Marketing effectiveness scales with budget, with each level requiring different strategies: Level 1 ($0-$10K) focuses on organic social media content and low-cost Meta ads testing; Level 2 ($10K-$100K) emphasizes building a creative team and testing multiple content formats; Level 3 ($100K-$1M) requires data-driven customer personas and community building; Level 4 ($1M+) demands campaign-centric approaches with creator networks; Level 5 (unlimited) involves monoculture moments and brand partnerships. The key principle is that creativity is empathy—understanding customer needs—rather than originality, and brands should focus on one channel to dominate before expanding.
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Every Level of Marketing ($0, $10k, $100k, $1m, $10m)Added:
At level one, I have zero dollars and I have the opportunity to spend between zero and 10K on a marketing budget to make money online. I want to market for my company. What is something I can do that's actually going to drive revenue?
>> So, two things. Making organic content on social media. We are at this fascinating point in time that even though it dominates our culture, people don't talk about enough in that you used to have to pay for any degree of attention. You had to pay for a television ad, you had to pay for a print ad. No matter what you wanted to do to promote your business, it required you spending dollars. Now from Tik Tok number one, Instagram post number one, you can get views. Make a video, you put it on Tik Tok, you put it on Instagram, it will give you at a minimum 300, 500 views from moment one. And if it's any good, it'll be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million. So that is this outsized opportunity that allows the smallest brands in the world to compete with regularsiz brands like right out the gate. You have to be taking advantage of that any type of video content, any type of carousel content using organic. But that ties to point two, you know, the meta ads economy, right? Where if you start spending on meta, you if you have any level of knowledge from what works on organic social, that helps inform what will actually help perform as an ad. You don't have to guess. You can validate a bit on organic and then take some of those learnings and put it into meta.
But what's great about meta ads is you can start your budgets like we started most of the accounts we work on at like $10 a day. You know, it is not a massive investment to go say we're going to spend $300 to validate a product, whether it's software, an agency, an info product, an actual physical product, uh, and test our way into something that works. So, all of this is a test, right? It used to be like this perfect launch world. I have to have all these assets, all these things. I launch my brand. Now it's like, "All right, we're going to try 50 social media videos that we make for free, and then we're going to take some of the top things from there, and we're going to be trying one to two new pieces of creative every few days in our ad account until we find the ones that work." And you iterate your way into success. And that's the beauty of it is right now you have $1,000 and an iPhone with a mic and you can be on that journey to sell whatever it is you want. And it's really like a miracle time to be entrepreneurial at all. What about if I don't feel creative?
>> Feel like that's almost a fallacy, right? Where if you don't feel creative, it's because you've been put into a bucket where you do that. Like every single human is creative. I think at at our heart, like we weren't born to go make slide decks and like work in spreadsheets and do X or Y. We wanted to be artists and lovers and like we had other goals in our lives when we were young, even if you had a passion for sports or whatever it is. And so like creativity isn't what makes content and and ads work. It's empathy. It's like understanding what is the problem I'm solving for a customer. What is the person who I'm watching this? What are they dealing with in their life? What do they want to watch? And like what do they want to enjoy? And then creating that in any level of capacity. Some of the best, you know, people we know that make content or have run things on ads are just talking about real things that happened in their life while they're yapping on a walk, right? And so I think it's like getting in that mind state that if you're not creative, maybe you really are. Option one or option two, I don't need to be creative. I just need to talk to my customer about the things that they want to hear.
>> Something I I think you touched on immediately there which is really interesting is that using empathy. It removes the ego from our shelves. So for example like I think even today I was thinking about making a story and I started recording and I was like ah this is about me. How do you get someone out of that mindset of being like it's about them? Nope. It's about your client or your customer.
>> The number one thing you should understand in marketing is you have to put yourself in the customer's shoes.
And still I meet marketers and teams and people who just can't do that for the life of them. Um but like a good way to do it is making a dummy of your avatar.
So for instance, if you're like I'm making content for younger guys who want to bulk up or fitness content, right?
Okay. Go have your Twitter Instagram account or your Tik Tok account. Follow the people they follow. Find one or two of your customer avatar. It's easy. Look at who they follow. Follow those same people. Create a faux feed and look at it and be like, "Okay, what are these people digesting normally? What is their content flow? And what do they want to get out of? Are they trying to laugh?
They trying to cry? they trying to get info, you know, like are are they late night? Are they trying to meet the opposite sex? What are they what are they doing with it? And then you're in the mind state of what they want. And when you begin to think about those factors of what they're already seeing and what they want, you can begin to devise a plan. I think that's the number one thing that any business person and any creators needs to think about is like no one cares about your story. They care about the value you give to them.
Now, you can make a Instagram story talking about you if it has value and interest and entertainment to those people. Uh, and that just has to be the requirement before everything. You know, I use uh one sec on my phone. It's like a app that blocks social media, but it requires you if you do want to use social media, you have to like say why.
You can set custom ones. And it's like cool. If you have that reminder in text every time that like I'm going to tell a story to my customer, bop. It's like those little subliminal things. Um, I'm big on this. You've probably seen the Jake Paul meme where he has like all the the Paul brothers have like all the manifestations like on their mirrors.
Like I'm exactly like that, too. But it matters on your phone as well or before you open a social media app. So there's a lot like little things like that that can work.
>> So do I have to have an overarching perspective on everything and everything I want in order to get started?
>> No, you need to have someone you are trying to serve. And that's with any business, right? You start a blue tint glasses company. You're trying to you are serving someone who stays up late at night working on their computer. I make content for creative and entrepreneurial people. They have a set of problems. I everything I'm creating is needs to serve them. And if if you just have that attitude on any business that you have and that's where this place you're coming from, you don't even need to be an expert. You don't need anything else.
You just need to have their best interests in mind.
>> So if I'm selling a product and I know that for a fact that there's not going to be any point that I'm going to want to press record. Do you think that it makes sense to have someone on my team press record >> completely? I think one of the biggest fallacies in brand content creation is it has to be the founder, it has to be the CEO, it has to be the whatever. Does not matter at all. Ideally, it's an expert in the niche. And this is something I encourage for a lot of that, especially medical. Right now, medical people have discovering content, right?
The the peptide world, wellness, everything's exploding. And it's like, yeah, get a dermatologist on camera. Get a nurse on camera. Get anyone in scrubs or a hat who believes in your product, who's on your advisory board, and put them on it. Their credibility is better than yours as a founder, right? And if they really believe in it, they give real advice, that's kind of worth whatever budget it takes or whatever equity it takes to do it. And then you can kind of trickle it down. Even if it ends up being a just a personable, friendly person, a model basically that works at your company or that you hire that's reading a script written by a professional, it's getting the same job done, right? It's you have to think about it's really about what the stories those people can tell. A founder can tell a certain type of stories. I don't even think now a lot of people want to hear that. They want to hear the expert.
This is like the true expert era of content and the expert can be either a true expert or an expert writing for a friendly face.
>> I don't have much money. So what is the gap? Should it be a priority at all unless I'm able to spend a lot of money?
>> Back to this opportunity. It's like if you have any business and you are not leveraging the fact that you get free attention on the internet from making like quick little videos, that would be priority one in terms of upside, least amount of money I have to spend to most potential result, right? And then right after that, it is how do I take any of those learnings and apply that to metas-pend where I can get money back guaranteed at a certain ratio. And really, I'm playing a game of how much good creative do I have to put in that I've learned from this free organic stuff I'm doing to be able to get that ratio higher.
>> I think I'm already learning something here because it's you're the fact that you're saying like you would spend $10 a day on a specific meta ad. What learning am I looking for if I'm doing that?
>> It will solve those problems for you.
So, for instance, if you set up a typical meta ad structure for a smaller business, there'll be meta ads gurus have different opinions, but basically you will have a test campaign and you will have a scale campaign if you have a simple product set, right? Okay. In the test campaign, you are putting in, let's say you're spending somewhere between $10 and $50 a day. You're putting in one to three pieces of creative into that every few days. And there's two things you're testing for. One, does it get spend? So Meta will give spend to a piece of creative based on if people engage with it or like it or actually watch it and they can find a demographic for it. And so if that happens, it gets spend, but you don't get any money back, then you've learned something, right?
You've learned that this is a piece of creative metal likes. People enjoy watching it, but I'm not selling right.
I'm not actually giving enough info or context or I don't link my ad and my landing page. A couple things you can diagnose there. Or number two is it's not getting any spend. No one's interested in it. And then you start looking, oh, it's getting spend and it is also making me money back. It's getting rorowass on that. And it will take a few days, right? You're only spending 10 bucks a day and you have $150 product. It might take you two weeks to validate something, right? If you start to see some positive spend, it's like, all right, let me increase that budget and we'll just keep doubling. There's a lot of conversation around the like the double it, you know, concept. obviously doesn't work when you're spending six figures, but when you're at that smaller scale, like this is what we've done even like I sell my shoe bags like on the internet. This is we've scaled all our campaigns to this exact thing where cool it's 50 bucks a day. All right, that's going well 100 bucks a day. Okay, it's going well. It's 200 bucks a day. And at some point you'll see diminishing returns, right?
Okay, that ratio is not the same. Now, is that I need more creative or is it that like there's less interest in in the product? You can begin to test your way into it. But like it's really a numbers game. It's not a hard one, right? It's giving you all the information you need and you just need to be diligent about tracking it. And I think people want it to be easy. It's not easy, but it's very doable.
>> So, if you're giving me a framework here, I'm starting from scratch.
Essentially, go and research my niche and the pain points of my niche. And then once I've identified whatever those blockers are, whatever they're looking to accomplish, I empathize.
>> Yeah. You create empathetic content for that.
>> Yeah. And then I post that organically, whether through myself or someone on my team.
>> Yep.
>> And then what am I looking for for an outlier data point for what what gets views or not. You'll see a baseline.
You'll basically be like, "Okay, my average content gets 800 views." Okay, this one got 4,000. Okay, that's something that is not only worth repeating that in my organic, but let's put that into an ad. Two ways to put that into an ad. One is, okay, is this creative? Actually talk about my product at all or tied to it. Just put it in there with the organic comments with everything. Just load it in the ad account, right? You can just basically get an ad code um and whitelisted if it's on like a team members account. The second thing you're looking for is uh okay, was this hook, if people's interested in the hook and can I redo that as an ad? This is something we do all the time where if you talked about a concept, a friend of mine, Cody, had a viral video, he owns a gym about like the Kentucky strength training in the 80s and it's like, all right, that didn't help his gym when he made a video about that concept. But if he hooked with the Kentucky strength training in the 80s and then he turned into a promo for how they use those principles inside his gym, all of a sudden that's an ad asset. So either you are taking the whole piece of creative or like the hook of the creative to then go into an ad.
>> Is it primarily about views or am I also looking for like sentiment and engagement? If you get a bunch of views and it's a negative sentiment, that's a different signal. That only happens if you're making kind of oddball or off the wall content, right? As long as you are making relatively straightforward, you can kind of look at the views and the general engagement as the metric. But it's easiest to just look straight at like what just got any level of organic success, right? If you're starting from scratch, this is significantly more nuanced at like the higher levels of brand building. But if you're just at zero to one, it's like, oh cool, that concept has four or 5,000 views. Let's put that in the ad account. And then it's just about getting over the the internal stress of like, oh, I actually just have to spend money on something that's like >> that's why I love Meta is like I started the t-shirt business with a friend of mine in college and we had to spend like $1,500 or whatever to get the first hundred t-shirts, which is like a lot of money. And then it was like, okay, how do we even advertise it? We couldn't. I was selling them at my college campus like out there the way guys would sell CDs, right? And it's like, okay, this is not a good strategy. But now it's like, oh, I can start with $10 a day. Like if you don't have $1,500 to spend on products and $1,500 to spend on just the ability to test some meta ads until they go, it's like, okay, just go work and do other stuff until you have enough money to do that to validate a brand. That is such a low barrier to entry. You could probably get away with doing that with $2,000. And then it's about patience, right? Because then everyone's like, "Oh, I need to raise money and do X and Y." Or you could just very slowly work this up over time. Um, I've worked on a a women's wear brand with with two of my friends for almost seven years now that started from they were literally selling leather goods at farmers markets to we were running meta ads light to now we run six figures a month on meta ads and it's just such a and it worked up without any additional capital. It was just slow. It was seven years. But guess what? 100% ownership. All the cash that comes out of it now is cash that we have. Like that is a uh that's a real entrepreneurial arc. It's not you know the oh I'm going to make a million dollars tomorrow. That's not how this works.
>> I think that transitions very well into level two. So level two would be that 10,000 to 100,000. And in this section, I kind of have questions because I think there's a lot of legacy businesses that have never existed online because they haven't needed to and that suddenly are realizing like, oh, I'm like five or six years way too late. So what's like a starting point for them if they're a small team or a founder led, but they're saying, okay, do we just put our founder in front of a camera? Like what's our what's our starting point from that gap?
No one knows how to structure a modern marketing team, right? Because it's so radically different. It's a mini media company with a organic aspect and a paid aspect that go hand in hand. That example I just had of if you're spending like sub $10,000 a month is kind of the exact same thing like in this next wave.
