Evan Lee: Thanks, Evan.
Cody Plofker: We're here.
Evan Lee: How's it going, party people? It's good to have you.
Cody Plofker: Solid.
Evan Lee: Oh man, thanks for having us.
Rose Mayo: Yeah.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, thank you.
Evan Lee: Most definitely. This is going to be a great one, everybody. So for for those who don't know, like these three folks are people I deeply respect. So Cody is someone I've known, I want to say for like a couple years now, man. Like it's kind of just flown by. And it's been so cool to see the exponential growth for Cody both professionally and personally in the last couple years. He's someone like I respect like I'd mentioned and he's the CMO of Jones Road Beauty, a clean beauty brand created by renowned makeup artist, Bobbi Brown. Uh, Jones Road just to like make sure everyone knows that Cody knows his stuff, has grew grown their audience by 250% and they've tripled revenues in 2022. So making that come to life.
Uh, on Rose's end, Rose is one of the best growth leaders out there, period. We put it down there with a big period. She's spent over a decade decade in the industry on both the brand and agency side and currently heads up growth, uh, at Very Great. They're the parent company to three specific brands. And then Darlene is the chief revenue officer at Tube Science. We've heard, uh, Paige from True Classic talk about Tube Science a little bit earlier. So Tube Science is the world's leading pay for performance creative company, uh, for Meta's largest advertiser, advertisers. Darlene, I don't know if you remember, but we talked like four years ago or something like that and you were someone I was like immediately impressed by. So I'm so happy that you're joining us today.
Darlene Ghorbanian: It's an honor to be here and share the stage with these two as well.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Amazing. Okay, everybody. Uh, so for today, when we're thinking about a data-backed creative pipeline, of course, we want to talk about just like how we start to data back it. But the very first thing that I'm curious about to level set on is, um, and I'm going to throw it to Cody first. But Cody, on your end, do you believe it to be important to have a data-driven creative pipeline or is it okay to kind of like shoot from the hip here and there?
Cody Plofker: Yeah, 100%. One of one of the most important things. I think, you know, the I first of all, I really appreciate the kind words. And I think one of the reasons I've been a a motion, you know, customer and fan from the beginning is because you guys have always been trying to blend that mix of performance and creative. And I think it's obviously post iOS something, you know, we've all seen more and more. So yeah, absolutely. I think it's super important. We have gone as far as actually building out a what we call a growth creative team. It seems like it's becoming much more common, like a creative pod on the growth team or something like that because, you know, you've got your typical creative team and they can produce amazing work, but they don't always necessarily are, you know, focused on performance. So yeah, I think so and you you just need somebody on your team who is making specifically ads specifically for performance, um, and obviously using data throughout that entire process of, you know, concepting and and iterations and testing. So yeah, absolutely.
Evan Lee: Love it. Love to hear it. And I think the other piece of it, I want to throw this to Darlene now is get your perspective because not only have you been at Tube Science for the past little bit, but you were at the Meta you were on the Meta side, you've been a bunch of different places at the end of the day, right? So you've seen a little bit of all different types of businesses and how they're structured. So curious to get your thoughts on like the importance if you believe it is to have a data-driven creative pipeline.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Those are the people that or the companies that tend to do well or break through, right? So, um, I would say that and yeah, I was at I was at Meta and I was lucky enough to be one of the first client partners on the e-commerce team and then one of the first on the disruptors team, which are the two, I would say like most focused on data-driven decision making and got to support some really amazing clients along the way. And then of course at Tube Science, it's exclusively working with those types of partners. Um, and so I'd say data-driven decision making is our lifeblood and the lifeblood of our our clients. We stand behind it and and I would say even when shooting from the hip, um, to use your expression, Evan, you can always, we're lucky enough to live in an era in performance marketing where there's always some access to some research and development and some data that you can gather around while making your decisions. And so basing those hypotheses on those data data derived, um, that data-driven research is ultimately what, uh, drives up success rates.
Evan Lee: I'm so happy you said that because like even shooting from the hip, the data points we can get are on general concepts, the personas we're going after, the pain points that we're solving. And Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you, switching it up a little bit from like what is or do you believe in a data-driven creative pipeline? Because it seems the story is pretty true. If you have any other thoughts, of course, throw them in there. But I'm curious in your world, like you oversee three separate brands ultimately that have different strategies where they start to go to market. So I'm curious about in your world when we're thinking about like the data-driven creative strategy side, like who is the primary person that's responsible for that work and making it come to life?
