On this episode, we have not just 1 elite marketer but 2 elite marketers with deep expertise in advertising in the Meta advertising platform and they’re here to shed light on what’s working now. It’s a great episode you don’t want to miss if you’re selling direct-to-consumer and you’re looking to scale through performance marketing.

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On this episode of the 2X eCommerce podcast, we have the pleasure of welcoming two accomplished experts in the field of media buying at scale for 8 to 9-figure brands primarily on the Meta platform, Blake Pinsker and Torii Rowe. With a wealth of experience under their belts, they have worked with renowned brands like MVMT Watches, Cuts, Liquid IV, Manscaped, and Manssion Jewelry. Their expertise and insights have propelled these brands to new heights in the ever-evolving world of eCommerce.

When I was pre-recording this episode with Blake and Torii, they mentioned something that stuck with me, which was that they want to burst the myth that Meta ads do not work. They went further on to say that the reason is social advertising and media buying will not or may not be working are down to two main reasons. The first is there is probably an inadequate product market fit and the second is marketers are losing a lot of event data, up to 80%, on a Meta advertising platform, which they seem to solve.

Why should you read this episode? First, you’re going to get into some secrets of powerhouse brands. They share insights into strategies and success stories in top brands, particularly MVMT Watches. They speak a bit about Cuts and Manscaped. The MVNT Watches insights are quite insightful. Second, you’re going to understand the importance of crafting brand Bibles for creative excellence. We speak strongly about the need to have brand Bibles that dictate the creatives you put out on social media or social advertising.

Third is mastering the art of creative. We delve into the winning formulas on how to create captivating ad content and how they test compelling hooks, messages, and copy points in direct response advertising. We also talk about their app stack and their view on the must-have tools and technologies in social media buying now, particularly on the Meta platform.

Finally, which is the most important, you’re going to decode what’s working, staying up to date with the latest trends and strategies that are driving results at scale for the brands that they work with. They gave a lot of insights. If you’re looking to essentially get a scoop on how to go about smarter media buying on Meta, then pay attention. Without further ado, let’s get started.

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Blake and Torii, welcome to the 2X eCommerce Podcast.

Nice to meet you.

I’ve been looking forward to this one. I read both of your resumes and I was like, “We haven’t done media buying, particularly a paid social episode in a long time, and here’s the reason why we need to do it right now.” A pleasure having you both. Where are you each dialing in from?

I’m in Denver, Colorado.

I’m in New York.

Blake, please give me your Genesis story and how it connects to what you’re doing now. Connect the dots as far back or as near as you can. I’d like to get some context as to who you are.

I’ll give you a brief overview of my journey. Back in college, I became insanely passionate about consumer behavior, marketing, and branding, and that was around the start of the eCommerce wave. I tried to start a few companies, failed miserably, pre-Facebook ads, and pre-influencer marketing. I decided to get a real job in real estate. In real estate, I quickly discovered that I didn’t care about doing real estate because I was more passionate about marketing.

I started working on the side for a little-known company called MVNT right after they had crowdfunded. I was the first employee at a company called MVMT. Right place, right time, MVMT caught that eCommerce tidal wave. My sole responsibilities there were mainly running social media. Also, when I came in, the first thing I did was build the brand identity and content strategy for MVMT. Once we started to tinker with paid ads on Facebook, our lives changed forever.

We became an early advertiser on Facebook. On some of our biggest days, we were spending upwards of $3 million on paid ads on a variety of channels. It was a crazy time. We learned the ins and outs. We learned what works and what doesn’t on everything from Facebook. We built a huge influencer marketing channel. We were working with thousands of influencers a year. We scaled TV,. We were running Google ads. TikTok wasn’t around yet but we were starting to dive into that once TikTok did come out.

The backbone of the business was Meta ads. We scaled the company from 0 to $100 million in five years, which went by in the blink of an eye. Around that time, I wanted to share what we learned with other people that I knew. I went to college with the founder of Cuts Clothing, my good friend Steven. I started to work with him and advise him at an early stage. Cuts turn into a huge success story. We’re also close with other brands such as Liquid IV, Manscaped, and Truff.

We saw those brands start to blow up following the same playbook and the same strategies. After we’d sold the company, I decided my next move was to take that playbook and rinse and repeat what we did at MVMT. Now, we’re working with startups anywhere from people who are starting to eight-figure brands that we’re trying to get to nine-figures now. Our main core competencies at DREAMLABS are paid ads. We do media buying for all paid social channels and then also do creative.

Torii, please go for it.

I’m the exact opposite of Blake. Blake was making $100 million companies and I was fighting crime as a police officer for four and a half years. I was a police officer in Arizona for four and a half years. After a few years, I realized I didn’t have the passion to do this for 30 years. A long time wasn’t for me. I wanted to keep expanding, learning, and things like that. My best friend and I, in 2017, ended up founding a company called Manssion, a men’s premium jewelry. We took that company to 0 to 8 figures in three years.