Uh except you have more things to try and you have more upside because you can press the gas pedal faster if things go well. So really you are in charge of what assets can I make? Like bucket one is what assets do I have? Whether it's someone talking on camera or a social media creator we have or a team or we're paying for shoots, whatever is how do we use that 10 to 100k we have to make x amount of assets and then it's what response do we get on organic social from those assets? Do we get organic sales from how we use them and then what do we get inside the ad account and it is purely a numbers and response game for how good and interesting and resonant can the creative be here through any of the styles we're comfortable with. I would recommend for a lot of brands you need to get one person on camera. Whether you hire a creator for eight or 10 videos a month, whether you have someone on your team, whether you pay for UGC, get that baseline of a person and then try that handinhand with like two other content pillars. Okay, we do carousels that, you know, showcase our product really well.
We do these like 15-second highlight reels where we have mini tutorials around whatever our product solves.
Okay, we get these three types of content. We are seeing what works organic and we're improving it. And we're putting as much of that content as possible into the ad account and making variance of that in the ad account. And you know, you and until you get things that tell you what works, you don't go any farther. But as soon as you get stuff that works, it's like you double down on what works and you keep adding to it. And this 10 to 100 is why you see so many brands grow so quick right now.
It's literally a formula of how interesting and creative and relevant you can be on organic and paid. And you run them both next to each other. And you don't need to do anything else.
brand guides, brand positioning, advertising, trade shows. All you need to do is go focus on that, which makes it very straightforward for a lot of people to actually solve it because it's a creative issue and a math issue. I see a gap here where someone says, "Okay, I don't know how to make people care about my company because their perception is when they're on social media, they care about people." I think about the people I even follow. Like, I don't follow Vayner Media. I follow Gary Vee. I don't follow Acquisition.com. I follow Axramosi. there's a massive gap in terms of like how do I get people to care about my product or business versus caring about me as a personal brand.
>> So I think there we are locked in this legacy of our social media account is the one we have to promote the one that has our company name on it which is just not true. Now you can make content that's resonant to people from those accounts great but all that's kind of out the window and I think that's where there's even more interest and if you are a marketing person or an entrepreneurial person you are okay not playing by those rules you have so much upside here. Uh but like hey if you said we're gonna have just a completely separate account that does X. Uh Opel was a good example of this like a social media app or they had a girl on a whiteboard doing tutorials about mental health. There were really plugs for Opel at the end of it but it was very high value content not on Maine. Didn't even have a handle related to it like of this girl to help promote what's what's like their general thesis and you can just break that infrastructure. Really you're you are trying to give valuable or entertaining content to the demographic you are trying to reach in a way that where you can either integrate your product lightly or integrate it well in the future but you solve that content market fit first and it does not matter if it is a person if it is a random account if it's a clips account if it's a aggregator or if it's your brand account it's whatever you want to do and so you can abandon the idea it has to be the brand it doesn't matter >> does that uh bring out any level of like brand risk because I'm thinking about like if I'm an owner or founder I know that I'm gonna be having this and this is my thing versus if I have like my director of marketing be someone that's like a front face.
>> It's a riskreward, right? It's like are you gonna be on are you gonna play it safe and not be on the fringe and not grow the same way or are you going to like try some of these things where give you a massive upside that don't work?
But I feel like brand risk and thinking about brand risk right now is probably the biggest threat to brand success.
>> Wow. because everything is moving so fast and there is so much opportunity and there are so many new mediums and people are actually taking advantage of them that if you are thinking or you're worried about this stuff for a second you're basically already behind like this is the I think we can call like the permanent bias for action era where it's like okay guess what that person leaves okay well we got two more people that were pumping in there that are following similar strategy it's going to be even better right you like you cannot spiral out from anything you cannot let anything like work out that you have to First, you have to be in this right now.
Even the time if you go spend, if you listen to this and you go spend 90 days planning, executing it, you're too late.
You need to be like, we did this in a week. I was having this conversation before we walked in here with uh I'm working on a a like a new offer set and with the team there and it's like, okay, this is no longer, okay, we'll write this out. We'll do the brief. It's like, who do we call today? It's like this is how fast it's moving. That's radically different from when I've had conversations like this even 6 months ago. It's like everyone is doing it now.
They've noticed like how fast it goes.
And so you have to basically make that cultural change of risk, brand help, whatever. Bias for action is everything.
>> The severe upside is obvious, right? So it's like if we have this amount of views and we can convert to ad spend over here, which will equate to a rorowaz over here. So like there's a direct positive benefit. Is there a negative downside of like a negative virality or like a negative like more than just like, hey, we spent a lot of money, it didn't really work. So if you have a bad message or a message that gets conveyed in a way that people hate, you either have some sort of core message or issue problem with your business or the people you have working with you or you have a product that is bad in which case this conversation doesn't it doesn't necessarily apply, right? But for any normal brand like there's hundreds of brands like come through cut 30 where we like train creators and brands and stuff and like jewelry brands, clothing, you know, baseball accessories, vintage, whatever.
So many of those brands like they've never had a a thing a negative thing happen. They've just been making a content. Even when they have, it's been conversation starters. I remember the jewelry brand we had in there had a viral video about like the wedding rings that she thought were like tacky, which is controversial, right? Cuz no woman wants to be told her ring is tacky. But at the end of the day, it wasn't like the end of the business or getting cancelceled and there's a lot of people who want the advice. And so it just depends on where you want to fly on that scale. There's very little downside to moving on things mainly because you look at every larger company is so slow, so painful. I did a series of brand workshops um earlier this year. We had 40 brands each at like these tour stops basically and we had major brands like major airlines big CPG companies like it was all like enterprise level brands and their core issue that they were all talking how do we get things approved we cannot for the life of us get things approved and I'm like oh now that's one problem we have to go solve but for anyone smaller than that for anyone outside of the Fortune 500 plus let's say the next 2 that is alpha you have you can take everything from those people because they can't move fast enough and if you even look at on a multi-year horizon how different Gen Z Gen Alpha habits are it's a a radical opportunity.
>> Can you like give me an example of someone you think is executing at this level very well? A content style where they say okay like their execution is really great. They're iterating really fast and their brand is growing as a result like astronomically.
>> Ramp in the software space is doing great where obviously they're trying all these things outside of main doesn't matter doesn't tie to it but they are kind of controlling attention. I think set active does a really interesting job with this where they're like theming campaigns. They have new stuff that's happening all the time. Skiims is probably the best where it's like they are always have multiple things like their calendar is so aggressive more than anybody else where they're just spinning on we have these influencers we have these initiatives we have these events we have all these photographers doing this we have multiple times a day on feed and look all good marketing kind of starts as gray hat black hat right you look at like okay what are people doing on the fringe like we got to clipping because of Andrew Tate for better or for worse right that's how this ended up being a thing now like streaming and who's really monetizing streaming and so it's stake it's the gambling companies Like that's it's what the AI companies are doing like Higsfield breaking all the terms of service of X to get people to do unpaid shills, right? All the stuff that happens in the gray market is just what's going to happen in the white market in a year now probably less like six months. And so if you're really looking at where that alpha is or like who's doing it to X degree, it's like oh what these gambling companies are doing with streaming right now is like what Proctor and Gamble should be thinking about how they're integrating their brands in streaming in the next six months. If you could structure like a very nimble marketing campaign, what's the team members that are probably required to do that?
>> So that usually starts with you have a more analytical briefing kind of typical social manager person who like does the meetings, does the posting, pulls the data, gets some ideas, and then you have like an actual creative or creator, like a person who can go shoot a bunch of content or be the face on cam and they work together in a pod, right? One, don't make the creative person go to the meetings. Don't make them fill out the sheets. needs to make over like their job is to get creative done and the other person's job is to make sure their calendar is full, all the reporting is in and that like all the priorities are adjusted. It's like okay that's a pot of one. Right now everyone's a multitasker, right? It's like you no longer just a media buyer. Are you a media buyer and a strategist? Because media buying has gotten really easy, you know, like what what are those combos? Like how do you get somebody on the more on the paid side of that to go with it? And then how do you expand those pods? It's like okay, if we have a creator like two creators, a social media manager and an editor, we can get x amount of stuff.
All right, like that's like pod one.
Okay, now if we have we can get two designers, a strategist. Okay, that's like pod two. And then do we need any more on the media buying side to support that or can we just do that with one person who also does analytics? You can probably do that. It's like then how many of those can you grow? You end up with these like little media pods. And what it turns into is like when you start to get to like a 10 person team.
It's basically a writer's room. Here's all the ideas. Here's all the product marketing stuff. Here's everything happening. We're murderboarding it. It's being distributed down into an asset flow here. And then like paid media and distribution and and advertising begins to build out like a more structural part of the org. But I think that is the the smart way to do it. Almost all these other jobs that you looked at. Oh, we have a copywriter. We have a like these are integrated now into all those core roles.
>> What role do you think is going to be outdated in the next 3 years?
>> Having to do anything related to maintaining or editing like a website.
It's not even being outdated. It's just have to be absorbed by another role like the designer now is like okay because you can go right to code or because like in framework I can just edit and click or whatever. It's like you there's no longer a developer needed like on that end. Media buying is another one that's kind of just being absorbed. Most strategists are just learning media buying and they start to realize, oh, it's intimidating because ads manager is intimidating. But once you use it, you're like, this is not hard. Like the answers are being given to me. And so like all the media buying is just going to be absorbed into either like strategy or other social roles. The director of marketing and the social media manager, they're going to be the same person if they if they aren't already. And that like head of social role is really crucial. The head of social role replaces so much other marketing. All of this is morphing together, right? You see a lot of these teams that are on the cutting edge. It's the organic and the ads team are the same. Like kind of we we discussed where they're going back and forth on absolutely everything and the same faces. That was not that's not the case for a lot of businesses. And so you see this kind of big amorphous mess is a lot is enabled by just how easy some of these things have become and then how how it's basically like a circle now instead of these parallel paths.
>> So here's level three. I think this is the place that's probably the most accessible and helpful for most amount of people because most marketing departments are here. This is the 100k to1 million dollars in their campaigns or in their teams dedicated to making money. And I think a lot of them are scared about how much change is happening so fast. What's different about marketing right now versus marketing like 3 years ago?
>> The speed and the volume is probably the biggest difference. And also the sheer size of options. You start getting into spending six figures a month on marketing. You now have this like this world of things that you can do. all of a sudden there's like you know actual initiatives and do we do X or Y and if you are doing this in the old model it's so easy to waste that money right like oh we're doing a trade show oh we started an events team oh all of a sudden this is 40 grand a month or this is 100 grand we spent 300 on this thing and you start to realize that if you don't maintain extremely tight control of what you're doing that money just like floats into the ether because this is also the the point in time where you lose measurability so one of the biggest things from the last that's come up the last 5 years is that you can measure marketing in those early stages the first two stages we talk about you You need to be relentlessly focused on the return on ad spend and the return from your organic social. How much money are we making? And since you're only doing a few things, it's very trackable. If it didn't come from ad spend, it probably came from organic. And you can really function off of me marketing efficiency ratio like as a metric of like how much do we spend and how much do we make? And then you start to get to the okay, we're getting closer to 20 to 50 million in revenue and then we're spending, you know, our 8 to 20% on marketing. that tracking is going to end somewhere in there and you're going to realize, okay, we can't scale any farther with this measurability. The finance team is going to be like, we got used to that, you know, like what do you mean we can't keep that going? You're like going to basically hit this top for a lot of brands. Some can continue scaling above it, but most can't. And you start to realize, okay, now we have to go back into the intangible where yes, we can we need to generate brand awareness and we need to do things that enable us to scale our spend more and enable us to get to this next level. And then it becomes more of like a chaos theory thing. And because uh so many marketing teams got used to math and leadership teams got used to math, they have a really hard time breaking that gap. And so the the marketer's job here is to be like, okay, we are we need to maintain fiscal discipline on what we're putting together from our content and our ads while also getting enough attention that those things scale. And then you have to look at this chart of a of awareness, right? So you have all these fringe activities. Like even three years ago, it's like all right, Tik Tok ads wasn't really a thing. We couldn't scale with it. Tik Tok shop was not a thing. live selling on whatnot or Tik Tok wasn't a thing. Streaming wasn't a thing. Uh we have all of these clipping all of these things didn't exist as marketing tools, right? You look at all of these options.
You're like, well, where do we spend our time and our dollars? Uh and you have to really are we trying to generate awareness? Are we trying to be so super sales focused? And you have to kind of look at where you are on that chain.
Like do we need more mass awareness to allow us to scale into that or do we need to reach are we not optimizing how much people already know about us are purchasing? And uh and so then it becomes much more of a like we have to guess and bet. And where I see people get caught up now is they'll then they'll try to do three or four things which is impossible. Like you have to be like all right we're going to bet on one of these where like we know Snapchat is where our customer is and we are going to be like the leading people in our niche on there. And I look at like NYX is a a cosmetics brand. They're like built up a big Snapchat following a couple hundred thousand and no other brand in the niche is is like doing that. And I was like all right that's an interesting angle to be able to go down on that. Tart's another cosmetic brand where they went all in on influencer and influencer trips in particular where they were like we see the ripple effects of trips where if we have all these people together and there's drama there's coverage of the trip other influencers are just talking about what's happening people are making viral videos about the stuff that they did the people are collabing on the trip we're like all right we see ripple effects we're going to go all in on that and they did I think that's where this gets interesting is you start to play with that you have to dedicate you have to be like what is that one new initiative we're going to do that we are just going to be the best at.
