Performance Creative in 2026: What We’ve Updated and Why

I'd love to hit some of the OG episodes and one that [music] like really stuck out to me was performance creative workflows. And then we talked ad creative analysis. So, I thought it'd be cool to kind of reflect on [music] what we were talking about back then, where we're at now, how those processes have changed.

Like we're sitting here last week [music] thinking about like big broad brush strokes for 2026. There was not a single mention of we need to launch X number of tests per week. It was all concept driven and like very creative driven. I like this idea of moving from arbitrary volume to concepts to be done. Do you have a sense of like roughly [music] how much ad content you want to be creating a week?

>> We're probably like 30 concepts a week. We've really ramped partnership the most. Just think age debate quality versus quantity. Sometimes it's five concepts per week. Sometimes it's 10.

>> Wo, that's a cool wallet. Hexclad hybrid pan. It's stainless steel and nonstick.

>> I've seen everyone talking about the Jones Miracle Bomb.

>> Every time you launch [music] new tests, it's a new campaign and then you can turn off losers and then scale up winners in that campaign at a CBO. With creative diversity being so important, I do think the challenge is having one team produce all of the content. Give them strategy up [music] front. They know what makes a good ad. They know what makes a good post. Like they know about the brand and then they just create and then it's just like every week they're just boom, here's five assets. It's like literally the I think one of the most important functions in ecom [music] right now.

All right, welcome to another episode of marketing operators. Um, we're going to do some refreshes on creative volume today. We're going to talk about ad creative testing, everybody's favorite topic. It's been probably 80, 90 episodes since we last really went deep on it. Um, but first, we got some cool. We got some backpack updates. We wanted to thank Portland Gear for some fresh. I'm holding it up here, some fresh leather backpacks emblazed with the marketing operator's logo. So, shout out that. Uh, did you guys get one in the mail as well?

>> I got one. I thank you.

>> I'm sad to say that. >> I took my stuff out of my Ridge backpack and I put it in my new Portland gear backpack. It's not that the Ridge backpack is retired, but I had to I had to break in the new backpack. So now I got to think through what's the what's the use case here.

>> All right. I was at Best Buy yesterday. I happened to snag the last Ridge backpack they had. So Connor's going away from Ridge. I'm going towards Ridge. You know.

>> dude, love it.

>> No, this backpack is sick. But no, it was funny. Some uh some product feedback for you. I I went to go get it and one of the the associates there was the other one was like, "Oh, I didn't know like Ridge made backpacks." And the other guys the other like, "Yeah, they make really good stuff." Like they used to make wallets.

>> So, you've got like you've got like mixed you got really good uh really good awareness on your your products being good, but you know, I think your your wallet uh wallets are going down. We're burdened by our own success of the new products.

>> Yeah. I guess that's like a good thing for you guys.

>> Yeah. No, it's definitely Yeah, it's definitely not a good thing. It's hilarious. It's more or less exactly what we wanted. It's like, you know, you're not going to be that big of a brand if you're a wallet brand, but you still want to make sure people know you make your hero product.

>> Yeah. But it is cool how even like the product quality associations transfers over. People are like, "Oh, they're known for good products."

>> Totally. Totally. Yeah. 100%. Um, also, one of the Best Buy blue shirts, not knowing that we made backpacks, we could do a little bit of little better employee education there.

>> Yeah.

>> Mhm.

>> All right, let's get into it. But before we begin, I want to thank motion rich panel Preient, Afterell, and House.

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>> One thing that's become really obvious this year is creative strategy is changing. It is no longer just just about make better ads or even make more ads. You have to have AI in your workflow. You have to understand all the right best practices today. And the leverage point is how you think about the creative.

And that's where a lot of teams are struggling. People are still learning creative strategy the same way they did years ago through trial and error, intuition, and there hasn't been a structured way to learn that role properly. It's also super hard to find great creative strategists these days. It's still a new role. Um, and it's one that's extremely important, but there's a lot of self-earning. It's and so that's why the training in the space is so important, and Motion is a huge leader of that. They're launching a uh a new free course and community launching in March. This is going to be a new way that people can really master creative strategy.

And what I really like it that this is this is all taught live. Things are changing so so fast, so rapidly right now that courses that were recorded 6 or 8 months ago, like those are all outdated by now. The course won't just be listening to people talk about ads. You will actually be handson in this course. So you're building concepts. You're actually making creative. You're testing it. And you're ultimately learning how to make decisions when things don't work out the first time. And the instructor lineup is legit. There are creative experts from brands like Carowway, Comm Harry's, Space Goods, Happy Mammoth, and agency leaders and founders from scaled brands. They're teaching what they're doing right now, not what worked 3 years ago. There will also be some potential, I'm supposed to say internships, at least for Jones Road, I'm going to say job opportunities. You'll have the ability to sign up and learn more, but we will be interviewing a few candidates as part of this partnership with Motion, which I am so excited about. The course is live. It's free to register. Seats are limited. If creative performance is part of your job in 2026, then this is worth paying attention to. We'll drop the link in the show notes.

All right. So, I went back. It's funny. We were talking about like what what what sort of content do we want to do and uh I was like, I'd love to hit some of like the OG episodes. And one that like really stuck out to me was performance creative workflows. And it was episode two. And then we talked and then we talked add creative analysis in episode 15. So dozens of episodes ago. Um over two years ago basically just about two years ago. Um so I thought it'd be cool to kind of reflect on what we were talking about back then, where we're at now, how those processes have changed, and then um you know, how are things looking differently as we move forward over the next couple months. Um so I want to start with creative volume because we we literally talk about this all the time. Cody, you just brought it up. we were in another chat. Um, but I'll I'll start with you Connor. So, so 2023 Connor Rolain says your biggest thing was you guys were cutting back. You were you were creating such high volume and you wanted to focus on higher quality stuff. I'm curious what's the experience been since. Is it the same strategy today or has it evolved at all?

>> Yeah, it's it's uh we've been very happy with this approach. part of part of that strategy too that maybe didn't get brought up like it wasn't a that strategy wasn't necessarily just like a cut volume to cut volume strategy part of the like other side of that sword was we thought we were overindexing on low fidelity content and obviously low fidelity content like iPhone shot UGC it's the easiest stuff to shoot so often when you're like pumping out volume you're shooting a lot of lowfi stuff so on the yes we wanted to like trim back volume cuz We thought we were like pushing volume just to push volume. But the reason we wanted to do that was a we wanted to go invest more in other channels like YouTube, CTV, linear TV, and we just needed to like open up bandwidth to do that. And we also wanted to just introduce more highfidelity content into our our Instagram and Facebook ad library because we thought we were under index there. And like naturally that content just takes more time to ideulate, to shoot, to plan. Um, and we've been like we've been very very happy. We're we're we're we are very much now not going towards volume and going towards I guess you could say more of like a a concepts to be done approach where it's like hey if we have good concepts ideulated like let's go make them. If we don't like let's slow down and think about new ones that we should make. So we're letting the we're letting the ideas drive it forward and not this like arbitrary number of ads to be launched. And yeah, I mean I'm I'm happy about it. like it's pretty it's pretty uh hard to look at our year-over-year meta account performance and um not be convinced that that's worked. And then if you go like to the ad level and you kind of organize by ad spend, there's tons of new ads that we launched this year that have, you know, shown up now in our top spending ads. So yeah, I think overall account health looks good and we're also seeing some of these new these new ads uh scale well. So I'm I'm very happy with the approach and I think we'll just keep going down that route this year. like we're sitting here uh last week thinking about like big broad brush strokes for 2026 and it was a really fun meeting. There was not a single mention of we need to launch x number of tests per week. It was all concept driven and like very creative driven and I think that's where we'll continue to go.

Okay. And and Okay. So I like I like this idea of moving from arbitrary volume to concepts to be done. Do you have a sense of like like roughly how much ad content do you want to be creating a week? Do you have any any any sense of deliverables like where you just happen to land land in this concept to be done approach?

