Ad Data Storytelling: Turn Numbers Into Narratives

Cate Wright: I'm Cate Wright. I'm the senior director of creative strategy at Monks.

Cate Wright: Uh, I've been in advertising and agencies for over nine years, which is pretty exhausting. But I did bop around a lot, which is why I wanted to show you the breadth of my experience. Um, I actually started in experiential and followed kind of where my client's investment was going to digital. And over time kind of built up my performance chops. Um, always been a creative strategist, but that's meant a lot of different things at different agencies. So it's nice to work across agencies. You get to pick up lots of different skills and those different environments challenge you. Um, but now I work at Monks and I'm building my own team of amazing strategists.

Cate Wright: There we go. Um, Monks is a pretty large global agency. It is over 6,000 people. Yikes. But our performance team and creative is only about 35. So there's a lot of big logos here. We work with a lot of the smaller and more mid-sized logo, um, and mid-sized clients. But we are a very AI-focused agency and we do a ton of production work on the brand side and a lot more kind of like the nitty-gritty of performance on the smaller side. So I'll get right into it. And by that, I mean into a small game.

Cate Wright: Um, okay, cool. I'm going to kick it off. This is the classic setup you're used to, but I've included only click-through rate.

Cate Wright: So, do with that what you will. There's an A and a B for Coursera, and I'm going to keep my eye on the chat, but let me know which ad you think performed the strongest. B. Okay. It's a mixed bag, but I'm seeing a lot of Bs. Interesting. Okay. It's funny everyone goes in waves where it's like the people, um, influence you that are above you. Okay. So click-through rate more than double on B. But, drum roll.

Cate Wright: Despite the similar spend, actually the ad on the left was the stronger ROAS and cost per acquisition winner. Um, last week we talked about kind of every loss is actually just a learning. So we did technically unlock a learning through this, even though the winner that we scaled out was the one on the left. And that was creative as targeting, which is a pretty cool learning to see followed through with data. So this is a screenshot from Motion, but this ad featuring female talent drove a lot of impressions towards a female audience 30, 25 to 44, let's say. But it's interesting because that means we can start to target incremental audiences we might not be reaching with some of our bigger hits. Um, so knowing more women were reached was a learning and we continued to scale the one on the left, but it did mean we could test further into the one on the right. So, exciting and an interesting way to tell a story even when an ad loses.

Cate Wright: Which kind of leads me to the thesis of today. The career unlock, making data matter. Turning numbers into narratives so that you can build trust with your clients and also move up in seniority in your career.

Cate Wright: A lot of us probably have seen this, and it's our job as a strategist to find that signal and not the noise and present what's only important and pertinent to making the future ads for our clients.

Cate Wright: So that big unlock comes from moving from reporting what happened, just kind of like regurgitating like these are the top ads, etcetera, to explaining why it matters and what we got to do next.

Cate Wright: A lot of that has to do with storytelling. So the data doesn't win the room, the story you tell does. And as a strategist and as a leader of a team, a lot of that has to do with how you're positioning that data.

Cate Wright: So you can make it matter and then you become indispensable. Obviously, we all want to be indispensable. Agencies are volatile places. You want to be the person that provides value.

Cate Wright: And the way you can earn that trust is reporting with regularity. This is a huge underpinning for my entire team. Reporting consistently signals to your clients, to your team, to your paid managers that you are an extension of that performance team. You're tracking the performance, you're close to it. And you want to tell different stories at different times so that you are adding new value throughout kind of a quarterly cycle or whatever that looks like. So this is the way I approach it. Weekly is your ad level. It's your tests, it's your new launches. You're staying close to the data and reporting when you can. Monthly is more of like a pulse check on patterns. And then your quarterly, this kind of goes back to Dara's diagnosis, but diagnose gaps or opportunities and this is a great place to bring in fresh faces for exposure, but also a really great place to bring in outside support. So I'll show you an example of how you can bring in Motion benchmarks, for example, to tell a really interesting story.

