AMA: Ad Creation Strategy, Production, & Iteration With Mirella Crespi

Ryan Lim: going to record this. So we have the information. And as I share my screen here, before we get into the AMA,

Ryan Lim: just wanted to do a quick little introduction of what we got planned for the day. So as everybody knows, we are here to see and hear from the wonderful Mirella. Um, she's going to absolutely crush it. And before I talk about her, just wanted to set the stage with a little bit of Motion as I always do.

Ryan Lim: So on the Motion side, we think of ourselves as the creative strategist hub.

Ryan Lim: And what that means is ultimately creative has become the most important lever for success, especially within paid advertising.

Ryan Lim: But what we also know is that there are two different types of people in the world. I know it's way more, but we have on one hand the analytical and on the other side the creative.

Ryan Lim: And there's this natural gap that's created between the two of them. So at Motion and why we like to have these conversations with people like Mirella is we're really dedicated to building this creative strategy flywheel.

Ryan Lim: And we really help support it through analyzing,

Ryan Lim: visualizing,

Ryan Lim: and ultimately sharing.

Ryan Lim: So that's what we're here to really uh promote.

Ryan Lim: And for today, I will ask everybody, if you can, any questions that you might have, please let's not use the Zoom chat. Um if it happens, it happens, but if everybody can throw it into Slido that I have here, that'd be amazing. That way you can upvote, you can get those questions in and we can see what other people are asking. And as everybody knows, the recording's going to be made available after this bad boy. Amazing.

Ryan Lim: Okay. So that's a little bit about Motion.

Ryan Lim: Um, everybody who's here knows a little bit about Mirella, but she's someone that um, I respect the heck out of at the end of the day. Uh she did not only an amazing like presentation at our creative strategy summit where everyone was absolutely buzzing about the content and her process. But I'm just lucky that I've gotten to know her over the past, I want to say like half a year or so just through conversation and she's incredible, right? She's a media buyer turned creative wizard. She's the founder of Creative Milkshake, which is the fastest growing creative agency out in Europe. And they were recently named both TikTok and Facebook partners. So absolutely smashing it. Hey, welcome to the party. And I am excited, excited, excited to hear exactly all the questions people have and what she's going to be talking about. So if we can, can everybody please give her some love in the chat? Welcome Mirella Crespi to the show, to the party.

Mirella Crespi: Hey.

Ryan Lim: Hey.

Mirella Crespi: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Ryan Lim: Amazing. Amazing. Okay. Um, so Mirella, there are a ton of questions fired up from our audience who are excited to ask you about different things,

Ryan Lim: but I wanted to set the stage a little bit for you. So like what I mean by that is like if we could start with a general question around creative strategy, right? Like what is creative strategy to you and why is it such a hot button topic right now? And let's start there.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. So creative strategy is how your first slide presented very clearly and visually that bridge between um creative production and the actual media buying. Um and what that really means is just being able to do performance analysis. So look at motion data for example, um take that those insights into actionable steps. So understanding and knowing what metrics to look at and what those mean. So what does your thumb stop rate mean? What does your hold rate, your CTR, your conversion rates, all of those things. Um and how does that translate into improving creative and the entire creative production process? Um being able to execute that um to then be able to build that cycle, right? Of creative production, setting the ads live, testing them, interpreting the data, um and overseeing that consistent process of production and iteration.

Ryan Lim: And Mirella, I feel like you're one of the best people to answer this question because like not only are you a creative wizard, you come from the media buying side at the end of the day. So in this new world, if you can, what's the main difference between a media buyer and a creative like strategist style role and what you're about?

Mirella Crespi: Um, the main difference is being able to understand and speak to why the ad is working, what ad is working and why. I think that's the main difference. Um, I've been media buying for like 10 years, which gives away my age. But um, back then, it wasn't so much about the creatives. It was being able to um press the right buttons and really be creative with like what was available to you as a media buyer in terms of targeting parameters and audiences and bid types and all of that. Um, and a really good media buyer, the the core responsibility of the media buyer really at heart is knowing how to make decisions of when to pause and when to scale just by like living inside the ad account. But then the creative strategist is able to take that information and speak to why those ads are working. Um, and a lot of great media buyers are amazing creative strategists. Um, but there are also media buyers that are incredible media buyers in their own right that kind of have no interest in being creative strategists and it doesn't make them a a worse media buyer because of that. Um, does that does that answer the question?

Ryan Lim: Oh, of course, of course. And I think like why I why I ask you that question is because like at the end of the day, because of that experience media buying, but also on the creation side, there's a deep appreciation for both of those type of hats that are worn, right? So being able to speak to it the way you did is super helpful for everybody, right? Um, and to get to some of the questions from our audience. Audience, first and foremost, please don't be mad at me. I know I'm not going to go through these in complete order. I like to chunk it, so it just makes a little bit more sense. And where I actually wanted to kick off is when we think about that flywheel, Mirella, we start with the research process. And one of the questions that I noticed in here that was upvoted the second amount here is where is your favorite place to conduct research when you start working with brands?