Along the way, we needed someone to run social media ads and we didn’t have anyone to do that, it was quite expensive. Quitting my job as a police officer, we didn’t have a bunch of money. We were bootstrapped there. I put myself back in college and went to YouTube University and ended up watching YouTube videos every day trying to figure out how to do this from some of the top guys out there.

I started looking for jobs on Indeed. I was looking on Indeed before remote work was remote. I started reaching out to people who needed media buyers and I’d say, “I’ll do this for 30% of the cost if I can do it from Denver, Colorado.” A lot of people were like, “We’ll take it.” It gave me the opportunity to jump into other companies and learn using their dollars while I was getting paid to figure out how to build our brand. Along that way, I met Blake as we needed someone to do creative for Manssion. Blake’s name was the guy who kept popping up, “You got to talk to this guy. You got to talk to him.” I was like, “All right.” We started working with Blake.

Along that way, Blake had a media buyer who was doing our media buying at the time. Blake was like, “You’re one of the best media buyers I know. I’m going to be honest, you’re probably better than the guy who’s running your ads. You should probably run these ads.” I was like, “I appreciate that.” It saved me some dollars so I started running ads. Since then, I’ve ran ads for some of the largest companies in the world, ADT, Clover, and some of the largest solar companies in the world, largest credit card processing companies. I’ve spent close to $500 million on Meta. Now I’m the Head of Growth over here at DREAMLABS.

Illustrious backstories and an experience. Torii, you handle media buying, that structure, and then Blake, you’re the brand guy.

I’m a brand guy at heart. Don’t get me wrong, I love brand. I built the MVMT brand identity, content strategy, and the real backbone of what you see on organic social for MVMT. However, as we know, brand is a long game, brand is how you position and how you differentiate in a market but you don’t necessarily see results overnight. As an agency, I want to see results immediately. If you’re investing in us as an agency, I want to be able to prove that our work is going to good use and we’re making you a return on your investment. Two, I want to be able to measure what we’re doing. With brand, you often can’t.

Although brand is my backbone, I know the backbone of what drives sales, at least in the short term for businesses, are paid ads. That’s where we focus. At MVMT, I had my hands on a little bit of everything, including paid creative and paid ads. Before we brought it in-house, I managed our paid team. I know paid extremely well. At MVMT, I had the gift of being able to learn the ins and outs of paid acquisition as well. As an agency, that’s where we wanted to focus because we felt like that’s where people were most impacted. I want to play that game rather than the one where we do a bunch of work and we can’t show you proof if it’s working or not.

It’s taken still a brand-led approach to your performance towards getting returns to what you do.

Everything we do is direct response focus. Everything is direct response. We understand brand. That’s the difference also between other agencies. I’ve worked with a lot of paid creative agencies and paid media buying agencies. If they don’t understand brand, there’s oftentimes conflict and you butt heads. We’re still going to produce creative that we know is going to convert often direct response focus.

However, we understand that you as a brand owner or you as a CMO or director of brand, that’s your baby. When you have guidelines or when you have a spectrum of styles of content or tone of voice that you can’t speak on, we try to do our best to follow within those lines and we get it. We’re not going to fight you over something subjective that you feel strongly about with your brand. The big difference is we get brand but we’re still trying to drive sales at the end of the day with direct response, creative.

I get that. I like that very much because of the parameters you need to operate within for brand even if you apply to performance or direct response. A question I have is what have been the essentials from a brand perspective that makes it prepared for scale on the direct response end, particularly in digital channels such as Meta? What do your best clients do well from a brand perspective to get your work to deliver the ROI they seek?

I’ll split those two out and then I’ll let Torii share his insights as well. From a brand perspective, are you communicating with a large enough or niche enough target market where the way you’re speaking is resonating with them? The way you’re carrying the brand and the identity of the brand, does it resonate with that market? Can you build a community on the backbone of that? That’s what brand is at its core. Any D2C company needs to be focused on having that. Otherwise, you can’t differentiate in the market. The second a competitor pops up with a similar product or tries to sell something cheaper, you’re going to be knocked off.

A good example of this is Athletic Greens. There are 100 different products that are selling a similar thing to Athletic Greens but nobody branded it as well as Athletic Greens and that’s why they own the market. Even though there are 100 different products like Athletic Greens that you can go get at Whole Foods or Amazon, a lot of people want Athletic Greens because of that brand experience, and the way they make you feel.

However, when it comes to actual direct response marketing in Athletic Greens, when they’re advertising on Facebook, how they’re driving people to the site is largely through good direct response marketing, and that’s everything from high-end content that’s super product-focused to UGC. That’s where we focus. That is what’s working best on the platform right now. It’s a handful of creatives in the creative mix. Different brands see different stuff work, which we’ll maybe dive into a little bit later. I’ll let Torii share some context on what he feels as well.

