Boomn's Cory Dobbin on Avoiding "Gut-Feelings" When It Comes to Creative

Cory Dobbin: and then we'll go through and we'll go, okay, this looks good. Oh, this this piece here, maybe we should try this instead. And then we iterate upon that before we actually run it. Um, once we extract the data from that, we do the same thing again, right? So we'll iterate upon that based on the learnings, you know, this this is working and this isn't, we know that. So let's iterate upon it. Now we have new variations. And then we'll do that process again where we kind of we take a look at the new variations and we go, okay, well, maybe this should be this or oh, that looks good, you know, before we actually get it running.

Reza Khadjavi: Hi everyone. I'm Reza.

Reza Khadjavi: And today I'm joined by Cory Dobbin from Boomn, uh, as part of a series of conversations we're having with media buyers to try and uncover the creative process and help help media buyers navigate around that, uh, in paid advertising. So to kick things off, Cory, would love it if you could introduce yourself and uh, and tell us a little bit about the work that you do.

Cory Dobbin: Yeah, for sure. Um, so currently I am the VP of brand strategy with Boomn, which is a direct-to-consumer e-com marketing agency. So, um, beyond just running paid social or SEM or anything like that individually, we are so sort of like a full-service marketing agency. So, um, we'll work with brands to help them resolve issues on their website, CRO, get them set up for SEO stuff, work on paid social, but really everything that I mentioned here is supported by, um, creative, which we have a full creative team as well. So, um, working with these brands, it's it's super important for us definitely to be constantly uncovering new creative, uncovering, um, things about the creative that is running that is working, what isn't working, and things like that. So, um, yeah, a lot of different uh direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands and fundamentally working pretty deeply on the creative side with all of them to sort of like feed all these different marketing efforts.

Reza Khadjavi: Yeah, cool. So in in the past, um, in the past year, I've probably personally spoken to a hundred or 200 media buyers in the industry, and the word creative just keeps coming up over and over again as something that's like super top of mind for everybody. And, um, and I was hoping that you'd be able to shed a little bit of light of like, as someone who's been in the industry for a while, first of all, like, why do you think that is? Why do you think creative has become as important as it has as part of the, uh, media buying process? And then if you could talk a little bit about what what is the workflow look like for your team with with, you know, the media buying team and the creative team and the clients? How do you collaborate? How do new creatives get made? If you could kind of just talk about the workflow there between these different stakeholders and the iteration process and anything that you can share around how that works, how that work gets done on your team.

Cory Dobbin: Yeah, for sure. Um, so I guess on the first piece there, creative is I guess the way that I picture it, the reason that it's so important is that, um, it is the face of your brand, right? Like if it it doesn't matter if you're running a prospecting campaign or a retargeting campaign, this is what is communicating the messaging that you're trying to tell to the end user. So, if it regardless of the campaign, it's it's what's telling the story that you want to tell. It's not, if you look at sort of like heat maps of how people engage with ads, it's it's the visual part first, then it's the copy. So you can you can really write anything you want in the copy, but the important part here is to get the creative right first and foremost. So, I think that it's it's important not only because it's the first touchpoint for the end user first or third or fourth, whatever. Um, it also it it's kind of like a universal language in a way for a lot of brands where it it doesn't matter the campaign you're running or the marketing channel you're on or, you know, are you running uh Google Display, are you running Facebook ads, are you, um, sending an email or SMS or something like that? It's all supported by creative. So the creative is in all of these different channels sort of like it has its own function in each channel too, right? It's specific to each channel. So there's a lot of considerations that go into it. And I think that that is sort of what makes it so important is that you can't just like create one video and run it forever on all channels and it's going to work. It's it's an iterative process for each campaign, for each platform. So it it gets really intense in terms of like the variations that you need in particular. But I think that that's why it's it's super important because it's just there's just the sheer volume of it that's necessary to properly communicate the message of a brand.

Reza Khadjavi: Got it. And and so you you kind of touched on a little bit and then what does that what does that iteration process look like? What does the workflow look like? How do the, you know, assume you're talking to other people in the industry who are trying to figure out how do they set up their process with regards to like working with the different stakeholders? What does that look like for you? What does it look like a day a day in the life of the team or a weekly cadence that you might have? What are the what does the process look like for your team?