>> I mean I can pull up our calendar. We in 2020 three we sometimes we were on launching like 15 20 concepts per week with tons of iterations under there. So now we're seeing >> that's often like sometimes it's five concepts per week, sometimes it's 10. It just depends on kind of like when certain assets get pumped through and like what time of year it is. Um, so I'd say it's, you know, at a minimum half of what we were doing and probably at a max like a third or a fourth and less iterations under each concept. So it's I don't have like spec I could pull up our creative testing calendar as like a follow-up here, but it's it's significantly less volume.

>> Uh, awesome. Yeah. So Cody, you were you were asking in a in a chat we had with a friend this week how they were setting creative volume goals. So I'm curious uh let's see, 2023 you were saying You guys would do like Let me pull it up here.

>> I also have a lot of questions for Connor, too.

>> Oh, dude.

>> If you want to go there first. So,

>> Connor, what what percentage of your if you can share like what percentage of your meta ad account is creative testing spend? Because I I was looking through the notes that Connor was putting together and it seemed like it was like decently high, like maybe 30%. And it and if that's the case, it seems like you're I you're more like we have much more volume, but our creative testing spend is less than it. So I wonder if you are just like spending more per test because you have higher conviction in them. If you're spending more just because, you know, your AOV or if you're like more successful, you know, your hit rate is higher and you're able to like scale them harder. Like what's that look like?

>> It's not It's not even that high. I mean, like I'm looking from September 1 through October 31 and we had 6% of our of our budget went into our like dedicated creative testing campaign. Now, that's not truly what's creative testing for us cuz also during that time period, we have like a big nice landing page test that we broke out as its own campaign that we spent a good chunk of money on. We're launching a bunch of new sweepstakes ads that were that were all in their own campaigns and that you could call that creative testing, too. So, I would say all in all over this time period, we're probably at like 10% uh 15% going into creative testing. So, it's not even it's not even that high. Um, as a as an overall percent, but also like the way that we like we just launched a cocktail shaker like we talked about. We didn't launch those ads in creative testing. That was our broken out into their own campaign because that's how we've decided to launch new products. But like that is creative testing. They're brand new ads. we've never ran them before just cuz it's not under our like evergreen creative testing. Um so yeah, I'd say like 10% over this time period roughly. It's not it's not a huge chunk.

>> And um what's your like if you can share like what's your like portfolio look like? And I guess like I'd be curious to you guys as well like I feel like Connor you guys are doing a lot inhouse. I don't know like would you say you're 100% in-house? Would you say you're like 50% like do you still have agencies in the mix? Obviously you have influencer ads in the mix. Like what's that that portfolio look like?

>> Uh I mean it's all inhouse.

>> if you obviously like the influencer shooting on their own but like we're facilitating it. So I guess I would technically call that in-house. Um, same with any net new content production. Like technically we might go honestly for like the paid social stuff and the YouTube stuff if stuff it is pretty much primarily in-house. Now for the higher level like CTV linear TV ads our head of content is going out and sourcing.

>> you know like writers and and people to help with the production. But again, it's like.

>> Yeah. So you don't have any shipping you content.

>> for like paid social but.

>> um not not anymore. Um yeah, not not since like Q1 of this year. We're we're pretty much 100% internalized and we were just yeah, we're just looking at the fees that we were paying some of these like buy spend agencies. We're like we should hire two more creative strategists, more in-house production people and like cut it'll be a fraction of the cost but probably better quality once we really get up and running. So yeah, we're we're fully no this is just in the US. We definitely lean on some like we lean on static for example in our EU UK hubs. Um, so we're definitely not not fully in-house over there, but um, yeah, the US is.

>> Yeah. Awesome. Um, I think it's a good I I want to I want to walk through that same same kind of set of questions for you, Cody. So, where are you landing right now with volume? Because if I remember correctly, over the last couple years, you guys you guys didn't have that much of a focus on volume, maybe became more of a priority over the last year and a half or so.

>> Yeah, we definitely have have tried to ramp up volume and and uh want to continue to do so. We're I should know we're probably like 30 concepts a week. Um I don't I don't know exactly. We've we've really ramped partnership the most. Um so that's really like the biggest focus and probably like the most number of the most volume of concepts that we're launching. Um but I think it's somewhere around 30 per week and want to do it you know bigger. I just think age debate quality versus quantity. Um I think we are shipping a lot of not good ads and I think that's a little bit pointless to do. So, you know, I think it's volume once you get once you get the right muscles in place. And so, we've definitely had successes in a lot of areas and then I think a few recently we're trying to make some bigger swings and kind of change the way we're doing it, which I think you have to a like just a performance isn't there, you have to, you know, restructure and and shake things up, but also like if the platforms are changing, you got to you got to do it. I think our our approach was a little bit um and the team we had was a little bit like three years ago, which like doesn't sound like that long ago, but like things have changed so much since then. And so I think we're we're trying to take like a very different approach to it and

>> we'll probably scale backup volume even above where we were at once. We feel like that's in a really good spot.

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So, so 30 concepts. Okay. So, being like slightly pedantic here, how do you define concept?

>> Yeah. Um we we we call it jobs. It's essentially what's what's given to an editor or a strategist. It is it depends for a partnership ad that's a unique video, right? And so that's that's a influencer doing a unique video. If we got and usually there's, you know, three hooks in that. So those are iterations, but a concept would be, you know, um I'm Jane and I'm doing a miracle on video in my car, right? Like we might do three hooks. That's one concept. If Jane does a what the foundation video in a kitchen, like that's a separate concept.

>> Um, so that's like a like a unique ad, not necessarily edited, but like unique footage. And then I think with statics, it gets a little harder because the way that we've gone from testing statics is like a bunch of very similar statics with, you know, different headlines. Like we're not really doing that. And so we might have an ad set that has like eight different statics or 15 different statics and they're variations, but like it's it's kind of muddled. I don't know.

>> Yeah, totally. No, I mean this is like also extremely blurry. I was talking about it with Resza from motion and I said I don't have like a clear view on what a concept is. I think roughly the way we treated it is some combination of message and format.

>> and like what are you talking about and how are you talking about it and then there can be you can imagine there are variations within that headlines or hooks or.

>> uh.

>> it could be um.

>> you could edit it differently, right? It could be like you could remove the voice over and add sound and things like and that would be variations of the same concept. Um, so.

>> Okay, cool. So, and you think you're delivering like roughly 30 of those? That's that that seems um with variations and we're talking about 50 probably 60 unique ads a week.

>> Yeah. So, we're probably going and doing three variations of like all partnership ads. Two to three of partnership ads. Not above that. We used to do like six, which is like.

>> it used to be overkill. Now, it's way overkill. Um and then yeah and then the other side but one of the differences that we've made is how we test um is trying to go to this like ecosystem approach and so rather than testing like three ads and in different adset and then you like scale them out into the whole one. It's almost like a campaign. It's almost like hey this is like and we're not fully there. We're like hybrid or we're going towards it but it's almost like hey this is a persona or like a value proposition that we want to test behind. We're gonna create like 12 to 15 ads and we're going to launch those and there's going to be statics, there's gonna be videos, like they're all going to be grouped around some type of shared theme, but they're all going to be like different ads because I think that's how Meta is saying it kind of wants things. So, it's still a work in progress. Like, I love it in theory. I don't find that we get as as accurate of necessarily clean data or learnings from it because you get, you know, three ads that get spent and the rest don't. But that's at least a little bit. And I think that just like completely makes that conversation of what is a concept so much more challenging.

>> Yeah. It's why it makes for such good podcast fodder.

>> It's why you talk about the same thing over.

>> and over here. Yeah. We'll be able to do these episodes over the next decade.

>> Yeah. Ask a Cody Cody quick question about that. Do you So are you launching all those like if you have this All right. So, let's say it's uh like a certain messaging angle around a specific product, like a certain problem that people have that your product solves. So, you're saying you'll go produce a like robust stack of content like maybe statics, like hi-fi, maybe some UGC, and then you'll you launch that all under the same ad set.

>> In theory, yeah, we're we're definitely not there yet. It's like we don't have like all of the the production and all of like the capabilities like line them all up at the same time. But.

>> Right.