You hit the nail on the head. The biggest thing for brand is how you make people feel. A lot of companies can get someone to buy one time. There are a lot of good websites out there and stuff like that but when you first get that packaging and you unwrap it, how does that makes you feel? when you get a T-shirt, a brand new watch, a necklace, or whatever, the way you carry yourself and how it makes you feel, that’s what I feel like brand is. I feel like brand is a huge retention effort as well.

A lot of people have that first-time good purchase. Have you ever had that package you’re so excited for and you unwrap it and it’s not what you expected? You’re disappointed and you’re like, “This is terrible. I was excited for that. The other side of the coin is that lack of brand, that lack of feeling that you were looking for.

Sometimes the product is what you expected but the rest of it, the packaging, the thank you note, all that little extra stuff is what solidifies what Blake said. When that next competitor does come around, do I stick with this brand? Cuts Clothing make you feel like this is the nicest T-shirt out there. There are a lot of t-shirt companies but Borelli and the team over there have done such a good job. You get it and you’re like, “This is worth the money. This is what I expected and if not beyond what I expected. This is why I’m going to continue to come back to them.”

I had a rant about a service I was delivering with my co-founder. I’m not going to mention the service. The reason I use the service is out of convenience because I’m out in the countryside in the UK and there are not many of those of that particular service but their service is crap. The moment a competitor comes, I’ll be the first to try that competitor in order to let go of this crap service I’m getting.

It’s the same thing with D2C experiences. I cannot disagree with you enough on the point you made about that brand experience. you said brand is a retention effort, It’s how it makes you feel to trigger another purchase, which is brilliant. Speaking on brand, we’re brand-first in this podcast. we’ll talk a lot about brand.

This is a question to you, Blake. Two questions. What was the process like building out the brand identity for MVMT watches? There were lots of moving parts at the time that were the army of influencers. You had thousands of influencers who were working with you on an annual basis and then there was the brand itself. How did you get that tone of voice, that core, and that soul? I equate brand to giving, to breathing soul to something, to a concept that people start to feel. Those are the questions I have.

I had the luxury of coming on the MVMT right after their Kickstarter campaign. I started as an outsider. I watched that whole campaign go down. I grew up with Jake, the founder, so I knew Jake extremely well. Outside looking in, I thought there was something missing for MVMT to differentiate in the long term and that was an identity for the brand that, for me, was aspirational. When I came in, the first thing I did was I sat down and said, “If we’re going to be good at this Instagram thing that launched, we’re going to need to be aspirational and inspirational and it’s got to be consistent.

At the time, we only had men’s products. We sat down, me, Jake, and Spencer, and thought about, “What are the facets of a lifestyle that we want to live? What is the type of person that we want to hang out with? Who do we want to dress like? How do we now package that all into one identity?” We built that identity based on what was trending on Instagram. We noticed that a lot of people our age wanted to travel and were inspired by travel.

What’s the one thing that you take with you everywhere you go? Your watch. We made travel a big part of the brand. We made chasing your dreams and working hard and hustling hard a big part of the brand. We made good fashion a big part of the brand. That was the backbone of what we built. We started with a brand Bible where we went over, “Here’s the tone of voice. Here’s how we speak and how we don’t speak. Here are the types of people we work with in terms of influencers and creators. Here are the different facets of the brand. Whether it be adventure, hustle, or fashion, here are all the components.”

We built out personas too. We knew no matter who we hired, how big the team got, and how big the company got, we could always refer back to this Bible or this document where we could say, “Everybody’s going to have their own opinion but this is MVMT. This is the MVMT voice and this is the MVMT brand.” That’s what allows you to keep a consistent brand that people can become familiar with, a consistent brand that can make people feel a certain way, and that seemed to work quite well.

We went from zero to a few million followers on Instagram and other platforms. We’ve got over 5 million followers on channels cumulatively and that was largely built off sharing content that people enjoyed at the time. Times have changed a little bit in terms of what content is hitting now. People want to see behind the brand a little bit more, the people behind the brand, the Instagram stories, and channels like that. We started to lean into that more too at the end of my time there.

Super insightful. Thanks for sharing that. At DREAMLABS, do you mandate all your clients to have a brand Bible or do you assist them towards finalizing or rounding up their missing elements in their brand Bible so you can advertise effectively or buy media for them effectively?

It’s a great question. A lot of the brands we’ve invested in, that’s one of the things we help them with at an early stage if they have not already established that. We show them examples and we walk them through the steps, “Here’s how you set the identity of the brand at an early stage.” No matter who you hire or what partners you work with, they will understand how to see the brand through your lens. One of the first things we ask for, no matter who we work with, is if they already have one of those. Some brands want that help and they want to build it and others don’t.

Sometimes what we do end up helping people with is we help them write their first value prop. We help establish that tone of voice. We identify who their target market is. Some of those things within that process, we’re certainly helping people with. Some are more hands-on than others. That’s a big part of what we do, especially on the creative side.