Rose Mayo: Yeah, I think I mean, I think this ties really nicely to asking about a data-driven creative pipeline, right? Because you're you're talking about adding data to the pieces that you're doing, but also I think like kind of what when you're talking about shooting from the hip, you're talking about not being too precious with what you're putting out there. Um, and I think particularly we have three different brands. Uh, we're also omnichannel. We sell in wholesale, we sell in Amazon, and we sell in D to C. So I guess you could multiply that and make it nine. Uh, nine nine different ways we're executing three different brands, three different channels each. Um, and particularly when it comes to e-commerce and and D to C is like what we've learned is we need to balance putting data behind what works and what doesn't work, but also we don't want to optimize ourselves into a hole with that. We don't want to go to we don't want to say, well, this works, let's keep doing it because you do that without adding that, not necessarily shooting from the hip, right? You're not just going out there and making something you don't think is going to work at all, right? You're put you're taking a couple of pieces and bringing it into it. Um, and we we try to marry kind of like this iterative and variation type, uh, mindset with let's go and create something that's new that ties to a new brand pillar or a new product launch, something that, uh, maybe we're taking inspiration from a competitor or something that we've seen other people do. Um, and kind of like throwing something out there, it's maybe a, I don't know if I'd say a 50/50 balance. We lean a little more on the data side than we do the shooting from the hip side, but, um, I think both are are actually very equally important or you can end up optimizing yourself into a hole.
Evan Lee: For sure. And what I'm curious about before we before we get like deep into budgeting, like now we're just talking about the jobs to be done at the end of the day. And I think we need to hashtag shooting from the hip because it sounds like we're rocking with it for a little bit. So Darlene, I'm actually going to throw this one back to you. So when it comes to the data points like you had mentioned, when you're coming up basically with new concepts, um, we might not have as much data to like iterate and create a bunch of different things. But where is your where is your team ultimately looking to get those data points to then inform what they start to make?
Darlene Ghorbanian: That's such a solid question, Evan. So the first thing that we do when we take on any new partner is we do this full stack research and development project where we're trying to look at their total addressable market and group them into different personas. And then those personas ultimately translate into different concepts that we can keep delivering to the client that ultimately result in, um, diversity of delivery on social platforms and ultimately is the best thing for the liquidity of your account at seven figure plus levels of spend and you're trying to spend profitably, of course. So the sources that we look at, they're pretty much limitless. Like if you're a Tube scientist, you have access to everything. You got Pathmatics, you have data.ai, you're using, you're using chat GPT, you're looking at YouTube comments, you're trying to group everyone's Facebook comments into like type groups and identify different personas. I'll tell you what we don't do. We do not subscribe to like the antiquated methodology of saying, you know, this is Jane and she's 37 years old and she has 2.3 kids and she lives in suburbia and makes, you know, 90,000k dollars a year household income. That's not how we approach this, but to answer your question, I would say that like we take all the limitations off of our teams to be able to look across data sources. Our teams, uh, you know, use Motion, they use tools like like all, yeah, we're fans, um, to try and group those folks together. And then once those personas are developed, it's actually like the next phase becomes writing, um, scripts that are very specific to the visual devices and communication techniques that resonate with those folks.