Cate Wright: And as a quick stop, uh, I do want to reground in the KPIs from the first week. I think it's really important, especially when you're establishing a relationship with a brand that you're working with to decide on your primary KPI and really stick with that. You can tell stories, especially with UGC with some of your secondary KPIs, which include like hook rate, hold rate, click-through rate. But you really want to be guided and rooted in something that's calculated, so it's not as fluctuating on based on spend. So usually that's cost per acquisition or lead or download or whatever that is. Um, and I would also highly recommend developing benchmarks that you can own based on averages. So if it's a new client, it can be challenging. I would recommend researching like your industry's benchmarks and trying your best there. But if you have a little bit of data, doing a look back and using the average allows you to have these benchmarks to move forward. A quick like example, the primary KPI here is cost per event registration, but the secondary events which are kind of helpful for the why are the secondaries. So win rate is decided by your primary and the story you tell is often, uh, reliant on your secondary KPIs.

Cate Wright: Um, and this is just my take on some of the performance indicators as well. Um, hopefully, yep, there you go. You can see the bottom. From the top, engagement rate, I feel like this is pretty familiar to most people. Hold rate, hook rate, there are kind of best practices for that. Efficiency metrics, which I would say are your primaries. So return on ad spend, cost per acquisition. I know this is a little like, uh, redundant for most of you, but I think directional is really important and that is percent of spend or spend momentum in a lot of ways. So we work in an ASC+ world. Most of your setups, uh, are recommended to be ASC+. And in that world, spend matters. So what the algorithm is putting its early bets on is often what it's scaling disproportionately. But what dominates can often be what they think is the strongest ad for you. I would say always cross-check your directional with your efficiency. So you don't want something spending all your budget inefficiently. But it can be valuable to keep an eye on spend, especially if you don't have a lot of signals. So for example, if you don't have a lot of purchases within a few days, spend can be indicative of which ad is more likely doing well. Contextual is, I'm, I included only like cost per mil or cost per thousand impressions, but this can be a good weather gauge for macro factors that can influence your account, um, or potentially speak to imbalance. So we just talked about kind of like the different moments or tent pole moments in the year for your brand. If you are e-com, Black Friday, CPMs will be high. That is not as reflective of the ad as much as it is the environment. So it's just kind of something to keep in mind. It can also show an imbalance or fatigue. So if CPMs start to creep up, you've kind of exhausted your low-hanging fruit audiences, the cheap gets, and now you're starting to get more expensive audiences. My hot take is I don't think fatigue is that relevant anymore. But if you're ever questioned for what it is, it's a mixture of high CPMs, so high costs, low click-through rates, so dropping interest, and expensive CPAs. But I would say it's pretty rare, especially if you have an ASC setup. It's more likely those things will just wither on the vine and not get any spend.

Cate Wright: Anyway, my two cents on some of these is also just to be skeptical. Um, these are some learnings I've picked up along the way. So older audiences are more likely to click, so they have higher click-through rates, but does not always mean they are your audience. Obviously, you can take that as you will. If you're selling something to older women, it makes sense, but for the most part, they're just more likely to click. If your spend is low, this is probably the most important. If spend is low, other metrics are going to be really deceiving for you. So you have to take with a grain of salt what metrics are when you only have a test with three ads because if two go or you have two ads, three conversions, if two of them go to something, it's 66% of your conversions. Obviously, that is not super honest. You have to let things bake and cook. Um, click-through rate not always indicative of down-funnel conversions. The example from the quiz at the beginning is a good example of this. Like, you're just some things are more effective at convincing people further down the funnel. Um, and then average view time, I would say look to your hold and your hook rates because usually people are looking at things for two seconds because we all have attention spans of gnats. Um, myself included.

Cate Wright: So I'm going to get back on track. We have the three types of reporting that build trust with your client and do different things. Um, so weekly reporting in my opinion is looking at your recent launches. You could be focusing on single ads that are really interesting. It could be early reads on tests. It's an ad-level view and we're going to get more macro as we go up. So, weekly.