I like the fact that you assist them with what you’re getting at that core. Good stuff. A big question is we’re in 2023, how does media buying, particularly on Meta, compared to the pre-COVID days? COVID was crazy. Over the pandemic, consumer behavior had to shift, it was forced to shift. People were seeing crazy results. Prior to the pandemic, Facebook was pretty reliable. There was no iOS update. How’s the landscape changed? You guys have been around the block for a bit of time. How are you adapting to the changes in Meta, particularly from a data perspective, which is the baseline for performance marketing, customer data?

We had a couple of updates, we had iOS 14.5 and iOS 16.4, and both had a tremendous impact on the media buying landscape. Pre-pandemic was all about putting as much money as you can into the platform. As long as you had a good business structure, you would come out profitable for the most part. It wasn’t about account structure and things like that, interest-based targeting lookalikes. It felt like whatever you would do, it would work on the platform. Some things would work more than others but everything worked to some degree.

There are a few things that have changed. Consumer behavior has changed. During the pandemic, everyone got more accustomed to having to shop online. During that time, they also got more accustomed to the ads and getting hit with ads everywhere they go from emails to every social media platform. Everywhere you look, there’s advertising now.

Meta is also internally slowed down, “We can’t just deliver this all the time as many purchases that we used to because people aren’t purchasing at the frequency they were before and there are too many advertisers now.” There are way too many people there. If they were delivering those results for everyone, they’d run out of that. There’s no degree of purchases that people used to do. The next thing is you have to be way more consolidated and way more data-driven than you ever were before and that comes from retention all the way to creative iterations.

Now, you can’t just go out there and pump into 25 interest-based audiences and think you’re going to have massive success with a carousel ad or a single image ad. A lot of this is like, “This worked as creative A. How can we take creative A and make it into creative A1, A2, A3, or A4, and make iterations?” That’s something our creative team is great at on our side. It’s so much more about the creatives now than it ever was before and it’s so much more about the account structure, the testing structure.

There are a lot of little things like seven-day click versus one-day click and the events manager scores on the back. There’s so much more data. Holistically as well, Meta is trying to make it easier for the average person who wants to come in and spend $100 a day and make it easier for them to be able to set up a campaign. They’re starting to take away the audiences and things like that. To answer it after this long-winded answer, the majority of it is it comes down now to more account structure, apps on top of that, tech stacks, and then creative iterations and creative improvements.

Thank you, Torii. Thank you for the insights there. To follow on that detailed answer, what is an ideal account structure and what horror stories have you had with account structures when you inherit an account? I’d like to know that.

We all laugh at you saying the horror stories because we’ve all seen those accounts. It’s different. The structure at every level has to change a little bit. We tell our clients this all the time. We’d get someone from 5 figures to 6 figures a day and 6 to 7 figures a year and 7 to 8 and 8 to 9, those all change. The business structure changes. Something that we’re good at since we both come from our own companies is we understand the holistic view.

We understand that Meta is going to drive a lot of things. For example, a subscription business is going to run differently than a non-subscription business. We might break even ROAS for a subscription for mass customer acquisition compared to maybe a one-time purchase like a couch, a rug, or something like that. Everything is different structure-wise. I can tell you across the board, they’re all consolidated. You cannot have this massive interest-based targeting across the entire account.

We have companies come to us spending eight figures a year and they have 10,000-plus ads that are running every 30 or 60 days because they’re all about this creative testing. You want a creative test but everything is about spend allocation, account structure, and keeping things consolidated. People have to realize it’s a giant algorithm on the back end that’s trying to learn and the more you throw at this algorithm, the more difficult it becomes for it to get the desired results that you want to achieve.

What are your thoughts on the advantage plus structure account simplification Facebook has been pushing since 2018? It seems to be getting simpler. Should people pay attention to that a lot? You also mentioned the attribution window, one click versus seven days and then there are views to factor into that. I would love your thoughts, please.

ASC is an interesting one. Everyone is still learning about advantage shopping. I’ve worked with the beta team directly at Facebook on these campaigns, which is cool so I get some insight. What we’ve ended up realizing is ASC is retargeting. Whether people think it is or not, it’s a different algorithm that is retargeting. This comes directly from Meta themselves.

One thing is ASC has always been one of our best performers in most of our accounts but there needs to be this direct correlation between still running your interest-based audiences or your broad audiences with creative testing and then having an ASC campaign. I’ve yet to get to an account that single structure ASC campaign only. Usually, we have an ABO one-day click setup and we’re doing some creative testing and scaling those. We have an ASC on the side. They might run 50-50 or 70-30 top-of-funnel to the ASC campaign. That’s what we’ve seen work best for us.

Everybody is messing with this existing customer budget cap as well from 0% to 30%, etc. It’s changed in every campaign I’ve done. I can tell you the best performer for us and I recommend it to everyone is your Klaviyo customers or however your ESP is, we directly tie in all of our customers to the back end. You’d be shocked how many companies don’t even have an audience tied into that. We get into a lot of accounts and they don’t even have an audience tied to the ASC. The whole point of it is to leverage your customer base from an external source to continue to improve.

