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Building Systems To Make Banger Ads · Scalability School

• 0:04
  Andrew Foxwell: Welcome to episode 3 of the Scalability School Podcast so glad to be with you, Andrew Foxwell here, with Brad and Zach. What's up? Fellas.
• 0:13
  Brad Ploch: Living, the dream.
• 0:14
  Zach Stuck: Owen.
• 0:15
  Andrew Foxwell: We are stoked to talk about creative diversity today. So what the hell is it? How do you actually put it into practice? How do you save money by? You know.
• 0:26
  Andrew Foxwell: knowing what it is, and not giving up on things too quickly? We love saving money. There's so much discussion about this of what it even is, and and everything. So that's what we're gonna get into today. Brad has a lot of run through of like his systems, and and we're gonna get into that specifically and we're gonna get into, you know, talking about
• 0:49
  Andrew Foxwell: basically the yeah, the framework that he uses and utilizes for this. So go ahead, Brad. Let's let's get started.
• 0:58
  Brad Ploch: Yeah. And I gave a fair warning to the guys before we jumped into. This is like, I'm gonna talk a lot and probably really fast. So if I need to slow down, they're just gonna interrupt me and ask questions to try and dig deeper into this. So
• 1:09
  Brad Ploch: we're calling this episode the what the hell is creative diversity? Because, as I scroll Twitter as I look in the Foxwell Founders Group, and as I look across the Dtc landscape. I think there's a lot of discussion around what creative diversity is, how to measure it, how to get it, because I think oftentimes people feel like
• 1:27
  Brad Ploch: strategy from a creative standpoint, is just like throwing things at the wall, hoping something sticks and then trying to do more of that thing. And there's not like a system in order to get to that. So what I did is I looked across what we do from an agency standpoint, and what I know Zach's doing on the brand side what they do at Homestead, and just kind of put together this, this
• 1:48
  Brad Ploch: this process that hopefully, you can just copy. So I'm just gonna start rambling. So I think the 1st thing to consider when we talk about career diversity is that when if we just
• 1:59
  Brad Ploch: let ourselves
• 2:01
  Brad Ploch: go and try to produce content. We're really not going to know where to start. And so I think something to keep in mind throughout. This entire topic is that
• 2:09
  Brad Ploch: constraints can help breed creativity and focus meaning like, if you can do everything like we're selling socks we're selling. We're helping Zach sell socks here. There's a lot of things you can talk about. There's a lot of benefits to the socks. There's a lot of reasons are better than others. There's a million different things you can talk about. And so you want to help define what you should be talking about by using constraints, and then you can kind of work within the strength
• 2:31
  Brad Ploch: within the constraints, and start to like check the box on testing things. Because I think that's another thing people get people struggle with is they don't like force themselves to check the box on things that they've tested. So they never know. Did this work or did. This didn't work. And I just you know, it's just it's back to the spaghetti at the wall hoping something sticks. And so I think.
• 2:49
  Zach Stuck: Got one thing I have for you so constraints I think the 1st thing I think of when you say constraints is volume, not even just anything else. So I think I'm curious how you think about volume. Maybe just give a couple of examples of like, Hey, your brand spending this much per month on Meta ads. Again, this podcast isn't just Meta ads, but like, it's what majority of these directing tumor brands all the way. 9 figure brands are mostly caring about. It's the big thing that you know, the big channel that
• 3:15
  Zach Stuck: you know covers the most spread of ad budget. So anyways, I'm curious how you think about that like, are you 1st thinking when you're saying constraints by quantity of creative?
• 3:24
  Zach Stuck: How do you think about that?
• 3:26
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, that's a constraints. That's a great way to think about it. It's not initially what I had in mind, but it's a big piece of it. So I'm glad you said that my initial thought for constraints is like, what are we talking about here and like? Do I have at least some kind of amount of evidence, for like, why, I'm talking about that in the ads, like, what is the positioning of the ads? And we'll talk through all that in a bit. Is it an image? Is it a video like those kinds of constraints? But I think
• 3:50
  Brad Ploch: the quantity of it helps refine it even further, because it's you know, if you know that your team can pump out 50 ads.
• 3:57
  Brad Ploch: you know, we'll we'll not worry about the specifics doing videos and images at this point in a month. Then, you know, you have to work back from that number. I think it's really helpful to be able to work back from that number. So to give you some examples.
• 4:07
  Zach Stuck: Totally that, or if you you know, you hire an agency right? Because most of the time an agency will be on a set scope, or at least you should be asking your agencies, hey? Like, what can I expect? Kind of roughly per month, based on what I'm spending what we're paying you per month.
• 4:22
  Zach Stuck: So I think, yeah, anyways.
• 4:23
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, it's a great point. And I think our our kind of like average benchmark benchmark on our end is like 2 to 3 projects per week per client. And that's just like at a at a baseline until we start to get into the higher spend levels and project can be defined by a lot of different things which I don't know if we need to go into right now. But it's it's effectively like project equals a brief. Within a brief, it could contain different videos and images and things like that. So,
• 4:47
  Brad Ploch: I think you know, you kind of have to set that benchmark for yourself, and you can kind of go into your ad account. Look at what you're spending on a monthly basis. Figure out how many ads you need in order to get to that level of spend. And like the simple version of that is, if you want to double your spend, okay, double the amount of ads you have going in the ad account for now and then. You can. You can revise that as you go. That's a simple way to think about it for the time being.