>> How fast are these iterations? I mean, we were talking previously about like the idea of being like, I can't do this in months or 90 days. I have to do this in a week. It's really hard to get a team to do that in a week from an organizational perspective.
>> In those first two stages, >> yeah, >> you just have to move. The getting started angle or the getting to uh like x amount of month is it just has to go like there can't be any static. Like I've gotten caught up in this in like my own projects where it's like, oh, this will just wait for three months or I have other stuff going on and it just lit lies. But when you get to this next stage where it gets more interesting, you already have that bias for action.
you only got to that area where you can spend six figures a month on your marketing because of the bias. And so this is now where you have to basically try not to lose it, where you actually do have to plan. Yeah, we're going to do an influencer trip. We do need to be four months out to execute that.
Concentrate on one thing that's going to drive that metric for you, that brand awareness, whatever it is, it's going to have the most result. You make your bet on it. And but then you have to realize if we're good at it, what scales need to operate at? I think the biggest thing is when people find something like that, it's like, okay, how many of these can we do? That needs to be the more the mentality. Oh, if it works and the numbers work, we need to be like hitting this as fast as possible because it's no longer there's no fatigue anymore. It is on until you're no longer hot or you don't create something like or you've put a gap out in the internet. You can like keep this repetition up. So, I think it's like it's almost like a different level of challenge. There's a massive gap between like the savvy teams that are intentionally doing a lot of this research, intentionally understanding their avatar and focusing more so on client acquisition versus like customer success or like customer satisfaction and service. Companies that exist in in the 2010s, you know, like they're thinking in the sense of like, oh, we really need to make sure that our main pages are all brand aesthetically specific and it's basically just a place for people to come and complain versus come and and engage. What's something that you think would help people come up with storytelling frameworks that incorporate their actual products?
>> This is the stage where you have real customer data, right? Where where you can actually get into personas. So software I love for this is a software called Outer Signal that um we used to do some of this manually, but it'll basically go and go through all your e-commerce customers, all your email database and give you personas. Everyone makes up personas. Personas is a really useful exercise, but they'll do like, oh, we did a couple thousand person survey that isn't indicative of what anything actually is. or they'll literally just make up whatever the CEO or CMO thinks it is. We interviewed eight customers and this is who they are.
>> But now it's like you can get real data.
You plug it into Outer Signal, it gives you like you have 30 to 35 year old drivers in urban areas that also buy these things. You're like, oh [ __ ] I have like a persona. I have seven. I can tape them out. I can put them on a board, right? And so I think that's the core thing to start with is like, okay, I have those people. And then who are they? customer service like radical focus on customer service and experience in this era is like everything is important in this era but like that's a particular one where you can stand out because everyone now is trying to AI automate their customer service and [ __ ] like be the one that doesn't in that same software the reason that we had started using is they used to manually Google every customer at the women's wear brand we worked on to find influencers because we had like one of every eight customers was an influencer and it's very important for us but now it's just like it'll just identify it you just get a list and it's like okay you can do it with every customer if you have the bandwidth but at least for your top 10% most interesting and influential ones direct contact that even if that's your marketing team and it's like can you seed them product for the future? Can you get feedback? Can you learn about that experience? Can they make content for you? Like all of us like it needs to become a community flywheel. If people want people to come to that page and have storytelling frameworks that apply to them, you need to understand the customer. You need the customer's help in creating things that kind of matter to them and it's where you can get like really creative um and you can base it on data. And so that's kind of like the exercise I think all those brands should go through is okay, we now know who our customer is. We're now communicating with them. Some of them are making content for us. Like all your best creators for a brand are probably going to come from your existing customers and you get that flywheel turning and then you see what that enables. Does that enable us to do certain types of campaigns? Oh, do we actually have we overindex in how much these people watch streaming and we should like lean into that. Like that information can finally come from data. How do I get people to genuinely care about the company? The gap here is how do I get people to like root for me? because there's a certain tier where people are like uh I don't I mean I like the products and that's fine but to be like I actually am a like an ambassador and I actually root for these people because I want to see this company win >> first it's really about the value you create in someone's life right like does your product make their life significantly better you know and will they advocate for that we were at dinner last night I was talking about whisper flow which is like a app on your phone that replaces your mic and it's like an AI version of the mic >> I downloaded it today >> I have a real advocacy that product made my life better it was recommended to me by my friend James I recommended it to you and it's like okay that there's an advocacy because of the value. I don't know [ __ ] about their branding. I've never followed them on social media. I don't know anything about it. But like like that is the number one part is you optimize your product experience. Once you've gotten that you're like okay what else can we do to really build that affinity and uh it comes down to are you providing value or entertainment online?
That's like number one. Like am can I in whatever content I'm doing in whatever presence I have online my influencers my team this this narrative we have am I giving you real value? And like so for instance, if you're doing something, you know, you have a fitness product and you also include like amazing free workouts and X classes or do whatever you're like, "Wow, I'm really participating in this brand thing. It's valuable. I would have paid for this and they give it to me for free." The entertainment is just as good. I look at this brand, Alexis Batar is a good example of this. They're a jewelry brand and they have like a TV show on their social media. It has characters. The fans love it. They people follow it around. It's about like drag queens in New York and like, you know, this has got this whole narrative and their fans go, "Okay, cool. Now they're basically just giving me a fun show. like I want to participate in their world. So you have to look be like all right from our product experience the value we can give or the entertainment we can give are we doing enough that our customer would care and from there once you actually start to build it you then look at your world okay what are all the events we have what are all the people that are contributing influencers customers our team what are like what's happening in the world like how do we shape this to feel like like a TV network right to feel like all these things going on have this huge macro level view and that comes from if you're really savvy at this level three or if you're like once you're getting into the like that real spend but it all anchors back to product experience, value, entertainment.
>> I feel like it'd be interesting. You just said you've never seen Whisper Flows social media.
>> So, can we pull that up and just you tell me like what stands out to you in terms of like the gap for them what they should be doubling down on?
>> I have seen one thing they did on X where they were like we brought five people into a or 20 people into like a scenario almost like this and they were like and if you can get Whisper Flow to mess up, you win a Porsche. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. They're basically showing off the efficacy of the product by doing a stunt. 23. This guy went to wing with Microsoft now sits behind.
>> Yeah, they're doingformational content.
>> The best marketing right now doesn't feel like marketing in a digital first.
>> Yeah, they're doing like high production value like using found footage and all that.
>> Welcome to Whisper University.
>> Whisper Flow lets you speak in your own words and turns it.
>> Yeah, they're they're doing they're building out their brand world, right?
They're talking about other things in technology. They're explaining what they do in like funny and relevant scenarios.
Like if you have a software based around a microphone, they're doing the right thing.
>> One of the videos that popped off, it got 630,000 views at the time. It's someone interviewing Steven about his experience using the product. Is that like a primary growth metric where it's like, "Okay, I need to find someone legitimate to enjoy this and then go find a way to >> when we talk about emailing all those customers, it's like and how that's your content." Like that's the exact example.
You'll be surprised if you go run your customer base through like a data platform like I mentioned and you come out with those people. Then you're going to be like, "Oh [ __ ] Stephen's on there. I'm going to email him. Thanks so much for using our product." D like start some sort of re relationship. And then that quickly leads to, oh yeah, I love this. Oh, would you do a testimonial? Can I pay you to do XY? Can we run this as a white listed ad? This happens to me all the time as an influencer, right? Like I um a good one was the human scale chair. I made a video about the human scale chair. Can we run this as an ad? You know, like all of a sudden you're like participating in that fly. That's a better ad than whatever the creative they're making because I'm genuinely like I love this chair. What happened with the the board?
I got this like it's a video game console that uh it's like a physical console that you can use pieces on top of that I got for my kid. I was just bought it as soon as I had it. I made the video about it and they hit the other day being like, "Hey, can we make an edit of this for the ad and like I'm passionate about thing I already own."
So, there are probably a lot of good creators and influencers in there and then how do you generate that into the content? And that's the most underlooked for even the massive brand. This is the era of the onetoone like VIP experience.
And that VIP might be someone that's super passionate about your product posting online getting four views, but they love it. Or it might be the fact that you have like a major person you didn't expect in your audience. That's one of the things that I as a creator feel like I'm missing out on the most is like I was with Gary Ve's team this summer and and and Ken, he has like people that are going through the people that follow on social media who's hot online and like helping him run a CRM for it. Who should I message? Who do I need to know? What do I need to do X about? I'm like, man, I have so many famous people and verifies and all like entrepreneurs that follow me. I'm not accessing that at all. I'm not DMing them unless I happen to see it in the notifications, right? And it's like that needs a team and every brand should think like that, too.
>> Does that require a luxury brand? Does it require like a boutique aspect of it?
Like if I have something that's like kind of basic?
>> No. I mean, look, this this is a voice app and Steven Bartlett is doing an advocacy for it because he's a customer.
It just requires social. People ask often, they're like, "Well, how'd you blow up so much on social media?" It's like I'm a very social person. I know every other creator in my niche, not because like they came DMing me. Being social was underestimated. And we did the same when I was doing my um my my valuable line, which is like the clothing I do basically like March for me. My wife emailed every single one of our first thousand customers. And then when we went into drop two, emailed all of them being like, "Do you want to pre-order the stuff early at a discount?" Right? Like it was a and it was a lot of it was just about who are these people, what are they into? Are they liking it? Do they want the size?
And do we have the feedback? It's not a luxury brand. It's like, you know, street wear that interests me at the time. And I think but it's like that participation is like takes less time than one would think. Everyone's be like, "How do I this AI?" That defeats the point. Defeats the point. Have those real human relationships. Uh you'd be surprised by like how far that gets you.
Social media being inherently social, you have to act like that from a talking perspective, who you're contacting, collaboration, like the more you lean into that as an individual or a brand, the farther everything goes.
>> Is that something that you would say like is a is a function of the marketing team is that they would reach out to these individual people. Like should that be something that >> Yeah. marketing or marketing coordinating with CX or it's one like one of the founders is like, "Yeah, I'm dedicated to having these conversations with and I this is the threshold I have." Really depends on where it lives.
But uh I've been in companies where it's marketing coordinating with CX. I've been with companies where marketing takes it on and I've been like and even where we're working it's like my wife and I are the founders of it and we're like the team's not doing it like we want to talk to the people.
>> Yeah. I've received a lot of emails like stuff that I'm just like oh that's kind of received as like spam.
>> A friend of mine was really trying to access more of the celebrities in his who are following him and I was like yeah like do you DM them something funny. Andrew Hubman followed me the other day and I sent him the skit I made about his chili he did with Goop. Cuz I was like oh it's funny. I'm like hey you follow me from this video but like you probably haven't seen this but like this is really funny. Like I think you'll enjoy it. What do you want to get DM'd or emailed like as a friend right? like you want to get sent a funny reel or you want to get sent a moment or something that made me think of you and like that is like just be human.
>> Let's bring it back to this like storytelling framework. You know, a year and a half ago, I was like really really fascinated with the Mafy Jets and that kind of marketing style was very obvious as to why that worked. And then Ryan Sirhunt kind of took that on. And Ryan Sirhunt's kind of been doing a very similar thing in terms of like creating characters of your team members to maintain authority frame for you as the founder, but leveraging them as like the primary person.
>> The first thing that popped to mind when you said that was there's a uh a local place by me. Let me see if I can find the link. It is a it's a Porsche restoration dealership that's by me in Orange County. What they do is the guy in the garage working on these cars and he will be like, "Hey, we're replacing the tire on this thing and that thing."
Like people get this problem on this year of model because X and Y, here's the four options that they had to replace it with and then they chose this one. I personally may have gone with that, but like I get it. You know, we're going to do this trim color and I'm like, I'm in. I'm there. Like someone's just explaining the interesting thing that happens if you have a visual environment like that. There's a lot of conversation about sets right now.
Obviously, we're like you you you've embraced that, but like if you are a brand that has that location where it's like we have a garage, we have a workshop, we have a warehouse, we have a manufacturing floor. It doesn't have to be glamorous, but we can put a character from there like in on it. The manufacturing one's one of the best ones. You see this all the time. We're packing an order for like X and Y or you know >> guy that does the lights. You know what I'm talking about? Where he says he starts like the meme and then he's like >> uh Tony.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's the girl, she uh she sells pancakes or something like that, I think, where they do like almost this like reactionary like and then they've established their own brands. I don't even know how many customers they get. I'm I'm assuming a lot.
>> It's a funnel, right? Like all content is a funnel. It's like, okay, if I have that person, I have that character and we want to talk about frameworks. It's like what generates attention. Like if Tony comes on and says something racist or weird on culture like he does, like that's going to get top of funnel.
People are going to get views on it and you're like, okay, that that may not sell a bunch of lights, but it's awareness. But then if the next level down doesn't get as many views, but it's actually way more educational and it's like, oh, here's how this line came together 0 to one. And you know, again, it doesn't get that virality, but it's middle of funnel. It's nurturing. Put that same face in your ads. This is another thing people don't do. Uh I was talking to a sunscreen brand the other day who has great great live people.