What are your thoughts on lookalikes? Based on that customer core, for instance, back in the day, you’d have lookalikes based on your top on CLV. Facebook had a feature for that. You could target, if you had the data, lookalikes of your top 1,000 customers, and Facebook would spit out lookalikes and they would work. You do 1% to 10% in different ad sets and all of that stuff. How reliable are lookalike audiences now on Facebook or Meta?

This is a hit or miss. Lookalikes are still there, especially that mid-range level, those companies sitting right around seven figures. That mid-range feels like they still work but they don’t have the scale capacity that they used to have. You might be able to get some good fast purchases out of a lookalike audience but it seems like they failed pretty quickly after that. They don’t optimize like they used to.

A lot of that is because if the lookalike is pixel-based with Facebook, we know that a lot of those pixels aren’t getting the data that they used to get since iOS 14.5. There are not as many events and stuff coming in to fire those. You need this massive amount of data which costs some people too much money for their customer acquisition costs. They don’t have the margin in there to be able to spend to make those lookalikes profitable.

They can be there but they’re not the scale that they used to be where a 1%, 3%, or 5%, and things like that still work. I know they still work because I also use them in lead generation. I can tell you that the lookalikes in lead generation have a higher sales percentage than interest-based. I know this is eCommerce but I can tell you that the quality can still be there but it’s just not at this massive scale that you’re going to find with a broad-based audience.

This question I’m about to ask is toward both of you, Blake and Torii, and it has to do with the fact that you mentioned the importance of testing across the board, particularly within campaigns, and one bit of the entire account management system you mentioned was obviously creative testing. The question is, are the other critical testing points like media buyers or brand owners or operators reading this episode should pay attention to one?

Within the creative testing, what are you doing? Is it like saying, “The first three seconds, let’s change this transition.” Where is the detail in creative testing or do you swap complete creatives knowing that one has worked, we leave that, and you create a slight variation? What are your variation points to understand that there are efficiency gains to have?

Torii made a few videos on this topic so I’ll let him take the mic.

Let’s do it.

That’s probably our bread and butter over here at DREAMLABS. This is what we do best I feel like. Media buying and creative have to work closer and closer together than ever before and that’s what we do well. With creative testing, you have your testing campaigns and everything is graduating up. Graduating to your scale campaigns is how we run things.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to come back and analyze your top 2, 3, or 4 performing creatives and we’re going to go back to our team, which is Blake and the guys, and we’re going to say, “This is what we’re looking at. This video or this image performs best. We need remixes or iterations of this.” There are a lot of ways to dice this up. This can be the Thumbstop ratio, which is three-second video views divided by impressions. That’s how many people stopped while scrolling through Instagram or Facebook and watch that video for three seconds.

If that’s low, let’s say 15% of people stopped and watched it, that’s going to be the creative focus for us right now. We’re going to come in and say, “We want to try to get this to 30% to 50%.” Like you analyze your funnel top-down, we do the same thing from the creative standpoint. From front to back, we have to analyze it. We’re trying to fix the click-through rate in the middle or get new UVPs in there. It’s not going to work if only 15% of the people are stopping. We need to get a higher percentage of people to stop. That’s how we do things. I’ll let Blake go into how they break that down on the creative side and what those changes might be and things like that.

To Torii’s point, a lot of it is iteration. We’ll come in and they have a home run ad but we’ll notice that the Thumbstop or the click-through rate is low. We don’t want to try to reinvent the wheel in this case. We want to first try to improve the performance of something that’s already winning. We’ll chop that up. Let’s say, at first, they show someone facing the camera. Maybe we try the product in somebody’s hand first or we try a better hook where we have a text-to-speech app or we have that creator give a hook that’s going to get people to stop in the feed better than him diving straight into a testimonial. That’s definitely one way.

The other thing we’re doing over here that we’re finding a lot of success with is we often will start with a messaging test whether it be us or the brand. There’s often a difference of opinion on what messages are going to hit. We could sit here in a meeting and talk all day about what we think is best or what our opinion is and then the day it doesn’t matter.

Oftentimes, what everybody thinks is going to be the winner isn’t. We don’t even waste time. We say, “Let’s put ten messages on paper. Let’s use the same creative and roll those ten messages out over the same creative and see which one performs the best. Let’s see which one has the highest click-through rate.” That will then give us an idea of where we want to focus a lot of the copy and the messaging in the future. Those are some of the things we do on our end.

Another thing that we do as well is we make a UGC or testimonial-type video modular where we’ll write out a batch of hooks, we’ll write the middle, a few different bodies, and then we’ll write the end. Depending on how those metrics are adding up, we’ll then re-slice that ad to continue to try to iterate and improve on what may have been the best version of that. That seems to work well for Facebook. You get more bang for your buck. You spend all this money to create the creative, you might as well try to make it better and better so you see a bigger return on your investment.