Evan Lee: That's so interesting. One quick follow-up for you is like, uh, escaping the piece of we build a persona, this specific person. So what I am curious about is people look for that simplification and you keep it just like problem solution focused, it sounds like. So I'm just curious about where this information goes to live essentially because you collect it all. Is it a like spreadsheet and that's where you're doing your work or where is that happening?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so it's a good question. So, um, it wasn't always so easy to organize the data, but, um, you know, we hired a a very talented chief data officer and we took the approach which was, um, really fruitful for us, um, where we said, let's find someone that has dealt with a much worse data problem. And so the chief data officer's background at Tube Science is used to work at like some of the largest insurance conglomerates in the world and that's the most fragmented pipeline. I'm not sure if there's anyone here that's ever worked for an insurance company, but it's like Evan, you. So maybe you can back me up here. Um, and so we said that let's, you know, let's bring someone in that has, um, figured it out for an issue that's really complex because video is complex, right? Um, and then of course, what we do is we tag every single experiment that we design to validate or invalidate the hypotheses that we have for identifying those personas that I mentioned in that R&D phase and then seeing if the visual devices or communication techniques that we're using work. So we have a unique tag that just goes into the ad name and then the results of those experiments are passed back into our data lake, um, and then organized into, um, a BI tool, uh, so that we can consolidate that that data. So we actually went, um, and made a way, um, to do this. Yeah. Um, and, uh, and so we use like, you know, classic data pipeline tools, you know, Snowflake to organize the data, Power BI dash, but the that's neither here nor there. Like you can use anything. I've seen clients using Tableau or Looker, um, in various ways. I think the key is actually like finding someone that can really focus on it and then building a team around them because as you very well know, Evan, I think Motion shares this, um, with us, that framework is always changing, right? It's changing every time the ecosystem changes and every time the demand for different kinds of visual devices is going to change and that's users in control of that. And so then your experiments have to change and the way you consolidate that has to change. So I think that like the best advice I can give for any company out there that's trying to emulate that is to make sure that your system is not brittle and make sure that your team is nimble and able to, um, to pivot quickly.
Evan Lee: I'm so happy you shared all this because really what I I wanted to get an insight into is like Tube Science is from what we've heard, cream of the crop in terms of what you're offering and what the system start to look like. And all of this conversation is so important when we are talking about budgeting because at the end of the day, like what we're talking about is a lot of steps and a lot of work that's happening. So Cody, I want to loop you back in. Jones Road Beauty, crushing it, been growing like madness. So it's been a great time over there and great has to be defined. So what I'm curious about is in your world, what are the things that you take into consideration when you're budgeting on the creative side, on the growth side. So almost I'd say like line items is how I think about it.
Cody Plofker: Okay. That's so I would say creative strategist. I mean you guys have kind of championed this and and pioneered this and you know, been really vocal about it, but I think it's either a media buyer who understands performance, who has a knack for creative, can analyze data, but also can actually be creative. I think a lot of times people forget about that is, you know, we might know what performs, but it's still you still want to be creative so you can take those bigger swings or you can go from the other side and and hire somebody or train somebody who has more of a creative pipeline background, but also has a knack for performance and and can understand it. I think either of those can work. So I think creative strategist, um, for us, we found somebody who was a really talented editor and kind of had been, you know, trained into the creative strategist role. I think that would be, you know, number one. That's probably like the most important thing I would start with. Um, again, everything is going to be different. You then probably an editor. Um, I think having a video editor underneath them, prefer in-house because I think communication is crucial and if you can like operationalize a lot of those learnings, then you just have a better chance of success in the future, but if not, you can totally go freelance or something like that. And then and then also a designer, those are like the core the core few. Obviously, those, you know, the the designer and the editor won't be really creating or producing net new things. So you have to make sure you're having that pipeline coming in. That might be agencies, that might be freelancers, content creators, um, might be shooting it in-house with your creative team. It depends, but I think definitely having, you know, strategists and then some combination of editor and designer to make all those variations, do those tests is probably where I would start.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I wanted to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have their own platform but is just going to make, uh, you know, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Cody, that's incredible. And everybody, we're coming up on the final five minutes here. So I think I just want to do like a quick round the round the horn here, uh, with the final question. So I'll ask it, give you a chance and I'll just give a general update. So, question that I'll ask each of you is just like, we've talked a ton about budgeting, creative strategy in general, times of year, scaling, all this good stuff. What if anything is there that you want to leave with the audience as a word of advice relating to creative strategy? Uh, and as you all noodle on that, Darlene, I'm going to pass it to you first. But just everybody, um, something we need to do after this is we need to make sure that, uh, we're throwing love into the chat. My chat might be broken if I'm in honesty. Sorry, I'm seeing this a little bit different. Uh, but throw love into the chat just for the the amount of knowledge that has been shared today. It's been absolutely incredible. So without further ado, Darlene, I'm going to throw it to you just on that word of advice.
