're going to

[00:49:43] spend, let's say we're going to spend a 50 K a month on, uh, this organic influencer program and we'll do that for a quarter and then we're going to have a very similar budget for a Gentio. So a hundred K a month, 50 K a month on each. I have a very hard time investing in that, especially on the organic side where we don't really at the end of like our, how are we going to know if it's working or not? Like, right. Is it impressions? Did we hit our CPM target? Do we have MV? Is it sales? Like it's very fuzzy.

[00:50:13] I think the, the YouTube creator stuff will be a little bit easier, but still not perfect. Um, and definitely want to chat about how we measure how you guys do. But I was like, we launched TV this time last year. We spent 50 K on creative had to spend 200 K on the first month. I had like no hesitations about doing that. And TV is not the easiest to measure either. I just find it really funny. And I'm trying to like almost call myself out on it that like it's super illogical.

[00:50:39] But at the end of the day, if we're going to spend, you know, 6 million on ads in a month, why can't I spend 50 K on a little bit more brand awareness? You know what I mean? Like when you put those numbers into perspective, it kind of sounds a little bit silly. Yeah, totally. It's the curse of the performance marketer, right? Like you want to, you want to be able to directly attribute everything. And I also like Cody that you mentioned, cause I think this is like, maybe got a little, got, could get a little lost.

[00:51:07] Like, I still think you should go into your post-purchase survey and look for directionality trends. Like if you see that like three creators are over indexing, like that's a good, like, even if it's not the net read of like all the revenue they drove, that's still a really, really, really helpful data point to go decide to like who to triple down on and who to maybe not work with anymore. Like that directional lookout is, is really helpful. So even if you're not like your main KPI is not a performance KPI, like still, still

[00:51:36] add those like attribution layers to your post-purchase survey and just see, like, you'd be shocked. Like you find people all the time popping out that you're like, wow, I'm, I'm surprised that that person's like over indexed in, um, self-attribution compared to some of these other people that like, just, you know, qualitatively you would have been like, well, that person is definitely going to outperform this person, but you never know. Like you never know who the audience is. It's a simple way to find people to work with as well.

[00:52:02] Like who do have you not paid to posts that people are saying drove them to buy? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Especially when you're seeding, right. If you're seeding with like hundreds of people a month and you're like, God, there's no way I could even put all these people into my post-purchase survey. Like then you start to see those write-ins and it's, it's really, it's kind of fun, honestly, to like get a sense and like, start to like hone in on like which audiences are more arrests or less relevant to you.

[00:52:27] So one of, one of the talking about this idea of like, um, maybe being cagey about how to justify the cost. We've been talking about like layering it into more campaigns. So I'm like, look, if we can spend 50 K or a hundred K on something that I'd never have to attribute revenue to, um, or I'm, I'm completely unable to attribute revenue to, but I feel like it's like compelling, memorable content attached to, you know, the launch of our travel

[00:52:56] category or the launch of our like summer rings program, something like that. I feel a bit, I might feel a bit better about it at that point. I'm like, I want a holistic approach. I want people just knowing that like this sale has started or we now have these products. So do you guys, maybe Connor, you guys have some details here. Like what is influencer? What is that organic brand awareness function of the influencer programs role in launching a sale or launching a product? Like, do you treat it differently throughout the calendar year?

[00:53:26] Yeah. Well, so all of our like brand ambassador level influencers all have organic monthly deliverables. So depending on what we have going on, we will brief them on like, Hey, we want your November post to happen in the back end of the month. And we want it to be promoting our, our black Friday sale or same with December. Hey, we have bakeware going live, you know, this quarter. So like, we want your post to like be really focused on bakeware and like, here's a brief on the value props to hit on.

[00:53:55] So yeah, we will give like specific briefs depending on yeah. What the like non evergreen calendar looks like. And then sometimes we'll even go out and say, okay, we want to do, um, cause that will also inform product seeding, right? Like we'll, we'll basically say, all right, like, again, let's look at a new product. If we think it's going to be a big product and a top of funnel acquisition product, then we'll say, Hey, we also want to go seed like a hundred of these with a hundred different creators that we've not seeded before to reach new audiences.

[00:54:23] Maybe there was a, we'll also go into, Hey, let's go select people that have posted from our product seeding program before. And that specifically would work well with like this new product and give it to them again. Cause our hit rate is going to be higher. And then the, and then lastly, we don't do this as much, but we have done it as when we might sometimes go out and say, Hey, let's go deploy another X dollars in like paid for deals with required organic posts. Um, because we really want to make this robust and like drive a lot of top of funnel awareness on this.