They do live on TikTok all the time, but those live people aren't on the organic feed and they're not in the paid ads.
I'm like, look, you have all these people watching the lives and these people are amazing on them. Like get them on the main feed. Get their face in the ad, right? Then your bottom of funnel is just leveraging that. That's why people pay big bucks for me for whitelisting is because people know my face, right? And so that's a a something that every brand should like take advantage of of that affinity. And like you start looking at that and you're like, "Oh, this is we have a funny guys in the warehouse and they do skits, but then they also do very legitimate here's all the hard work that goes into the order." And then those are the guys that are like, you know, getting paid a little extra to be in the ads like run it.
>> What do you think is the gap between like the pursuit of virality versus the pursuit of conversion?
>> Most people don't understand is you need the virality to raise the floor to get better conversion. So even I look at that with my content. I made a video this week about coffee shop design. Got like a million views. It's not going to get me any customers. It's not going to get me any email signups, whatever. What it is going to get me is anyone that's interested in design and like design in retail as a follower or as someone who's in my target. And when I then make I made a more educational version of that video talking about like um like applications you know brands can do in influencer marketing if they're doing extra a more tactical piece. Any one of those people that was aware of it before a lot of them are going to get served that same video. And if they are in a tactical role now they're real fans.
That's who I want. But I would never have the ability to even reach as many people with that more tactical video if I didn't just widen the TAM because this is how those social networks work, right? You see the viral video, you get show more of that person's content, especially if you like it or you engage with it. And it's like you need to leverage that. And so I think it's just a funnel and it's like if you are really trying to build awareness and you're posting five times a week, it's like two of that top of funnel, maybe three of that middle of funnel. You're really focused on like getting all the way up there. But if you're a brand that has big reach, you already have good views on almost everything. It's like maybe we do one or no top of funnel and we're really focused middle and bottom. I think about a lot with my content where I'm like, do I need any more followers?
I got 600k on Instagram to like do what I need to sell. Probably not. If I just wanted to focus on selling as much as I could to those people, I could make no top of funnel content because the reach is there. And think about where you're at in perspective. So, I think every single viral video we've ever made has been in one of like five tribal pillars.
It's wealth, health, relationships, politics, or religion. And within those they're like there's like subcategories.
And so for example like within the relationships tribal pillar it's like there's parenting. Everybody has a parent or is a parent. There's dating.
Everybody wants to date or has dated or hates dating right? Everyone wants to be married hates like my assumption is a lot of people in this space they go into the wealth category and then subcategories of that wealth category.
For example, under the wealth category, you have luxury and then within luxury, you have luxury sub and then within luxury sub, you have this. And there's like these tiny little niches that fall within those overall buckets.
I'm curious what you think in terms of like how does someone add more personality so that they're more likely to have virality or have mass exposure on the right things because like for example I don't want to be necessarily associated with politics because that's nothing regards to my content but like relationships like if you're a dad you're probably going to want to follow me because I'm a dad so like there's something that we can relate on. How does someone from a brand perspective like actually consider those things?
>> So we look at pillars and what can succeed almost the opposite. We look at it tactically. So it's not about the category, wealth, health, any of those.
It's about the format for top of funnel pillars versus format. The killer. This is one I use all the time. It's like, can you compare things and say that they're good or bad that people then form an opinion on? Uh big dentist we had come out of cut 30 did this where literally like toothpaste, mouthwash, dental trends, something you consider to be really boring. And he's just like, I'm a dentist and no, you shouldn't do that. That's bad for you. Like this is a horrible product. Okay, this is exactly what you should do. He's rolling down a list. So versus content comparison as a format is great.
>> Can I say on that? It's like I think the way I think about it too is like if you do a versus format that's within the health pillar, but then at the same time if you say like if your hook is something like your wife will hate your bad breath if you use this that like that adds the relationship dynamic of it where it's like anyone that has a wife cuz then like it separates and tribal it's a qualifier right like um like I had a video that did really well once I was like introverts need an extroverted spouse like this things and then all of a sudden you're qu like okay people are putting themselves in tribal buckets but I do end up thinking virality like either as a versus video or it's a oh my god I didn't know that story you know or it's a a tribal belief is the other one like that coffee shop video is just a tribal belief maximalism is better than minimalism is an inherent thing we hold and like I can lean in it can lean into that and we have basically a few of those where it'll be like all right these are the top off of funnel like things that that work or not but then adding in the personality to your point like so qualifiers is a huge part of content and hooks qualifiers and curiosity gaps and you've probably heard these terms if you watch videos like this but a qualifier to your point is like if you in that hook go from okay the best dental floss for whatever to the best dental floss for wife guys. All of a sudden, you've like niched that down. It's a qualifier, right? And then in the curiosity gap is okay. In this hook or in what I'm expecting to hear, I'm going to stay to the end because I really want to see X happen, right? Like there was uh like someone wants to see the the person finish getting ready or what the final fit's going to look like, whatever you're opening that gap. For brands who want to inject the personality and things in there, there is basically overt and uh like overt and covert ways to do it. Like the covert way is just like the setting, right? You can learn a lot about a brand by the things that are in the background or the set or what's on the YouTube like my YouTube set has a bunch of like medieval helmets and gauntlets and [ __ ] and it gives you an idea of things in a certain way. It's like all right, what can we do just by setting and the way people dress and look? I'm dressed in a certain type of street wear, right? Like other marketing gurus do not dress like that.
That's a signaler in itself of like this person knows a certain world that the other people don't. It's like what can you do like that's covert and then overt is like what can we actually say? And so I recommend if you have any those personalities on camera like let them talk about like real life like as a dad, as a father, as whatever. And it's almost it's always anecdotal. This is something I encourage because so many creators copy. Okay, I'm just doing another format this other person already did. It's like okay, how do you either at the beginning inject your expertise?
So instead of like things in Paris, I find chic. It's like things in Paris, I find chic as a first year interior design student. Now I already know something about you. Then there's the back end. Okay, once I made this video that people already like, it's like what anecdote can I put in there like about the end? And it's like, yeah. And it's actually really funny because I'm going to Greece next month and I've been thinking about X and Y and it's just give it a tangent. And basically we call that uh it's like a video within a video. I I do a lot of this now. So if people watching my content, they're going to see it where it's like, okay, I made this video. Okay, now here's a second video. Why not? Let me just talk about where like this trip I'm going on or this whatever because I think we're longer content is doing a bit better.
And then it gives you a whole opportunity to introduce people into that. And if you hook again and then you just give it a different kind of format and you're still sitting there talking, it works really well. And that's like your opportunity to inject personality, especially when you have a format you already know works.
>> I think you glossed over something that's really important, which is that the initial concept still has to be interesting, right? So, it's like cuz like the average person's life is not very interesting. And so, if you're thinking from a brand perspective, it's like, okay, uh travel content, there's an aspect of travel content that could be really interesting. There's an aspect of travel content that's like not in the personal brand spot. Like Ryan Trey is probably the best at this where I'm like you can make going to Target sound like an interesting endeavor versus like the average person is like that's just >> Yeah, you either have to be actually exciting or you need the personality to make it exciting. And I encourage a lot of people don't let their personality shine in content. It's like you got to make jokes. I try to have at least a joke a video. Not everyone like likes my humor, but like it's way funnier when I had a video and I'm calling out like you order a seed oil cortado versus if I'm just saying you order a coffee. Like just having some of those those jabs or those pieces is is really really important. Um, or it has to be exciting.
So, basically, you have to do one or the other. And if you have both, and if you can make jokes and you're like in the rare fish market of wherever, that's going to go even better.
>> What do you think about like trend hacking? I think that's a lot of what companies are trying to do because they're saying, "Okay, this worked. We want what they have, so we're just going to do exactly what they did."
>> Once you already have a successful strategy, you can start thinking about trend. You can't start as we're trying to hack a trend to get a successful strategy. And that's a really important thing for brands to think about. If you're like, "Our social media sucks.
We're going to hop on these trends."
You're never going to get your social media good. You need to have your formats and the things you have tested into that are unique or at least unique enough to your brand that work. But once you're there, trend becomes really important there because you already have a basis. You have a fan base. You know how to make good content. A trend happens. Now you have the ability to like really put some gas on the fire.
One of the the brands I I work with who are just working on a strategy for this where they're basically their internal team approvals take too long and they don't have enough bandwidth ever to hop on trends fast enough and the trends and cosmetics are done in 72 hours. Like you got to be on it. And so they're like cool what do we And it was like, okay, we need a quick turn creator. We need one of the girls we work with for our creation needs to be like, we will give you x amount of money if you have this done and back to us in 36 hours and it's good. And we'll do that at all times.
And that budget is pre-approved. The marketing leaders like anytime you see a trend, you can go spend $1,200, whatever it is. And then that creator knows like, I want that work. I'm ready to go, you know, like this is I'm getting more than I usually get, whatever. And then everyone knows that relationship exists.
So they can sit in that meeting or get that Slack that everyone shares and be like, oh [ __ ] should we hop on this?
And it's like, okay, yeah, cool. Send it to Carly. We know what the cost is. Or, no, we don't. It's not the right trend.
And so, I think that's kind of how you have to think about is like, do we have enough of a framework? And then once we do see it, do we have a framework to act on it? You need to be able to say, we're going to prioritize this over our regular work, or we have a way to actually execute it.
>> How important is it to be the trends setter versus the adapter?
>> I think for personal brand, it is very important to be the uh the setter, right? Because everyone can copy so easily and those people I see it and there's a lot of people that copy my content, but none of them get a fraction of the brand deals or whatever. like is something to be said for being first if you keep your foot on the gas. But for brands, I think it's about where your customer is in the cycle. I always use Aritzia as an example of this. I remember when the TSA bin videos were going viral. Aritzia did that [ __ ] like 6 months later during Black Friday, right? They know their customer is not the coolest customer. Their customer wants to be on trend, but they're not paying attention. They're working working women for the most part who are like, "Okay, maybe I'm on on trend, but like it's if I'm a couple months later and it's still cool, like it's still cool to them. probably new to them coming from that company. So they're like, "Cool, we're late on the bell curve. They did like the big 3D object stuff later than everybody. Doesn't matter. Still ripped for them because their customer is at a certain point in the bell curve. So I would think it's about acknowledging where it is." If you have an ultra trendy brand, you have to be setting it, right? If you or you have to be right behind it. Berga is a great example of a brand that's right behind it. So they are iPhone case brand. They do every kind of visual trend that's happening like they they I think they're probably shooting every week if not if or at least twice a month. and they are just like if it's a visual trend, it is in there. They are on it as fast as humanly possible. I I don't think they're ever setting it, but they're always one degree behind. So that's like level two because they're trendy, but they're not like the trend setter. And then all the way back to cool, if you're a brand that like if you're selling to people that are behind that bell curve, be like, "All right, we actually can take advantage of this trend two weeks later, no one's going to care." So I think it's really about mapping where you are out. It all comes back to that customer persona exercise, right? Which I think is underrated. And I'm actually shocked now you have so much better data than you did like years ago on it. you know, >> how do you prevent yourself from like being perceived as corny or stealing?
Cuz I think creative stealing is going to be a big thing in the next few years >> as someone whose content gets stolen absolutely all the time. It's like, okay, I even hate saying stole just because ideas sort of belong to the internet. A, some people may not even know they took something because they're actually taking from a copy of somebody else. Like, so it's like three degrees removed. And then also it there's no recourse. There's no anything that's happened. So I feel like we're in this kind of odd world where the consumer might not know who the origin was. They may not have seen it. they may not ever that like everything is like both feels icky and it's up for grabs. And I hate saying this because I know it's just going to make more people take my content, but like it's sort of just like anything goes. It doesn't matter as long as it's not egregious. As long as you're not copying a word for word script or taking or whatever, if it's an idea, ideas belong to the internet for better or worse now and you either embrace that as a creator in terms of like what's going to happen to your work or you don't. But like we're never going to hunt down the original references.
Everything's a reference of a reference.
I think we've lost the ability to track human creative and there's kind of no going back.
>> When you're a smaller size, you're more willing to use like AI in creation versus when you're a larger marketing team, it's almost like you hate it. It's almost like the there's like a there's like marketing teams that are like, "Oh, you're taking away my job by like using and using AI in this."
>> And this is a that's a fascinating combo to have right now because like if you have a full-time job and you're actually like and your company's actually growing, you don't have time to keep up with this [ __ ] Keeping up with the AI marketing tools is a is for the unemployed. Yeah. Right. Like >> it's it takes so much time. I'm a uh work as a creative director at a PE firm. there's a mandate at that firm that we spend time on AI and that we document our AI processes and it is a huge component of like of that business that business we we are in on it you you should spend time on it and like that's been very effective like I set up yesterday a whole new project in um like the brand voice of one of the brands we have that we query copy for and loaded in all the docs and everyone has access to the project now and that's a valuable tool for everyone at that or now also not just that we created this thing but that everyone in the org now knows that that function exists that they could do for their own ideas if they're an MBA or accounting or have a different without that mandate, I wouldn't be spending that time on it.