Darlene Ghorbanian: All right, I'll make it I'll try and make it quick, um, but impactful. So, uh, don't spend on anything that you haven't taken the time to document for yourself, what am I trying to find out when I run this ad? Um, and the second thing that I will say is that and this is more of a advice for media buying, but a very common mistake that I see made that ultimately ends up in like, um, non-conclusive testing. Um, is make sure that when you're setting up any new test that you're isolating the creative as the driver of success so that that way once you've spent your test budget, you understand what those elements were and what those elements weren't. And if you're working on Meta or any of the social platforms, that simply means isolating your concept into its own ad set and making sure that you're spending at a minimum five, preferably closer to 15 conversion events. Um, don't knee jerk turn anything off. Like you'll run the risk of turning off ads that are effectively going to drive top of funnel. Those take some time to warm up. So I would say that like combining those two things is is what the TLDR version of what my advice would be for effectively testing everything you learned in this session.
Evan Lee: Talk to them. Talk to them. Thank you, Darlene. Rose, I'm going to throw it to you.
Rose Mayo: Um, yeah, that's really good advice. I'm Darlene, I'm like mentally taking notes on what you just said too. Um, but I I think my my advice would be like, don't feel like you have to check boxes. Don't, um, don't feel like you need to do something just because everybody else is doing it or because it's something that worked for you a year ago. It doesn't mean it's necessarily going to work now, you know, and and don't feel like you need to, oh, well, I've got all this brand creative, I have to use it, right? When you know that that might not be what works for you. Um, so yeah, I would say it's really like thinking, you know, like Darlene said, it's like really thinking before you do something. Like, does this actually fit the goal I'm trying to achieve, whether it's ad creative, where you're driving it, how you're messaging it. Um, you know, we pull a lot of data into also, um, kind of our customer journey from a product standpoint and we think a lot about how our ads can contribute to that. Like, is this acquiring somebody on the products we know is going to lead them into the best journey possible, um, not just, hey, we got this really great creative, but like it's going to take them somewhere totally outside of that journey they need to have. Um, yeah.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, bring us on home.
Cody Plofker: Oh man, there's there there are so many things that are kind of going through my head, but I think just like bigger picture, I said it earlier, but just don't get caught up in in either or. Um, people have really strong opinions and people have found what has worked for them and you really don't know until, you know, you test, but really think about and, it's not quality or quantity, both are important. It's not static versus video, both have a place in an ad account. Um, and I think you just don't want to get too emotionally hung up or caught up in one style or preference and you just got to do what the ad account likes and just give yourself a fair shot at testing things. Have strong opinions loosely held. Um, be very open to, you know, just pivoting based off what the data is going to tell you. Um, and and make sure you're sharing that data and communicating that data so everybody on your team is on the same page, uh, for all your future testing.
Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. And people can walk away with that immediately. And honestly, that gives me an alley-oop that I can kind of just catch and dunk now. So Rose, I'm going to throw it to you first and then Darlene, I'm going to have you follow up after. But it's really piggy backing off of that last piece that Cody had mentioned. So resourcing, internal, external, mix, all of that good stuff. So Rose, in your world, how do you think about it? Like how do you determine where you might need some external partners versus something we hire internally? Um, just your whole process if you wouldn't mind sharing.