[00:54:52] So, um, yeah, absolutely. It's just like a matter of like, like we have some a plus launches coming in 2025, like in terms of like activation and like acquisition retention, all the channels associated with each. So those are ones where we'll be a lot more intentional about like specific briefs for those product drops. Yeah. One hundred percent. All right. I'm really just grilling you guys. Oh my God. I got one or two on this. If that's right. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:55:17] I was thinking about like, there's a, there's a very rough, but visual like anecdotal correlation between how our, like a new product launch does for us on a revenue perspective and how our EMB does, how our influencer program does part of our, a big part of our seeding strategy is around launches, right? Cause you have to have things to get people excited about. And if you think about it, at least in the beauty space, like these creators are getting,

[00:55:44] you know, boxes from all of these brands or seeing everything that's out there on the market. So they're very aware of brand perception to brands, how products are positioned. And, you know, it takes a lot to get them excited because they're getting box after box after box. And I think if you can make them excited, somebody who, you know, is kind of, is an influencer and is getting all this free stuff and they still get excited enough to post it and use it, then there's a very good chance you'll get your customers excited.

[00:56:12] But I think if you're not able to get them excited, um, that just tells you that there's something about like the marketing or the product offering, that's just a little bit of a miss. So like there is some rough correlation that we see of like how our EMB is tracking for a month and like how our business is doing. Um, and then the other part I'm, I'm super excited about, and this was, you know, another brilliant idea by Ashton. So as we are doing these contracts, we're getting all these deliverables. One thing we're going to put in there, and I'm curious if you guys do this is an option for whitelisting for some type of partnership licensing.

[00:56:41] And so we won't have to strike it from the beginning. We will see how the post does. And I also got this, I've talked to like the seed health team and they, they do a lot of this stuff, but there's likely a correlation between how something performs when they post it on their, you know, their own channel, their own reel and how it would do as an ad. And so if we want to, any of these deals will be able to say, great, we got it. You posted it. Did pretty well. We're going to run it as an ad for 14 days. We're going to run it as an ad for 30 days.

[00:57:09] And, and so part of it is we're trying to tie kind of our influencer strategy into our larger brand strategy. Like one of our biggest focuses for the year, one of our, uh, one of our big rocks, if you will, is to do a better job reaching millennial audience. And so part of it is we're just going to have to do a bunch of stuff for a quarter and or half a year or a year and say, we think that this is probably good marketing. We think this is what we should be do. We should be doing. We're going to look at the end of it as a whole and say, did we do a better job growing our

[00:57:38] revenue amongst this cohort that we set out to grow? And maybe we can't say it was specifically this post or the specific influencer program, but we just think, you know, strategically looking into it that, you know, we have to leverage creators. Creator marketing is huge. And Bobby's not going to resonate to everybody, especially in this younger audience. And we've got to leverage creators and we've got to work with them across organic social

[00:58:02] paid social, um, you know, earned media, potentially even, you know, e-com maybe some product collaborations with them, but we've got to start somewhere. So, um, hopefully we'll be able to see the proof in the pudding in terms of like the business goal we're tying it to, if we give it, if we're patient enough with it. Totally. Yeah. I think that's a great point. And that was, yeah, I brought that up earlier. Like, as we go into 2025, thinking about it from a demo perspective, if we want to grow

[00:58:29] in a, a, a tech business from a product perspective or appeal to a, uh, like a tech interest, um, we want to take that full, that kind of full spectrum approach. It's almost like a holdout. Like, I think it's easier for us to measure age and demo than it is tech. Um, you know, but it's like, if we just like went really wide with our influencer strategy, like it would be hard to say, Hey, total revenue is up. But if we went pretty deep on like a millennial demo and then we noticed our sales from millennial

[00:58:59] customers were up compared to everything else like that, at least it's like, Hey, that's the one variable that changed. So I don't know how you would do it from tech. I mean, maybe you would have to totally, we could survey people, um, age could probably be a component. Um, like we, we do skew, uh, on the older side. And I would imagine if we're trying to hit the person who's, you know, waiting at the Apple store to get the new iPhone, that person's probably a bit younger too. Um, but it's a great point.

[00:59:26] It's, it's really a lot less clear cut how we would measure the success of that other than we feel good about it. We could survey people. We do, yeah, some strategic post-purchase surveys and things like that. All right. Let me, let me ask one more question before we get to a Gentio. Cause I do want to talk about performance stuff. Are you guys doing anything interesting on like the, the other side of the spectrum? We've got product seating on one. We've got like big activations on another. Um, I think we were all fans.

