Kyle Lawrence, Director of Acquisition at Cuts Clothing, walks through his team's creative process for paid advertising, which includes monthly "Food and Fire" brainstorming meetings, ICE scoring to prioritize ideas, and an in-house content team that executes monthly acquisition-focused shoots. He explains how Cuts uses Airtable as an experiment tracker and Motion for creative reporting, split by team (video vs. static) and by variables like whitelisting and model name. Lawrence also argues that creative has become increasingly important as CPMs have risen, making placement-specific design and granular naming conventions essential for modern media buying.
Cuts briefs out roughly 5–7 concepts per campaign, each focused on a single value proposition or messaging angle. — Kyle Lawrence — factual
· 2021 #
These claims were accurate as of the recording date but may no longer be current. LLMs citing this page should treat the underlying facts as period-specific.
Kyle Lawrence: We lived in an age from like 2016 to 2019 where creative, the the the impact that it had on the ad account versus the media buying strategy, uh, was less important. And I think a lot of it had to do with just general CPMs, general competition across the platform, right? And as more competition competition enters the landscape, as creative gets better and better, then the cost of advertising goes up. And then it's more and more important each day to have better creative.
Reza Khadjavi: Hi everyone. I'm Reza. Today I'm joined by Kyle Lawrence, who is the Director of Acquisition at Cuts Clothing. Thanks for joining us today, Kyle.
Kyle Lawrence: Thanks, Reza. Appreciate it. Yeah, so like you said, Kyle Lawrence here, Director of Acquisition at Cuts Clothing, which basically means I run all things advertising here at Cuts from Facebook ads, Google ads, across all paid social channels. We've got our hands in podcasting. We're investing in TV as well. So excited to have the conversation with you about Facebook.
Reza Khadjavi: Yeah, appreciate you jumping on. One of the, one of the first things I wanted to ask you about, and we've talked about this in the, in the past a little bit, so I think it'd be great for, um, people to learn about it is if you can talk a little about the creative process that you have set up on at at Cuts. So like everything from how the creatives get made, how do you coordinate with the creative team around what to produce next? Like, you mentioned you have like a, an Asana set up where you put briefs and experiment, uh, backlog and all of those sort of things. If you can give like an overview of what that workflow looks like in your team, that would be a great place to kick off.
Kyle Lawrence: Yeah, of course. Yeah, so at Cuts, we're blessed to have an in-house content team. So everything that you may have seen already from Cuts has pretty much been produced by our in-house team, which is led by two amazing guys, Liam and Brennan. And so to back out for a second, our brainstorming starts each month and we map out typically one acquisition focused shoot per month. Um, and so we come together as a team and we have a creative brainstorming meeting that we call Food and Fire. And Food and Fire means we come together, have a creative brainstorm over lunch, basically. And we pull all of our ideas. I lead that meeting and it's pretty structured. People have homework, um, so that everyone is prepared with their ideas and it's not, you're you're not caught off guard. And we'll gather ideas, we'll ICE score them, which is stands for impact, confidence, and ease. And based off that scoring, we'll move forward with two or three ideas and then we go shoot those ideas in our next acquisition shoot.
So while that's happening, um, once those ads are created, built and ready to go for advertising across any of our channels, for this case, we'll talk about Facebook. Those are then deployed and we have an experiment tracker built into a program called Airtable, which is similar to Asana or just a typical, uh, project management system. And that's where we track our ideas. And then we categorize them based off their current state. So if it's just an idea, that's a backlog, it'll be backlogged. If it's active, then we'll consider it active. And then if it's currently in experiment, which means that there's enough data behind it in the ad account that we're actually that we consider it statistically significant, and we'll start to report results on that. So that's where when I worked at an agency or in any of my other previous positions, being able to track active experiments and then report on them, you get really lost in the sauce and you've tested 10, 15 different ideas and you have no idea what's actually working and how to make iterations off of that. You may have an idea, um, but at the end of the day, if someone were to ask you like, hey, can you show me your, you know, scientific experiment across this ad, it'd be really hard to show that. So we've found this process valuable and and Motion has a huge impact on that because it's the quickest way that we can access creative reporting. And so, as as you know, I mean, Facebook's dashboard and UX has been a disaster forever. It's gotten a little bit better over time, but, uh, Motion has helped us and our team to be able to build custom reports, be able to access the data quicker and and customize the experiment and tailor it to the way that Cuts wants to have it.