Rose Mayo: Yeah. Um, we're most we're in we're internal slash a mix of freelancers, uh, or kind of resources that we lean on right now. We've worked with external partners in the past. I think the challenge with external partners, especially as has as creative has become more and more important is, um, I think it I think it can work if you have the right people on your side and the right partner in place and you're at a budget level where you can take some risks and it's not necessarily going to be the most impactful thing. I think where it's really challenging is when you're in what Cody said kind of that like phase one of like you have to just kind of figure out what works for you, right? Like working with an external partner can be really hard. Um, because they might not know your brand the same way. You might not even know your brand. You're still kind of figuring those things out. Um, and I think it it can also kind of like limit in terms of the outputs and stuff you get depending on who's working with them, who's managing that flow of information. Um, so right now we're we're internal. We have a creative director, we have, um, a mix of team that works on our creative side from production to shooting to, you know, managing like post-production of it and all of that. Um, you know, we are debating a lot right now kind of like live as we're thinking about 2024 of like, do we start, you know, have we gotten to a scale of where it makes sense to in-house any of those freelance pieces? Um, and I think, you know, when we think about like one person owning stuff versus the network is, um, one, it can help to get different perspectives when you have a few external resources that you're working with who are freelancers or different partners that you've worked with ongoing. Um, so the extra perspectives can help. Also, we're in a little bit more of a unique position where we have multiple brands and they might have the same deadline, right? Like everybody needs stuff for Black Friday. If we have one person doing it, how do you decide who gets done first and make sure it gets done in a timeline? So we usually have a couple of different people who are working on some of the exact same things for those types of timelines. Um, but I I do think it's generally beneficial, you know, with the kind of direction that that creative performance has headed to have someone internally who is driving the strategy even if some of your external creation happens through freelancers or an agency or some other partner.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Darlene, agency person in the room. I'm so curious to hear about your experiences, not only at Tube Science, but your entire career because it's spanned across so many different areas.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so I feel like I'm in a great position here because I speak with about anywhere between 1,000 to 2,000 inbound, um, folks from our website that want to partner up with us and get a really good idea of segmenting like who are the folks that have reached 500k plus levels on a single channel profitably and what are the common denominators of the folks that have not. Um, and often times, one of the most common denominators is the lack of an in-house team that is focused on performance-driven creative, um, that is working internally, that is incentivized for revenue-driven actions, um, and where they are, uh, they are working for a leadership team that genuinely prioritizes and understands, um, how to think about performance and brand, right? And so, I would say that like having an in-house team is like a non-negotiable, um, aspect. It also does give you the benefit in addition to I agree with everything Cody and Rose said. And in addition to that, um, marketing is now like your product roadmap information flywheel, right? So when you're in a very competitive, um, space, um, where there's often times like tons of disruptors that emerge the second that you establish a market for a product innovation that you've come to the market with. Um, what becomes really important is that you are, um, you have a feedback loop for what people care about. And often times that's your your ads, right? So like what are the barriers that people care about of entry that are creating situations where the ads are not working and the product doesn't resolve for. Um, or what are the other types of products that these people care about? You get a lot of that from your marketing team. So I think that like when you're first getting started off, it is super important to have an in-house team. Second to that, you don't need as much volume when you're not spending as much, right? So I think that's another mistake folks make is is overtesting and then spreading learning too thin across the account and not allowing anything to get out of the learning phase or even approach 50 conversion events per week. Um, and so because you don't need too much volume, then it's actually like more economically responsible to have the folks working on this in-house for those two reasons. At some point, when you spend enough, um, you'll notice that your need for more creative and a consistent success rate on that creative is going to start to grow exponentially, not linearly. So if you're a 500k spender and you did it last month with 200 new ads, if you want to spend a million, you're not going to need 400, you might need 600, you might need 1,000, right? Um, and that's because the more that you spend, you're inherently reaching lower and lower consideration audiences. So you have to have more strategy applied and you have to launch more tests to succeed with those lower intent audiences. And at that point, you reach a diminishing point of returns where it does make more sense to have an external pay for performance partner, right? Um, and it's really nice to say that, you know, as Tube Science, like there's a market for pay for performance. Like that was one of our, um, company missions, uh, was to disrupt the agency model. Um, and so, and so I think that, um, when you reach that point is when it's a good, uh, it's a good milestone for you to start thinking about bringing in an external partner.