Cate Wright: Example of a weekly, and I'm going to send my presentation through if you either want to screenshot or anything like that, but deep dive into a new ad. So this is like an ad that you've invested in, you've put some persona research into, whatever it might be. This is how you want to present that ad so that it gets the attention it deserves. Always have your platform and dates, that's like table stakes for someone who's dropping into your deck. Your headline is very important and it puts your ad into perspective. You want to give potentially your opinion, you want to include stats, comparative stats if you can. We'll talk more about that. Your visual, I didn't add the GIF because I forgot, but if you have a video, add a GIF because that allows people to kind of get a sense of the pace or what your hook might be. Um, otherwise statics is great. And then video analysis, I always find this to be a really interesting nugget in the Motion platform when you click into the ad and into ad insights, you can go to performance, check out the drop off. And I think what's even more important is what's happening at the moment of drop off. Like how much information are they getting pre-drop off that's important to either like your product's sale, if you have a key selling point, are they getting to it by the time they're dropping off? And then KPIs, so if you have your benchmark KPIs we talked about, how does this compare? Is it within range? Is it maybe lagging? Um, and then your audience is also a really interesting thing to take a look at. And you can do this either by link clicks or impressions if it's still early for your ad.

Cate Wright: Yes. Um, Kathleen from my team, shouting out that you can use Adobe Express to get videos, um, into GIF form or a janky internet site as well. The next kind of weekly reporting example is actually more of like a, you don't have a ton of actual conversion, but you do have a wave of new launches you want to take a look at. So, spend being kind of like that directional metric here is going to be where you're kind of like lumping things. And you can make a lot of good inferences based on that. So again, you've got your table stakes, platform, dates, headline, your visuals, and then what we have here is like spend zones. So if it's going to take a while for a conversion to happen, especially if you're in B2B or if you kind of just have like a higher priced item or etcetera, um, this does allow you to take a read on the early signals. So I like to lump them into this kind of zone because often those low spend ads within a week, they're not going to continue to spend drastically. And then I would always include insights. This is part of like the Motions, um, sample they sent you of templates, but it's always a good place to add your observations. Um, try not to make any huge assumptions when you're making these, but include your insights, um, and compare them to best practice if you have best practices.

Cate Wright: The number one rule for kind of like keeping things simple, I would say is leading with your headline. So your slide title says your insight, not the topic.

Cate Wright: And that's the same kind of hierarchy you use for designing ads, it applies to slides. Unfortunately, in the agency setting, deck building, slide storytelling is just a huge part of your job. It's a great skill to master.

Cate Wright: And what that might look like is you're not trying to tell people mid-funnel results, campaign performance, spring dresses. Assume everyone has a short time time amount. This is our weekly. Um, but more of maybe like UGC is 12% more efficient than branded video. So that's comparative. We're missing high-intent users on mobile. That's more of like an insight that could lead to a lot of discussion. Spring dresses drive 50% higher click-through rate. So, generic to more specific is going to be helpful and you want every slide to kind of have like a single most important point to take away.

Cate Wright: Now we're moving to monthly. So we were on weekly, we're now on monthly. We got to go bigger. It's less ad-specific and it's more of a review of your ad mix and your portfolio. So an ad mix is like taking that zoomed out view of all the ads that are running in your account at a time and identifying kind of the onlyness factor, where you might not be messaging, personas you might not be attacking, that kind of thing. So what's working, what's not? It's like your ultimate pulse check.

Cate Wright: The thing that I think is the most valuable on a monthly basis is just curiosity. You want to anticipate the questions people might ask based on kind of like some of the leading data you're providing. So for example, these two ads, and I know we talked about them in the preview, how is creative affecting our targeting? Could be an interesting thing to look into. It might send you down a rabbit hole, but often times, really, really valuable stuff comes out of rabbit holes. So who's this reaching and why is it efficient? Is it the hook or is it the fact that 70% of the audience for my ad is women or is that kind of like a cart before the horse situation? It's nice to add elements that might anticipate what a client or a paid social person on your team might ask and come with that preemptively.

Cate Wright: One example of that is in Motion, there's the persona analysis tool. So let's say you click into that.

Cate Wright: And you use your monthly to identify pivots or gaps. So for example, this shows that we've got quite a few personas that we're, we're targeting against in a bottom funnel campaign. You want to be finding your scalable opportunities. So, this isn't a perfect slide, but it's really simple and easy to take away. We should be shifting volume to support parents and business owners. 56% of your spend is currently supporting personal budgeters. And then you're taking a look at these opportunities where it's affordable, there's high interest, the thumb stop might be a lot stronger, and you want to identify where you can then, I guess, exploit that, which we were talking about. But include your recommendations. You can also, I think the insight here is fairly simple, but this is a great example of just identifying your pivots in the monthly. And this is a little bit more macro than let's say thinking comparing one ad to another. So you've kind of lumped them.