>> Yeah, If we're doing like a sprint or we're trying to test a new persona like we're we're trying to create.

>> different ads, right? Let's say we're reaching busy professionals and we're trying to talk about how this is great like before Zoom and stuff like that. Like we're we're going to shoot different stuff. We'll get some UGC going. We'll get some, you know, [clears throat] existing assets. It's we'll usually start with that before like shooting new production stuff because usually we want to test the message sooner. But yeah, we we'll we'll try to find a bunch of different ways to speak to the same thing or the same person and we'll put that together.

>> Got it. Nice. And then and single campaign then all around that.

>> Yeah, Often often single adset. So we have and I know one of the questions like CBO versus [ __ ]. We have two ways we test creative. One is partnership ads. We have and it's like right now it's like our second highest spending campaign. We have a partnership ads [ __ ] where we test things for partnership ads. Usually like 250 bucks a day. That is more traditional testing where it's like one concept, three variations, 250 a day. We'll let things spend a thousand before we do anything. So that's usually like 5 days. Um but it depends obviously how quickly we scale it. If we see any signs of life of leading indicators, so you know, north beam rorowass, uh, percent new visits, you know, cost per thousand accounts reached, like we'll start scaling the budget up in there. Um, if after a thousand looks bad, we'll we'll cut it and then we'll we'll scale things in there. Like we have stuff in there that's probably spent like 100 grand over the last like, you know, month. Um, but we will obviously try to scale it out into like another campaign, but if it's performing, we'll leave it. So that's like one way we do it. And I think for partnership ads, I really like it because we are investing a lot in this content and we kind of maybe it's sunken cost fallacy, but like we kind of do want to, you know.

>> we do want to force some spend to it. I also think we're investing a lot in this content, you know, because we are confident in it. So it's like it's all just like a level of probability.

>> The other campaign that we have is a CBO with I think it's been a while, but I think we do minimum spends on it and we'll usually have like three adsets in there. uh with minimum spends and that's kind of those like 12 ads in there concepts. Um I think if we were more confident in a lot of that stuff, I think we just haven't really had the right approach or strategy. I probably would be more comfortable going [ __ ] especially because there's a lot of ads. It's not like you're forcing spend to like two ads. Um but we'll we'll do that and then we'll kind of just like let things, you know, see how they perform. So we have both going. I do think I lean towards the [ __ ] approach a little bit more which is obviously different at the beginning of the year.

>> Those are the two types of campaigns that new creative gets put in.

>> Yep. Yep.

>> Okay. Super interesting. Why do you feel partnerships should be its own campaign?

>> Um because I wanted strictly because I wanted to test them in [ __ ] and we didn't have [ __ ].

>> Got it. Got it. So more for like the cleanness of it and because I want the reason I want it to be [ __ ] is you know some of these partnership ads I mean on the high end you're spending like we just had our largest partner is 30 grand a month just on content.

>> like I don't want to put that in ASC and like hope it gets spent right like.

>> sure.

>> I'm going to spend some money on that because I think you're you're everything is a bet and you're saying hey I'm willing to spend this money on the content because I'm not confident like I then need to put some level of spend behind it. Um, and maybe I've just gone a little bit away from trusting the system, but I think on that content where you have a sunken cost of the content, like it definitely is worth it. And so that that's the main reason why otherwise we could we could if we were doing [ __ ] everywhere, we could just have one campaign for it.

>> Yeah, 100%. Okay. Interesting. I um to jump in on on you guys want to talk campaign structure for creative testing quickly. we could jump around a little bit and then I do want to talk about how you're sourcing all the content that you're you're getting Cody. Um because I've come around on this a bit like one of our big differences year over year really is that we have a far more consolidated campaign and that comes from a couple places. One, I asked about the partnership ads because we've just been less we've been more flexible on the ways in which we'll consolidate different product or licensing deals or you know just seasonal newness or promo ads um into the same campaigns. I do think there's like it's like what are the dimensions that you really need to be breaking it out. We obviously have different ad accounts for our different categories. Our meta reps will sometimes say like just throw your ring ads, your luggage ads, and your wallet ads all in one, you know, CBO campaign. And it's like, just give us everything in like one budget line. We're not going to do that. We're nowhere near that. Um, but we went from thinking, hey, we every new launch should have its own campaign to saying we think there's value in in um, you know, Meta uses the phrase budget liquidity in giving Meta more budget liquidity between these campaigns that unless we're like unless we really care about inventory or the margins are significantly different. Let's roll up more of these campaigns and group them together a little bit more. So, we just have a far more consolidated structure.

>> So, you have So, if your ad accounts, you have three ad accounts.

>> We have three ad accounts.

>> All right. Do you have are they same pixel like or are they all unique pixel?

>> So two of them have unique pixels that fire conditionally on um product the the product type field. Um so if you're buying a wallet you're f you're you're um we're firing a purchase event from meta just for that and that's a wallet purchase. We know that. Same with rings and travel right now uses our um Travel Right Now uses our general pixel that fires on all purchases unconditionally. Um and we're going to try to move to consolidating to one pixel and then using custom conversions.

>> Cool. Cool. I love Yeah, I was going to ask if you tried like because we're we're we are one ad account. We used to be like so consolidated that it was one campaign and now we're trying to break things out further and I feel like separate accounts, separate pixels like as far as you can get. So I was curious if you've like tried different ones cuz otherwise it's Yeah, it's like a hard thing to test.

>> Yeah, dude. It's an impossible thing to test. And it's hard because like really the categories that use Yeah, like a little bit of a side tangent here. Every time we've moved to a single pixel, the categories performed better. That's that's not causation. I'm not saying that those things are like are caused by one another necessarily, but it has happened. So then the the whoever we're talking to, our reps or someone else would be like, "You guys should try consolidating." And it's like we don't really have any reason to. Things are performing well. It technically got better when we switched it over. There are limitations. You don't get um any serverside tracking. So you lose all of the Cappy stuff when you have conditional pixel firing. Um and that's a problem. And like I think over the long term it probably makes sense for us to figure out how to get Cappy on all of our pixels. Um, but it's kind of a a a delicate a delicate what's the phrase here? We're walking the line as far as like how we want to approach it. So, we're going to try to consolidate. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully, we don't see any like negative impacts at the category level. That's really how we'll be looking at it because we're not going to be able to AB test it or do any sort of household out. Um, so we'll just see how that goes.

>> So, you're going to go you're going to go you're going to try to go separate ad accounts, one pixel.

>> Yeah, one pixel. and then just optimize for the custom conversions. So the the problem the the reason we do it and we can actually even see this in our um travel ad account sometimes the one that uses the purchase event that fires on all purchases is we are promoting a a product that is has a $450 AOV when you buy it. It's extremely high. If we allow there are there are many times where because we don't have the best performing ads or for whatever reason like just things are not really working in the account. We'll see Meta begin driving $120 average orders and it's like oh yeah you are no longer acquiring luggage customers. You're no longer doing what we're asking. You are just kind of like feeding off the bottom of funnel that people interested in Ridge Wallets are coming in and they're purchasing you know a Ridge wallet, a key case and a tracker card or whatever. And that's not at all what we want. But if you don't even allow for the purchase event to fire on that sort of purchase, I think Meta has that constraint and will is is more accurately optimizing towards the goal that you're setting for it.

>> Yeah. Yeah. No, I I I think that's probably how we're going to test first is we're going to test different ad account, same pixel, do some signal engineering because I think the separate pixel seems like the most risky or like the the biggest one. And obviously you said there's some, you know, downsides. I don't know how much, by the way, I think this is one of those things that like I'm sure some meta reps will be listening. Like they they they can't advocate for it. Like I just think they're never going to say, "Hey, I think you should set up a different ad account." It's like it's like admitting a little too much of of you know, maybe the systems being inefficient or maybe Olivia's point from house is like the systems are actually so good at getting what you want that this is like a you know, somewhere where you need some signal engineering. But yeah, I think that's that's always been my theory is that the the system is so good at optimizing for the thing that it's tracking the most of. And like that is I think if you look at the best brands in DTOC, they're like they're like single buy buttons on websites. They look like AG1 more than ever. All all the like Invogue brands right now are like extremely low skew count and all of your paid social channels are just optimizing for one very simple thing. And I think if you're trying to build a big catalog business or potentially even more difficult like just four very unique lines of business that like the idea that you don't need to do any sort of signal engineering is just like kind of silly to me.