Evan Lee: Love it. And something you ended there and also brought it up earlier in your response, but you talked about like incentivizing teams in the right way and then in the agency world, pay for performance. So earlier in the conversation, I think you were alluding to like internal brands building out their own creative teams. So talk me through like the wide range of what it means to properly incentivize, uh, creative strategy, creative teams, uh, and what that means to you.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so, um, I think that it's important to align any creative strategist incentives with the outcomes. Like I'm a huge Charlie Munger fan. He said, if you tell me the incentives, I'll tell you what the outcomes are ahead of time. Yeah. Um, and so, uh, basing your your team's comp on profit for the company is the ideal scenario, right? That allows them to move freely across creating 20 small hits or focusing on creating some whales, right? Because profit is at the end of every single, um, you know, performance review or maybe their bonus incentive plan. That's certainly how we do things at Tube Science. Um, and because our our entire model is aligned to drive profitable spend from our clients, it makes it really nice and easy for us to measure those things for our teams, right? And so I think that that's the first part. I think the second thing that is really important to recognize where I've seen like really great in-house leadership from creative teams, um, is to get out of their way, like and to let them be experimental. The most awesome thing about what we are living right now as marketers is this huge shift from like a brand telling you how you should think and feel and selling you a product to aligning like with a consumer's communication style, um, what is great about the product and why they should care about it. So it's a very consumer-driven era in marketing versus what it used to be, I'd say like 10 to 20 years ago. Um, and so, and so I think that like, uh, I would call shooting things as the hip like some of the more experimental things that that folks do. Um, but it's important to also like keep folks motivated because performance marketing, it's not a very thankful world, right? Like the second that you do something great, your media buyer is going to spend up on it and then accelerate decay and before you know it that you got to get the iteration process in there fighting that decay and clients that spend, uh, $3 million are not going to be like, sounds good, let's do that again next month. They want to spend five and like, and so, um, I think it's just as important to as, you know, creative leadership in in that position to find ways not only to incentivize folks, but to keep them motivated. Um, because it's a fast-paced job, right? So, um, those feedback loops are are pretty fast, uh, but then right after it comes more work, right? The second you do well. So you have to find a way to resolve both of those things within your organization if you want a fluid moving performance creative team.
Evan Lee: Very good. Very, very good. Okay. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structure, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there's there's a relatively low end there. And then when it comes to like the content creators, like when we're working with outsourced, right? There's obviously the volume of what we're doing internally with like our existing team. So like compensated through headcount. But when we're working with external content creators, um, it again, it varies really widely. Like are we working with somebody who is an influencer or a partner? Like the one I referenced earlier, she's called Planet in the Kitchen. She's got like a couple hundred thousand followers, huge Amazon storefront, um, has created a lot of content for us, drives revenue to our Amazon business, like significant revenue. She posted a product the other day and we jumped up to like the number two product in that category on Amazon within hours, right? So it's like we compensate her much differently because we know there's revenue tied to her outputs that is immediately traceable. Um, and we work with her like consistently. We have like I said, some of most of her creatives have been some of our top creatives for a year plus at this point. Um, and she continues to produce for us. So we look at the compensation we're going to give her very differently from somebody who's new or unproven for us. Um, and or somebody, it depends again, are you buying into their following? Are you buying into, uh, just the asset production? Are you trying to buy into whitelisting, you know, rights with them? Um, so there's a whole host of factors that go into it. We generally try to air on a little bit more of the conservative side or even looking at some ways that we can do rev share or affiliate with them if they are a, um, you know, more of an influencer type of person versus just a content creator who, you know, doesn't necessarily have a big social following but is just going to make, um, some assets for us. That's usually on the lowest end.
Evan Lee: Got you. Got you. Okay, that's super insightful. And it's still so cool to call out the person who's absolutely crushing it with everything they produce. Like once you find that person, it's like, all right, let's go to the moon. Let's go to the moon. Cool. Cody, next question I have is for you. So Rose gave us a little bit of insight into team structures, talking about like creative team internally and creative director. In your world, what I'm curious about is who is your team that makes the creative engine come to life? Uh, and even throw in like the the growth side too on who's running the ads and what that looks like.
Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. Uh, can definitely share. Again, it's going to be so different for every company just depending on what's your internal DNA, what's your either founder, CMO, or head of growth skill set. Some people are more data-driven, some creative teams, you know, so some creative or growth people might be more data-driven, some might have more creative skills than others. And then some creative directors and departments might be purely on like the creative brand side and then some that are more of, uh, you know, pure growth kind of DNA company might be more on the performance side. So I think that depends. For us, our creative team is amazing. Um, they focus more on the brand side. So very, you know, very very good at kind of making things look on brand, look cohesive, not necessarily, um, driven by performance. And I think that's totally fine. Um, they do a lot of kind of like our in-house shoots. We kind of partner, we, you know, collaborate on them. Fortunately, here they actually like report to to me and marketing. So it kind of makes things like easier to, you know, be able to work with. And then we have a, uh, kind of what we're building out like a growth creative pod. So, um, I currently kind of oversee all all, you know, since growth actually still kind of doing, you know, a little bit of the media buying as well, but, um, training some people on on that side as well. And then we have a growth, uh, a creative strategist, right? So she is on the growth team. So she sits on the growth team. We don't necessarily have like strong bonus or or, you know, incentives like financial incentives per person, but I think it's important to, you know, have people on the team that, you know, they're they're incentivized to obviously grow with and grow. So it's, you know, that's essentially our creative strategist is just focused on making ads that convert. How do we come up with ideas? How are we doing research, you know, talking to customers, talking to our influencer team, all that kind of good stuff, um, understanding past data, looking at all of your social comments and things like that. Um, so somebody's got to do that. For us, we have our, you know, our our, uh, creative strategist do that, but that may be the creative team, that may be, you know, the director of growth, but I think somebody has to do that. And then somebody also has to be able to share, um, past performance data. So obviously we use Motion for that, but we want to see in a given month or quarter, you know, what are our top seven spending ads? We'll do a comparative analysis. We want to see how much did we spend on video versus static. If we are working with creative partners, you just got to make sure your naming conventions are good. How much did we spend through these partners? How much did we spend through whitelisting versus not? Uh, different styles, how much did we spend on studio versus UGC or something like that? So you can kind of zoom out and take a bigger picture. I think a lot of those data things, we actually have our growth team do it, even though we have a creative strategist, you know, we we have our media buyers and growth team do it because they're closest to the data and they kind of share on that. So again, it's really going to depend, but you need somebody who's coming up with ideas, analyzing past data, and then also iterating. We actually have, so we have our, uh, creative strategist concepting new ideas, briefing creators, video editors, being involved in productions. We have our growth team, so we have a growth manager who's actually doing iterations because they're launching the tests in Meta. They will decide what to scale, what to kill, what to, you know, to iterate on. So it's actually their decision. They will then brief the creative strategist. So they'll be the one briefing the creative strategist, pulling data, often using Motion and saying, hey, here was our spend, here was our ROAS. We use Northbeam, so we we kind of look at like our Northbeam one day click ROAS. So yeah, here was our AIDA metrics. Here's our recommendation. It might be, you know, this had this was a what we call a yellow ad, right? You're either green, that's like 10% of ads are just kind of scale and they're going to crush it out of the gate. Red is like 10% of ads are probably just like not even worth iterating. We'll put that into a creative review deck that we do every two weeks. And then 80% of ads probably have some signs of life, but they're just not ready to scale yet. That's where growth teams will compile the data, put it together. We use Notion for like all of our project management for for this. And then often we will recommend things. We'll be like, hey, you know, common scenarios, the spent okay, CPA was okay, but not good enough to scale. We think if we got a better hook on this, everything would get better. Here's a report or here are our top five thumb stops in the account, like have at it. And then the creative team will kind of take that data, take that insight, um, creative strategist and then we'll brief the editor, um, try to come up with new ideas for that hook or whatever it is components. So we try to just have it be really collaborative and have everyone be clear on what part of that pipeline they're responsible for. I will say when we were a smaller brand, we had one growth manager that played the role of media buyer and creative strategist. So it was a little simpler. And that's what I would probably recommend for smaller brands is, you know, allow your media buyers to be really hands-off in the account, leverage machine learning and spend a lot of your time on letting tests run and thinking about how you can make better creative backed by data.
Evan Lee: Amazing. Perfect. Everybody, you heard it here first. If you're starting to build out the team, you know what to do. You know what to do. I do want to jump over to the audience Q&A at this point. So we've had a ton of questions that are starting to trickle in. Please, please, please keep upvoting if something starts to resonate with you. And the one that I want to call out first, Darlene, this one's on your end.
On-screen text overlay with a profile picture of a woman with dark hair. The text reads: "Gabriel Collins. Question for Darlene - Tube Science was pointed out as a company that handles the 'iteration' process well. What do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?"
Evan Lee: So Gabriel's asking, Tube Science was pointed out as the company that handles iteration process well. This was by Paige at True Classic for context. Uh, what do you do that sets yourself apart from other companies trying the same things?