Mirella Crespi: That's a really good question and there is not one simple answer to it. Um, research is such a huge part of creative strategy and I feel like most of the time people's research is limited to just looking at the Facebook ad library or looking at TikTok top ads when in reality it's so much more than that. So, let's let's take a few minutes to like dive in and explain my it's to why research is so important and why it's not just one favorite place. There's three types of research, trends research, competitor research, and audience research. Trends research, there's no way around it. You just have to mindlessly scroll TikTok and Reels and that whole thing to really be able to have a finger on the pulse of how people are creating and sharing content for those platforms. How are they formulating, you know, their content? What kind of hooks are they using? How are they shooting? How are they making transitions? Um, so that's trends research. Competitor research. Competitor research can be done in the go-to places like Facebook ad library, TikTok top ads. Although TikTok top ads can be quite deceiving. People tend to think that because an ad is in TikTok top ads, that means it's working. That's not true. I've seen so many ads that are featured in TikTok top ads that I know for a fact are not working. So your best chance at finding creative references in TikTok top ads is applying the filters really well. So making sure you're filtering creatives that the campaign objective is conversions, sort them by CTR or even average watch time that tends to have a higher correlation with ROAS. Um, so use TikTok top ads but use it wisely. PP ads is a kind of unknown paid tool. Um, most drop shippers will know, but it's a really great tool to find um what's working on TikTok as well. VidTao is a great one for YouTube research. Foreplay also has an incredible discovery section that they keep building it out. So that's also really helpful. But I think one thing that I notice and what I train my creative strategist on when doing research is like you're searching for these brands or you're searching for keywords and you found a creative and you're like, okay, this ad, like let's let's recreate this, let's emulate this. When you look at an ad, what do you see? There there is a method to the madness of actually looking through creatives and being able to take those learnings from the research, from your competitor research and turn it into something that you can actually execute. So this this is what we call like the creative analysis stage of the research. So this method of creative analysis, you can apply during the research stage and also during the interpretation stage. So after the ads have gone live and you have data on it and you've identified this is a winner, this is a loser, you still need to be able to analyze the creative and understand what made it work and why is it not working. So you have the creative, the metrics we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the wild, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah, I feel like there's a lot, I honestly don't put out as much content as I should because I still have time. I should make time for it. But there are people out there that do incredible like Savannah, Dara Denny, her YouTube channel is amazing, a wealth of resources. She really breaks it down in such an easy to digest way of like everything from media buying to creative strategy. So I think those would be a great place to learn from as well. Savannah's TikTok course is also amazing. Um, yeah, I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've determined that we want to let them go. It was hard to let those babies go, but they will come back to us with good data. And then at this point, one of the top voted questions we have here now is how do you decide which element of the ad to tweak as an iteration for your next batch? Are you looking at hooks, music, text overlays? How are you determining where that focus is?

Mirella Crespi: So our method of iteration is I'm very visual, so I'm literally visualizing in my mind. We have the creative and we have the metrics that we pay attention to, which is the thumb stop, the hold rate, the average watch time, the CTR, click to purchase, ROAS. Um, these metrics correlate to different parts of the creative. So for example, the hook is is the hook doing this job, the thumb stopping rate is is the hook doing the job of making them stop scrolling? Then the hold rate, what happens after the hook? Is the ad engaging enough to help them keep watching? Um, the click through rate, does it does it resonate with them enough to make them want to click through and buy and so on and so forth. So you have the creative analysis and then we usually do three hypotheses in terms of like if we change this, then it will improve that. Um, and that's kind of how we determine what to focus on if it's changing the text layover, if it's switching the visuals, if it's using a different voiceover. Um, it's really based on identifying what metric are we focusing on and what do we want the outcome to be?