>> And so I think we're in this really awkward point where they don't even know and they don't feel validated enough to go into it and can get to your point smaller teams that will spend that time early. It's just another edge that these small businesses have and that's a uh really hard thing everyone's going to have to deal with.
>> Do you think that there's going to be a distaste for the usage of AI if it's found out that it's used? How do we maintain a standard for creativity?
>> There's two levels to it. There's like is AI used in the visual generation of something or is AI used in the flow of the marketing team? Every marketing team um I'm working with is using claude in some advanced level, right? Some people are generating whole landing pages. Cody from Jones was posting he's going right like designed a code generated like he was posting that on X which is is crazy like where their LPs are fully done.
Ashwin um is doing full LPs generated from cloud, right? So like all their landers are just like that's a function that's done that's going to happen.
Every brand is gonna who's smart is going to do that because it's a waste not to two okay we generate copy we generate whatever two processes like even now like I do social audits and diligence and frameworks for briefing I still brief a lot of creative strategy I have a whole tool suite for that Colin Landforce on the cut 30 team built an entire video database that gives us frameworks and trending videos and outliers and then breaks down the hook status identifies if enough of them are there for a trend I get that in an email so now my briefing time for project work is a fraction like any brand that's not leaning into that kind of stuff is that's a waste of time and no one's going to be feeling bad about it because it's working on what want to do and no one's going to see the other end. Now, when you get to the generative side of it is where it gets interesting. I did a video the other day about all these luxury collabs happening. So, Stanley Lee had a there's a collab that went ultraviral. Same thing with uh it was like Miumu and Smeg. They don't exist, just AI artists, but no one could tell.
They get reposted by the aggregator accounts and once they leave that first AI account, everyone's like, "Oh god, amazing collab." I think we've hit this point where it's like if you can tell it's AI. You'll get some negative customer sentiment, but honestly, you'll probably still do numbers. And so, it really comes down to if it actually impacts your sales. I've talked to some crisis level brands around this. We're like, "Oh my god, we got a thousand bad comments." And it's like, "Okay, did it impact revenue? Has it impact subscribers?" The answer was none. And so, it's like, "Okay, then how much hate are you willing to put up with on social media?" Which a lot of brands don't want to, but at some point, if revenue doesn't hit, maybe you'll live with. And then also, is it recognizable? That's the problem we're going to be dealing with is like everyone's going to assume every time I write anything verbose in a script people are like AI. I'm like yeah okay Gen Z do you just not hang out with people that read cuz like this is just words you know like and so I think there's this status of like people are going to try to find it but then they can't tell and that's going to gradually make it kind of shrink away. I would basically look at like don't even deal with it right now. Don't even think about having to go like I you know get some alpha using the AI content right now when in six months it's going to be so much better. I would just like avoid entirely engage in like going closer to 27. I want to talk about distribution probably at the next level a little bit more and really dive into it. But for this, I think there's a big push to saying, okay, it's annoying to try to get influencers.
And it's a lot easier for me to spin up personas based off of lookalikes that fit my target demographic, especially because the influencer doesn't have to be famous. So, I just need like volume of content on this.
Do you think that that's going to get out of hand? Has it already gotten out of hand?
>> Marketing team, especially bigger companies, agencies don't want to do work. If you are in that scenario and if you're on the team and you're like kind of close by and the work from home, like >> you are [ __ ] >> Yeah.
>> Uh because the people that do want to do work and who are now AI enabled to some of the stuff they don't want to do are like [ __ ] superpowered, right? And you look at the difference. The influencer example is what brought that up for me where it's like a lot of people want the biggest influencers, right? because they're deploying the most amount of budget in one place where they can guarantee a return because you know what sucks having to go find 10 influencers to add up to the same thing is 10x the amount of work of just contracting the one and so lazy teams will go to the biggest things and uh and that's the case for all marketing right we talked about that budget oh cool we just put together the trade show program oh that's half the marketing budget great I don't have to think about all this other stuff when the real answer is always all these micro things have to add together what's happened is people are so removed from that they don't understand the scale so back to what you asked like okay should we be hunting a big influencer, a bunch of micros basically >> or creating our own micros with AI.
>> I think creating your own micros with AI is maybe going to be effective in the ad account but won't be effective in real life. It's always going to be like the hunt down. I again I would basically throw some creative in the ad account, make a couple posts if you're kind of more on the fringe, but if you're a brand with like standards who's worried about it, [ __ ] wait till the end of the year. It's going to be so much and then evaluate because it's going to be so much significantly better and it's not good enough now unless you're really that that amazing. The meta right now is having an army. You have an army of creators, an army of UGC, an army of clippers. your media output and volume is shocking like uh like if you are a brand I know brands that are doing thousands of pieces of creative a month in tweet and that's organic and the ad account when I look at the core project we I work on at ambest where I work is seating thousands of influencers a month with seating packs and getting like 50% plus post rates like the volume of content is unfathomable even from when we started working on that project it was hundreds and we keep doubling it being like when does this end right and so I think that if you are a team that's not doing that, there has to be some culture shift or some moment where you go like oh my god there's so much more work now and there's so much more volume cuz the answer is 100% versus getting the one big influencer. It's like cool maybe they anchor a campaign so people get excited about it but you're adding on you want to have the 60 and you want to be taking those shots on goal with them because you're going to get more results then you want to be calling those down and adding the next 60 and then building out your team and that is what's going to get you the results. I worked as an IT project manager for about six years. And I think it was in 2021. I would get on these calls that I would call like, you know, $50,000 meetings. It was a Fortune 500 company.
And in this call, it was uh the VP of marketing, uh two directors of marketing, social media manager, uh VP of ops, VP of IT, and I think VP of revenue management. And >> this is why I left traditional work, but yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. And I'm over here as an IT project manager and I'm I again like you you're on teams and you have to like you have to show up for the call is what it is. The entirety of the call was on for the like the marketing department initiative was what shade of green should be the the confirm button on the like success page on a like five page flow for customer like ordering. I left but like I imagine that company's still at that kind of pace cuz like at the time I was like this is insane. People want me to join calls all the time if you do some kind of work or whatever.
It's like oh there's 18 people from the marketing team on this for the creative review.
>> It's like this is not this is not it.
It's not bias for action.
>> Who are actually the important people that should be making these decisions on these things.
>> Yeah. So creative enablement is probably the biggest thing where it's like okay if it's a button color the UX designer that is their idea and they should have some KPI around conversion rate and what they're improving or not. A choice that can be made with data or made and then measured. Leave it to whoever is doing it and make sure they have something measurable in place. That should be the rule for everything. I include social media. If you guys are running a pillar system and doing analytics every month and like all that stuff, let them post whatever it is they want and bring you the quantifiable data that you can have an opinion on every month or every week like from that. When you're having a meeting, is this a meeting where politics may help determine the outcomes? Let's bring up that creative review scenario is a good one where 13 people are on a creative review for content. Do all 13 of those people have enough of a basis in what is good content to be able to have a voice there? Absolutely not. Maybe there's two people that own content. So, what's going to happen? Someone who has a strong personality or is a strong arguer or a group of people that are lobbying for some specific thing are going to take control of the creative and then your creative is going to get [ __ ] And so, this is like this is what you have to avoid in all cases is like are these people on there going to have an opinion or can it get swayed by politics? And you can have as many decision-making meetings as you want when it's people with a genuine opinion on the thing who aren't going to get swayed by it for a result that you can't measure at a lower level. Run as many of those as possible. And if not, you got to just let it fly.
>> I think some of the best ones are like these very nimble teams where it almost feels like it's like a spitfire. Like I think again like the Mafy Jets, I'm like there's probably like one person reviewing >> and they're just running. That's the future, right? The less teams than you'd think. And then when you grow it, it is that it's that writer room mentality.
Even that's how I'm trying to treat the teams we have now where it's like we have as few calls as possible and when we do it is idea murder boarding.
Everyone puts their stuff up on the wall and all the references. What is our should we do it or should we not? Oh, I like this or I like that. And it's like there's no bad ideas. Um, and it's like and everyone needs to be positive and if like and if I say that we kill something, there's no more conversation about it. Yeah. But yeah, human collaboration should be around that, not around like anything tedious. But yeah, to your point about the $50,000 meeting, if people that don't know what that means, it's like the hourly salary of everyone on the call and then the the cost it is to the company for that meeting to exist. Like remove as much of that as possible and force them into bias for action, right? Like those people could have been hunting down the 10 new influencers for the campaign, briefing a new piece of creative, doing that thing that's being put off, presenting you the data to feedback. And the way that you get around doing that is having accountability of what people need to present, what metrics and what results and whatever to their managers and then what those managers then present to the CEO and having like a regular flow for that that's weekly or whatever that people actually read and respond to. Like that's the only framework you need.
>> Well, this is level four and I think at level four, we want to talk about marketing budgets that are over a million dollars a month. Something that's really key here is we're in the big leagues and the amount of testing and established like proof that people are good at this. Like at least the amount of money being thrown at this provides a lot of opportunity. Also a lot of room for waste. What's the most important thing if a marketing director is watching this right now and they're saying okay we have this amount of budget and we want to be on the cutting edge of this. What's the most important thing for them to factor in for this next quarter? in the previous level is where people start to you enter into the chaos theory of marketing, right? You can't measure things in the same way.
You need to enter into brand awareness.
And to get to that, this level we're talking about, you have to have had some degree of success, right? You have to have like made those things work to make that jump. And so the key thing here is now your business is bigger, more is happening. And it's like how do you not lose the momentum you have to new process, new people bringing in a bunch of MBAs or people from old orgs? Like how do you retain your edge um while the org grows? And that's a genuinely hard problem.
>> Do you think that there's some companies that are legacy that are doing it well?
>> When you look to people like Vayner Media's clients where you'll get a lot of people that will come there be like we want to stay cutting edge. We want to work with one of the more cutting edge agencies. David's a good example of someone who's done this not legacy but who's done this quick. Like I imagine they're somewhere around this this size now. They've zipped up to that level.
And it's like they are they're still hammering there in Tik Tok shop. They're still like they're doing in they're like high-end interesting campaigns. They're seating influencers. They have like Julia Fox out there. They are like they're launching more stuff. Um they they're running like a grip of paid ads.
They're one that's like gotten there really fast. I think is interesting because they're democratized across media. Like I see their ads on X. I see the stuff that hammers on Tik Tok shop.
I see like full level campaigns. I see seeding going to influencers. I'm like, "Oh, they are methodically executing every single thing in that playbook."
>> Is this a place where it's becoming essential to have a popular person associated with your brand?
>> Extremely helpful. And this is where you'll see like, you know, uh, Super Goop signed, you know, like a chief creative officer who is an influencer.
Kis, they're a candy company, I think, from Germany signed a big influencer, like comedian influencer for their launch into the US to have him be like a face of of what that looks like in cosmetics, etc. will really get you to like have that big high-end makeup artist that now represents your brand or whatever it is. So, I would look at it like this. One big face is great if you have the right person and it's perfect, but I think the team strategy is almost better where it's like what are the five or six people that really represent this brand to our different target demographics. I used to work um with a a surf company called Lift Foils and what I loved about working with them is they had the protein, the old school skateboarding pro team, but they were smart about it was like every new market like Australia was becoming a new market. They had a great surfer in Australia. They had like a pro guy who also did all the Red Bull stunts. So, he was had we had like viral stuff that came from him. They all served these different purposes. It was eight or 10 guys and I was helping manage the content and it would be a constant what are you guys making? What can we do as a collab post? Here's some ideas are working for the other guys. We need these tutorials and then I had content coming in from like eight amazing people that help me serve different levels of the scale and different regions. There is no excuse when you're in that million a month to not have that network of it that basically makes everyone's job easier. Companies stop letting creators be creative. And so like this is that place where like the marketing brief ends up becoming like really strict and specific of being like hey we need to make sure these things are on brand. We can't do this. We can do this. The bottlenecks of those things. How do you manage that from a marketing team perspective where it's like we want to work with creators but we have to also just let them be creative.
>> You know what's really interesting is I actually dealt with this on the influencer end. So um I got contracted to do a series of videos with Cash App which I was really excited about and they had and they came to me basically solving this problem. They were like look we have determined internally that we need to have more breadth in what we're allowed to do and allowed to say and be more interesting about it and we also want to be able to talk about these like kind of hard topics, right? like how Bitcoin is involved in the Cash App ecosystem or about like okay we have an AI money bot that will give you like it's not financial advice but it will give you basically like AI feedback on your portfolio or like or what you could be doing or if you moved this or or that or like you have this savings account access or this is what you spent this month and the breakdown and that can all happen in the chat and so they were like cool as a more intellectual creator I can go into some of those more like complicated concepts but they had to build a framework they had to say we're not approving these like the other ones we have a different standard of that and I think that two-tiered system I think is really important. It's like cool, we have our standard for we needs to run through legal, we need to do X or Y, but okay, if we don't want to do that, what are the parameters? Okay, we can't talk about these three things. That means no legal review, but we can't touch those.
Great. Here's these here's the standard.