>> Okay. And then I guess to close up the point on this and go back to cryp testing. So you think rather than try to get meta to optimize for multiple different things, have it optimize for one single thing multiple different times.

>> Yeah, exactly. It's just building redundancy. And that's why it's like Okay. So, the one thing I'll say quickly, we don't really I don't think there's much value, at least our belief at Ridge, is that there's not that much value in the different ad accounts. We just think that's more like organization more than anything else. It's really about like the event that you're optimizing for. We set up those pixels to build that redundancy. We want to be optimizing for exactly what you said, the one thing, but doing it multiple multiple different ways.

>> But but there are there are learnings at different levels. Like I don't think it's just ad account. Like I know there's learnings at page level, right? There's learnings I believe at some ad account level. I don't know like obviously there's learnings at pixel level. So what I've been told over is like if you're going to do it you almost have to do it and again I we haven't tested but you almost have to do it like clean. It's almost like Grunin's approach like different funnel so you different everything.

>> Totally. Yeah. Or you look at like you know Fabletics has like a Fablettics men Facebook page because I think there's there's learnings being rolled up there. So we could probably be even more we do a ridge travel or a ridge rings separate pages. We could probably be even more experimental, but as it relates to the pixels, we're going to try to consolidate a little bit more and then have those custom conversion events and then optimize for those. And that should give us a ideally a nice mix of like Cappy and all the server side stuff that you need. You have access to the full suite of value optimization tools, but you're still optimizing for like the exact thing that you actually want to be driving. If you're still making budget decisions based on platform dashboards, you're not optimizing, you're gambling. This episode is brought to you by Prussian AI, the measurement and forecasting platform built for scaling omni channel brands. Because here's the problem. Attribution tells a story that's convenient, but not always the story that's true. Your best campaigns, they don't just drive direct conversions. They create ripple effects. They lift branded search. They drive organic traffic, direct traffic, and ultimately they improve performance across your entire funnel. Repression is built to capture the full impact of your marketing, including delayed conversions, cross-ch effects, and the longtail performance that keeps working even after you stop spending. Repression really changes the game is forecasting. Because the real question isn't what worked last month. The real questions are what happens if we scale this campaign by 10%. Are we already saturated or is there still an efficiency pocket we're missing? If we cut spend, will performance hold or will it collapse? And are we balancing top of funnel and bottom of funnel the right way or starving one side of the system? With Preient, you can forecast at the campaign level, model different spend scenarios, and understand the real relationship between spend and outcomes, so you stop wasting budget on outdated assumptions. Because a dollar in December is not the same as a dollar in August. So instead of defending your numbers in a budget meeting, you can walk in with a plan. And if you're ready to stop guessing and start forecasting, visit prussionai.com/operators. Prussion AI, like GPS for performance marketers.

>> Yeah. And you're doing that now like you're you're uh or sorry you are you are or are not optimizing for the custom purchase event right now.

>> We have separate pixels. We have examples of se completely separate pixels at fire conditionally. You don't get cappy. We're going to try to consolidate to one pixel. Get cappy and use custom and conversions to still get the effect of optimizing specifically for like a ring order or a luggage order.

>> Yeah. Yeah. because we do the we do what you're moving towards but slightly different where we have a single pixel but custom conversion events but we are not actually we're still optimizing for the single like overall general purchase event we we're just using right now the custom conversions as a as a measurement tactic.

>> but I but at the but we've had these custom conversions set up for I mean over two years now so we have tons of specific purchase conversion data and uh we'll probably get into like how we how we like the dimensions that deserve new campaigns cuz that's kind of the approach we've taken. But I do want to go and we haven't felt the need to like make any big swings because we're getting pretty good performance out of all of our brokenout categories. But I do want to try and see like what happens if we do optimize for this knife purchase in this knife campaign. Um and and not only use it for measurement. So I'll be curious to to check in with you once you guys have made that made that test and got some data back.

>> Totally. Yeah. I do think like the campaign level though like that's been our approach and that's why our our ad account looks so like if you were to go in there I'm sure all you guys are oh my god like there's a full a full uh you know ad account page length of live accounts and it's because we we don't break out our our product categories into new ad accounts but like every time we do this it like revalidates that as long as you're breaking it out at like the campaign adset level. Like we just launched our cocktail shaker. Couldn't it be more clear that a it's a different buyer? What I've been very happy about is I can very clearly see this the the campaign optimizing over time. Like we started off at like it's just the CPA has been slowly going down and down and down. We haven't done any refreshes on creative. We haven't done any refreshes on the campaign. It's just clearly more data is getting passed back to Meta and Meta is getting better at at going and finding a more efficient CPA. So, I've been that's like just like a recent example for Hexcloud where we didn't have to do any like the signal engineering was happening through the just the campaign structure. We didn't have to do any like weird technical pixel stuff. Maybe again, maybe we could. And to your point, Connor, maybe we should test that. But it seems that just by having it broken out as its own ads set ad campaign ads set ad funnel, it's it's kind of achieving what we wanted it to, which is reaching um an incrementally different audience than we're reaching with our like, you know, cookware ads going to a 12 piece set landing page.

>> What what from my experience, the only thing that I would add to that is when things are working, I think Meta will do that, right? Like if you're saying, "Hey, I I just I I don't care about any conditions. Just optimize for purchase. I'm going to give you these um cocktail shaker ads and go do it now. And if it can get cocktail shaker ads, it's a cocktail shaker ad to a cocktail shaker landing page. Like obviously if things work, the best thing it can optimize for is cocktail shaker purchases.

>> If it's not working for some reason, then I've then I feel I see Meta beacon to like, oh, we're just going to we're going to see uh percent new visits go down. We're going to start driving people that like are just buying wallets and things like that. So it's like you almost lose um you lose the constraint when you don't have constraints. You lose leverage in like low volume periods or when things aren't working and you have to be like more deliberate about testing into them. That's where we've seen issues.

>> I also think that's where to start like like start the less.

>> Yeah.

>> less technically demanding. Yeah.

>> Yeah. like and then if that doesn't work right because like that's what we're going to do is separate campaigns maybe some we're going to test some custom conversions with you know whatever it is different ways different value rules as well and then if that doesn't work then you can figure out what is your next step from there is it totally is it page is it add account so for me it's campaigns add account pixels is probably how I would go about it.

>> and then and then I'd even put the custom conversions like earlier in that process.

>> campaign.

>> campaign custom conversions. Yeah.

>> totally agreed.

>> Yeah.

>> we have seen that by the way though like fragrance when we when we try to put fragrance ads, it's happened a few times in makeup campaigns just weirdness like we're like makeup will stop miracle bomb ads stop performing like it just it just throws it off. I I do think like high level this I think any no matter what size you are I do think now more than ever I mean they were harping on this at the performance summit right was was signal engineering like whether you're going to be set doing like the more advanced stuff like Ridge or whether you're just going to be doing it in the ad account with how you structure it like I do think like you got to be going into it with like signal engineering in mind and keeping the signal clean for your business objectives and not just like oh I have two campaigns and I have like 10 different products I'm I'm dropping under all these campaigns. Like it is going to that will definitely have adverse effects on your not just your ad account, but like you'll probably see that flow all the way up to your like revenue growth. Um totally. So I we're definitely thinking about that more and more and more. And I think that's what like that's the big.

Takeaway, I think here is like you don't have to be doing all this super technical stuff. I think you can, if you need to, but you should be like, everything you build out in your ad account should have that like signal engineering, signal clarity lens on it 100%.