[00:59:57] I, I think Dr. Squatch has been doing this the best where like, and they also very clearly like kind of calendar it out. They've been, they built their business with bar soap. They go to launch a body wash and it's like, okay, obviously they want to make this a splashy moment. That's when they engaged Sidney Sweeney. When they came out with, uh, the manscaped competitor, they're like, um, the, the, the body hair trimmer. They got Nick Cannon and they like insured his balls for $10 million or something like they

[01:00:23] do these like high end memorable, uh, like buzzworthy moments. Are you guys thinking about that at all? Or, or, or have experience, um, activating people in that way? We definitely are. We have some, we have some big product launches in 2025 that we are planning to, um, yeah, do exactly that. Just like position them really strongly with some of our creators. Um, and we have some people that were already on like deals with, um, that we're going to

[01:00:50] focus on, but also we're likely going to bring in some outside folks as well that just on like one-off deals. Actually, we actually did a pretty good job of it with our pizza steel. Like we launched our pizza steel with an organic social pro post from Nancy Silverton. And if you guys don't know Nancy, she has, um, this restaurant called matzah in, in Los Angeles. That's like world famous for, for it's an Italian restaurant and, you know, pizza and pasta. And that was like, uh, I think we did a really nice job with that. We were also able to leverage it for paid, um, because the content was so good.

[01:01:20] And like, we, we are like our team shot it. So I think that was like, uh, like kind of like a JV version of hopefully what we can build on in, um, in 2025 for some of these, like what we, what we see as being even, you know, larger product, um, launches and larger upside. So, um, yeah, we're, we're trying to get better at it. And like Gordon was also a good example of like how we levered him with the sweepstakes where like, that was a big splashy moment. We made him like the court, like the, like he was the heartbeat, like that hero video

[01:01:49] on that landing page was the heartbeat of that campaign. Like if without that video, that campaign performs way, way, way, way worse, I think. Um, and that's another one where it's like, yeah, that's a good way to position a, a marketing campaign using and leveraging the clout of an influencer and like, not even just the clout, but that video, like they literally shot that in one take. I could not have explained it that clearly in 25 takes.

[01:02:16] So not only is like leveraging a social proof, but just like his skillset as an entertainer was like uniquely qualified to deliver that message in a, you know, one minute and 15 second video. Like it's, it's not just the cloud. It's also like their ability to create content. Um, and, and like, where does that work best for, for certain like campaigns, whether it's a sweepstakes or a new product drop or a sale or whatever it is. Totally. Cody, are you guys thinking about it? We're definitely thinking about it.

[01:02:43] We're not acting on it yet, but, um, a, I mean, I actually asked you like several months back cause I saw you guys did the, the Marquez deal and I was like, this is a huge bet. Like, should we be doing something like that? And I think definitely been inspired by HexCloud. So yeah, definitely thinking about it. A lot of it would be this millennial expansion strategy. Um, thought was like, let's not bite off more than we can chew. And we've really done no paid influencer. So let's start with what we're doing and that'll be the strategy. Totally.

[01:03:09] But does that then lead to something larger either with these creators or give us the confidence to invest in something a little bit larger? Um, but yeah, and I think it would be very similar to how HexCloud has Gordon. He's obviously always going to be the face and that's Bobby for us. And we're not trying to put like another face or somebody level with them, but are there different people that are slightly beneath him from a integration standpoint to help reach those different audiences? Right. I've seen HexCloud do stuff with Benny Blanco or do stuff with, you know, uh, Haley Bieber or stuff like that.

[01:03:38] So I think it would be kind of adjacent to that. Um, one, I don't know if you guys, you guys probably don't see it. I haven't seen it cause you don't have kids. You guys know Molly Baths. She's like a YouTuber chef. She used to be like Bon Appetit and now she's got her own. She's great. So like big on Instagram, YouTube. Um, she just had a kid and she, she did this like billboard with, um, this like lactation company and it was in Times Square and, and you know, she was, you know, had, uh, some

[01:04:05] lactation cookies covering up a little bit, but you could still see some stuff. And the, they took it down. Whoever like the billboard company was took it down and it kind of made a lot of stuff. And so Bobby where, uh, where Shireen used to work. Um, they're like the, the formula company. They did a partnership with her and they essentially did, uh, Times Square out of home with her. Right. She posted on her channel. So Instagram, YouTube, several, multiple times, there was a ton of earned media. So a ton of press behind it.

[01:04:35] Um, obviously Bobby created a ton of content. The only thing I didn't see a lot of paid social. Um, so I think they could have done a better job there, but overall, like, and I have no idea how it helped the business. I don't know. Um, but Bobby's like an incredible business, but I just thought it was like such a great, like holistic, dare I say the word like brand marketing campaign, but leveraging a creator, leveraging an influencer, somebody who's not a traditional celebrity, but they're more

[01:05:01] of a creator and just having the same content and the same overall messaging throughout all these different points. It was just such a well executed campaign. So I would love to do that at one point. Um, I think we just gotta, we gotta crawl a little bit before we can run, but you know, definitely plan to at a certain point. Totally. And I love when kind of a similar point here, but I'm going to go kind of on the end of it's like a scrappier route, I think. Uh, but when you can find the right alignment between like whatever you're talking about

[01:05:31] and the celebrity or the athlete or the creator, like when the partnership in and of itself is content, I think is like a really special kind of point. Um, like I actually thought manscaped did it incredibly. They do it. They do it. Well, they still do it. Well, I shouldn't act like they don't do it as well anymore, but like they, I remember them working with Alex Caruso, who was this like cult, uh, cult like figure on the Lakers a couple of years back. This like balding white guy who was just way better than you'd expect him to be.