Here's like where where our threshold is. And they just widen it up and then basically say, hey, a certain amount of content or a certain amount of creators or this one campaign is going to live inside the secondary set of rules. And that makes it so that everyone at least knows the goalposts.
>> Does the influencer have to have leverage in that conversation? it's more important for the team, right? Like because basically the influencer is going to their performance is often going to be how restrictive they are.
Like I get some of these briefs or they'll change the brief last second or I mean I have one for a big brand deal where I made an amazing video. They decided that didn't reflect how the company wanted to be seen and we made like a not as good video later and you're like it's demoralizing, right?
But like you will still do it. And I think that's where like it had to be internal, right? It was their internal choice not to accept the first one even though they accepted the brief. They have to come up with their standard and because the influencer is going to go try to make the best content they can.
I'm not ever trying to make a shitty ad.
I'm trying to make it the best thing humanly possible so I get more ads, right? And doesn't look bad on my feed.
And so I think it's a lot more of like how can we as a team give the guideposts that are actually realistic. And the other part is they're hiring some of these agencies. I see that in some of the briefs I get. Some of these big agencies write these briefs that are just corny. I think it's more important to have a creator or influencer that's like an adviser to the marketing team like that's uh or an adviser to the agency that's actually just knows how to make content. So you're like that doesn't work. No one's going to do that brief >> right now. They're trying to hire influencers in house and be like, "You're going to be our little, you know, you're going to be our little doll that we're going to roll out every single time we sell something." Do you think it's smarter for people to actually find creators and influencers in their niches that are successful and then say, "Hey, can you advise us to like and just pay them a return?"
>> Yeah, I think it's both. It depends what your issue is. Get creators on longer term. I'm making eight episodes. I'm making 10 episodes. I'm on your feed three or four times. It's going to work better for everybody because the repetition really helps. It actually builds brand value. And then the influencer has some like, okay, I know I'm spending a long time in this relationship. I need to make this matter. I have security around it. Like that's still critical. But if you are if you are struggling with briefs or struggling with what like if you brief well and there's no complaints and everyone likes everything and the content's good, you don't need to worry about it. But if you have you struggle with the briefs aren't good enough, creators don't like the briefs, the content that we brief doesn't perform, just get get that person you already have to advise or bring someone in to advise or make sure the agency you have is is tapped in. Are we entering a phase where creatives and creators that actually have platforms already are going to get bought entirely?
>> I'm interesting to think how that works.
I've been, you know, starter story got got by HubSpot. I'm on HubSpot Media Network. I'm like one of the creators in there. I thought about that because of that where I was like, okay, I have a newsletter that's branded separately.
Someone could buy the newsletter. We've had offers to buy it, but no one could buy my YouTube channel the way you could buy Starter Story. It's different than if it was a Patrick Wallace channel. And so I actually think that's really interesting. I think it's going to be more like athlete deals cuz even what I'm seeing now, I have year-long deals with multiple brands. That's what's going to kind of basically turn into is like, oh, I'm signed to the Clippers for 3 years, 8 million, and then like it's going to go to the next. I think that's a better way to look at it because it has to evolve. I don't think you can necessarily buy that access. But what you do see is like equity or positions or whatever that is. It's like look, I'm a creative director at a PE for there was no influencers doing that prior, but it has value for everyone involved to be able to like have partnership or have equity or do X and Y. It's going to be prolific. It honestly matters more for some of these folks to have like who Adidas did that collection with that I think it's like a Swedish girl influencer English girl more sales and more awareness than their athlete collabs, right? And so I think not only are the numbers going to get to that level u but also the importance for across the board will be like that and they're going to print they're going to announce it campaigns rollouts like treat it like a real deal.
>> What's the primary metric to track in this for a lot of these awareness campaigns for these levels? It's like you're not really looking at direct conversion. and you're looking at brand awareness and association with things that we really want for the people we really want to be associated with. So like for example, I'm thinking like normally in the podcast world like or like podcast/creator world in law form world it's like you want to see the conversion that came from that episode.
All right, sweet. This many people came from that episode. We saw that this many people use the code that was associated with this creator. I'm curious if it actually is going to pivot into like, hey, we just want this creator to be associated with us and what we're going to pay for is x amount of impressions.
>> Two metrics there. So basically you're either a um a broad creator or a targeted creator. So a broad creator is you're there to get views and you are want to be tangential to the target market or the core consumer market but it's like your job is to put up views at a acceptable CPM level that has more affinity than an ad would.
>> I think he's probably a micro influencer for them but uh Gana Meyer for Manyhat and >> his job is to put up views about ManyHat to the target demographic of Many Chat.
But then I do Many Chat videos and it's a different thing, right? I he'll probably put up more views with his editing style whatever to a wider range of people talking to creators. I am talking about many chat to brands about how to use Manyhat as a brand and having integrated that in businesses and it crushes. They don't want the same amount of views there. The metric is probably significantly different. So that's what I mean by a targeted creator. The saves and shares and intent are way more important there. So even like I'm always encouraging brands to look at that. Like I have some I do a bunch of content with Amazon doesn't put up huge views, right?
No one people trying to go see a viral video about like of the Amazon FBA changes, right? Uh but it's like okay, does that video have like 300 saves?
like that is 300 people with an intent to contribute to a change in the existing Amazon business they run because there's no other reason that you would do that. Are they happy at the cost they pay to get 300 intents on that at what those people are worth to them as a lead rate? Absolutely. And so I think that's where like the targeted metric to me is saves and shares for these really hyperimportant people.
>> Interesting. That changes the communication structure for how influencers and creators would communicate with brands. I think completely >> because like that's the biggest complaint that I hear is so many people say like oh there's not a tangible ROI to content because you're not able to directly attribute a sale from I saw this video.
>> Anyone that's thinking of that is like operating in a world that they're so like old school like it's like that's like a extremely boomer mentality. It's like meta ads boomer mentality. There's like a four levels of influencing that's really interesting is like okay cool. We have our core influencers. They appeal to our market. They're going to make sales. We can do directly measurable.
Every brand should have that just like you have your core meta marketing. Then there's like new market. If you're a cosmetics company and you want to acquire a male consumer and you come to like it's not your core, but you work with an influencer there, it's going to be less ROI, whatever, but you're hitting a new market. Then there's just like message awareness to trendsetters, the right people. I did Super Bowl campaigns last year. I did Rocket Mortgage, Super Bowl campaign last year.
They're not marketing the Rocket Mortgage campaign to the masses with that. They're marketing it to other marketers and agencies and making them an attractive person in that space to attract talent, to recruit, to attract agencies, to be the agency of record.
that people look at them differently within just the space that I occupy. And I think it's like looking at those levels of um of influence and then looking at the like like the moonshot angle of like okay can we invest in lower level stuff that might give us like a higher level of ROI. Influencer is holistic now. Influencer is not like a channel you attack on the way you do like a single meta ad, right?
>> We're kind of dancing around this and I think this is probably the key part at this phase which is distribution. That to a lot of people can mean a lot of different things. What does it make you think of? how far you take an asset, the amount of platforms and things that you are pushing to.
>> I think of quantity, but very similarly, I think of like beyond just like how far and how many platforms, it's like how much can you squeeze the life out of this?
>> Yeah, that's what I mean about the asset. That's kind of good to tap into.
So, for instance, like you made a great video with an influencer and you have rights to put it wherever. It's like, okay, do you have Tik Tok, LinkedIn, Snapchat? One thing I encourage every company to do is like if you have active people on LinkedIn, have them post your organic and influencer content on their LinkedIn be like look at this cool thing our company did. It hits a really specific demographic and like more B2B and stuff in an excellent way. Um but it's like all right, have we pushed this as far as we can? Have we tried its variance inside the ad account? Are other people talking about it? Is it on our LPs? Are we highlighting that top content inside our email marketing? Do we have segmented email marketing with the data we have and the influencers supposed to appeal to that persona is showing up in the content to that persona? If you have a good agency right now and you have that outline and you have frameworks, what I just described is not intimidating. It's just the process.
>> Are there things that you could perceive as like steroids? Because there's that cuz as soon as you talk about distribution, I think I mean Gary Vee has talked about this a lot cuz he's like, "Oh, I'm like I tested posting a lot on my main feed and then I've even caught him sometimes where his team accidentally posts on his main feed, but it was intentionally for the other account." Yeah, >> it was either for the other account, it was for trial or something like that and he's like, "Oh, I'm like it was like an accidental thing and then they deleted all of them." So I saw him post like 12 times.
>> The script accelerates. This is something we did when I was um uh still working at Jailblasters is we were doing FPV content. You could see people's hands with playing with the blasters.
And that content is then repurposable in any number of languages. And we had a far bigger Spanish speaking Tik Tok account than we had US because there was a lack of Spanish speaking content at the time. And so the creator was making these and we're doing the English voiceover version, the Spanish voiceover version. And then it's the same thing as we do in beauty now where it's like if there's a banging script then you break it down by look. It's like oh we actually need someone with dark skin. We need a younger person. We need a person with skin issues. We need a person with whatever. All your TAM is based on the language, the look, the whatever. And so if you have a [ __ ] winner, your job is to multiply that. It's the same way the Tik Tok shop creator like WhatsApp groups and Discords will then share the winning video so the other creators can like replicate the winning video. But especially if they look different, have a different style. And so concepts burn these concepts to the ground, right?
Until they [ __ ] stop generating money.
>> When you say FPV, do you mean like first person? So in that same sense it's like it's like a meta glasses kind of.
>> Yeah, exactly. So we we were shooting with the neck iPhone rig. They're playing the game like the the game we're promoting and and it's just a hands content and that was like the core of it. Someone picks it up or they unbox it or do they do it? It's almost like a video game >> with a with a voice overlay or >> Exactly. One of my uh go-to techniques you if you go look back at every brand I've worked with or if you start to wonder if I worked with a brand then you see this you'll know is like is it the under the inaction tutorial? So like a good example of that at gel blaster is like people are firing little gel blasters at each other and then they're explaining to you this is how you do this function or reload like while the game is going on right we did this with uh the surf brand where the guy was on the wake uh he was he was wake foiling and he's explaining how to wake foil while he's on the foil and then he's got the mic on he's over the water and like that's such a compelling uh format to be like okay it's not just I sit down and tell you how to do it it's I'm doing it while the thing's in action or there's like some other variable is like such a great way to make a product tutorial hit. I think I saw a variation of this where it's like someone it's a it's a guy that's like he's skateboarding or longboarding down like a long thing and it looks like he's about to crash and but his tone and his voice is like so calm.
>> But even if you're like hey if I'm explaining if I'm telling you about the new Pirelli tire Yeah.
>> and I'm I'm standing in front of the car. Cool. If I'm telling you about the new Pirelli tire and I'm driving at 90 miles an hour that says a completely different thing. That's the same with basically any level of product, right?
Like even if you're selling a supplement and it's like cool in between like I'm on the bench like in between sets being like this has helped me get my eight rep max up. It's just inherently more interesting watch.
>> A lot of those types of styles can be awesome for brands that don't care about having a personal brand at this scale.
Do you think it's important for some level of founder to be present in most of the content?
>> No, I think that uh all that matters is that there are faces. You want faces associated with your brand. It's going to help you reach more people. It help you develop affinity. Does not have to be the founders. Doesn't really matter who they are. The easiest way is to get influencers in the space. Like I mentioned, someone really credible. The more successful you get, the more likely your founder is a psycho and you probably shouldn't put them on camera.
I'm just saying like it is what it is.
And the stakes get too high.
>> The other thing I want to ask you on this is Mr. Beast was talking about how all of his best short form content doesn't include any communication because the Tam is larger. The Tam is larger.
>> Yeah, TAM's the whole whole thing. If you have a truly >> widespread product, like you need to be able to watch it without any voiceover, any communication, have it still like appeal to anybody, right? I'll never have I don't have any content that you could just watch and it would have the same appeal. So my TAM will never be Mr. Beast. That's totally fine. But I would basically think I look at rules like that are only useful like if you're selling brownies, if you're selling water, if you're selling like whatever, think of content like that and that TAM.
But if you have a if you are selling anything that requires like intellectual end of it, it's a very different game, right? Because then you want to be able to use your intelligence to build brand affinity.
>> We're at that point where it's like I mean money doesn't feel like very important in this. we can kind of throw money at whatever. We can test whatever.
What is the core team and what types of campaigns like what budgets should they be setting for some of the aggressive campaigns they're wanting to do?
>> I mean, this is like nuanced by business and nuanced like by size. But this is where you usually end up with like you have your core team and then you have like special projects. And this is what you'll see now in terms of recruiting is it's no longer we have the social team.
It's like we have our social team and then we have like our head of Twitter or head of whatever. And so this is about like you get an expert in to run this thing you're going to do >> head of content kind of situation.