• 5:07
  Brad Ploch: So I think as we get to setting up the constraints outside of you know the the number part that we just talked about. I want to take you through the process of what we do to onboard clients, because I think it helps set up those constraints so high level overview of what we do when we get get our hands on everything is we go look at competitors.
• 5:23
  Brad Ploch: We go, read all the reviews, and you can use Chat Gpt, to help you with that, and we can get more specific if you want. Go into the ad account. Watch all of the ads, particularly sorting by top spending and go get a sense of what's working there. Jot down notes from the reviews in the ad account. You build out these target personas.
• 5:38
  Brad Ploch: What? Who's responding with to ads right now, what do they care about and kind of building out this map which ultimately becomes a content map for us, which shows pillars and angles, and so to define.
• 5:49
  Zach Stuck: Hanging in.
• 5:50
  Zach Stuck: I'm gonna
• 5:50
  Zach Stuck: have you pause for a second. So target personas like explain that more because I think a lot of people are like, I know, who buys my products. But do they really? I think, is
• 6:00
  Zach Stuck: like the main thing that I push back on, I'd say, like a lot of our customers, even for the brands that I own. Sometimes we're like this is who we think is buying our product. But who actually is so how do you think about target personas? How do you set them? Obviously, it's probably unique by Brand based on what the product is, how many skews are selling. But like, how do you think about that?
• 6:16
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, I mean, the the more skews, the infinitely more complex it gets, because you can very easily have different products or different people responding to different products. So what we try to do is we go look at the reviews and we'll we'll sort them by persona. We're like, we'll look at them all, and then group them into what are the common things that pop up, and that'll kind of help us define like, what does this person care about. If you have a gifting product.
• 6:40
  Brad Ploch: you'll see.
• 6:41
  Zach Stuck: Sorry is this like demo based? Is this like interest? Like, yeah, maybe give us like an example of a brand like even, I mean you could use hollow if you even want, just for ease. But like, how would you look at that? If you go look at Hollow, how would you consider that.
• 6:54
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, I've got another brand in mind. So like we have a, we have like a novelty gifting product that we own. And so on that specific point, we'll organize it into different types of like gift givers. So it can be for Dad, for the person in their life, for Mom, like the intent of how they're buying is one of the ways that we'll do it. You can also go use case. So for Hollow. It can very easily be like
• 7:18
  Brad Ploch: hunters versus, just like general outdoorsy people or people that are hiking. Or I think maybe you guys are getting into some other categories within that. Now you just launched a new website and you can go see all the see, all the personas on the website very thoughtfully. So I think there's like intended use cases is an interesting way to think about it. You can break it down a little bit further and like, go into like the psychographic information like, why are they buying? What does it mean to them all that different stuff? But I think it kind of just starts with
• 7:41
  Brad Ploch: going to the reviews, seeing what's most commonly popping up, going to the app
• 7:46
  Brad Ploch: delivery looks like, because I think oftentimes clients are surprised because they've never actually broken down the ad spend before one example, we had a client that sold body wash, and they were surprised by the fact that it was like older women buying the product because they were like, Oh, this is for dudes like I'm selling to dudes, and it's like, Well, you are. But there's a different person buying this. So I think there's a bunch of different ways to like, get to personas. Reviews in the ad accounts are like existing evidence you have today. You can start to branch out from there. But like you got to start with what's available to you
• 8:16
  Brad Ploch: using the data that you have. So that's how we that's how we do that.
• 8:20
  Brad Ploch: And then you take those personas, and that's where you can kind of build out this this content map, which is where you start to say, what are these people care about? So within the context of hunters? Right, we'll go back to Hollow as an example. A pillar would be the core message of the thing that the hunter cares about, which is, it keeps their feet warm when it's cold outside, right? Like that's 1 of the core core things you could say, and within that you can probably define that pillar
• 8:47
  Brad Ploch: a bunch of different ways from an angle perspective. So it's the fact that it's moisture wicking which helps pull it away from your feet. So it keeps your feet warm. It's just made out of something different, so that alpaca fur is better than cotton or wool, which people are normally used to using. So it's and pillars and angles can can manifest themselves in a bunch of different ways. Another way to think about this from like an apparel perspective
• 9:11
  Brad Ploch: from a pillar core messaging is like the Usability, generally speaking, is a pillar, right? Like, if you make a functional apparel product, the usability of that is a way to think about the pillar. And then, you know, maybe the aesthetic is another one.
• 9:24
  Andrew Foxwell: Right, right.
• 9:25
  Brad Ploch: And then you tear down into those angles from there.
• 9:27
  Andrew Foxwell: I mean, you know the so
• 9:30
  Andrew Foxwell: what I would say. You know what I've heard in creative diversity, and what the fox will, you know, Gpt just pulled out, you know, in terms of looking at creative diversity is looking at the difference across 4 major dimensions, which is one conceptual angle problem. You know, problem solution, emotional trigger product benefit, highlight, aspirational identity.
• 9:51
  Andrew Foxwell: And then visual format so ugc testimonial. That's obviously one of them.
• 9:57
  Andrew Foxwell: The difference in pacing and style? Is it rapidly cut? Is it slow? Build, and is it offer call to action, variance. So price, drop, bundle, and save free gift with purchase whatever
• 10:09
  Andrew Foxwell: the check that it came up with, which is, you know, I think a you know, conversion of a lot of ideas that came up with this, which is, if I showed these to 5 different types of customers, with each one resonate with a different ad. If yes, you have created diversity, and if no, you're iterating, not diversifying.