[01:06:00] And they did a, they did a integration where he like shaved his head and, and it's like, and for the people who recognize Alex Caruso, you know, he's like kind of famous for, for this receding hairline. Him using a manscaped razor shave his head was like content in and of itself. And I talked to their, their old VP of marketing. They get all those deals super affordably because they find these like unique opportunities to create a moment that with people who don't have a ton of brand interest, Alex Caruso was coming off the bench. They did last year.

[01:06:27] They did maybe last year, the year before John Daly to launch their beard trimmer. It's like, yeah, I don't think John Daly is getting a ton of inbound right now. They're like not a list creators or, but they're recognizable figures that they can create a moment with. And I think striking that balance is like, is a true art. So that's why I'm impressed by the partnership is the content. Is that what you said? I said the, yeah, the partnership in and of itself is content to some degree. Like there's something memorable story. Like, like it doesn't. Yeah.

[01:06:55] So I think that's the thing that we're trying to be incredibly thoughtful of is like, it just can't feel like this is a cash grab or a money grab. Totally. Same thing with the brand club. Like there's gotta be this authentic tie in where it just feels super authentic and on brand for both sides to partner together. Same if you were to do like a brand partnership. And, and there's this opportunity for those to have like really outsized outcomes. If you like, if you strike the right moment. So, um, that's brilliant. I like those. I like those examples.

[01:07:24] Uh, we were, we were talking about the other side of that, the other side of that coin. Um, we've been like dream shot, like conversation, probably not, not ever going to happen, but like we have a Japanese business show. He Otani is like Japanese and the best player in baseball, but he's also making $75 million per year. So like, what are we going to offer him? That's going to make him get out of bed. Probably nothing. Like, you know what I mean? Like, is there any, like the John Daly example and the Caruso example, that's brilliant.

[01:07:53] Like the ability for those influencer teams to identify those people and like have a narrative that would make sense. Um, and like, it's also rising all tides. Like that's, that's awesome. I love those examples. Yeah. They did a Scott van Pelt at one point. Manscaped did Scott van Pelt has been like the sportscaster on ESPN. It's like, yeah, he's not getting a ton of brand deals. That's not a sexy partnership, but there's something unique about it that really sticks out.

[01:08:21] Everyone knows ad comments are super important for social proof, but they're a mess to handle spam, trolls, customer questions, good reviews at Ridge. We had four full-time people to moderate all of this, which was expensive, but necessary. One of the reasons we moved to rich panels, we knew they'd be launching new AI tools and they just launched their AI social media manager that handles all of our ad comments. It's built right into rich panel, our help desk software, which no other help desk has

[01:08:45] anything like in the first two months, AI handled 11,000 comments, saved us 760 hours of work. It's like four months of one person's time. And the best part is it didn't cost us anything else. It came with our regular subscription. If you want to learn more about rich panel, you can join one of their weekly migration webinars. It's 40 minutes. They show you the platform, how to switch from your current system and how much money you can save. It's great for CX team to evaluate rich panel and see if it's a fit for your business. If you want to add social media superpowers while becoming more efficient, go to richpanel.com.

[01:09:15] Book a spot for their weekly migration webinar and get your CX team to spot too. I've got Cody's tweet pulled up. You made quite a prediction last week. I'll read it aloud. This is straight from the Cody Ploff Twitter channel. I predict the next big channel that is going to blow up is a Gentio. They make it super easy to buy YouTube creator ad spots. Not technically a channel, but I guarantee you're going to hear a lot more about them. We're testing in Q1. I couldn't be more excited. Starting to hear more about them already. Now, no sponsorship.

[01:09:45] Someone asked below. We're not getting paid by a Gentio at all. But Cody, why are you so excited about it? I'm like disclaimer, I'm likely going to invest just because I think it's awesome and I think their team is great. So I'm throwing that out there, but have not done so yet. Definitely not sponsored. I actually responded to a cold email about this. That's how... And I almost never do. I usually have a rule. If I didn't seek it out, it's not something I should be spending time focusing on.

[01:10:14] But I've thought about this for a while and years of having some type of platform to make this stuff easier. But it just seemed really... I've wanted to do this, have a YouTube presence, do these types of things. But it seemed really daunting to me. We probably would have had to hire a team of people, additional people or an agency. And I just didn't really know how to get started. But I know the value of these type of partnerships.