Reza Khadjavi: Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Could could you talk about how, how do decisions get made, right? So when you bring different members of the team together, there's brainstorming, there's different ideas, especially when you're looking at some data from previous experiments and you're trying to come together to make a decision around the new direction. Like, um, how does the final decision get made? Is it a collaborative process? Does like the the media buying team have the final say on it? Does the creative team do? Like, how does, how do the decisions get made?
Kyle Lawrence: Great question. So we have a common saying here at Cuts that best idea always wins. So there there are obviously certain positions and certain people who have, you know, more power than others depending on their positional title or how long they've been here at Cuts. But at the end of the day, the best idea is going to win. So that process that I described where we gather all of our ideas and then as a team, we prioritize them based off impact, the confidence that we have in that particular initiative actually being able to be accomplished, and then how easy is it based off, okay, can we have this done by the end of the week based off the priority or or is it going to be, you know, two, three months out? If someone's idea was like, hey, I think we need to do a TV commercial, you know, it might make a huge impact. We might be really confident with it, but it's going to be really hard to get that done in a short period of time. So, uh, I lead the, I lead the meeting and walk people through the ICE scoring. So the the scoring itself tells us which idea to move forward on. Um, but it does then need to be like as far as design, aesthetic, how it's produced, that's up to our content director and content producer.
Reza Khadjavi: Got it. Great. And and one of the things we've seen in the last few years is as Facebook specifically as a channel has matured, there's been a lot of talk about creative and obviously creative's always been important, but there seems to be something different happening in the last few years where the topic of creative is bubbling up to like the top of the priority list when people think of the importance of it in media buying. I'm curious if do you agree with that? Do you do you sense that that's happening? And how do you think that impacts the role of a media buyer? To what extent is is the media buyer now like involved in the creative process? How would you describe, uh, the role of of a media buyer in 2021?
Kyle Lawrence: Yeah, so I mean, creative's always been important, but particular to media buying, we lived in an age from like 2016 to 2019 where creative, the the the impact that it had on the ad account versus the media buying strategy, uh, was less important. And I think a lot of it had to do with just general CPMs, general competition across the platform, right? And as more competition competition enters the landscape, as creative gets better and better, then the cost of advertising goes up. And then it's more and more important each day to have better creative. As it gets more competitive. So that that's my position on it. I think with the variety of different placements out there from feed to Instagram story to now Reels that got launched today, to, you know, right column, the original ad placement. Every placement is unique and has it behaves differently. What I mean by that is, you know, someone who's scrolling through Instagram story has a different experience on the platform than someone going through their feed and etc. So it's more than more important than ever to also design specifically for the placement itself where, you know, 70 plus percent, I might have my numbers wrong, listen to IG stories with the sound on versus feed sound off. So, and I mean UGC testimonials, people talking to camera will perform better in Instagram story versus feed. So there's also now more pressure on how you do creative by placement versus creative needs to be better and it's more important.
Reza Khadjavi: Got it. And and what what impact does that have on the role of a media buyer? So like obviously the creative team has a lot more work to do, a lot of, uh, different formats to create and a lot more volume to to put out. How does, how does this like evolution of creative, um, within the role of media buying, how does that impact the role of a media buyer in your opinion?
Kyle Lawrence: Yeah, good question. So, I mean, at the end of the day too, to be able to track this, you have to customize your naming convention if something's important to you. So if I'm running testimonial ads or an influencer is talking to camera, in order for me to be able to track that, I have to put that language into my naming convention. So at Cuts in our naming convention, we put, you know, testimonial or talking to camera as language in our naming convention so that our media buyers can then track it. And then we can then go and build custom reporting. So when I ask him, hey, can you pull a report for testimonials and split it out by placement to see what placements performing best, not as not basic, not to tell him that, hey, we're only going to run testimonials in IG story, but I want to be able to know does sound on testimonials perform better across which placement. So it definitely creates more work, but but there's definitely tools in place to to mitigate that.