Darlene Ghorbanian: Thanks, Gabriel for the question. This is a solid question. So, um, our our iterative process is set up in two different pipelines. So let's talk about them separately. The first is when we deliver a round of ads to any client, one of two things can happen. They either work or they don't work. Um, and work for us means that they're spending close to or past a 10k level at a 15% better CPA or ROAS than the client. That's how our model works. Um, and so if they work, um, then the iterative cycle is designed to go to work fighting decay because media buyers are going to crank up budget, they're going to accelerate decay. And so we might do things like change the opening sequence, change the ad copy, but just keep iterating and re-delivering those ads to our clients, um, in a pace that we try and we try and get ahead of their spending increases, uh, week after week after week. This is if you have a healthy portfolio, 50% of your portfolio should be this, by the way. Should be iterations of things that have already proven to work. They have the highest ROI, they have the highest hit rate. I often find, um, many folks have been kind of like trained to think of like things aren't working, I need to do something new, whereas like when you look at the data, changing, making micro changes to things that have already proven themselves out to work is actually the highest ROI action you can take. Um, and then the second, um, iterative cycle that we have is if something doesn't work, right? So it is important for everyone out there that's listening to not just do iterations, right? Because if you're just iterating, you're hitting that one persona, your delivery becomes homogeneous and then it's a ticking time bomb for high CPAs, right? You never know when it's going to happen to you. Um, and so to address when our clients, uh, or sorry, when our ads fail to work, we take the test budget, um, that the client spent testing that ad, and then we look at a string of metrics in the creative funnel and try and reverse engineer to where the breakdowns were. And then we apply that information and then round after round, we're making fixes. So to give you like an example of one data combination, let's say that some an ad had like really high thumb stop rate but really low click rate. This is a super easy one. I think everyone's familiar with that. Like then we would say like, oh, the breakdown was like in the incentive to get someone to click over or like the selling sequence, what have you. Um, maybe we didn't build enough exit points. Um, and then we'll make fixes and round after round, the expectation is that we get closer and closer to wins so that we can graduate that to the winning cohort and fight decay. I hope I answered your question, Gabriel, but if not, come in through the chat and ask a follow-up.
Evan Lee: The only thing Darlene that I'll ask is just like, there's the creative production and then it's performance. Do you do you and the team also jump in and like run the media? Is that what's happening here? Or do you advise on how they should like run these testing campaigns? Because there's also a structural element to it too here.
Darlene Ghorbanian: Yeah, so we're either doing one or the other of those two things. I would say like most of our clients just based because of the sheer size. So most Tube Science clients are spending a million dollars plus by the time we enter into the ring, um, have in very, like the best media buyers out there, you know? So, um, and so most of our clients are buying in-house, but we do have a segment of clients where we're handling the media. Even for the ones, um, where we're not though, we are sending very regular, um, optimization, um, strategy notes because of course, we have this benefit of looking across the ecosystem of the largest accounts and seeing different kind of things that are working, right? So like, you know, launching things into ASC, for example, or testing multiple optimization tactics as you scale your spend, um, you know, when Reels started to work, stuff like that, right? Like, um, and so, of course, we're sending out like, uh, regular recommendations to all of our clients as well that are very specific to each ad. Um, and and often times you'll find my team reaching out to their clients and being like, this Tube Science ad decayed, can you shut it off? Um, so, so yeah, we we try and cover those bases as well.
Evan Lee: Cool. I love it. Okay. So the next question, I don't know if it's spicy or not, to be honest. So, so you call your call on how much you're willing to share or not here. But it's a it's a comp question. So Rose, I'm going to throw this one to you first. But specifically with content creators, how are you thinking about compensation? So it doesn't have to be an exact number if you're not comfortable, but it's like performance-based, is it set fee, is it uh, like rights forever, anything you're willing to share?
Rose Mayo: I mean, honestly, it varies so widely that I don't even know if I could share like a specific number sort of short of walking you guys through like a whole bunch of different things. But I think there's a few different ways that we source content. Like one, we've worked with platforms like Mini Social in the past, uh, and we still work with them occasionally like when we need to generate a bunch of content very quickly or for certain, um, things. And so you know, there's like a set cost there, right? I like, you know, you're spending a couple thousand dollars for like a certain number of of assets. Um, they may or may not perform, you may or may not use them, but you know, there'