• 10:28
  Andrew Foxwell: So it kind of goes with what you're saying in terms of you start with looking at the competitors just at a baseline, looking at the competitors, looking at the reviews. What they've got. You're looking at target personas, which initially is like yes, database, but also some like gut feeling of like, Okay, these are our people.
• 10:46
  Andrew Foxwell: And then you're building up this content map with pillars and angles.
• 10:49
  Andrew Foxwell: How do you?
• 10:51
  Andrew Foxwell: So the pillars and angles we kind of got into it. You start to get into the the format and the type.
• 10:56
  Andrew Foxwell: The question I've always had. When start doing this is like, if you're doing this on your own, how do you start to organize this like?
• 11:02
  Andrew Foxwell: How do you start to not go insane with wanting to create like a billion ads all the time. Right? I guess that's a that's an interesting.
• 11:12
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think that's where we go back to the idea of constraints. And so the way that we think about it is, let's put together a monthly plan for what we want to talk about. So if you're if you're spending any amount of money on ads right now. You have some idea
• 11:27
  Brad Ploch: of what is working from a messaging standpoint, so maybe we'll just keep going back to hollow as an example like Zach. I think one of the 1st things that you guys, one of the one of the things you discovered that really helped unlock some additional scales that like hunters really like to the product. And so let's say, you're looking at this, and you're trying to come up with a plan for what do I do next from a creative perspective.
• 11:46
  Brad Ploch: you say, over the next 30 days I'm going to focus all of my effort on hunters like I'm going to do nothing else except for focus on hunters and building ads for those specific people we can talk about when to consider pivoting away. That's a question I'll have in a bit.
• 12:00
  Brad Ploch: But you just kind of set up this plan to focus on hunters, and that is the initial constraint.
• 12:06
  Zach Stuck: So yeah, the constraint is, I'm going to pick one target persona for the 1st month. Let's just stick to it by a month, and then let's figure out like what my output is. Maybe that's 50 creatives that go out. And maybe that's 10 videos and 40 statics, just because images are easier to make. And videos are a bit harder
• 12:22
  Zach Stuck: cool. That makes perfect sense. And then is the thought there that you're basically picking a new persona every month. Or are you iterating on that persona? I think you should get into like when to move. I know I'm making you go ahead of what you're planning to. But like, let's talk about like when to think about
• 12:39
  Zach Stuck: looking at a different pillar. When do I actually consider that? Because I think that's where a lot of brands that are small, that are maybe spending a thousand dollars a day or less are like trying to do too many things. Very likely right. Their ad dollars are being spread too thin.
• 12:55
  Zach Stuck: so yeah, tell tell us how you think about that.
• 12:57
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, I think if you're spending a thousand to $3,000 a day like you probably shouldn't pivot away. If it's working, let's say it's working. You're really happy with the performance. Or you're like, you're close to being really pumped about where it's at. You're, you know, within
• 13:10
  Brad Ploch: 10 to 20% of your efficiency goals or you're smashing them. You're just like I can't spend more. I'm stuck here. You probably don't want to pivot away from that it's just like you're not spending enough to have saturated that specific thing that you're talking about hunters in this case. And so the way that you could think about. It is like, Okay, I probably shouldn't pivot away from like a default perspective unless it's not working.
• 13:33
  Brad Ploch: If you have some evidence of success, I think the way that you can consider pivoting away is like, I'm going to spend 70% of my create. We just define capacity. Right? You said 20 images, 10 videos or something or 40 40 images, 10 videos.
• 13:45
  Brad Ploch: You could say, 70% of that is going to be focused on hunters. And 30% is going to be shot in the moon at other things that we have some evidence of success. For we see people hiking in these in reviews, we're going to take 30% of it and focus on that group of people.
• 14:00
  Zach Stuck: Yep, yeah, I think like the biggest thing for us was. And we've realized this after seeing so many brands come through Homestead and then like now doing it ourselves is that
• 14:09
  Zach Stuck: you can very likely push
• 14:11
  Zach Stuck: up way more than what you actually think. You can obviously tam dependent. But, like most most brands can spend.
• 14:21
  Zach Stuck: you know. Call it a hundred KA month easily on one target persona, and just like drilling into new pillars, which are these like different angles. Different, you know.
• 14:32
  Zach Stuck: different pillars of like the types of creative. So I think, okay, so we have this idea of all right. So you have your target persona that you're going to pick.
• 14:39
  Zach Stuck: You have the rough angles that you might go after, like, like, we've talked about this hunting thing. For example, it could be. Whatever right like, we can start using another brand besides hollow for future like examples. But
• 14:50
  Zach Stuck: now, what now? What's next? Like? What is next? Now, how do I choose images videos? How do I choose? Ugc versus statics versus Gpt. Images like, how do I think about what to do next?
• 15:00
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, I think it helps. I'm assuming that everybody listening to this for the most part, has spent more than $0 in their ad account, right? So I think what they can do is literally like, I'll walk you through exactly the process. I will go into something like a motion and start to build out a report. I will look at a report of my top ads over the last X amount of time. Call it 300. Give it. Give it a year. If you have a lot more data than that, you can go further back.
• 15:24
  Brad Ploch: and you'll say I'm going to watch them, and I'm going to start to categorize those things into pillars. Right? So once I have, and maybe maybe it's at some point we can show examples of what these reports look like, because it might be a little bit hard to visualize.