Um, so we were talking about, we got on that topic because I was talking about campaign consolidation. That's where Ridge is at. And another place that we've, I don't know if you'd consider this campaign consolidation, but I've liked where we've landed from a creative testing workflow perspective. So, where we're at now, we have one creative testing campaign for each category, but like we're not breaking out different, you know, in the past, we might have had a video campaign or an image campaign or something like that. Just dimensions that we've decided we're better off consolidating now. So, single creative testing campaign, CBO concept gets launched as a new ad. So, we'll have a number of variations in there. We're doing minimum budgets on it. So, that's how we're ensuring that dollars get allocated to new concepts. And I guess the, the concept variations of a single concept in an ad set is not a hard and fast rule. There are scenarios where we're grouping in a few more. Um, but by and large, we're launching a lot of new ad sets in the CBO campaign. We're using minimum ad set budgets to make sure that dollars are getting allocated there. And then what that's allowed us to do is it's become like a hybrid winners campaign plus creative testing. So, um, when things begin to perform, we can, it will naturally take up a larger percentage of the budget because we might have a $10,000 budget for the creative testing campaign and only minimum set up to spend $6,000. So, all of a sudden, whatever is winning gets to spend that additional $4,000. If we have any concerns about one ad set spending too much, we can set maxes, too. So, you get a lot of control there. Um, and then we're able to scale that campaign while continuing to launch new ad sets within it to say, um, hey, yeah, we, we need to spend $400 a day on these XYZ new concepts. Um, and this is what actually I got from the, the performance summit and was something that we implemented in the summer of last year. Um, is like, we just want to get to budget liquidity faster. What we'd been doing in the past is we would be testing everything in [ __ ] campaigns and then we would be like trying to like pseudo-scale those and then we just had a media buyer making decisions at the ad set level, which just doesn't make any sense. Um, so like, just how do we, how do we set up the, the testing campaign and the structure so that we can get, get to that liquidity faster and that's kind of the place that we've landed at now. And it's allowed us to, um, the creative testing campaign, we've been talking about creative testing budgets. It's hard to know. I don't know actually, like our creative testing budget on a day-to-day basis because a creative testing campaign ends up being able to scale so meaningfully because we're able to maintain this hybrid approach. Yeah. So like, I'm looking last, this, like last 60 days, it's like almost 40% of our ad account was spent on creative testing, but the majority of that will be going to things that we've deemed are winners and that it's just a, it's just a subset of that that's like truly testing with the, the ad set minimums.

>> I like that a lot. I think the, the point of getting to liquidity faster is great because like, I can tell you on the, it's kind of funny because you and I have flopped from CBO to [ __ ] over the year, but on the partnership stuff, right, that that is an issue, especially when we get a winner and we have 30 days rights and we want to scale it as fast as possible. It's like, all right, we're launching this as at $500 bucks a day or $250 bucks a day. Like, yeah, you can double that for, you know, a few days in a row. You're still not spending that meaningfully. Um, and and so it's like, how are we like, for example, we, we had a winner recently, it was, you know, $30k a month and we actually launched it a little bit later, so we like didn't have full months. We're like, all right, we got to spend, you know, we try to spend 10%, so we got to spend $300k minimum on this, you know, to hit our goals and I'm like, all right, we launch it at $1,000 bucks a day. Like, I could, that's not much. I'm like, I, I can either just double triple it up in here, you know, and do that. I can relaunch it, right? And not me and my team, but we can relaunch this at, you know, five grand a day, see how it does. We can try to scale it into other stuff, but, you know, it doesn't always perform the same. So, like, I love that you have the, the option, you know, the liquidity in there. I think makes a lot of sense to scale it faster and take advantage without having to manually decide.

>> Totally. And we've talked about this before because the other way that intuitively made sense to me is just to be launching new creative testing campaigns like on a weekly basis. Every time you launch new tests, it's a new campaign and then you could turn off losers and then scale up winners in that campaign at a CBO. And then we just, we just landed at the spot that is like this big hybrid campaign where we can get a lot of volume behind it.

>> And do you have any concerns with kind of competition of like, do you ever feel like the newer stuff doesn't get a fair shot against the older stuff or do you feel like the minimums take care of that?

>> I think the minimums take care of that.

>> Okay. I think it's a really like elegant solution where it's like, we can make sure if we have some, like in your case, we have some expensive piece of creative that we really want to put budget behind because we feel good about it and we want to make sure we like fully flesh it out as an idea. It's like, you can set a $3,000 per day minimum and just spend $30,000 over 10 days on it. So you get the like, you get full control on the low end and then as soon as you want to scale, we've at least gotten to the point as it relates to this campaign to say, "Okay, Meta, we will, we will allow you to allocate however you best see fit over like over the minimum amount. We have minimum set for $50k a day or whatever. We want to spend $100k on this campaign. The rest of that $50,000 can can be divvied up however you choose." And then you even have control on the high end with the maxes where like, if all of a sudden Meta have wanted to spend the additional $50,000 on one ad, we might just set a maximum for that ad set and just say, "Okay, no, we actually do want you to distribute it a little bit more than this." But we try to like, we're trying to like minimize the amount of manual decisions there a little bit. And, um, this is at least the current approach.

So, can I, so if you, because we do a similar setup, CBO minimum, minimum ad set spending. So, we're, we're not going to like drop a new ad set in there, a new example, and it's going to get, you know, $3 of spend. So, when you, when you find a winner and it's in a CBO and you're like, hey, we want to scale up this, this winner, but it's, it's a CBO, so you don't have as much control over the ad set except with like some of the min and the max. Like, will you, what's the actual like tactic to make sure that you're spending more on that winner? Like, are you, if, if Meta is not doing it? So let's say you spend like, you have a min $500 per day or a $1,000 per day. Maybe one scenario is like, that ad starts working and Meta is recognizing that and it starts to spend way over that min. And in that case, you're probably like, great, we don't, maybe need to touch it. It's doing what we want it to do. Um, do you ever have a scenario where like, wow, this ad set relative to our other creative tests right now is really crushing, but Meta is not spending much over the min? Like, do you have any tactics to be like, how do we get more budget behind this outside of, you know, duplicating it into a scale campaign or something like that?

>> Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's really just those two options you have. When it comes to getting more dollars behind a winning concept, I guess there's three options. Uh, Meta either figures out it's winning and does it for you.

>> We're saying that doesn't, that doesn't happen. If you want to get it within that creative testing campaign, we would just set a higher minimum.

>> So now, now all of a sudden we're saying, um, this isn't a creative testing minimum. This isn't $500 a day. This is like, we want to make sure that we're spending $10,000 a day here. That's totally plausible.

>> So now your min went from like $500 a day and you're like, we've, we've called this a winner. We're going to actually go into the ad set and edit $500 to $5,000 or $10,000 or whatever it is. That's the lever that you have there. And then we do still take winners and then la, we have two um scaling campaigns that we have that have different types of exclusions. So we do get it there. So like, but those are CBO as well. So just if you were trying to get budget behind it, we do get it in more places in the account. If it is a winner, you'd like to think at some point Meta figures it out and just starts putting budget behind it. But if not, you just have the controls around the minimums.

>> Yep. Got it. That makes sense. And do you, maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but what do you see the more, the most success with now? Do you see the more success with raising the min or duplicating the ad into, we, we've put the most success we've seen or what I think feels like a meaningful difference is the performance and scale we can get out of what is called a creative testing campaign. Just because this is where the ads are first launched, it's where they get the most learnings. You're giving Meta the flexibility to deliver more budget behind each of those new concepts so you can scale that campaign further. So it's this again, this like weird hybrid that feels like the most beneficial. We've never had, like I said, last, last 60 days, creative testing for Meta for a wallet business is like almost 40%. You would never expect that, like that would be really high.

>> Yeah, it's about 40%. Um,

>> but it's not actually.

>> But it's not actually. And that's like, and I actually think that's the win is that we were able to more quicker and more effectively get to winning ads, getting budget,

>> right? That makes sense.

>> Our Meta reps were happy with it, too.

>> They were like, "Hell yeah."