It doesn’t hurt to run nine variations side by side. My takeaway from that is you’re probably on an ABO setup rather than a CBO. With CBO, you’re restricted. Dynamic creative ads allow you to upload a ton of creatives there and are difficult to track performance. Are your ads set up manually or not?

I usually do ABO setups. For example, let’s say Blake is doing that messaging test, we take those 10 images with the 10 headlines, and I might set that into one ABO with enough budget behind it. We’re not measuring for ROAS, we’re measuring for click-through rate on that. We’re trying to see which ones are getting the most clicks here. That’s one way. If we’re doing normal testing, Blake might give me 3 to 4 variations of one type of ad. We’ll put all of those inside of one AVO or one ad set and continue to do that and then we’ll graduate via post-IEG up to our main-scale campaigns.

Exclusions and prospecting. I was going to ask you this earlier on but it skipped my mind. With top-of-funnel prospecting campaigns where you’re trying to get new eyeballs and new impressions, what’s your structure like? Is there some element of retargeting there or do you purely focus on new eyeballs?

I don’t do any exclusions. I don’t do any retargeting directly or anything like that. ASC already does that retargeting. If that’s living inside of it, it’ll be there. For the most part, everything is a broad-based audience. Even if it isn’t interest-based, it’s extremely broad. We’re trying to get the largest audiences out there and we focus on creative testing. The only time we start busting out audiences is when we’re trying to horizontally scale a client. It’s super difficult to spend $150,000 on a single ad set in a day so we’ll start busting out other audiences to try to capture more eyeballs.

Zooming into creatives testing, do people still read ad text? How relevant is ad text? What about the headline and the description? Do you pay attention to all those elements? Is it just the creatives, the video content, or the image content?

The ad copy still comes and plays a little bit. You have more bang for your buck testing creatives faster. What’s going to make a bigger difference, the ad copy or the image? The image, 100 times over because that’s what’s going to be seen. At DREAMLABS, we can move fast enough that we’re busting out new images and new videos all the time, new iterations. We’d rather focus on that. If we have a big top winner that we can’t seem to beat, we might go test ad copy on that. For the most part, it’s always going to be about the creative.

One of the biggest challenges for brands is their ability to be content creators, the ability to deliver creatives as fast as the agencies want them to. Working with DREAMLABS, is it a completely hands-off thing from a creative standpoint? They’ve given you a brand Bible. They’ve given you initial creatives they’ve had. You have your do’s and don’ts from a tone of voice perspective and messaging perspective. Do you take it and go with it or is it still a collaboration with the brand owners?

Content, as you know, is a never-ending flywheel. What we don’t do is content specifically for other channels outside of paid. We’ve shot TV ads. We’ve shot social content. We’ve stopped that because it had been a bit of a distraction from what we were trying to do on the paid side of things. We’re solely focusing on paid creative and we do everything from high-end content shot on a RED camera to UGC shot on an iPhone. We’ll go all in on whatever’s working the best.

We continue to test new things like 80% of what’s working and 20% trying new things. We’re trying to get a feel for what’s working in the account. A lot of brands we notice they’re still creating a lot of creative on their end. For us, that is great because that’s more we can add to our arsenal. It’s typically pretty collaborative.

Some brands don’t do creative on their end so we’ll do the load of it. We could do 360 of everything like I said but a lot of them still want to create that content for their site and for the socials that we might not be creating. We end up using that and remixing that for ads as well. To answer your question, it’s a little bit of both. It’s a lot of creative because of the sheer amount of content that these brands need to create for their daily channels and their daily marketing anyways. It’s a mix. It depends on the package and who we’re working with.

The content here should be optimized for collaboration rather than silos.

Silo, when it comes to creative, the more minds you can have giving new ideas, the more inspiration you could source from other people. You want to talk a little bit about AI today but it’s almost like would you rather have AI where AI is pulling data from multiple sources to come up and generate answers for you? That’s where collaboration benefits you. I only see X amount of ads. I only get so much inspiration. I only have a certain amount of ideas. when we bring a whole team into that and their team, we all have a different set of eyes and that helps the end product when we’re able to have all of our minds put together to build this one machine to create all the creatives that we’re creating.

I love all this. You’re speaking my language. There was something I wanted to mention when you talked about the brand Bible at MVMT or MVMT Watches, which was more around the fact that your brand Bible is a set of systems. A lot of brand owners don’t appreciate that. Once you understand that, the system set the tone for many other activities such as performance marketing whether you’re going to even be doing TV advertising or whatever. It’s that baseline system. I wanted to mention that.

You can’t expect anybody to be a mind reader. Whether it’s a new employee or a third-party partner, you can’t expect someone to read your mind or your vision on what the brand should be like. The ultimate goal for everybody is to delegate and move on or even move out for some people. If you ultimately want to delegate and you want other people to think like you, you have to set up those processes in order for that to happen. Otherwise, you’re going to be let down time and time again.

Going to AI, we can’t not have a conversation about media buying in 2023 and not speak about the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which is AI. Specifically generative AI, how has AI impacted the way you approach creatives that last mile? I would love to know.