• 15:35
  Brad Ploch: But we have a brand that sells diffusers. They're thoughtful. They're really nice diffusers like the ones that make your house smell nice. And there are 3 things that they care about or want to talk about are
• 15:50
  Brad Ploch: kind of like the clean and safe angle like it's better for your pets and your family. Right? So that's that's pillar number one pillar number 2 is like the device performance like, it's just better than anything else you can buy, because they've spent a lot of time engineering this thing and 3 is like the fragrance experience. So like, what does it actually smell like? How does it make you feel? Because scent can trigger emotion? Things like that? So those are the 3 things that they care about. So when I look in their ad account over the last year.
• 16:13
  Brad Ploch: I start to go organize. Okay, this ad is in this pillar. I just organize it. If you have naming conventions set up, it's probably a lot easier to do this, but if you don't, in the meantime you're going backwards, you organize them into a pillars, report.
• 16:24
  Brad Ploch: you look at that report, and you say, great. Most of my spend is going into this pillar, and my efficiency is substantially better than the other 2.
• 16:33
  Brad Ploch: That which is exactly what happened in this case. And now I can say.
• 16:36
  Brad Ploch: what do I do next? Well, then you can go within. Let's call it clean and safe. Let's say that clean and safe is the is the top spending one. You go into that report. You build an additional report for all those ads, and you just look at them visually. Motion gives you those nice little cards, or you can just look at them, and you could say what is missing. And if you look at them and you say I'm only running statics, and they're comparison ads. You're like, Oh, shit. I probably need to switch this up, and I need to consider doing something else. So I'll pause there for a second, because I will ramble. Yeah.
• 17:05
  Zach Stuck: No, I mean, I think that that's great. I'm right. Now. I'm looking at Hollow's ads last 90 report in motion top creatives which are like the ad spent a minimum of $500, and it has at least a row as of a 1 day click of 1.5 or higher. And yeah, I mean, it's very clear that there's moments that we hit even ourselves where it's like. All these ads look very similar. They do not look like different ads. And I think that one thing that
• 17:33
  Zach Stuck: people like David Herman has talked about on Twitter and other like really smart marketers have talked about is like, does the ad look and feel different? And if it doesn't truly look and feel different, Meta will treat it the same as another ad that looks damn near the same.
• 17:46
  Andrew Foxwell: Yeah.
• 17:46
  Zach Stuck: So I think I think that this is where, like the idea of iterating versus taking new swings at creative is just so, you know, so important to
• 17:57
  Zach Stuck: actually breaking through. So to your to your example like this diffuser, brand, clean and safe like. That's the angle we're going to go down. If all of them look like statics that have a post-it note on it that mentions a sale that are your top ads, probably time to try something different.
• 18:14
  Zach Stuck: that feels like a completely different hook, something that's more more visual. Maybe you pull in a crazy Gpt image background. Of something that just looks radically different from what you're testing, but obviously still staying in that same pillar which is clean and safe. So trying headlines, trying stuff like that. Anyways.
• 18:31
  Andrew Foxwell: So.
• 18:31
  Zach Stuck: That's my perspective on it.
• 18:33
  Andrew Foxwell: Brad, that you know. One thing I I guess there's 2 questions that I have. One is is so much of of the creative world and the knowledge that's around it that we hear. If you really talk to folks that are in the know, it goes back to talking about emotion is like a huge part of it, and how you're triggering emotion.
• 18:53
  Andrew Foxwell: And I think you can go down that road and freak people out a lot as like one tactic but then you also hear people talking about whitelisting and as well as like another tactic, which is which is related, and like you could have whitelisting people, you know, go towards emotion. But as you start to look at this, you're building out these reports, you know, you're going through and looking at these things and diving in.
• 19:18
  Andrew Foxwell: how are you? How do you start to consider the consumer emotion around these and like what percentage of the ads running across your accounts focuses on an emotional angle versus an Us. Versus like us versus them. Or you know, another really really common like a founder video. That kind of stuff, right? Cause. I feel like the way to unlock growth initially is obviously to consider creative diversity as a goal.
• 19:47
  Andrew Foxwell: and then to get into thinking about emotions, and then to diversify into using creators and things as well. So I'm curious, like across your cause. Ours is heavily in that regard. That's why I say that. And I think I've heard the same from founder members as well. So curious.
• 20:03
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, we can stay on the same kind of diffuser example. Because I think that's a that's a really good one. For from an emotional standpoint. So to back up for one moment like when you start to build out these reports, so it becomes really apparent, is just like the gaps that exist right? If you go look across your pillars and you have your top spending pillar has the fewest amount of ads for it. It's like, okay. Well, the easy answer is, I should just make more for that specific thing.
• 20:28
  Andrew Foxwell: I mean, that's like what you showed us in that example of like you had the return on ad spend on this one. It was like you'd only created 6 concepts for it, but it was the best return by a wide margin, right? And motion makes that so easy to do that right? So anyway.
• 20:42
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's exactly where I was going with that. So now I can. Now, when I see that I see that there's a gap to be filled. I can go look. And in, you know, again, using the examples like, let's say, all of your ads are comparison ads, and that's worked really well. Well, maybe the next step is taking that and looking at the comparison ads, and figuring out like, what is the emotion that can be triggered from it. I don't know if I can give you an exact percentage, but like using the idea of of clean and safe, it's like, well, if all your statics just say, like safe scenting, or like clean.
• 21:10
  Brad Ploch: clean ingredients like, Okay.
