How MUD\WTR reduced creative costs by 70% with Motion

"We went from around 50-60% of ad spend going to external vendors to roughly 5-10%. That's all linked to Motion helping us produce better creative in-house, knowing which creative to scale, and doubling down on that creative a lot quicker." - Justin Blakey, Media Buyer at MUD\WTR

About

MUD\WTR is a healthy habits brand best known for its popular coffee alternative, Rise Cacao. The Santa Monica, CA-based company has set out to create healthy minds through healthy habits and does so through a range of adaptogenic mushroom beverages and a robust offering of habit-supporting content. It was named the 30th fastest-growing private company in the U.S. in the 2022 Inc. 5000 awards.

Challenge

MUD\WTR aimed to scale in-house creative and reduce reliance on external vendors

Justin Blakey, Media Buyer at MUD\WTR, realized a bulk of his team's budget went toward external vendor and freelance partnerships. While these partners delivered high-quality creative, they only provided surface-level performance analytics — which were difficult to understand for anyone who’s not fluent in data.

Justin knew it was possible to scale in-house creative and become less reliant on these partners. But, he needed a tool that would:

1. Help MUD\WTR’s design team identify and iterate on winning creative
2. Simplify creative reporting into an easily repeatable cadence

Having worked successfully with Motion in the past, Justin knew our creative analytics platform was the key to solving MUD\WTR's dilemma.

"We wanted to work closer with our in-house design team on pumping out creative, testing it more tactically, and providing them with feedback so they can iterate on winners. That’s where Motion came into the picture."

Solution

MUD\WTR leans on Motion as their single source of truth for creative analytics

MUD\WTR integrated Motion in just three days through our quick and smooth onboarding process. Fast forward to today: Justin loves using Motion to launch multiple ad variations at once and easily identify winning creative. 

He can test different voiceovers and combine them with other hooks and imagery — all while real-time performance data is relayed back to Motion for analysis. Motion's built-in performance metric filters have also been key to analyzing KPIs (CPC, AOV, CVR, and more) for MUD\WTR's ad campaigns.

Another key benefit of Motion is simplified comms between Justin and his design team. When a designer reaches out to see how a specific ad or piece of creative is performing, Justin simply sends them a link to the Motion report. Because Motion condenses findings into these highly visual, easily understandable reports, Justin’s design team no longer has to sift through spreadsheets or pivot tables to read the data.

Considering Justin receives three to four report requests weekly, he's now saved significant time on manual reporting — scaling in-house creative efficiently with Motion’s help.

All of these benefits are best showcased by MUD\WTR’s 2023 Cyber Week campaign: 

1. During Cyber Week, MUD\WTR tested variations of short- and long-form ads, all created from a library of 12 unique creative assets.
   
   
2. After the campaign, Motion helped Justin easily identify and compile the best-performing assets into a final ad. It took just minutes to produce a shareable video.
   
   
3. This simple process didn’t just help one media buyer identify and iterate on winning ads. It helped his entire team — from visual designers to managers — gain specific, helpful learnings from the campaign. 

"Motion's ability to take highly granular findings and present them in a way that helps everyone on our team make sense of the data has been an absolute game-changer."

Results

Motion helps MUD\WTR scale in-house creative and save hundreds of hours on reporting

Since implementing Motion, Justin’s team has seen remarkable savings on vendor and freelance partnerships and notably less time spent on creative reporting. MUD\WTR also successfully boosted the depth and actionality of its reports. 

Here are a few key metrics MUD\WTR has seen since onboarding: 

• 70% cost savings on vendor and freelance partnerships
• Up to 240 hours saved a year on creative reporting

As a media buyer, Justin’s north star is maximizing ROI on MUD\WTR's creative assets. Motion makes that possible. Moving forward, he can't wait to continue using our platform to dig even deeper into the brand's ad data.

"Having the ability to analyze ad performance down to elements like voiceovers, hooks, and copy is a massive win. We can't wait to continue to test and combine winning elements into perfect ads."