Cate Wright: One seniority hack I think of as like you move through your career is thinking of your portfolio or ad mix. If you're auditing a new account, let's say, it's really important to take a zoomed out look and see like, are we covering all the best formats for our industry? Are we talking to a lot of different personas? Are we too narrow on one persona? So thinking in that way can be helpful.

Cate Wright: And back to monthly, this is also a good time to break down things into patterns. So, it's pretty important to think less single ad and more full portfolio. Um, this is an example of just like an ad that kind of takes a look at one year's breakdown of formats to the next. And I think what's a bold or not best practice takeaway here is suggesting that some of the format diversification actually didn't work. So you're allowed to take kind of big swings here if you can back it up with data. If best practice doesn't work for you, I would suggest testing into it or challenging convention when you can. So the idea here is break things into patterns, find identification, identify opportunities, and then exploit those when whenever you can.

Cate Wright: Quarterly, which not everyone functions on a on a business quarters, but that's every three months or so and that can be a good time to kind of like do a zoom out. You'll have enough data often times to make kind of like clear, um, justifications for insights, things like that. And it's a great time to retrospect, so look backwards, celebrate your wins. This is more of an agency thing, but it's important to justify what your value is to your clients. Um, the same goes for if you're a strategy in-house, um, and to kind of like make your role important. And identify opportunities and pull in supporting research.

Cate Wright: So, one of those research items you can bring in for additional context might be like the creative benchmarks report. For me personally, I really find a lot of value in this like, how many ads should you be testing and volume best practices. Historically, there haven't been that many great resources for this, so I find it really great. The reason we look to do this was specific to solving a problem for a client. So we saw that a lot of our all the agency legacy existing ads in an ad account were dominating all the spend. So I don't know if people feel this way as well, but let's say you have like 10 new ads, you launch them, none of them scale. They're all up against something that has 90% of your spend. So you're thinking to yourself, am I not taking enough swings? Is the volume need to be higher? How can I adjust that?

Cate Wright: So, pause. This is also a place you want to bring in new faces. Um, this is an agency, but also I think a good place if you're like within a team in a business to bring in different audiences for different perspectives and to keep that in mind as you're kind of crafting the narrative. So like CMOs want like the zoomed out TLDR, campaign managers want the data, and I would say put that stuff in the appendix. Um, the most important thing obviously being a shareable link.

Cate Wright: Like for this, you'll get a shareable link. Now, so we ended up seeing like what the breakdown was for competitors, that was kind of on the side.

Cate Wright: Then we took a look at ad volume for what we produced versus legacy ads that had run for a long time. And this is kind of the infographic it spits out. It's pretty sick. It's a great way to see the volume, um, and the breakdown. So like, I believe this little dip before it becomes majority pink is where we started entering the picture. However, the challenge for this client is that these are still 80 to 70% of the spend going towards legacy ads. That's a problem.

Cate Wright: Because, and this is a fairly common recurrence, which is the volume of new ads is too low to challenge legacy ads. When you're in an agency, every ad costs money to make a lot of the time. If you're by yourself, you're cranking out ads, it's just a lot of effort. But the problem is these legacy templates, legacy ads absorb all the budget, starve out your new ads, as we go around around the ring, and then your new ads get paused or marked loss. Uh, and then that reliance deepens on those legacy ads. So this is a fairly common occurrence. Um, that's kind of like identifying the problem or your diagnosis.

Cate Wright: And then your solution is that we've identified that, we're providing solutions, and ideally you have the data to back up that it worked, which we do now, but at the time we did not. So recommending new volume and changes to your ad mix. And I remember I said seniority talks to the portfolio and the change a little less to the specific ads. It's unlikely that you're going to have one ad that's going to be your unicorn that crushes it right out the gate. So you need to think more holistically and higher volume. So some of those strategic shifts that we've made, we've temporarily paused some of those big ads that had a ton of spend. We were a little hesitant. It's a risk and reward balance, but temporary pause, see if it has a negative effect overall on CPA. Scaling strategies that were incorporated by the media team, and increasing ad volume was like a large part of the diagnosis here.

