Building Creatives To Scale Brands On Social

Evan Lee: Now I'm gonna kick us off with a screen share.

Evan Lee: Awesome everybody. Well, like I was mentioning earlier, super, super appreciative and excited to have everyone here today, especially at the end of Q1. So this is going to be a good one. I'm excited to to welcome my friends to the building. Thomas is in the house. And today we're really going to be talking about building creatives to scale brands on social. And he's the right person to talk us through this stuff. But before I get into the intros, just wanted a quick word on the motion side as for people who attend our events know that I do.

Evan Lee: So at Motion, we are the creative strategist hub and that comes to the analytics and reporting side.

Evan Lee: And why we do what we do is because since iOS 14, the creator economy, we know that creative has become mission critical, meaning it's the most important part of your paid advertising strategies.

Evan Lee: But what we also know is on one hand, we have our performance teams or media buyers, but on the other hand, we have our creative teams.

Evan Lee: And what's happening there is there's almost a natural disconnect that's created. On one hand, we have the analytical brains, live in spreadsheets, do what you need to do. Whereas on the other hand, we have our creative folks, more conceptual, right?

Evan Lee: So that natural friction where we want to operate is try and bridge that gap by following this what we call the creative strategy flywheel, which we'll dive into. And how Motion is able to enhance this process of the creative strategy flywheel is by making it easy to analyze,

Evan Lee: visualize,

Evan Lee: and then share these results amongst everybody involved.

Evan Lee: And from a housekeeping standpoint, I always say this, but questions you have, like Thomas had mentioned, please, please, please throw those into the chat. And one thing I want to mention is of course, we're going to hear from Thomas around like answers to those questions, but everyone in our creative strategy community is super tight knit and I know you all know your stuff too. So if you have opinions, please offer your thoughts to some of the questions that come in as well. And then the final thing that I do know, and I know I saw a couple things come in the chat, is just on the recording end. Um, this will be recorded. Anyone who has registered will receive this recording. So no worries. We've got you covered on that front. Okay. Sweet.

Evan Lee: So without further ado, I am very, very excited to welcome Thomas to the party today. Thomas is absolutely incredible. Um, what can I say about this guy, man? Thomas is the co-founder and managing director of Sapphire Studios. Sapphire Studios is one of the biggest, well, TikTok partners first of all, but in terms of producing UGC style creative for their clients. They've worked with brands like Adidas, Fabletics, to name a couple of them, and they're consistently pumping out creatives that are getting allocated more than eight figures in spend, which means a ton of money coming your way from that. And then Thomas on a personal level, um, he's a Forbes 30 by 30 recipient. He does his thing. But I just wanted to to welcome him to the party and everyone in the chat, can we show him some love just to kick us off, please? Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome.

Thomas Ma: Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here.

Evan Lee: No sweat. Sweet, Thomas. So, um, one of the things that I I kind of wanted to kick off with here is I feel like there's a high level I was able to tap into your personality wise, but I don't think I did you justice in terms of who you are. Would you be able to to give the people a quick intro of like what you what you're about, what you do, all that good stuff?

Thomas Ma: Yeah, I guess what most people are surprised about is I never went to school for marketing, nor did I have the dreams of becoming a marketer when I was in college. My my story starts, you know, in Chicago. I was supposed to be a pharmacist because my parents wanted me to pursue that route. They didn't think marketing was a great career, but in college, the grades weren't there. And then I just kind of got this passion for, um, Instagram and social media because uh everybody on campus was consuming it at the time and it just became something that I just wanted to learn about. So I started asking people how did they do it. And I'd reach out to all these page owners and just hope that they would respond. And I would get into these Facebook groups. Back then it was popular. And then over time, people started telling me like, hey, like you can put ads on these pages and you can make them like user generated. You can make memes and they can be great content. So I started traveling to more events and people would say, what do you do? I'm like, ah, I'm interested in marketing now. And here's what you should do. And then eventually people said, you know what, why don't I just pay you? And that was kind of the moment where I was like, oh, wow, I'm officially a marketer. Um, I have a business partner, of course, and at the time, it was just a new niche that we discovered. So that was kind of my introduction to content. And the other fun fact I'll throw is while I was starting the company, you know, we didn't have that revenue in the beginning. No trust. It was always just find people to give opportunities and hope that, you know, it could lead to something because back in Chicago, I was working at my mom my mom's nail salon, which many people don't know, uh, after college. So working there, I had to learn like the pedicure, manicure and all those fun stuff that you would anticipate post-college life would be like.

Evan Lee: I think I think it's funny because just like in your world, falling into marketing and then exploring the path that you did, like, honestly, there were so many different routes that you could have went. We're talking about creative and that's ultimately where you landed. But on your end, was there an intentional decision to lean into the creative side rather than start, um, I don't know, like a full-fledged full service agency that's focused on like media buying as well?