Ryan Lim: I love that. It comes back to the data. The data is going to tell you where to focus and now that those things have been out in the world, you can actually make those decisions. Um, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but before I do, everybody, we are coming up on the final 12 minutes here. So if there are any questions you want to get in, please smash those up votes. Like that's how we're going to make sure we get those final ones in from Mirella. So let's keep an eye on that. But what I mean by Mirella, I wanted to switch gears a little bit is you're putting out great content all the time, like whether it be on your website or you're putting on on Twitter, like all of that kind of stuff. And a lot of this is about like building the right team at the end of the day, right? So I have a like a bunch of questions that I want to sprinkle in, but where I actually wanted to start is you're almost effortlessly throwing around these metrics, our thumb stop ratio, our hold rates, our CTRs and all of that kind of stuff. How did you go about bringing your team up to speed on how to like speak this language on the data side?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, um, we have internal training that I've put together, um, to help them understand like when we did our team retreat in Manila, there was a hours of workshops on like explaining to everyone and it's not only the creative strategist, it's the video editors as well. It's the production team as well because one thing that's really important is for this team to be able to collaborate and work together effectively, they need to have that terminology and the shared um language of the hook, like the CTA, like everyone needs to know what that is and what that means so that when we get ads back from video editors, we're able to say, hey, can we make that hook better? Or like, um, when we create storyboards sometimes, we'll give production a wild card. Like for the hook, we'll just be like production wild card. They can do whatever they want. And sometimes those are the best performing hooks because they'll literally take like something random and make a bizarre texture with it, you know. Um, yeah, and it's really important for everyone to understand those things. I think making sure that you have your key metrics down and explaining to them what each of these things mean, um, and how does that translate into the creative and what's the objective at the end of the day. Um, yeah. I feel like I get a lot of requests for this and there isn't really a formal training for creative strategy, um, yet, I think. And it's something that's in huge demand. I'm currently hiring um, for creative strategists. So if anyone's looking for a job in creative strategy, it's up on our website. Um, and I find that it's always like when I'm interviewing a candidate, I end up being like, okay, they have a great work ethic and personality and they're hungry to learn, but I'm still going to have to train them on like to really understand this world, you know. Um, so yeah, there might be a course in the works. We'll see.

Ryan Lim: I love how this like the creative strategy community if we call it that is like so supportive at the end of the day. Like Dara's incredible, like like people are sharing it in the chat right now. So it's just like being able to support each other through this. Like everybody, um, there's a lot of amazing people including yourself. So it's like I really, really love that you spread the love at the end of the day. Um, one of the other questions that I wanted to make sure to get to is like we have a range of people who are here with us today. We have a lot of people who are actually experts themselves and being able to go through this process. We have people at the beginning of their journey as well. So just curious, you've seen it all. Like for someone just starting out, um, what advice would you give to somebody who's beginning their journey as like either a creative strategist, a media buyer who who just wants to be great at the end of the day?

Mirella Crespi: Um, consume as much content as possible. Like the fact that you're here listening to this is already a great place to start. Motion does a great job. Um, people on Twitter also are fantastic with the amount of knowledge that they share for free. Um, and resources that they give as well for free. You might have to follow, retweet and like, but they'll give it to you for free. Um, yeah, and I think like if you're starting out in the creative strategy space, um, maybe a good place to start is like trying to make content yourself, you know, and like reaching out to clients and seeing if you can um, create content for them. Um, internships, I'm sure people are always down to hire, um, people that just are hungry to learn. Um, it's two very kind of different routes. I think if you're trying to get into the media buying space, it honestly is way easier now, I think than it used to be back then because it's less about like once you understand how to use the platform and like ads manager, um, and you understand what button does what, it's really then about the creative strategy, right? And understanding like what ads to to create. Um, yeah, I hope that helps.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. Honestly, Mark threw it into the chat too. Um, like learn by doing. That's honestly like one of the best pieces of advice as simple as it is that I've heard and I think we like sometimes forget that, right? So that's amazing. That's amazing. Okay, I wanted to try and pick like a couple, I don't want to say curve balls, but ones that are a little just like, I don't want to say harder either, but just like more pressing, I'd say. And one of the questions that I saw roll in was related to managing failures. So let me see if I can find this one right here. So there's a lot of ads that are created, a lot of creatives that are creative, not all of them are going to win and some of them like it's going to be hard in certain accounts because it is. So how do you manage failures? Say you tried all creative approaches and ROAS, CPA, whatever it might be is still low. How are you approaching those?

Mirella Crespi: Um, that's a really good question. I feel like at the end of the day, like if you've really have tried your best with creating strong like direct response creatives, really understanding the audience and and all of that, it's like two questions I would follow up with is like ROAS is low. What does that mean? Like well ROAS being low, maybe there's something wrong with like the business model where like we've had clients come to us and be like, we need a five ROAS, otherwise we're going to pause ads because it's not profitable for us. And then I'm like, okay, then you have like a business model problem and you're not ready for paid customer acquisition on these channels, you know, like you need to work out a few things before you can invest in ad creation and invest in paid advertising. Um, so I guess that that would be a question. If that's not it, then I would say like no amount of good ads or media buying can fix a like product market fit or a bad offer or just something that people don't want to buy, I guess. Um, I'm like pushing the blame to like, oh, it's a bad product. Um, but really, I feel like you can you can get close to breaking even if you've tried a lot of things. Um, but really nothing is working, then I would look outside the ad creation itself.