>> Well, we've seen more. I think when we had this conversation like on episode whenever we had this conversation last, like Hexcloud was having a really hard time getting winning ad, like new creative test winning ads to serve in our scale campaigns. That's actually not that is shifted and I wonder if that is has to do with the, the Andromeda update because it like again, theoretically it does seem like Andromeda would allow for more uh horizontal scale amongst ads if you give the, the account like the setup to do so. And now I'm going through like our scaled campaigns this year and like tons of new ads from this year are showing up in our scale campaigns, which I'm I'm pumped on because it's allowed us to kind of reconsolidate our scaled campaigns. Now again, our our account still looks crazy because like we have scaled campaigns for cookware and then like different like like audience audience enhanced bidding and like value bidding. So now you end up with like a bunch of different like technical settings to scale out certain categories and then you also have like the non-cookware stuff. So it looks, it still looks kind of crazy. But I've been very happy that we've been able to take winners and not have to like do as much kind of like campaign jockeying or even just scaling up in the, like we will still scale up in creative testing as long as it performs well. But I was looking at our like creative testing campaign from September 1 through October 31 just because we don't do as much net new testing in the in the following two months. And like I think our highest spending ad set was like $50 grand. So I'm like, great. This is because we're, we're finding winners and we're effectively getting them out of this campaign and and getting them to scale um in the scale campaign. So, I don't think there's a right way to to do it necessarily, but I've been happy at least about that and what that's meant for like the, the amount of live campaigns we have in in Hexcloud at any given time.

Totally. Um, so, yeah, Andromeda obviously plays a really big role here, right? Like I think that's that's what's driving a lot of the decisions or changes or experimentation around campaign structure. So, I do want to go back to Cody as it relates to you. You guys are delivering 30 concepts a week. That diversity is more important than ever with things like Andromeda. Um, who's producing all that content?

>> We're not current, we're, we're pretty agency heavy. We're not currently producing a ton. So, I would say we have a decent amount our different workflows, pipelines. So, like our creative team who's less like paid social focused, um, right, we have a lot of launches every two weeks. So like all of our statics comes from our creative team, whether it's, you know, our creative director and creative team working with our, you know, external photographer. We do, you know, we do, um, every probably two to three months of like a campaign shoot where we'll get multiple products. So that's just like all of our e-com assets, all of our hero product stuff, like that. One person on our, on our internal team does a lot of, like product still and and video. So that's like a lot of assets that then gets repurposed, whether that's, you know, or B-roll. We'll try to get some like social style iPhone stuff on those shoots as well. Um, and then like static. So that's that's a lot of it and at least that's like a lot of statics and a lot of like launch stuff. We'll shoot some stuff with Bobby, whether it's, you know, a little bit more higher produced or iPhone lately. Like we'll do that internally as well. So that's just, you know, our internal creative team and creative strategy team and social teams. Um, we have probably one to two agencies that we're working with, um, at a given time for, you know, creative and and I, whether this is the episode or not, like happy to share how our approach is changing. Obviously, you know, we talked about kind of moving towards the organic social stuff, but we have kind of like creator agencies that that's more like I'll call it more of your like UGC rather than like influencer and then influencer, we do a combination, right? So this is like mainly the partnership ads, um, of internal. We have, you know, people on, what we try to do is is if we get people that are performing, get them on a, you know, six-month contract and get, you know, multiple deliverables. So we have people like that. We have just like people from, you know, our internal team's effort that like we can kind of reach out to and get some content. Um, we have Super Bloom. So we had Lily on, like they're definitely the bulk of our partnership spend is is with them. Um, we do two things. Some of it is just a UGC pipeline where it's, it's influencer stuff. It's whitelisting, but it's there's no like organic influencer post. It's just getting content and whitelisting and then probably double the amount of budget comes from, um, you know, people posting on their on their IG, either whether it's a reel or a story and then getting, you know, getting rights to that as part of it. Um, TBD on which style performs better, but it seems like both of them work. So they've been most successful. You know, we've tried some other stuff like Aentto and some other agencies, but, uh, really consolidating that down to Super Bloom for the majority of it and then some internal stuff, uh, for for whitelisting ads. And yeah, we'll use like static, right? We'll use like, you know, static, like really trying to build up a fleet of designers, you know, we'll use like Activate and Talent and stuff like that to get like a bunch of designers. uh starting to ship some AI stuff. It's, it's getting to, I'm curious if you guys are, but like, just with statics, not with videos, like I'm not interested in like AI UGC, but with statics where it's like very close to just like unlimited amount of of those. Um, so that's that's kind of currently where we're at lately.

Every market I talk to says the same thing. Budgets are tight, goals are higher than ever, and I have to prove what's working, not just report it. And that is the new reality of marketing. If you can't afford to rely on guesses or platform reported results, you need clear causal proof of what's actually driving growth. And that's exactly where Haus comes in. Incrementality testing is the new scientific way to measure true impact to see what's moving the needle and what's just noise. So you can reallocate spend based on fact and not faith. Cody, Connor, and I all use Haus for incrementality testing and it's become a core part of the modern measurement stack. They're now working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands, which shows just how quickly this approach is becoming the new standard for serious growth teams. Haus helps you run real experiments across your channels so you can answer questions that actually matter, like which channels are truly driving incremental revenue? How much should I really be spending on Meta, Google, or YouTube? And what's the halo effect of my ads on Amazon or retail sales? What sets Haus apart is the combination of rigorous science and marketer-friendly design. The math under the hood is complex, built on causal inference and experimentation. But the platform itself is simple. You can choose your questions, launch a test in minutes, and get clear, actionable results you can actually use. Plus, every customer gets a dedicated measurement strategist, someone who's lived in the world of growth and knows how to translate data into strategy. They'll help you design smart tests, interpret the results, and build a repeatable culture of experimentation across your team. With Haus, you aren't just buying a tool. You're buying the growth marketing team that can help you make the most of it. In a world where every marketing dollar is under a microscope, you need to know what matters with Haus by going to haus.io/operators, that's H A U S.io/operators, and start allocating your budget with confidence.

>> Do you think it will always be so like, given, given how diverse the creative needs to be and how much you need of it, will you guys always be this agency heavy or do you think you're in like an explorative phase and you'll eventually start in-housing more of it?

>> Yeah, for sure. that that that's how I feel about it. Um, we will definitely do more like on the influence side than Super Bloom one, but like they're, I'm not just trying to like pitch in, like they're really good at it and so like we've had better performance from them versus, you know, others. But yeah, I think we'll do both, right? Like we won't just be them, like we'll do more internally for, um, creator stuff. Definitely, definitely I think more, I think definitely we'll inhouse it more. Um, I think definitely it's been, you know, as we explore want, you know, ideas or as we've had, you know, team turnover and stuff, it's kind of like what, who can we bring in against some kind of fresh ideas. Um, but, um, I think it, I think it depends or what I'm learning. I, I know you've said this about like your, you know, your influencer partnerships, like less partnerships but more like bigger ones. That's kind of how I'm approaching approaching agency stuff. So in the past, we might have had like five agencies at a time. Now it's like I want like two agencies.

>> Um, but you want to like fully utilize them. You want like

>> deliver our business. They know like everything, but but bigger partner. The, the one thing this is why I was asking Connor about this is like, with creative diversity being so important, I do think the challenge is having one team produce all of the content. It's just hard to come up.

>> Totally. I, the, the, the biggest change that we're making, obviously we're going to change, we're going to, we're merging organic and paid social under one. So that's a big change that we're, we're go, we're actually not really producing that much content or or right now, we're, we're not going to be producing that much content. We are going to be working with creators. So I think an internal team can work with a wide range of creators and get the creative diversity you need. I think the challenge is if you have like an internal production team, they are probably good at one style of creative.

>> Totally. And that's

>> I personally think the scenario where you have an internal team quarterbacking like a network of creators. I think of that as internal. That's almost exclusively what we do at Ridge. Like we don't, we don't actually have anybody who's filming any content that gets in the ad account in any meaningful way. Like there's maybe a handful of exceptions there, but by and large 95% plus of the especially the volume-based content that we create, I would consider being done internal, but it's all briefs that we're sending out to creators. We're paying $100 a video, $80 a video, $200 a video, something like that. Um, and that feels, I I consider that an internal process. I just don't see any scenario where we have any sort of system that is truly employees of Ridge creating content in that way.