[01:10:41] And I just like the promise of this, that it makes it super easy. So it automates a lot of it. And so we're able to get a lot of data through their integration with YouTube to see... First of all, we're able to submit a brief. There's some parts of that's like a software where we submit a brief. We put our recommended CPMs. Their team is great. They came to our office last week to meet with us and go over a strategy. But they'll advise us and be like, this is what your CPM should be based on our knowledge of the space.

[01:11:11] So it's very much like they function like an agency partner as well. But you get to see stats on the creators. So average views, engagement rate, what niches are in. There's definitely some really cool AI stuff that they're working on and building in. And then you're able to see all the recent ad reads that this creator has done. And it's really as simple as you submit a bid. You pick the CPM. You decide how many videos you want. You put it in there. So we probably approved and submitted a bid to 40 creators.

[01:11:40] Right. All very different price points from $600 per video, which is probably 15K, 20K views per video all the way up. We got one just accepted. That was 15K per video that we're going to test with. That's several hundred thousand views per video. And a variety of niches. So for us, we don't really want to go after beauty that much. We're kind of the beauty brand for people that aren't huge beauty people.

[01:12:07] So we're going after a lot of mommy vloggers, a lot of home decluttering, cleaning, some content, business stuff. We submitted a bid to Bethany Frankel. We'll see if she accepts it or not. But she's definitely talked about us a lot on social. We think she would be a great one. Pricing on that, Cody? I'll have to check. I forget. But apparently her beauty rate is way higher than other verticals. She's just much more selective.

[01:12:37] But she's awesome. She's posted about us a lot before. But most of these will be net new creators. So yeah, it makes it pretty easy. You literally put all this in. You approve or not. The one thing is Agentio has also been great. And they're like, hey, this creator we think will crush for you. We work with her and other brands. So they've got that data that they have been able to share. So their advice has been great. And we submit the bids. And it's not a ton of back and forth.

[01:13:03] On the other stuff we've been talking about, our director influencer has been talking to people's managers for 4 months now just getting rates going back and forth. This is much less relationship-based. Here's my bid. Here's the CPM I want to pay. Here's how many videos. Do you want to take it? Yes or no. And there's no back and forth. Or there's very little. So we're getting bids accepted. Yeah. So I'm pretty pumped. I can talk about more, but I'll pause it there. Yeah.

[01:13:29] I mean, the general premise is like, can there be a platform where you can spend influencer dollars more like Facebook? Yeah. That's what it feels like. Much more scalable and exciting. And a little bit more data behind it. And they do a lot of stuff. We're not there yet. But they're integrated with Shopify. So you can send products through it if you want. UTM tracking. It does like dynamic UTMs. Creates, you know, codes and stuff like that. So yeah, it's just trying to automate a lot of it. And then obviously get more data behind it. Yeah.

[01:13:58] I'm super curious to see how it plays out. Because you're really, you're adding. By making it so transactional, you're adding all this liquidity, right? You're like, you're like publishing campaigns. You're placing bids. Like there's just more liquidity in the market, which should make it easier to sign 40 deals like you guys did. And I forget one of you guys said it earlier. But like, I think so much of good influencer marketing right now has been like pretty harsh negotiating.

[01:14:26] And like the brand's best influencer benefit from a more opaque market. So I'm curious to see if like more liquidity, more transparency, more just straight transactions can actually lead to better performance. That's what's still so TBD. I love the idea. Quick spiel. And then Connor, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. And we have like a certain amount of careers. We have thousands of creators that we've worked with. So we've got like a book of business essentially that we can, when we want to spend money, we'll go.

[01:14:54] And we have relationships with these people and we can negotiate and things like that. Now that only gets us so far. So now we're trying to explore like what are the higher leverage ways to scale the program from here? And that's where something like a Gentio is enticing. Because it's like, yeah, look, we can go. We know exactly how much we're spending on deals. We know what CPMs we're comfortable with. And we can accept 40 bids and that can be really easy. Still TBD on whether those deal can actually perform. But that's how we're thinking about it. How is it like just another tool in the toolbox for scaling the program?

[01:15:24] Sounds cool. I'm going to check it out. I haven't dabbled with it at all. What I will say is I fucking hate influencer managers. It's such a slog. And like you get the back and forth is so brutal, man. Like it just, it's impossible to get deals made. It really is. So this seems like, I mean, that's a huge pain point I've experienced. And if they can solve that, like even that alone. We're getting these bids accepted. And these guys are like, great. Can't wait to work with you. I've been meaning to try the products. But like, yeah.

[01:15:52] And they're like, I got great ideas for how I want to include them in my video. So there's been none of that like awkward back and forth. That takes months. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I also have a certain disdain for managers. But like, but that's where so much of the alpha has been. Like I got forwarded a manscaped email years ago. And I, again, I think they did it like the best. Back in 2021, I think their team was like 12 people. Like it was just, they had a big team that was super operationalized.