• 21:12
  Brad Ploch: that's probably going to get people who are like in market. Maybe they're kind of comparing different options. But what it's not going to do is it's not going to convince the mom who is concerned about like their kid with asthma like breathing in these heavy things, but they have dogs that are running around the house and making it smell like garbage, you know, like. So I think that's where you can start to get into the storytelling. And I think that that's where
• 21:31
  Brad Ploch: you probably start to unlock those additional buckets of spend by creating ads that kind of speak to those different tiers of emotions. I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but kind of think about it.
• 21:43
  Zach Stuck: I think Andrew brought up one thing that I think is really interesting when it comes to creative diversity, it's whitelisting. This is something like for my my brands in our portfolio we have a handful of clients that that definitely put a lot of energy into it. I think it's super useful. But when it comes to creating ads that feel and look different, like hiring creators that are completely different, people doing completely different things with your product or thinking about it completely, differently.
• 22:11
  Zach Stuck: is a great way to do this also, like Meta sees it as a new handle, a new user. So like. There's a good chance that while one of your consumers is scrolling through feed, they don't just see like your ad with like your brand title. And then they see another one of your ads, the brand title. If you're running whitelisting, there's a good chance that they see like 1, 2, 3, 4 different creators while they're flipping through reels while they're flipping through stories while they're flipping through whatever
• 22:37
  Zach Stuck: that makes this like concept where it feels like everyone's talking about you. I think that that is like such a unique way to go about this I saw someone was talking about on Twitter today. I think I forget who that was. Mark was his name Martin
• 22:49
  Zach Stuck: Marin. You like the Marin Marin, so shout out to Marin for saying that, because I feel like that's the perfect way to describe this where it's like
• 22:56
  Zach Stuck: it benefits Meta for the fact that all those ads feel different. But it also benefits your customer, who is like, Oh, wow! There's like a bunch of different people talking about this product in potentially a different way. So
• 23:07
  Zach Stuck: okay, I think whitelisting is a great way to to.
• 23:10
  Andrew Foxwell: Marin, a a great founder member for the record. And he, yeah, so and so on. The the note of you know, going through and understanding that. I think
• 23:21
  Andrew Foxwell: a question that I or another thing that I've heard, that I'm curious. If you guys have heard as well as Meta is actually pushing in all of their like summits. And all this stuff.
• 23:32
  Andrew Foxwell: like whitelisting as a thing that needs to be like is going to be the unlocked. So obviously, they're going to make this easier. But also, whenever Meta mentioned something, it's like, you know, it has. It gives you a little bit of algorithmic advantage. I feel like it's like they're saying this on purpose. Have you guys heard this as well? Or I mean, I heard it from some founder members. So I was curious.
• 23:54
  Zach Stuck: Yeah, we have. I mean, from our reps, at least, agency reps. Yeah, I'm certain that the like Meta performance summit that's coming up here in June. That's going to be a big topic, because it forces creative diversity, which is the whole other piece that they've been talking about. Right? So yeah, I think it's a
• 24:08
  Zach Stuck: a pretty big thing.
• 24:09
  Andrew Foxwell: So, Brad, on your on your
• 24:13
  Andrew Foxwell: looking at your system that you have that. Okay, we're talking about why yours is great.
• 24:19
  Andrew Foxwell: So why does your creative diversity system and the way that you identify and work with it suck
• 24:24
  Andrew Foxwell: like, what are your gaps, and what are the people that
• 24:27
  Andrew Foxwell: are awesome that you admire like. Let's talk about Jess from fire team. Somebody that I deeply respect and think is like doing incredible work like, what are they doing that? You're not
• 24:38
  Andrew Foxwell: I. I have a guess, but I'm curious of your take like what? What would take your system from good to from like what it is. It's great to excellent. What? What's the difference, or what's the Delta?
• 24:48
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know if I'm gonna have a perfect answer. But my gut take is like, I'm
• 24:53
  Brad Ploch: I'm generally like a pretty analytical person. And when I'm looking at this from like a measured creative diversity perspective, what I'm trying to do is say, Okay, we've got these are our pillars. Here's how much we quantity of ads spend of spend into each of those things. Okay within that, what are our angles and our personas within that. What is the content format? What is the type like? I'm trying to literally put it. Here's a quantity of ads. And here's a quantity of dollars behind my creative diversity. And I think, like there's just a
• 25:20
  Brad Ploch: just like some some vibes that I think Jess has from an experience that you just like can't replicate. Now I know they're really smart and like that's a little bit of a cop out, and I don't want to just like, say, talent, because I know he's worked really hard to like. Get to where he's at with all that. But I'm very analytical and trying to like measure that. So I don't know exactly how to put my finger on it, but I think there's a there's a little bit of a little bit of sauce, and
• 25:42
  Brad Ploch: so I that thing.
• 25:43
  Andrew Foxwell: It's like my.
• 25:44
  Andrew Foxwell: My personal feeling is that it's based on like the fact that they sit down for a long period of time to go into this
• 25:53
  Andrew Foxwell: right like they sit down and they'll they'll chat to be. They're expensive because it's their people's time sitting there being like.
• 26:02
  Andrew Foxwell: what do you think
• 26:03
  Andrew Foxwell: like, how are we going to dive into this? Which is, I think, a lot of us, because of the nature of what we do? Right. If you're a brand owner listening to this like, you only have so much time so paying for that access as people that are going to really deeply study it and go into it with you, and obviously using their own proprietary methods to discover more creative diversity, I think, is a really interesting point, and I think if we spent, the question is, if we with our clients.
• 26:27
  Andrew Foxwell: if I spent 15% more time doing this, would our ads be 15% better like, May. I think so?
• 26:34
  Andrew Foxwell: Right? So I think it's a i think that on.