>> Yeah. Unless you have like specifically creators and residents.

>> And I guess sorry, it, it can happen obviously, but then to your point, they're not going to be producing diversity. You're not going to be able to have a couple on staff and a single young dude and a single old dude and like people living in different parts of the country. Like you'll just, you'll never be able to do it. So you can produce content internally, but I think just quarter, like working directly with creators should be considered more or less an internal process. I can't see it getting any more in-house than that. I think it's, it's about like, if you're going to inter, like what we've done is we've internalized a lot of it, but we have multiple different flywheels going on internally where like when I talk about stuff we're shooting, that's like anything super high fidelity, right? Like anything that we think is going to be more of like a, a premium feeling hi-fi asset that we just don't have that raw footage for, we will brief that in with our content team. Often it's just like shot list, right? It's not even full on. It is, it is also full on baked out concept, but also it's also like, just, hey, here's a list of shots that we don't have yet that like a creator can't shoot for us cuz we want to cut them together with some other hi-fi assets we've already made. And then we have like what you just described where, you know, we have tons of creators that we are briefing to shoot all sorts of stuff and and obviously that's like not happening in our studio, but we will also bring creators in studio because we found good success with some of these like hi-fi more studio produced like influencer-led ads. So, we're doing, we're doing a little bit of all of it. Um, totally. And it, it's like, I think allowed us to still be diverse because we have like different teams owning different flywheels and it, and it's like, it created uh, just kind of baked in diversity because of that.

>> Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a good point. There's difference between who's producing and who's who's strategizing. And I think, yeah, more of the strategy in house, the the agency temporarily. I think the one will definitely be, you know, Subloom just because they're like influencer experts and like I think they, they give us a ton that we don't, you know, have and we could build it, but, you know, it's currently working very well. Um, but I think on the other side, yeah, our, our two, not to get into it too much, but like our two like real big rock things are like, having a, we'll call it like a Discord, whatever is like a community of creators that that you just have a deal with. And this is not like influencers as you see, but it's just like, all right, you're on, whether you're on retainer, whether you're posting organically or not, right? Whether you're a TikTok style creator or not, it's just like, there's just a pool of people. Now, you know, HUD's comforts is like 17,000. I don't maybe expect that, but like I think even hundreds you can get a lot of value from, but it's just like they don't need a full brief. They're they're coached, right? Cuz I think like some some brands will will brief creators, some will script them even. I haven't found that approach working. I would rather give them strategy upfront. Give them like re, like us do the research. We give them strategy and they're coached. They know what makes a good ad. They know what makes a good poach. Like they know about the brand and then they just create and then it's just like every week they're just boom. Here's five assets. Here's whatever it is. Um, that's the goal. So we're working with an agency right now build out like an organic TikTok and IG like trend dashboard so we can just see what's trending in, you know, our space relative to the other stuff. And they can literally just see that and they're on retainer and they can just be like, "All right, cool. Redness is popping off. Here are the top five organic videos in Redness. I'm gonna go make five and we'll just get them uploaded that week."

>> Uh, and sorry, where's the, where's the TikTok trend dashboard living?

>> It's just like a dashboard we're building. We're building it with an agency, but we'll just essentially have like a BI tool and people can just see that and walk in on Monday morning and be like, "All right, I I got I I owe Cody five videos today or I owe five videos this week."

>> Like they already know about the product, the brand, all that stuff. Like, and then this is a, this is what we're working right now is in progress. And then it's just like, "All right, here's the ones that are performing. I think this is what we can do." And they just like ship it because what, what I found with like UGC agencies, this is what we're not doing. The tube science, the narrative, the whatever it is where it's like it's scripted, right? It's like, it's, it's UGC in quotes, but it's like, you know, you know, you know the kind I'm talking about, like the very like forced kind of direct response, very scripted, that has never worked for us and it just never well. What works for us is with stuff that feels very organic, native. Right? And the other thing, like I've learned about it is like, I remember when when we were at the Meta, we went to the Meta performance road show. I just like brought my team there and do you guys know how they have that, um, IG Reels like trend trending thing? So in like in Meta Business Suite, but you can see like what topics are trending for Instagram Reels. I was like, I want a, I wish I had like a full-time employee creator who just sees this and they're just like, oh, that's what's trending. I'm going to make a content. I'm going to upload it that day and see how it does.

>> Because, because like what happens, what I found with these agencies, right? It's such a long process where you have to, you bring them on, you have to ship products, you review creators, you go over briefs, you script them, you get, you get round one of footage, you edit it. It's, it's editing by committee and you have five people who are giving notes on it and you don't even, everyone's got their opinion. The, the agency is editing stuff a certain way for the brand just because the brand is paying them money, but they're probably doing it begrudgingly. You you end up with this like watered down piece of content that's like pretty produced, but it's also not produced like Connor's team is doing in like a beautiful thing, you know? It's like this middle ground, right? And so I'm like, you just wasted two to three weeks where you could have just shot something, put it up that day, seen how it did, got some data, iterated. And so what I'm trying to do, and this is this is very similar on organic and paid socials, is avoid that middle ground of like multiple edits, multiple people approvals. It's either something gets shot and uploaded that day, whether it's organic social or paid social. You see how it does and then and then you make iterations based on the performance of it and it's all based on trends or organic insights or something like that, or you know, or you're going to then do production stuff where like you're going to take a long period of time to make a perfect video. But I think that middle ground is like what I'm trying to stay away from. And so that's the goal. We're, we're literally building like a creator in residence, creator in residence program to do that and like that's what we're trying to get to. So hopefully in six months we can come back here and I can be like, yeah, this worked well. That's exactly what I was going to say. Uh, like it's funny looking back on some of the older pods, like what we were, we're talking about creating and we're still kind of at the point where you're creating dozens of concepts a week with variations. Maybe you're landing between like 50 and 100 ads. What you're describing, Cody, and I'm, it sounds like it's maybe the most critical question you're addressing at Jones Road right now, is like six months from now, you might be creating hundreds of pieces of content a week. If you have, if you have a Discord of 17,000 people, I'm sure Comfort's posting and testing thousands of ads a week, I would think. Um, so just creative volume a year from now might look like so significantly different, it just won't even be recognizable.

>> I think so and that's like the bet and the hope and it's, it's, you know, again, but it's all organic and paid. Um, and yeah, it's just the ridiculous, but again, it's not possible for a brand to to create that. It's all done internally, but it's all creators.

>> Okay. And then and then in that scenario, like if you think about a creative testing campaign, is it what you were describing earlier? Like if you're getting, let's let's call it 200 posts a week now that are going direct, you want to test it on paid. Do you set those all up as ad sets and run 200 bucks a day and just have this like,

>> I don't know. Do you have any idea?

>> No, I haven't gotten there yet. I feel like that'll, it probably won't be an overnight fix. It'll be like our account will like mold as we scale, you know, because I don't know. I'm curious how comfort does it. I remember I talked to somebody from Rise one day and they're like, "Yeah, we launch creative every day." Like that's the goal. It's like, it'll be so much creative that I don't think we can launch it weekly. Like we want to do it daily.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, Connor, I'm curious. What's your answer? Thinking about what we were talking 18 months ago, two years ago has changed a lot. You guys are at a good kind of steady state today. What do you think are the critical questions you're addressing that you'll want to be circling back on in the future?

>> Yeah, one one thing we're trying to figure out a solution for right now is the like the filler content from creators. And while we have a lot of like influencers that we work with regularly and these are not necessarily like huge influencers, like we find people that have, you know, 10,000 followers, 20,000 followers perform really well for us and these are very cost effective. You know, we're paying, you know, probably a thousand bucks per month when we're sourcing new creative from them and much less than that when we're not sourcing new creative. But one thing we are trying to be better at and I know some people like have creators in house and and do it this way. We are going a little bit of a different approach to to start is just bringing on someone that is like super experienced in e-com working with creators to source content and they will not even be full-time. There's be a freelancer, but having this person as like a freelancer, I don't know how many hours per week exactly, like 10, 20 hours per week, where anytime we need creator-led content from not an influencer, just like a creator, that person has an absolute army of people that we can go and get content for, whether it's, you know, a 65-year-old woman or a 24-year-old man, whatever it is, and like we can kind of go fill that content much quicker because we just have the network and we have a single person who is just all they're going to be focused on is sourcing that like creator-led content and like filling our library with any gaps that we have. So that's like one of the big bets that we're taking in 2026 is like bringing this person on and seeing if we can just like get this creator content much much much quicker and get it into our ads much much much quicker versus right now it's like we don't have that.