Cory Dobbin: Yeah. Um, it's pretty dynamic, honestly. Like there's I one workflow that we we use quite often is we'll just have like a brainstorming session where we'll sort of like find, um, maybe like an issue in communication that we want to resolve and we sit down and we think, how do we do that? Um, and then come up with different angles. Um, from there, we'll sort of like write out different scripts that support that. We'll figure out, do we want this to be UGC? Do we want it to be testimonial? What type of creative do we want this to be first and foremost? And then what's the messaging/script that we want to use within that? At that point, we'll probably have, you know, 10 variations of a piece of creative that we want to roll with. At which point we work with our creative team to if we need to shoot new content to support that, find stuff in our archives that supports it, whatever, so that we can cut together the the message that we're trying to tell uh specific for this. Um, and then at that point, you know, we'll get it running. Uh, in example, just paid social, we'll get some Instagram, Facebook ads running. Then we'll look at the data after running it for a while, see what that looks like, take from that some learnings and then iterate upon that. So we know, oh, this version of this ad worked, but this one didn't. What's the difference? Communicate that to the creative team and have them reiterate upon the version that was working, removing any of the elements that didn't.

Reza Khadjavi: Mhm. And then and then how do decisions get made where obviously the media buying team is learning stuff and, you know, they they have data behind what they what they see as working and what's not. So when they go to the creative team with a lot of uh opinion and direction around around where to go. And then the creative team is also like, you know, they're the creative team. They they have an they have an eye and a vision for making things look great. Um, how is how do decisions get made? Is if there's ever any like, I don't want to say like tension or conflict, but differences of opinion between the the final decision, how do how do those decisions get made? Is it just, you know, going back and forth until until something is resolved or how how does that work?

Cory Dobbin: Um, it's it's kind of a a balance. I think we are blessed uh at Boomn with a structure that works really well where we all sort of just like kind of understand what the ultimate goal is and it's it's very collaborative in that way. But, um, I think fundamentally everyone's just looking at the data. Um, you try and remove the emotional element from it. If the data says that this works and this doesn't, then that's what we're doing more of basically. Um, and then obviously there's considerations about brand guidelines and things like that. But fundamentally, it's the data tells us the story.

Reza Khadjavi: Got it. And so and so let's talk about the data a little bit. How do you, how do you, how do you put that together? What do you look what do you look at? I know you guys use Motion. We'd love to hear uh kind of reports you guys create there, how that fits into into the uncovering of your of your data. How does that, what does that look like?

Cory Dobbin: Mhm. Yeah, so, um, definitely Motion has helped with this. Uh, saying that very transparently, not just because you'd like to hear that. Um, it has helped us a lot. Honestly, I've had a lot of positive feedback from the creative team as well where, um, before, you know, we would probably use like a preview link from Facebook or something after like pulling some data into a report and looking through it ourselves and then give the preview link to our creative team and it's just a very cumbersome process. So, um, having our creative team actually on Motion as well so that we can walk through it together, uh, screen sharing it if we need to, whatever. It's having that visual element has really helped sort of like clear up that story a lot. And I think that to give you some examples of like tests that I use Motion for, it's sort of like two part. So there's the the top ads uh or the top performance report that we use where as I mentioned before, usually when we come up with a concept that we script with or something like that, we'll create a a bunch of different variations. And then we'll we'll run those all as a test to see which variation works the best within this one concept or this one script. So being able to actually compare each of these ads with the the performance report tool has been super useful for us because we can without considering the advanced features like, um, the filtering and stuff like that, just from a top down being able to see this is exactly what these ads look like. This is our our spend versus our ROAS or something like that, right? So, being able to have that visual element and tell that story when we're just looking at variations within a test has been super useful for us. Um, the second part of that is the comparative analysis tool, which it's something that I've been going into a little bit more depth on recently because, um, a few different strategies like, for example, one client that I have in mind here, uh, has multiple product lines. One product line converts very well, but is a very little rev share compared to like our hero products, for example. So one of our goals currently is to try and increase its revenue share. We want to proactively try and scale this one product against the other ones to see if we can retain the conversion rates on that. So something that I've been using the comparative analysis tool for is, um, well, first of all, there's a strong consideration that you need to make for nomenclature in the account, right? Of which you have a pretty good resource on that. So, um, we've we've gone through and made sure that we're labeling everything properly so that we can pull these reports. But, um, pulling comparative analysis reports on each product line individually instead of individual pieces of creative, we're looking at maybe like, um, all ads that contain car or something like that, right? Comparing it against all ads that contain truck. Um, and then looking at those two product lines separately from one another. This is something that becomes really messy when you're looking at it in a dashboard in in Facebook. And excluding the fact that they're their reporting function is a little bit broken at the moment, that whole process is cumbersome on its own, exporting that into Excel or something and building it out into a way that's actually digestible. So, I think that that is the comparative analysis tool, that's something that I've been using a lot for recently and it's been of great help to our team.

Reza Khadjavi: Awesome. Cool. Well, this has been really great. Cory, I appreciate you sharing your expertise.