• 26:36
  Zach Stuck: Yeah, they're just. I mean, we use the word intentional. And I feel like these podcasts, it's just like a word that I keep referencing over and over again. But it's the truth of it. Right is, they're very intentional. They take a lot of time, and that breeds creativity, and when you have creativity, that that's where, like diversity comes out of right. It's completely different ads that feel completely different back to back to back. And it could be some crazy static headline with some like wild visual, and it could be as simple as
• 27:02
  Zach Stuck: like a piece of paper with like a little note on it. That just is like the way that it's written really makes you pay attention to it. So yeah, I think they do definitely fire team does a great job with that. What I want to get back to kind of like what we were talking about, Brad, which is
• 27:17
  Zach Stuck: kind of choosing like when to think of the next pillar I know we kind of, you know, brought it up a little bit. So like one thing I wanted to share, which is like an example of hollow. And then I'd love to hear how you've thought about this, for other brands is
• 27:29
  Zach Stuck: like we, the hunter thing is seasonal for us, right? So when we started hollow, we literally launched in the fall. I launched it, basically took a bunch of pillars or a bunch of like potential, not pillars, but target personas launch statics to figure out what one could maybe work, and that was the one that clicked. And so we doubled down on that to your point. We got it up to like 1015 KA day and spend.
• 27:47
  Zach Stuck: That was our 1st year. Then it was like, Okay, we need to figure out how to sell these socks outside of Q. 4 to someone other than this demo that only buys this product mostly in the fall. I think there's a lot of brands that have seasonal products and stuff like that. So then it's like, okay, how do I think about other stuff?
• 28:01
  Zach Stuck: We? I mean, we basically went back to the same approach, which is what are the potential personas of people that could buy this product. And we always start with statics like that is like our bread and butter way to do it, because I think you can like, from a volume standpoint, from a diversity standpoint of statics. How they look, how they feel. Headline testing, you know.
• 28:20
  Zach Stuck: angle testing to your point like, I guess I'm curious on, you know. When are you telling brands, hey? This is the point. You've hit the point like, let's go look for somebody else. And like, How do we get more scale out of this business, because I think that's where a lot of people feel like they get stuck.
• 28:34
  Zach Stuck: hey? I'm stuck doing 250 KA month, and I can't punch through, and I don't know why I can't punch through.
• 28:40
  Zach Stuck: Usually I feel like it's a persona issue where they're just like stuck on trying to sell it to the same customer, saying the same exact thing so like, how do you think about that when you tell them?
• 28:49
  Zach Stuck: You know? When do you feel like it's officially the time to move on to the next stage.
• 28:53
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, I I think it. It's unfortunately it's they can be like, really tam dependent, as you kind of alluded to earlier and also be like, might be product, mix, dependent like you're not. You're not going to be able to make swimsuits
• 29:06
  Brad Ploch: pop in out of season unless you like you're using something that can help you sell in Australia. And you know the other, the other hemisphere that said like, if you like, consistently, month after month, like 2 months in a row. You're like running your head against the wall, and you like. Cannot you increase ad spend and efficiency just degrades you increase ad spend efficiency just degrades like it's probably start. It's probably time to like.
• 29:30
  Brad Ploch: start to use that 30 to 50% of your creative projects like focused on something else.
• 29:37
  Zach Stuck: And this is like, after you've already tried all the different types of ads. You're running statics. You're running founder videos. You're running Ugc, you're running whitelisting. You're running, you know, all the gambits of different types.
• 29:49
  Brad Ploch: You're doing offer testing. You're doing landing, page testing within speaking to your yeah, yeah, hammering all of that. Yep.
• 29:55
  Zach Stuck: So you've blown through that persona. You feel like you're not extending it, and that's where like the scale isn't coming from. Now. It's time to think about, okay, how do we go about it next? So yeah, to my point, earlier, we think about it with statics. First, st how do you like. If a brand is at that point, it's a client of yours, or if it's your own, how do you think about that?
• 30:11
  Brad Ploch: Statics is a great way to do it. I think what's really nice about AI recently is like you can, you can take a bunch of B-roll footage as long as like.
• 30:18
  Brad Ploch: It's not overly aggressive in that demo. And you can use AI voiceovers over the top of it and tell a different story like, we're doing this for a brand right now where we took, we started. You start wide, and then you go narrow. So here are the 5 things we can say we can use AI voiceovers and a bunch of B roll and just like, remake the top.
• 30:36
  Brad Ploch: What's really nice is with with it, too, is you can like you could run it through. Here's a fun one. You could run it through Google AI studio and have it transcribe the entire thing. Here's what's on the screen. Here's what they say. Here's the captions. Here's the format of the video. Here's what they show
• 30:48
  Brad Ploch: cool. You take that, and you throw it into chat, or Claude. And you say, can you rewrite this for this demo? Now you need to give it a little bit more brand context and like what the demo cares about, and then have it do it for 5. Take that, throw that into 11 labs. 11 labs, gives you a voiceover boom. Now again, the visuals are where maybe gets a little bit tricky, depending on how specific the visuals are, but that's super low cost in a way to like extend, as you know, like statics can.
• 31:12
  Brad Ploch: great way to test super cheap to produce, but probably have a little bit of like upside scale limitation, so it might be hard to prove fully. Prove it out, especially if you need like, really explain the product. So that's another low, low cost way to do it.
• 31:25
  Zach Stuck: Yep.