Thomas Ma: Yeah, um, I learned this early on. So I started in 2015. Now it's seven years later. Always find a niche that you can get opportunities in. And for us, TikTok creative in 2021, no one did. Everybody was pretty skeptical of the platform because, you know, it's still in beta. Like, yeah, they had their problems and it wasn't fully fleshed out. But I just knew, you know, eventually it would work out because it was like one of the biggest platforms in the world. It is today. So that meant finding the clients to give us that case study because without a good case study, you can't reach the big brands. Today we have like the Amazons, Smile Direct Club and all those DCs on our website, but oh yeah, back then like just knocking on doors, that's the equivalent of what we were doing and we were doing it for free. We were paying out of pocket just saying, can we make you free content that you run? And some people would say yes. And then some people would say yes, receive the content and not run the ads, but that was part of the the journey. And who was the squad at that point? Who was like, okay, yourself knocking on the doors, but actually shooting some of this stuff, putting it together and developing that style.

Thomas Ma: Yeah, um, well, we we live in downtown LA, so it's like me, business partner and probably like we had a team of like 10 probably full-time. And previously again, we did performance marketing, which we were good at. But the content side, it was just it was just scrappy, like a lot of DMs, Instagram, a lot of back and forth and working with creators. We even had a shoot in the LA apartment one time and we learned that, you know, it was hard to do that because it took a whole day and it cost, you know, a good amount to have so many people in the house shooting high high-end ads. So the easy route was UGC, they shoot it and we we produce it, which meant we edit the videos.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. And if we take a step back now, like being in 2023, I always want to say 2022, I don't know why. My brain hasn't adjusted yet. But being in 2023 here, why why is it more important than ever for creative to be the main focus rather than anything else?

Thomas Ma: Well, without creative, you can't tell your story when you're running paid advertising campaigns. Well, of course, you can do Google and things like that, but at least for the big social platforms, there's just so many eyeballs that consume it every day. Like, I guess a question in the chat I have is, how many hours do you spend on social media every day? Is it one hour, two hours? Too much. Okay. I'll let's look through the chat because this will kind of tell you why you need to make great content.

Evan Lee: We're seeing one to two hours just on social, which is funny.

Thomas Ma: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just going to say the majority of people spend a bunch of their free time on the social platform. So it's important to find ways to communicate to them in a way that doesn't seem like you don't want to be too salesy, I guess. Now we're talking about content because that won't get someone to like want to buy something or join a rising platform.

Evan Lee: And in your case, do you have any instances where you'll work with a creator and then they'll deliver something that isn't up to par or or lack of? That might be of concern?

Thomas Ma: Say that again.

Evan Lee: So he's curious about like the quality of production in UGC. Is it ever at a point where like it's not the quality that you'd expect because it's shot on an iPhone in someone's home or something along those lines?

Thomas Ma: Oh yeah. If the iPhone's like an iPhone 8, for example, the quality is going to be like distorted. So, yes. Um, the answer is we we have a list of people who have sent us great quality videos and then those are the people that we invite to future opportunities because if we get a distorted video, like we can't use it. If the voice is just like muffled, right? And you can hear half the audio, that's not helpful to us. The brand's going to be like, what is this Sapphire? Like you guys just you're not making high quality content. Again, high quality doesn't mean like DSLR. It's just visually is it can you read and see and hear?

Evan Lee: And will you have the patience to deliver like feedback in that instance or would it just be like, ah, good try. Like let's try, let's let's keep it moving type of deal.

Thomas Ma: To who?

Evan Lee: The creator in that case.

Thomas Ma: Creator? Uh, well, we have an incubation process for a reason.

Evan Lee: Mm.

Thomas Ma: So it's like if Evan, if we're onboarding you, you send a video that's just not the best. I mean, at the moment, like you may not be invited to because we invite people based on like what we need. It's not like a sign up process where you can be like, hey, I want to sign up for XYZ. That would just take too long logistically.

Evan Lee: Entirely. Okay. And we've spent some time talking about and I know Lara had this question come through, but we've spent some time talking about like that flywheel approach here and we've really focused on research, ideation and briefing. And the question that Lara has is, which tools are you using to do the research, create assets, share briefs for creators and all that project management stuff. Example she provides are Notion, sheets, other project management tools. What's the tech stack?

Thomas Ma: Uh, CapCut if you don't have a video editor or you have quick edits, CapCut is a great tool on the desktop. It's okay on the phone, but desktop's way better for you to look at things from, look at your videos on a bigger monitor. And Motion, of course, um, it's something we've done a lot lately is remixing. If you don't know what remixing is, let's say you have 50 ads. Well, you should probably study the data. One thing I love about Motion is studying thumb stop ratio. And that means, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but thumb stop ratio just means, uh, is it they view the videos for the first three seconds and they go on?

Evan Lee: Yep.