Cate Wright: Um, what ends up coming out of this quarterly is a proposal. So, looking at our benchmark, our year-to-date average, and then what we would recommend based on that benchmark report. So we got these awesome benchmark outputs. We're making way fewer than we need to be making, about half. So how do we fill the gap? Um, obviously this looks different for every brand. This isn't necessarily the breakdown for you, but like this is our little quarter corner of the world here for this client, and this is our recommendation where we're basically tripling our scope, which is obviously a business move, but it's also a performance move.

Cate Wright: So again, that's an example. I'll send out this deck for you. Um, it does manipulate the chart, yeah. Um, but the goal is to report with intention. Use your different meetings and your different face-time moments to drive home different messages so that you're adding more complex value to the accounts where you're working. So be honest, be thoughtful, like I mentioned, be really curious. Um, and use your weekly as kind of like staying close to your ad level, your monthly to stay close to your portfolio and the patterns, and then use your quarterly to be thinking like on an account level. Like how are we changing the way we work? How are we changing the formats? Things like that.

Cate Wright: Fabulous. That is it for me. And I'm happy to kind of like shift over to questions and stuff.

Cate Wright: I'll stop sharing my screen too. Cool.

Evan Lee: Round of applause. How are you feeling, Cate?

Cate Wright: I'm good. I'm good. I was tracking the chat, which was too distracting for me. I should not have done that. Like, hindsight 2020.

Evan Lee: Seeing all the questions come at the exact same time. It's like, okay, how can I pick it up and try to brilliant my answer? And it's like, ah, where was I? But everybody, thanks for making the chat so pop in. It's so good. Okay. But for today, and right now, we're going to be diving into, uh, like more of the details. So one of the first questions that I saw come up here, Cate, and I'll pull it on stage.

Evan Lee: Is around research. So this question was, what percentage of your strategy research is done by using AI versus hard research, probably just like manually yourself these days?

Cate Wright: Yeah, I mean, I often use AI as like a kick, like to kickstart research. Um, so like more often than not, it's sometimes starts there. But I feel like when it comes to like hounding down hypotheses or things I have hunches about culturally, I'll often do that with hard research and then like also help with AI. I would say now it's probably 50/50. That's probably not true. Probably 70% AI and 30% hard research. And it's shifted more and more AI over time.

Cate Wright: Um, I would say it's pretty reliable, so like no harm in doing that. It's just a matter of like when you're looking into the data or the performance or the historical performance, that's more like where you want to get your hands dirty, I think.

Evan Lee: 100%. And there is still something about like having the baseline skill to be able to do it manually if you needed to. So you're really not automating it away at that point.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I think, yes. I'm like obviously pro-AI, but I do, um, fear it's becoming like, I can't take the subway without my Google Maps situation where it's like, I'm too reliant on the technology. Um, so I do want to make sure I like keep my research muscles in shape.

Evan Lee: I remember the MapQuest days quite well when I had to like remember what the MapQuest said or I had to download and print out the sheets and be like, okay, what's going on here? So similar to just like offloading it all.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Uh, okay, one of the things that I saw pop up here was a, a bunch of questions around reporting, of course. But the first one I'm going to pull up here is just like time. I'm also going to hijack it a bit.

Evan Lee: So Christina asks, what percentage of your time/role is spent on reporting? So let's definitely pick up that one first. But then I'm going to have a follow-up more related to like the structure of your team and how do you structure the role and responsibilities for what people are tackling.