[01:16:21] And you could tell every message that they would send managers or direct to creators was like crafted to sign as, as, as effective and strategic of a deal as possible. Um, and that's obviously like, I think what works, it's those tiny wins you got to grind out over time. Um, yeah. But for people looking to deploy budgets and, and maybe just the scale that you can get, um, you'll be able to get good performance out of something that's a little more programmatic. Yeah.

[01:16:47] I think scale, if, if you're, that's really the focus or I think getting started is super helpful. Maybe in that, you know, the, in between, like I, I, I do get that concern that a lot of the alpha is in like the relationship and they negotiating. Um, yeah, I, I definitely get that. But yeah, so we're excited a little bit more about our strategy. Like, you know, we, we obviously plan and definitely give me feedback because, and I've talked to a few people like Nate Lagos was super helpful. Like they've done a lot of this YouTube stuff. Um, obviously you have been in the past and you've shared a bunch, uh, Trent who used

[01:17:16] to be a sleep, like they've done a ton. So I've had a few people share some of their like tactics, which has been really helpful. Um, but it seems like it's like a mixed bag. You almost don't know what, what niches are going to perform. And it's sometimes like, it's not who you think. Like I've heard of some like really obscure ones performing where it's like, for example, for us, it's not, it likely may not be beauty and it might be something that we don't even think is like that close or that related. Um, but it just happens to have the audience or it like fits in.

[01:17:42] And obviously we'll try to have the, the content be as native to people's or the ads be as native to people's content as possible. Um, obviously still very transparent. It is an ad, you know, they're, they can say this video is sponsored by the other thing that I've seen is like, and a Gentio team had this feedback is like a lot of times their subscribers will be just really like into them as people and creators and root for them. And so sometimes they want to see them succeed and actually get brand deals.

[01:18:11] It's not like they're like, Oh, this is an ad. I hate it. And so sometimes being in their videos multiple times just builds that little trust. It's like, Hey, okay. This is clearly not just a, a dollar thing, but like the, like this, this brand is actually continually like showing up for this person. Have you seen anything like that? Dude? Absolutely. We said that from the very beginning. It's the only, it's really the only ad channel that like can build goodwill. And that was, we particularly felt that when we first started working with like, I always bring up Theo Vaughn or Anthony Fantano.

[01:18:40] Like, I think we were basically the first brands to ever work with those guys. And it became like a meme in the community that they were like, well, hold it salesman. Um, so yeah, totally. There's that like kind of tertiary benefit. Uh, let me talk about measurement a little bit. Give me, this is our, our strategy. Give me some feedback on it. We almost didn't do it initially because of measurement. Like, and we even talked to a few other brands that do this style program. And like, I wasn't getting a great read and a Gentio has some great customers. I don't want this to make it sound too much.

[01:19:09] I'm going to add, but like, they've got some like really, really legit, like nine figure brands, but I just like, couldn't get a great read on like how this stuff was performing for people. And I didn't know how we would. And it's one of those things where it's like, I don't want to commit to this and do a quarter of it. And like, at the end of it, be like, did it work? I don't know. Like, I, I want to know. I don't need the exact dollar. So we'll do a combination of things. We'll do obviously post-purchase survey. We'll add YouTube creator and have a conditional question where they say, which one we'll do a code. We don't like to do discounting.

[01:19:38] We will do a code and we'll do a gift for purchase. So we can have people put in like a, you know, Connor, Connor free or whatever it is, um, you know, or, or C Mac and hopefully get some, some measurement on that. And then obviously we'll have UTMs, North beam, you know, UTMs in their description. I am not expecting great return on investment there. Like for example, on YouTube ads, we might run it at a 0.5 or 0.4 one day click row S because

[01:20:07] a lot of the value is actually coming from a view. I mean, 40% of the people that watch YouTube are not watching it on a, you know, somewhere where they can click. Like there's also some QR code stuff that a Gentio like automates that does redirect. So it's going to be, and then I'm really pumped about this. There's a beta going on. We'll be the second person, but prescient has integrated with the Gentio. So I think that'll be pretty awesome, um, to measure that, you know, the halo. So it'll be kind of just like a triangulation of a bunch of those things.

[01:20:35] And then hopefully over time we can get a multiple kind of compared to that click attribution. So maybe it's at 0.5. Is that kind of what you guys think about or do? That's, I mean, what we are, what we effectively do is we have an assumed multiple. Um, like we don't, we did when we were using an MMM, it technically gave us a readout of what it thought our ROAS was on partnerships, but we've just basically over time, it's a,

[01:21:00] it is a very soft science between codes, between post-purchase surveys, between click data. Are we comfortable at certain results? Um, so then we currently largely look at click data under the assumption that there is, as some multiple. And then that's how we're, that's how we're kind of measuring and judging all the deals that we signed. So incredibly similar to what you're talking about. Okay. That makes sense. That's kind of the combination or, you know, based on people I've talked to. So that's helpful. Yeah. Did you guys, did you guys do anything with landing pages?