• 31:26
  Zach Stuck: no, I love that. I think I was gonna ask you to name the tool. So thank you for doing that in advance, because I'm sure everyone was curious on what you were talking about.
• 31:34
  Andrew Foxwell: This is the exact thing.
• 31:36
  Zach Stuck: Yeah.
• 31:37
  Andrew Foxwell: You know what I'm saying? I know a lot looking at 3 of them.
• 31:40
  Andrew Foxwell: I'm 1 of them. Yeah, we're here.
• 31:43
  Zach Stuck: Gambit. I think that
• 31:47
  Zach Stuck: I mean we just did this for what it's worth. So with the sock business, which again, sorry to all the listeners that are like, I'm tired of you guys talking about this, but it's a brand that I'm public about and love like talking about, because there's good examples, but we are launching. We just launched for trades. This is one of these other cohorts that we've realized. Hey, these customers are on their feet all day. They need really good socks. Great. So we're going after that.
• 32:08
  Zach Stuck: Exactly. Brad's playbook. That he just did is what we did. So it's like, okay, take our top ads that we know that work
• 32:14
  Zach Stuck: run them through all of these AI models, which is a lot of heavy lifting that you wouldn't have to. Do. You know, if you have a small team or you're a lean team or your founder just running your own ads. These tools are not that expensive to be able to utilize, like you know, less than hundreds of dollars a month that we spend on these tools, and just say, Hey, go make me the same concept for a different persona. I think, then the idea is like the biggest gap I find. Is that then a lot of brands, either, you know, if their agency can't produce enough creative
• 32:44
  Zach Stuck: is just like finding a video editor that can basically take these like briefs that are written in Gpt and do that. This is one resource. I don't know how you think about that. It's something that we're starting to try and figure out internally for ourselves, as we try to crank up. The volume of creative is like, Okay, I need more editors and people, because, you know, AI hasn't gotten good enough that it can just like. Here's a brief. Go edit it for me. It's not quite there, hopefully, you know. Hopefully, it can get there sooner than later. But
• 33:11
  Zach Stuck: That's 1 thing that I feel like a lot of brands and struggle with is like, Hey, I have all these ideas. But then the production part slows them down. So how do you think about that? Do you have any resources like, how are you thinking about from a volume standpoint of like, okay, I just did everything that Brad just said his playbook. Now, what like am I stuck with my agency? Who says that they can produce 10 videos a month. Am I other? Are there other resources like, how do you think about that? If you're that brand.
• 33:36
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, I think. Well, there's probably a couple of different ways to think about it. But I mean you shouldn't be. You probably shouldn't be mad at your agency if they're like capped out on production, because, like you agreed to what they said, this is also bias coming from an agency, but like they have a predetermined scope. So if you need more for them, just go back to them and ask like, Hey, how much are you doing and like, how do we ramp it up? And you have to decide for yourself if that's cost effective or not? But, like.
• 33:56
  Zach Stuck: That's a very fair point. As another agency owner and a brand owner. I feel like, that's kind of the sweet spot is like, yeah, this is why I said in the beginning.
• 34:03
  Andrew Foxwell: Definitely like make a huge.
• 34:05
  Zach Stuck: But put.
• 34:06
  Andrew Foxwell: Pretty much fits. Squeaky wheel. Make your agency
• 34:09
  Andrew Foxwell: get make sure you get them mad. Then they'll really give you a lot of shit.
• 34:13
  Zach Stuck: Yeah. Then you're gonna get high. Roi. Anyways keep going, Brad. Sorry.
• 34:17
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, no, that's great. It's great side point. So I think then, if if they're like capped or like you decide, it's inefficient from a cost perspective to like, pay them to do more like you can just find a freelance video editor and like, just you can go on upwork or Fiverr or a million different places and send out a bunch of legit test projects like, take your brief, send it to them, see what they do, and then you can just kind of decide from there.
• 34:41
  Andrew Foxwell: Yeah.
• 34:41
  Brad Ploch: That's if that's if you're not like, if the bottleneck is actually the production and not the ideas, that's what I would do if it's ideas. That's maybe something to dig into a little bit more.
• 34:50
  Andrew Foxwell: Yeah, I would say, I completely agree, and was going to make that point, you know. There I was talking to Leandro Cabrini, who is a member, and he runs propel, which is like an outsourced Latin American talent agency.
• 35:01
  Andrew Foxwell: And I said, Hey, like, what's the biggest position that you hire for have you've been hiring for for founder members. And he said, video editor.
• 35:08
  Andrew Foxwell: like, you know, and video, and like, just even like a person that can do video and can do static editing essentially like that's the biggest one.
• 35:15
  Andrew Foxwell: So I completely agree with you, I think that that's a good differentiation. Right? You're looking at there, you maybe you do have an issue with that iteration, and like the the angles you should go on. And again, I think that's a function of your time. So I think one of those decisions that you have to make as a founder is okay, where is the most high leverage thing that I can do in my business.
• 35:37
  Andrew Foxwell: And you know that individually, of what that can mean. Personally, I feel like one of the highest places that an agency currently can add. The highest leverage is like proper media buying. And this by, you know, helping you through the process of creative diversity.
• 35:52
  Andrew Foxwell: And I'm not saying you should go hire an agency.
• 35:55
  Andrew Foxwell: you know you could do this on your own. But the point is is that like is that the highest leverage place for you to spend time? Now, if you're a founder that has creative chops and you have a creative background, this could be an easy thing for you. But a lot of folks, don't you know, and so, knowing kind of your strengths and where to go is a really important thing, you know, so much of being a business owner. Right? Is like knowing just as much we should do, and versus what you shouldn't do. And you know, I
• 36:19
  Andrew Foxwell: we I think we all need to pay a little bit more attention to that. All of us agencies and brands. But I think that's a big differentiator and important point to to.