>> It, it's like literally the, I think one of the most important functions in e-com right now.

>> Right?

>> Yeah. It's what Connor just said is extremely similar to what you're talking about. Yeah. And we're, we're in the same bucket. Now, let me ask you guys this, because I do think there was a trend where people were creating a ton of volume. It wasn't meaningfully different. So, I think we all went through the the the experience of wanting to like cut back and taking more intentional, we, we wanted to be more intentional in the way that we were creating concepts. Would you guys agree that that that happened over the last two years is like, we would happily take a reduction in volume if it meant an increase in quality, diversity, and thoughtfulness of concepts?

>> Yes.

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So now we're talking about creating massive amounts of concepts with like huge teams of creators. Uh, do you think like, so I haven't, I'm having this thought right now, but like, actually maybe the most important piece will be like the coaching aspect to make sure that you're not getting just a bunch of average concepts or like boilerplate stuff from this team of creators. Or I could also see, hey, it actually, it doesn't matter so much. We're just going to solve it with volume. If you have hundreds of people creating content, it's like even if even if it's only 20% of them are doing meaningfully, you know, new and interesting and creative and diverse concepts and like you're still going to get more than what you need and it's just the volume play. Or are we going to go through the same thing where it's like, it's less about quantity and it's more about how are you finding the right creators and coaching them to the right concepts and like actually focusing on quality? Where do you think we are in that like adoption curve?

Well, I, I can speaking from Hexcloud perspective, we are, we kind of have two separate things happening and we have like cookware, which is like our most mature funnel. We've been running cookware funnels for four years and and very much still going to be intentionality over everything. If we can get to more volume through intentionality, great. And I absolutely think that like this, this freelancer that we're looking at hiring will help us do that. But then on the other side of the spectrum and like Connor, a lot of our conversations we've had on here have kind of shifted how I am thinking about this. Like I want to introduce a lot more product funnels into our account this year because to to the conversations we've been having and some of the holdouts you've ran, you've validated that those different products are reaching new audiences. And sure, we do have like some big product launches that I think can be like good acquisition funnels on their own and that's one part of it. But I also think that we have products in our in our stack right now that are really popular products, like the our wok, our griddles, our high-sided pans that we don't push creative across those, but if I think if we did, we would be reaching new incremental customers than we would be reaching with our current cookware stack. So, I think when you think about the like A+ product launches as well as the like, hey, we just want to get more ads across our griddles, I think we're going we're going back to a more like immature phase in those funnels where volume is way more important. So, like yes, we're still going to be intentional, but we're almost going back to where cookware was in 2022 where it's like volume, volume, volume, volume. We got to like scale through. So like we're going there with certain funnels, but we're still going to be very, very, very intentional in like letting the concept lead the way in our more mature funnels. So we're trying to, we're trying to strike that balance and like do kind of different things for different funnels. And that's where like having this person where we can just source creator content super quickly is going to help us check that that volume box for like these new products that we have launching in in 2026 that we're all very confident can be, you know, big new acquisition pipes on top of the ones that we already have built out. So, um, yeah, kind of going back a little bit in time to where we were a long time ago and needing to serve that a little bit more. I think I think working with creators correctly actually fixes the or like naturally allows for diversity because I think if if you're working with creators correctly, you're not over scripting and doing things like that. And you give them, I think the right strategy upfront that's like, like the right brief is like, here's maybe a few of the value props that we want you to touch on. Here's what's performed for us. Here's dos and don'ts. And then like go create, right? Like we want you to be creative, right? And so I think if you're working with them properly and you're not like overly scripting it and briefing it and trying to make it on brand, like I think you actually get that natural creativity. Um, espec if you're doing properly and then part of creative diversity is uh, like one thing I'm really curious about is trying and it probably is so simple is like, when you get a winning ad or a winning creator ad, just give that, let's say you have that discord of people, just give that to them and have them recreate it because a, they're going to create it in a different way, but like also part of uh, reach and traffic is who it's coming from. And so let's say you get a, you know, mid-40s male talking about, you know, Ridge wallet. Well, now you get a, you know, and he's, you know, essentially has a certain look, maybe he's, you know, middle of the country. Well, now get somebody, um, you know, 30-year-old, different ethnicity, different background, like, and it's not that all of them will work, but if you have this big pool of creators doing the same thing, like a, they're all going to give it their little unique approach, but they're all going to maybe reach different people differently. So, I think that's like one aspect that like, if it works, I, I'm curious what your guys think is it's so simple that it's like, you just need that creative, that that creator pool to then just go ship it off to and like already have structured.

>> 100%. I, and I, I've said this for a long time. I think most problems can be solved with volume and if you just have a ton of creators, it just kind of naturally addresses some of the issues. Exactly. To your point, I also agree with Connor's point that it's like, we will probably, if we all do our jobs well or like, uh, if, if this strategy plays out in the way that we anticipate it to, we'll all build communities of creators over the next year and then we won't care too much about the volume will help and then we will reach a certain point where it's like, oh, it's actually we need to be shaping this like resource like maybe a little bit more effectively and that's where and that's just like the natural flow of things. It's like, just get the volume, get the ball rolling, get traction, get people creating content, you'll get all the benefits of that and then as that business matures and the way that Connor said it, it's a matter of like crafting a little bit differently. And that's why Cody, I was curious about the even the TikTok dashboard seems like such a great resource where I, I think you there's a scenario where you can find just a couple bits of information and a couple bits of guidance that can actually be like super effective in just like helping this network of creators produce like even just slightly more relevant or better content.

>> Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. And again, like I'm always going to bring it right now back to organic social. Like we'll have some creators that are just doing ads, paid social, but a lot of it is going to be that because I also think that's such a great testing ground. It's really the same algorithm and environment and it's like,

>> but I don't know if you guys look, but like there are creators on TikTok that post essentially the same thing every day.

>> Yeah, totally. And it's just like slight difference and like some of them take off, some of them don't. So there is, I, I totally get quality and like especially with Andromeda, like the same ad over and over is not going to necessarily do much. So like it's not the exact same as organic social, but there also is something to like, the way these social algorithms work and the people behind them, you just have no idea what's going to perform. So there's some level that I think probably it's like like almost marrying the having different funnels or pipelines where like creator stuff is like super high volume, very, not briefed at all, like not scripted, and then you also should have some stuff that's like what Hexclad's team is doing is like beautiful polished things that you're like meticulously editing and like you're not shipping 40 of those a week. You're shipping like two of those a month probably.

>> Yeah. 100%. And it's and it's like some of the stuff that now has just become a part of our product workflow and other stuff is like the one-off stuff. So you have like the cocktail shaker Dr. Dre collab, right? Where that was obviously all very meticulously ideated, edited, um, edited again, edited again, launched. And then you have other stuff where we always shoot product hype reels now, like always. Whenever we're shooting a new product, there's always that hype reel and it's like just a beautifully shot. Uh, it's value prop driven. It shows like the use cases really well. Like that's just part of our like checklist now whenever we do a new product. So, it's a little, it's a little bit and then some of the stuff that's one-off gets like ultimately brought into the, the, you know, kind of the checklist now.

Totally. Um, All right, guys. Well, I feel like this was pretty good, pretty good little check-in.

>> Yeah, that was great.

>> All right. Thank you for listening to another episode of Marketing Operators. As always, thank you to our sponsors Motion, Rich Panel, Pression, Afterell, and Haus. Make sure to like, subscribe, please leave comments, questions, tweet at us. We'll be doing a Marketing Operators Hotline coming up soon. Would love to get some of those questions addressed. Thank you for listening. We'll see you again next week.

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