Ryan Lim: And I don't think you're placing the blame. Like like for me how I interpret it at all, at all, and all honesty because like there's always a million things you can do, right? Like there's some things that people think will be the easiest lever to pull and it's like, why is it not working? But ultimately what we're looking for is focus. So how you had been able to describe like, hey, ROAS is bad, why is it bad? Like that's the right question because it might be a whole landing page, a loading issue and all there. And it's saying that's where you need to focus. That's creative stuff, we'll get to it, just not right now. So I don't think it's the blame. It's literally just like where are we placing that emphasis at this point in time. So I really, really like that. I really, really like that. Okay, Mirella, the last question that I saw pop up here, which I know everyone is talking about more recently is the idea of performance versus brand and if that's an argument to be had. So let me try to find pop it up here. Uh, let me find brand. Yes, here we are. So how do you think about the balance between brand creatives and performance marketing oriented creatives, performance creatives? Um, ROAS could be strong, but then like there's this something to be discussed here in terms of brand story seems to be weakening. So there might be a philosophical belief you have, would be curious in any which way you take it.

Mirella Crespi: Um, I'm assuming this question is coming from a founder who is like so passionate about their business and their story and um, I guess my question would be like, how much money are you guys making already, you know? I feel like if you're building a direct to consumer brand and your main strategy for growth is customer acquisition on paid social, you shouldn't be worrying so much about your brand story and all of that until you've reached a certain level of of revenue, you know what I mean? So like there there can be balance though. Like your brand story can live in your organic socials. Your brand story can come through on your follow-up emails. Um, your brand story can come through in your packaging and a personalized note. Like there's so many ways that you can infuse your brand story and not be so worried about like, oh, are my ads telling my brand story? The job of your ads is to acquire customers profitably. I wouldn't be worried about brand unless, you know, you already have that really dialed down. Um, yeah.

Ryan Lim: Love it. Love it. And you'd also alluded to this earlier, um, speaking to to trends on TikTok or trends on Facebook and what seems to be happening there. Something I'm curious about is when you do develop that initial creative strategy, how much, and I saw this question in here as well, but like how much does each platform come to mind? So are you developing creative and concepts specific to platform at that point?

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we have a list of ad types for TikTok, a list of ad types for Facebook. With TikTok, you obviously have less freedom, so to speak, because it has to be they don't they have to be TikToks, right? They have to be like UGC, but then you have different styles and different constructs that you can use. So for example, you can go for like POV, you can go for the green screen, for the questions box, for like the storytelling, for the unboxing. Um, and then for Facebook, you have a lot more um freedom because you're not just stuck to UGC. You can do so many more ad types. And I think that for Facebook, something that's super important to consider is like you want to make the most out of every placement that the platform has to offer. So not only focusing on videos, short form videos, long form videos, carousels, graphics. So you really are giving kind of the algorithm something to serve on every single placement that they have available.

Ryan Lim: I love that. So we've done a we've done, we've started to make our way through like all of the steps in the process, like the research side, the translation side, understanding what we want to do. There's some questions in here that are now talking about launch. Not sure how much you are involved in this process, but I'm going to dig into your media buying hat a little bit more than anything. And one of the questions that we have here, which is seen as the second most upvoted right now, is what is your exact strategy for testing the creatives and scaling them? Do you have input? Do you talk to your clients about that? Um, take it any which way you'd like.

Mirella Crespi: Yeah, so there's two sides of it. There's what I see, which is I look into a lot of ad accounts every month. Um, and then there's my opinion and what I think, you know, people should be doing. The thing with media buying, there is no, if someone's telling you this is how you should do do it, they're wrong. There's not one way to go about it. You know, you can fight all day over you should be testing on CBO or ABO or you should be having one campaign or you should have a million campaigns. Like there's no right or wrong really. I've seen literally everything work. But I can say with confidence that for accounts that scale, for accounts that are spending over 100,000 um dollars a month, consolidation for sure is the way forward. Um, usually testing on broad. Um, when we send creatives and the media buying team just throws them on like a broad CBO testing campaign, it definitely hurts my heart a little bit because I'm like, we've spent so much time scripting and shooting those ads and Facebook will give it like a little sprinkle of spend. Um, but you could also argue that spend is the biggest indicator of performance, right? In the platform. Um, if you trust the algorithm that way. And I kind of do because there's so many things that we can't see, like the estimated action rates and all those things that are super important, um, that we can't see. But I prefer as personal preference to set um, test on broad with ABO to give creatives a fair chance and also to give us enough data to understand why it worked and why it didn't. By doing the creative analysis we talked about before.

Ryan Lim: Most definitely, most definitely. And now like to jump back into that creative analysis and get a little bit more specific with it, are our creatives are now in the wild. We've