• 36:28
  Zach Stuck: Being on the brand side. Now, I can 100% validate that this is probably one of the biggest leverage points. If you're an e-commerce business is this alone? So this morning I'm on calls with our manufacturer, talking about delays, talking about product and all that stuff. But at the end of the day. I mean what is like every brand. Say, if you're like intro, call with an agency, if you can hit this cpa, or if you can hit this row as you can scale infinitely so like at the end of the day. What gets that
• 36:54
  Zach Stuck: ad creative in your ad account is actually probably the biggest leverage point to get there. And as we've you know, as Meta has said, as we're talking about, you know what is the best way to do that which is creative diversity. So I think, like
• 37:06
  Zach Stuck: this is definitely something that most brand owners should be thinking about and taking time to say, Hey, even if I'm a product person, even if I'm an Ops person, even if I'm not, you know the marketer in the business. Be thinking about this. Make sure your team is, make sure your team. Make sure your agency is like doing their best effort at this, because I think it can have the most impact. I mean, we're at a point right now with Hollow, where
• 37:30
  Zach Stuck: inventory has been an issue as we've been scaling as we've been growing. But we're getting to a point now where it's like, the only thing that's going to allow us to scale is just more efficiency and more more ad spend. So it's like, how do we do that? We go find more personas to sell to? We figure out what angles and pillars like are going to resonate with that persona, and we just spend more money into Meta. And this is like as a brand that's doing, you know, millions per month in revenue. This is not, you know, a small case. So I think it's relevant for companies. Dtc companies of all sizes.
• 37:58
  Brad Ploch: Yeah, yeah, in order in order to get to that point, like, in order to even get to that point, to begin with, like, how how far I don't know how comfortable you are with like specifics, but like, how far did you ride? The hunters angle like just to give people some kind of context.
• 38:11
  Zach Stuck: Yeah. So I'm I'm pretty wide open about hollow for the most part. But yeah, I mean, we did like, basically, our 1 million dollars in revenue was mostly around. That angle was warm socks for hunters, I mean, we spent probably 2030 K. Testing different personas, and immediately the hunter, one just like Pops. We're like all in on that. We did that for almost a year. That was like our 1st year was like a million
• 38:33
  Zach Stuck: to get up to 8 million, which is like our next year. That's where we were like, okay, we can't just sell in Q, 4, we have to sell in other periods. So you know, we found this trade thing. Hey? Trades, workers love
• 38:45
  Zach Stuck: this product. It fits the same kind of like angles as what worked for hunters, but can also work here.
• 38:53
  Zach Stuck: That got us to 8 million. And then last year was like, Okay, we really need to sell this outside of Q, 4, like hikers can use. This other personas can use this. Runners can use this Marathon. People can use this. Cyclists can use this. I mean, that's where we really had to open it up and say, Okay, if we can get on a daily basis, one to $2,000 in spend for each one of these personas and kind of each one of these, like we call them cohorts. Internally.
• 39:17
  Zach Stuck: the scale becomes much, much easier to hit. It allows us to spend 2030, 40, grand a day on Meta. Then, when we're spending a couple grand per persona per cohort, and I think that that's where brands where they like feel like they hit a ceiling. And they're like, Hey, I can't scale anymore. There's probably a good chance that you could sell your product just in different positioning or to a different persona.
• 39:37
  Zach Stuck: You just need to like, think about what those could be. And creative is the best way to like, go about testing to see if they're even interested, or if you can find, like an angle that resonates. So that's kind of how we thought about it, year over year.
• 39:48
  Brad Ploch: It's really interesting, because, like not not to spend any significant amount of time on this. But like, you can really easily see how like that understanding. That person also. Then, like, goes to new product development. Right? Like, okay.
• 39:59
  Zach Stuck: Totally.
• 40:00
  Brad Ploch: This. This isn't. This is good, but it's not great for this person's like. Then you're expanding your your tam through through product development, which is probably a whole. Other discussion absolutely.
• 40:08
  Zach Stuck: Sounds like another, great podcast
• 40:10
  Zach Stuck: yeah, it's exactly what we're doing. Right? Like, we just launched this trade collection. Now, we're launching, you know, a trail collection and a run collection like these are all things that are personas that we're unlocking, that we're like, okay. Now let's go make a product specifically for them, because our customers, like our general product, but like, if I make a product for them, they build it for them. And I can price it right? I can actually build even more of a larger like ecosystem. So yeah, I think a lot of brands.
• 40:33
  Zach Stuck: not only with ads can do that, but can start thinking product wise that way, too.
• 40:38
  Andrew Foxwell: Brad. Thank you so much for all the knowledge as always. If anybody has any questions, feel free to reach out to each of us. You can hit me up at Andrew Foxwell. Digital com. I'll try to send along any written resources that were shared. And Brad appreciate you walking through the concept, Zach, as always, thanks for the knowledge and thank you everybody for listening. Please review the podcast if you get the chance, we will definitely take those reviews, and we appreciate your help in helping us climb to the top of the charts. Baby.
• 41:04
  Brad Ploch: Number one coming forward.
• 41:06
  Andrew Foxwell: Have a good one. Guys.
• 41:07
  Zach Stuck: Thanks. Everyone.
• 41:07
  Brad Ploch: Later.