Cate Wright: Yeah. I mean, so my role is ideally doing a little less reporting than I once did. So I have a team of five senior strategists that work with me. Um, but they are basically like self-autonomous on three to four clients at a given time. So they're doing their own reporting, ideation, that kind of thing for their own clients, um, continually throughout the month. I also am on clients, um, and I would say the reporting probably depends on the client's ask and also their media spend or sorry, setup. Some setups are more complicated and require pulling a lot more. Um, but I would say ideally, like maybe 30 to 40% of time on reporting, just, and that's like building in a lot of like fire needs air. You need to like have some time to strike inspiration. So if you're looking at data and just like rinse and repeating, reporting the same stuff, you're never going to take the time to like zoom out and play with the Motion tools or be like, why is that still dominating the spend or why is this that way? So, 40% with the ability to flex, like, you know, whatever, 10% when you're really curious. Um, and I think now more than ever, it's important to find ways to iterate and to come up with new concepts is really challenging. So I only see that part exploding more, especially as more of reporting can get automated with like weekly reports being automated or, you know, leveraging tools better.

Evan Lee: Yeah. I, I really like that. I don't know if this resonates, but what I'm hearing is is like reporting almost serves your clarity at the same time. Like if you're just, if you're just putting it on autopilot and not paying attention to it, like there's no point really. But like if you are doing it to gain clarity of what should we do next, what should we make next? It's very strategic in that sense then. So I think that's the way that I've interpreted what you've mentioned.

Cate Wright: Yeah, clarity is like name of the game, best word for a strategist is like a lot of people don't have time to distill what you need to distill. So like it's okay that your time goes to doing that, especially if there's value.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah. Everybody in the chat, blow it up, blow it up, show the love, all the emojis. Appreciate it. Appreciate it so much.

Cate Wright: Thank you guys so much. I was, I love Motion so much. So I was so scared. So I'm so glad it went well. I love you all so much. Thanks, Evan.

Evan Lee: Love it, Cate. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make like an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is a little bit more about your journey. So Amanda's question, I'll bring it up on stage.

Evan Lee: So Amanda asks, how did you start your career as a creative strategist? Was that how you pitched yourself and did you create a creative portfolio or just talk to us about your journey?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I, I mean, my first role was a creative strategist, but I would basically call it like a peon to a creative director. Like it was like a very junior, junior creative role and that's just what they called it. Um, and that was in kind of traditional experiential because I knew I wanted to do advertising but not exactly where. Um, so I started working on a digital team and then from there, I actually went to a really small agency based in Brooklyn. Shout out Twigeo. Um, they taught me so much that like I like I learned right from the founder about paid performance stuff. And that's where I was building my portfolio the most. Like I did have a portfolio from my experiential, but I mean, looking at it now, it's totally irrelevant. But it's important to document your wins because like you got to sell yourself in every room you step into. So, I would say like one of the best things to be thinking about long-term career is like, what's the summary of this chapter of your career? What did you like, what did you take away from here? What did you work on? Like, be tracking those moments of wins, um, in both your resume and on your LinkedIn, um, so that you can build your portfolio. And if there's ever like, you make an ad that crushes, ask for permission to have that in your portfolio from the client or your brand you're working on, like just save them in a folder. Um, and then like you could vibe code it, you could do whatever you want. I think I have an old Wix that's really not updated, but she, she exists. And LinkedIn becomes more, I think, important the more senior you get as well is self-promotion, which I hate, but you got to do it.

Evan Lee: Yeah, it's part of it. It becomes the distribution side of things to getting yourself out there.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: Amazing. Uh, it's also funny. Colette picks up, I'm from New England. We actually need boat shoes. So the humor and the delivery on the strategic end is, are, are great. The other one I want to pull into here is from Ash.

Evan Lee: So Ashley asks, what do you do when you only have one spending ad? Should you just assume that truly is the best ad even though the others really never was tested with spend? Or should you move the others to their own budget?

Cate Wright: Right. Yeah, I mean this is a pretty typical problem, I think, is like if you have everything in one, let's call it like an evergreen ad set, you just put everything in, the historical winner, there's like a preference from the algorithm to keep feeding what it knows works. So there's two approaches. I did mention in one example that we like paused a top performer to let others work. That's not really best practice. It's a little bit high risk. So what I would suggest is setting up what's called a preheating campaign. It's just like a separate campaign for your testing ads. And it lets not only the algorithm get to know your ads, so there's like a little more recognition. Um, it kind of like evades the learning phase in a lot of ways too. You can put like smaller spend against that campaign and let them percolate in there and then try to launch them from there. So it's almost like you graduate what's doing well from that smaller set to your evergreen. It gives them a little bit better of a chance to compete. Um, I would not assume always that the ad that's like dominating your spend is the best ad, but like I said before for KPIs, you could keep an eye on efficiency. If efficiency starts to dip for that ad and it's like now it's a Titanic and it's sinking your account, that's the point when it's like, all right, what are we doing? Are we pausing this ad? Because the ends justify the means. So that's a lot of things. There's three things is like identify once it starts to be weak and fatigued, that's when you can pause it hypothetically. But if it's doing well and it's strong, you might want to just like protect your new ads by putting them in a separate campaign, letting them kind of like go for a week or two before you graduate them.