We’re fortunate to have a creative team that is obsessed with learning about AI. They’re using and constantly experimenting with ChatGPT and some of the platforms out there to generate copy and generate hooks. What it does is it allows you to have a laundry list of hooks. You could ask ChatGPT to write you 100 hooks and you then, as the human, is the filter for that. A lot of that, we’re still adjusting, and we’re still toying with to make that end product but it’s giving us a list of ideas that could have taken us hours previously.

It’s not necessarily writing any of the final hooks, messages, copy points, or scripts but it’s giving us a long list of ideas to pick from, which we may not have thought of on our own. There’s a lot of awesome stuff there. On the actual creative video or photo side of things, this is good timing because we experimented with something new that seems to be doing pretty well in one of our accounts.

I credit one of our editors, he’s brilliant, and he delivered the recent folder of creatives. He initially had images to work with and he wanted to make some videos out of these images. He used AI software to essentially turn these images into animations. Those seem to be performing quite well, at least out of the gates. There are some cool stuff there.

I don’t think it’s long before we see AI editing full videos for us and doing some of the back-end work for us on the creative side of things or even developing images. CGI Is one that makes a lot of sense. Why Can’t we one day tell a computer, “I want a CG 3D rendering of this watch or this necklace.” If it doesn’t already exist, that is a pretty easy no-brainer because it’s a computer doing computer work. That’s going to be exciting once that happens.

I was watching a video around Adobe. I don’t know whether if this is a private beta version of Adobe but it had ChatGPT-type prompts on every aspect of an image. If I wanted to change my hat, let’s say I was wearing a hat or I was not even wearing a hat, I could hover over my head in a video or image and I could say, “Put a red hat on the prospect,” and then it will. You could say, “Make it a bowler hat.” It was intuitive. There were some hits and misses but I found that accurate and convincing. There are video editing apps out there, for sure. Out of curiosity, this AI software that changes images to animation, do you know the name of it?

I don’t.

Another thing I’m finding interesting with AI is throwing the tone of voice of a brand, throwing that in completely, feeding AI a thousand words. I’m speaking to ChatGPT and then asking it for a hook. As you said earlier, the more data AI has from you, the more accurate it would spit out. It’s powerful as in the opportunity with AI and the speed it’s giving your team to roll out iterations and stuff like that.

Even for this podcast, I’ve been throwing in the transcript into ChatGPT and Google Bad and then asking it to do all sorts of stuff, whether it’s summaries or picking out the key points and then giving that to the video editors to figure out for our shorts videos and all of that. I’m a huge fan of it at this point in time.

Another question I had was a conversation I have on Twitter, it was with Roman who’s the co-founder of Linjer. He’s going to be on the podcast again. They’ve been on the podcast before and he has another brand called Raycon, a $50 million brand. He’s coming on the show fairly soon. We’ve had a few hitches with him coming on the show.

He asked an open-ended question and it was more around retargeting. What percentage of your account budget do you allocate to retargeting if at all given the fact that Advantage Plus is an efficient retargeting system within Meta? I’d be curious to know what your focus is on budget allocation on retargeting.

I’m a 0% guy. I don’t allocate anything to retargeting. Everything I do is broad audiences and keep it at the top and let Facebook or whatever platform it is go out there and decide who to spend those dollars on. There are a lot of smart media buyers out there but there’s no way we’re smart enough to pick exactly what it should be doing. We used to bust it out of 7-day add-to-cart, 30-day add-to-cart, or 90-day add-to-cart. Everybody remembers those days.

There’s no way now at this point with how much data is in the backend of Meta that we’re going to come in and say, “This is the best audience you should go retarget.” We leave it open now. We leave it open, focus on the creative testing, and keep pumping numbers in there. The other thing is people have to look at things holistically is that omnichannel. The more people we can get to the site, the better off you’re going to be long-term. It’s not always about trying to get that second dollar or third dollar immediately today.

Sometimes, when people retarget, you can lose the balance in an account. If you’re retargeting in a three-and-a-half ROAS, people keep raising those budgets and raising those budgets. You also have to realize you’re burning the funnel too. It’s like when you run a sale and you burn the funnel out and then you got to rebuild the funnel. It’s the same thing. There’s this fine balance for you to try to figure out in the account and I’d rather leave that to Meta where we focus on the creative testing and better account structure and things like that.

I don’t think anybody has ever expressed the concept of a sale the way you just did, which is you burn a funnel out. That was pretty cool. It is apt. You burn a funnel and you need to rebuild it, which is interesting. I want to talk about AppStack, your go-to AppStack. What do you recommend to the audience from that perspective?

Also, what is your dashboard? Facebook, if we’re to liken it to a dashboard in a car, you will not drive well. Simply, you break some speed limits. If you go by the dashboard on Facebook, you might be slow on certain roads. You might not know when you run out of fuel. When you look at Meta’s dashboard, is that still correct, speaking to you as an expert, if it’s not what you lean on? Blow up your AppStack to us, please.