[01:21:28] Like, did you, were you thoughtful about landing pages and like where you send people? Like, are you customizing and building like a, you know, maybe, maybe for like a big one, like MKBHD, like you're doing a page for, but like, did you do that for everybody or do you just drop people on a random page? We have a lot of people go to random pages, but like, I think we probably have dozens of VIP pages built out. Like we had a part of the program. If it's a good deal on size. Yeah, totally. And if they're performing well and we want to like, we called it our VIP program.

[01:21:56] We want to work with them on a more like retained basis. Then we would also ask for assets with them and the wallet that we had a template built out and we'd have like the overseas team go in, drop in the new assets, build the new page, things like that. So we ended up having like, we probably have 60 custom pages. It really hard to tell you like whether that was a, yeah. At what size of creator it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. We're not going to do that out the gate, of course. We were doing them more regularly and like that juice wasn't worth the squeeze, but

[01:22:25] then like, like I'll send it to you, Cody. I'll send you the ER like Benny Blanco, where it was like huge activation, custom product, like where we shot content with him. Like that one, we did a custom page. Haley Bieber, we did a custom page. So like, yeah, some of the bigger creators were like, we really want the experience to be congruent. But once we like, as we've shifted it less and less towards it being like a direct, like the only time we're making these pages is if it's like more of a direct purchase page, right? Like you'll see this page, like with the custom apron.

[01:22:55] And then we had like three bundles. We even had like some, you know, we had Benny's baby bundle and Benny's big ass bundle for like cookware bundles as well. So like this was, we did want to like see how much revenue we could drive on these products specifically. And this page was fun. I mean, like the branding is very different. So it almost required its own page. That was like very distinct from our core site. Like we don't really have any other option other than to build a custom landing page here, but we don't do it a ton anymore.

[01:23:21] It is a great measurement method is if there's a skew that you're only talking about on YouTube partnerships, you know, that's a great way to measure that. Like it, right. Like if you have a specific product. But they have to be clicking though, which is so tricky. Cause like I really, Oh, otherwise I can't get to it. Yeah. We assume a higher multiple from, from YouTube than other channels. And like, I mean, I think more people end up buying on Amazon. That's why attribution is such a, such a mess. That's right.

[01:23:50] So yeah, you know, quickly on the point of the landing page is one of my favorite brands and we've tried to emulate this a lot with MKBHD is, uh, eight sleep and how they work with creators. They get custom content. They get ad rights. They build a custom landing page. It's not super personalized. They basically just have like headshots at the top of the creator, but then it is a full funnel just built out around. They had one for Marquez for a long time. And then they had another Andrew Huberman funnel that was just like killer.

[01:24:16] And it was like relatively low touch it felt, but just like super high impact. Um, so they're a great one. If you guys are looking for, for inspo, that's our plan. Yeah. We, uh, Trent sent me the, the Marquez one actually. Um, AG one has done some solid stuff as well. Like they do a bunch for their larger creators. Um, I love that. I love when you get the creator partnership that, that flows through the full funnel. Um, we have seen, and I, I agree, like we definitely aren't going to do it for everybody. I think it's only going to make sense.

[01:24:44] Like, I don't even think anybody we've selected in this first batch is going to make sense to do it. I think, but as we, we, we move up market, um, on like a Instagram white listing basis, I remember we had this one good piece of content. It was actually just an organic, you know, influencer posts that we got rights to, and it was fatiguing or it wasn't quite performing how we wanted. And we spun up a page, just a listicle. Um, her name was grace and it was just five reasons. Grace loves like miracle bomb. And obviously had her full name in it and it, it lifted performance quite a bit.

[01:25:14] It like crushed. So like that is like the best, the most data and like the best experience we have from doing this. But, um, I have definitely seen that work on paid social. And then the one cool thing about agentio, we can then the same way we can for our influence stuff. We can, once stuff goes live request to license it and you can run it YouTube paid social, uh, and, and essentially pay, you know, a fee and bid a fee and just say, we'd love to run this and you can edit it and run it for 13 days for, for a fee. So that's another thing we plan to do as well.

[01:25:43] Uh, obviously creative diversity is going to be a big one, reach millennial audiences. Hopefully these people, their, their clout will carry over from YouTube to paid social to Instagram. So that's another thing we're excited about. The other thing that's nice about landers is like from a pure technical attribution standpoint, like being able to go into like an edge mesh and, and, and showing long tail, uh, conversion of like everyone that's landed on a page for their first visit. So that's another one is like looking up, um, performance by URL.