Evan Lee: Yeah. No, it's not necessarily different than a, um, testing campaign. Preheating and testing are kind of similar. Um, but you could have like less expectations for preheating than testing against certain things.

Cate Wright: Yeah.

Evan Lee: So Cate, how are you typically determining creative volume, creative volume that's required?

Cate Wright: That's a good question. I think the reality is, um, we have scopes for how much we're allowed to make for clients before it becomes not profitable. So that's like reality check. But ideal world, um, I mean we do use the benchmarks. I think we also use a combination of like what's best practice for our setup. So if it's like an ASC campaign, we want to have like at least like six to 10 ads healthy. Every test to have like four to six ads. Um, that's kind of like where we kick off. And then I think you start to develop bespoke best practices for every account you work on, like what you kind of know works for them versus others. Like maybe that taste changes per account, but like you know what's going to sink or swim. I think it's important to have like high confidence and you develop that with taste. And then like, maybe in my like high school art class, there was something about kind of like feeding yourself the type of stuff you like. So like obviously be engaged with the paid social world, be open to lots of ads and like let yourself react to them in the wild and see what like catches your attention. And, I don't know, also feed yourself beautiful things so you're not always seeing ugly ads, but yeah.

Evan Lee: The balance, everything is always the balance. Okay, I love the take. I love the take. For sure, for sure. And then kind of stepping, uh, away from the ads a little bit here. Mike had a question pop up.

Evan Lee: Do landing pages matter? Telling the whole story because the ad may fail if a landing page is off, right? Are you speaking with the people making the landing pages too?

Cate Wright: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, landing pages, yes, they do matter. Um, and you can often tell when a landing page is failing if an ad crushes, but the conversion metrics are like mysteriously low or weak. That would be a place where I'd put a flag, um, and be like, all right, something's happening that's not translating. Especially if you have the ability to track like add to cart but not purchase or like some kind of like journey. Even if you can't, if something is really, really doing well on all other metrics, it could be worth flagging that something's not working because the landing page and the checkout experience are all important. And I would say, we probably could do a better job of that. Uh, you don't have to design an ad that looks just like the landing page. That I think is like a little older style. Like obviously if you have UGC, it's not going to look right just like the landing page. But it's important to have like some elements of the message that like will ground them somewhere. There needs to be like some element of matching luggage in messaging or like the price feeling the same, things like that just need to be through lines. But yeah, landing pages are major, especially if you work in-house and you have a say. Not that I don't have a say, but you have more of a say. I would lean into landing pages and optimizing them and testing them. Like you're a strategist, you can test landing pages. You're not just making ads.

Evan Lee: Love it. Yeah, Eric, you got the playbook right there. You got the playbook right there. And then like Cate mentioned, it's inspiration on the visual side. So whether it's looking at other brands or whatever it might be, pair those things together, let it fly, and test your hypothesis.

Cate Wright: Yeah, I'll also add like if you have a small business that has like some organic going on, like you could try to find learnings there, like who's engaging a lot with you or like who are you reaching? Because that's free, that's free learnings for you.

Evan Lee: I love that so much. So I, a lot of people have been asking about service businesses a lot. And I'm just like, hold on, what service are you guys offering? Is it like an HVAC company? Is it like a cafe? Like, is it a lawn care business? And on TikTok, I know we'll see a lot of different just organic posts like blowing up. It could be someone pressure washing the crap out of their sidewalk. So I feel like organic gives so much inspiration for these types of businesses on what it can look like.

Cate Wright: Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Lee: Okay, the next one I want to pull into here is