Facebook is still good with high-level metrics. I still look at the majority of things there. Click-through rate and cost per link click, all of those things are still going to be legitimate. Thumb stop ratio, which we talked about earlier, is still legitimate inside of that. It’s a custom metric you have to make but all of those things are still there.

As far as attribution, that’s where we start getting lost in media buying nowadays. You have so many third-party attribution tools such as Triple Whale. Everybody knows of Northbeam and those kinds of things. I’ve used all of them. I don’t know if they want to hear this but I’m going to be straightforward here. They’re all pretty similar as far as attribution. I don’t think anyone’s pixel is ten times better than the other person’s pixel. It may pick up a couple more purchases, somebody’s might.

You still have the North Star here. They’re all still pointing towards this ad is doing the best or this ad is not doing the best. As you were talking about, you’re steering or driving the car or whatever like that. You need to know which way the road needs to go. You turn and you turn right and when to brake and when to hit the gas. That’s all you need nowadays for the most part. All of those tools work well. Northbeam goes pretty far and in-depth of lifetime value and things like that how long it takes for someone to convert.

On the flip side, you have Triple Whale who’s more data aggregation. They take all your platforms, put it in there, and you can see that profit by the minute for your business, which is pretty incredible. It’s come a long way from the spreadsheets and Google Analytics that we used to run off of. Those are the main ones for media buying. As far as eCommerce, there are a lot of things as far as an eCommerce business but media buying, I don’t think it needs to be as complex or convoluted as some people make it. You need good direction.

How critical is proprietary software in the media buying world?

At the top levels, it’s what’s going to make or break you. Getting a company to nine figures is way more difficult than it used to be. The brand is important but tech is what’s driving the game here. From the creative standpoint, you need fabulous people but you also need good tech to analyze these things. Also, on the media buying standpoint, we talked about a couple of times as events manager scores and things like that. A lot of people don’t even know what events manager scores are, diving into those, and things of how much data is getting pushed back into Facebook for you to optimize off of.

Most people, if they look at their page view events, they’re usually sitting at 20% to 25% of their page view events are pushed back to Facebook. We usually have our clients sitting around 98% to 99% within 90 to 120 days and that’s proprietary. That’s working for us and that’s what helps us grow. We’re able to feed that data and continue to optimize off that where most people are losing 75% of that data that they’re paying for.

That’s a poignant point. Thanks for bringing it in. It reminds me when you’re into cycling or triathlons, yes, you should perform as an athlete but part of your success is dependent on the bike you choose, the gear you decide to choose, and the team. Super interesting insights on event management. Is there anything we haven’t covered? We’re about to wrap up this conversation, which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed because there are two perspectives, normally there’s one perspective. Is there anything you think we should talk about that we haven’t covered just yet?

Let me first ask you this. For most of your readers, what types of roles are they serving and what size company is most of the audience? Maybe I can give you an answer based on that.

The people who reach out to me directly are either operators or they’re working for operators that are $10 million plus. They tend to be like Shopify-plus merchants, the ones who stick around for a bit of time.

One thing that I’ll share for people who are hitting a glass ceiling at that stage, there are a few things that you need to look deeply into. One is product-market fit. Am I doing something different? Is my product at a good enough price point and high enough quality where this is really scalable? That’s number one. No advertising channel and no creative matter at the end of the day if you don’t have a good enough product market fit. You might hit a glass ceiling.

If you have that, the second thing that I think is a misconception right now, even the best brands in the world, they’re still finding a ton of success on Meta, and they’re still scaling on Meta. The landscape has changed and the problem is a lot of people are still using 2015 or 2016 strategies, pre-iOS 14, pre-COVID, and those strategies don’t work anymore. It’s important that you look at the brands that are doing well still. You reverse engineer what they’re doing, especially on the creative front, but then you also say, “What do we lose with iOS 14?”

Torii touched on tracking. How do we fix that problem? How do we solve that problem? How do we get our event matching scores from 20% to 90%? If you’re able to solve those problems, you don’t have an iOS problem. It’s different but at the same time, you are solving the problems that are keeping you from scaling and keeping you from growing. It’s a misconception that Facebook doesn’t work or people can’t scale in this environment. For every brand that you show me that isn’t scaling, I’ll show you one that is. That’s often an excuse. I can find you a handful of success stories, people who are crushing it right now. Everybody has that opportunity still.

Fair point on differentiation and that product-market fit to open up that runway for you to grow the scalability runway. It’s been a pleasure having you both. For people who want to find out more about your agency, it’s DreamlabsAgency.com. Are either of you active on any social platforms professionally?

We’re active on Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin.

Great stuff. I’m going to keep in touch and continue to watch your work. We’re onto something and I love your ambition, the calibre of brands you’ve worked with in the past, and the ones you’re supporting now. It’s been a privilege speaking with you both. Thank you for coming on the 2X eCommerce podcast.

Thank you, Kunle.

Cheers.