[01:26:12] And like, that can be helpful as well for just like understanding how that traffic converted over time. That's a really cool feature. I hadn't really thought about it that way, but yeah, like using, like they're essentially tagging people who've landed on a certain page. So you could look at them over time. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's what we do with the sweepstakes. Like when we were like, I wanted to understand, like, show me everyone that landed on this page. Like I want to see conversions and revenue for people that landed there, not necessarily people that navigated there, which is really interesting. Um, just to like kind of compare that data a little bit.

[01:26:41] I guess you could, you could in theory do that in like a North beam too, right? You'd just be looking at it from the ad level. Show me all the ads that landed on this page and then show me how those results change from one day to 30 days. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. Assuming that, um, yeah, as long as you, yeah, you could just filter it by that ad name of if you're like distinguishing the destination in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And of course you are nothing more important. Yes, of course. Of course. Yeah. How could you not?

[01:27:09] Connor, do you think, uh, CMAC, do you think like, have you seen these, some of these YouTube videos, like we'll continue to get views and continue to get sales like over time, like past the 30 day window? Yeah. So we'll quickly, one point that I was going to make earlier, you were talking about niches, um, performing, uh, and it might be surprising which niches perform. I mean, we see a lot of different niches perform and the thing is they'll perform, they'll quote unquote perform at very different rates.

[01:27:36] Like we know that we can pay more for like a history channel than we can Fortnite highlights or something like that. And we, we've over time kind of refined, it's really just our managers have a great sense of like this type of content is worth a $10 CPM. Whereas, uh, smarter every day I've talked about before was our, one of our best videos ever was last summer. Um, and he has a very kind of nerdy, like home gadget channel. It's an older audience. It's more affluent. There's probably higher educated to some degree.

[01:28:07] Um, so it's one thing to think about. And then from an evergreen standpoint, 100%, it's been a while since I looked at this data, but, uh, for a while, if you looked at any given month, 40% of the revenue is actually attributed to videos that went live early in, in an earlier month. Um, so we see this very long tail. We see that in our post-purchase surveys as well. I mean, YouTube, these videos, these videos organically rank. It's like a search engine at the end of the day.

[01:28:35] So certain videos like have a very, very, very long tail to them. Um, but that also, it depends on the content too. A history channel will have a much longer tail than, uh, the, the most flash in the pan content. We sponsor someone like a Philip DeFranco does a daily show. So you get 1.2 million views the day the video goes live and then you basically never get a view again because nobody wants to watch the news from three days ago or whatever. Um, so yeah.

[01:29:00] And then that's one thing, um, when calculating CPMs, a Gentio looks at just the first 30 days. So they're actually certain content. You're getting like a little bit of a bonus because you're calculating this, the CPM on that 30 day period. But there are a lot of videos that, that get views for much longer. Is it also like a podcast where you think like frequency is important? Like you think this is higher fun or maybe you're reaching somebody's audience first time. And like, it's important, like, right. If you're going to sponsor Theo Vaughn's podcast, like,

[01:29:27] you know how everybody jokes about like Huberman or Tim Ferriss, you can't get away from AG1. Like, I feel like frequency is just very important for these style of things. There's a sweet spot. And like, and then this also becomes like one of the really frustrating things. Um, I think frequency is beneficial. Like, uh, hitting a creator's audience a couple of times makes sense. Um, there's also like very quickly diminishing returns. So like the Philip DeFranco video videos, we've sponsored him dozens of times, but if we have too

[01:29:57] many of those integrations too close together, we've exhausted the audience really quickly. And that's actually a big issue that we've had is we've been exhausting these creators too quickly. I would actually love for them to perform every month forever. And we just don't see that. So the, the, the two things that we've done are one, we've tried to get better at, we've tried to get better at creating ad reads so that the content stays fresher for longer. For sponsoring someone for the third, fourth, fifth time over a six month period. Like we want those integrations to change to some degree.

[01:30:26] Um, so we've tried getting that to work. And then the frustrating thing is like, that could just as easily be an attribution issue that like people at that point are just clicking the links less. Right. But that, that fourth, fifth video is actually just so memorable at that point that that is like an incredibly qualified person. So I'm not even, I'm not even confident that there are massive diminishing returns other than the way that we do measurement. The performance gets worse over time. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. Well, thank you again for listening. Hope you found it helpful.

[01:30:56] I told Cody and Connor, I'm gonna send that episode straight to my team. So hopefully you guys found it as substantive as I did. Make sure to like, subscribe, share with your friends, your family, your teams, your bosses, uh, everyone who has any interest in marketing and e-commerce generally. As always, thank you to our sponsors, Motion, Prescient, Rich Panel, and House.