Thomas Ma: So that's key. Even if the CPA may be low, I may take like video A and video B, slice things up and just stitch it together so that we have a good thumb stop ratio and I might take the thumb stop ratio on video B and add it to video A because it's a science. Um, that can increase conversion. Now, if you do those tests, right, and the numbers aren't there, then it could just mean the video is just not a great fit. So you know right away, it's like, you don't just make one video and just assume it's it's bad. Uh, you you got to let it hit spend, you know, a couple hundred dollars will tell you, you would see your CPA. And then our creative team has a meeting, obviously, to go over the data and the trends. So for month two, you'd be looking at, hey, like maybe a thumb stop ratio was a success for month one and this video has a great body that converted. So then we might take some of those trends and reproduce them with different actors and do something similar so that, you know, a video that has performed in the past will continue to do so. Step two is we may take some pieces of campaign one and add them to campaign two for that second month, especially if the thumb stop ratio is amazing, but the body didn't perform. We're like, hey, client, we see a lot of good thumb stop ratio where people are engaging. We're going to mix up our body. And then we try it. And then the last piece is the call to action, which is like five seconds. A call to action is, well, tell them what you want them to do. Like run to the site, run to the store, go eat at XYZ brand, Subway, Chick-fil-A, whatever.

Evan Lee: Works. And for everyone else in the chat, if you have any of those final questions, let's get those in because like we'll we'll spend the the remaining time we have answering some of those. And one of the ones that I see from Jacqueline who's been great throwing in some good questions in there is related to um, like the creator roster that you have. So her specific question is, do creators have to share information related to like phone devices so you can actually determine the quality of screening? And I think if I extrapolate that question, is if there is a brand or a team who's looking to onboard creators, are there things that they should be asking to be able to get that context in what's happening?

Thomas Ma: I believe we have like an onboarding deck. So if somebody were to apply to our incubation program, they kind of know what the expectation and what video is of high quality. And we also have a video that explains from our creators what is great and what is not great. So that's the upfront like, hey, this is what we're looking for. We'll pay you on your test. And if the videos don't like match up to what we're seeking, well, they're not going to be invited to future campaigns. Now, they can always reach out to ask for feedback. And that's why doing this like it inspired me to find a way for our team to do quarterly, something like webinars like this. I think this is so powerful.

Evan Lee: And now Roy has a question, but Roy's asking like, what's the biggest challenge nowadays with UGC?

Thomas Ma: Uh, well, video quality, responsiveness, making sure they're present. They can read the instructions well. Especially film angles. Sometimes if we have like a physical location like a subway or something, uh, we have to make sure that, you know, they go out to these sites to shoot content. So the challenge can be like, as we have different point of views, like if you're at the gas station or you're in your car, the creators may have to spend more time. So the challenge is finding people who can do that what we ask.

Evan Lee: And then building upon that, John has a question and wondering your perspective on, hey, the hook could it be UGC, but the rest of it, can we introduce more branded style elements?

Thomas Ma: Yeah. Yeah, that's that's what I was saying with movie trailers. Um, you can have the high-end videos, but you could also do like a voiceover. You could do a voiceover too and talk over the audio because that's different. That that talks to the TikTok native tone slash, you know, Reels or whatever that's vertical video.

Evan Lee: Cool. So in that instance, what you'd be what you would be looking for is like the initial hook itself. It's like, hey, how can we have a specific person, a creator that's going to resonate with the persona that we're going after? But then being able to, when you mentioned movie trailer, being able to say like after that first two, three or six seconds, it's saying in, okay, taking Sam's example, like here are some shots of the hotel in action. Would would you still have the creator overlaid on top of that or like what other elements would exist there?

Thomas Ma: I may mix up the voices. So it's not one person speaking the whole time. So I may have like a voiceover like a narration as the video continues. And with the high-def video, I would maybe add in some TikTok optimized text on top of it. So, you know, those bubble texts, like especially if it's a hotel for Sam, like the video is nice, but you got to fill it up with some optimized, in my opinion, like stuff for the platform. And with TikTok, it's like great videos typically have those bubble texts, TikTok native font. Don't be using like a font that no one's ever seen because that's like it's different. You don't want to be, you could try it, obviously, but you want to kind of do what works sometimes.

Evan Lee: For sure. And the last question that I have for the day on my end is similar to like main challenges. I'm almost thinking about, um, with UGC, in your opinion, is there one thing that people aren't considering enough when they're either working with creators, scripting, anything along those lines that they should care about?

Thomas Ma: Uh, don't wait too long on your ideas. If you work with a vendor and agency, give them some time. You know, don't just expect anybody to just walk in there and just get it right on the first time. That's not reality. In the past, like we used to do, you know, starter campaigns, one month start, but now, you know, I just ask if you're the brand, be patient, have a testing budget where you're okay that you may not win immediately because you're testing. And then use platforms like like this, tools to save time and optimize.

Evan Lee: Love it. Amazing, Thomas. Well, thank you, thank you so much for all of your time today. I really appreciate it. And everybody who's in the who's in the audience today, again, thank you for your time. It means a ton. Um, we will catch you on the next one. Let's say, let's say and throw some emojis into the chat. Thank you, Chantel. Everybody in there. Really appreciate your time. It's been absolutely incredible. And if you have any other questions, you can get both Tom, Thomas and myself just with the the information I've included earlier in this chat. Thanks everybody. We'll talk real soon.

Thomas Ma: Thanks. Bye.