>> Yeah. But also, but that now it's like even by network, right? Like you don't go get your head of social isn't now going to go own Twitch, right? You probably need to get a Twitch person, right? So there's a lot of that happening whether it's contractor, regular to get like this person to help >> validate changing director of marketing like is the director of marketing being pivoted by >> the director of marketing is changing a lot where it's like okay that person is kind of either a director of content and social uh or they are a also the creative director and they're across everything and ads and all that and they're like briefing and it's like way more tactical than it used to be and it's a hard job because the VP and CMO is so now most likely disconnected from how everything works and are lost and can't report and describe the same things. So you end up with these like director level max roles. They have all this responsibility that then usually end up leaving because as you know we can all make way more money in this like in this alternative world. And so it's like a really hard gap in this. And so the savvy people are uh and if I'm a CMO and I know I don't know my answers to this your answer is like okay you get your hitter your director of marketing whatever they're more tactical than ever and they are either a head of content or they are like basically a creative director where they're basically influencing how good everything is inside your org. uh because it's no longer ability to be a glorified product project manager role, right? Like that can't exist in this new world. And if you're like, we're doing a new initiative and that person doesn't have the bandwidth or the understanding to do it. Like we want to go conquer X and that person doesn't know it, then you hire a specialist for X. Describe this person to me because I think there's a lot of people that are like they're looking for what they perceive as a unicorn. They have to have uh a breath of experience and be a subject matter expert on a bunch of different things.
Likely they don't have any proof, though.
>> Everyone's looking for I don't need a social media manager. People used to want to hire social media managers. I need someone who can do the social media strategy and they can then hire the creators, hire the social media, hire the whatever. But like if you really understand social to that level, either you are have been in the game for years in the trenches and are probably director of marketing, VP of marketing because you moved up in your career or you are also a creator in which case you probably make a lot of money. And so you end up with these like okay we need a creative strategy have to have spent all this money done all this. Creative strategies is like a before creative director basically is what's turned into where it's no longer I write this copy or do X or Y. It's like I either brief and help organize organic or I brief and help organize paid or I do both. And then when you can do that on a campaign level, that's when you're in like basically entering into and you facilitate everything and you have the ideas, you can think ahead. You can enter into CD territory. But yeah, the uh the the job for that is so hard to do. It's part of why we designed this thing we have now where it's like cool, let me train you on everything you're missing. Okay, do you know a few of those, but you don't know email marketing or you don't have X in your portfolio. Can we do have you give you some assignments and some feedback and some ongoing to do? Like that's the gap and like it's a gap. so big I was like I'm selling into that gap like actively right now because you just see where that is. Um look and that's the hardest part is marketers now understand because you're so tied to the money what your skill set means. If you're a good media buyer and you can also craft some ads you have a few relationships you're like okay wait I can do the math like 2x rows we're spending x amount a month like that's x amount of profit. Okay if I just had five grand in 6 months I could do and then all of a sudden they don't work anymore.
>> We're separating two different things.
There's a tactician and then there's a strategist. Does that person have to do the same thing to do this role?
>> No you have a creative skill set and you bolt those things on top. top creative strategist. If you bowl those things on top and you have a network and you've done experience, now how you can be a creative director.
>> What's a personality trait that's going to be consistent in the killers?
>> They are creative people that have found a way to organize. You have all these creative people that uh they don't have process. They don't want have whatever.
But >> cortex is is pretty is pretty cooked.
>> You're Yeah. Yeah. Say so like basically it's like okay I can go I can do these things or I'm good at this whatever or I love to be a video editor. And then there's the people that are like this is my reporting framework and this is my three spreadsheets and I have a list of all the influencers I've ever worked with. As soon as you get that person no matter what level they're at, you're just like put them in it. If they have any degree of creativity and they've learned to organize like that, you do it.
>> What's the budget range for this?
>> All the offers we're seeing is like 120 low. It's like 152 plus. It's so funny to have like a role that's like not necessarily it's not full leadership that's like in this, right? And people are look info product people are hiring for that. Creators I know are hiring for that. They need those people to support them as influence. Like it's so in demand. And when you were asking about what how do you attract that when they know they can go make their own money and really it is like are we doing creatively interesting things with other interesting people that are really that can really blow up like every creative wants to work on that environment. when I go work on a project now, it's because I'm like this is sick with sick people and it's going to get like farreach and we're not have a bunch of constraints.
And as soon as any of those things aren't true, it's like goodbye, right?
Yeah. And then the other part is like unlocking real levels of money, right?
Like we we were spiffing a strategist the other the organic strategist on if the organic post would also scale on paid, like giving them like a big carrot on the other end while they were learning paid. That role is worth a lot if it's actually generating rev. >> Do you think that you're going to see a lot of people arrogantly think that they can do it by themselves? And how do you separate that gap between someone identifying I can do this by myself in an agency format or a freelancer format.
>> I don't think a lot of people will sign up for it cuz it's hard. I don't think people that are unequipped to do that strategy role will try to hop into it because like oh now all of a sudden oh yeah give feedback to the media buyer and they're like [ __ ] >> it might be a question where like I'm in my moat where like I know a bunch of heads of content of people and I'm like it seems like this like very attainable type of thing.
>> You have to perform. That's the biggest thing is like you need to be confident enough in your ideas. And that's why so many of these people have ended up being creators is like that was my biggest thing once I started making content while I still worked and I was SVP of marketing was like oh like I know I can tell you 100% for [ __ ] sure that's a bad hook or not. And I didn't have that uh conviction before and it only comes from making it you know and then all once you have that then you're like oh I have complete confidence in anything social related and if you and then you start doing it on a second network and then all of a sudden you're like of course I can crack Twitch. What we're talking about here is like there's a certain level of I say arrogance I think it's confidence but like it comes across sometimes in the wrong people as arrogance. creative people. There's these issues with creative people as a whole, right? Where creative people aren't confident. They don't want to be confident in their work. Afraid to post on social media. Insecurity is rampant inside creative people. And then the most loudest are often the most insecure, right? Uh and then you get this idea that creatives also are afraid of money. They have been taught for so long that if you monetize your art, you you sell out, right? And so that's one in their heads. And then the agency infrastructure has manipulated and taken advantage of those people for decades and put them in their place and said, "Yeah, you deserve 68k a year as a junior copywriter. We're going to lay you off first or as an art director who does whatever." And uh and then they've been locked into this when right now at this moment in time that is the most rewarding job is if you have a creative who can make stuff move on the internet at the same time. you are worth significantly more than likely your boss or your boss's boss and but you're too timid to go about it and it's a there's a cultural dissonance there and it only gets solved at least for the people I've met from having like enough ego to put your stuff on the internet and then getting success from that and then realizing how much people get paid because you're talking to other influencers and then you're like [ __ ] and then you do it and there's only so many people that make that jump.
>> I want to make this podcast something that's attractive to companies. I really want to but because like and I don't even know how to broach that conversation because at the same time it's like at what level am I focused on the CPM of what's valuable on what level am I thinking about the distribution of like people have already used my content like clips from this content is ads right so it's like that's already happened I don't know how to answer that negotiation because my focus is like >> views has been awesome yeah even that well look at TVPN's a perfect example right where people are talking about oh every ad spots's a million dollars and they only and people are talking [ __ ] they only get 5,000 listeners it's like yeah who are the people what is the decision level and then what is the average deal size what's a ramp ramp a customer worth to ramp a lot. Some of the people are always wondering about certain ad deals I do and I'm like look some of these SAS companies if it's a you know if their first year AOV is 10 grand and it's software like like the the financial implications are like very different like their cost per leads are so much higher than anything else and so it's just about like really like do you speak to that audience that appeals to it and can you articulate that and TBPN articulates it in purely in the like you can see it in the talent of who's interacting with it right and then X is a great network for that it's harder to see on the other networks >> last part of this section What are some companies or brand pages that you think are really at the top level that everybody should be looking at?
>> Bad Ombres is a great one. They're a food brand, like a burrito brand. Uh they're like a smaller business, but they've just done a great job of like the narrative of their business. They have the story of the founders. They have the story of the things they do.
They were up for an award in Phoenix, like where they're based, but they tell every story in video, and they tell every story in carousel, and they reiterate it on their stories, and you feel like this narrative you've belonged with of how the brand has grown. They're a really good example of like a small business that does not have a lot of money that is doing it excellently by being like content first. Fotic, they're a perfume brand where the founder is like extremely active on it. He has this like set in like his area and he's breaking down his preferences. He talks about I don't buy this type of perfume bottle. Here's my favorite fragrances and how he develops and debuting the new stuff like centered around one personality. Another good like they probably don't have a team. It's like a person. Belmont is interesting.
Belmont's hospitality. Hospitality is notoriously bad at social media. Um, Belb's done a good job at embracing like the carousel trend um at embracing like making creative around their experiences they have and they really elevated the experience. I've seen AI content from them um that's been solid. They they're doing like little vignettes and again no text, no overlays, just that visual style. That's a good example of like a trad luxury hospitality company that's uh doing an excellent job. Burger, like I mentioned before, they do a good job being being on trend. Shien has a makeup brand called She Glam. Their content is incredible. the production value, the level of quality, how they choose to do it, the sound and audio editing. Gizu is another good one in the cosmetic space.
They have uh influencer like kind of celebrity founder and but they are just doing the way they do their event recaps, the way they do their collabs.
They do these big food collabs very Mr. Beasty where they're like they collab with the big celebrity chef. They have these huge kind of displays and they're moving all the content fast and they're like huge piles of vanilla and you're like it's so perfectly built for the internet. But I just also appreciate the little things like their event recap videos are just edited immaculately and like that's that's another good one. Uh Sunny's is a smaller they're a Filipino uh or Philippines based cosmetic brand and they have like a sunglass brand and stuff as well. They have like kind of pretty elevated like mid-tier brand content.
>> Ideally you have someone in your marketing department that is chronically online or at least intentionally online, right? but more likely chronically online. And usually they're able to identify within the niche of their interests. This creator is going to be popping off. Like usually you have someone that's like, okay, they have a good gut and they see someone that has like under 20k followers and you're like, the odds the mathematical odds of this person is going to get to 100 is high. I had that recently with someone that launches a brand new account and I could just tell this person it was he was golfing with his wife or something like that and he was >> Yeah. You're like this is going to go >> insanely creative. just like in insanely creative challenges like and then being like day one of this and always doing like 10day challenges and you like whatever it is making it seem impossible but like just really funny.
>> How quick should a company be to say like dude I want them >> and get on it and like and be like either to give them a really simple structure or be like what's your dream scenario you when you get to 100K what would the sponsor that have helped you get there get there? I'm doing like upfronts now the way people do TV where like I'm pitching the content to my sponsors like far and ahead of time.
It's like yeah I'm going to Japan and X and we're going to do this content. You interested? And I think uh brands should be looking at their creators they do work with that are good like that too.
Be like hey you think about doing YouTube or what's what's coming up new for you that we can get involved with early? Like I still have like one of my YouTube sponsors was there since day one. I've never even asked them to up the rate.
>> Yeah.
>> Like they're still paying like a fraction of the others because they were there when I didn't have anything and like sick. And so I think there's like a lot of that to to worth looking at. The upside is is the juice, right? Like get anyone that you think is going to have that upside performance, you can get in ahead of time. Like that is the win. And look, you're seeing big brands doing it.
Chanel's doing it.
>> I'm right here.
>> Yeah, Grant's right there. Uh but it's funny like like even Louis Vuitton, Chanel, all these luxury brands are doing the same thing now. They're they're getting these celebs like who is it? Uh I I don't know my movie stars as well, so I was learning this from my wife, but it was like they're getting these actors that are like new.
>> It's no longer interesting to have Timothy Shalom. We want to get like the person that's going to be >> well and they'll have both like Louis Vuitton has Zinda and then they have uh like I think it's like Chase infinity or one of these like new wave and it's like oh that did not happen before and it's like make the bet and like have the star, right?
>> That's a good transition point to it's level five where it's this unlimited budget. Uh you're doing crazy marketing campaigns. You're getting insanely highlevel people to come in and just do it for that one commercial. you're saying, "I want this creator to run this whole thing and do a specific project and they're going to give him infinite amount of money just to be able to do that." Who is doing that well and who is doing that bad?
>> Claude is the best example of doing it well. Uh, and this is the truly like I'm sure the budget's unlimited, >> but also the TAM is unlimited. Yeah. And it's new and they're just hammering it.
When I'm doing like a workshop in this level or whatever, like the challenge that people are going on is like everyone thinks why doesn't why aren't these brands do this hip new thing? Why aren't they involved in X and Y? And it's like to do an initiative at a brand at at that size, you basically uh you have to have scale. It has to be able to scale into some huge TAM. Doing something small is almost like a waste of time or they're or because it's going to require so many people have to be involved at a brand that's in the billions of dollars to be able to like do anything and so many layers of whatever that like it's almost not worth it. I love the Cloud example because they are doing a few things well versus the scale of the campaigns they can do.
So Cloud does influencer marketing. I did one of the early it's one of the first ones when they started influencer.
I I did that and they scaled into um like the Instagram giries angle hard.
All these female creative like really smart making really great content more intellectual. They basically sponsored all of them. It looks like they were like oh this kind of works. We got 10 or 11 of these. They still sponsor other creators but they went and they just dominated that TAM.
>> Yeah.