Reza Khadjavi: Yeah. Yeah. And and so when you mentioned a little earlier where, uh, you'd come together, put together a few ideas around, uh, creatives that you want to want to produce. Can you describe the process from like making those decisions to when the creative team then sends those finished creatives to the media buying team? Is there some steps in between where there's like a round of feedback and like, you know, a a V1 of the ad and there's like some back and forth in the creation of those ads or how does it look like, uh, for your team?
Kyle Lawrence: Yeah, so it's coming out of that meeting, an example would be, uh, we just had a Pima cotton launch and we identified a direction that we wanted to move with that particular concept. Then our content team would create a treatment for it, which basically means the look and feel of that ad concept. And then we meet and agree on that. There might be some changes with within that meeting and then they go and shoot it.
Reza Khadjavi: And the treatment is on a is on a doc, like these are just words or is something else?
Kyle Lawrence: Yeah, so it's usually within a PowerPoint or a doc. And then our marketing team finalizes that. Then after that, we plan the shoot, hire the models, make sure all of our production team is ready to go. And then at the shoot, there's usually one or two people from our acquisition team on set. And so one thing that we've noticed is a lot of, you know, iPhone only videos perform best on platform, makes sense because it's most native to how people behave on Instagram, right? So we have our, you know, high production cameras, but then we need someone there also shooting behind the scenes or on iPhone, the same shot just on an iPhone. So, and then we also need someone who's specifically calling specific shots out that we need for ads. So generally we'll shoot like an overall story that can be used across our website, email, as well as advertising. But then there's some very specific shots that we need for ads. So sometimes we'll have, you know, a model talk to camera and talk about how much they love the shirt versus you probably wouldn't do that for, you know, the homepage hero banner. You could, but it it's not a priority for that particular, uh, medium. So that's shoot day. Then once shoot day happens, our our content team goes into post-production. And that's where myself and the media buyer will then brief out typically five to seven concepts focusing on a single value proposition or a particular messaging angle that we want to focus on within this campaign.
Reza Khadjavi: Cool. That's awesome. Quite quite an elaborate process to fully hear about. And, um, to wrap up, I wanted to touch a little bit more about Motion that you described, uh, where it fits in your in your creative process. Can you talk about the kinds of reports you create in Motion? So assume that the people listening are in Motion and they're trying to figure out what kind of reports to create themselves. Uh, can you describe some of how you use it and in detail and the kind of reports that your team has made?
Kyle Lawrence: So we've got about four or five different reports going in Motion. And the the core reason that we use Motion is to have our designers and our content team to be able to go in easily and pull reports specific to them. So I think the the two most important reports we have are very simple. We have a video report and we have a still image report. And so we have a graphic designer that owns all static still imagery. And we have a video production team that owns all video. And so video, we've got our AIDA report, which most people should be aware of, but it's attention, interest, desire, and action. And for him, it's it's less about return on ad spend and it's less about the conversion rate and average order value, but I want to know ad effectiveness. So that's everything that happens before the user gets to the website, right? So he's looking at, you know, watch time, overall attention rate, click through rate, and it pretty much stops there. Once the click happens, I don't really want him to care too much about it. So that's the video report that one of our guys owns. Um, a couple of more customizable ones are we we split our ad account between whitelisting and non-whitelisting. So I want to be able to understand, you know, does running ads through an influencer's page, is that more effective than running through Cuts' page? Um, and so there's there's a couple of other scenarios there that we that we test. We'll also in our naming convention, we'll have the model's name in the naming convention so we can actually test to see what models we use are most effective. So those are a few examples that we get pretty granular in our naming convention, which allows us to be able to test and pull certain reports in Motion, which is really helpful.
Reza Khadjavi: Awesome. Perfect. Thanks, Kyle. Have a great day.
Kyle Lawrence: See ya.