>> They said oh this audience is converting for us. We're reaching someone who's not like we're reaching like a way our competitors aren't and it works and we can now get hundreds of creators. Like I've seen so many in that campaign now it's a great example of like we did influence we found a niche our competitors aren't in scaled it and now you're kind of seeing the same and like it's like not like you're doing 100 initiatives it's like that is an initiative that is hammering and they're run paid behind it etc. But also they're doing monoculture and these are the two things worth to think about at that level like if you are functioning is like what can we of these what are these new things we're doing streaming influence can we just really scale can we just do use our size to operate at the level other people can't and then there's the monoculture aspect like cloud launching the keep thinking campaign on mass television the way Apple would used to launch an ad so it has all this conversation around it and then following up with another highle concept at the super bowl what are those moments we still have left which is really Olympics Super Bowl, Black Friday, like maybe Valentine's Day, like maybe some huge thing happens. There's only so many monoculture left, but you have to participate in it. That value, I think, is now undervalued. Getting a Super Bowl ad that everyone talks about and also having a whole rollout campaign like Carl's Jr., Alex Earl. I love the Carl Junior, Alex Earl, cuz she was overposting her like her boyfriend at the time was posting the behind the scenes. They were ripping so many posts cuz it was big for her. And you're like, cool. I bet a bunch of that wasn't even paid. I bet that's just like she's trying to make the most of the moment.
they're making the most of the moment.
It's a multi-prong campaign and like like there is it's actually underrated uh attention even at that high million cost for how being able to actually like get into the culture. And so I think like that's where those brands really focus. It's like yeah, can we be the brand at Coachella? Can we scale into influence and do a huge like we're not going to get six marketing creators.
We're going to get every marketing creator and we're going to do it every month and like you're just like that's where I think the thinking needs to be there.
>> How much do you think Mr. Beast changed culture in this in this game?
I don't know.
>> Think about all the like he had what he just did Salesforce and Slack and then before that he was running Shopify. He was one of the first creators to be like, "We're going to hand you a million bucks or 500,000 bucks just to be in one video."
>> Yeah. But I think it's also like he's just a celebrity. That's like the way they would use Tom Cruz. It's almost like bad to me. Like I don't want to give Mr. Beast 5 million bucks to be in my Shopify ad. I want Mr. Beast to make the most viral piece of content that we've ever [ __ ] seen that like has our brand in it. I So I think it's like almost like an oddball usage. She's just basically crossed over to being utilized like a celebrity. And I almost don't think that's right.
>> You think it's more intentional for like, you know, like Adobe Creative to be sponsoring Colin and Samir? Like that's a more >> Exactly. And then if you're a brand of Adobe size, which is what they do, um, get everybody, right? As many people as you can. That is a scale game. We want all of them. You want to be able to enable them to do good creative. And then can you tie that to some big campaign or some overarching idea? And how do you optimize all the stages of that funnel? It's funny how much brands at that scale lose of the more traditional marketing process. like what's the LP, is there a download, can we get email metrics from this, the email campaign work over time, they often just lose that to the core like we just need to promote at this high scale.
And I feel like if you're able to execute some of that monoculture and you're able to have like the economics of uh like the funnel that comes from that, you are uh you can operate at the really really really interesting level.
Now, >> how do you not come across like all of the gambling ads? The gorilla marketing for gambling is insane right now.
>> No one's enforcing the rules on anything. So, how where do you want to operate in that? Yeah, like the gambling part and again that's just eyeballs.
They're just like they are just saying what are cheap eyeballs, what are expensive eyeballs and if you have the budgets to do it, you can think like that. We did an audit on a massive company. I'm not even going to get any detail on it, but it was about the marketing spend and you're just like, oh, it's just lost in the sauce, right?
And without any quantifiable metric and uh and like let's use uh let's use Salesforce as an example. Salesforce runs all these huge Super Bowl ads. They roll these influencer campaigns, but it's not going to a to a funnel. It's like they ran that whole thing with Matthew McConnA about like agents.
>> Yeah. that and like I don't know Woody Harelson was in there and they're like we're just going to get this.
>> But guess what? If that same campaign which made no sense was like get the ebook that explains agents at salesforce.com/x and they have an email value per lead.
They just treated it like a traditional funnel which they should understand more than anything. And then you actually got say a couple hundred thousand business owners to understand what agents are because they got the free course or the ebook and they just treated it like some more direct response marketing. a a a brand who sells that kind of thing, activating at that level, just attaching it back to the funnel. So, you're both getting the brand awareness you're already getting and you're actually getting it you're getting people into a flow and their whole marketing team. You could have look a 100 people could work on that honestly like at an or that size and it would probably be ultra effective. And I feel like that's where this gap is like getting reached is like you can no longer kind of operate in that pure awareness like claw is doing this. These are campaigns. Those are UTM links. Like it's like they're functioning at that scale in an incredible way. What's really interesting this is once you get to the point where you're doing commercials, there's not really a value to the commercials anymore. Especially for some of these SAS companies, it's not about being nimble. It's like you can hit more people by just hitting the other platforms. It just needs to be very campaigncentric. It's like, okay, instead of just putting up some weird ad, god, I saw an ad. It was for Waterlue. Uh I was on streaming the other day. It was just terrible. It's like whatever agency they had should just get asked immediately. It was like people were dancing or whatever. It's like no, like that's not how like what is the campaign? What is the overarching thing that Waterloo is trying to do to position themselves against the Croy or whatever? Oh, we're a Texas brand or whatever they want to do. And then it's like how do we then express that across all these mediums and because the campaign is getting like it's it's a onepus 1 equals 3 scenario. We're resonating on influencer. We have all these ads going out. Okay, now it's on streaming television. Oh, it matches our um our aisle interrupterss at retail.
The little standouts you have when you walk, they have like a little graphic like and all of that ties together to create a moment that gets a message across like that. This is the best time ever. And I use that Carl Jr. campaign or the claw campaigns as an example of this to then add on all these these things they have add up to this overarching idea that can permeate consciousness of of their consumer.
>> I want to get tactical and and have people see how your brain works in this.
Is there a big company that you would love to work for?
>> Yeah, Mercedes. Let's go.
>> Mercedes. Okay. So, say that you came into the Mercedes department and they said, "All right, Orin, we're going to give you this unlimited budget. You can do whatever you want and our goal is broad awareness." What would you do?
What's the first step based on the personas? What insight can we get either a consumer painoint or a thing happening in culture etc that is interesting enough and big enough that we could anchor a campaign to like we need an idea and I think uh and maybe it's a handful or whatever but we need that like clause like the keep thinking idea where it's like not necessarily the best idea but an idea and it's based in a consumer fear oh we're going to lose our creativity because of AI. like that has a thought through concept that anchors the core of their marketing and how they approach influencers. So, we need that insight. And I don't know if I can brainstorm that insight that fast, but it's like, you know, the uh we were marketing the mini Gwagon or whatever. And it's like there's there's something around how people are perceived or or culture or the Instagram ability or whatever. It's like, okay, we have some core insight there about, you know, the lifestyle uh that sells the thing that we want to sell. And then it's you then it's like okay we have that insight then it's like what uh what avenues are we going under like okay we need we have our core campaign on our social we have this really optimized video we have the photo shoots that come from we have all the assets that roll out we have the teaser that comes in front of it we have the unveil of the actual campaign we have how we promote that campaign after okay then what are anchor influencers we could have involved that actually be in the content of the ads and help multiply it and tell that backstory to the Alex Earl point then what are the influencers that we have that then multiply the campaign once it's live And then what does it look like if it's successful and it hits our metrics? And what are those metrics?
How hard can we push the gas pedal on it? Okay, we can we do 5,000 influencers with like this this type of brief and if it doesn't hit the metrics, we don't do it. If it does, we do. And then like what does like the TV spot look like from there? And then what are like the international like variations on it? And how wide can it go across? Like when we go down all these pieces like all right, does this also make sense on TikTok?
Does this make sense on streaming? Like what's the X? What are all the places we advertise or want to? And like how deep can we go? And what are the metrics that unlock the next stages of it? And like that's basically how any major campaign would get built.
>> Maybe Shelby sat buying Mercedes like a G Wagon was like >> up.
>> No, but like maybe that did more for Mercedes than it did for her. And I'm thinking, okay, well, so if I'm a this massive brand, this like this margin like this massive thing and a smaller like influencer did this, but got a lot of culture attached attaching to it.
Yeah, there's brands do this very well.
Like I think what was the one uh Stanley where the girl's house burned down all the ride was a Stanley and then like they like the CEO responded and they like hopped onto that but the Shelby Sap one maybe a bad example cuz I don't know if Mercedes would want to be associated with it but say that it was like slightly more >> it wasn't a make money online influencer and did the same thing and it was just as popular like you have to ask yourself as CMO orever's in charge or whatever level be like okay how big does this resonance go back to the point we had earlier is this does this only appeal to like a certain level of internet culture it only goes so far it's probably not worth our time >> you don't think that the the tribaless of it actually expands >> at that level. See, at every level of the four up until this one potentially, but then when you're at this level, it's like, okay, you need >> mass market. You need every single person, >> every single basically like that's how you start to make decisions. That's I think what people don't understand is like, oh, we could just do a thousand of these moments. And it's like, can you like I've just not set up to be able to review and work through those and be worth the time. In the perfect world, yes, we're going to activate every one of those moments. We actually we built a framework that anytime that there's a viral Mercedes moment, we now have an infrastructure to plug that into. That is an example of being able to take advantage. Like say Mercedes did the influencer Mercedes campaign. Like every time an influencer buys a Mercedes or buys a Gwagon and gets some level of virality, they're like, "Oh, actually we're going to build around this. We're going to go send them this custom package and we're going to launch this ad campaign and we pay X and then we're going to have like the Mercedes team's going to show up and do X and Y and we're going to do it a hundred times with every influencer." That becomes useful versus we're just activating Shelby Sap. Now again, if it's Nara Smith, that's different.
>> At that level though, is it like is your thought process? How fast did it go to like, okay, you're going to do a car podcast where you have a personality doing it and then you're going to go get all those influencers and then interview them just within the Mercedes.
>> At that level comes down to like do you have the talent that can execute that at that level, right? Like if I have someone if they have you and you're like, "Oh, I know how I'm going to make sure every one of those clips is viral."
Great. But if like if you're like we're not that good at that and we don't know if those clips are going to hit like >> you have unlimited budget. That's that's the thought process.
>> Yeah. you have unlimited budget, but you don't have unlimited time and then what does it do for Mercedes if they like launch a podcast and all has 900 views or it's all like sponsored and paid?
It's like there has to be some level of like we have a comfortability like on this or it works with everything else, right? And could that be one element of that influencer campaign like yeah, we get them on the podcast. I did a campaign for car gurus which I love doing. They were like I was literally they're like pick cars from car gurus and like talk about like why you buy them and using their the feed the functionality and YouTube content for car guys, right? Where like that's a perfect they got the right people, built the right team. Mercedes could totally do that. Um, but it's just like having that confidence in the team members to build that together.
>> The very last thing I want to cover, what would you say are the things we overemphasize when it comes to content marketing, >> being on brand, always having to have the product front and center. Like this is a storytelling world. And uh, and it needs to be fluid. And if you're trying to live by any old standards, you're like, you're going to lose to a team with bias for action who doesn't have those same standards to have to sit with.
>> What's underemphasized?
>> The size and scale with which you can operate at. even small. How many accounts, how many angles, how many pieces of creative, how many things go in the ad account, how many influencers, how many creators, the scale you can really operate at even when you're a smaller team is absolutely staggering if you just lean into it. And if you like need if you want to like go down the rabbit hole on that, like go to any brand that's really scaling on Tik Tok shop and look at how many they'll have 3,000 affiliates, 5,000 affiliates every month and they're communicating with them and they're operating it and they'll have multiple channels and you're just and you'll go, "Oh, how big is the team?" and it's like three people and you're like, "Oh, this is like we're in this new era that people can't even wrap their heads around cuz the scale is so much bigger than what everyone's been doing for years."
>> And do you think that people settle for like one creative a day when they should be going for like four creatives a day?
>> It depends on if your one creative isn't even good.
>> It doesn't matter. But I think people who are making good stuff, you probably could have 5x the velocity without if you were just taking it that ser if like that was the priority. But but I think it's a waste to think about scale before you're good. Orin, I just want to say I appreciate you. Your wisdom in this is like evident. It's like something I love about you is like, dude, you're you're so ADHD. It's comes through in all of your communication and it's so obvious, but it's at the same time I think like this is the type of marketing brain that's required in order to innovate.
And I think that's like that's why you're at the top of where you're at is because like your awareness not only to take stuff in. We didn't even really get into your organizational process, but if other people want to watch other people pieces of your content where you talk about how you've organized or other podcasts we talk about how you've organized your your structure of the day to make sure you're receiving all the stuff you need to receive to make good decisions. It's obviously live and breathe this. That's the thing that's required from every marketing department. So, I just want to encourage like any person that's in any any level of marketing whatsoever to you're clicking on this video probably because you already know of him, but deep dive because the gap of your awareness of how fast things are changing, Orin can help like dramatically like bridge so that you're able to kind of come through it and say, "Yes, I understand what's happening and at least I understand what happened 40 days ago and how that's going to impact what's going to happen 2 months from I just really appreciate your wisdom in this.
I've I've learned a lot and I think >> it was it was good to chat and look uh we we just switched the table at some point. I interrogate you about the podcast scaling, but we'll get there.
>> Sounds good. Sounds good.
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